Indymedia in a crisis

Explosions echo down the street. Tear gas spews from canisters—activists hurl them back over police lines. Protesters flee in to the indymedia center as volunteer security tries to slam the door shut before riot cops arrive. Somebody helps shut the door from the outside and is dragged off and beaten by a dozen cops. Teargas seeps under the door as the street medics setup a makeshift triage clinic in the lobby. Hundreds of people run back and forth amid a sea of computers, cables, cramped desks. Amid the chaos fotos are published to the website, articles written, video’s edited, and servers rebooted. The radio team baracades their studio and keeps broadcasting. A video camera from the roof catches and streams the police breaking through the front door. Then silence. The office has been occupied by the authorities, silenced for the moment while people scramble to keep the information flowing.

It’s Seattle, Quebec City, Munich, Buenos Aires, Prague, Quito, St. Louis, Genoa, Baghdad, Geneva, Ramala, London, and Porto Alegre. This is not one place or one event, but a history of events played out many times to different degrees around the world.

Indymedia, the nerve center of the globalization movement, thrives on crisis. The crisis of globalization, protest, confrontation, occupation and repression. A story of crisis which can never be told with a single voice or grand narrative, is made real by a multitude of media activists.

Indymedia is a child of the globalization movement. A model for communication uniquely suited for covering the protest movement that created it. Autonomous yet collective, it’s communitarian media with a militant edge. Creating space for spontaneous collaboration within a thousand fractured separate projects.

There is always moment during chaos when i look up. The phones at dispatch are ringing off the hook. The chaotic roar of voices engulfs the space. People are working with all the heart. Nobody can remember the last time they ate or slept. It is at this time i smile. We are winning. Creating a media revolution to make revolution possible.