Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Anarchist Story-Telling

Perhaps you should read for yourself what I'm talking about. The International Anarchist Conspiracy and its splinters and various copy-cats have adopted a new narrative by way of independent media.

A while ago a series of "communiques" like this one from the IAC related to the readership by way of wizardry and witchcraft (as they called it). I thought this was pretty hilarious. Anarchists were referred to as witches and wizards possessing strange forms of revolutionary magic; minutemen and other klansmen were referred to pejoratively as "muggles" as in, yes, Harry Potter. Other fantasy metaphors are used as they see fit, since they see their ideological narrative is sort of like casting spells on capitalists and breaking the spells of the spectacle.

Sometimes you'll read in one of these communiques that something happened that actually didn't happen. You ask yourself, wait - did the wizard actually blow up a bank? How do you know what part of it is real and what isn't? That probably makes a lot of people angry who want to know really bad whether it actually did happen or not. Especially the police. And they read that kind of stuff seriously. That makes it even more hilarious. So, on the one hand I find it really imaginative and clever, and on the other hand really cynical.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am much too sober. I don't find a lack of narrative styles to be so oppressive as the concentrated ownership (or ownership itself, for that matter) of means of distribution of any narrative whatsoever. This I think represents a more fundamental exercise of power than broad endorsement of a particular narrative style.

Google news not opting to broadcast IndyMedia is of course a reflection of that power. We oughtn't support the goog; we ought to get our news elsewhere and convince as many people as possible to do so, as a matter of course. At the same time: I still use gmail.

Hans Ostrom said...

I wonder what Google's criteria are for determining what is a "credible" news source, but I assume its searches exclude Fox News and the New York Times.