To bring down the institutions of Empire, we must begin to build the rules, relationships, and institutions of a New Economy. These must be lived into being from the bottom up.
So how do you know whether your work is contributing to a big-picture outcome? If you can answer yes to any one of the following five questions, then be assured that it is.
1. Does it help discredit a false cultural story fabricated to legitimize relationships of domination and exploitation and to replace it with a true story describing unrealized possibilities for growing the real wealth of healthy communities?
2. Is it connecting others of the movement’s millions of leaders who didn’t previously know one another, helping them find common cause and build relationships of mutual trust that allow them to speak honestly from their hearts and to know that they can call on one another for support when needed?
3. Is it creating and expanding liberated social spaces in which people experience the freedom and support to experiment with living the creative, cooperative, self-organizing relationships of the new story they seek to bring into the larger culture?
4. Is it providing a public demonstration of the possibilities of a real-wealth economy?
5. Is it mobilizing support for a rule change that will shift the balance of power from the people and institutions of the Wall Street phantom-wealth economy to the people and institutions of living-wealth Main Street economies?
Unexpectedly the Avatar story is cloning itself onto real life situations. More accurately, it was life on Earth that inspired the imaginary action on Pandora, so not surprisingly many are drawing upon this new planetary myth to make their plight– ironically– more real.
For example, in the above video, clever Palestinian activists done Na’vi outfits to translate their cause’ imagery into a new symbolic order. By recontextualizing their cause through a new set of signs, the reality frames of the past can be challenged by the Avatar meme. Paradoxically, by identifying themselves as indigenous, these Palestinian youth are also connecting themselves with global pop culture, a hybridized strategy that can jujitsu around the political controls normally exercised in the mainstream news media.
Likewise, an indigenous group in India, the Dongria Kondh, are fighting the mining operation of Vedanta Resources. The whole thing more closely parallels Avatar, which has not escaped the attention of Survival International, an NGO that helps endangered tribal groups. They sent an appeal to James Cameron for support, and have released the following video that describes the plight of the Dongria Kondh.
(For more background information on the Dongria Kondh and how to support their struggle, follow this link.)
Expect to see more blue people appearing on Earth in the very near future.
This years’s Blog Action Day theme is “climate change.” I’d like to focus on language.
So what’s in a word? Not much and a lot. Words don’t actually carry any meaning. Our belief in this comes from a fallacious cultural understanding of language based on the “conduit metaphor,” which views communicate as the transportation of things. For example, we say “I don’t get the idea,” or “Am I getting this across to you?” as if words contain information. But is this what really happens? Look at the word “message,” one of the core terms used in traditional information theory to denote a self-contained unit of meaning. Simple enough, yet if I say, “Did you read the message,” or “You don’t get the message, do you?” those are two different concepts. In either case “message” depended on context to convey its meaning.
Likewise “climate” and “change” also have different meanings in different communication environments. This was the stroke of brilliance behind Bush’s creation of the phrase, because it drains the situation of any real meaning or urgency, no matter how it’s communicated. Or take “global warming.” Both words actually make us feel really good, don’t they? But if we were to say planetary heat death? Or global ecological catastrophe? Or my fave, vampiric capitalist climate chaos? What kind of images do they invoke? As you can see, though words don’t “contain” meaning, they can frame our attitudes, especially when contextualized under certain conditions.
ecoAmerica, which has tested a lot of different phrases in focus groups and phone surveys recommends, “deteriorating atmosphere” (you can read the report here). To me it sounds rather weak and inept. Nonetheless, the report’s recommendation to use new language to frame environmental issues created a bit of a dustup between the New York Times’s John M. Broder and George Lakoff at the Huffington Post, which centered on whether or not framing language can impact social change.
In my view framing and language metaphors can influence the way we think about issues, but that they do not program how we think. I believe all communication is contextual and negotiated. The idea of mass media frames is not much different than Walter Lippman’s suggestion that democracy requires public manipulation and propaganda. A primary solution to climate ______ (fill in the blank) is local. We need to have discussion and dialogue amongst ourselves to come up with solutions, not media tested mind frames spewed by satellite beamed talking heads. I realize that mass media have a generalized impact on how we view the world, but a few linguistic “climate” experts cannot compete with the mythological language of advertising. Until we stop selling cars as the next great green fetish, I don’t think any amount of framing can compete with the context that commodities enrich our lives.
Finally, we need to acknowledge this isn’t just “climate change,” but it’s “lifestyle” and “human habitat” change as well.
My experience has been that mass media is best left to the corporate overlords who rule that realm, and to do an Aikido maneuver around them. Through pattern recognition (my alternative to critical thinking), we can step aside as these frames are hurled at us, and let them boomerang back to the source. Meanwhile we can have groovy film festivals and house screening of ecologically oriented documentaries served with local, bioregional fare as we reassert our community spaces away from the mass mind manipulators who claim to know what is best for the planet.
Sadly the poor Star Wars geeks at BoingBoing got duped by Derrick Jensen‘s unfortunate parody video, which slams all environmental strategies that don’t advocate violent resistance. Apparently he cannot differentiate the cartoon world of Star Wars with his own vision of the world, which seems to be a 19th Century caricature of far more complex reality than one in which it is possible to attack a center of power. To be sure, Jensen is a prolific writer and tireless advocate against the Empire, but having read many of his articles and books, I’ve grown weary of this kind of criticism that ultimately ends up leaving one feeling powerless. His latest missive in Orion Magazine made the false analogy that composting didn’t stop slavery. It’s a rhetorically witty retort to all us idiots who recycle, or even to those of us who advocate personal change.
I give Jensen credit for asking tough questions and for reminding us that what’s at stake is not just personal consciousness, but social justice. He’s right to criticize solutions that are only individualistic. Yet in identifying the enemy, he draws on Industrial-era assumptions of power and resistance:
If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.
The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.
I think this is a rather simplistic view of these particular confrontations and their outcomes. After all, it’s the Empire that took Hitler down, no? The fact is we have an opportunity to confront the system every time we make a lifestyle choice or eat a bite of food. To disparage these kinds of actions at the moment of actual contact we have with the system on a daily basis is asking people to surrender these opportunities to some abstract dream of bloody revolution. Me sense is that Jensen has not entered in on a Star War plot, but rather into a PK Dick novel, in which the sci-fi sage wrote, “To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox: whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies” (from Valis, p.134).
I’ve been fortunate to have participated in two media revolutions, punk and the social Web. Nonetheless, I think comparing the two makes a false historical analogy. Essentially I believe punk was the last rebellion of the Industrial Age. I don’t mean the “last rebellion,” but it was one in which reality was substantially differentiated. Punk was at the transition from the fixed one-to-many media system to one that is networked (many-to-many). Punk was necessary and possible because it worked outside a hierarchical media system (that eventually changed once it became commodified to the point that Cher could sport fire engine red hair or a guy with a mohawk and skateboard advertised online stock trading). It built alternative cultures because no one else gave a shit (except the police, which seemed to overreact to the punk movement’s expression). It is no longer possible to distinguish yourself as an outsider according to clothes or hair style. This is why it’s now possible that high school kids in the ROTC can dress like punks. Back in the day a punk entering into a military officer training program would be impossible to conceive. Punks were about threat: looking scary, acting scary and mirroring the violence of society as a kind of mockery. It was about being a tribe clearly distinct from the bullshit hypocrisy that surrounded us (Reagan had just been elected when I got into the punk scene). People often ask me trivia questions about the ’80s, but I can never answer them because I refused to participate in the pop culture or the system of that era. I was in an alternative reality. Punks were refuseniks.
I don’t think social media can make these kinds of claims. However, don’t let me give you the impression that I think we were better. It was just a different reality with different tools– it was organic in the sense that it existed as a result of physical encounters between people (mainly at shows), that rallied around music, fashion and art. It was a gathering of the “freakatoni.” Social media certainly replaces the networking tool that we used– telephones, zines, mail art, touring– and does a better job of the kind of self-publishing we were into (especially in terms of distribution of music, words and ideas). Still, one thing I miss is the visual fingerprints you saw on everything. There was a lot of craft involved, whereas a lot of new media is far too slick and impersonal for my taste. I do like the equalizing effect of new media– but remember that it goes both ways. We have more transparency, but that makes marketing to us more accessible to corporations. It’s easier for them to target and identify us, and to design niche targeting. For instance, any “garage” band can have a MySpace page, but guess what, you voluntarily gave the richest, most powerful transnational media corporation in the world access to all your demographics and fans.
I don’t mean to be skeptical or unexcited about the potential of social media to promote protest movements– I think it’s more true in “non-Western” countries who are less bludgeoned by consumer capitalism. But I remain skeptical that what we are witnessing now is like punk.
There is something ironic yet unconscious about the Tactical Stencil Lab’s attack on Marine recruiters in Brooklyn: in their noble counter-recruiting effort to challenge the Marine’s tactics, they have revealed how deft and sophisticated the military really is. In other words, the activists lost the info battle before it even started.
It’s time for old school activist tactics to change.
Having done workshops in neighborhood high schools featured in the video and also having worked in “minority” schools heavily targeted by the US military, I have observed that the military is much better at engaging the community and speaking a language it understands than many activists who come in from the outside who have no experience engaging locals. The difference is market research. The whole aesthetic of Tactical Stencil Lab comes from the avant-garde and speaks a nihilistic language that will draw no one into its movement except those who already understand their aesthetic (note the video’s dreary atonal soundtrack). In this video there is a short clip from a Marine recruitment video that speaks better the symbolism of escape and transformation that makes military recruitment successful. This doesn’t mean that activists should pander to persuasive ad techniques of the Marines, but notice the quasi-religous beauty of the ad featuring the African-American male jumping into the pool– a scene practically lifted from Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl‘s Olympia.
Whereas the Marines are doing market research and engaging directly with the community they are recruiting from, I’m doubtful Tactical Stencil Lap is doing such grassroots work. Consider the dressed-up Hummer at 0:50. This demonstrate the skillful marketing techniques of the Marines that draws upon an Afro-Carbean and hip hop aesthetic that is more common in the area.
Tactical Stencil Lap would be perceived as invaders, whereas the marines are far more compelling and intriguing because they speak directly to those they want to recruit. The whole videos unconvincingly utilizes a foreign dialect lacking a local sensibility. Who is this message supposed to appeal to? If I showed this video to the students of this community it would not engage or interest them. I know because I have tried. Putting up graffiti “kill or die” on the shutter is no better than advertising, but done with lesser skill or research. Why not do it in vernacular style? If you want to uncool the Marines, at least do it in a way that a kid with no future prospects will understand.
It’s better to find ways to engage youth and to propose alternative solutions that are more attractive and viable. There are already is enough “kill” and “die” slogans filling the rhetorical atmosphere. The key that makes marketing work is that it’s an invitation. What kind of alternative activity could Tactical Stencil Lab invite local kids to do? Create art!
Carrotmob is a good example of the kinds of social activism enabled by Internet social networks that Clay Shirky talks about in Here Comes Everybody– a combination flash mob and consumer pressure that invites social change through positive engagement with businesses. This is a fine first step, but I hope they take it a step further than promoting energy efficency in stores by advocating for energy efficient products, i.e. locally made goods. Little markets–so-called convenient stores–are often what I consider to be like a hell-nexus: alcohol, tobacco, porn, fast food, disposable products, Coke, etc. These are the acupuncture points of empire. So I hope they keep up the pressure by encouraging the sale of sustainable products as well.
We have an oil dependent aggricultural system. If people are not able to grow their own food, then we are talking about the death of civilization, and that is no exaggeration (read Soil Not Oil by Vandana Shiva) because peak oil means the breakdown of our monocultural agricultural system. Democrat Rosa Delauro has introduced HR 875 which will severely impact independent food producers:
HR 875 mandates that anyone who produces food of any kind – meat, milk, fruit, vegetables et cetera – and transports that food for sale be subject to warrantless government inspections of their farms and food production records. These random inspections can be conducted at the whim of federal agents without regard to farmers rights or property rights. Further, the law would allow federal agents to confiscate records, product as they see fit as part of the inspection process.
Agents could also implement draconian restrictions regarding how farm animals can be fed, how fields can be managed and the end result of these restrictions could mean the end of organic, biodynamic and sustainable agriculture practices if these practices are deemed “unsafe.” Farmers refusing to comply would be subject to penalties. (From Nourishdkitchen,com)
A similar law was passed in India which made it illegal for independent farmers to process their food, thereby allowing Monsanto another tool to take over local agriculture (also in Soil Not Oil). Would it surprise you to know that Delauro is married to a Monsanto consultant? Also, did you know that six corporations control 98% of the genetically modfified organism market? Those companies are Avantis, Dow, DuPont, Mitsui, Monsanto and Syngenta (source: Fair Future).
I don’t want to sound alarmist, but this is not about safety but is about control of your food. This is a path towards future starvation. Do what ever you can do, and muster any ounce of energy you have to do something about this. For starters, go to this article for background and links to take action.
On March 28 we can voluntarily turn off our electricity for an hour in solidarity with the Earth’s climate, but also as an excellent pause mechanism to reflect upon our energy-saturated lifestyle. Moreover, make it a party or community event. I heard that during the last blackout in NYC some said it was one of their greatest New York experiences because people went outside and chilled together. When was the last time we did that?
We did something like this in Italy a few months ago and it was the first time I played my guitar in six months. Maybe I can succeed in actually talking to my neighbors!
Upon reading Ann Elizabeth Moore‘s awesome polemic, Unmarketable, I’m tempted to create a new blog category, “clusterfrak.” This would be necessary for posts in which I feel compelled to document nefarious marketing practices that have infiltrated the counterculture, but in doing so am forced to give free publicity to the offender. What is one to do?
Moore’s book is a passionate plea for the return to integrity. As a former Punk Planet writer and most excellent journalist, Moore brings in her passion as an activist who believes strongly in community spaces free of corporate marketing. She laments (as do I) the inevitable commercialization of community spaces that she holds dearly. She decries further the willingness of scenesters to sell out their peers for a buck, noting that in her own social experiment that she was able to get zine-makers to give away all their rights to her in exchange for free candy.
Moore articulates a sound criticism of culture jamming and Adbusters, which echoes my own rants on this blog. Essentially culture jamming ends up creating more mindshare and attention for the brands they intend to criticize. Even a book like Naomi Klein’s No Logo becomes a primer for ad agencies on how to market to the anti-marketers. Talk about a clusterfrak!
I think the one unarticulated irony that results from reading Moore’s book is the fact that punk has always depended on capitalism for its existence. Just as Satanists need Christianity to define themselves, punk depends on an industrialized system to justify itself. With postmodernism that all ends because you no longer have a clear target or something to bounce off of. That is is why I always refer to punk as the last rebellion of the Industrial Age. Note, I’m not saying the “last rebellion,” just one that can claim a distinct space outside of corporate control. Clearly that is no longer the case.
Speaking of which, what initially compelled the writing of this post was another blog post about Groove Armada offering its music for free on the Web, but the catch is that you have to register into a Bacardi social network site to get your “free” stuff (BTW Mog appears to also be advertising the Bacardi ruse– actually, it’s not a ruse at all, which is even more depressing). Unlike Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails who did offer their albums for fee on their own Websites, this is clearly a Bacardi marketing ploy that surely paid Groove Armada well.
At first I felt like ignoring this, not wanting to draw attention to Bacardi who, thanks to me, has a little more free advertising. But because I find it reprehensible that musicians remain blinded to the devil’s pact they make with alcohol companies I feel the need to speak up. Considering how much alcoholism and drug abuse has ravished the music scene, I just find it unconscionable that music magazines and artists continue to support the alcohol industry.
Which leads me to the conundrum of how to draw attention to this without giving Bacardi more air time than it deserves. I suppose the only thing I can do at this point is to warn you that that the Groove Armada track really sucks. OK, I actually didn’t even listen to it, but I’m offering this preventative measure as a last ditch effort to remind you that the first one is always free…
To paraphrase former Homeland Security tzar Tome Ridge, You’ve been warned!
There are moments in a nation’s — and a planet’s — history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction. We think such a time has arrived, and we are writing to say that we hope some of you will join us in Washington D.C. on Monday March 2 in order to take part in a civil act of civil disobedience outside a coal-fired power plant near Capitol Hill.
We will be there to make several points:
* Coal-fired power is driving climate change. Our foremost climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, has demonstrated that our only hope of getting our atmosphere back to a safe level—below 350 parts per million co2—lies in stopping the use of coal to generate electricity.
* Even if climate change were not the urgent crisis that it is, we would still be burning our fossil fuels too fast, wasting too much energy and releasing too much poison into the air and water. We would still need to slow down, and to restore thrift to its old place as an economic virtue.
* Coal is filthy at its source. Much of the coal used in this country comes from West Virginia and Kentucky, where companies engage in “mountaintop removal” to get at the stuff; they leave behind a leveled wasteland, and impoverished human communities. No technology better exemplifies the out-of-control relationship between humans and the rest of creation.
* Coal smoke makes children sick. Asthma rates in urban areas near coal-fired power plants are high. Air pollution from burning coal is harmful to the health of grown-ups too, and to the health of everything that breathes, including forests.
Back in the day (yeah, I’m starting to sound old), punk co-mingled with Industrial music. If you are not familiar with that genre, imagine the sound of screeching and grinding machines blasted through broken guitar amps, and you have an approximation. However, Industrial music was often more sophisticated, and wasn’t just wall of noise, ear-bleeding self-induced torture. Artists (yes, the term is appropriate) used tape loops, industrial power tools, radios, TVs and invented their own instruments to often create dreamy soundscapes that were like film soundtracks for civilization on autodestruct. Germany’s Einstürzende Neubauten were probably the masters (but with a hat tip to Throbbing Gristle and later Psychic TV), with Blixa Bargeld setting fire to performance venues whenever possible.
I recall a Sonic Youth gig in LA (circa 1984/85) in an old brick sewing factory which featured the band Debt of Nature, who pushed Black Flag’s PA system to the edge of a wormhole. Debt of Nature’s guitarist, who had gouged out his guitar neck in-between frets like a sitar, produced such a low frequency that it made my body pulsate, so much so I thought my organs were going to burst. I feared the whole building would collapse. Those lowriders with their subwoofers had nothing on these guys.
Anyhow, here is the ironic part. For whatever reason (I’m still trying to sort this one out), we voluntarily exposed ourselves to blistering noise, and loved it. I speculate that it was a way of harmonizing with the electrical grid, or just tuning into the world’s angst and making a jam out of it. Sadly, this is not what the American torturers had in mind when later on they began using loud music as a technique for breaking prisoners. The first I heard of this was during the U.S. invasion of Panama. I recall all kinds of music–including Tibetan chants– were blasted at Noriega to flush him out of his stronghold. Now it has come to light that during the past 8 years (probably more), an assortment of pop music was also used to destroy the minds of prisoners.
It’s tempting to make a joke out of the fact that Sesame Street and pop culture icon Christina Aguilera were used to torture people, but this is not something we can just sweep under the rug of postirony hoo-ha and chalk it up to the misguided experiments devised during the Age of Meaninglessness. What is even more shocking is that humanitarians such as Rage Against the Machine and Nine Inch Nails were also used to destroy people’s minds. It’s one thing for a bunch of stoned skateboarding teenagers to stick their heads in front of guitar amps turned up to 12 and call it fun, but when the government does in a cell in which a person has no means to escape, it is so incomprehensible that it makes my ears bleed thinking that someone actually thought this was a sensible idea.
Donald Rumsfeld, you are no punk rocker. I hope you rot in a cell someday while forced to listen to “Free Bird” on infinite loop.
I was at this Paul Hawken talk and it remains one of the most inspiring I’ve seen. Given these troubled days, I thought it would be nice to take a breather and to remember we are the ones we have been waiting for.
Bridging media literacy with ecoliteracy, this blog features various meditations and musings by Antonio Lopez, an old school dharma punk and media educator. He is the author of:
