Digital Humanities Centre

The article presents the story of the underground Solidarity radio, a less known chapter of dissident media activism, whose emblematic form was the " extra-Gutenberg " phenomenon of underground print culture, or samizdat. It proposes an approach, infl uenced by media archeology, in which both can be studied as part and parcel of the same communication environment in order to better understand the particular articulation of dissent, media and modernity which both represented. It proposes that in addition to being a certain media form, samizdat was a " social media fantasy " – a shared cultural matrix which embodied political expectations and passions about liberating effects on horizontal communication, attainable here and now through means at disposal of an average person. Underground broadcasting developed in the shadow of the samizdat materialization of this emancipatory media fantasy, despite the fact that radio activists mastered a unique craft of intrusion into the public airwaves, which gave broadcasting an aura of spectacularity that underground publishing had lost as it expanded.

The phenomenon of dissident print culture in the People’s Democracies of Central Europe and in the Soviet Union is arguably one of the most extraordinary chapters of the postwar cultural, intellectual and political history. In Poland, for more than a decade activists, in numbers increasing from hundreds to thousands, would meet, in secrecy, using codenames and passwords, to edit, print and distribute books and periodicals on every subject and catering to all tastes, building extensive networks of horizontal communication sustained by voluntary involvement and accessible technologies, the existence of which was of vital importance at critical turning points in history of the democratic opposition under late socialism. 
An iconic manifestation of civic disobedience, dissident media activism as a cultural, intellectual and political phenomenon should not be reduced, however, to its instrumental purpose of overcoming state surveillance of ideas and their flow. Unlicensed publishing brought together actors, their practices and ideas, with technologies and things, to form a complex web, which was both a horizontal communication network that sustained the flow of dissident ideas, and the corresponding web of meanings. Within that broad web of meanings articulated around social media practices, this study explores the political instances of meaning-making beyond the conceptual polarities of the Cold War paradigm, representing an approach which fuses insights from the second wave of samizdat studies and intellectual history of dissident political thought.
Dissident social media gave shape and meaning to the prefigurative philosophy of political action, corresponding to the conviction that organizational forms a collective action employs to achieve social and political change predetermine, or ‘prefigure,’ the kind of polity it aims at instituting. The prefigurative principle provided the framework in which the unlicensed social media activists could makes sense of what they were doing as a form of practicing democracy. It was a way of asserting that small collective forms of democratic agency are possible even under repressive conditions and that their transformative effect on public life can escape the perennial dilemma between revolution and reform. But also conversely, for the oppositional political thinkers, the unlicensed print culture gave this idea a strong ground in the lived experience.
However, if the vision of prefigurative democracy permeated the imaginary of dissident social media activism, it was not always the guiding philosophy of action of the broader oppositional movement, and while a significant purpose of this work is to examine the distinctive features of the unlicensed social media politics, another, no less important aim is to understand its place and significance in the broader intellectual history of oppositional politics in Poland. From the perspective of that entanglement, history of underground print culture, that this study narrates, is the history of the rise and eclipse of the dissident prefigurative vision.