The first time I saw protesters dancing on the roof of a police van was at a May Day demonstration in London in 2002. Over the dulcet acid techno beats of a bike-powered sound system, a friend explained that we were imitating the Reclaim the Streets movement of the 1990s – free parties on highways that doubled as tactics of resistance against infrastructure projects in the name of halting ecological and capitalist crisis. I learned then that I had come too late for anything new. The late cultural theorist Mark Fisher described this era as one of nostalgia (-algia, the suffix, signifies pain, distress). Thanks to the ideology of what Fisher called “capitalist realism”, faith in the future had been cancelled.
I didn’t know it yet, but something did make us different from the leftists that came before us: the internet. (It’s a cliché because it’s true.) In the scene that took shape in the aftermath of the anti-globalisation movement, politics revolved around affinity groups of hippies, punks, ravers, and teenagers preoccupied with squabbles between youth anarchist networks and Trotskyist organisations. These groups focused on direct action: protests against the arms trade and to free Palestine, school walkouts against the Iraq War, squatted camps at G8 summits. Unlike our predecessors, we had Indymedia to learn about protests, and web forums and riseup.net listservs to stay in touch. In 2003 Fisher started his blog K-punk, inspiring a network of radical bloggers. This was not a scene where left theory or history mattered much. Political education meant learning to encrypt emails on action training weekends. The only thing that held the young, fragmented left together was a common enemy: the warmongering Labour Party.
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