About The Free Range Network

The Free Range Network began work in late 1994, and was one of the early activist groups in England & Wales that supported grassroots organizing using the Internet – years before the major campaign groups would see the potential of this. Thirty years later we not are so much advocating the opposite view, but rather a more informed and deeply critical view of how people work collectively within the ‘fully networked world’.

When The Network first got toge­ther thirty years ago there were few mo­bile phones, few peo­ple were aware of the Inter­net or email, and ‘the web’ bare­ly exis­ted. The Net­work’s major re­source, the Free Range Acti­vism Web­site, began off-line on a CD in early 1995; by 1996 it had moved on-line as one of the early UK acti­vism sup­port sites – for­mally becom­ing the ‘FRAW’ domain a few years later.

Though our work has ebbed and flow­ed with the needs of the UK acti­vist move­ment more gener­ally, over this time we have played a pur­pose­ful role sup­port­ing com­mu­nity-level organ­iz­ing on local is­sues, and parti­cipa­ted in na­tion­al organ­iz­ing around is­sues as di­verse as nu­clear power, incin­era­tors, GM crops, and frack­ing.

For the first few years much of the site was devoted to hosting copies of official documents, laws, and guidelines, because government did not make these available electronically for the public – and in fact charged a small fortune for printed copies via the HMSO bookshops. By the turn of the Millennium we were giving away tens of thousands of pounds worth of official documents a month. Shortly after this the government started publishing these materials themselves, freeing this space for other work.

For much of the 2000s the con­tent of the site shif­ted to­wards acti­vist mater­ials: Both the mater­ials we pro­du­ced to sup­port our work­shops and train­ing ses­sions; and small tem­por­ary web­sites or publi­ca­tions made avail­able on-line to sup­port groups who could not pub­lish elec­troni­cally them­selves. By the 2010s social media had large­ly taken this role too, and so the site now hosts the re­search of Net­work mem­bers that sup­ports our wider shared goals.

As part of our early work in on-line organizing we ran a weekend workshop in December 1999 looking at both the potential and pitfalls of the ‘new media’. As the briefing produced for that weekend stated:

As society has become more complicated many people have withdrawn into the safe confines of their everyday lives. In the process, they often become the victims of change rather than the participants or creators of it. Worse still, many people view the process of change, politics, or development, as something that they have no part in because they have no power – which in essence is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you retreat from change, and presume that you have no part to play in influencing it, then you will remain a slave to your circumstances.

‘The Detractor's Convention’ (December 1999)

As the algorithmic manipulation of reality via electronic networks and social media has sowed ever-greater isolation, atomization, and confusion, this is clearly the situation which divides the environment of the mid-1990s to that of today – which we must now highlight as the principal obstacle to radical change.

What is required is an approach: which encourages autonomous action ‘in real life’; informed by our direct perceptions rather the largely abstract or representative action on-line; which have become increasingly enmeshed within algorithmic filtering, censorship, and manipulation by increasingly ‘unreal’ on-line debates. The simplest way to do this is to learn the skills of organizing off-line once more, blending those with minimal on-line content, in order to circumvent these restrictions.

Thirty years ago we advocated the use of digital technologies to enable action, albeit the corporate-dominated digital agenda has since pushed people into a wholly passive role in the fully-networked world. Today the introduction of AI and micro-targeting portends an even more ‘captive’ role for the public in deciding political agendas.

Looking back on our past work we find that tech­nolo­gies that were once help­ful have, with the greater cen­tral­iza­tion and algo­rith­mic mani­pula­tion of the mass media, become an ob­struc­tion to change. Con­se­quent­ly, while we still advo­cate the use of some human-scale tech­nolo­gies, our con­sider­ed view is that true acti­vism must move off-line in order to avoid the in­creas­ing ideological and legal blocks that grassroots movements now face on-line.

Moving on from our thirtieth anniversary this is our new focus – supporting the creation of a method of activism that is critical of its use of technology and the media. More significantly, whereas we once relayed the ‘new’ skills of on-line activism, today we feel the need to relay the ‘old’ skills of off-line radical activism as, with the dominance of electronic media across society, those socially-based skills are becoming increasingly scarce. They are, though, ideally suited to working around the technological blocks and borders being erected in virtual spaces.

Though we rarely used the Inter­net or social media as our main means of opera­tion before, going for­ward the empha­sis within our work will deli­ber­ate­ly focus on ‘off-line’ or­ganiz­ing. Where we do used elec­tron­ic net­works or social media this will be pri­mari­ly as a means of pub­lici­ty and the com­muni­ca­tion of key re­sour­ces. Be­yond this, if you wish to get in touch with the Net­work, you should seek to find us off-line in the ‘real world’.