Indymedia legacies in Brazil and Spain: the integration of techno political and intersectional media practices

Luiza Aikawa, Sandra Jeppesen and MARG | 2020 | article in Media, Culture & Society

The Indymedia network is recognized for its open-editorial platform, as well as its prefigurative combination of technological tactics and organizational strategies. In this article, we discuss the legacy of Indymedia in countries not often focalized in the network or in the scholarly literature, namely Brazil and Spain. These countries were chosen to address gaps in the literature regarding Indymedia-influenced adaptations of horizontal media practices established in peripheral spaces such as Latin America and the so-called ‘Global South of Europe’.

This research is based on data sets from two empirical research projects comprised of 37 semi-structured interviews in Spain and Brazil. The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and comparatively analyzed using NVivo. Media activist practices challenge the reductionist binary that situates information and communication technologies (ICTs) as either deterministically revolutionary or intrinsically complicit with capitalism. In this context, using Midia Ninja in Brazil and XNet in Spain as case studies, we argue that Indymedia has had an impact on technological innovations adopted by contemporary intersectional social movement media projects in the global south, critically analyzing ways in which media activist projects have resisted exogenous and endogenous intersectional inequalities through developing specific organizational structures and practices.

We find that intersectional practices related to the anti-capitalist technopolitics of Indymedia have both shaped and been shaped by specific dimensions of digital technologies. We argue that in alternative media practices, intersectionality and anti-capitalist technopolitics have emerged together as intertwined legacies of Indymedia.