[Reader-list] The Anarchogeek interview
Patrice Riemens
patrice at sarai.net
Wed Jan 30 00:19:01 IST 2002
original on:
http://www.anarchogeek.com
Interview about the anti-globalization
movement Dec 26 2001
This is from an interview i did for a grad
student working on her thesis about the
anti-globalization movement.
First, may I have your name and
affiliation/position for bibliographic
purposes? If you do not wish to be
cited by name in my thesis, please let
me know, and I will include only
anonymous information.
People keep telling me I should be quite about my name and
try and hide my idendity from my work. They're probally
right. Although all i do is make websites, fix computers, and
help organize media centers i probally do put myself at risk.
That said I've been "outed" so many times and so publically
that it often doesn't feel worth hiding things.
I'm Evan Henshaw-Plath. At the moment i'm in rural
northern california where I grew up but I've been traveling
the anti-globalization circuit for most of the time since the
seattle protests. I've been to in central and western europe,
and throughout the americas. I'm a volunteer with the
imc-tech collective, a loose network of radical techies and
geeks who support indymedia projects. We don't have titles
or leaders. Aside from indymedia in 98 i founded an activist
website, protest.net, which is a global calendar of protests
and activism. Protest.net is maintained as a closed
collective project which i work on with three other net
activists. I'd say if you had to give me a title, it would be net
activist although i'm not sure i like the term. It brings up
visions of people who think they are making social change
because they send lots of emails and spam their friends
with guilt ridden emails.
In my research on the anti-globalization movement,
your name and/or organization came up. I have a basic
understanding of the direction of your work and the
issues you are concerned with, and I do not want to
ask you for information that is available elsewhere, so
please tell me where I can find such information in
order to save your understandably valuable time.
1) Is it fair to characterize your work as
anti-globalization? Why or why not?
It's the title we've got. For better or worse we are the
anti-globalization movement. At least it's more creative than
being called the "new left." :) Perhaps we should be more
accurately called the anti-neo-liberalism movement. That is
infact what the EZLN says in their famous quote, "Against
Neoliberalism and for humanity." The problem is that most
people, especially in the anglo world don't understand what
neoliberalism means. In the US we have this warped notion
that liberalism and the left are one in the same. People get
confused. They might think, well neoliberalism, liberals
means democrats, and you have the new democratics like
the DLC and Clinton. Therefore neoliberalism is what
clinton advocates, which is true, but by then you've lost
most people.
For a while after Seattle I always insisted on saying
Anti-Corporate-Globalization. I know others use the term
anti-capitalist-globalization. Infact outside the US the term
anti-globalization and anti-capitalist are used somewhat
interchangeably. There are american activists who have
tried to bring that practice in to the rhetoric of the american
anti-globalization movement but it doesn't resonate. The
problem is that most americans have a pretty blury
understanding of the differnece between democracy and
capitalism. This is why I prefer the term anti-corporate
because americans know what corporations are, they know
how they affect their lives, and they can take a stand against
corporations.
All that said, we've got the term anti-globalization
movement. It could be worse but I still perfer it us being
called the "new new left" or "really quite new left" or the
"post this that and the other and don't remind us of the 60's
left." The Economist keeps trying to brand the movement
anti-globalist, but it dosen't seem to be catching on. By the
same account i know plenty of activist who try and call it the
movement for alternative globalization but that doesn't
sound very catchy to me.
2) Do you consider yourself part of a movement?
Please explain why.
Yeah it's a movement, or maybe a movement of movements.
For me i finally stopped wondering if it was a movement
when I saw people returning from the Quebec City FTAA
protests pumped up at getting involved and wanting to learn
even though was the first protest they'd ever partipated in.
In someways the question of is it a movement can be
answered the same way you answer 'am i in love?' If you
still have to ask your self the question then the answer is no,
once the answer becomes 'of course' then you've got your
answer.
I could go in to looking at how we're creating counter
structures, our own insitutions, ideologies, spectrum of
groups, goals, and tactics, but the short answer is we're a
movement.
3) How do you define globalization?
You could write a whole book on that subject. Infact there is
a whole new category of books and academic scholarship
growing up around globalization studies as i'm sure you're
aware. I'd recommend No Logo by Naomi Klein and Empire
by Negri and Hardt as two books i've found interesting.
Globalization is the whole series of social, economic, and
political transformations that are taking place as our
technology and social institutions shift and become highly
integrated. The principle problem with globalization is it's
being driven by a neoliberal economic agenda which
includes free trade, privitization, the gutting of the fordist
welfare state, and the shift of power from nominally
democratic nation-states to unaccountable supranational
bodies.
4) What elements of globalization are you taking
action against? What is your message?
The part above. The whole point about the anti-globalization
movement is that we're actually quite globalist. I'd use the
term internationalist but really it's also anti-nationalist.
We're perfectlly happy to see the nation state whither away.
The problem is what it's being replaced with.
5) Many people have described activist networks when
speaking of the anti-globalization movement and
others. Can you comment on the nature of such
networks, and the particular weaknesses, or strengths
of these networks?
Well first off you need to know that there are many parts of
the anti-globalization movement. There are parts of the
movement such as ATTAC, or in the US the Green Party /
Nader groups, which are creating big ngo / political party
type organizations. There is nothing really new about how
these groups are organizing. They are working to construct
a new social democratic order and are using pretty
traditional methods.
The more radical parts of the anti-globalization movement,
both the street activists and the more with it NGO's have
adopted a new model for organizing. We've used a lot of
technology and communitarian, decentralized,
anti-authoritarian values with their roots in the anarchist
tradition. Mailinglists, cellphones, websites, affinity groups
are all the tools of our movement. It means we have no
offical spokes people, we have no offices or party line. We
have a hard time raising a lot of money or supporting big
personalities. On the other hand we can get things done that
could never be done regardless of the money. We grew
indymedia from one center with a dozen volunteers to a
network of 75 media centers in 23 countries in a dozen
languages which has produced a dozen feature length
documentary films, printed dozens of local newspapers, and
more in under two years.
I was talking to some friends with indymedia norway. They
were setting up a media center to cover an ATTAC
conference. Attac had the conference very well organized,
paid for people to fly in, got the speakers lined up, got the
publicity, and even had pretty good attendance. Quite a
logistical feat. But the imcistas asked if they could help
them get a car to move computers and equpitment for the
media lab and attac couldn't do it. The imcistas had to figure
it out. Despite all the resources of attac they couldn't do
something as simple as get a car. Indymedia and the more
PGA inspired end of the anti-globalization movement
almost never have a problem finding a car. When the shit
hits the fan everything just starts working. People stand up
and contribute and it's amazing. You should really spend
some time in an imc durring a major action. Really without
seeing a convergence you can't know what the
anti-globalization movement is about.
7) Can you comment on the role of new technology in
your tactics? How has new technology affected your
work?
Well i'm basically a net activist, so technology plays a huge
role in my tactics. We joke that we're 'tech support for the
revolution.' It's true in a way, we may not get a revolution, or
if we do it might not turn out like we intend, but we are the
tech support for the movement. Most of my work is focused
on communcations technology. Websites, email,
mailinglists, cell phones, radios, media labs, video cameras,
magazines, newspapers, filers, community, web and pirate
radio, public access tv, theaters, all come together to
provide the infrastructure upon which the movement
communicates. This is both internal communcation where
we are debating an comeing to develop critiques,
coordanate ourselves, and to present to the world our
perspective. We can and do work to get our ideas and
messages out to the CNN's of the world but that's a very
limited medium.
The anti-globalization movement could not exist without the
internet. This is not to say that we wouldn't be struggling
over similar issues but the movement that we have now
wouldn't exist. We wouldn't be making the connections and
coalitions. We couldn't organize such massive coalitions
with almost non-existant overhead if we didn't have email,
mailinglists, and websites. I think the tactics of having very
large broad protests with indymedia centers, converence
spaces, counter conferences, legal protests, illegal protests,
and direct action wouldn't be possible without the net.
There has some been some interesting stuff on the subject
that has come out of the RAND corporation about networked
organizations. It's worth reading. They basically looked at
how technology was changing organizations and wars.
They've analized the EZLN and the black bloc, they were the
ones to come up with the concepts of cyberwar and infowar.
That's basically what we are fighting. It's not a war with
bullets, a civil war, or a cold war. It's a war of ideas and real
power politics played out between governments,
coporations, and civil society. Governments have really lost
their power over their own economies which puts them in
an increasingly weak possition. It's a fight over the
legitimacy of new institutions as we struggle over the nature
of a globalized society that is coming in to being.
The technology is playing a huge roll in shaping society and
the struggle. This is nothing new, i mean Marx considered
the state of technological development to part of the base, a
fundamental part of the economy from which the
superstructure of society is formed. I'm not a marxist and I
don't agree with the modernist dicotomy between base and
superstructure that Marx articulated but it's interesting to
note. Today we have seen the growth of electronics and
especially computers shift who can be an engineer and
creator of tools of production. The huge growth of the
internet is in part due to the changing nature of technology
which allows anybody with a computer to recreate the
software it runs. This isn't directly connected to
globalization but it's a big interest of mine. Technology has
gotten suffently advanced that digital computers have
become the domain of popular innovation and production.
8) Can you comment on administrative (government,
law enforcement) responses to your actions, and its
effects on your efforts?
They don't like us. They want us to go away. They want to
get rid of us but they don't know how. It's a struggle over
legitmacy and in some cases we have as much or more
legitimacy than they do. That doesn't mean that they aren't
stepping up repression, activists are starting to get longer
jail time for arrests during protests. The assault on the imc
and the school across the road during Genoa doesn't bode
well. We are seeing a slow convergence between police
tactics in the third world and those in the first.
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