DiY Culture

George McKay

DiY (Do it Yourself) activism has usurped more traditional forms of political protest amongst the young in Britain of the nineties. DiY is about action and it takes many forms: from swooping en masse on a destructive quarry to producing and distributing an alternative press, from trawling round the revived summer festival circuit with your message to organizing one-off spectacular mediagenic stunts like climbing Big Ben, from setting up a long-term protest camp to organizing, as the extract from DIY Culture below describes, illegal rave parties

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For other old(er) readers and (ex-)activists I've this point to make: if paragraphs or chapters in this book take your breath away because of their displayed ignorance of or arrogance about previous radical movements and moments -- the ones you were involved in the sixties or seventies, for instance -- that's only part of DiY Culture's fault. Remember your breath's taken away because you're a bit unfit. You need to get out and about more. Adopt a tree, aggravate some trespass, make the acquaintance of a D-lock. What about some dance to a pedal-powered sound system in a blocked-off street? There's some serious fun to be had out there. There's people out there who want to hear your history, too. DiY writer Camilla Berens tells me of young DiY-ers on national anti-Criminal Justice Bill protests in London through 1994 asking each other `Where are the old hippies, and the punks of the seventies? Where are they when we need them?' Ahistoricism isn't really a preserve of youth -- it's combated as much by the elders keeping their own ideas and actions fresh, in the memory. And, if you suspect that DiY has a thick patina of radical chic, well, whose fault is that? Who acquiesced, kept their heads down under Thatcher in the 1980s, settled for New Labor in the 1990s?