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Welcome to the “augmented revolution” – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com

6 Nov

Simply put, the terms “real” and “virtual” to describe the physical and digital worlds are inadequate: Facebook is real as the rest of the world grows increasingly virtual. It is this massive implosion of atoms and bits that has created an augmented reality where properties of digitality — information spreads faster, more voices become empowered, enhanced organization and consensus capabilities — intersect with the importance of occupying physical space with flesh-and-blood bodies.

via Welcome to the “augmented revolution” – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com.

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Matthis Chiroux: The Wisdom and Power of a Leaderless Resistance

1 Nov

With no leadership structure to dismantle, the message of the Occupy movement stands poised to self-perpetuate, impervious to traditional routes of attack. The greatest tradition in movement breaking of all time, wanton violence, could still be used against us, but as the establishment learned once again last Tuesday in Oakland, sometimes using violence to clear an intersection can fill it twice as fast.

What is to come of our struggles is a story yet unwritten. We cannot honestly say we will win. What we can say is it doesn’t matter. Simply to struggle changes to world, and we learn from the struggle and continue to fight more effectively for the change we seek.

via Matthis Chiroux: The Wisdom and Power of a Leaderless Resistance.

Come Together, Right NOW! Music on the March

18 Oct

Yeah, Dylan was cool. But today we have marchin’ music that would burn his protestin’ butt.

Last Saturday Salon published an article by Stephen Deusner on protest music: Will a new Dylan emerge from Occupy Wall Street? For better or worse it struck me as a bit of a lament for the Good Old Days when they had Good Old/New Protest songs, but, alas, kids today don’t write ‘em like they used to:

As Occupy Wall Street has gained momentum, it has been compared to the anti-war and civil rights protests of the 1960s by commentators as diverse as comedian Dick Gregory, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain and scores of newspaper columnists. Yet, as Mangum’s performance demonstrates, they are very different in at least one regard, however minor: Music is not quite the central force today that it was 40 and 50 years ago, when a song like “We Shall Overcome” or “Fixin’ to Die Rag” could communicate certain motivating ideals and reinforce solidarity among a great throng of participants. Instead, it remains peripheral.

Things get moderated toward the end:

The lesson of the 2000s seems to be to approach politics obliquely instead of head-on, to make it one concern among many. If protest songs are largely absent from Occupy Wall Street, it’s not that they aren’t being written. It’s that they no longer serve the same purpose they once did — and are so spread out across genres and audiences that they don’t register as broadly as they once did. …

On the other hand, protests inspire music, not vice versa. Perhaps the artists participating in or even just witnessing the Occupy Wall Street gatherings will be moved to write about their experiences. Perhaps the next great wave of radicalized pop is just a few months or years away.

Well, maybe.

People’s Music

But I have a somewhat different take on the whole business. Back in the day the most important music was the music sung in black churches, mostly traditional hymns and gospel. That’s the music that summoned, organized and energized the civil rights movement. The anti-war movement was a different group of people and, of course, a different issue, but it emerged in a public arena that had been activated by the civil rights movement. Continue reading →

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Permaculture, a Beginners Guide

14 Oct

“Permaculture offers a radical approach to food production and urban renewal, water, energy and pollution. It integrates ecology, landscape, organic gardening, architecture and agro-forestry in creating a rich and sustainable way of living. It uses appropriate technology giving high yields for low energy inputs, achieving a resource of great diversity and stability. The design principles are equally applicable to both urban and rural dwellers” – Bill Mollison

via Permaculture, a Beginners Guide.

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Worker Cooperatives Reduce “Hard-Core” Unemployment | Truthout

1 Sep

The income-generation initiatives that mushroomed in Argentina in response to the severe 2002-2003 crisis have come together in the National Confederation of Worker Cooperatives (CNCT).

Among the various models that sprang up, in addition to the state-promoted cooperatives, are worker-run factories that were salvaged by the employees after the owners declared bankruptcy – and, in many instances, actually fled.

José Sancha, the head of CNCT, told IPS that the cooperative federation is working with the ministry of social development to offer training courses for workers new to the cooperative movement who are entering the Argentina Works programme.

via Worker Cooperatives Reduce “Hard-Core” Unemployment | Truthout.

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Work Sharing | Work-sharing could work for us – Los Angeles Times

29 Aug

Where this is headed is to a shorter work week. And leaves more time for drumming and dancing, community gardens, and everyone teaching skills to kids and one another.

After surveying policies around the world, we found that there is one that clearly dominates in terms of impact and cost-effectiveness: work-sharing. The idea is simple. Currently, firms mostly respond to weak demand by laying off workers. Under a work-sharing program, firms are encouraged by government policy to spread a small amount of the pain across many workers.

In Germany, for example, which has used work-sharing aggressively in this downturn, a typical company might reduce the hours of 50 workers by 20% rather than laying off 10 workers. The government would then provide a tax credit to make up for most of the lost pay, with the employer kicking in some as well. In a typical arrangement, a worker might see his weekly hours go down by 20%, and his salary go down by about 4%.

via Work Sharing | Work-sharing could work for us – Los Angeles Times.

Guerilla SK8 Park in Jersey City, Part 1

8 Aug

Sometimes people just go ahead and create what they need without waiting for the government to act. That’s what a bunch of kids and young adults did in Jersey City a few years ago. At least, that’s what I surmise after the fact. I don’t actually know what they decided, when, and why. I just know what they did. I know, because I walked into it by chance. Here’s that story.

It was in November of 2006, about a month or so after I’d become interested in photographing local graffiti. I was walking in the neighborhood, or perhaps I was in the car on the way back from my Sunday AM grocery run. One of the other, it doesn’t much matter. Anyhow, I spotted some color:

sk8 park.jpg

That’s the stuff, says I, that’s the stuff. When I got closer, I noticed a ramp against a wall:

one old ramp now gone.jpg

And then this:

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Someone was obviously using this site—the floor slab of an abandoned industrial building of some sort—as a park for skateboarding and BMX bike riding. See:

bikez3

I took this in July of 2007. Notice that the art on the walls has changed. It seems that some local, and not so local, graffiti writers used this site as something of an experimental gallery even as the skateboarders and BMXers used it to hone their athletic skills. Continue reading →

The intersection of food, design and politics

1 Aug

Fascinating images from the Good Olde Days (But the Best Days are Yet to Come).

Above and below are some samples from The Diggers Archive, a group of radical thinkers from 1960s San Francisco that used food (free healthy food!) as part of their art and political message. These pieces are from their newspaper FREE CITY NEWS, that showcased some pretty cool hippie graphic design.

via The intersection of food, design and politics – Imprint – Salon.com.

Radiation Mitigation – Miiu.org

28 Jul

This is about how to deal with radiation if your world gets irradiated.

In a globally connected world, the bad news is that we cannot “opt out” of radiation poisoning that comes to us via nuclear plant meltdowns or other means. So the question is not how to avoid radiation exposure but how to mitigate it. The good news is that there are some ways to mitigate radiation exposure and by learning about them and adopting some of them into our lifestyle we may find ourselves living more healthy lives even when we do have to ward off the damages of radiation. First, let’s consider the problem.

via Radiation Mitigation – Miiu.org.

While you’re there, check out the whole site. Good stuff there on resilience, localizing, and creating a whole new world “under the radar,” so to speak.

That’s Not Trash, That’s Dinner

26 Jul

We can get more food out of the plants we raise as food crops, thereby making better use out of the biomass.

If home cooks reconsidered what should go into the pot, and what into the trash, what would they find? What new flavors might emerge, what old techniques? Pre-industrial cooks, for whom thrift was a necessity as well as a virtue, once knew many ways to put the entire garden to work. Fried green tomatoes and pickled watermelon rind are examples of dishes that preserved a bumper crop before rot set in.

“Some people these days are so unfamiliar with vegetables in their natural state, they don’t even know that a broccoli stalk is just as edible as the florets,” said Julia Wylie, an organic farmer in Watsonville, Calif.

via That’s Not Trash, That’s Dinner – NYTimes.com.

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