Ben Manski: Let us begin by talking about your political origins, your childhood, and young adulthood. What's your story? What brought you to the work you ended up doing in the 1990s?
Norm Stockwell: I was raised in a Left household as both my parents were politically active. And so I grew up in the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and also the early stages of what now would be called the Sister Cities movement. They were involved with groups like the US-China People's Friendship Association and other similar organizations that were looking to build people-to-people ties with folks in countries that were the enemies of the United States government at the time. I was deeply influenced by the culture of that period. Marching down the street with a hundred thousand people, for example, all singing the same songs like “We Shall Overcome,” or “Oh, Freedom” during the civil rights marches in Chicago was very formative for me. It was instructive in terms of the culture of the movement. It was really moving just to see and experience so many people inspired by the messages that were conveyed in the music of the time.
Going from there, moving forward through the '70s and '80s, I was again involved in a lot of sort of political cultural activities around folk music in the 1980s, working on a thing called The People, Yes, which was an annual cultural festival that we did in Chicago in the years leading up to the hundredth anniversary of the Haymarket Centennial in 1986. Prior to this, in 1982, I had worked on the salute to Paul Robeson in Chicago, a several days-long event that honored Paul Robeson as a people's artist. At that time, I was also involved in the US-China People's Friendship Association and ended up working at China Books and Periodicals in San Francisco for a little while. Again, I think the combined features in this work was that there was both the role of culture in the movement and also friendship as a way of addressing the landscape of US policy.
Then in the '80s, I was also began getting involved in solidarity work with Central America. Right after Ronald Reagan was elected we were confronted with a President who was trying to play out the Cold War in proxy wars in Central America. So, beginning in 1981 there was work in support of the people of El Salvador and, shortly after that, Nicaragua. I ended up working for a while in Nicaragua with a newspaper. It was a bilingual paper on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua during the Contra war. Once more there was this kind of people to people, friendship-based elements to this work. We had an exchange project with this newspaper in Bluefield on the Atlantic coast working with the US-El Salvador sister cities and then later other sister city projects with Vietnam, with East Timor, and so on.
Also during that period, I was doing a lot of labor organizing, again, particularly through the cultural lens. I was a member of the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World and was involved in doing annual May Day commemorations and cultural events, mostly in Chicago. Although in Madison we did also do an annual May Day event that involved some sort of cultural activity, whether it be a sing along, or showing a film, or something. And then by the mid-nineties we were working together with a number of other activists in town through a coalition that organized a whole week of events from Earth Day to Mayday around both environmental issues and labor issues, through a cultural lens.
Manski: Turning to a perspective on the broader movement of those times. Can you speak to your role in building democratic institutions that were economic institutions, media institutions, and cultural institutions? In particular, can we talk about WORT and the Lakeside Press?
Stockwell: When I came to Madison, I had worked briefly at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago and I started a branch of the Old Town School here that went for a year or so, which taught classes in folk music, all different instruments, and hosted concerts and workshops. From that, I got connected with WORT community radio, originally through folk music. I did a folk music program there for a number of years, which was again rooted in this notion of folk music as a component of political activism—folk music being the musical expression of the hopes and dreams and aspirations of everyday working people. I would do programs that would be focused around a theme or a topic, like music of the civil rights movement, music around revolutions, music focused on particular artists like Phil Ochs, Peggy Seeger or Ewan MacColl. And from there, I kind of drifted into getting involved in news and public affairs programming. I started doing interview programs around some of the political issues that I was involved in, particularly El Salvador, Nicaragua, and various other solidarity movements around the globe.
Then I also learned the engineering technologies of doing radio and began to see community radio as a way to democratize the production and distribution of news and information. So, beginning in 1995, I was hired on the paid staff at WORT and my by job title was Operations Coordinator, which involved both administrative and technical duties. But it also, at least the way that I envisioned it, involved being connected to the community radio movement as a whole, both nationally across the United States, but also internationally. In fact, I had connections with an organization called AMARC, the World Association of Community Broadcasters, and participated in a number of international community radio events. I also worked with Prometheus Radio Project, helping to get low power radio stations going around the country. We did what were called barn raisings where we would help spend like a weekend helping a community radio station get on the air. Involvement through that connected me with a lot of other independent media activists. It was in part through awareness of this that I became connected with Seattle. The Indy Media Movement, as I see it though, got its start, not in Seattle, but several years earlier at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1996 as there was a convergence space there, which in many ways was the seeds of what became Indymedia Seattle. I was down there for some of that in '96 and then went on later to participate in events in Seattle.
Manski: Let's talk about Chicago '96 and the counter media project at that time, the whole constellation of people who came together through it, and that why was that important?
Stockwell: There were a number of groups that came together. Chicago had been the site of the Democratic Convention in 1968. And in some ways, I think a lot of activists in '68 felt that the event was intended to put what was happening on the screens of the mainstream media as anything else. There was the chant, "The whole world is watching." It also showcased how the corporate media is not our friend. A lot of people naively hoped that if the images of people being beaten by the Chicago police were televised around the world that it would create some sort of transformative change. And it didn't do that. So, when the convention came back to Chicago in '96 and it was the first time the Democrats had been back since ’68—and the first time any convention had been back to the Midwest at all since then—the idea was to create a space for people to make their own media about what was going on. To do so, a building was reserved for what was what was called the Convergence Center. That term, as you know, was picked up by the anti-globalization movement in the wake of Seattle. And the point of this was also for people to come together and cross fertilize each other’s ideas and projects. I think that's a really important thing to understand today in the days of podcasts. A lot of people are making media in their basement, but there's not the kind of atmosphere that's created in a community media newsroom, whether it be the community radio station—which is where this happens on a day to day, ongoing basis—or whether it’s these convergence centers around events that are created by indy media spaces. The atmosphere of people sharing ideas and talking to each other as they're creating news really makes for a much more diverse picture of what's going on.
I think that's the legacy and the history of Chicago ’96—independent media and the community radio newsroom at full-power or low-power community radio stations—spaces where people come together. And, yes, they're developing techniques in these spaces, but they're also developing this common understanding of the things that they're confronting and that they're reporting on. Certainly, there's a grand legacy of this in print media going back to the counterculture press of the 1960s with papers like the Chicago Seed and The Black Panther. It hadn’t, however, really happened in multimedia before that convergence around the 1996 Democratic convention in Chicago. Afterall, this was in the early days of digital media production when we began to see great leaps in technology. More and more people had digital cameras and were using digital editing for both audio and video production. Reporters started using mini disc recorders for reporting on events. So, multimedia came out of the combination of all of these innovations in digital media technology and the accessibility of those tools then combined with sensibility about the need for a people's news service.
Manski: What was the role of activists, media activists, technology activists and those involved in movements of the period in creating these technologies and approaches to new media practices?
Stockwell: The mini disc recorder is a good example because it was originally very clunky to carry around. And then Sony really developed a smaller, more portable version that could be carried while people were jogging. And, then, I believe it was during the 1996 campaign trail when some reporters at National Public Radio (NPR) first figured out that you could use the mini disc recorder to record the speech at the campaign stop and then quickly edit it on en route to the next campaign stop or back to the hotel. That's when people began to understand how this could work as a news gathering tool. And by the late '90s, by the time of Seattle, it was really the tool of choice for activist journalism because it was very simple to use and understand. When Jeremy Scahill traveled to Yugoslavia in 1999, he called me from the airport as he was heading over, as he had just bought a mini disc recorder. So, I talked to him over the phone about how you could use that to actually produce a piece right on that recorder. Technological advantages that tool offered really gave people a lot of flexibility. By Seattle in 1999 there was a whole series of kits that everybody could check out from the Indymedia Center, including a mini disc recorder, a handheld microphone, and a pair of headphones. They could then go out and gather audio in the street and then bring it back to the media center to produce pieces and upload it to the internet.
It was the same with portable video cameras. Again, this was the early days of digital video and mini-DV tapes as well. This meant people were able to start doing things that they couldn't do before. Similarly, the company here in Madison called Sonic Foundry had developed a digital editing software that was very powerful and easy to use. And we got them to give us a bunch of sample discs of the program, called Sound Forge 4.5 at that point, which I then took and distributed to media activists at community radio conferences and the independent media center in Seattle. This allowed people to do very elaborate and powerful digital editing on a laptop computer making it the tool of choice for digital editing. Jeremy, in fact, told me that in Serbia in 1999, that the most pirated software program you could buy it in the black market was Sound Forge 5.0, which was getting distributed all over Eastern Europe.
In short, this particular tool, combined with the mini disc recorder enabled people to have a complete radio studio in their laptop computer. Not long after that people started developing broadcasting software as well meaning that you could create an internet radio station on your laptop computer. Later this led to working with AMARC, the World Association of Community Broadcasters, to distribute a product that was basically a radio station in a box—a laptop with a piece of open source software that you could use to, in just a few short minutes, create a live streaming radio station right there at an event, any place where you could connect to the internet. It was a very powerful tool for democratizing the production and distribution of media.
Manski: You've made a number of references to the interaction between audio, visual media, and the internet changing during this period. Can you talk about some of the ways in which activists together with communities, media, and journalists were working to find new ways to make use of the internet and multimedia?
Stockwell: The term globalization from below really came out of the movements of Latin America. It was the people in Latin America that started talking about using the tools of corporate globalization to push a message of people's globalization. That is what inspired a lot of activists around the world to look at ways that the internet could be used in this sort of a project. In it's beginning, Indymedia was a global project. I remember in the days preceding the World Trade Organization (WTO) conference in Seattle there were people gathered in this office space that had been rented by some lawyers. They were in these long internet chats with folks all over the globe in Australia, in Europe, in Latin America developing what would launch on the 29th and 30th of November as this Indymedia project. What Indymedia did was to allow people to combine audio, video, text and distribute it over the internet in ways that had not really been done before.
Now, I'll take a step back and talk a bit about a couple of things related to internet news development. One is The San Jose Mercury News in 1996 when it released Gary Webb's series of articles called Dark Alliance about the connection between the Contras and the Reagan and Bush administrations and the distribution of cocaine, ultimately, into South Central Los Angeles. The San Jose Mercury News was tremendously creative and, for the first time, put up articles with links to the original source material and audio clips. The other was a conference that we had in San Salvador in 1998. It was co-sponsored by AMARC and by a number of other Latin American media organizations and was for those interested in working on independent media and using the internet as a distribution platform. And there was a very interesting moment in that conference when the folks from the Czech Republic were talking about how the internet could be used as a way to stream video news reports from Europe to Latin America. This farmer from rural Guatemala then got up and said, "In our town we barely have electricity let alone access to high speed internet that would be able to carry these huge video images. Plus, we speak 23 different indigenous languages and many people in our community don't even speak Spanish. How is this going to benefit us?"
One of the things I talked about as a response to this was an experiment that had been done here in Madison where they were doing public service announcements by faxing a number and getting a fax back of a listing of community calendar events. It was the idea of having a central hub capable of receiving the high-speed internet technology, but then distributing it through whatever technology was available and that includes email, fax, and community radio to reach people at whatever technological level they were at. It was a way to make information accessible to the most people.
I later shared this story with the folks at Democracy Now! as they were beginning to develop its plans for a distribution platform. Now Democracy Now! is available through email headlines, internet streams, podcasts, public and community television and radio stations, in English and in Spanish. It’s a multi-platform distribution of the same materials so that you're reaching your listeners wherever they're at and that's the model that I think community media really developed.
Manski: Is it arguable that it mainstream, corporate media infrastructure came out of this process?
Stockwell: That’s absolutely correct. In fact, I make that point in that piece I did 10 years ago on the 10th anniversary of Indymedia that all of what corporate media does today, they learned from us. That includes the fact that at every fire or flood or natural disaster you have CNN broadcasting people's cell phone video and a lot of the commercial stations even develop platforms for receiving them. Similarly, the whole notion of podcasting that people have today. I think podcasting was ... I think it was Adam Curry who coined the term back in the 2004 or something like that. But this idea of having ... It basically combines two technologies, the uploaded MP3 audio file with RSS syndication software, so you could get that file delivered to your computer. And that really comes out of Indymedia's newsfeed. I mean that was the idea of the newsfeed when Indymedia started it in 1999. Similarly, much of what commercial media does today they got from community media activists and adapted and whitewashed.
Another one that I want to talk about for just a minute is the Iraq Journal website, which Jeremy Scahill and I created together in 2002. Essentially, Scahill was in Iraq at the time and Hussein had blocked the internet, so, we had to develop a system to get that material out. We came up with a platform that was modeled on Indymedia, but with an editor. It also involved a a system based on old Usenet technology before big files could be transferred, which split a large file into multiple smaller pieces. I would receive 100 pieces of video file, stitch it back together into a single video, which was then rendered in NY and literally run over to the offices of Democracy Now! for broadcast in the morning's news. Basically, it was a grassroots independent media model and we were able to get this news and information out of Iraq. So, that's another example of the way that these technologies were able to do that the corporate media giants couldn’t.
Manski: Turning to Seattle, what was your relationship to the protests in 1999?
Stockwell: Partly through my connections with the international community radio movement, I knew that Seattle was going to be a big deal. For this reason, early on I wanted to get involved there. I ended up getting hired by a program called “Making Contact” out of the San Francisco-Bay area, which had decided that they wanted to do a live broadcast every day of the Seattle protest. I also talked Jeremy into coming out there as we had a free place to stay with my parents. Of course, we just ended up at the offices the whole time. Democracy Now! also came out there to do one of its first on site live broadcasts from an event. I got there just after Thanksgiving when where they were assembling the Indymedia Center. I knew several of the people that were involved with setting that up. There was also a pirate radio station broadcasting from a few blocks away and several other activists that I knew from various projects and movements from around the country. We all converged in that place in that time.
In terms of my main project that week, with the folks from “Making Contact,” we were sharing office space downtown with a space that had been rented by Lori Wallach and the Global Trade Watch folks. The broadcast that we did was done live from a public radio station in Seattle. Every morning we got all of our materials together from the previous day and then early in the morning we went to this site at this radio station with a studio and used the satellite system to distribute it. At that time, neither public nor community radio stations were really using the internet as a source of audio program. As I was credentialed, I was also able to be both inside and outside the meetings, which is a tactic that I've used in all of the various political conventions and also the various trade meetings—the WTO in Seattle, the WTO in Cancun, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in Miami and so on. You really get a fuller picture of all of what's going on that way.
Manski: As you had inside and outside access, what lessons could you share from your time in the streets, the meeting halls, and the editing room during that week?
Stockwell: There are several things that I think that are important to remember and learn from Seattle. One is that it was really well organized. Activists in advance of the Seattle protest had done a bunch of very good reconnaissance and planning. For instance, having the demonstrators lead the police up into the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle, so that the tear gas was actually affecting people who were otherwise well-to-do middle or upper middle-class Seattle residents, who had no other political connection to it, meant they were impacted by the protest in their community, raising their awareness of these issues. On the flip side, we had the development of new police techniques in response to Seattle, which had been highly militarized and became the hallmark of policing in the anti-globalization protests. Then what came to be known as the Miami model was a transformation from having heavily armed police trying to maintain a line and keep people out to the very lightly armed police who actually chased people.
Another important element of Seattle is the way other countries began to become a part of the process when they became aware of the protest outside the convention center, which was in support of the interests of the smaller countries. There was a situation at one point where Charlene Barshefsky, the trade representative under Clinton, had gotten a small group of people into this one room and closed the doors and they were trying to forge out some consensus. Meanwhile, there were people from other countries from the Global South that were outside banging on the doors saying we want to have a seat at the table. That radically impacted what subsequently happened in terms of countries standing together against the United States, which was trying to control negotiation processes at these types of summits. This includes countries like Brazil, which unfortunately stepped back from that at the FTAA meetings in Miami. That said, it wasn’t simply Lula stepping back that was problematic in Miami, but also the dissolution outside of what was called the Teamster Turtle Alliance—the environmentalists, anti-globalization activists and union activists. After that organized labor kind of stepped away from supporting the anti-globalization protests. Those two breaks, were key in the transformation that took place between Seattle and Miami.
Manski: You've now spoken not only about Chicago and Seattle, but also in Miami and DC and Philadelphia. Can you speak some about other critical mobilizations such as the Los Angeles uprising, Rodney King, The Day Without an Immigrant, the Wisconsin Uprising, Occupy Wall Street, Ferguson, among others. What role did these events have in 21st century movement processes? And, more broadly, how do events shape movements?
Stockwell: Thinking about Los Angeles, of course, there was the killing of Rodney King and subsequent uprising in the mid-nineties, but then there's the Democratic National Convention which I covered. In terms of lessons from these moments, a big thing is that it was not only activists who were learning and adapting, but that the Right and the police were, too, and in some cases more quickly than the Left. The thing about what we called here “Day Without Latinos” in Wisconsin—elsewhere “A Day Without Immigrants”—is that it was one of the largest mobilizations of that kind at that time. And it was critically important, of course, because the people who organized it were immigrants as opposed to by white activists telling immigrants what to do. Meanwhile, the thing about Occupy Wall Street, which eventually grew into all the different occupy movements across the U S, is that each city had its own flavor. Occupy Wall Street was its own particular thing based in New York and had New York sensibilities. Whereas, the one that happened in Madison, the one that happened in Colorado, and so on were each shaped by the issues of their own city. People that look back on it now say the problem with the Occupy Wall Street is they didn't have a unified set of demand. I think that was the whole point—that there some commonalities, but each movement was shaped by its own geographic location and its own issues in that community. What happened in Madison, for instance, took a very different form and eventually resulted in the tiny houses that are now being built and distributed as affordable housing. And, finally, Ferguson was a peak, central mobilizing point. This is partly because of the buildup leading up to it and the kind of pressure cooker in which it occurred. It was also because of the over the extreme repression by the police. This catalyzed an intense response and solidarity in the protests.
And in terms of the role of events in movement building, there are a couple things to consider. One, they become a kind of symbol and focal point. When you say Ferguson, Missouri, everybody knows what you're talking about. When you say Seattle, everybody knows what you're talking about. The other thing is, in terms of the Indymedia movement, all of these things have formed this kind of central point to coalesce around. One of the things that I think everyone involved in Indymedia learned over time was that it's much easier to organize an Indymedia project around an event with lots of people converging from all over the country.
Take, for instance, here in Madison. There was a nascent Madison Indymedia project that existed. We also had really strong independent media communities. And we had community radio and television which were a very active center for media and democracy. We had the progressive magazine and all these different things. Then the mayor's conference came and so we rented a space. We set up an independent media convergence center for people to come together and do the work of an Indymedia project for that period. That formed the energy and the impetus to really activate that group. So, I think that it is important that these events form a place for people to converge around. And, again, as I mentioned earlier in the conversation, this notion of the cross-fertilization that happens when you bring people together in these intense spaces is critically important for movement building and new projects.
Think of the people who were part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil war in the 1930s. All these were activists involved in so many different things throughout their lives—whether it was in Central America, labor organizing, civil rights organizing—had this central moment of coming together for a common project that spurred them to further activism. Ferguson is similar in how it was the moment that shaped so many activists’ understanding of what it meant to be part of a movement. Similarly, there were people who became active in Seattle that looked back to Seattle as that shaping moment for them. And for me, it's marching in civil rights marches in Chicago in the 1960s and becoming inspired and educated through that process.
Manski: How do you understand the present period and what movements and what is their relationship?
Stockwell: Of course, the Zapatista uprising very much informed the Seattle uprising. Similarly, it was the international awareness of what the WTO was that we in the United States only learned in Seattle in 1999. It was that international awareness that informed the world social forum movements, which we haven't talked about at all. But the world social forums, which probably I would say sort of reached their peak in many ways in 2005 in Porto Alegre, Brazil where there was 150,000 people from all over the globe. Although smaller, the forum still continues today. I think these are also a very important series of movements to look at and talk about. In fact, in some ways they form a parallel to what we're talking about. As the landscape has changed both in terms of media and technology, it seems like these large gatherings and large events are not as much the focus with perhaps a few standout exceptions like the Women's March right after Trump's inauguration or the marches for science and, most recently, the global climate strike. A lot more focus now seems to be placed on working on issues in local communities where you are rather than these big gatherings at international events, forums, meetings or protests. I think that's good in many ways—for example, it was ultimately the local focus of the Wisconsin Uprising that made it so powerful. And coming back to technology and media—we can now effectively link up global and local issues by sharing things across platforms and without spending lots of money or burning lots of carbon. That said, it still isn’t the same to meet someone you do activist work with through a chat than by sharing a cup of coffee with them.
