The Bureau of Public Secrets website is 10 years old! Inaugurated 22 August 1998, the site now includes over 600 webpages in 13 languages, and has received over 5,000,000 visits from people in more than 220 countries. For this 10th anniversary, Ken Knabb has posted a brief account of the development of the site, along with a few remarks on the radical potentials and limits of the Internet.
Link of the day: BoPS: Ten Years on the Web
Writes Ken Knabb:
I continued surfing the Web, discovering and exploring countless sites of every type and quality while simultaneously noting email addresses of people or organizations I thought might be interested in my site. I began by searching for anyone who seemed to be interested in the situationists. Then I hunted up all the anarchist sites I could find; some of those sites had links to other anarchist sites, many of which in turn had their own link lists. . . . I did the same thing with various ultraleftist currents, then ventured into more eclectic areas Food Not Bombs, Critical Mass, Amnesty International, prisoner support groups, antiwar groups, radical co-ops, alternative communities, infoshops, surrealists, ecology activists, pirate radio stations, just about any halfway radical sites in East Europe or the Third World, and so on and on. Once I had accumulated a significant number of email addresses in these various categories I would send them an email announcing my new website.
Kind of like Knabb, I stumbled across his site looking for the Situationist manifesto.