> Distro of ideas still isn't ideal, but we're not in
> the days before Gutenberg's printing press press,
> either. What the fuck. Extremely complex multimedia
> presentations can be made, we have meetup.com type
> stuff, email newsletters, and an impressive amount of
> popular and unpopular musicians are at least liberal,
> at worst, downright explicitly anti-capitalist and
> anarchist at best.
>
> And still -- the one thing still lacking is serious
> workshop organizing -- hitting the fuckers where it
> will hurt them the most. Everything is happening but
> that. But talking about unions to many people is often
> like talking about universal healthcare. Yeah, you can
> relay the facts all you want, but at the end of the
> day, I can probably find something on some blog to
> contradict you, the person thinks, so in the meantime,
> thanks, but no thanks.
Interesting comments, B.
I would respond to your thoughts in several ways.
One is that the democratization of media has been a good thing, but that the balkanization of progressive media into thousands of little blogs has been a horrible development. Yes, it's good that people have the freedom to DO their Own Thing, but they aren't doing anything TOGETHER. That's what sustained anarchist and radical media over the past century--like-minded people came together to publish a newspaper or magazine, or, less frequently, produce a small documentary or movie.
Witnessing all of the radical magazines go under in the past year (and more that I know will soon go defunct), what's striking is that these projects aren't working together and that people don't see a need to support these projects.
Another problem that radical media projects face is lack of funds. You can't do anything serious and large scale without money. This is one lesson I've learned the hard way as an independent media activists. It's a rare media project that thrives solely on volunteer labor. If you want to do it right and reach lots of people, you'll need to spend money on staff, advertising, printing costs, and so on.
I'm not talking here about nonprofits like the one I found out about yesterday from a friend, which wants to spend $300,000 on developing a website.
If you want to hit the fuckers where it hurts, then you need to have a movement made up of people who are focused on hitting those external fuckers. Problem is with the Left is that its members would rather spend all their time hitting each other than doing what Michael Moore is doing.
Chuck Infoshop.org