Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

278 Brian Holmes
Town, where hundreds of protestors surged out of a tube station at the
moment of a staged Wght between two colliding motorists. Techniques were
then invented to make “tripods” out of common metal scaffolding poles: trafWc
could be easily blocked by a single protestor perched above the street whom
police could not bring down without risk of serious injury. News of the inventions
spread contagiously around Britain, and a new form of popular protest
was born, along with a politicized performance culture. Later protests
saw the occupation of a stretch of highway, or a street party where sand was
spread out atop the tarmac for the children to play in, reversing the famous
slogan of May 1968 in France, sous les pavés, la plage (beneath the pavingstones,
the beach). Ideas about the political potential of the carnival, inXuenced
by the literary critic Mikhail Bahktin, began to percolate among a
generation of new-style revolutionaries. From these beginnings, it was just
another leap of the imagination to the concept of the global street party—
Wrst realized in 1998 in some thirty countries, within the wider context of
the “global days of action” against neoliberalism.
London RTS was part of the People’s Global Action (PGA), a
grassroots counterglobalization network that Wrst emerged in 1997. Behind
it lay the poetic politics of the Zapatistas, and the charismatic Wgure of Subcomandante
Marcos. But ahead of it lay the invention of a truly worldwide
social movement, cutting across the global division of labor and piercing
the opaque screens of the corporate media. For the day of global action on
June 18, videomakers collaborated with an early autonomous media lab called
Backspace, right across the Thames from the LIFFE building. Tapes were
delivered to the space during the event, roughly edited for streaming on the
Web, then sent directly away through the post to avoid any possible seizure. 9
Perhaps more importantly, a group of hackers in Sydney, Australia, had written
a special piece of software for live updating of the Web page devoted to
their local J18 event. Six months later, this “Active software” would be used
in the American city of Seattle as the foundation of the Independent Media
project—a multiperspectival instrument of political information and dialogue
for the twenty-Wrst century. 10
As later in Seattle, clashes occurred with the police. While the
crowd retreated down Thames Street toward Trafalgar Square, a threatening
plume of smoke rose above St. Paul’s cathedral, as if to say this carnival really
meant to turn the world upside-down. The next day the Financial Times bore
the headline: “Anti-capitalists lay siege to the City of London.” The words
marked a rupture in the triumphant language of the press in the 1990s, which
had eliminated the very notion of anticapitalism from its vocabulary. But
the real media event unfolded on the Internet. The RTS Web site showed a
Mercator map, with links reporting actions in forty-four different countries