Interview with Alex, October 3, 2001.

Clip 1 | Clip 2 | Clip 3

A: My name is Alex. I’m here to protest against the impending war in Afghanistan. For me, reading a lot of the unofficial media, like slashdot and other Web pages, I’ve been hearing a lot of things that haven’t been making the mainstream press, like the Bush government’s $43 million donation to the Taliban for saying they’ll crack down on drug production. Even the lunatic conspiracy theories have made me look into it more.
I’ve actually been folding paper cranes outside the front of Melbourne Central for three weeks. Just one day a week, sit down, fold paper cranes, get people to come up and fold a few with me, because it’s a symbol of world peace and it’s a good way to express what we feel.

R: Why paper cranes?

A: At my primary school, one of the staff read us out the story of "Sadako and the thousand paper cranes" and that kind of touched a nerve with me with this build up and stuff, because I knew there’d be stuff happening.

R: What do you think of globalisation?

A: It’s a double standard. The more stuff I watch from SBS about double standards in the EU about tomato production, sugar production, like the way Australia can’t get into the EU, the fact that our allies in America, that whole thing about lamb… did not improve my opinion of globalisation, let’s put it that way.

R: Do you see the cultural communication, like your cranes, as part of globalisation?

A: There’s a difference between that kind of monetary globalisation and cultural exchange. Globalisation isn’t cultural exchange. Some friends of mine got into Judo. And I learnt a bit about Japanese culture through studying Judo and I learned a bit of the language doing that. And I play Go *, the traditional Japanese war game.

R: Do you feel like you’re part of a global community on the Internet?

A: Definitely. I really felt for the people who wrote about their experiences in New York. I read a lot of first hand accounts of the World Trade Centre disaster and I was really upset by and moved by that. I was also particularly disgusted to read of a certain pseudo-religious organisation going into the World Trade Centre disaster area and administering their pseudo-science in the name of relief. I just found that particularly offensive. That’s something I would never have found that out reading mx, even reading the late Melbourne Express, certainly the Herald-Sun and the Age don’t pick up on a lot of things that matter to me. The thing with the Internet is that you’ve got a set of interests and if regular media cover it, it’s a fluke.

[*] As an aside, see Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 352-3, for a discussion of Go as an example of the war machine and chess as an example of the State apparatus. (RB)