Joanne Richardson
Proposal for Networked: a networked book about networked art

"Whatever Happened to Tactical Media"

(Explanatory note: The title and content of this proposal is based on an unpublished presentation I made at Transmediale 07. I have published a short essay about tactical media in 2002, which has subsequently been included in various anthologies and translated in different languages, but the proposal for this present study goes in a very different direction than the earlier essay.)

Keywords:

tactical media, do-it-yourself, media democratization, media activism, subversion, nomadism, mobility, open publishing, Indymedia, Web 2.0

Abstract:

Tactical media is a concept and set of practices - fusing art, activism, and the subversive use of new technologies - that emerged around the Next Five Minutes festivals in Amsterdam from 1993 to 2003. This text proposes to evaluate both its successes and failures, first by examining its initial definitions, and some contradictions in these definitions that emerged at N5M4, and, secondly, by turning to recent phenomena like Web 2.0, which question some of tactical media’s initial assumptions about media democratization. The distinction between tactics and strategy, which tactical media was based on, is becoming increasingly problematic, as are the assumptions that subterfuge, nomadism, rhizomatic proliferation and mobility are necessarily good and would be used for progressive social aims. And the optimism that open structures and open publishing would turn everyone into producers has a serious limitation – this democratization (on the level of freeing information) may have been achieved by Web 2.0, but in this case it has turned out to be a clever way of exploiting labour, since the producers of content on Web 2.0 platforms are not also the owners. The study concludes that in order to answer the question about what makes “our” media different, it is necessary to go beyond the concept of tactical media as well as Web 2.0, and to look at other participatory media projects like Indymedia, which are not simply about rhizomatic structures or open publishing, but seek to destabilize the dominant mode of production and the concept of ownership.

Proposal:

David Garcia and Geert Lovink’s “ABC of Tactical Media,” written for N5M2 in 1996, became a kind of default manifesto for the movement. In this text, the adjective “tactical” is inspired by Michel de Certeau’s distinction between strategy and tactics. For de Certeau, strategy is the weapon of states, economic power, and scientific rationality. Strategy presupposes an autonomous territory and a clear separation between a space of one’s own and an exterior. By contrast, a tactic lacks an autonomous place and is forced to operate on enemy territory, according to rules imposed by a foreign power. Tactics subvert these rules through clever tricks that lead the enemy to self-destruct. Based on this distinction, the concept of tactical media tried to find the common features among a heterogeneity of activist media practices - it was an attempt to answer, from the inside, what it was that made “our” media different. Some of these common features are: (1) Tactics belong, potentially, to everyone. By extension, tactical media is about the democratization of the media as a result of cheap consumer electronics and new forms distribution, which made it possible for an increasing number of users to talk back to the mass-media. (2) Tactical media is not a direct attack but a form of asymmetrical warfare in which the mode of combat (subterfuge, the use of tricks and ambiguities) becomes its most important advantage. In its most celebrated examples (RTMark, Etoy, EDT), tactical media became synonymous with media hijacking or communication guerrilla. (3) Since tactics does not have its own territory and cannot plan a general strategy for seizing power, it depends on the chance opportunities of the moment. By analogy, tactical media has no central command or predetermined course of action, but is characterized by mobility and flexibility.

At N5M4 there was an idea in the air that tactical media was in crisis (this was even the name of one of the panels). On the organizers’ mailinglist, several people criticized the idea of ephemeral, hit and run maneuvers and claimed it was necessary to put the strategic back on the table. It was during this last event that some of the contradictions of tactical media began to emerge. One of the reasons tactical media became trendy is that its notion of tactics – and the focus on asymmetry, spontaneity, flexibility and nomadism, in contrast to the desire to occupy territory - seemed to be in sync with recent social movements and poststructuralist theory. But there is an importance difference. For De Certeau, autonomy belongs to strategy; tactics is about the impossibility of autonomy. By contrast, autonomy has been the hallmark of social movements from May 68 to Seattle and beyond. It was also a feature of many of the practices that were labeled “tactical media.” The attempt at N5M4 to include Indymedia under the umbrella of the tactical illustrated this contradiction. Indymedia may be decentralized, rhizomatic, flexible and nomadic, but its position is obviously strategic. It is based on a desire to create an alternative to the mainstream media, and the concept of autonomy is central to this alternative. Another problem that came to light at N5M4 had to do with the initial assumption that tactics are inherently liberating because they are used by the weak to fight a war against the strong. In 2003 David Garcia confessed that Islamic fundamentalists were one of the leading groups using tactical media in Amsterdam, and concluded “we were extremely naïve … in our implicit assumption that tactical media (giving voice as it does to the excluded and disenfranchised) would automatically be harnessed to emancipatory social movements.”

If subterfuge, rhizomatic structures and nomadic mobility are insufficient to define what makes our media different, it seems that the democratization of the media, or, more precisely, the idea of open participation, which has been an important feature of the N5M festivals from the start, would be a more accurate point of commonality. The idea behind openness is that open structures would transform media from a one-way dissemination of content to a multi directional network, thereby blurring the boundary between consumers and producers. But openness is also inadequate as an explanation. Web 2.0 is based exactly on the promise of everyone becoming the media as a result of consumer driven technologies and new possibilities of distribution. It is true that sites like YouTube and MySpace have changed the mode of production by empowering everyone to become a producer of content. But while they have placed the means of production into the hands of the ordinary person, they simultaneously withhold its ownership. All the hype about democratization and open participation that empowers everyone to become producers has turned out to be a clever system of exploitation that outsources production to amateurs who are willing to work for free, for the pleasure of it. These celebrations of openness create a false idea of empowerment by masking the inequality between producers and owners. In contrast to Web 2.0, there are many other participatory media projects that destabilize the concept of ownership - like usenet, which has been around since 1979, open publishing sites like Indymedia and Wikipedia, video syndication platforms like V2V, Ngvision, and peer to peer file sharing. 

It is necessary to pose the question again about what is it that makes our media different. The concept of “tactical media” has proven to be inadequate in explaining this specificity. Not only is the distinction between tactical and strategic increasingly problematic, but the utopia of freedom through media democratization, seemingly actualized by Web 2.0, has serious limitations. This study will conclude by pointing to Indymedia as a more useful example. The most interesting thing about Indymedia is not its open publishing, but the way it is organized and managed. And the fact that in contrast to tactical media, which is primarily based on negative definitions (what we are against), the practices of the Indymedia network are instead inspired by a set of positive principles.