ABSTRACT
The valiant members of the National Alliance of Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC) fight on the front lines in the civil war to keep public media arts culture truly popular.1
These museum curators, festival directors, grants agencies, foundations, distributors, alternative exhibitors, and media production groups together sustain a viable, dynamic media arts culture despite the intensification of the transnational media sector that robs us all of any place to argue and be with people other than ourselves. These warriors, together with NAMAC, carve out places and spaces for public culture in these terribly privatized times. Despite the headaches and heartaches of keeping the non-profit sector alive in a zeitgeist wherein popular equals commercial, these various cultural workers perform the hard work of organizing a popular resistance to commercial media. This transnational corporate media sector more often than not deprives us of creativity and collectivity, two modes of action that define the popular as that which energizes action beyond the self.2
