USENET newsgroups served as early hubs for white supremacist networking and music trading

Evidence

News groups are an important interactive aspect of the medium. They operate within USENET and offer forms of exchange, debate, and chat concerning particular themes and special interests. Articles and responses are sent to news groups by electronic mail. Racist Net activists have established their own groups within the alternative or “alt.” areas of USENET. The most important of these news groups are alt.politics.nationalism.- white, alt.rewlution.counter, alt.skinhead, and alt.revisionism. The news groups become a context for racist sentiments to be countered by antifascist activists or nonracist skinheads but they also allow for networking, exchanging information and correspondence between white power music fans. This can vary from posting lists of CDs for “tape trade,” to advertising or simply posting information about new web sites or channels for Internet Relay Chat and online discussion groups. One recent posting to the alt.skinheads newsgroup offered a list of 340 Oi! and white power CDs and vinyl recordings for trade, along with an offer to make copies of a further 163 tape recordings. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2561

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to broader literature on how marginal movements use mainstream tech infrastructure for organizing — parallels the law-merchant work on how informal communities build reputation and trading systems outside formal institutions.