Fragments of Tactical Media

FRAGMENTS OF TACTICAL MEDIA begins with a memory: the night Indymedia went live during the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. Folding tables, cheap gear, shaky clips, and a sense that the internet itself was a crack in the system, a space you could move through on your own terms. Tactical media was about finding weak points in existing institutions, using the tools at hand and striking at the right moment. Today, the crack has been paved over. We have moved from the network to the feed. A single post can reach millions, but only on the platform’s terms. Algorithms set the pace, surveillance sets the limits, and extraction pays the bills.

The internet described in this book is no longer a free space or a place to hide and organize; rather, it is a landscape of isolated, fully surveilled islands. So, what is tactical media in the here and now? What can activists do with media today? This collection brings together strategies, reflections, experiences, and tools that try to move between islands and build archipelagos. Across community radio and DIY TV, meme ecologies, mesh networks, anti-scroll tactics, livestreams from war zones, and knitting workshops to better understand infrastructure, its contributions map what tactical media looks like after the feed: smaller, stranger, more local, and often slower, but still incisive. Ni dogma, ni vibe. Not a promise of a single solution, but a set of fragments to help connect, endure, and act.