Copyright 1995 by Spunk Press. Permission is granted to copy this text.
WHO HASN'T HEARD OF US
There are no magic answers, no miraculous methods to overcome the problems we face, just the familiar ones: honest search for understanding, education, organisation, action that raises the cost of state violence for its perpetrators or that lays the basis of institutional change - and the kind of commitment that will persist despite the temptations of disillusionment, despite many failures and only limited successes, inspired by the hope of a brighter future. - NOAM CHOMSKY
...aims to bring anarchist and other alternative literature to the growing number of people who have access to some of the newer forms of electronic communication.
We are an open access producer of alternative and anarchist material of both yesterday and today aiming at the widest possible distribution of material in electronic format free of charge. We want to saturate the Internet and BBS communities with literature which will help theirs users liberate themselves and others by means of education leading to action geared to liberating society as a whole by next Tuesday. The work may or may not originate from someone with net access - that is unimportant. It will however originate from those who wish to help open peoples' minds to new ways of thinking.
You can find out more by sending an e-post message to <spunk-info- request@lysator.liu.se> this will add your name to the growing Spunk Press information distribution network. This means that you will receive the catalogue by e-post every time a new issue is published and that you will receive this newsletter.
This newsletter, The Spunknik is produced every few weeks. It is done, as is everything in Spunk Press, voluntarily by a series of round-robin editors. Editor of this issue is Neil. Next round-robin editor in the queue is ChuckO <Charles_T_MUNSON_Jr@umai l.umd.edu>
If you want to reach the actual archive, which is what Spunk Press is all about anyway, you can get at it through ordinary FTP by using
ftp://etext.archive. umich.edu/pub/Politics/Spunk
Or through the World Wide Web (WWW), using
http:/ /www.cwi.nl/cwi/people/Jack.Jansen/spunk/Spunk_Home.html
Coming out of a sticky phase
Hit us hard. We bounce back and we have plans to bring you the Marquis de Sade
Like it or hate it you've got to think about it.
Getting ready for take off - fasten your safety belts please.
Our weapons are not violent. We believe in mutual aid, co-operation and open discussion - that is to say we are anarchists. These are our weapons. That is why the establishment whose main purpose is to supress and stiffle are concerned at our growing influence. We welcome their attention whilst pissing scorn on their sterility. Their are hooked on their drugs: inertia, greed and exploitation. We are hooked on ours: activism, sharing and justice epitomised in our support for Mumia Abu-Jamal who we have no intention of allowing to become another Jesus.
We offer no apologies for being right. We are bored with the Spectacle and insist on allowing all to participate. We still stand for those values that seem to have been forgotten by those who claim to monopolise them. We are accused of violence... by those who gave us Hiroshima and the death on the front pages of your newspapers. We keep alive (in our archive) the values of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Goldman and Malatesta. But also today we pogo to Chomsky, Bookchin and the Zapatistas and we read Bey, Black and Debord. Anarchism is our rock n'roll.
Shoot the T V, burn the car , drop the job and turn instead to the Spanish Revolution or the Spunk Press Contact List. Recycle the Sunday Times into something more useful than printed marmelade. Get a drift of what it's all about by sending e-post to collective list, you won't be alone.
A total of 1954 accesses to 591 documents and that's just one month and just the site in The Netherlands! The real figure could be 3 or 4 times higher! That's good shooting Spunksters. Over 50% of our documents accessed. What are you interested in? Bombs, sex, food and fun! Hmmmmmmm... well musn't be censorious.
277 intro/Spunk413.txt The Anarchist Cookbook, reviewed by Esperanza Godot
62 intro/Spunk464.txt Re: ANARCHIST COOKBOOK
25 recipes/Spunk162.txt A Nice Cup of Tea
23 art/Spunk400.txt Art as Anarchy
19 humour/Spunk621.txt Revolting Peasants, from the film 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'
15 writers/Chomsky/Spunk732.txt THE NOAM CHOMSKY ARCHIVE
15 tech/comms/Spunk149.txt The Anarchist's Guide to the Internet
14 recipes/Spunk159.txt Pumpkin Pie
14 contacts/Spunk150.txt Anarchist electronic contact list
12 writers/Chomsky/Spunk153.txt Interview with Noam Chomsky
12 images/wildcat/Spunk575.gif The best looking anarchist in the world
12 images/Spunk966.jpg Car Advertisemnt
12 art/Spunk351.txt Digital Visions: Computers and Art, review by Karl Young
11 recipes/Spunk160.txt Guacamole
10 quotes/Spunk098.txt General quotations
10 misc/Spunk933.txt SEXUAL COMMUNISM A SUCCESS
10 misc/Spunk726.txt FUCK PUNK by Tad Kepley
10 images/Spunk883.jpg Arne Anka
10 art/Spunk338.txt The Theatre of the Oppressed
Donald and I both feel that it is extremely unlikely that anyone is going to take offence (or legal action) against someone like Spunk Press. Apart from anything else I seem to remember that one is entitled in the UK for educational purposes to copy a certain amount (I believe there is in fact a stated percentage) from a given work without infringing copyright. This is surely our ball game. We are not considering (I hope!) of putting on line the complete works of any of the biggies...
This did not meet with complete agreement to say the least, This is a very generous and optimistic view of things said one member of the collective,
Problems stretch in a number of directions. One of the most serious is simply the hatred most mainstreamers feel toward Anarchists -- in fact, the less they know about Anarchism, the more they tend to hate it. If you look at the problems caused by a single piece of the flimsiest yellow journalism, you can see how Spunk's vulnerability. Going after copright infringment would be an easy way to close Spunk down without bringing politics, free speech, or anything of the sort into the picture.
and it was also clear that quite a few collective members are indeed tackling the biggies. Will nothing stop these folk?
Another member had an odd thought and decided to share it with the collective by suggesting that we should loose press from spunk press for most perposes, just in case we want to use the defense if ever needed , that we are common carrier not publishers to loose liablity, which it is true for most things except spunknik, we are not publishers more a library
That could have been it. Things were quiet for many days and then just as the Spunknik 3 editor thought he'd landed a cushy number, in response to an enquiry about the state of the archive, one member heretically suggested I think the reason you didn't get a response is because no one is doing this at the moment. Spunk Press is really in a messy state right now
Spunk Press flew into action. One member responded that he had suspected the situation was such but was motivated right now to get some stuff done Some unix czar was needed: Hmmm. I'm becoming quite proficient in Unix. If I was given some steps on how to use the scripts I might be able to do some stuff. Not to be outdone another member announced a personal intention to free up some time in the near future to at least get the backlog sorted out, the scripts documented and a first draft of the "editor manual" written. And there was more. Another person offered to take on a share of the updating and/or html-izing work at any time Turned out that this person was also fairly UNIX-savvy, and regularly involved with maintaining the WWW pages and gopher/ftp archive site for (some) lists.. Not only that we also learnt that Spunk has been steadily rising in my priorities lately
Suddenly folk were coming out of the woodwork to htmlize, prioritize and generally organize. Some were still a little concerned about what procedures have been in the past, and about where we stand on issues like creating html versions of texts but proposed solutions to problems were coming in by the sackful. Far too many (fortunately) to cover here.
One interesting idea of a technical task force was floated: the SETF (Spunk Engineering Task Force). Could we save newbies the aspirin bill resulting from overexposure to Unix, etext, html and people using the Emacs W3 browser running inside XEmacs. which according to the Emacs-info pages about W3 ... is capable of parsing true HTML 3.0 code. and yes, it can actually show graphics *inside* an XEmacs buffer. Did you miss that? Don't worry another member reliably informed us that it was Cool
Other masochists moaned that Although I struggle to understand you at times I think my efforts will repay in the long run. Some anarchists will remain eternal optimists.
But the hardest part of (re)organizing is, no doubt, getting started and Spunk decided to approach the problem in a cool and logical fashion by prioritizing and looking for volunteers... The ensuing debate brought up the following suggestions:
HIGH PRIORITY
All of which seems to suggest that now is the time to consider...
EAA
c/o Box A
12 Mill Road
Cambridge, CB1 2ND
UK
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