Well, well, well. Looks like the election turned out just the way we all knew it would in the end. But what’s important is that you played the game. You sat through the horse race, the performance, the suspense, the numbers, and the photo finish. In the process, you were exposed to the advertisements, the polarization of the imagined community referred to as America, and the charade of ‘choice’. Meanwhile, the war machine turns on.

The US Army killed a man in broad daylight in Chinatown. A woman died in Red Hook of hypothermia because 74 buildings are still without heat & electricity in a city that calls itself industrialized and modern. And of course, the drones keep bombing.

But you didn’t hear about any of this, because you were watching election coverage.

Thanks for playing. You fell for it. Tomorrow, like today was, is your choice:

Rinse, Repeat, or Revolution?

We live in an age where we experience events through mediated channels more than with our senses. The drama of a natural disaster like Hurricane Sandy becomes as much a media event as it is a meteorological event. Amidst the 24-hour multi-network news coverage, the simple message to ‘be prepared and stay indoors’ becomes totally engulfed in by the torrential barrage of the redundant, monotonous fluff that provokes panicked hysteria and drowns out any other real news.

At the same time, we see the officials desperately feel the need to justify their legitimacy and reinforce a fiction that we rely on them to keep us safe. Figurehead mayors and governors standing in front cameras trying to capitalize on the occasion to bolster their popularity and take credit for the actual emergency work being done by thousands of crews working out in the wind and rain.

These work together to create an environment of fear, and in a position of passive disempowerment, the inability to act in the face of the storm extrapolated into an inability to act at all, in deference to the instructions of the men on the television. We are left only with the choice to do as we’re told, stock up on commodities, stay indoors, keep consuming, be afraid, and trust the government.

Meanwhile, using extraordinary emergency situations as a justification for the ever-augmenting powers of the state is becoming an increasingly popular tactic. Yearly freak hurricanes mean delirious rushes to stock up on water and batteries, and the bureaucrats getting more and more comfortable declaring states of emergency. The constant specter of an unexpected catastrophe means “preparedness” through surveillance, security, paramilitarized police forces, suppression of freedoms in the name of maintaining a tenuous status quo.

This is a distinctly American hysteria.

(written somewhere over a large body of water)

Revolution just ain’t what it used to be. We missed out on the epoch where all you had to do was kill the king, and you instantly became king, the castle and kingdom became yours. or when all all you had to do was get enough of your buddies and storm the Bastille or the Parliament or the Palace, and the powerful would tremble before you and flee in in a panic; or why not roll up like Che & Fidel waltzing into Havana with a celebratory swag, the revolution declared complete. Like you could win a war just by staging photo op in front with a “mission accomplished” banner.

This revolution isn’t coming. Sorry.

What, is in not gonna happen now because I said it isn’t? Like it’s something invisible we have to just have faith in, like afterlife and easter bunnies? Okay. Fine. The revolution is coming.

In the mean time, while the hours clock onward waiting for the revolution that isn’t coming, we’ve got to find more time to be revolutionaries. And also find a time we don’t have to be revolutionaries anymore.

Time’s a funny thing. It’s been abstracted and grafted to the capitalist rhythms of production and societal programming, but there are still a few vestiges where we can see time for what it really is. Because it’s relative, time essentially stops in certain situations or places like during weather emergencies, in theatres, hospital rooms, jail, and airports. There’s a feeling of stasis that you get when you go to the airport. There’s really no other place that you need to be other than in a line somewhere at the time agreed upon by your boarding pass and your watch. But when you’re taking a plane somewhere, it’s pretty much the only thing you really can’t miss, even if you wanted to. You don’t really have a choice, unless you lose your passport (something I’ve experienced). Flights often take precedence even over funerals (something else I’ve also experienced). And once you’re on the plane, there’s literally nothing else that matters. A zombie uprising could be going on, but you wouldn’t even know about it, and even if somehow you did, you wouldn’t be able to do anything about it except worry until you get through passport control.

I know a lot about Cuba. But the fact that I’ve never been to Cuba really kind of demonstrates that I actually know absolutely nothing about Cuba. Every last bit of information I’ve consumed with regards to Cuba has been filtered through the US of A. Facts traveling through passport control, customs, visa interviews, security checkpoints, baggage check, x-ray scans and metal detectors checking for anything dangerous to a semantic status quo (which is administered by another department). Come to think of it, that’s probably true for just about everything. History’s an airport.

Nonetheless, I digress. I’ll put it simply. Dreams of insurrectionary overthrow of the hyperaccelerated matrices of decentralized globalism are just naïvely misguided. I’m not sure if it ever was, because history’s shown us time and again that what comes after the popular momentum starts to get steered by a narrow minority, and it all starts all over again. Furthermore, here’s no single citadel where power sits, contemplating, waiting to be grasped and uprooted. Even if the masses were to push past all the sentinels who barricading anything that looks even remotely important, we’d find the monuments, the capitals, the stock exchanges to be utterly hollow. The system keeps on churning in the background, moved along by invisible hands so far separated from each other they don’t even know. Global capitalism is a swarm of airplanes covering the planet, each of them with little groups of people inside, completely unaware or indifferent to what’s going on on the ground.

So we’ve got to stop imagining there’s going to be some huge climax, a giant earth-shattering orgasm called ‘revolution’ that changes everything all at once. If we push it, rush it and blow it all too fast & premature, we’ll all just end up in jail and forgotten. Revolution is like long, slow, mind-blowing sex. When you’re doing it right, it’s not about the climax. It’s about the sweet sweet feeling that comes from the resistance.

This also means eschewing the ‘reform vs. revolution’ binary. We can dream of the liberation party, the ecstasy of dancing in glass and fire and metal and oil, the roar of wild justice that casts off fear, attachment, and regret – let’s remember that escapism is an opiate, and that cages are very real. Let’s remember what we’re fighting, and that its strengths lie in recreating itself, nestling itself everywhere we try to push it out. But when we start to withdraw our engagement from it, we’re decelerating the flows that power the machine. Capitalism is dying on its own, we need not waste our energy fighting it - what is needed is to dream start constructing the alternatives to be ready for when it collapses.

The revolution keeps on turnin’.

A simple question: What is a bank?

Think about how you would explain it to your children. At the most basic level - a bank is a community resource. The concept has existed for centuries. It’s a place where people can store so that they know it’s safe, and when a group of people in the community all put their money there, a bank has the ability to use the excess to loan out to someone who needs it so they can buy a house, send their children to schools, et cetera. When you deposit the money that you’ve worked for into a bank, there’s an element of trust that is mutually exchanged there. Trust, mutual understanding, and consent are foundational concepts in any relationship. You entrust the bank with an obligation to keep your money safe, so that you can withdraw it if you decide you need to - and in return, the bank is granted the consent of those who deposit their money there to manage these resources so that the arrangement collectively benefits the community.

If the constituents of a bank could all be in the same room and look at each other, there would be a clear understanding of who the stakeholders are, who has invested what, who is accountable for what - not in the sense of “investors” and “shareholders”, but in the sense that these people are a community, and that the bank is an endeavor, an institution, where the security of one depends on the others, and requiring responsibility, trust, and accountability, as does any relationship we decide to enter into.

But this isn’t how it is. And banks are a little bit more complicated than that, aren’t they?

For the first time in history, our epoch is one where the affair of managing money is a business in itself. Stocks, bonds, derivatives, dividends, options, futures, securities… Newly invented financial “products” have made the Financial Industry is one of the most profitable in the world - but not for the constituents who withdraw and deposit the money that they had entrusted; given their consent to store for safe keeping. At some moment in the last couple centuries, while we were all either asleep or drunk on imported champagne, it became so that the completely normal and natural thing to do was to take all the money you have, and promptly give it to a bank. Why, of course! What on earth else would you do with your money, keep it under a mattress? So goes the clichéd response, which scratches the surface of how deeply into the culture the financial industry has embedded the idea of its dominance, so that it can maintain a monopoly on money. Financial companies spend an obscene amount of (our) money to pollute the psychic landscape with ads & marketing campaigns carefully designed to give a charming face as a caring, benevolent institutions faithfully committed to serving you; interpellating a mythical identity of the celebrated consumer: a wholesome and discerning character who invariably walks away from a transaction satisfied, smiling and existentially fulfilled in life, thanks to (product x).

Choose to resist the ingratiating façade, and life gets more difficult for you. On the other side of all the marvelous wares and services banks provide to their beloved flock of consumers lies a field of penalties and inconveniences. Don’t have a credit card? You’ll have to pay your bills with a check at the post office. Don’t have a checking account? That’s an extra fee, and you’ll have to pay seven days in advance. Building credit requires entering into debt, and if you have no credit or bad credit, well, you’d better buck up and pay a a higher deposit for that apartment, or a higher interest rate on that car. But why all the coercion? What’s been swept underneath that Persian rug, anyway, besides a tag reading “MADE IN SWEDEN”?

The self-perpetuation of a culture where the mind-space of the masses is saturated with advertisements and distractions is founded atop the not knowing, the squirreling away of unsavory details of what we are participating in, keeping people in the dark, especially the ones who must keep buying, keep shopping, keep working 14-hour days in a sweatshop in the Philippines. The irrefutible fact is that a bank is a capitalist institution whose bottom line is profit - and to get it, they can do some bad things with our money, making us all unintentionally complicit in practices like investing in nuclear weapons, arms trading with despotic tyrants, privatizing clean water in developing nations, speculating on the price of food, profiting from toxic mortgages in foreclosure… the list goes on and on. The financial industry is like a giant international casino, where bankers gamble our futures away with chips we paid for.

Globalized Capitalism speaks only one language: Profit. It doesn’t discriminate about where it came from. And in a globalized system of finance capitalism, earnings are directly proportional to exploitation. One man’s benefits equal another man’s loss, another woman’s oppression, and a hundred people’s blind eyes. Because money is the lingua franca, giving money to multinational corporate banks effectively empowers them to do with it as they please, and we don’t have much of a say, and accountability isn’t part of a grammar that only understands numbers, returns and currency symbols. There isn’t any venue for an international community of depositors and financial managers to look each other and partake in an understanding of what affairs occur using capital resources. When we aren’t aware of what we’re giving our consent to, we are left disempowered, without agency, control, or freedom to choose. When an unregulated financial industry is entangled with a hazy political system that mirrors this lack of transparency and democratic participation, we have a problem. And when the two are so perversely intertwined that money, power and politics are so much a part of the same orgy that they are indistinguishable, we have an even bigger problem. (Jamie Dimon, you are an asshole.)

As austerity rages and threatens to raze the capitals of Europe to the ground, the operators of the machines that power this system are quickly waking up to realize what the banks have been up to. Iceland’s people have already rejected the public debt forced upon them by irresponsible financial managers through a national referendum. The challenge that lies before us is to bring about the next generation of banking institutions - but will we make the same mistakes of our history? People may want to burn the banks (and rightly so), but the prudent thing is to start to think about what to put in their place.So, let us return to the original question: what is a bank, and more importantly, what do we need it to do? It’s a fundamentally simple question. Instead of chasing the fading dream of endless growth, which inevitably sows recession and hidden repercussions far away from our periphery, how can we establish sustainable institutions that meet our basic needs? Emerging from the disillusionment that the era of virtuosic financial creativity was far too good to be true, let’s take agency over the consensus of what our resources take part in. A community that makes decisions together in a collective relationship based on understanding and trust can make just decisions to create responsible institutions for the future of banking.

Italiano \ Français \ Español

On October 5-7, I’m traveling to Italy to speak on Occupy Wall Street at the Internazionale Journalism Festival, along with friends Laurie Penny, David Graeber, and Claudia Vago.

October 8-11, I’ll be in Strasbourg France at the “World Democracy Forum” - a stuffy official government conference for tons of foreign officials and diplomats, which is, quite frankly, a debasing farce performance that won’t be inclusive or participatory at all, as all the events are either moderated panels, or invitation-only debates. Activists in France have already organized a counter-forum to take democracy to the streets and make it for and by the people, not at fancy conferences behind closed doors.

Finally, after a little rest, I’ll be heading to Madrid for #13O - A Global Day of Action against Debt & Austerity ~ Remember October 15th last year? This is going to be even bigger.

I’m really looking forward to livetweeting and livestreaming, as well as writing long-form editorial. I’ve been in contact with a few different news outlets, and we’ll see if someone picks up the story.

But I really need your help! All this stuff costs money, and I’m doing this all on my own. I’ve never crowdfunded before, and I know that a lot of people are doing it these days, but I actually see it as a really amazing new way to democratize capital and fund projects that interest people and manifest ideas that empower citizen journalists to create an alternative media narrative to what’s in the main stream press.

If you can, I’d really appreciate if you can donate. Every little bit helps! It really does!

DONATE

The feeling is unmistakable. Something is happening around the world. For the first time in the history of human communication, individuals around the globe are connecting in a way never thought possible, showing solidarity with people they may never meet, involved in protest movements in countries they may never visit, yet recognize a common struggle, a shared humanity.

But in order to analyze these phenomena, we must first seek to define it. When we refer to “The Global Movement”, we should move towards delineating the a container for this experiment. Are we just talking about the USA, Egypt, Greece and Spain? Is it just groups who use the terms “Occupy” or “Indignados”? What about Canada, Mexico, Portugal, and Italy? What about protests happening in China, Hong Kong, South Africa, and Macedonia? Are not the indigenous struggles of the world fighting the same enemy of corporate imperialism and globalization as the working classes of the industrialized world drudge onward under the weight of Atlas-oppressing capitalism?

How do we navigate this uneven landscape of culture, language, technology, and political environments to pull out common threads, standard measures, recognizable signs of the growing consensus? We are spellbound by an tenuous, yet shared silence - dark sharp gazes clandestinely darting as each other’s in a panicked heat not to be the first to break the anxious stillness.

Who will let loose the first primal scream that liberates the avalanche of unlocked rage?

A particular sentiment captures an entire generation.

Obama excited you in 2008 with his liberal message of change. But you didn’t know what you wanted to change, so you went with it and voted for him.

Then the Financial Crisis slapped you in the mouth, and you realized Obama is a tool just like the rest of them and has no interest in bringing Change to this system built to exploit the masses.

So you’re left with an existential dissonance because your liberalism tells you to vote for the blue guy - yet you realize by simply looking around that Obama hasn’t returned on the promises he made when he fooled an entire nation with his charming speeches. Yet he can smile and say “well, at least I’m not as bad as that crank Romney”. [ And sure, he’s right. Romney’s a bloodsucking psyocpath. ] 

To summarize: Obama can do whatever the fuck he wants, and then turn around and say “Shut up and deal with it. Just be happy Romney isn’t President.”

AND THAT IS POLITICAL CONTROL.

When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is democracy.                                -Jefferson*

You should never give away your voice. All this screaming in support of Obama as if he were some plastic celebrity makes me fucking sick. If you give away your support freely and blindly, politicians don’t have to do anything except maintain the status quo. Politicians should never feel comfortable, as if they have the blind support of people without having to work for it.

Withhold your vote. Go on strike from this political system, and make your demands.

deep breath

Okay.

I know. 

They said, “OWS has got to get involved in the election! You’ve got to stay relevant! Get in line and get involved in politics! blahblahblah…facepalm

And I’ve always been resistant, and I’ve always thought we ought to stick to our message and ignore what’s going on in the circus.

And I say, fuck that, we’re never going to cave to the pressure of the media machine. We’re much more powerful as a free radical force that can’t be bought and can’t be co-opted.

I’m a data nerd. And I’ve been looking at the numbers. And I hate seeing their message dominating the media landscape, when I think we still have an extremely relevant perspective, but we’re not getting it out enough. I believe in a different kind of action and engagement. Let’s look at

THE DATA.

Yup.

You guessed it.

A lot of people are talking about this shit.

Here’s some metrics comparing keywords one month ago, 

one week ago,

and last week.

This one’s interesting. Here’s a tag cloud querying a cross section of “#OWS” + “#RNC”.

The x-axis shows how frequently in time a term is mentioned, whereas the y-axis is how much in volume (read: retweets) a term is mentioned.

Analysis: While terms like ‘GOP’, ‘tcot’ and ‘obama2012.  are mentioned more frequently, the term ‘occupy’ still receives more social spread on an individual basis. Even though our enemies have lots of attention, we still have the power of words. The word occupy still resonates with people.

But it’s just a word. Words are our tools, until we make them our masters. They are our weapons. Believe in yourself or not – We actually have intellectual high ground over the hypersimplistic polarized narrative game that currently dominates the information arena. Our mission is to infiltrate and disrupt that arena, because it is just as vital to the operation of machine as the activity of the screws on the trading room floor.

Simply from a data analysts’s perspective, I can off the top of my head think of a few simple tactics for media 

1. Curate a selected list of influential personæ talking about campaigns/conventions/elections. Engage with friend and foe alike, and invite others to do the same. Why should underpaid campaign journalists monopolize the conversation?

2. Co-opt their messaging. Jam their hashtags, create trojan horses out of their propaganda. GoogleBomb them, Santorum them, vandalize the internet. 

3. Watch the conventions on TV and troll the fuck out of their speeches & debates. …slow cringe

4. Organize scheduled interactive events that people can participate in and will talk a lot about. Let’s invite some well-known speakers to debate, and broadcast it on YouTube. Let’s organize online rallies. Temporally-based events are what drive social media traffic. We plan huge marches in the street and they barely get media coverage (MayDay anyone?) We have to _*be *_the media. Media academics endlessly debate about whether the internet is a dimension separate from the ‘real’ world and our ‘real’ lives, or if it’s not separate at all, it’s a place just like any other where we live our lives and interact with the world and the people and ideas in it. I’m of the latter persuasion, and firmly believe that we’re fighting a media war just as much as we’re fighting one in the streets. The revolution is in the streets - the ones we walk down every day, which are unmistakably both physical and digital.

This is a call to plan and execute actions of your own dreaming: act online with the same fervor that we do in the streets.

Your smartphone is as powerful as a molotov cocktail.

Let’s dream together, and keep our creativity flowing freely – we’ll never get in line and “get behind” the election. But we sure as hell will get engaged.

⨳

Dear Charles Koch,

Greetings. I trust this message finds you well. Today, I had the fortune of coming across this short op-ed that you wrote. I thought I would write you this open letter to share a few observations.

Your writing struck me as disturbing, hypocritical, self-contradictory, and above all, mendaciously misleading. I was perplexed by your references to the faults of the Soviet Union, as if it were threatening to somehow resurrect itself and start stomping all over global democracy once again. While I wasn’t surprised at the common and frankly ludicrous treatise that most filthy-rich capitalists like yourself have a tendency to repeat, that making any fundamental criticism of the current economic system makes you a dictorship-loving Stalinist, I was quite amused at the irony, given that your great-grandfather made his fortune in Soviet Russia in 1929.

I actually find it quite alarming to listen to the ramblings a billionaire being alarmist about how policies of regulation and big government under the mask of “socialism” managed to fail in a totalitarian dictatorship that its people buried decades ago, and what’s worse counterposing it with calls for “economic freedom” to save us from some invisible spectre. I hate to break it to you, but nobody feels sorry for you grumbling about how you’ve been oppressed by government regulation when you’ve still managed to become the fifth-richest person in the United States.

But the real crux of your undoing is your disparagement of the “cronyism” of those who would skirt the free market you love so much for their own unfair personal gain, and get “something for nothing” by taking bailout money from taxpayers:

“Many businesses with unpopular products or inefficient production find it much easier to curry the favor of a few influential politicians or a government agency than to compete in the open market.”

Did this sanctimonious Libertarian champion of the “free market” just decry his own cherished hobby of buying politicians? I think you’d better eat your words, and fast.

Mr. Koch, you are an absolute hypocrite. If you truly believed you what you wrote, then you wouldn’t have donated $20 Million to lobbying politicians in the year of the financial crisis alone. What you really want is economic “freedom” for tycoons like yourself to continue to ravage the economy with impunity, and are perfectly happy with any government that allows you to remain exorbitantly wealthy.

While you continue your deluded campaign of misleading entreaties and abuse of terms like “economic freedom”, you are at the forefront of corrupting our political freedom and bastardizing democracy by depraving the political process in a concerted and deliberate effort to place the influence of money over the voices of the people. 

The people are coming to take back what’s ours - our democracy.

Expect us.

Cordially Yours,  

Shawn Carrié 

Note: The following is an editorial study in two parts; a play on words, connoting both an analysis piece written in two parts, and a musical étude - or rudimentary composition meant for study and training for the perfection of basic skills - reflecting on two separate yet connected movements.

{To be translated into Italian}

Last night I saw a really, really profound film. It was called Diaz: Don’t Clean Up This Blood. It’s an Italian film by Daniele Vicari recreating the horrific events of the 2001 G8 protests in Genoa, Italy.

For those who are not familiar with this history, I have two things I would like to say:

First, I am not surprised that such a thing would have been hidden from our view as a society in America, and as people of the world. It is the quietly suppressed story of how at the fringes of power, an alternative people-powered movement was the victim of a “Mexican Butchery” at the hands of the global war machine. As the G8 convened in Genoa, hundreds of thousands organized in protest around the Genoa Social Forum, which run concurrent to this feast of the cabal of hypocrites. And as this farce was taking place away from the view of the people, atrocious acts of violent injustice were committed by a militarized police force controlled by the rich and powerful in the shadows behind the closed doors of the G8 meeting.

In a midnight raid, riot police descended upon a school and media center being used as a headquarters and refuge for the organizers of the Genoa Social Forum. Hundreds of people - activists, journalists, participants of several different nationalities - were subjected to an unbridled brutality such as is normally reserved to a place in our minds’ inventory for nightmare and slasher horror films. Hundreds were woken from their sleep to be beaten and grievously injured to a point near death, carried out not in handcuffs, but on stretchers. Broken limbs. Kicked out teeth. Some crippled, some in a coma. This, a lunatic’s nightmare, did not end here, as those arrested in the midnight were then detained in prison for several days and tortured physically, sexually, and psychologically.

Yet the nightmare here still ends not. Every attempt at a semblance of justice resulted in acquittals, dismissals, cover-ups, denials, and abdication of guilt or wrongdoing. Initial trials found no wrongdoing on the part of the police. Appeals yielded a mere pittance of accountability for those responsible. When an Official inquiry wad commissioned to review the events, the government voted to block the investigation.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Such is the so-called “democracy” we live in, and the warning of an artistic work such as this film is too relevant to the struggles we are experiencing today in New York, Chicago, Oakland, Montréal, and elsewhere to not be heeded as mandatory curriculum; a lesson of our past to be clear on our future. We may have seen just a taste of it at #NATO and only narrowly avoided a massacre as the G8 this year hastily retreated to tuck itself away in the woods. Otherwise, we would have been in for a bloodbath. It is so vitally important to understand where we are coming from, and the history of the movement we find ourselves a part of today.

Occupy Wall Street had the tendency to be simultaneously overly self-referential and yet not self-aware. But a handful of individuals appreciate the present moment’s positioning in the broader lineage of the Anti-Globalization Movement. Radical lawyers - Street Medics - Mutual Aid - Horizontal, Consensus-Based Organizing - All these existed before September 17th, and so did the violent government repression, surveillance and infiltration of social movements.

And so the second thing I have to say to those to whom my recounting of this story is a shocking revelation is this: see this film - not because I casually recommend it with a favorable review as if I were film critic - see this film because it is our history. And don’t stop there. Educate yourself about where we are coming from, and where we are going. And don’t stop there.

Part II:

To the people to whom my story is not new;

To the Italians:

{To be continued}