The legacy of Indymedia: from opensource to surveillance capitalism

Perth Indymedia

In the early 1990s the internet was largely considered a tool for global democratization. Particularly in the western world it was largely thought that new digital media would bring about a radical transformation in how civil society both engaged with the state and organised itself. In 1999, on the back of the huge anti-capitalist and alterglobalisation movements, the Indymedia network was born. One of the first open-source projects that radically transformed how people, especially activists engaged with new digital media technologies. Indymedia's Raymond Grenfell speaks to three founders of Indymedia, Allan Boyd and Shayne O'neil from Perth Indymedia and Stacy Lightfoot from Sydney Indymedia to discuss the history of the network and our new online platform capitalist reality.