The Long of It

The ideas behind Eggplant Active Media had been in a dream state for a long time before a chance meeting between members Jason Lemieux and Arthur Foelsche. In the hallowed halls of the #tech channel on IndyMedia's IRC server. Jason had been scheming for years about the creation of an electronic media and design company that would focus on providing services to progressive organizations and individuals who were working to promote a better world. As an activist, Arthur was looking for ways in which to fund his own work that didn't involve joining corporate ranks. In a long series of discussions which quickly gathered more participants, the Eggplant evolved from Jason's brain-child into a collective vision of a worker-owned and operated new-media design collective.

These initial visions of the Eggplant where hashed out in conversations, both in person, and via long IRC meetings. Here, notions about what kinds of work the Eggplant would take on, political and community responsibility, structural arrangement of the Eggplant, pay scales, revolutionary politics, capitalism, and many other weighty subjects carried a mad band of visionary activists through many a round of late night typing sessions, fueled by a burning desire for a new world built on ecology, democracy, and ethics, and a slight addiction to coffee and caffeinated mints.

A central tension became clear throughout these discussions, which continues to be the subject of discussions within the Eggplant: How does one work to create a new society within one riddled with domination, exploitation, and environmental destruction and still be able to pay the rent? The direction that the Eggplant has chosen to travel is not an easy one– we have a commitment to working with groups that reflect our own ideals and embrace the kind of society that we envision, yet we also have commitments to our families, communities, and unfortunately, land lords.

We fully recognize that it is not possible to ignore capitalism, to just not participate in it, yet our mission is to not perpetuate it. We believe that one approach to dealing with this question is to structure our organization in such a way that we promote the kind of values that we believe a society should have inside of the Eggplant. While we may not always work for the most revolutionary or progressive of clients, we believe that the Eggplant internally must reflect the kind of society we believe we can create. Therefore our structure embraces participation in decision making processes, equitable pay scales, rotating duties, non-hierarchical structure, supporting the needs of members, and by donating our time, energy, and support to organizations working for the same ends we are. While much of our days are spent behind keyboards, we see the work we do as contributing to global struggles for a better world. Though this sometimes takes different forms and often looks more like a keyboard with a collection of coffee mugs around it, through our support of different organizations, releases of open source software, and good will toward humanity, we believe the work we do has meaning.

In late spring of 2001, Evan, Jason, and Arthur met in New York City to begin work with one of the Eggplant's first clients. The models, structures, and even by-laws, had not even been fully fleshed out, but the need to pay the rent, and the desire to move the Eggplant out from the virtual world necessitated finally getting started. We left NYC to retreat to a cabin on a little pond in central New Hampshire, where water fights, tipping canoes, and the Blue Rocket were the inspiration for finally putting ideas onto paper. Despite battling for bandwidth over a shared 56k phone line, this retreat solidified all that is the Eggplant today.

Since these epic water battles, the Eggplant has become a much more solidified body. The collective has grown and we have worked with many different kinds of organizations and clients over the past four years. We have developed an infrastructure that allows us to support the needs of small and large organizations alike, offering hosting, programming, design, and consultation services for wide variety of organizations. While we still have water fights, we’ve had to make rules about squirt guns and computers.