Ferguson 1 Year Later: We're Still Living In Crisis 

By Rika Tyler, Hands Up United Director

The commemorative anniversary weekend of the death of Michael Brown Jr. has come to an end. Weekend warriors are packing their bags and heading home. It was a beautiful and uplifting weekend, but we knew it wouldn't last. After all the silent marches, vigils, memorials, sermons and concerts, people in the street are still screaming,"No justice, No peace!" because we're still living in a state of crisis.

• campaign,
• activism,
• social justice,
• BlackLivesMatter

WikiLeaks statement on the mass recording of Afghan telephone calls by the NSA 

Friday 23 May 2014, 05:00 GMT

The National Security Agency has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic (and international) phone calls from two or more target countries as of 2013. Both the Washington Post and The Intercept (based in the US and published by eBay chairman Pierre Omidyar) have censored the name of one of the victim states, which the latter publication refers to as country "X".

• infopolitics,
• info-activism,
• wikileaks,
• surveillance

WikiLeaks Press Release: Secret US Embassy Cables 

Wikileaks began on Sunday November 28th publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents will give people around the world an unprecedented insight into US Government foreign activities.

• infopolitics,
• info-activism,
• wikileaks,
• diplomacy

The Lessons of 2011: Three Theses on Organisation 

Republished with permission from metamute / Mute Magazine in London: 
Moving beyond the conceptual polarisation of tight-knit vanguardist parties and loose-tie virtual networks, Rodrigo Nunes sifts the residue of last year's wave of revolts to produce a more nuanced picture of organisational dynamics in the age of Web 2.0

• activism,
• post-governmental organisation,
• tactical camping,
• occupy

Anonymous statement: Operation Egypt 

Dear Citizens of the World

Anonymous can not, and will not stand idly while people are being denied their basic rights and human liberties. Yet, there are still a lot of governments worldwide who fail to even aspire to the standard of freedom that was set by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These governments believe they have the right and privilege to impose upon their own people an 'official' version of 'reality' which isn't in any way tampered by the truths of everyday life under which its citizens are living. Anonymous believes this is an outright crime which can not go unpunished.

• middle east,
• anonymous

The Information war 

Humanity has always invested heavily in any scheme that offers escape from the body. And why not? Material reality is such a mess. Some of the earliest "religious" artefacts, such as Neanderthal ochre burials, already suggest a belief in immortality. All modern (i.e. post-paleolithic) religions contain the "Gnostic trace" of distrust or even outright hostility to the body and the "created" world. Contemporary "primitive" tribes and even peasant-pagans have a concept of immortality and of going-outside-the-body (ec-stasy) without necessarily exhibiting any excessive body-hatred. The Gnostic Trace accumulates very gradually (like mercury poisoning) till eventually it turns pathological. Gnostic dualism exemplifies the extreme position of this disgust by shifting all value from body to "spirit". This idea characterizes what we call "civilization".

The Re-Code.Com Story 

Conceptual Overview

The products we purchase are the inventory of our lives. To chain stores, this inventory is cataloged through the Universal Product Locator symbol (UPC). The UPC symbol is known as a barcode. Barcodes are now found everywhere in our world, extending outside of product inventory into our comic books, our science fiction, our films, and even our tattoos. These codes represent the fears of literally becoming numbers or becoming digital that are in many of us. These are not fears we wish to dismiss. The RE-CODE.COM project brings together the tactical media actions of the Carbon Defense League and the video and performance hijacks of Conglomco in a way that takes online action outside of the box for real world instigation. Looking at the heavy reliance on digital systems in chain stores utilizing the UPC barcode system, we see a problem or a virus in the system. The virus is the human. We are the nightmare of the digital to some extent. We are the squeaky wheel.

• campaign,
• consumer rights

The Brent Spar Syndrome 

Shell is not going to forget lightly its misadventures with the Brent Spar. The Oil Major was taken by complete surprise when the Greenpeace campaign against sinking that former drill platform achieved its goals. What happened to Shell can in fact happen to any corporation. Loosing control of the situation as result of the activities of a pressure group has become a nightmare scenario for the modern multinational enterprise.

• campaign,
• activism,
• net.activism

Enter the Swarm: Anonymous and the global protest movements 

Felix Stalder explores the swarm politics  of the 'endlessly fascinating Anonymous story' in an essay written for Le Monde Diplomatique, where it appeared in a slightly edited version and under a different title.
This version of the text was originally distributed via the international nettime mailing list.

• tactical media,
• activism,
• anonymous,
• swarm

CAE: Framing Tactical Media 

Anyone involved with "tactical media" (TM) before its famed christening in 1996 at the Next Five Minutes had to know that naming this cultural/political tendency was going to have some very negative repercussions. The naming was the first step in doing what TM feared the most°Xclaiming cultural territory doomed to house haunting archives. Once given an official title, so many nasty processes could begin - most significantly, the construction of historical narratives. So many narratives already exist explaining this ephemeral, immediate, specific, and deterritorialized process of cultural production that seemed so urgent to so many radical subjects in the early 90s.

• art,
• tactical media

Chobi Mela VI International Festival of Photography, Bangladesh 

PRESS RELEASE

Chobi Mela VI to Open a Portal to a Restive World of Dreams

"All that we value, that we strive to uphold, all that gives us strength, has been made of dreams"

• photography,
• Bangladesh

What is Mental Environmentalism? 

A brief history of "The Journal of the Mental Environment."

The core idea behind Adbusters, the essential critique that motivates our struggle against consumer society, is mental environmentalism. And for seventeen years, since the seventh issue of Adbusters was published in 1993, the subtitle of the magazine has been "The Journal of the Mental Environment". But, what exactly is mental environmentalism?

• subvertising,
• culture jamming

Occupy and UK Uncut: the evolution of activism 

Occupy Sandy gained the attention denied to Occupy Our Homes because it replaced militant Occupy! with "do-it-yourself" Occupy. Feel-good mutual aid displaced attention from the underlying contradiction between public housing and private utilities onto the quick fix of digital media. Occupy Our Homes, on the other hand, confronts the system with its failures ? predatory lending, homelessness, and empty bank-owned houses. The problems it addresses can't be solved by rolling up our sleeves and getting involved; they require political solutions.

• urban intervention,
• activism,
• precarity,
• street protest,
• austerity,
• occupy

We Interrupt this Program 

On January 20, 2018, marking the one year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, Deep Dish TV and Paper Tiger released We Interrupt this Program, a video/web series about the global eco-economic-political crises and rise in far-right politics.

EuroMayDay 

EuroMayDay is a transnational demonstration of precarious and migrant people held the First of May in more than a dozen European cities.

• politics,
• campaign,
• activism,
• migration,
• social justice,
• EuroMayDay,
• precarity

TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From the Keyboard 

Viva La Piracy! An intellectual freedoms documentary based around the interpersonal triumphs, and defeats of the three main characters against the largest industry in the known universe. The media industry.

• infopolitics,
• copyleft,
• public domain,
• info-activism,
• copyright,
• intellectual property

Vakuum TV 

VakuumTV was founded in February 1994 on the initiative of László Kistamás. Its members presented weekly broadcasts on Monday nights at the most popular cultural club in Budapest, Tilos az Á. Needless to say, the designation 'VakuumTV' was not meant to refer to any kind of conventional television channel which could be received on TV sets in commercial circulation. Rather, its founders envisioned a live show in which a large frame separating the stage from the audience imitates the experience of watching TV for the audience. Thus VakuumTV can be received only where this frame is set up.

• next 5 minutes,
• tactical television

EuroMayDay Call Spring 2010 

Precarisation is the norm, temp work, low salaries, unemployment. Barbed wire, uniforms and camps that protect fortress-europe, excluding and persecuting thousands of women, men and children. Police and armies are in the streets, with their cameras and helicopters. Control is everywhere, terrorist laws are used to legitimize repression. The media keeps the lid on the pot that is starting to boil over. At the same time it is doing its best to convince us to keep up consumption. The serpent is eating its own tail. Our brothers and sisters in the south are paying the bill; and we pay too. Animals becoming extinct show the way to the future generations. And at the same time, the banks are throwing our billions out the window...

• campaign,
• activism,
• EuroMayDay,
• precarity

The Middlesex Declaration of the European Precariat 

We networkers and flextimers of Northern and Southern Europe, autonomously gathered at Middlesex University and determined to go beyond the sclerotizing European Social Forum, solemnly join minds and bodies in the present declaration of conflict against Europe's governments and corporate bureaucracies.

• campaign,
• activism,
• EuroMayDay,
• precarity

Information Devolution 

As new technologies make it possible to move more information faster than ever before, we are dazzled by the millions of gigabytes that move across the world in nanoseconds. We are infatuated by bandwidth, digital television by gadgets and gizmos. Yet we hardly ask questions about the quality of the information: what is it that we are communicating? Is it relevant? Will it make the world a better place? And does all this information add up to knowledge?