Indy-Fundamentalism: Its Root Causes

Indy-Fundamentalism is a movement in turn-of-the-20th Century Progressivism emphasizing the literally interpreted Indymedia Charter as fundamental to Progressive life and teaching. Indy-Fundamentalism also refers to the beliefs of this movement, i.e. Indymedia, or the adherence to those beliefs, or the manner of adhering to those beliefs. It is a movement or attitude stressing strict and literal adherence to a set of basic principles, these being the Indymedia mission, points-of-unity and structure.

Here we examine the Indymedia points-of-unity and structure and then describe how these rules are strictly and fanatically applied as Indy-Fundamentalism.

The Independent Media Center Mission Statement:

"The Independent Media Center is a global network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth. We are motivated by a love and inspiration for people who work for a better world despite corporate media's distortions and unwillingness to cover efforts to develop an egalitarian and sustainable society.

With autonomous chapters in more than 200 cities across the world, the Independent Media Center network has become an international information source for media activists. The IMC seeks to create a new media ethic by providing progressive, in-depth, and accurate coverage of issues. We are a community-based organization using media to facilitate political and cultural self-representation. We seek to illuminate and analyze issues impacting individuals, communities and eco-systems by providing media tools and knowledge to those seeking to communicate.

The Boston Independent Media Center is a grassroots organization committed to using media production and distribution as tools for promoting social and economic justice in the boston Area. We are dedicated to addressing issues that the mainstream media neglects and we do not conceal our politics behind a false objectivity. We will empower people to "become the media" by providing democratic access to available technologies and information."

Examined: Indy-Fundamentalism strictly and fanatically applies the following beliefs as imperatives:

IMC is a member-based organization.
IMC members participate in and evangelize/spread the global network of collectivized media outlets.
IMC media outlets shall be radical (communist/anarchist) in nature.
IMC media outlets shall be accurate (biased) and the stories featured shall be leftist passion plays.
IMC is motivated by love and creation of a better world (e.g. "another world is possible").
IMC members must believe that other media outlets tell lies, and IMC tells truth.
IMC insists that a media conspiracy exists whereby the egalitarian / sustainable (socialist and ecoterrorist) movements are denied coverage.
IMC chapters are autonomous.
IMC is measured in quality by its quantity of franchises.
IMC is an activist information service.
IMC seeks to morally change the media to a Progressive set of ethics.
IMC is communal.
IMC is a facilitator of political and cultural self-representation. ("Self" is not quantified by this organization).
IMC is an illuminated organization.
IMC analyzes issues on the basis of things happening to people against their will, (e.g. why bad things happen to good people).
IMC is reflexive, and/or a reaction formation.
IMC is a tool and knowledge provider.
IMC is a promoter of social and economic justice. (e.g. of Jesuitical Social Gospel).
IMC is not objective.
IMC is kingmaker of people deemed worthy of "becoming the media" (e.g. a liason for siezing the means of production).

This body of beliefs/imperatives characterize the Indy-Fundamentalist as a joiner, an evangelist, a minister of information, a collectivist, communist-anarchist, an ESFP Meyers Briggs "Performer" type who gesticulates, or an INTP "Mr. Spock Buddhist" type who rationalizes altruism and sacrifice, and places "the needs of the many before the needs of the one" unless of course he is the one, in which case he shifts to egalitarian mode. The Indy-Fundamentalist either writes stories reminiscent of passion plays or Henrik Ibsen existentialist plays which are then passed off as criticisms of "this world" and pleas for a more idealistic world. The leap from the one world to the other is often impossible, irrational, or requires some form of sublimated mass upheaval on a fated day of Rapture in the indeterminate future.

The Indy-Fundamentalist has a collective criterion of truth, in other words, what is decided by long division at the lowest common denominator across the largest group (or the largest group present) is the TruthTM. Woe unto he who challenges the "truth told passionately." These Fundamentalists are the protagonists of the passion play, or the Chorus relaying the moral lesson of the tragedy of life (cliche) as the underprivileged masses either cannot articulate, or as they themselves as agents of the underprivileged (via transferrence or skin or genital privilege) do articulate. Failure of the mainstream media to cover these passionate performances owes to the evil capitalist conspiracy to oppress them and then hide the oppression. Ergo, the secret and devious hand of the white-male-employed-capitalist-anglophone-Satan was set against them, and they are merely retaliating on behalf of morality.

The morality is of course Progressivism or rather International Socialism, as distinct from the autarchic, progressive nationalist, conservationist ideas of The Progressive Party of Teddy Roosevelt. Thus, it is a decadence progressivism, a ressentiment progressivism, a reactive, homosexualized, vegetarianized Marxism, loosely stilted upon the Kantian Categorical Imperative, Hegelian Historical Dialectical Materialism, and Platonism. There is also an unhealthy dose of anti-materialism, and a rejection of the principles of biological health and commercial success. Successful individual endeavors and robust claims or prominence of individuals are deemed suspicious, as they would be in a cult such as Scientology, Communist Party USA, Mormonism, or the Jehovah's Witnesses. Embedded in this morality is also the Puritan Ethic, Protestant Iconoclasm, and again Scientology, as the adherents to Indy-Fundamentalism are engaged in a constant purge of charisma, free-thought, taboo ideas, and financial well being from their commune and its prospective members. As distinct from Scientology however, "bad engrams" are not brainwashed out, but rather transmuted into accusations against "society" hence its appeal to young people.

Thus is the Indy-Fundamentalist organization incapable of actually facilitating political and cultural self-representation. So, it resorts to a two pronged pathway of rationalizing, and cultural appropriation. The rationalization process is characterized by the incessant purge of new ideas, and the laying of blame of failure upon evil social forces. The cultural appropriation process is characterized by role reversals and thefts such as whites acting as revolutionary blacks, men acting as battered women, women acting as oppressed minorities and rape victims, college students acting as Zapatistas, Americans acting as Native Americans, and Jews acting as Palestinians. The open travesty of such behavior requires constant camouflage which feeds the evangelical portion of the movement which has adopted Affirmative Action, and thus constantly seeks melanin and estrogen infusions in the form of new recruits and a constant self-deprecation and self-depredation of one's whiteness, one's rich Jewish parents, one's prep or Ivy League school. The passion play must be performed constantly in the form of protests and the coverage of the protests, and the censorship of the ridicule of the protests. One is reminded of puppet shows at the Temple Emanu-El, or bad street performances by musicians in training.

As for the autonomy of the local Indy-Fundamentalist franchise, (church, infoshop, cell, or node,) this is rebutted by the Approval Process which is a function of the International, which is a reduplication of the Master Node which is the IMC main node, whose religious Year Zero began at the Seattle WTO Protests. The network of Indy-Fundamentalist franchises are largely centralized on a few key servers, many of which house several if not whole swaths of "independent autonomous nodes" whose information is cross-syndicated, and whose secretive editorship all use the Master's clandestine networking service. The Master of the franchise is of course a lecturer, a power point presenter and self-promoter with feet firmly rooted in the Capitalist world. The quantity-as-quality criteria of Indy-Fundamentalism is thus bunk, as it is a cloning / droning phenomenon save for the fact that the individual franchises are staffed by locals whose cloned opinions and beliefs were harvested and outfitted by, and not manufactured by the Master node. The autonomy is also besmirched by the node for node facilitation of the same bodies of anarcho-communist groups by and on every IMC, and their editorial membership overlaps.

IMC, like an anti-capitalist Amway, is a mechanism for self-representation. But the sense of self is lacking and manifests as a cult-of-no-personality, with core members sabotaging one another and dragging one another down in various bids for micropower. IMC's network-self is thus subject to easy sabotage. "Self" is an eigenvalue within Indy-Fundamentalism which consists of the "self-identified" activist merged with the "anti-hierarchical" activist. Thus is Indy-Fundamentalism manifested as an endless constructive-deconstructive act and zero sum game. Activists self-identify as activist factions and then rapidly self-unidentify or self-disassociate / apostasize from the other homogenous but hyphenated subgroups engaged in the pathetic struggle to control a portion of free serverspace allocated to the IMC local node. Thus the communal notion is refuted, though the infrastructure of a sovietized website remains for whichever subgroup + technician muscles it away from the others. Whichever subgroup controls the node becomes the core group of Indy-Fundamentalists, and its choice of propaganda becomes the Illuminated Thought or mutually agreed upon corn pone opinion du jour.

Whether this constitutes "Information" is a matter of debate within the current cabal, but in terms of Shannon Information Theory, it constitutes Information when the signal-to-noise-ratio permits discrete signals to be processed by the readers. Much of the content of an IMC is noise, in the form of phentermine ads, links to noise blogs, links to disinfo blogs where signal is deliberately mixed with noise about 9/11 conspiracies, and space aliens. Qualitatively the information on an IMC is largely an echo or mirror of information on other IMCs, which leaves the heavily formatted, heavily and viciously dumbed down inflammatory info signals of approximately two editors and four local anarcho-communist groups, all of whom believe some hybrid of their own organization's dogma, and the tenets of Indy-Fundamentalism.

The idea that this largely dirty Information source is "illuminated" implies that the providers of this noisy signal are themselves a form of Enlightened Beings. One must forgive the hubris of an Ivy League education. The "enlightened beings" who write the passion plays of Indy-Fundamentalism come across as tepid and dim-witted reactionaries. Though their texts are heavily embroidered, none of them have mastered the techniques of fine calligraphy or binding associated with monastic republication. Their explication as to why bad things happen to good people (themselves, or the reform chosen), thus lacks the majesty of a sacred book, but this is of course a high handed criticism. Indy-Fundamentalism is a chandala religion, bargain basement mass morality which ranks somewhere below Zack De La Rocha or Serj Tankian's angry and emotional vocal riffs and screeches, and far less musical. They are expected to suck, and suckiness is the criteria by which they distinguish themselves from the federal agents they believe have infiltrated their toasters, bugged their lunch boxes, and financed every criticism of their organization.

The last tenets of Indy-Fundamentalism can be rolled together, namely the exclusive claim to be promoters of the right way of thinking in their immediate community. How many of these do we have in Boston? Many. We have Nuwabians, ISKON, Scientology, Hillel House, Church of Christ, The Christian Science Mother Church, and all of these within the few narrow blocks spanning Newbury Street to Columbus Avenue. They range from cults of relative acceptance to 503 c) nonprofit scams, but of them all, Indy-Fundamentalists claim to promote social and economic justice while at the same time claiming to promote and demote members of the community at large to status of media personnel, and with a borrowed, begged, stolen and mostly tenuous infrastructure.

The Independent Media Center Structure:

Listservs: There are seven: Announce, Discuss, Dispatch, Editorial, Tech, Radio, Video. Due to low staffing, most of these are peopled by the same 3 to 5 individuals, and each node has at best one technician who maintains the site and migrates it across servers. The Discuss lists are for planning. The Dispatch lists are for fielding third party submissions, to which if you are identified as non-Indy-Fundamental, you will be blocked from submitting. Tech is for maintaining the site, usually migrating it to another free server, fixing it, or instating various censorship protocols, such as user or keyword blocking. Editorial is where the IMC editors fight and complain about one another and their readership or critics, and plan their frivolous lawsuits and protests. In the case of Boston IMC, the Editorial discussions were made private, after openness had been deemed a serious liability to their kingmaking and consensus manufacturing abilities. The relevant note to Indy-Fundamentalism was that the decision to hide their organization's censorship and information control process from their readership was deemed by the upper echelon to be within the guideline of the IMC General Practice. That is to say that several of the more communist, anarchist, or eco-terrorist nodes such as the one in Chicago have gone clandestine and closed, and thus there is a "growing consensus" to hide the activity of IMC from the public. The Radio / Video lists represent outreach to Indy-Fundamentalist low wattage radio and community access television stations in local left-leaning greater metro areas. In Boston, these are found in Cambridge, Somerville, Allston, Jamaica Plain, (e.g. college ghettos) and on college campuses.

The Independent Media Points Of Unity:

This terminology has fallen out of favor, but essentially, the points of unity are the same as International A.N.S.W.E.R. that all information content and members must be anti-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist, homosexual, and vegan at all times. All members are equal, but lesbians, latinos and blacks are more equal, though precious few -- if none -- of them actually participate in the organization. Also, any statements which are deemed to be slanderous (critical) of Indy-Fundamentalism are to be censored, though the word "censor" shall not be used, in fact it too shall be censored. Also any individuals who have been censored shall be placed on probation and targetted for future censorship, barred from membership, and barred from using the commons or the "community" or its donated facilities if they did attempt to appeal acts of censorship. An individual barred from the community is considered shunned, and memos shall be circulated across all tangent communities to disenfranchise said blacklisted individual, generally sink his boat, deny his venue, and shout down his duly paid for and legally organized events.

At first glance, many of the weaknesses of the Indy-Fundamentalist structure are self-evident, those being the same weaknesses of other cults and totalitarian movements. At second glance, one can see how the members themselves take advantage of the structure, and how they determine in from out. At third glance, one can see core flaws in the network which can be used to destroy it, harry it, or run down its resources. These flaws which involve reversing, counterbalancing, or aggravating the list of IMC imperatives will be addressed in another writing.