The scent of damp soil and half-forgotten futures, a version that flow, a sourcebook for day-to-day life and activism from a time when the local living alternatives were not theory but everyday life, in a small English town https://oxford.indymedia.org.uk/ It’s an archive now, a time capsule you can wander through. If this current generation is looking for inspiration, I’d suggest starting at the beginning, the last few years of the site weren’t exactly its golden hour.
When I went back recently and found this page, I stumbled across two posts from my younger self, still humming with the raw, chaotic energy of those years. A small echo across time.
Oxford #Indymedia is a local example of how utopian and dystopian currents flow, how hope and burnout danced around each other like quarrelling siblings. It shows how people lived alternatives rather than just theorising them, how the #openweb wasn’t a dream but a sweaty, meeting-filled, joyful, improvisational practice. If you want to dig deeper into the era, my own site is here: http://hamishcampbell.com
And for the moving images, the pixelated documents of that strange, fertile period, go rummaging in these vaults. Sort by oldest to get the proper archaeology:
There’s a lot there, though less from Oxford, mostly happened pre #dotcons, where you can can’t find in these videos. The compost, the mistakes, the stubborn courage, the feeling that another world wasn’t just possible but already partially assembled in basements, squats, boats, and borrowed offices.
Maybe someone will pick up a thread and weave something fresh with it. That’s the hope.
