Getting serious about anarchy online By Mitzi Waltz It was probably an NSA man's worst nightmare: a roomful of dedicated anarchists swapping e-mail addresses, planning new online linkages and surreptitiously swapping PGP tips. England, Scotland, Spain, the U.S., Germany, Italy, Holland, Northern Ireland and a few other places we'd best not mention were all represented. In a meeting hall papered with outrageous images created by Homocult, a radical working- class queer art group that specializes in shock-therapy graphics, some hovered over ongoing Internet and BBS demos, others scribbled down "how to get online" basics displayed on wall charts and the rest plied the Internet old-timers present with dozens of questions. Scottish brogues and Midwest nasality combined with the insistent beat of a Nine Inch Nails tape and the arrival of several cases of beer to crank up the noise level. Who's got the cheapest connections in the Netherlands? Any recommendations for Mac BBS software? What do I need to check out WorldWideWeb sites? Too many questions, but somehow they all got answered. Small groups soon formed to discuss individual interests and projects-in-progress, bring newbies up to speed on the basics, or pass on sensitive information. Tallboys of Strongbow's Super fueled the spirit of camaraderie for several hours, and three more workshops were instantly scheduled to handle the overflow and cover special concerns. Carefully orchestrating for chaos. Pulled together by a handful of above-ground activists, many of them meeting IRL for the first time, "Anarchy Online 101" was part of a 10- day anarchist convention held in London late last year. Organization was handled online, primarily through the good graces of the multinational Spunk Archive crew. The Archive is a repository of anarchist writings maintained on the Net, sort of the anti-authoritarian's Gutenberg Project. Matt Fuller from London's Fast Breeder BBS, itself a hotbed of digital thoughtcrime, led off with a critical look at digital media for the "culturally engaged," with on emphasis on DIY. For Fuller and the other anarchist sysops present, getting beyond preaching to the converted is the key reason for creating online meeting places. "Fast Breeder gets a lot of kids from the suburbs, and people who have access to the networks through work," Fuller said. "It's a way to link up with people who aren't political activists or who at least aren't involved overtly within political groups." It's also a way to let would-be hackers know that there's more to anarchism than a disk-full of half-baked anarchy files. "We have to develop a new kind of politics to deal with information economies," where companies ostensibly based in the First World farm out work to data-laborers in Eastern Europe, India or Ireland, Fuller said. If the goal of business is total control over the workforce, these arrangements seem ideal - workers don't live together, don't know each other, may not even speak the same language. They do, however, have the ability to communicate in new ways, and to "strike" using methods that have nothing to do with picket signs. "We want to create a space online where hackers can meet up with people who are interested in systems, in getting the tools to change them," he said. In an era when one guy with a modem can do more to bring down the infrastructure in a few minutes of love-bombing the phone system than 10 commandos with well-aimed AKs, hackers definitely have those tools. This crew was here to start the process of redistributing that wealth of knowledge. Bypassing media monopolies. Communication was also on the agenda. There's been a lot of talk since the Net's earliest days about its potential as an alternative news medium, and it's certainly proven to be the fastest way to spread an unfounded rumor worldwide. But hard news? Consider the case of the Zapatista rebels in Mexico. When the mainstream media was just getting out the word that some wacky peasant revolt thing was going on in Southern Mexico, EZLN documents were already appearing on the Internet in their entirety. The data took a convoluted trip. At a school somewhere very close to the uprising, a sympathizer sent electronic versions of the communiques to several friendly addresses at American universities. Within hours, Workers Solidarity Movement, an Irish anarchist group based in Dublin, received the texts in English via a mailing list originating in the U.S. WSA shot them off to Glasgow Anarchist Group in Scotland, which republished them widely online and also set up an Italian translation that went out on the Net. "A couple of days later we got e-mail from Moscow, where they had read it in Italian and wanted to know if we could send them a copy in English," said Iain MacSaorsa of GAG. And the process continued - messy but highly effective, and surprisingly fast. Within four days, complete sets of the guerrillas' communiques were available worldwide, often accompanied by historic commentary and in several languages. A supporting picket action called by a US-based solidarity group was able, via instant communication with counterparts in Europe, to set off coordinated demonstrations at embassies in the West. Twenty days after the first Zapatista action, an international information network was in place and humming along merrily. For anarchists, the Zapatista rebellion held special significance, since its "army" relies on a non-heirarchical structure and makes decisions by consensus. It's been a long time - not since the Spanish Civil War - that an openly anarchist-influenced group has had a reasonable hope of holding and protecting territory. Can using computer networks to get the word out offer them the opportunity for protection via the court of world opinion? It's a test case, but a deadly serious one for those on the front lines. It made this meeting most timely. Hands-on, heads up. Participants leave with pages of e-mail addresses and visions of community in their heads. It's more than visions, really. Just pulling the conference together created one group that will keep on communicating. Spunk pulled in more contributors to keep its archives growing, and cemented plans for interactive communications as well. The Spanish anarchists in attendance are already setting up a network of anarchist BBSes and figured out the best way to hook them up to the Internet from information received here. The Germans have a similar system running. A whole lot of people will be testing encryption programs over the next few days. Looks like somebody finally took that cliche about the "anarchistic structure of computer networks" seriously. Look out aboveI ___Resources___ Many local BBSes and online services have an anarchist discussion group hidden away somewhere - PeaceNet's is particularly interesting. Here's just a few more @ resources: Usenet newsgroups: alt.society.anarchy (dominated by anarcho-capitalists, reader beware), alt.politics.radical-left, misc.activism.progressive, alt.zines AAA Web - news and announcements mailing list. Send "subscribe" message to aaa-web@GNU.AI.MIT.edu The Anarchy List - anarchist discussion mailing list, currently flame-infested. Send "subscribe" message to anarchy- list@CWI.NL El Lokal, books and music in Spanish, ellokal@pangea.upc.es Extreme Books, books in English, send any message to catalog@mailer.extremebooks.com for catalog Freie ArbeiterInnen Union (German autonomist info via WWW) - http://anarch.ping.de/FAU Glasgow Anarchist Group - cllv13@ccsun.strath.ac.uk Practical Anarchy Online, newsletter: international @ news and analysis - subscription requests to cardell@lysator.liu.se Spunk Press Archive - e- mail spunk-info-request@lysator.liu.se, go WWW at http://www.cwi.nl/cwi/people/Jack.Janson/spunk/Spunk_Home.html, gopher to gopher etext.archive.umich.edu or FTP to etext.archive.umich.edu (/pub/Politics/Spunk) The Seed (alternative info via WWW) - http://web.cs.city.ac.uk/homes/louise/seed2.html Workers Solidarity Movement (N. Ireland) - an64739@anon.enet.fi