This presentation will discuss how activist movements use independent publishing to invoke a memory trace of historic antecedents. In America, the Occupy movement (2011-12) has used independent publishing as a way of tapping into a spirit of participatory democracy, as imagined during the 18th Century, through pamphlet distribution. Likewise, Occupy drew on the self-publishing tradition of the countercultural “mimeo revolution” in America during the 1960s. The mimeograph had been used as a tool to disrupt corporate publishing culture and television networks during the 1960s with some success and some surprises. The aim of this paper is to encourage seminar participants to think about how digital media continues to be “haunted” by print cultures of the past. We will discuss why this awareness will continue to be important for understanding processes of collaboration through publication and distribution.