Four years before Daily Kos,
seven years before Huffington Post,
there was ProActivist.com.
ProActivist.com was originally an award winning progressive political zine/blog that was conceived in mid 1997 and was online between early 1998 and 2001. The site disappeared after there was a disagreement with the hosting company, Pair.com, and they deleted the entire site without notice. There was no known back up copy.
ProActivist was one of the net's first blogs and certainly one of the earliest political blogs to ever exist. But the site was never conceived as a blog in the traditional sense most people think today. It was created as a political magazine, or zine, with a primary focus on photographing, documenting and analyzing protests in all its forms. The site was not updated daily or even weekly like blogs are today because the focus was on offering as much informed opinion as possible. Most essays on the old site, especially the photo essays, involved days if not weeks of work before they were ever published online.
As the owner of the site, I made a concerted effort to research the various aspects of a political protest event. I would travel, in some cases thousands of miles, to conduct interviews and take photographs. In most cases I also did extensive research before everything was uploaded to the site. In some cases, such as when there were massive protests during World Bank/IMF meetings in Washington, D.C., the site was updated with photos and audio recordings within hours. Because I wanted to go beyond mere personal opinion, I never strived to make ProActivist a traditional blog. Everyone has an opinion and bloggers are frequently uninformed if not outright ignorant as the blogosphere clearly shows today. I wanted ProActivist to be better than simply a collection of cheap armchair opinions.
After the site disappeared I allowed the domain to lapse and it was bought up by a cyber squatting company and the site was reduced to simply various links to other commercial web sites. Since I believed that the site's contents were completely lost I never bothered to reacquire the domain. Then I came across an online article about how nothing on the net ever disappears. There was a link to archive.org. I had never heard of the site before. It was a thunderbolt emotional moment when I searched the site and found the contents of the original ProActivist.com. I want to express my deep gratitude to the folks at archive.org for their efforts in archiving the internet.
Some of the contents of the original site will be reposted while some content, especially words or photos created by others, will only be linked to at archive.org.
While ProActivist.com's past will not be forgotten, the focus and content of the site will change and become more like a traditional blog. I am no longer the naive activist I was in the late 90s. And I also no longer have the time and resources to fly off to a protest half way across the country.
Since this site was created I found that progressives, in many cases, were no better than the conservatives they were opposing. Ideological extremism is not exclusive to a political party or point of view. I look back at some of the words I wrote and published for the original ProActivist and disagree with myself. In some of the repostings here I will indicate where I've added, changed or deleted words that are different than what originally appeared.
Since ProActivist is now going to be more like a traditional blog and less like a magazine you, the reader, will want to know more about the person posting who has created this site. So here is a brief bio:
-Served in US Army Intelligence for two years prior to the first Gulf War. Was honorably discharged after refusing to a carry a weapon and requesting a position as a medic.
-Planned, organized and edited the original ProActivist.com for five years and attended protests of various kinds all across the country plus one overseas protest in Iraq.
-Traveled illegally to Iraq in 1998 to photographically document the genocidal effects of the UN sanctions.
-Co-Director of New Hampshire Peace Action from 1999 to 2003.
-Created and operated birddogger.org, a web site focused on how to effectively challenge presidential candidates during the NH primary. (The site is still online, although hasn't been updated in years.)
-Conducted hundreds of media interviews over the years and was a subject of two NPR stories.
-Published opinion writer with columns in various newspapers and web sites.
Over time, as I publish regular blog posts, I will talk more about who I am and what I've experienced. I still take the label progressive, but I no longer affiliate with any organization. And I now call myself an egalitarianist and reject the term feminist. More on that in future postings! While liberals/progressives will find much here they agree with, they just as likely be offended and disagree. Stay tuned.
-Patrick Carkin
ProActivist.com