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Whence Indymedia? |
Current rating: 0 |
by gehrig
(No verified email address) |
02 Aug 2006
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An interesting post from indymediawatch.blogspot.com. The site is mostly the blog of a Fox News type taking potshots at Indymedia -- some deserved, some not -- but every now and then interesting things pop up in the comments from people within the IMC movement. I thought this one was worth passing on. @%< |
David, I wish it were the case that the SF schism and creation of Indybay was rooted in some well-meaning Indymedia volunteers' desire to speak out and distance themselves from Nessie's overt antisemitism. But if you look over the history of that rift, you'll find that the split was more personal and personality driven than anthing. It was never rooted in or framed as being speaking up against Nessies' antisemitic agenda.
There was some talk of getting SF removed from the Indymedia network, but this never was grounded in what would have been rightful observations of racism. Instead, the calls for SF's removal were solely related to domain name decisions and some final decisions in handling what had been the collective's tech resources.
Personally, I don't see LA Indymedia as the worst case in the network. Their editors are negligent in patrolling the newswire, sure. And yes, the result of their blind eye is an antisemitic site. However, that still (in my mind) is less offensive than the Indymedia sites where editors actively promote to feature status with overtly antisemitic material. (DC Indymedia's repeated history of featuring articles with "zionazi" accusations and using nazi imagery comes to mind as a prominent example of this sort of behavior.)
The de facto reality is that there is no accountability to Indymedia principles within the network. A media network that was grounded in the ideals of open publishing and community-based collectives that followed transparent decision making has been replaced by sites with extremely small cliques (3-5 people) controlling the site, making heavily biased censorship decisions in the interest of pushing their own political agenda, who hide any material critical of the site (some Indymedia sites have less open reader critique than mainstream media these days), and who have closed off any transparency and accountability for their decision making.
Moreover, it's not going to change. The only way a collective is going to get disaffiliated from the network is if there are no site editors whatsoever and it's clear that the site has gone feral and been abandoned. (Even then sites can go on for 6+ months before they're tossed.)
And while the mechanisms exist for sites to be removed from the network, the cultural norm in Indymedia now is for collectives to adopt the attitude of "if you don't say anything about what I'm doing, I won't say anything about your site." And so, while there are some sites and collectives that still adhere to the initial principles of Indymedia and are well done, they won't stand up against the abuses of other collectives.
As it happens, much of the founding leadership of Indymedia has quietly exited the project, and what's left seems likes a ghost ship without any real crew. For the time being, it's made for a nice ride for the fringe and hate groups that have latched on, but ultimately it's probably a boat that's going to sink.
The dismal thinking of "we're not going to register as a non-profit, because that's just buying into the state, coercive, capitalist, blah blah blah system" thinking that won out at that the global level means that the entire indymedia domain is under a private individual's name. Ultimately, Indymedia global is successfully going to get sued for libel or rampant and persistent copyright infringement, that person will bail, and no individual is about to pick up that hot potatoe. Moreover, then local collectives not under the shield of nonprofit status will find probably find themselves in similar boats.
The fact is, many of the people who hold the domain name rights (and with that the legal responsibilities) of Indymedia sites have left the network and aren't about to protect what they've abandoned. And in the few cases where fringe individuals have gone ahead and taken up legal accountability, I expect they'll quickly jump ship too. (My experience is that the fringe and hate groups that have taken the reigns of the worst sites are fairly lazy, legally inept, shallow opportunists. It was one thing when Indymedia had ideological support behind it, but now that it's a medium of convenience for hate, it'll be more readily abandoned under pressure.)
And while the likes of EFF have (very kindly) offered a great deal of legal assistance to Indymedia in the past, it seems just a matter of time before the racist baggage that Indymedia is increasingly mounting up will make them an unattractive (for damn good reason) client for any group to defend. The Indymedia of today is very different, very much more decidedly racist and militant, than the Indymedia these legal defense groups initially signed on to assist.
And if the legal downfall scenario doesn't unfold (crap this is long, sorry), it'll be the lack of tech assistance that cripples many collectives. Indymedia used to have a flourishing tech community, locally and at the global lever. There also used to be several active open source projects in the pipeline for providing better software tools (Active, Mir, Dada, and Freeform). Now most have been abandoned or left with only one or two developers. So while techs as a group haven't done a great job of loudly speaking up against the racist crap and increasingly authoritarian behavior of Indymedia editorial cliques, a large number of them have at least had the decency to just stop volunteering support to a project that's gone so terribly awry. As a result, these are sites back-ended by open source projects that have been abandoned or fallen behind in patches, sites that are hosted on poorly-adminstered servers, sites run by groups that many of the former indymedia tech community have said good riddance to. I sure am not advocating trying to crash or corrupt a website, no matter what it's political views; that's both illegal and ethically wrong in me eyes. However I suspect that what happened to SF's site is going to become increasingly common across the network as people get angrier at Indymedia and more and more techs get increasingly disinterested in supporting the mess that many collectives have turned into. |
See also:
http://indymediawatch.blogspot.com/2006/08/guilty-until-proven-innocent.html#115448581419672584
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This work is in the public domain |
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Re: Whence Indymedia? |
by Skeptic
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
20 Aug 2006
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First, a question about the title. Do you mean "where has Indymedia come from", which is the literal reading of "Whence Indymedia", or "where is Indymedia going:", which should be rendered "Whither Indymedia"?
Second, an observation:
If you check out the "Latest Comments" on LAIMC it becomes clear that they have suddenly switched to a program of overt ideological censorship a' la Nessie.
Even purely informative comments get deleted for daring to point out that the use of fabricated quotes attributed to public figures, something endemic on the 'net, is as common among anti-Semitic hatefreaks as among those of other species.
It's sad. How it is that an increasing number of people reject the simple fact that external reality is not ideologically determined is a mystery to me. I suppose that these folks have never been involved in work that requires testing your hypotheses against observable reality.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if i approached my day job with the sort of immutable a priori assumptions which seem so common to self-described "activists".
I suspect that I would find out firsthand what a million dollars worth of bluish-white smoke looks like. |
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Re: Whence Indymedia? |
by gehrig
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
20 Aug 2006
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You're right, "whither," not "whence."
And LA's fall into overt political censorship, while allowing the most amazing bullshit to remain, guarantee its eventual demise. What community would put any energy into maintaining LA-IMC? International Neener-Neener's Union Local 349?
@%< |
