# Tactical Media as right-wing training ground? - A Dutch case.

Florian Cramer

The prominent Dutch politician Martin Bosma, chief party strategist and right-hand man of far-right leader Geert Wilders, has a past in Amsterdam's tactical media scene of the 1990s. Is this a biographical freak accident, or does it say something about the tactical media discourse of that time?

## 0. Autobiographical Prologue

When I first encountered the term "tactical media" in the 1990s, I could not make sense of it. Was tactical media supposed to be the equivalent of "tactical weapons"? Or did the name refer to the fashion and product design jargon of "tactical" as something designed to look like military armor? Was it just linguistic sloppiness combined with fashionable jargon to speak of 'tactical media' instead of 'media tactics'? How could media - i.e. information technology - be tactics in and of themselves? By virtue of their engineering?

Only later did I learn about tactical media's implicit reference to French Catholic thinker Michel de Certeau's _Practice of Everyday Life_, which defines tactics as "an art of the weak,"^[De Certeau, _The Practice of Everyday Life_, University of California Press, 1988, p. 37] which cannot "produce, tabulate and impose" spaces, but can "only use, manipulate and divert them."^[De Certeau, p. 30] This definition is closely related to the situationist concept of "détournement"; or (in a practical rather than philosophical sense) to the deconstruction rather than the construction of spaces, situations, media. Replacing "spaces" with "media" in De Certeau's quotes, "tactical media" does not seem to be fundamentally different from the older concept of "alternative media." In the 1990s, it served as a revitalization of the latter, fueled by the hope that mass-commodified, increasingly cheap (digital) consumer technology would democratize media production, making alternative media less exclusive to create _and_ more powerful in their reach.

All this - arguably - happened. But it did do so with a different politics than imagined in the 1990s. Martin Bosma is only one, and not even the best, example of how "tactical" and alternative media publishing has morphed into the memetic-populist politics of the far right. (Another would be, for example, Jim Goad, editor and publisher of the 1990s transgressive underground zine _ANSWER Me!_ and later author of _The Redneck Manifesto_, which became a key reference for the U.S. "Alt-Right"; or the German sociologist Frank Böckelmann, who was a Situationist in the early 1960s, a postmodernist theorist in the 1980s, and a protester with the East Germany's extreme right "Pegida" movement in the 2010s whose theory journal _Tumult_ morphed into a far-right magazine.) Although I would argue that this writing was on the wall, already in the 1980s and 1990s, if one looks at countercultures and DIY media production more comprehensively.

As a student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1992, I had witnessed New York's _Paper Tiger TV_ come to our campus as part of a week-long conference of the academic journal _Rethinking Marxism_. This concept and practice of political activist community TV with very low-tech means, in pre-Internet streaming times, also seemed to inform Amsterdam's "tactical media" scene. Growing up in West Berlin, I was intimately familiar with the "Open Channel" ("Offener Kanal") cable TV, where anyone could come and broadcast, and whose resulting program was an eccentric, low-tech variety show featuring live sex tantric instructors, a neurodivergent elderly Turkish immigrant call-in show host who spoke incomprehensible German and was verbally abused by racist German callers, a sleazy self-appointed restaurant critic whose programs (and meals) were paid for by the restaurants he praised, a professionally produced gay TV show featuring, among others, three 80-year-old trans women who spent 20 minutes in front of the camera "exploding from our beauty," and the occasional TV show by West Berlin's post-punk subcultural video and performance artists.

The New York and Amsterdam approach to DIY alternative electronic or "tactical" media seemed (somewhat) less incidental. It was more clearly rooted in post-1960s New Left social movements, interested early on in the hybridization of broadcast and participatory digital media, and thus in line with Félix Guattari's 1990 concept of "post-media" and his hope that "[n]ew technologies foster efficiency and madness in the same flow. The growing power of software engineering does not necessarily lead to the power of Big Brother. In fact, it is much more cracked than it seems. It can blow up like a windshield under the impact of molecular alternative practices."^[https://www.metamute.org/editorial/lab/towards-post-media-era]

Today, in 2025, these expectations not only are hopelessly outdated and historically refuted by digital platform capitalism and the oligarchic collusion of Silicon Valley tech billionaires with the second Trump administration. They also seem politically naive in their own time, as if (from the early 20th century life reform movement to post-punk) counter-, sub-, and alternative cultures and media had not always encompassed a highly diverse and often problematic spectrum of philosophies and ideologies, including esotericism and alternative science, psychedelics, religious fringe, and various forms of libertarianism, as well as racist and extreme right-wing positions.

In this respect, I was much more attuned to the view of DIY culture represented in, among others, Ivan Stang's 1988 book _High Weirdness By Mail - A Directory of the Fringe: Crackpots, Kooks & True Visionaries,_^[Stang, Ivan, _High Weirdness by Mail_, 1988] which represented the full epistemological and ideological spectrum of DIY self-publishers and media producers, from anarchists to ufologists, underground artists, flat-earthers, alternative science proponents, and even Holocaust deniers. The use of collective identities and pseudonyms, such as "Monty Cantsin" in a subcultural periphery I was involved with, was a radical experiment in giving up control, since anyone from these fringes could potentially join and become part of the shared identity. In his 1967 novel _The Crying of Lot 49_, Thomas Pynchon had sketched a similar diversity of countercultures that operated the underground postal network "W.A.S.T.E." Based on such diverse, radically experimental and borderline dangerous epistemologies and politics, I had been highly critical of what I perceived as left-wing academic and activist simplifying misreadings of these countercultures.^[Among others, in my 1997 review of _Handbuch der Kommunikationsguerilla_: Cramer, Florian. “Lustarbeiter.” SKLAVEN, no. 38–39, 1997, pp. 60–62.] What was covered in _High Weirdness by Mail_ (and in closely related periodicals such as the 1990s review zine _Factsheet Five_) is the same political, philosophical, and ideological spectrum that now populates Internet social media and has moved from the fringe to the mainstream.

## 1. From counterculture...

A distinctive feature of 2010/2020s far-right and postmodern-fascist governments is their inclusion of formerly subcultural actors and currents, in a larger slipstream of their inclusion of libertarian politics. If the modernist fascism of the 1930s was characterized by its aesthetic ideology of militaristic uniformity linked to grand narratives of empire and nation, the postmodern fascism of the 2020s seems to be characterized by its chaotic appearance, clownish-memetic politics, and lack of grand narratives except for floating signifier references to an unspecified better past, as in the slogan "Make America Great Again." In the second Trump administration of 2025, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen have taken former art school philosophies such as accelerationism, in its far-right "neoreactionary" offspring of "Dark Enlightenment," into government policy; Andreessen even literally. Published on the website of his venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz in 2023, his "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" states:

> "We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns. To ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever."

In its appendix, "Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism," the manifesto lists Nick Land (whose philosophy informed accelerationism and who turned to the radical right to promote the "Dark Enlightenment"), Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Buckminster Fuller, and Andy Warhol. The list also includes the more usual heroes of Silicon Valley's Californian ideology such as the economists Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, and futurists Ray Kurzweil and Stewart Brand. Andreesen, Thiel and Musk thus seem to add a third movement to Fred Turner's book "From Counterculture to Cyberculture": from counterculture to cyberculture to postmodern techno-libertarian fascism.

## 2. The Netherlands

The Netherlands could be seen as the forerunner or laboratory of this cultural and political development. Trump's political ideology and style were fully prototyped by Geert Wilders, who entered the political mainstage in 2004, with Martin Bosma as his right-hand man and campaign manager. This was two years after the landslide victory of Pim Fortuyn, a former Marxist sociologist who had turned to neo-conservative, anti-Islam and hard-right positions in the 1990s, first as a columnist, later as a political candidate and leader of his own party. Fortuyn was assassinated by a political activist in 2002. His party went from zero seats to the second largest in the Dutch parliament that same year, but disintegrated soon after.

All three politicians had biographical overlaps with tactical media or left-wing alternative culture in a broader sense. In 1991, Fortuyn was a one-off contributor to _Mediamatic_, reflecting on the use of rhetoric, language and technology in politics and his own work.^[https://www.mediamatic.net/en/page/16443/fortuyn] At the time, Mediamatic was a periodical on new media and art that, among other things, organized the new media conference "Doors of Perception" in Amsterdam and operated in the larger orbit of Amsterdam's 1990s tactical media scene. In his youth, Wilders was part of an alternative youth scene in his hometown of Venlo, and in 2010 confessed to still being a fan of the left-wing political punk band Dead Kennedys.^[https://www.hpdetijd.nl/politiek/politiek/21169/geert-wilders-lekker-van-die-foute-linkse-anarchistische-bands-] (Conversely, Sex Pistols/P.I.L. singer Johnny Rotten/John Lydon is now an open Trump and Brexit supporter.^[Barbara Ellen, John Lydon: 'Don't become entrenched in one opinion and get stuck there for ever', _The Guardian_, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/oct/11/john-lydon-interview-i-could-be-wrong-book-nora-wife-carer-trump-brexit])

Martin Bosma's involvement in Amsterdam's tactical media scene of the 1990s was much more substantial, falling in a period between his university graduation and his professional career in media and politics. Bosma had studied at New York's New School for Social Research, worked for Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign and graduated with a master's degree in sociology in 1992, worked as a freelance journalist for various Dutch and international news media, including CNN and Dutch public television, and - remarkably - was director of the multicultural radio station _Colorful Radio_ before entering politics in 2004. Since 2023, when Geert Wilders' PVV party won the national elections, he has been the Speaker of the Dutch House of Representatives (i.e. he presides over the Dutch national parliament).

After 1992, Bosma was a regular talk show host on the experimental television program _De Hoeksteen Live_ ("The Cornerstone Live") which aired on a local Amsterdam cable television station and was initiated by the artist Raoul Marroquin. Dutch journalist Sophie Derkzen described it as "a chaotic and hectic program with a motley crew of artists, hackers, politicians, journalists, businessmen, neoliberals and activists [...] a kind of celebration of the multicultural society, with lots of noise, half-working camcorders and a ramshackle Internet connection."^[Sophie Derkzen, Martin Bosma van de PVV. Jekyll & Hide, _Vrij Nederland_, http://www.vn.nl/Archief/Politiek/Artikel-Politiek/Martin-Bosma-van-de-PVV.htm. 27 juni 2009, translated from Dutch by Florian Cramer] It included non-stop 12-hour broadcasts, shot in a fast-paced, gonzo journalistic, hand-camera reality TV style, with improvised interviews with often little-known artists and activists. In addition, viewers could participate through IRC chat rooms and phone calls; the chats were displayed as text overlays on the TV program.^[Manny Frishberg, Roll-Your-Own Net TV Takes Off. _Wired_, 2003, https://web.archive.org/web/20031001170759/ttp://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,59623,00.html] Later, Hoeksteen TV migrated from cable tv to Internet streaming.

Hoeksteen TV had some similarities to Paper Tiger TV in its DIY approach and aesthetic. It also had its origins in political activism during the "1999 World Trade Organization demonstrations, when the show carried feeds from the Seattle street protests via a combination of ADSL and cable modem."^[Frishberg, ibid.] In later years, its politics seemed less clearly defined than Paper Tiger TV's, which among others produced a 10-part series "WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM" about the rise of the far right during the first Trump administration in 2018.

Perhaps most significantly, Hoeksteen TV prototyped a mix of citizen journalism, DIY television, and internet social media that became more common in the 2010s. This DIY broadcast style and approach played a crucial role in various populist electoral campaigns, including Donald Trump's first successful presidential campaign in 2016 and Rodrigo Duterte's campaign in the Philippines that same year. It became fully mainstream in Trump's second term in 2025, when the White House revoked press credentials for traditional news media such as the Associated Press, replacing them with right-wing bloggers and YouTubers. What the editors of _The Tactical Media Files_ call the "modest goals of media artists and media activists" as "a movement that challenged everyone to produce their own media in support of their own political struggle"^[Eric Kluitenberg and David Garcia, _About the Tactical Media Files_, 2020, http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/classic/articles/about] also applies in principle to the far and extreme right and their weaponization of the Internet.

Hoeksteen TV participated in most editions of the Amsterdam festival _Next Five Minutes_, arguably the most important local, national and international networking event of the tactical media discourse and movement. A program announcement for the fourth edition of the festival (2003) even claims that Hoeksteen TV was one of the local alternative media initiatives from which Next 5 Minutes grew.^["Next 5 Minutes grew out of the lively mediaculture of Amsterdam of the eighties and nineties, which revolved around local radiostations such as Radio 100, Patapoe and Radio de Vrije Keyser, and local tv-stations such as StaatsTVRabotnik, de Hoeksteen and Vrije Keyser TV", http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/n5m4/article.jsp-articleid=1209.html . In a similar vein, David Garcia said in an interview: "Around that time, you had all sorts of madcap projects emerging, from Rabotnik TV to Kanaal 0 (which I was involved in) and Park TV and the Hoeksteen—various kinds of experimental forms of television, from the unwatchable to the interesting, were exploding on local television. I am not saying the audiences were very significant, but the specific atmosphere of freedom in Amsterdam at that particular point in time did spawn many influential and interesting things, like the theorization of tactical TV, projects like Artists Talking Back to the Media and later on Next 5 Minutes", in: Bergs, S., & Bartholomew, A. (2017). Tactics of Mischief - From Image to Infrastructure: Interview with David Garcia. _Kunstlicht_, 38(3), p. 88] In addition to his involvement with Hoeksteen TV, Martin Bosma is also credited as an interviewer and host for _Next 5 Minutes TV_, a program that accompanied the second edition of the Next 5 Minutes Festival in 1996. The festival's conference program was opened by DeeDee Halleck of Paper Tiger TV, "with screenings of influential old and new material from the Paper Tiger collection."^[http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/n5m2/program/]

Contemporary artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh remembers Bosma's performance on Hoeksteen TV as that of a "provocative character."^[Wendelien van Oldenborgh, _Forged Alternative_, e-flux journal #22, 2011, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/22/67760/forged-alternative/] According to the station's founder Raul Marroquin, one of the "permanent features" of Hoeksteen TV was the following: "On his way home from the office Hoeksteen financial wonder boy Eric Bartelsman does an annoted surfing session of economic sources while Hoeksteen Senior Anchorman in Editorial Functions Martin Bosma analyses and evaluates the day's markets and the influence of on-line trading in economics."^[Arthur Bueno, posting on Syndicate, https://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/syndicate-9908/msg00072.html] He thus was responsible for the "fun [free market neo-] liberal edge" on Hoeksteen Live, although "barking without a real bite," according to a commentator on the Dutch right-wing populist website _Geenstijl_.^[GeenStijl, _Martin Bosma. Held_, https://www.geenstijl.nl/2327861/martin-bosma-held] 

The inclusion of neoliberal and libertarian positions in  counter-culture was by far from atypical for the 1990s. Much-read writers of that time such as Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson), who also spoke at Next 5 Minutes, theorized in a gray area between anarchism and libertarianism.^[Wilson later acknowledged this himself: "in some of my writing I may have given the impression that I would become some sort of cyber libertarian", https://www.e-flux.com/journal/21/67669/in-conversation-with-hakim-bey/] Hacker movements and the Open Source software movement prominently involved right-wing libertarians such as Eric S. Raymond whose widely read essay _The Cathedral and the Bazaar_ was simple repackaging of Friedrich Hayek's idea of "spontaneous order" as opposed to central planning.^["The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved", Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, _First Monday_, 1998, https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/578/499?inline=1] Even the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 involved supporters of the far-right libertarian politician Ron Paul.^[Doug Henwood remembers this as follows: "While the diagnosis was often sharp, goals were amorphous. The prevailing ideology was a fusion of anarchism and populism, with a few Fed-hating Ron Paul hard-money types thrown in. (Thank God almost no one was talking about Bitcoin in 2011, or it probably would have been big)", https://jacobin.com/2021/09/occupy-wall-street-ten-year-anniversary-99-percent-new-york] 

Since Bosma's work for Hoeksteen TV was unpaid, as was that of all those involved,^[according to Ine Poppe, https://monde-diplomatique.de/artikel/!361602] it marks an in-between period between his student years, full-time paid media work and eventually professional politics. His career resembles that of Pim Fortuyn in his development from academic to provocative op-ed commentator to full-time politician. After Fortuyn and Bosma, the politically even more extreme Dutch Alt-Right politician Thierry Baudet made the same career moves from junior academic to newspaper op-ed columnist to politician with his party "Forum voor Democratie" in 2017. The party won the Dutch provincial elections in 2019, became even more extreme during the Covid-19 pandemic, and has since shrunk to a small faction in parliament.

## 3. counter-politics

Martin Bosma's move from economic (neo)liberalism to the populist far right is not atypical in European politics: Under Jörg Haider, Austria's FPÖ mutated from a free market-liberal to a far-right party in the 1980s, Germany's AfD began as a party of neoliberal economists, and Bosma's boss Geert Wilders was a politician in the Dutch establishment neoliberal VVD party for 14 years before clashing with its centrist wing and founding his own party in 2004.

Bosma's 2011 book _De schijn-elite van de valsemunters_ ("The Pseudo-Elite of the Counterfeiters") is both a settling of scores with the political left, including the mainstream liberal left, and a journalistic-autobiographical account of the early beginnings of Geert Wilders' party.^[Bosma, Martin. De schijn-élite van de valsemunters: Drees, extreem rechts, de sixties, de Groep Wilders en ik. 7. edition, Bert Bakker, 2011.] In 2025, it is in its seventh print run. The book brings up, comparatively early in today's far-right discourse, many of the main contemporary talking points of postmodern fascism, such as reckoning with "cultural Marxism" (p. 67-68) and Islam (throughout the 376 pages of the book) - calling "muslim immigrants the shock troops of [the] May 1968 [student movement]" (p. 318) -, a plea for "remigration" (p. 42-52, 60-62), and the claim that Adolf Hitler was in fact a socialist (p. 245), and that "Hitler's socialists were not only left-wing, but also green [party types]" (p. 251). (The same argument was made by Alice Weidel, head of Germany's far-right AfD party, in a video-streamed conversation with Elon Musk in 2025.)

More specifically for the Netherlands, the book includes several attacks on what Bosma perceives as the country's extensive culture of public funding for left-wing causes, while deploring a lack of funding for "organizations that stand up for Israel or against Al Gore's climate theories, against the European superstate, against development aid, or against the multicultural project" (p. 113). This critique includes contemporary artists as "subsidized artists" (p. 97), a "multicultural art elite" that is opposed to "citizen opinion" and necessitates "budget cuts for the arts" (p. 99). This is in line with the PVV's 2010 party platform, which calls for supporting regional folkloristic traditions ("searching kioevite eggs, carnival"), but abolishing all public funding for contemporary art.^["Respect voor de vele lokale tradities: kievietseieren zoeken in Friesland, carnaval in Limburg etc. [...] kunstsubsidies schaffen we af", Partij voor de Vrijheid, _De agenda van hoop en optimisme_, 2010, https://www.parlement.com/9291000/d/2010_pvv_verkiezingsprogramma.pdf. Accessed on 1st March 2025] Bosma is even rumored to be the main driving force behind the PVV's anti-art rhetoric, along with speculation that this is fueled by his own past in Amsterdam's art scene.^[My source are conversations with Amsterdam-based artists who encountered him in the 1990s.]

At the end of the book, Bosma summarizes his critique as follows:

> "I think the key lies in the upheavals of the 1960s [...]. Radical ideas, essentially rooted in cultural Marxism, became commonplace: antipathy to the nation-state, internationalism, glorification of the Third World, social engineering, aid-dependency syndrome, negativity toward Christianity, and cultural relativism - with the law of the abject West as the common thread. All these ideals come together in multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is the crown jewel of the sixties."^["Ik denk dat de sleutel ligt in de omwenteling van de jaren zestig [...]. Radicale ideeën, die in wezen hun wortels hebben in het cultureel marxisme, worden gemeengoed: afkeer van de natiestaat, internationalisme, verheerlijking van de derde wereld, maakbaarheid van de samenleving, hulpverleningssyndroom, negatief tegenover het christendom en cultuurrelativisme – met als rode draad de Wet van het Abjecte Westen. Al deze idealen komen samen in het multiculturalisme. Multikul is de kroon van de sixties." (p. 317)]

In effect, Bosma writes this book as a renegade, as if to dispel any doubts about his current beliefs and political positions. After all, it could easily be argued that in his past work for Hooksteen TV and Next 5 Minutes, and even more so for "Colorful Radio," he not only participated in the post-1960s multiculturalism he now denounces, but also directly benefited from its support (including government cultural funding and left-liberal politics regarding the governance and allocation of TV and radio frequencies) and built his early career on it. And it is a similar liberal policy in today's Netherlands that allocates slots on public broadcasting as well as taxpayer subsidies to far-right TV programs. These are, currently, the right-extremist program Ongehoord Nederland, the right-wing tabloid spin-off WNL and the right-wing populist station POWned whose gonzo journalistic style could be called a less experimental version of the one pioneered by Hoeksteen TV. Thus, Bosma's following statement reads not only as a rehash of standard conspiracy theories about "cultural Marxism," but also as a reckoning with his own past:

> "It is the leftists who call the shots in crucial positions in society. They control the civil service, the arts, the media, the unions, the judiciary, the universities, and they distribute the millions and the jobs in the crucial Subsidy Network of the Left."^["het zijn de linksen die de lakens uitdelen op cruciale posities in de samenleving. Zij beheersen de ambtenarij, de kunst, de media, vakbonden, de rechterlijke macht, de universiteiten, en ze verdelen de miljoenen en de baantjes in het cruciale SubsidieNetwerk van Links." (p. 319)]

With such statements, Bosma continues to play the role of the anti-establishment edgelord that he already played on Hoeksteen TV. This also applies to the design of the book. Encountering _De schijn-élite van de valse munters_ in 2011, Wendelien van Oldenborgh found that "it was not immediately clear to me what it was that I was looking at":

> "[T]he cover of the book ensures that you will recognize its appearance following that of the protest pamphlets inspired by left-wing movements of the 1960s, 70s, or 80s. At first I was not certain whether this was a bitter use of irony or the author’s conscious appropriation of the tactics and terminology of these protest movements for the sake of his quite different convictions. He seems to know very well what they looked like, and how effective certain techniques can be, and this could very well be due to his own proximity to these same leftist movements."^[Wendelien van Oldenborgh, _Forged Alternative_, e-flux journal #22, 2011, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/22/67760/forged-alternative/]

In other words, one could read the book's cover design as a tactical media operation and thus as a reactivation of Bosma's own toolset from the days of Next 5 Minutes. It is tactical media in the way that the term was partly reinterpreted in the 2000s,^[Among others in: Raley, Rita, _Tactical Media_, University of Minnesota Press, 2009] i.e. as staged media pranks in the style of the Yes Men, or as "communication guerilla." Looking like something that belongs in an anarchist or radical leftist bookstore, Bosma's book attempts to act as a political Trojan horse. Its title, "Pseudo-Elite of the Counterfeiters," thus ends up referring back to itself, whether intentionally or not.

# 4. Is the medium not the message, after all?

As mentioned above, Martin Bosma's case is just one, and not even the most interesting, example of "tactical media" being turned on its head politically. The most comprehensive and spectacular case so far was the "Meme War" of the American "Alt-Right" movement in 2016, which repurposed the media tactics of, among others, the earlier Anonymous movement, partly overlapping with it and originating in the same online subculture of the 4chan imageboard.^[For a comprehensive account, see Nagle, Angela. _Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right_. Zero Books, 2017.] In 2025, this theater shifted from a populist to an elitist and oligarchic stage, as accelerationism in its right-wing "Dark Enlightenment" version became U.S. government policy under Musk, Thiel, Andreessen in the second Trump administration. 

It could be argued that the inclusion of (cyber)libertarians and their talking points since the 1990s - in Tactical Media, Open Source culture, the Occupy movement, etc. - created political ambiguities and gray areas that, in retrospect, render today's far-right mutations of these currents and tactics not so surprising. But the more profound question is whether, to quote de Certeau again, "an art of the weak" is a political position at all, or whether it doesn't overlook the fact that "the weak" can also be fascists. Contemporary fascism operates as a patchwork of minorities, constructing itself - as Bosma does - as an oppressed and abject minority even where it isn't. Aside from lacking a grand narrative, its structures are rhizomatic. This does not contradict Deleuze and Guattari, but fits with their analysis of fascism as being "inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State."^[Deleuze and Guattari, _A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia_, University of Minnesota Press, p. 214] In today's postmodern-libertarian fascism, such a state is not even the goal, but rather the dismantling of states. Thomas Pynchon anticipated this in 1967 with the inclusion of the white suprematist "Peter Pinguid Society" in the underground web of the "W.A.S.T.E." communication subculture. 

Applied to media - respectively technology -, this means that operating from a "weak" position, being bottom-up, DIY, countercultural, subversive, etc., is politically and ethically meaningless. Since the early 20th century - since Eisenstein, Brecht, Benjamin, Eisler and Agitprop - artist-activist media engagement has fallen into two basic positions, with a number of positions in between: (a) to view media/technology as a mere vehicle and carrier of messages; so that any medium (including the classical mass media of broadcast and print) could be used for one's own political purpose; (b) to insist that the structure and apparatus of the medium/technology itself is crucial, so that - for example - anarchism could not be adequately communicated via centralized, top-down mass media. McLuhan epitomized position b with the dictum that "the medium is the message."^[McLuhan, Marshall. _Understanding Media_. The MIT Press, 1994.] Marxist cultural studies, in particular, rejected this theory in the 1960s and 1970s, insisting instead, as Stuart Hall did, on the agency of recipients in interpreting what they were served by mass media.^[Hall, Stuart. "Encoding - Decoding (1980)." _Crime and media_. Routledge, 2019. 44-55.] As a perhaps unintended side effect, there was a lack of imagination that apparatuses, and with them communication, could be constructed differently.

Marxist cultural studies objected to the denial of social and political agency in McLuhan's media theory - since it ascribed agency only to technology itself, while taking technology as an ontological given. Nevertheless, the concept of the medium as message inspired artists and activists to rethink media technology by reimagining and rebuilding it at the level of its designs and configurations, by constructing their own apparatuses. This began in the 1960s with Nam June Paik and the RainDance Corporation, and continues to this day, for example in the construction of Open Source, decentral, community-run social networks in the "Fediverse."

On a practical organizational level, the question might be: Does the historical lesson of the 1990s Tactical Media movement and its political naivety apply to the present? In retrospect, the Tactical Media movement occupied a unique time and space, precisely between the 1960s and the 2020s, and was probably the first such movement in which electronic media experimentation reached a wider, non-expert audience. Have contemporary media activists learned from the mistakes of "tactical media," for example in their use of social and political codes of conduct and their rejection of right-wing libertarianism? Or is history repeating itself, for example, with Trump's "Truth Social" network which runs on Open Source Fediverse technology developed, largely, by anti-fascist volunteers?

On an ontological and epistemological level, the questions are even more fundamental: Doesn't "tactical media," and related media activism, amount to a cruelly optimistic misreading of McLuhan? To a naive and ultimately techno-solutionist belief that society can be changed by changing its tools? That the Marxist cultural studies critiques of McLuhan were ultimately correct, because the meaning of a medium depends entirely on its users and usages? Which ultimately means that _any_ apparatus can be made fascist? And that rhizomatic and "tactical" ones have proven particularly effective in this regard?

It is perhaps uncontroversial that the (structure of the) message can be changed by changing the (structure of the) medium, respectively of the information technology. This is a truism of art and design. The more pressing question is whether changing the medium in order to change the message is really politics, or just pseudo-politics, similar to the belief that politics can be changed simply by changing the means of political participation (such as from representative to direct democracy). And whether the gain of such system or configuration changes, in "tactical media" or elsewhere, aren't more aesthetic than political: pleasures of high weirdness.