In Amsterdam in the late 1970s, before the installation of the city-wide cable television infrastructure was even halfway complete, young hackers worked to crack the system wide open. The first cable TV pirates decided to broadcast hardcore pornography – a choice they thought would attract considerable attention – which appeared late at night on the dead air after the channels ended regular programming for the day. These pioneers operated within a mutable punk/anarchist demimonde, which was loosely united by widespread unemployment and the practice of squatting disused or vacant property.

The squatters, the “no future” generation, were anarchists and autonomists – both by disposition and, to a lesser extent, political conviction – who, in the late 1970s, branched out from autonomous living to create autonomous media in the form of newspapers and zines, as well as pirate radio stations and cable TV broadcasts. The young artists among them were quick to realise that pirate TV had potential well beyond late night porn. Beside the vandalistic interruption itself or the provocative spectacle of pornography, pirate television provided an opportunity for open-ended, free distribution of DIY content and the possibility to create an ad hoc community around music videos, video art, tapes of performances, and other experimental content.

During the short time that the pirate cable broadcaster Rabotnik was on television in 1982, they devoted a large part of their coverage to De Reagering, a performance-art-cum-political-party active in Amsterdam at the time, and its boisterous figurehead the toy-pistol-swinging poet Mike von Bibikov (Fig. 1). De Reagering started as an intellectual exercise among a group of friends comprising Don Bierman, Frank Oorthuys, and Rein Jansma, who came up with an idea to concoct their own political party while reading Rousseau's Social Contract. The party's name, coined by Oorthuys, was a pun on the Dutch words for “government” [regering] and “to react” [reageren] (Haas 2012: 13, 22–25) and the group soon attracted other disaffected and unemployed members of the youth culture scene of Amsterdam: punks, squatters, artists, and their soonto-be spokesperson Bibikov.