Activism, Acceleration, and the Humanist Aporia: Indymedia Intensified in the Age of Neoliberalism

This article suggests that the humanist aporia, which is productively at work in the Indymedia project, has become a main ingredient of technological acceleration under neoliberalism. The article draws out Indymedia’s response and relation to what it will call “speed-elitism” by emancipation and by setting its tensions to work for acceleration as if it were justice. Indymedia therefore is exemplary of the present-day conundrum that humanism finds itself in, where technological mediation increasingly intensifies politics rather than annuls it. This convergence of the humanist project and technological acceleration is then logically marked by an increasing despair around how to bring about global justice, and speed-elitist underpinnings require that Indymedia be seen as left-wing promise.