Anarchism

Anarchafeminism

Anarchist University

The following text are the prepared remarks for a presentation given at a session called "Street Libraries: Infoshops and Alternative Reading Rooms", which was part of the American Library Association conference. The actual presentation was given on June 28, 1998 and the text differs from these prepared notes.

Infoshop Presentation

June 28, 1998

A. Intro
B. What it is
C. History
D. Observations

A - Intro

Good morning. My name is Chuck Munson.

I'm here this morning to talk about my project, a virtual infoshop called the Mid-Atlantic Infoshop.

I've been involved in the anarchist movement for over 10 years and publish a zine called Practical Anarchy. I was also one of the co-founders of the Spunk Library, which is an online anarchist collection. I currently volunteer as a librarian for that project and am currently converting books from AK Press to online books. I have also been following the infoshop movement for most of the 90s and have visited shops all across the U.S. I've even tried to start one in Madison, Wisc., which never got off the ground.

B - What it is

The Mid-Atlantic Infoshop includes several hundred pages and pages on a wide variety of topics. These topics and services were developed over several years, pretty closely following the whims of the site maintainer. Feedback from visitors and other anarchist webmasters also incited new content. Given that the site is so huge and volunteer time is so limited, some content may be months old where other pages are updated nearly daily.

The TAZ is a part of the infoshop site that is a kind of Yahoo-like index to anarchy on the Internet. It has pages that list anarchist web sites alphabetically and by location. It also includes pages on cultural sites (i.e. Chumbawamba), mailing lists, Food Not Bombs sites, newsgroups, bookstores, and zines.

The MA Infoshop News Kiosk is an index updated almost daily of news and current event items of interest to anarchists and activists. It includes links to both mainstream and alternative news sites, and it links to news items taken from radical news listservs that are marked-up and placed on the infoshop site.

Resources for self-education are a prominent feature of the site; this stems from my insight back in 1989 and 1993 that hypertext technology would enable underfunded activists to create materials for large audiences for very little money. One of the oldest features has been the Internet Anarchist University, which includes links to articles on the history of anarchism, events in anarchist history, famous anarchists, frequently asked questions about anarchism, and several quizzes. The IAU has been very popular. The Anarchofeminism Kiosk is a similar page that includes texts written by famous anarchist women such as Emma Goldman and Voltarine de Cleyre. A year ago I created the Sacco and Vanzetti 75th Anniversary page which includes links to content about these famous anarchists. This page is very popular and I attribute this to kids who are working on school reports.

The infoshop also has many links to etexts and e-zines. This stems from my ongoing work with the Spunk Library. Spunk is one of the oldest etext archives on the Internet; it includes several thousand anarchist and activist articles, books, zines, images, and much more. The infoshop has a page with links to anarchist e-zines like the Shadow and Kaphraster and the zine I edit, Practical Anarchy.

One of my interests this past year has been the micropower radio movement, so the infoshop now has several pages on that. The main page includes links to other micropower websites and lists known pirate stations. Related pages include one on movement news and one on the consolidation of the D.C. radio market (spectrum).

There are also several pages devoted to helping anarchists network. There is a page for anarchist activists in the D.C. area and one for "southern" anarchists, that is, anarchists living in the southern United States, a region with a perenially poor anarchist presence. The Anarchist Librarians page is for radical librarians and those interested in alternative libraries.

The infoshop also includes a mixture of pages devoted to offbeat interests of the moment. Recently, I started a page on "Giulianism" which is devoted to criticizing and following "quality of life" New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. The infoshop also has pages devoted to authors bell hooks and Octave Mirbeau.

C - History

The seed of an idea that later became the Mid-Atlantic Infoshop was planted in my head in the fall of 1989 when I was a grad student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. It was my first semester in the School of Library and Information Studies and I was trying to figure out the Macintosh computers in the undergraduate library computer lab so I could write my papers. It had been several years since I'd had any experience with a personal computer.

While fiddling around on the Macintosh one day I discovered Hypercard, which was a hypertext program that came with each Macintosh. It became quickly apparent that one could create some primitive multimedia applications with a bit of Hypercard tweaking, text editing, and use of the computer graphics module. It occurred to me that here was a DIY technology that could be used to make anarchist educational propaganda. One of my experiments with Hypercard involved a hyperlinked "stack" of "cards" with bios of famous anarchists.

As is the case with grad school, I dropped that project in order to keep up with my school work. I was also out of touch with the anarchist movement at that point, to the extent that I wasn't even reading movement zines and newspapers. But I had made a connection with the Hypercard program and my previous experiences doing anarchist and other political zines.

A couple of years later I was out of grad school and sweating my way through a low-paying paraprofessional job. That job was at a drug prevention agency that was affiliated with the university, so it did offer a few perks. Since I was the computer dude in the agency I had access to the newest computers and this new called email.

Meanwhile, I had switched jobs and had joined the email listserv anarchy-list (which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary). This put me in contact with anarchists and radicals around the world, including Mikael Cardell of Sweden, with whom I started an online version of my zine Practical Anarchy. It was 1992 and Practical Anarchy Online was one of the first ezines. We collaborated on the zine via email and emailed it out to subscribers and listservs. It was later archived on gopher servers and projects such as Spunk. Mikael and i have never met in person.

In the Spring of 1993 I had the opportunity to attend a librarian's conference at the University of Illinois-Urban Champaign. At this conference I got to attend a demo at NCSA given by Marc Andreeson and some other guy. The demo was of the World Wide Web, which was still a fairly new thing. A few months later NSCA released the Mosaic browser for Macintosh and Windows. I was instantly hooked during the demo and became very excited about the technology. I had an inkling that this could be useful for activist propaganda, but I didn't realize then how easily the DIY aspect of the web would develop. In the fall of that year I installed my first web browser.

In 1994 I moved from Madison, Wisconsin to College Park, MD where I took a job as a systems librarian at the University of Maryland. In November of that year I attended a workshop on how to write HTML and by January of 1995 I had my first home page up courtesy of some space provided by the university. At this time I was in intermittent contact with the folks at the Beehive Infoshop in downtown D.C. In playing around with HTML it occurred to me that I could put up a virtual "storefront" for Beehive and the infoshop movement. I didn't really make a connection with the Beehive people and they closed their infoshop that year, but I continued with the online infoshop.

Details

I've been following the stats for the MAI site for several years. Certain features are continuously popular, although pages will become more and less popular based on how current they are or if their content changes. The most popular pages by far are the ones dealing with the Anarchist Cookbook (about 3500 hits per week). This part of the site includes several essays that are critical of the original cookbook and information about a real food cookbook that is being created. Folks looking for information on the original AC use search sites like Alta Vista and they end up at the infoshop site. Thousands of people visit this part of the site every week.

Other popular parts of the Mid-Atlantic Infoshop include The TAZ (200 hits/week), the Internet Anarchist University (80 hits/week), the News Kiosk (130hits/week plus hits on individual stories), the Sacco & Vanzetti pages (180 hits/week), and the Anarchist Librarians page (200 hits/week). Overall, the entire MAI site gets around 15,000+ hits per month currently (June 1998).

D - Observations

One of the advantages of a "virtual" infoshop is that it is "open" 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It's only unavailable when its web server goes down for maintenance, or accidentally, or when the phone network goes down. Such is the nature of the web. This availability allows materials at the infoshop to almost always be accessible by anyone around the world with a web connection and the ability to read English. This costs very little money, which is a stark contrast to the operating expenses of an infoshop you can physically walk into.

The infoshop also serves as a virtual reference desk, which means that dozens of emails are sent each week to the shop's email address. Most of these are dumb remarks sent by teenagers who are disappointed that we don't carry bomb-making recipes in Anarchist Cookbook section. A typical example would be: "What is the web site for the anarchist cookbook where you blow shit up and break into houses? Or how do u get into it.." After this group, the majority of emails are from people asking that we link to their site or update our link to their site. Then there are folks who ask where they can find a book, or an individual, or a group. An example concerning a book question would be:

"The first is a source from the anarchy for anybody homepage from way back when. The title goes per what I remember as Lies My Teacher Told ME. The other is a book from the around 1950 entitled A (or The) History of Human Sexuality by R. Lewinsohn."

There are also requests from students working on papers for high school or college. And finally there are the accolades and the flames, including the frequent criticism that "we are gay and should get a life." By and large, most of the comments have been positive.

Conclusion

The Mid-Atlantic Infoshop has exceeded my expectations as a community resource, educational experience, networking guide, and propaganda tool. The comments that have been emailed to me and the site stats show how important the MAI is to people. Like other activist sites on the web, the Mid-Atlantic Infoshop demonstrates that there are populations whose information needs aren't being served by traditional means, like libraries, newspapers, schools, TV, and government institutions.

Maintaining the infoshop has become so time-consuming that it could use some full time staff to develop it and keep it up. This is not surprising-any online service with content requires upkeep and development if it is to stay relevant to its visitors.

While a virtual infoshop is beneficial to those who use it, it is not a place where people can drop in and hang out. Cyberspace lacks this face-to-face interaction, as I've discovered over years of being online, but it can be very helpful facilitating face-to-face encounters between people who live on society's margins.

I would like to point out various flyers that we have available….