chapter

Introduction

Fragments of Tactical Media

Chloë Arkenbout, Kate A. Babin, Tommaso Campagna and Sepp Eckenhaussen

On the night of 24 November 1999, during the Seattle WTO protests, Indymedia.org went live for the first time.¹ People crowded around folding tables to upload shaky camcorder clips, write reports, and publish posts. Right then and there, a loose network of people with cheap tools made their own media, tactically pushed against the mainstream broadcast order, and claimed a place in the global conversation. A synergetic rush of energy, collectively channeled into the aether. A sense that something new was taking shape in the digital sphere. A network shaped by the people. Tactical media in practice.

Things have changed since those early days. Today, a single livestream from Gaza or from a protest camp in Belgrade can pull in more viewers in minutes than many Indymedia nodes received in a week. People can use the outreach of platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube if they know how to cut through noise, ride the algorithm when it helps, and slip around it when it doesn’t. But the ground is not the same. We have transitioned from the network to the feed. Early internet culture imagined the network as something you could navigate on your own terms. You could wander through archives, forums, link lists, and other small sites. Today, most of us live inside the feed, a constant stream that decides the order of events, the tempo, and the reach. The feed collapses attention into a single timeline and turns media into an endless present. Gaining visibility is possible, and sometimes it is huge, but always on terms set elsewhere. Virality is easy, while infrastructure control is impossible. And yet, tactical media is still urgent. Because the need for independent media, obfuscation tools, and safe spaces to organize has not faded. On the contrary, they are more relevant now than they were thirty years ago. Of course, today, tactical media looks different from before. That’s the point. They are fluid, adaptive, sharp, timely… tactical.

It was never a theory. Tactical media was a name that came after the practice, shaped by the people who were already doing it. The term surfaced around the first Next Five Minutes gatherings in Amsterdam in 1993, an international festival on tactical television, where artists, activists, and hackers pushed cheap tools and open networks to see how far they could bend them.² In 1997, Garcia and Lovink, drawing on Michel de Certeau’s notion of the ‘tactics of the weak’, described tactical media as cheap DIY media used by people cut out of mainstream culture to push subversive and non-commercial aims.³ These tactics played out in short, focused acts like guerrilla media, detournement, and art-activist pranks. Groups like Critical Art Ensemble, RTMark, The Yes Men, Electronic Disturbance Theater, and many others took whatever tools they had and inserted noise into broadcast and early web spaces.

The idea was simple. Acting in the gaps. Repurposing what is available. Striking where the system is slow. Tactical media took that everyday logic and pushed it into the media field. The tactic mattered more than the medium, and the temporary breach mattered more than building institutions. (One of the reasons to be cautious toward tactical media today.) New social figures rose to prominence online: the hacker, the prankster, the camcorder kamikaze. Tactical media blurred the lines between art, activism, and daily resistance. It was a time when the internet still felt like a gap—a playground or sandbox waiting to be filled with meaning, social relations, politics, and aesthetics. It looked for a moment as if the media were not a fixed machine controlled from above, but something one could intervene in from below.

Today, we write with a different proposition. It is clear that the internet is no longer, and perhaps never was, separate from capitalist reality, but rather is its continuation, its intensification. The original tactical approach of celebration of speed, chaos, and temporality has been completely absorbed. In a feed-shaped environment, tactics do not just disrupt, they can be recruited. As Kluitenberg warns, ‘These tactics were fully appropriated… in the service of an entirely strategic political agenda.’⁴ The platforms that dominate our communication are extractive, restrictive, and often openly repressive. The original dream of a global network of resistance has not vanished entirely, but it has transformed, shrunk, and scattered into smaller, more intimate experiments.

This book was born from a specific inquiry into that transformation. When we launched the open call for submissions, we were emerging from a two-year project at the Institute of Network Cultures called the Tactical Media Room. Starting with our larger community during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and continuing through the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the protests in Serbia, and student encampments in Europe and the USA. The project’s concept was straightforward: to create a dedicated space where activists and researchers could narrate conflicts from their own perspectives. We organized physical and hybrid meetups to coordinate both publishing content and building concrete actions.

We kept publishing diaries, articles, and livestreams, but through the years, the sense of urgency changed. In practice, we realize that the crises we reacted to never gave way to reconstituted normalcy. On the contrary, the stack of crises kept growing. Wars, genocides, climate catastrophes, and recessions piled up—not even to mention the everyday reality of gender-based violence and racism. Moreover, we knew that these crises are interconnected. There is no global warming without colonialism and no capitalism without patriarchy. However, the complexity of this stack of crises makes tackling them as a whole a rather daunting practice. Crisis upon crisis has generated mobilization and agency, but also an overwhelming sense of impossibility and powerlessness. We can see nearly everything, broadcast more than ever before, but what can we actually do with media?

This paralysis is not coincidental; it is structural. It is the result of decades of incessant compounding of platform power in the hands of a few tech broligarchs. Platform capitalism has advanced toward violent surveillance, political regression, and default brutality. Platforms no longer simply distract, but wound, exposing the violent nature they previously tried to hide.⁵ Even activist paralysis is baked in. Our attention, our data, and even our political anguish are treated as resources to be mined. This system demands constant affective labor, or the uncompensated emotional work of bearing witness and fighting misinformation on their terms, which inevitably leads to exhaustion and activist burnout. The moral bankruptcy of free software and its co-option by big tech has left us with fewer viable alternatives than we imagined possible in the early 2000s.

So what now? How can we use media in tactical ways when ‘the line dividing the symbolic and material aspects of mobilization, becomes less clear when digital technologies are both the means of expression and the expression itself’?⁶ If we need a diversity of practices and tactics for the many struggles and urgencies we face, can we at least share common (digital) tools? If we can draw any conclusions from the contributions in this reader, it’s that tactical media today looks radically different from its early incarnation. The internationalist force of Indymedia has transformed into more intimate forms of resistance toward media consumption. Some look familiar, like local radio and community platforms. Others stretch the field, from knitting as infrastructure work to slutty urbanism and anti-engagement strategies that refuse the scroll.

These practices do not promise the next Instagram killer or the search engine that will topple Google. Instead, they work at a different scale: toward local experiences, small communities, and small tech. Small isn’t a retreat. (At least not always.) It’s a shift toward collective paths that can actually work. A testing ground for new forms and media that may or may not someday lead to a system overhaul. We will cross that bridge when we get there.

This shift reveals a subtle but profound change from the original definition of tactical media. Where it was initially understood as fleeting, temporary, and opportunistic, a tactic used in the moment, the practices represented in this book demonstrate a different approach. They are not one-off interventions but rather attempts at slow, strategic infrastructure-building; they are tactics that aspire to become enduring practice, refusing the platform’s logic of rapid obsolescence and immediate scale.

There is a peculiar contradiction in the formats that these tactical infrastructures adopt. A surprisingly large number of the experiments and practices in this book take forms that resemble older media like radio and TV. It would be easy, but also mistaken, to describe these retroforms as media nostalgia. Instead, the stream artists and pirate radiocasters described recognize that in the age of platformed media, one does not tune in or out, but undergoes eternal, non-negotiable information overload. In other words, good old content flow is back, stronger and more immediate than ever.⁷ Building TV or radio media is thus not a regressive practice, but a way to weaponize the format of the feed against itself. The algorithmic timeline is a hostile broadcast channel that must be disturbed, stretched, or redirected. From careless consumption to culture jamming. From virality to slow punk. From data transparency to smudgy nichecore. By intervening directly inside the stream, these tactics reclaim the ‘liveness’ that defined early tactical media, creating moments of friction within the very machinery of extraction.

And although we see trends and common interests, there is no uniformity in the infrastructural or formal features of the projects shared with you in this collection. Some build local networks and small tech infrastructures. Others use the major platforms with a clear understanding of the risks and limits. The point is not purity. One does not build a self-contained media island in the platform sea. If anything, the shared underlying principle is a stubborn insistence on platform promiscuity; a refusal to be locked in, logged on, and sold off for data parts. The tedious maintenance of an autonomous server and the opportunistic approach of platform hopping are equally valid in the struggle against the platform lock-in effect. The point is paying attention to what we do, why we do it, what works under which conditions, and which trade-offs we accept.

Beyond the platform lock-in effect, the tactical terrain is vast, and treading on it is rewarding. The reader of this book will encounter information smuggling as media ecology, experiments in networked feminism, anti-colonial meme communities, community radio as commons practice, TikTok streams from Gaza, and forking as political practice. Each contribution represents not a solution but an approach to navigating the contradiction of organizing resistance within the very systems that enable oppression. An imaginative testimony to the knowledge that another world is possible.

But the question that haunts this collection, the one we cannot fully answer, is whether these local experiences can create new futures on their own, or whether we need to find ways to organize, amplify, and scale them. The promised globalist reach of early internet activism turned out to be a trap, a seduction that mirrored the logic of the platforms we now oppose. Today, early tactical media formations like flashmobs and temporary autonomous zones strike as nearly indistinguishable from hegemonic platform virality. Like memes, they suddenly appear, catch attention (and clicks?), and disappear without leaving a mark. Calling them subversive or even radical seems laughable. And yet… The mechanism of the organized network or organet remains our best weapon against a techno-feudal internet. To fight a system based on extraction, we do not need a single global platform; we need a federation of strong, hyperlocal nodes. Today, the organet returns not as a tool for global reach, but as a necessity for local survival. These local practices are better understood as durable cells in a network of nets, rather than nodes in a singular global body. The task is no longer to scale up, but to scale across. Yet without some form of coordination, some sharing of common tools for common causes, we risk fragmentation and isolation.

Perhaps this is the real tactical question for today: not how to build the next Indymedia, but how to connect the knitters with the radio collectives, the meme communities with the mesh networks, the data activists with the performance artists. How to share strategies, reflections, experiences, and tools across struggles without recreating the centralized infrastructures that failed us. How to broadcast glimmers of hope without going back to concepts that no longer hold, or perhaps by going back to them differently.

Glimmers of Hope

In assembling this collection, with the risk of sounding cringe, we hope that tactical media can offer glimmers of hope. We understand hope not as naïve optimism that encourages passivity or as a promise of technological salvation, but as a catalyst to ignite action. As Rebecca Solnit writes: ‘It’s important to say what hope is not: hope doesn’t mean denying realities. It is not the belief that everything was or will be fine. […] Hope locates itself in the premise that we don’t know what will happen, and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty, there is room to act.’⁸ In a similar spirit, Hannah Proctor articulates hope as a fragile, hard-won capacity to continue acting together even when infrastructures fail, movements fracture, and defeats accumulate. ‘Hope not just as a feeling, but as a practice—something you do rather than just something you experience.’⁹ She reminds us that political desire often begins in moments when another world briefly feels possible. Yet she also cautions that clinging to a purified or triumphant image of hope can itself become destructive. Instead, she argues for communities to acknowledge exhaustion, grief, and the emotional debris of struggle while still committing to organization as a practice of care and endurance. And so do we.

Our aim with this collection is to amplify the shared practices where, despite the horrors of our time and despite the challenges of late platform capitalism, people keep intervening, sabotaging, refusing, building, trying, repairing, and imagining together. Proctor would not claim digital technology to be either a source of hope or despair, as, according to her, the real question is: what would a more liberated future look like? If anything, we hope (see what we did there) this reader is a source to spark enthusiasm to keep fighting for that future.

Fragments for Inspiration

A collection of unruly, tactical media practices is, by definition, fragmentary. We celebrate this diversity of angles, for a rejection of an overly polished environment or a lack of forced cohesiveness is a tactic in and of itself. As you’ll soon read in In the belly of the meme: Tactical dissemination in the Arab and diasporic digital sphere (p.167), a chaotic or messy aesthetic directly counters the sterilized facade encouraged by mainstream platforms. In their article, Tafeche and Kharma introduce us to two meme-makers creating from Arab-diasporic positionalities, illustrating how memes and meme communities have the potential to carve out spaces for those who might otherwise feel disconnected, the many cultural fragments within the memes functioning ‘as relational threads linking diasporic backgrounds’. The messiness and contradictions within these memes reflect the complexity and nuance of the cultural and political realities of their creators and their audiences.
Several authors in this book insist that on an organizational level, too, acknowledging the complexities of the crises we face is vital, and should be reflected in the modes of organizing and cultural production in order to be effective. In the text Forking For Future? The Case of the Extinction Rebellion – Just Stop Oil Split (p.259) Manconi and Gambetta reveal, through a connection to the idea of forking in open-source communities, how conflict within organized social movements can lead to what they call a socio-political fork. A split that has the potential to strengthen and expand a movement, a fracture that does not diminish it. In Offener Kanal Europa: Can a TV channel save public access? (p.71 ), Nora Spiekermann and Giacomo Marinsalta detail their artistic response to urban financialization, interrupting the cold, sanitized nature of public spaces born from neoliberal privatization with their own version of messiness. Live performance broadcasts and talk shows designed to connect with neighbors and neighborhoods, turning polished ‘products’ into environments that are actually lived in. Public spaces with identities that are formed through their imperfections. As the authors put it, these interruptions and glitches work to fracture ‘the seamless order of a rendered city shaped by financial interests.’ In both of these texts, friction and fragmentation are the generative forces.

A further, admittedly crude reason to for us lean into fragmentation, is the sheer, overwhelming, beautiful amount of tactical media practices today. In addition to the editorial contributions we have also added a Tactical Media Repository (p.279), highlighting this even further. Here, you will find a collage of more tactics, facing off crises by utilizing a range of strategies and tools. To name a few: Tommi Marmo provides a workshop guide to understanding decentralization through knitting in Knitting Our Internet  (p.317). Learning Palestine (p.291) is a collective that works with multiple forms of knowledge dissemination – new and old – to prevent the limitations of corporate-controlled networks. Or Tools Against Surveillance Capitalism (p.309) by xvendetta, provides a set of concrete alternatives to platform monopolies that can be used to de-google our lives.

While the tactics gathered in the repository are brief and intended to offer more resources, the articles reflect extensively on their lived experience and experimentation. They show how such approaches take shape in practice, across different contexts and forms of collective work. Jack O’Grady, for example, examines how we can tear ourselves away from the endless scroll in Disrupting the Doomscroll: Tactics for the Collective Reclamation of Attention from within the Content Machine (p.121). We learn about Denise Sumi’s experience at The Island School of Social Autonomy and how their pedagogical model can inform collective reconstruction and radical local autonomies for communities in Convivial Tools for Worlds to Come: The Island School of Social Autonomy (p.217). Alongside the Cashmere Radio broadcast recording, Matilda Jones describes how experimental audio can capture the heart of on-the-ground mutual aid in The polyphonic potential of mutual aid collectives: Sounding solidarity in experimental audio (p.51). And in Remember to remember (p.23), Wanderlynne Selva acquaints us with an unpublished manifesto through poetic memory, a rewriting of dpadua’s 2009 technopolitical warning, they prompt us to remember each other, remember magic, and the necessity of concrete openness within and outside of technology. They remind us to hope. And this hope – along with the slow tangible collective action that invokes it – is a throughline in all the texts we’ve assembled here.

Staying in the Middle

This book doesn’t offer solutions, nor does it claim to be an exhaustive overview of tactical media today. These contributions offer fragments of strategies, reflections, experiences, and tools that help sustain the everyday labor of mediated resistance. There are countless experiments, projects, and practices happening across the world that aren’t documented here. What this collection offers instead is something equally important: a loud call for more of this research, more documentation, more sharing of tactics and tools. It’s an introduction to a concept that, now more than ever, is urgent.

Because if we’ve learned anything from the past two decades, it’s that we cannot afford to let these experiments disappear into the noise of platform feeds, to let these practices remain isolated and undocumented. The work of mapping, connecting, and amplifying tactical media practices is not academic luxury; it’s rather a political necessity. Every radio collective that shuts down without sharing its knowledge, every alternative platform that vanishes without documenting what worked and what didn’t, every community tool that remains invisible to other communities fighting similar battles, represents a loss we can’t afford.

This book is not a beginning, but it is not an ending either. We are happy with the messy middle; to stay with the tactics. We call on our fellow researchers, activists, and artists to do the same: document your experiments, share your failures, connect your practices. The urgencies remain. The crises stack higher. But the tactics have changed, become more personal, more local, more weird. And in that weirdness, in that refusal to scale according to platform logic, something else becomes possible: not a solution, but a crossroad of practices changing the media landscape.