In this book, a considerable distance has been travelled from Latin American guerrilla warfare, to guerrilla television, encompassing, along the way, Western European and North American urban guerrilla cells; Italian and German autonomist radical political movements; British punk music; European free radio stations; militant, collective, and minor modes of cinema in a range of contexts; and radical forms of television. In the process, different concepts and models of guerrilla networks have been articulated, which have necessarily varied according to the context and practices involved. The guerrilla media theory articulated by Mao Tse Tung and Che Guevara, influential as it was, is clearly different to the urban guerrilla concept developed and deployed by the RAF in Germany or the Weather Underground in the US, and this is different again to ideas, practices, and tactics of guerrilla media, whether in radio, film, video or television. Nevertheless, the prevalence of the guerrilla concept across all these fields in the 1970s is striking, and also largely ignored in most media-historical accounts of the period.

This work has also aimed to extend contemporary theoretical orientations into new domains, questioning some of their usual assumptions and foci. For example, media archaeology, in many of its most well-known articulations, stringently avoids political questions, unless these are questions strictly connected to the materiality of media systems. The insistence on technological materiality and non-teleological accounts of media development can, in the worst instances, lead to an entirely depoliticized and ahistorical account of great inventions and their inventors, paying scant attention to the socio-technical machines in which technical inventions are implanted and manifested in various ways. While such tendencies can be found in both Kittler and Zielinski's media theory, so too can resources against this process as was indicated in chapter one. Specifically, this book has taken up ideas of the misuses of technology as can be found in Kittler, and Zielinski's concept of anarchaeology, as a way of discussing heterogeneous uses of media technologies in both political and media movements, more as a form of bricolage and the invention of socio-technical machines, than pure scientific invention.