To what extent do the revolutions and revolts of 2011 reflect a new world born from the shell of the old? Were these revolts of the internet generation — networked individuals? Are people not only using new technology but becoming transformed by it? For anarchists, what lessons can we learn and to what extent must we transform our organisational methods and structures?
Andrew Flood looks at Paul Mason’s recently published book ‘Why its kicking off everywhere’ and in particular what Mason has to say about the internet and the emergance of the ‘Networked Individual’. The recording is of a WSM supporters meeting in Dublin and the 20 minute presentation is followed by 30 minutes of discussion on the ideas outlined, roughly as summarised below.
Dublin last weekend saw about 400 people take part in a demonstration against the intention of Seán Sherlock, the Labour Party Minister for Research and Innovation to bring into law a requirement for Irish internet service providers to block access to sites that allow the downloading of copy righted material. This is a similar law to the SOPA and ACTA laws that Hollywood & music industry lobbyists tried unsuccessfully to force through the US Congress. A second demonstration is to take place this Saturday.
In December 2010, I and a few other people published 200 copies of Anarkismens ABC, a Danish translation of Alexander Berkman’s ABC of Anarchism. Since I had never tried publishing a book before, I have decided to note down some of my experiences with the process, in the hope that it might be useful for others thinking about experimenting with small-scale self-publishing.
Last Monday I did a talk on the political use of social media like Facebook and individual security concerns for RAG (Revolutionary Anarcha Feminist Group). The text I based the talk on and the audio recordings of the talk (which had four other speakers and 40 minutes of discussion) are with this blog post. I ranged fairly widely as I think these questions can only be understood in the balances revolutionaries have always had to strike between effective communication and personal security.
Last week a friend on Facebook was complaining that she was getting Youth Defence ads. Youth Defence are a virulently anti-choice organisation in Ireland, probably comparable to the likes of Operation Rescue in North America. Anyway I was curious and asked her to do a screen capture if it re-appeared which it did. I then realised this was a parallel campaign to the one they were running in the newspapers and that it all related to the ABC case in the European courts so I wrote up the article below for the WSM site to put it into context.
This morning I managed to sort out a long running tech problem with the Pageabode sites and took the opportunity to catch up on Anarchist Writers visitor states through AW Stats, the Facebook fan page and google analytics. I’ve summarised some of the findings here including the additional information coming from Facebook which lets us know the gender, age and location of our Facebook fans.
The ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is a trade agreement being negotiated by the Obama administration through the United States Office of the Trade Representative. The trade agreement is particularly interesting on a number of points.
Way back around 1993 I co-hosted a political slot on a pirate radio station for a few weeks, that was my first experiment with audio rather than writing as a way of transmitting ideas. The experiment was brief and it was a decade later in 2005 before I returned to audio, this time online. As well as talking a little about Radioactive this post looks at the technology I’ve used and methodology I’ve developed since then in the course of recording some 100 audio segments. I include sample recordings so you can see how different equipment gives different results.
I was about to do an update when I noticed one of the authors is logged in so rather than risk have them lose whatever it is they are writing I’m going to hold off and fill the time by giving some details of visitor numbers, most popular articles, search terms etc. The site has existed in some form for two years and our peak traffic so far was this October when we broke 10,000 unique visitors (10296 to be exact) and over 17,000 individual visits (the difference being due to some of the unique visitors coming here more than once in that period). Our most popular article rather unsurprizingly is the Anarchist FAQ index page which has now had around 25,000 views since its creation a little over a year ago.