       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











