Resistance Comes First: Pirate TV as Postmedia Activism

Abstract

Resistance Comes First:Pirate TV as Postmedia Activism Joseph Sannicandro (bio) HACKED TRANSMISSIONS: TECHNOLOGY AND CONNECTIVE ACTIVISM IN ITALY BY ALESSANDRA RENZI University of Minnesota Press, 2020 HACKED TRANSMISSIONS: TECHNOLOGY AND CONNECTIVE ACTIVISM IN ITALY BY ALESSANDRA RENZI University of Minnesota Press, 2020 A brash "self-made" billionaire with no previous political experience is elected to the nation's highest office, buoyed by a rising tide of populism. Sophisticated manipulation of the media stokes xenophobia and resentment toward elites. The chattering classes decry declining press freedom and the hyperpolarization of society, while supporters seem happy to toss a monkey wrench into national politics as usual. While this farce may now be familiar to American readers, the tragedy began for Italians in 1994, when Silvio Berlusconi first took office as prime minister. Berlusconi continued to dominate Italian politics through 2011 and whose specter still hangs over Italy even now, always seemingly one clever joke and a smile away from the news cycle. More important than Forza Italia, the center-right political party he founded prior to his first election, is Berlusconi's control of Mediaset, Italy's largest mass media company. The Economist calculated that, while in office, Berlusconi had "wielded influence over some 90% of Italy's broadcast media," the primary source of news for a majority of Italians.1 Berlusconi took advantage of the media liberalization that followed the widespread popularity of pirate radio during the 1970s, epitomizing the appropriation of resistance that would characterize his political career. But the politicization of the media in Italy certainly [End Page 194] did not begin with Berlusconi's conflicts of interest. Already in 1967, Umberto Eco recognized that "a country belongs to the person who controls communications,"2 and Italian activists have never ceased to make media production a prime terrain of contestation.3 In Hacked Transmissions, Alessandra Renzi provides a timely reflection on how activists challenged Berlusconi's media dominance. Through an immersive and historically thorough (auto)ethnography, Renzi explores the case of Telestreet, a decentralized network of pirate micro-TV stations that turned television into a collaborative epistemological practice with those marginalized by the media—not "representing" everyday life but incubating and organizing resistance through connective practices of coproduction. Renzi's genealogy of Telestreet finds its roots in the pirate radio movement of the 1970s, stretching through twenty-first-century digital television and social media. Telestreet intentionally describes its practice as connective rather than collective, making for a clever means of continuity that downplays what could otherwise become a technologically deterministic narrative. Renzi's intervention is not guided by the novelty of new media, but she instead carefully emphasizes "how people come together, work together, and change with technology" (4). The interrogation of connectivity extends to the study's method, as well as to its form. Hacked Transmissions "lays out a collaborative research methodology that puts processes of subjectivation at the center and attends to an ethics of connection and care" (2). One might not be surprised to find such language in an ethnography drawing upon fifteen years of participation, yet the conditions of activist research present unique challenges that necessitate such deep imbrication. Hacked Transmissions consists of an introduction, eight article-length chapters, and a short epilogue, a perhaps unconventional structure linked by what Renzi terms a "social movement energetics" (14). Coursing through multiple terrains of struggle, this focus on energy offers Renzi a way into the narrative that centers on neither specific individuals nor technologies. Renzi makes significant theoretical and methodological contributions to the study of activist media, while those not already predisposed to Continental philosophy will still find much of interest in her qualitative research. Her method of co-research benefits from the use of anecdote, personal stories, and a plethora of heterogeneous voices. The history of Telestreet's transformation from [End Page 195] "Indymedia-style to social-media-based production" has many commonalities to the experiences of other transnational media activists, while bringing to bear the unique contributions of Italian theory to the study of media, which Renzi articulates as connective activism, composition, and hacking (4). Many have argued that Italy is a political laboratory whose developments often anticipate those elsewhere in Europe and beyond...