(Mon April 5th / 8pm / £4/3 but no one refused entry due to lack of funds)
The film US NOW tells the stories of the online networks whose radical self-organising structures threaten to change the fabric of government forever. From picking the team for your football club to Zopa, a bank in which everyone is the manager and Couch Surfing, a vast online network whose members share their homes with strangers; the principles of these projects - transparency, self-selection, open participation - are coming closer and closer to the mainstream of our social and political lives.

To launch a month of events on the history of the struggle for democracy in Britain, Bristol Radical History Group and Bristol Indymedia bring together key writers, activists and controversial bloggers in a public debate about the impact the internet has had on the struggle for popular democracy. The panel, chaired by Bristol Indymedia and includes Alice (Trapeze Collective), Roy Norris (Bristolian), David Goldblatt (author of the seminal work on the history of football 'The Ball is Round'), Chris Chalkley (People's Republic of Stokes Croft). Join us to discuss the pros and cons of internet activism from football clubs owned by their fans to struggles to control the nature of our communities to freedom of information and political organising through social networks. Has the internet opened up opportunities for new forms of political struggle and democracy or as some argue, forced us into impotent and atomised behaviour in front of screens, divorced from the real world?

Organised by Bristol Radical History Group and Bristol Indymedia.

http://www.usnowfilm.com/
http://www.bristol.indymedia.org
http://www.brh.org.uk