Rage Against the Machine

In 1998, a group of radical media makers and social justice activists opened the Independent Media Center in an abandoned storefront in downtown Seattle to provide street level news coverage of a large-scale mobilization protest against a meeting on the World Trade Organization, what later became known as the "Battle in Seattle." In the years following this event, Independent Media Centers have been established in over 150 locations around the world, creating a primarily online network of autonomous radical media outlets, linked by a commitment to radical democratic principles such a decentralization, open-publishing and complete transparency of process. This analysis advances the central argument that the Indymedia movement is more than just an alternative media outlet; it represents an attempt to harness the potential power of the globally networked Internet to create a new public sphere. It is a space not only for the production and dissemination of alternative content but a truly new public sphere where alternative methods of organizing that do not rely on traditional notions of hierarchical structure, leadership and decision making can be developed, not only intellectually but through direct practice. In order to advance this argument, this study employs a multi-method, multi-sited approach using a descriptive analyses of various Indymedia artifacts, an examination of the structures of the North American Indymedia network and an ethnographic as well as auto-ethnographic examination of a single IMC within the North American Network. The IMC is examined trough the lenses of Downing's theory of Radical Media, Atton's theoretical framework of alternative media, the idealized Public Sphere and Theory of Communicative Action of Jürgen Habermas and various applications of Autonomous Marxism.