Page 10 - Print21 Jan-Feb 2022

At Large
The revolution will be – in print
I’m walking around wearing a screen-printed t-shirt that says... Free Press: Free Assange.
It’s a Christmas gift from family who rightly picked up on my sentiments about our fellow Australian who is banged up in jail in the UK for publishing documents about the way the Yanks prosecuted the Afghanistan war. They should let him go free, absolutely. He was only doing his job. But the CIA and the NSA in the USA are vengeful, oppressive organisations, and I hold out little hope. Only mass pubic action might make a difference and prod our bunch of somnambulates in Canberra to get involved and bring him back.
I’m not a great activist. The only real protest movement I ever joined was anti- apartheid. And if I wasn’t gifted the Assange t-shirt, my contribution to the cause would likely remain at dinner party activism and the occasional donation.
But I confess the feeling of community and support I got for my emblazoned clothing from other walkers in the park, sparked a sense of belonging. People nodded and smiled. Others called out ‘Good on’ya’. Some stopped and engaged, sharing their own disquiet at the treatment of Assange and our government’s lack of moral fi re. It was most heartening.
It set me thinking on how protest politics is a real world phenomenon, as opposed to swirling blather of the digital meta-verse. Street protests by anti-lockdowners and anti-vaxxers get major airtime on television
Making a public statement has never been easier, but getting
it noticed is another matter. Cutting through the bedlam of online digital to get your message out is almost impossible. The babble of voices drowns out any attempt at rational discourse. Print is one of the few channels where it is still possible.
channels. Anything resembling a riot, such as the Melbourne kerfuffle late last year, stops a city and dominates the news cycle. You may not agree with them, but they’re making a point.
Every march is an event, and every event brings out the placards and the signs to wave about. Banners and posters are everywhere, proclaiming outrage, serving as rallying points like flags in a medieval battle. They’re a world away from the keystrokes of the digiverse trolls who sit remote, stirring up as much trouble
as they can, without any risk to themselves. Occasionally, if it gets rough on the protest march, the placards are employed as weapons, or set upon as targets by the opposition.
At the birth of the internet, we had great hopes that fi ally government control of information was over. The genie was out of the bottle and the revolution was moving online. But it didn’t happen; look at China
Say it loud: Print cut-through
and Hong Kong, look at Egypt and the corpse of the Arab Spring. The internet can be
shut down at the whim of dictators and the offenders identified. Look at Julian Assange.
Which brings me back to print, to spray-painted graffiti, scattered leaflets, underground newspapers that cannot be silenced by the fl ck of a switch. Banners can be hung from buildings or infrastructure.
A discourse can be continued by leaflets, prosecuted, dare I say, by t-shirt wearers. In authoritarian states it’s a high-risk business, no doubt about it. Protesters will go to
jail. But a print-based underground is still possible, where an online movement is not. In Australia and New Zealand we live in broad-based, tolerant democracies, thank goodness, so have little to fear from the authorities. But we know vigilance is the price of liberty and it’s satisfying to realise, at least to me, that print and printing remain a bulwark against a complete takeover by surveillance government. 21
Patrick Howard — Editor-at-large
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