Stephan Urbach is part of Telecomix (previously), activists who worked tirelessly to keep the Internet on during the Arab Spring, when endangered despots were killswitching net links in a bid to keep protest from spreading.
Urbach wrote a bestselling account of his work called “Neustart,” which received enthusiastic critical response. Now he’s crowdfunding €3,800 to pay a professional translator to finish an English edition of the book (the first chapter’s already done and online). €50 gets you a hardcopy of the book and an acknowledgement by name.
Urbach hopes that he will find it easier to source a mainstream English publisher for his story once it’s already in English.
Telecomix was an international group of activists working for free communication. During the green revolution (known as „Arab Spring“) we were working with people on the ground in Egypt. When Mubarak shut down the internet, we deployed modem landlines and faxed the modem numbers to Egypt. People used them to write Emails, blogposts and upload small pictures form Tahrir.
When the protests started in Syria, we were working with Syrians to help them to get pictures and videos out of the country without getting caught by the Syrian intelligence services or the police.
We made friends with people in Syria. Some of them got killed by the Assad regime. We had hard times and struggled – as individuals and as a group.
I have held lectures about our work all over the world – from FSCONS in Sweden to Free Connected Minds in Beirut. From lectures in Harvard and Yale to DOKU:TECH in Prizren.
Together with Ingo Petz I wrote a book about the events and my life as an activist. It has, in fact, been published in German by a large publisher. You can get it in German on Amazon, as an import in any bookstore or in my own shop. It has received great reviews in the media.
There is a book called .REBOOT and we need to get it into English!
[Stephan Urbach/Indiegogo]