S11, the protest against the WEF at the Crown Casino happened just over 10 years ago.
The website has been down for a few years, but it has just been archived at http://s11.media2.org
Melbourne Indymedia was launched a month or two before the protest, so this site has an anniversary to celebrate too.
Congrats everyone.
It was amazing at the time when the mainstream media outlets were lying outrageously (some based on false information by police-hired PR company Burson Marsteller), how much truthiness and passion came through, where you could taste how honest people were being, unedited, anonymously on melbourne.indymedia.org. And it told a very different story.
There's a bit of discussion about the organising strategies over at:
Here's an old review of the protest with emphasis on the websites linked to it presumably written a few weeks or months after the protest...
Globalisation: protest and organisation, or why s11 rocked
by Dan Cass
www.s11.org is the website from the three-day blockade of a World Economic Forum meeting, which took place at the Crown Casino complex on the Yarra River in Melbourne, Australia, 11-13 September 2000. The WEF is a roving private club where the 1000 richest corporations discuss the direction they wish to take globalisation. So in Australia the WEF brought together executives such as Microsoft's Chairman Bill Gates and others from Nestle, Nike and McDonalds, with sympathetic politicians from the Liberal, Labor and Australian Democrat parties. For one month following the s11 blockade of the WEF, the website s11.org was the most visited political site in Australia and currently ranks 4th, up there with the corporate-priced and corporate-styled sites of the mainstream political establishment.
(see http://www.top100.com.au/aust/lifestyle/politics/index.html).
The s11 site, like the protest, was a remarkable achievement because it managed to generate authenticity for itself despite having no easily representable structure from which to draw on. Content, design and function decisions on sites representing organisations are rather simple technical questions. But since s11 was a decentralised, spontaneous protest of perhaps 40,000 people, there was no organisation which could guide these decisions. It was a testament to the cohesive nature of the movement itself that a self-appointed web team could pull together a site as true to its anarchic origins as s11.org was.
Content: what and how?
S11.org was an online community space for people considering taking part in the blockade. It was also accessed by the media, security forces and the WEF. The blockade itself was part of an ongoing series of so-called 'anti-globalisation' protests worldwide, known by their date or location: n11, j18, o26, Seattle etc. These protests vary quite widely in character, with each event displaying a particular mix of theatrics, peaceful assembly, NVA (non-violent direct action), violence, media interventions, conferences, music, parliamentary debate and cyber activism.
The site opened up the possibility for a diverse range of online and offline participation. When it carried the claim that the blockade's official anthem was a song with ironically radical sounding lyrics by John Farnham, an expatriate English mainstream rock crooner, this generated wide media controversy. Farnham's manager, Glen Wheatley, became involved in condemnation of the site as he strenuously argued that his artiste would never condone the blockade. There were also cases where people attempting to land on certain corporate sites ended up visiting the world according to s11. With threats of lawsuits these incidents gave the most 'positive' coverage in the lead up to the blockade. It should be noted that Melbourne's two daily papers were particularly negative about s11. The very conservative Fairfax-controlled Melbourne Age tried to argue that the protests were meaningless, wheras the Murdoch controlled Herald-Sun gave a perversely descriptive and hysterical beat up of 'expected' protestor violence. Needless to say both papers were wrong.
People who visited s11.org before the blockage were given advice on everything from protesting, transport and billeting to political backgrounders and the alternative news source melbourne.indymedia.org. Protestors visiting from interstate and overseas, (including two politicians from New Zealand) were able to make contact with local billets, arrange their attendance at globalisation conferences and follow the indymedia coverage of media, government and police preparations. They could also find out about protests techniques and philosophies, for instance via links to the British Reclaim the Streets movement, complete with primers on the construction and deployment of urban blockade devices such as tripods.
(see http://www.gn.apc.org/rts/tripod1.htm).
S11.org also guided people to the s11 legal and medical teams. Potential protestors could find out about various paramilitary policing methods, such as chemical agents, and ways to deal with them safely. Everyone was also encouraged to know about their legal rights and make preparations that would frustrate police attempts to destroy the blockade using mass arrests.
Conclusion: It rocked.
S11.org worked very effectively. Aesthetically, the site was charming. Simple blocks of colour sat against white-backed text. Well hacked images of Crown and a menu of links (to events, organising, protesting tips, corporate profiles, What is the WEF, FAQs, contacts etc) framed a main information and contact list. This scrolling list was so long it felt clumsy compared to design-rich, information-poor commercial sites, but this was necessary to encompass the vast number of related organisations and events. Like many young activists they generated an announcement list out of the excellent www.egroups.com service. A count-down clock raised the sense of expectation and the text was all concise and well edited.
Links to sites and email addresses were generally more reliable than many commercial sites, such as the Fairfax f2 shlemozzle. A nifty propaganda page served visitors pdf downloads of the distinctive round s11 sticker, leaflets, posters, cartoons by Heinrich Hinze, banner ads for web sites and a promo ad (viewable on Realplayer). After the blockade a new site was made (with the original frozen at s14: http://www.s11.org/s14/s11.html) and a lovely 'Parade of Heroes' added, where funky green robots representing various groups and organisations involved in the blockade jiggled across the screen (viewable with Macromedia Flash 5 at http://www.s11.org/parade/index.html).
Overall the site must take some of the credit for the success of s11 blockade. It was neat, fast, spunky, informative and the John Farnham and other media interventions were a very effective weaving of the cyber and the non-cyber media spaces.
Context: community and change
S11.org and the protests of which they are a part are at the cutting edge of online culture and globalisation because they are the globalisation of radical concepts of democracy. Unlike traditional leftist models of internationalism which lead towards a democratic society of nation states, this movement is a nascent global society of people. So while many left thinkers are debating the utility of the UN in moves towards a fairer ordering of the family of nations (eg. Joseph A Camilleri, Kamal Malhotra and Majid Tehranian (2000) Reimagining the future. Melbourne: La Trobe University) the actions of the movement are giving people a direct voice and the experience of direct action.
The foreign and national correspondents covering the WEF and s11 correctly saw these events in a global context. (Interestingly, they complained to the s11 media centre that their stories were being edited towards incorrect interpretations by desk-bound editors. A commercial radio journalist even apologised for his network's hostile editorialising.) One correspondent compared the blockade to civil unrest in Northern Ireland or the former republic of Yugoslavia. He said that in those places extreme police tactics come when the government is justifiably fearful of being toppled or the police are physically threatened by Molotov Cocktails or bombs. He had never seen a protest as peaceful as s11 incite rsiot police charges with full-length batons, horses nor the alarming incident, soon before the courts, where a police vehicle charged the crowd and ran over a woman.
Another correspondent from an international wire service was one of a dozen mainstream journalists who were batoned and bashed by the police. He said that protestors in Australia are not aware of just how brutal state repression can be and should generally think themselves lucky.
S11's online presence did not just influence mainstream media coverage, it created some of the images in that coverage. Once it was clear that the international newsworthiness of s11 was the police violence, networks clamored for good footage of police brutality. Major international media used s11.org to get to melbourbne.indymedia.org, where they found the desired footage and stills from independent media makers. This was some of the most graphic record of events and some media makers sold their images to the networks. The most truthful TV reportage of s11 was on Channel 9's Sunday Program, which was given a 7 minute indy-produced segment on the strict condition that no editing or voice-over was made.
IndyMedia's Melbourne site generated about 700,000 hits, carrying hundreds of spontaneous text story contributions from Melbourne and around the world, including substantial documentary of the blockade: 200+ images, 15+ videos and 35+ audio stories. The online IndyMedia coverage did not replace community print, radio or TV media. IndyMedia actually produced a printed bulletin during s11-13 and SKA-TV made a documentary, watched in screenings in Prague during s26 and across Australia and New Zealand. Undercurrents, Australia's national community radio current affairs show, crossed to s11 and was available globally via streaming at http://www.2ser.com.
Globalony for the masses (and their mouses)
What we are seeing in the wave of 'anti-globalisation' protests is a quite new form of social protest and community formation. What is remarkable is the rapid evolution of the movement and its methods. Forget those long volumes of Noam Chomsky or Jurgen Habermas, or that Derrida and Foucault you picked up from reading design magazines, the movement is defining its own rules and changing the global social reality along with it.
A central aspect of this evolution are the distinctive new forms of specialist but autonomous organisation, such as those groups that put together the professional web-based activist services of s11.org and melbourne.indymedia.org. They have arisen spontaneously to address weaknesses in the movement. For example, during the Battle of Seattle, the police demonstrated their weakness and their authoritarianism by shutting down mobile phone and other public communications systems being utilised by protestors. In order to address this threat in Melbourne, a group formed i(X)press, a walkie-talkie assisted bike courier service for the blockade (see http://www.criticalmass.org.au/ixpress/title.html). They spririted documents, medical supplies, legal information and digital images/video around to those who needed them. This innovation was discussed and promoted online and will inform future blockades in other cities around the world. (For a discussion of these specialist groups see 'World's best practice blockading' in s11 Spring available at http://www.bobbrown.org.au).
Much globalony has been written about cyber democracy, the politics of technological artefacts, networked community and the postmodern condition. All these concepts must be reinterpreted in the light of current events if they are to remain useful. With the escalating wave of globalisation-related protests and associated online organising, new dynamics are being generated. The international popularity of the IndyMedia network and s11.org (which was the 400th most visited www site for a period) demonstrate their importance. History is opening up, again.
Dan Cass is Co-convenor of the Sydney Alternative Media Centre (see http://www.samcentre.org) which hosted a national media briefing centre in Melbourne for s11