Tactical Media Sustainability

Sustainability has been on my mind a lot lately. It started at S11 last year. Apart from learning a lot about the practices of the corporate media, I also got a lesson in the benefits and drawbacks of various activist strategies. It quickly became obvious, for example, that yelling into megaphones, chanting slogans for as long as your vocal chords would hold out and heckling those didn't follow your dictates was not the most workable approach, short- or long-term. On the other hand, the practices of those of us who were making media about S11 didn't seem nearly so unsustainable. Our activities were informed by a logic of participation: blockading here, writing a short piece in the middle of a sit-down there, constantly on the move. But while we all like sledging socialists, a video camera is no better defence against burnout, exhaustion, or police batons than Green Left Weekly—as the boy in the Tuesday morning disaster yelling abuse at a line of cops from behind his camera quickly found out.

In terms of the ongoing relations between international anti-corporate-globalisation movements and the many sites of local struggle, S11 was just a spike in Melbourne's intensity graph. And so it is with independent media: it's happening all the time. That's why I'm interested in the people behind the cameras, the news wires and the publications. I'm interested in the ways our identities interact with our aims and practices, and how these interactions can become more sustainable. So let me out myself. I'm 25, white, female, urban, queer and a small press editor. I'm writing this on a computer in an office in Fitzroy, with a poster for a grunge Hamlet on the wall in front of me and a program guide for RRR, a local indie radio station, to the left. The use of this office after hours for all kinds of subversive and perverse activities is a pay-off for the more official work I do between nine and five. I inhabit a privileged position with access to a global body of communications networks, and I use them as much as I can. Being a media activist means 'moonlighting', 24 hours a day.

It seems kind of unfashionable to be outing myself like that. Denying responsibility and spreading misinformation about individual involvement is all part of the territory. Media activists are constantly moving out of the spotlight, wary of a corporate media machine hungry for more subversive 'kids' to commodify. But I'm making a deliberate move here to start to question what it means to be engaged daily in an effort to win back freedom of information, space and capital.

If the media is everything, what does that make a media activist?

If the media is everything, an immersive set of spaces and techniques in which we're constantly throwing out lines and hooking them in, moving through, looking, speaking, reading, talking—if the media is everything (even the wilderness), then a media activist must be able to do everything. To engage with it, we must know everything about it. Being a media activist is about tools and technologies—Flash, DreamWeaver, Quark, Photoshop, cut'n'paste, critical theory, editing, Perl, pirate radio, autonomous organising. This book itself is only one effort to kit you out in a long global series of such projects, from Punk Planet's special 'Become the Media' issue to LINUX user groups. The slogan 'Don't hate the media, become the media' is almost always followed by a set of instructions. (It helps if you have a short attention span and a high information retention rate, because we'll take you through five minutes on each different tool and at the end you'll be asked to summarise everything you've learnt. Extra points will be awarded to those who spontaneously invent a new medium along the way: see IMC/Catalyst.)

Following on from that, it appears that while media activists may learn how to use and be used by lots of different technologies (we might even get pretty comfortable working in various immersive spheres), we may not ever engage with a medium as craftspeople or (god forbid) creators. Craftsmanship is a far lower priority than just getting something done. And not for lack of ability, but lack of time.

Some people defend this tendency in the name of DIY or deliberate, inclusive amateurism—when nobody uses their skills well, everyone is on the same level. And while there is a beauty in spontaneous, fast production, I also find sustenance in crafting a piece of writing over time (especially writing which is purely for my own satisfaction.) Taking the time to say precisely what I want to say not only sharpens the message, it inspires me to keep going.

Others argue that as communicators and organisers, we can get other people to make things for us; designers, animators, writers, film-makers, radio-producers. We're not artists, just the ones who bring it all together. And sure, no-one can learn all the skills to be a multi-platform, all-singing, all-dancing media-maker in the time we have (especially when that time is measured in activist microdeadlines). But again, there's a sustaining, creative drive to make stuff in nearly every activist I know. Getting other people to 'make the content' is fine, as long as you don't feel deadened because you're not working on your own stuff.

The media maker as productivity engine

Although I have had numerous conversations with various media-makers about the tactical advantages of experimentation and play, in practice we tend to drive ourselves as hard as corporate middle-managers. Despite the rhetoric and inspiration we draw from diverse sources (the Situationists, Autonomia, anarchism, critical theory), we all too often fall back on a stringent sense of productivity and the work ethic that echoes the worst aspects of capitalist society and Marxist traditionalism.

What do we do with our bodies? We spend hours on computers. Everything is done by email; the few opportunities I've had to meet with people face-to-face in organising this thing called Media Circus have been delicious breaks between long doses of constant online immersion. We experience back pain, eye-strain, and the disembodiment that results from spending too much time online. And before you say it, of course this doesn't compare to the sixteen-hour-days forced on factory workers here and abroad. But solidarity means something other, something more, than working ever harder to expunge the guilt of white, 'first-world' privilege.

Maybe we need to reconsider the 'labour' of media-making in broader terms. Labour isn't just, as Michael Hardt points out,

what we do at work for wages but rather generally... the entire creative potential of our practical capacities. These creative practices across the range of terrains—material production, immaterial production, desiring production, affective production, and so forth—are the labor that produces and reproduces society.
—Michael Hardt,
Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics: 6

Labour, in this sense, is something I am more than happy to engage in. After all, it's a potential new social domain we are imagining here. We are working to change the world. But how often do we recognise that 'working' also means fucking, eating well, dancing, making friends and being broadly 'in the social'? Geeks (and we are geeks; the nature of this global network of information/programs/language/technology asks that we remake ourselves as geeks) tend not to be 'good' at socialising and hanging out. Maybe that's something we need to work on more. Sustainable living depends on balance. If we reduce labour to its incarnation in the work ethic we forget that play is vital labour, too.

Inaccessibility/Insularity

Overwhelmingly, only those who are already hooked up can 'hook in' to the communities of global and local media-making. Submitting an article to an Independent Media Centre still requires website navigation skills and a computer on which to type your article. It seems easy to many of us, and it's only when that 'ease' is interrupted that we notice how much we take it for granted. When someone admits that they don't have daily Internet access but still want to be involved in an independent media project, the general reaction is a blank stare and subtle disbelief. People who don't have net access or who aren't comfortable with using computers seem apologetic, as if this is something they should be ashamed of (perhaps slightly immoral, in a productivity sense—which is of course what 'immoral' means, 'unproductive'.)

Of course, attempts are being made to provide cheap hardware available to people who don't have the money or the resources to get connected. The urgency of making open source software, renovated antique hardware, LINUX, and free or minimal-charge media labs available and accessible has already begun to penetrate the consciousness of those media-makers, like me, who have all the Net/printing/scanning access we need. This is also an important facet of building community: it brings us back to the local spaces we inhabit. Then again, how will it all work? How many people can a media lab with, say, five networked PCs and maybe four Mac desktop-publishing computers sustain?

More than ever, we need to be conscious of the hierarchies of knowledge we are party to, and to think of ways we can share knowledge and skills. This needs to happen in a fashion that crosses boundaries—between localities, between hierarchies of citizenship, between issues, between communities, between the various priorities that individuals have as we engage at different levels of 'activism' with different campaigns. More importantly, we can't expect that everyone who participates in media activism does so by our standards of what media activism is. The beauty of living in a community which functions purely on informal association (instead of the corporate ladder) is that what counts as our 'labour' can and must be open to constant reinvention.

Gate-Keeping

As media activists, we might be expected to engage in some critical analysis of how we practice our forms of media. Unfortunately, I think we spend an awful lot of time criticising the corporate media monopolies, and not nearly enough time questioning the ways we, as media participants, are also gate-keepers in the movements of information around, and sometimes out of, the public sphere. I mean, yes, in my ideal world every human being will participate in the media, in collecting, dispersing and critiquing the information that will make power accountable to those it affects.

But what is media, if not the practice of mediating information to organise people? Helping organise Rogue States and Media Circus, I've noticed that the skills you become most adept at are those which advertising and PR hacks would die for. This is the ability to persuade people that they should get involved because they'll miss out otherwise. It's the skill of producing desire. It takes place at all levels, from asking friends to come along and help out, to negotiating with high-level academics or corporate PR hacks themselves. And you get good at it. Very good.

But networking skills are only useful when they're a means, not an end, and it seems we are sometimes too willing to get involved in networking for its own sake. Back-slapping and buzzwords don't make a movement. We need a hub of powerful, creative vision that will really sustain interest, involvement and long-term action; otherwise, all we are building is a new network of exclusion.

Conclusion: In which I vacate
the spotlight and deny my involvement

So, what makes a sustainable media-maker? What strategies can we use to keep ourselves going for the long haul? Because it is a long haul; there is no end in sight. No matter how many people tell us that as participants in rhizomatic, multiplicitous, momentary and fragmented structures, all we should be thinking about is the next spike in the intensity-graph, the spikes keep coming and the intensity is redeployed from day to day. What can we do to somehow 'enjoy life' in the face of the constant stream of bad news we expose ourselves to, pass on to others, and critique? What can we do to look after each other? How can we achieve a balance between enabling the participation of other people and our own participation in 'making'? Because it's the 'making' I like about media-making; media itself is a terrible bedfellow at times.

I can't say I have any answers. The position of authority I've assumed to write this is a place I'm eager to vacate. You probably know better than me, because if you're reading this then you're obviously a media-maker in the sense that everyone is a media-maker, potentially and actually—yes. If the corporate media complex is busily eating the future, we are the ones who will remake the world from the regurgitated remains they leave. And as somebody says, the future is now.