Soon digital broadcasting will make more space in the ether to sell. Politics are already prepared for this. We need to step
in now and make sure our ether does not end up as one big muzak hall. Showing the need for variety with illegal broad-
casting is one way to achieve this. Illegal transmissions could also help in the case of a project like Insular Technologies,
to test the possibilities of an alternative computer network which depends on packet radio. Occasional rings of transmis-
sions could be made on different wavebands and frequencies.

To close of this plea for illegality: in Kroatia a pirate-station was active that used a metal garden fence as its antenna. It
would also drive around with a small transmitter and use the car antenna to broadcast. Small and un-effective in the sense
Of spanning large area's, but so much fun. A great display of knowledge too

THE DEF

OF TACTICAL MEDIA

pue ej3e9 piaeg

{or part two of the ABC of Tactical Media, posted to nettime in the spring of 1997, http://www.nettime.org and the zkp4
der, http:/www.desk.nl/~nettime]

CAMPAIGNS AND MOVEMENTS

Although a global conference, the first Next 5 Minutes, held six years ago (1993), was dominated by the first large scale
encounter between two distinctive cultural communities. On the one hand, Western European and North American cam-
Paigning media artists and activists and on the other hand their equivalent from the former Communist countries of Central
and Eastern Europe, dissident artists and samizdat activists, still basking in the after glow of the role they played in bring-
ing down the communist dictatorships. In the excitement of discovering each other, these two communities tended to gloss
over their ideological differences, understandably emphasising only the shared practice of exploiting consumer electron-
ics (in those days mostly the video camcorder) as a means of organisation and social mobilisation. We referred to these
Practices, and the distinctive aesthetic to which it Gave rise, as tactical media a term other activists, artists, hacktivists,
video makers etc. are continually circumscribing and redefining the perimeters of just what that term might mean.
Although the differences between these two groups were under-played at the time, they were nevertheless profound and il-
luminating. In the United States and Western Europe, tactical media, both then and now, are overwhelmingly the media of
Campaigns rather than of broadly based social movements. They are not a megaphone representing the voice of the op-
pressed or resistance as such. Once upon a time in the West, there were movements without one specific campaign. They
were into questioning every single aspect of life, with ‘the most radical gesture.' “We don't want a piece of the cake, we
want the whole bloody bakery." But now there are a plethora of campaigns detached from any broadly based emancipato-
fy Movement. In contrast, central and eastern European media tacticians, or the “samizdat media”, had been very much
part of broad social movement. A movement that resulted in the dismantling the Soviet Empire. They tended, in the early
days, still to be if not exactly starry eyed, then uncritical, about their future under a market economy.

Six years later, the Consequences of unaccountable global Capital flows have bitten deep. And although less utopian about
the emancipatory potential of new media there is a general convergence of many tactical groups around the principal of
learning the lessons of global capitalism. While refusing to leave globalism to the investment houses and multinationals,