Being on IRC when news is breaking is the strangest experience.

Genoa

I’ll never forget sitting at a computer in La Spezia, Italy last summer, after getting turned away from Genoa. I was slowly communicating, trying to help in what ways I could remotely. And then the chilling message “they’re raiding the IMC” flashed across the channel, and for a few moments we got a play by play, and then the updates stopped. All of us who weren’t physically in Genoa, sat, and waited. We held our breath. Adrenaline pumped as if our own doors had been kicked down. And yet when I stepped out side, I was in a peaceful town at the foot of the lovely Cinque Terre. A friend in Seattle described stepping outside moments later, and stumbling from the vertigo on the transition from war zone, to sunny afternoon. It was long time before more information flowed, and when it did, it was bad.### British Columbia

This evening wasn’t as shaking but its amazing how different a community of news is from the morning (or evening) broadsheets. A friend came on IRC this evening struggling with the news of another friend’s house being raided.(You can read the press release) And I quietly got up, and walked to the front of the house and locked door. This wasn’t “news” in the modern sense, mediated stories, blurbed into the popular consciousness – education, doctrine, and entertainment all rolled into one, it was actually happening, it was real. And was much more relevant and immediate because of it. On a positive note, I think that is what independent media should be attempting to foster. An active public sphere that provides the much needed context that makes the days events into something other then a gallery of horrors.

The press release ends with the imminently practical, and disturbing:

Because all his computer hardware and files have been seized, David is unable to check email at this time. He can be contacted at. [and then the address]

I try to imagine what my life would be like tomorrow if the FBI raided my house, and the imagination fails.