The Spunk Library (also known as Spunk Press) was an

anarchist Anarchism is a political philosophy and Political movement, movement that seeks to abolish all institutions that perpetuate authority, coercion, or Social hierarchy, hierarchy, primarily targeting the state (polity), state and capitalism. A ...

Internet archive. The name "spunk" was chosen for the term's meaning in Swedish ("anything we want it to mean"),

American English American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the Languages of the United States, most widely spoken lang ...

("courage or spirit"), and

Australian Australian(s) may refer to: Australia * Australia, a country * Australians, citizens of the Commonwealth of Australia ** European Australians ** Anglo-Celtic Australians, Australians descended principally from British colonists ** Aboriginal Aus ...

("an attractive person"), summarized by the website as "nondescript, energetic, courageous and attractive".

History

According to anarchist

librarian A librarian is a person who professionally works managing information. Librarians' common activities include providing access to information, conducting research, creating and managing information systems, creating, leading, and evaluating educat ...

Chuck Munson, the library was begun as Spunk Press in 1992.Alasbarricadas interviews Infoshop founder, Chuck Munson
", Infoshop.org, 2008-02-20. The founding contributors – Ian Heavens, Jack Jansen, Andrew Flood, Iain McKay and ''

Practical Anarchy The Alternative Media Project is a non-profit organization that promotes anarchist media. Infoshop.org Infoshop.org was founded in January 1995 as the Mid-Atlantic Infoshop. Infoshop was established as a general resource on anarchism An ...

'' editors Munson and Mikael Cardell – originally met via an online forum, namely Jansen's Anarchy Discussion email list. The Library was run by an editorial collective during the 1990s. It was not intended to replace print

publishing Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribu ...

, but rather served a shop window promoting anarchist book publishers, newspapers and journals. By 1995, it was already the largest anarchist archive of published material catalogued on computer networks, though it faced a media assault accusing it of collaborating with terrorists such as the

Red Army Faction The Red Army Faction (, ; RAF ),See the section "Name" also known as the Baader–Meinhof Group or Baader–Meinhof Gang ( ), was a West German far-left militant group founded in 1970 and active until 1998, considered a terrorist organisat ...

, of providing instructions for bomb-making and of coordinating the “disruption of schools, looting of shops and attacks on multinational firms.” The Library remained largely inactive during the first decade of the 2000's, with the

home page A home page (or homepage) is the main web page of a website. Usually, the home page is located at the Root directory, root of the website's Domain name, domain or subdomain. For example, if the domain is example.com, the home page is likely l ...

last being updated in March 2002. The ''Rough Guide to the Internet'' described the Library as being "organized neatly and with reassuring authority". Chris Atton, writing in ''Alternative Media'' (2002) hailed the site as an "advertisement for socially responsible anarchism with a significant

intellectual An intellectual is a person who engages in critical thinking, research, and Human self-reflection, reflection about the nature of reality, especially the nature of society and proposed solutions for its normative problems. Coming from the wor ...

pedigree", remarking that " a world where anarchism is still largely derided or maligned by the mass media, that is an important function" and drawing a comparison to Infoshop.org.

References

External links

Spunk library manifesto
{{Anarchism Anarchist websites Internet properties established in 1992 Online archives

History

See also

References

External links