The story of A-infos
From Freedom News UK
This year is the 30th anniversary of A-infos—the multilingual news clearing-house that pioneered anarchist publishing on the web
~ Alisa-Ece Tohumcu ~
A shift in global communication was underway in the 1990s, and as digital networks began to transform the dissemination of information there was a need for a decentralised, non-hierarchical platform to facilitate the exchange of revolutionary ideas and news.
As a response, A-infos was launched in 1994, standing as an international anarchist newswire; forming a community amongst anti-authoritarians, anarcho-communists, syndicalists, and other revolutionary groups to collectively share news.
Emerging in the same landscape as other radical publications, A-infos created an international network that managed to eschew the individualism and market-driven constraints of its digital media counterparts. The project remains committed to anarchism as a “social theory”, rejecting both liberal reformism and also symbolic activism which substitutes mass struggle for performative gestures. As the biography of the A-infos page puts it, their work is rooted in the tradition of the Haymarket martyrs and the critique of authoritarianism.
The project was not simply a product of the digital age but was built through decades of anarchist organising. There were earlier efforts to create an international anarchist network around the 1990s, consisting of a printed sheet of news launched at anarchist meetings in the Netherlands. This model essentially was able to lay the groundwork for A-infos to become a multilingual digital news service which extended beyond borders and aided in the cultivation of a broader international community.
By 1995, the platform had transitioned into a wholly electronic format, with email subscription lists in a wide range of languages to archive anarchist news and analysis; this structure remains intact to date. Its archive stretches over two decades, establishing it as a key resource within the development of anarchist thought, action, and theory throughout the years.
Andrew Flood was a contributing member of Spunk Press from its founding in 1992, a project which went on to be the largest archive of published anarchist media at the time and digitally catalogued in 1995. He, alongside some of his Spunk Press team members, went on to establish A-infos and stated that an anarchist gathering in 1994, Ten Days That Shook The World, is what enabled the project and other such collaborations to take place. With the rise of software like Google Translate in 2006, the news A-infos was circulating became more accessible and the dependency on multilingualism became less important.
Ilan Shalif, a Jewish anti-Zionist anarcho activist is said to be one of the longest-running members of the collective. In conversation with Shalif, he recalled his desire to be a revolutionist at the age of 15, becoming the main editor of A-infos in 1998. He detailed the struggles present in the maintenance of the newswire from its dawn, as it was initially heavily dependent on people sending in articles and needed multilingualism for international accessibility.
He also shed light on a split which occurred within the collective regarding the topic of consensus, resulting in disagreement across a great proportion of the team who left the collective. This also physically manifested through a member pulling all the server plugs, leaving the newswire incapacitated for a short period. Flood also states that following involvement in the 1998-1999 summit protests, members also began to drift.
The project’s longevity is a testament to its enduring relevance within anarchist praxis and organising. As a collective they do not define themselves as an “open ‘liberal’ service that distributes anything sympathetic to anarchism”, but more so dedicated to the distribution of news from anarchist collectives and those engaged in direct action. Flood believes in the ongoing useful role of the fortune of A-infos and its cross-platform inclusivity.
As the media landscape is in continuous shift, accelerated by the rise of social media, algorithmic curation, and the exponentially increasing centralisation of digital platforms, A-infos persists as a space for unmediated and direct communication. As radical movements look toward the future, it provides an enduring model of how such communication can function outside both the State and the capital as the newswire stands as both a historical archive and also a living project. Fundamentally, their commitment to autonomy and collective decision-making remains crucial in a landscape dominated by surveillance, corporate control, and State manipulation of the media.
