The Zapatista Effect: The Internet and the rise of an alternative political fabric

Harry Cleaver looks at the role of technology and the internet in spreading class struggle.

http://libcom.org/library/zapatista-effect-cleaver

The Zapatista Rebels “The Electronic Fabric of Struggle”
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~miturria/project/zapatistas.html

The Pacifica Counterrevolution Hits WBAI: Another Call for Action

Edward S. Herman

http://www.1worldcommunication.org/pacificacounterrevolution.htm

“Given the importance of the media in hegemonic processes, and in contesting those processes, what is happening to Pacifica, and now WBAI, should be first order business for the left. This was our only radio network, and it is being destroyed!”

Extra! Articles by Edward S. Herman

http://www.fair.org/extra/writers/herman.html

The Noam Chomsky Archive

http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/

“This archive is hosted by ZNet, the web site of  It contains the

full text to many of Chomsky’s major works, the complete audio to several

important lectures, and numerous articles, interviews and speeches.”

Media Beat

http://www.fair.org/media-beat/

“Media Beat is the insightful weekly syndicated column on media and politics written by FAIR associate Norman Solomon. It runs in newspapers across the country.“

Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting — FAIR

http://www.fair.org/

“FAIR, the national media watch group, has been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986. We work to invigorate the First Amendment by advocating for greater diversity in the press and by scrutinizing media practices that marginalize public interest, minority and dissenting viewpoints.

“As an anti-censorship organization, we expose neglected news stories and defend working journalists when they are muzzled. As a progressive group, FAIR believes that structural reform is ultimately needed to break up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent public broadcasting and promote strong non-profit sources of information.”

Protests in Moldova Explode, With Help of Twitter, by ELLEN BARRY
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/world/europe/08moldova.html?_r=1&hp

The sea of young people reflected the deep generation gap that has developed in Moldova, and the protesters used their generation’s tools, gathering the crowd by enlisting text-messaging, Facebook and Twitter, the social messaging network. The protesters created their own searchable tag on Twitter, rallying Moldovans to join and propelling events in this small former Soviet state onto a Twitter list of newly popular topics, so people around the world could keep track. By Tuesday night, the seat of government had been badly battered and scores of people had been injured. But riot police had regained control of the president’s offices and Parliament Wednesday.

Texting Toward Utopia Does the Internet spread democracy? by Evgeny Morozov
http://bostonreview.net/BR34.2/morozov.php
Labeling a Muslim Brotherhood blog as “undemocratic” suggests duplicity. Thus Western governments, caught up in the heady cyber–utopianism of the last two decades, face a dilemma. Without their investments in blogs, blog aggregators, and video blogs in far–away but geopolitically important places, the online voices of the West’s favorite secular and democratic forces would not carry much weight. Yet, investing in new media infrastructure might also embolden the conservatives, nationalists, and extremists, posing an even greater challenge to democratization. A brief look at the emerging cyber–nationalism in Russia and China provides a taste of things to come.

By JOHN MARKOFF

Shiyu Zhou is a founder of the Falun Gong consortium

The Iranian government, more than almost any other, censors what citizens can read online, using elaborate technology to block millions of Web sites offering news, commentary, videos, music and, until recently, Facebook and YouTube. Search for “women” in Persian and you’re told, “Dear Subscriber, access to this site is not possible.”

Last July, on popular sites that offer free downloads of various software, an escape hatch appeared. The computer program allowed Iranian Internet users to evade government censorship.

College students discovered the key first, then spread it through e-mail messages and file-sharing. By late autumn more than 400,000 Iranians were surfing the uncensored Web.

The software was created not by Iranians, but by Chinese computer experts volunteering for the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that has beem suppressed by the Chinese government since 1999. They maintain a series of computers in data centers around the world to route Web users’ requests around censors’ firewalls.

Read the rest of the report here…