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Make media, make trouble: hacking the infocalypse in the Italian Telestreet.

Article Excerpt
As the cold rain lightens, I pass the small twice-weekly farmers market and travel down the corridor past the Italian class for migrants, the bookshop, a meeting, the circus class. In one room, a web of cables crawls above, converging in a loft. Upstairs, a small group chatters in front of computers, editing, uploading, downloading, emailing--organising a 24-hour pirate TV station. This is the Xmercato24 social centre in Bologna, Italy, home of TeleImmagini?, part of the Italian TeleStreet movement of around eighty pirate micro-TV stations, most of which have emerged in less than two years.

In an era of ever-increasing media concentration, Italy is perhaps the most extreme example of this monopolisation. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi owns three of the four main private TV channels; Mondadori, Italy's biggest publishing group; the AC Milan football club; and much, much more. Berlusconi also has great power over RAI, Italy's state-owned media networks, giving him control of the six biggest television channels in the country and access to 90 per cent of the national daily audience.

But his and other corporate influences are far from hegemonic. There exists, simultaneously, an innovative network of grassroots media that is bringing conflict to this state of affairs. This network does not merely react to Berlusconi, but also provides other forms of information dissemination and new social relations that break the patronage of the entrenched media, both state-owned and corporate-controlled, and question the traditional consumer-producer divide.

Italy has a long history of resistant media. In the 1970s, a host of independent radio stations sprang...

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