Trying to Remember: A Personal Reflection on Activist Histories and Memory Holes

Looking back on the activist groups I’ve been part of over the past few decades, I find myself drawn into the messy business of memory. Not nostalgia, something more grounded than that. A desire to trace what actually happened: why things unfolded the way they did, what they meant politically and personally, and what we can still learn from them.

But this work isn’t easy. Many of the people I worked alongside carry completely different versions of events. They remember different turning points, attribute success or failure differently, or sometimes choose to forget altogether. Writing about this – even carefully – risks reopening wounds. It challenges settled myths. It can feel uncomfortable, even unkind.

So the question keeps coming back: is it worth trying? I think the answer is yes. Painful, imperfect, but necessary. As George Santayana famously wrote: “Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.”

And in our small corner of the world – radical media, grassroots tech, DIY networks – repetition is a real problem. The cycle of reinvention is one of the most frustrating aspects of media activism. We keep rebuilding the same tools, replaying the same conflicts, falling into familiar traps. Why? Because we don’t do history well.

More precisely, we don’t keep our history. Websites disappear, servers shut down, backups are lost, and mailing lists become unreadable. Entire communities vanish almost overnight, leaving little trace beyond broken links and half-remembered stories. The next wave arrives thinking they are starting from zero.

This amnesia isn’t accidental; it’s cultural. There’s an ingrained tendency within activism to assume: “We invented this. This is new. We’re the first.” I’ve heard this countless times from people who are thoughtful and brilliant. It’s not arrogance, it’s isolation. A lack of intergenerational knowledge transfer. The result is predictable. Each new cycle repeats the mistakes of the last, often with shinier tools and worse outcomes.

Another reason to document our own histories is simple: if we don’t, someone else will, and they may not understand what actually mattered. Academic and institutional accounts often rely on authoritative sources: funded projects, named leaders, official reports, and neat case studies. That’s understandable, but it means messy grassroots realities frequently disappear from the record.

Grassroots work rarely fits institutional narratives. It’s decentralised, anonymous, improvised, sometimes deliberately undocumented for safety or principle. Yet when official histories are written, these messy spaces are where the real change happened. In truth, many of the most effective projects I’ve been part of were born in squats, kitchens, backrooms, chaotic email threads, and improvised hacklabs. They weren’t polished; they were alive.

Take #Indymedia, I was there to helped build and maintain parts of it. It transformed online publishing and participatory journalism. For a time, it worked remarkably well, until it didn’t. Its decline wasn’t just about technical debt or burnout. We lacked strong practices for documenting process and preserving institutional memory. When fragmentation came, there was no shared record to return to, only fragments, myths, and personal recollections.

That experience is part of why I later focused on projects like #OMN (Open Media Network), alongside #indymediaback and #makinghistory. These are attempts to embed memory into infrastructure itself: to preserve process as well as outcomes, to balance individual and collective histories, and to resist co-option by institutional gatekeeping and #NGO driven narratives.

So should we document activist histories? Yes, because we keep losing what we build. Yes, because new generations deserve shoulders to stand on, not endless reinvention. And yes, because remembering is a political act.

But we need to do this carefully. With plural narratives rather than single heroes. With archives that hold disagreement instead of smoothing it away. We need to document failure alongside success, not as shame, but as compost for future growth.

And we need to stop assuming the truth will speak for itself, it won’t, we have to speak it, even when memories clash or perspectives diverge. This isn’t about gatekeeping, it’s about keeping gates open for those who come next.

If you were part of these histories, write your piece, even if it contradicts mine, especially if it does. If you’re building now, take time to look back. Find the old code, talk to the elders, search for the backups, document what you’re doing as you go.

History isn’t just the past, it’s infrastructure.

Let’s build some together.