FEED
Saturday night I got home from a party. While I was scanning emails—deleting ads for Viagra, cheap airfare, and listserv nonsense—I saw the subject header, “NY Independent Media Center (IMC) Journalist Murdered by Paramilitaries.”
I opened the email to read about the shooting of Brad Will, a 36-year-old anarchist and documentary filmmaker, a friend to many, now another dead dreamer. Paramilitaries shot Brad while he was documenting the barricades set up by the APPO, the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca. As he often did, he was taping a people’s struggle for direct democracy. He dared to portray forbidden realities: people rebelling against government repression and taking charge of their own lives. While Brad was documenting action and possibility in Oaxaca, thugs killed him.
I scoured the corporate media for news about the shooting, the APPO, and the analysis of the U.S. press. I couldn’t find a thing. I wasn’t surprised. Typical information starvation was what I expected. Several days later, I sat in an audience watching a panel on journalism and democracy. I asked a network news journalist about the lack of coverage of Brad’s death. He said, “The story is not front-page information.” Apparently, neither is the APPO’s revolutionary challenge to state authority.
Stories of resistance feed utopian imaginations. Perhaps that is why those stories fail to be newsworthy.
Even after Brad’s death, the press continues to trivialize and degrade the struggle in Oaxaca, feeding the public evangelical, hustler-drug dramas and pop-science studies of mice, red wine, and cure-alls for obesity.
A murdered colleague, the dominant press, a utopian struggle, distant fragments fraught with possibility and despair plagued me.
Unsure what to do, I dressed up in a clownish anarchic costume, picked up my video camera, and told the story in the persona of Soapbox Pirate. I posted my crude observations to community.freespeech.org and youtube.com, online spaces where users share videos. Within a day, hundreds had watched my careless performance, my ridiculous, rapid response.
I published the news of Brad’s death on my Myspace bulletin board and watched as others spread the notice.
Posts multiplied.
One declared an electronic blockade of the Mexican Consulate’s website. Others announced protests of consulates throughout the U.S. Disappointed by corporate media neglect, I saw news spread through the alternative press. Free Speech TV, Narconews, Infoshop.org, and dozens of IMC sites featured reports about Brad, primers on the struggle in Oaxaca, and updates about federal police attacks on the APPO.
Brad’s last video, taped as he died, spread across the Internet. His murder turned him into a martyr, galvanizing a global response to the Mexican government’s mobilization of federal police to break up APPO barricades.
People demanded and created information about the actions Brad was documenting in Oaxaca. Protests erupted. Corporate media ignored them. Starved for images of resistance, people took matters into their own hands. A week after Brad died, I come home from another party. I’m surfing the Internet. Representations have proliferated. They feed my hunger for information.
I sip water from an old glass jar and send a quick text message to a friend. “It just takes people, dreams, and action.”
KYLE HARRIS is a filmmaker, writer and programmer who works as the Acquisitions Manager at Free Speech TV.
