Upon hearing this story, Idris smiled discreetly. Crossing his legs and leaning towards the table, Idris spelt out how such alternative ways of accessing information had become one of the core incentives for him to continue using Esperanto. For Idris, hegemonic, national languages such as English and French had become intrinsically connected with mass communication: to reach as wide a public as possible, major news outlets often convey information in English. Likewise, as he claimed, the logic behind social media prompts users to write public posts on their timelines and profiles more than to exchange personal messages, as well as to post in a more widely used language like English, so that users can communicate with a larger public and become more influential. Esperanto, by contrast, proposes a different rationale:
Esperanto is more about personal communication. I can write to a random Esperantist anywhere via social media and ask them something about life in their country or about their mother tongue. With other languages, maybe I couldn't do this. It wouldn't make sense for me to send a private message to a random person in English or French asking these things because they would be suspicious of me; they would think I'm a weirdo. But it's possible to do this using Esperanto, because that's the whole point of it: to enable a different form of communication, to allow people who don't know each other to get in touch. So, most communica- tion in English and other similar [meaning 'national'] languages focuses on mass communication, but Esperanto makes us more open to what is called ad hoc communication [he used the expression in English].
When learning foreign languages at school, students are often presented with a vague idea that a given language skill will be useful for them in the future—this usefulness being loosely defined in terms of job oppor- tunities and trips abroad. For Idris, however, the usefulness of languages became clear early in his life: Arabic, French, English, Ukrainian and Russian served his immediate purposes and were more closely linked to his personal and professional needs. By contrast, his drive to learn Esperanto was not goal-oriented, even though it spoke directly to his desire to find an easy-to-learn language. Yet Esperanto's seeming non- instrumentality, or pointlessness, was what made it useful to Idris. It added a non-compulsory character to the language learning process, which, free from any sort of commitment or obligation, became fun and opened up possibilities to him regarding ad hoc communication.
In establishing meaningful one-to-one contacts with Esperantists from other countries, Idris used Esperanto and the Internet to establish more horizontal and autonomous global networks of communication. Although the social media he used (mostly Facebook and Twitter) could serve mainstream purposes, he attempted to engage with them as tech- nologies for the construction of autonomy (Castells et al. 2004: 246). In this way, he sidestepped the one-to-many approach of mass media and the many-to-many focus of public posts on social media (Castells 2008: 90). Along similar lines, Idris regarded the SAT-Amikaro debates as safe spaces in which he not only practised the language, but also remained up-to-date with world news and politics as these topics were shared and debated by his peers, without the mediation of journalists.
Certainly, Idris is not the only person who seeks alternatives to mass communication. Looking at twenty-first-century alterglobalisation movements in line with Idris' critique of mass communication, several studies have explored how activists dismiss political representation by deploying certain communicative strategies that oppose mainstream mass media. Authors such as Maple Razsa and Andrej Kurnik (2012), for instance, describe ethnographically how the political practices of the 2011 Occupy Movement in Ljubljana, Slovenia, enacted alternative forms of communication and decision-making. While representative democracy empowers politicians and political parties to act as legiti- mate spokespeople for their voters, direct action activists in Ljubljanas Occupy encampment tried to incorporate the voices of every activist into their debates in the public square, making room for everyone to speak for themselves and represent themselves through direct democracy. Their tactics encouraged the formation of decentralised workshops, in which marginalised minorities could express themselves, learn from each other and carry out political action within the movement regardless of the majority's support. With this strategy, Occupy Slovenia empowered its participants by providing safe spaces for them to be individually heard.
Teivo Teivainen (2016) also analyses the interplay of representation and communication by looking at similar alterglobalisation movements such as the World Social Forum and Occupy Wall Street. Teivainen argues that these movements' activists dismiss political representation, as well as the delegation of power and responsibilities to others, by valuing prefiguration. In short, prefiguration is a political strategy that entails a congruence between the ends that activists aim to reach and the means they employ to reach them—which posits that democratic goals must be achieved through democratic means (Teivainen 2016: 23— 24). Examining the materialisation of such stances in general assemblies at occupied city squares, Teivainen concludes that democratic decision- making is more likely to take place in units of relatively small scale, in which anyone can be more easily heard. Along these lines, voice gains ground as a core element in building a more inclusive and horizontal society.
Just as direct democracy and horizontal communication find in small units their prime location, Esperanto provides Idris and other Esperan- tists with a space oriented towards a smaller public and more specific interlocutors who, through cosmopolitan principles and sociabilities, are likely to be more open to certain differences. Hence, commu- nicative spaces set by Esperanto make room for every participant to make their individual contribution and be heard, through a network of non-native speakers speaking a language over which no one can claim linguistic authority. Once the frame (Bateson 1972: 177—193) of Esperantujo is established, such relatively hierarchy-free, democratic communicative settings enable Esperantists to have access to first-hand information about different places across the world through people's experiences, narratives and personal impressions, rather than through the more impersonal accounts coming from journalists. It is in this sense that communication in Esperanto shares features with communi- cation carried out by activists for global justice and against neoliberal globalisation: Esperantujo also provides a space in which horizontal ad hoc communication (in Esperanto) is valued as an alternative to mass communication (in English or another hegemonic language). Interest- ingly, the language historically labelled 'universal' turns out to realise its full potential in a numerically limited speech community.
Yet, reading Idris' engagement with Esperanto through the lens of horizontality and direct democracy does not mean that he and other Esperantists oppose mainstream mass media. As a tool to access infor- mation and make contacts via ad hoc communication, Esperanto inval- idates neither other languages nor mass communication. In addition to communicating with individual Esperantists online and regularly joining weekly debates in Esperanto, Idris also had on his mobile phone several news apps and read the news on a daily basis from The Guardian, Le
Monde diplomatique and Franceinfo, aside from several Tunisian newspa- pers online in Arabic and French. Hence, his use of Esperanto is not a way to evade or oppose the mass media or mass communication, but to add a further layer to his access to information.
In Gramscian terms (Gramsci 1996: 177—188), this is not a matter of opposition between the hegemony of English (or of any other hegemonic language) and the counter-hegemony of Esperanto. On the contrary, Esperanto figures in Idris' practices as a linguistic alternative that allowed him to aggregate new knowledge and make international communication more personal and enjoyable. Rather than broad-casting, Idris chose not to address a large and indistinct public, preferring to build online rela- tionships and friendships through one-to-one contacts in Esperanto. In other words, Esperanto became useful and effective precisely insofar as it was affective for him, which also owes to the relatively limited number of people who speak this language and make this community. Indeed, this usage of Esperanto turns it into a non-hegemonic practice: not some- thing that confronts other languages directly, but something that opens up a novel set of communicative practices. Yet, as in any line of flight, Esperanto's possibilities are bountiful, but not endless: as discussed, this language may not cultivate a plurality of options when it comes to job opportunities or possibilities of communicating with the wider society abroad.