Democracy and Autonomy: The Contradictions of Global Social Movement Networks

Scholars of emergent global social movements and other transnational activist and new media networks have hailed the coming of horizontal, flat, democratic networks tied to new communication technologies. The shared claim is that these networked organizational forms, and accompanying cultural practices, are creating a new more egalitarian social world. At the foundation of this argument is the unexamined embrace of the twin concepts of local autonomy and participatory democracy. However, within transnational networks these dual aspects of the cyber age, democracy and localism, are often in tension with one another.

In this paper, I use the indymedia movement as an exemplar of a transnational media network where the dynamics of global democracy and local autonomy come into tension, offering a more nuanced look at the intersection of the global and the local in global networked social movements. Founded during the WTO protests in 1999, indymedia is a globe-spanning media network, with over 200 active nodes on six continents, where news and journalism is produced in multiple formats in over 30 languages. In specific, in this chapter I look at the decision of the global indymedia network to reject a large grant from the Ford Foundation because of Ford’s history in the Argentine dirty wars. The heated episode almost forced the young dynamic network to shut its doors, and brings to the fore the complex tensions of local autonomy and global sovereignty, highlighting the conservative and oft-times reactive nature of transnational communication networks. Moreover, this episode and indymedia in general, brings to light the inability of decentralized networks to build proactive power, highlighting the disorganizing and at times debilitating organizational logic of contemporary social movements.