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By Any Media Necessary: Mapping Youth and Participatory Politics

Black And Yellow - AnCap Remix

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Students for Liberty
About
Founded in 2007, Students for Liberty (SFL) is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students and student organizations in the goal of advancing liberty in the United States and globally. SFL is a student-driven organization that provides training, networking opportunities, and educational resources for students nationwide; it has quickly become one of the most prominent and revered groups in the student liberty movement, a transnational, youth-led movement rooted in a range of libertarian philosophies, from Objectivism to Austrian Economics, but more broadly committed to expanding economic, social, and intellectual freedom. Members of the liberty movement have created a vibrant online community and utilize diverse media practices to share their love of liberty and fandom of libertarian theorists.

Also, check out Dorian Electra's work, rooted in Austrian economics, a popular philosophy within the Student Liberty Movement.

See Liana Gamber-Thompson's By Any Media Necessary chapter, "Bypassing the Ballot Box," to learn more about Students for Liberty.

Contributed by Liana Gamber-Thompson on 5/10/14
Students for Liberty Media
"Fear the Boom and Bust" a Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem
Ann Coulter Battles Stossel at SFL International Conference
Black and Yellow -AnCap Remix
Music Videos Music videos are a particularly powerful and complicated maker practice. They combine the complexities of both clever song writing techniques with often fast-paced video editing, that tells a story or provides a visually stimulating counterpoint to the music. But for millennials and those growing up after the launch of MTV in 1981, the format has become part-and-parcel to media consumptions habits.

What music videos, particularly pop and hip-hop, offer though as a pedagogical tool is their catchy, repetitive song structure that repeats choruses and act as a mnemonic device. Moreover the lyrical rhyme system of storytelling information or rhetorical statements provide an emotionally engaging and easy-to-follow logical structure.

Amongst the organizations, they're both examples of completely original songs as well as parody songs, that use pre-existing songs as a base to change the lyrical content or original meaning. For example, the music video Fear the Boom and Bust is an original song that uses hip-hop tropes to analyze opposing economic philosophies of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keyes. The playful song helps to make the dry subject more fun while the simple storyline of the video helps to illustrate their opposing arguments and lifestyles.

Black and Yellow - AnCap Remix on the other hand uses a pre-existing popular song by Wiz Khalifa to give it new meaning. While the original song referred to the "Black and Yellow" of Pittsburg Steelers, in the remix it's used to refer to the colors of the Anarcho-Capitalist flag. So the remix reappropriates the rallying spirit of the original and directs that energy towards defining an ingroup identity of what it means to be an Anarcho-Capitalist. Libertarians
Bypassing the Ballot Box Drawing on data from a case study of Students for Liberty (SFL), this chapter examines how some groups of young people seek to forge new social movements based in participatory politics while simultaneously taking advantage of existing relationships with established institutions. Students involved with SFL are often self-identified libertarians, though the organization as a whole maintains the broader mission of “advancing liberty,” and members consider themselves part of a larger movement they call the Student Liberty Movement. Founded in 2008, SFL started with just a small group of students who organized a roundtable at Columbia University to discuss best practices for campus organizing. Today, SFL is “a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide a unified, student-driven forum of support for students and student organizations dedicated to liberty.” While SFL has grown tremendously in the past 5 years, it has remained true to its grassroots beginnings by resisting top-down leadership models; the group still relies primarily on its student leaders to implement programs and organize conferences, and the small group of SFL paid staff is composed almost entirely of former student volunteers. Members also engage in a wide range of online participatory practices and modes of creative production like those seen in Chapters 2 and 3, as evidenced by everything from playful music videos paying tribute to Austrian economists to memes critiquing the political status quo. The chapter also explores the movement's non-voting stance and how it relates to their changing notions of citizenship. Because young libertarians view their opinions as being largely ignored by mainstream media and political parties, they must often rely on alternative learning networks and grassroots forms of communication and circulation. We also explore how SFL benefits from institutional ties and scaffolds member participation in established libertarian political spheres as represented by the Cato Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, and other think tanks and policy organizations. At the same time, we describe the potential contradictions surrounding this relationship: young libertarians rely on financial and institutional support from such institutions yet are also increasingly struggling to gain distance from them. SFL leaders are now talking about what they call “second wave libertarianism” (to borrow language explicitly from the Women’s Movement), which adopts a “big tent” approach to alliance and movement building; advocates of second wave libertarianism seek to build partnerships with liberal organizations just as often as with conservative groups in an effort to break down the traditional political alliance between libertarians and the Right. This strategy marks a departure from the first wave of libertarianism (the 1970s and 1980s) where leaders worked to build uniquely libertarian institutions and shore up political connections to conservatives. Today’s libertarians are as apt to participate in an Occupy Wall Street rally as they are to attend a Tea Party gathering.

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