Category Archives: #Occupy

Meanwhile… Actual Living Mayans: Zapatistas Retake the Plazas

After months (years?) of people talking about Mayans in the past tense, as a bygone civilization that predicted the end of the world, tens of thousands of Zapatistas quietly filed out of the mountains in southern Mexico and flooded into … Continue reading

Posted in #Occupy, Bandits, City, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Spatiality, Territory, The State | 1 Comment

Interweb Motley # 12

“Show me a fifty-foot fence and I’ll show you a fifty-one-foot ladder.” Or maybe a ramp (#fail). The New Yorker brings us 2012’s most outlandish stories from the drug war in Mexico. Photo ops: Creepy photo montage of university Financial Aid offices … Continue reading

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The New Aesthetic Part II: Writing Like A Drone

My first post on the “New Aesthetic”—that weird, sometimes unsettling irruption of digital phenomena into real life, particularly into our visual culture—described it as a “structure of feeling,” a term coined by cultural critic Raymond Williams. For him, a structure … Continue reading

Posted in #Occupy, Art, City, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Raymond Williams, Security | 2 Comments

Interweb Motley # 8

The Altlantic dissects “Gangnam Style,” the South Korean music video sensation that has reached a gajillion youtube views, revealing its critical edge: a commentary on wealth, class, and value (aka capitalism) in contemporary South Korea by skewering one of its richest … Continue reading

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Beholden: David Graeber & Rebecca Solnit

Guernica magazine published a great conversation between David Graeber and Rebecca Solnit, two people who I admire as genuinely original thinker-writers with ample street-cred to back it up. They talk mostly about debt, anarchism, and occupy. “Neoliberalism isn’t an economic … Continue reading

Posted in #Occupy, David Harvey, Everyday Life, Hegemony, Political Economy, The State | Comments Off on Beholden: David Graeber & Rebecca Solnit

Territory and Autogestion

Marina Sitrin, who was part of the original #Occupy foco in Zuccotti Park, wrote a brief essay on “Horizontalism and Territory” drawing from her long-standing engagement with Latin American social movements, particularly those that gained force amid Argentina’s 2001 crash. … Continue reading

Posted in #Occupy, Dialectics, Everyday Life, Henri Lefebvre, Spatiality, Territory, The State | 2 Comments

Meow: The Politics of Anonymous

Quinn Norton, a writer with Wired, has published a fascinating three-part series titled, “Anonymous: Beyond the Mask” (Part I, Part II, Part III). She tracks the progressive politicization of Anonymous from its diaper days chatting on 4Chan to #Occupy by … Continue reading

Posted in #Occupy, Art, Bandits, Critique, Everyday Life, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Law, Networks, Pirates, Science & Tech., Spectacle | 1 Comment

Afflicted Powers

Retort. 2005. Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in an Age of War. New Edition. London: Verso. Despite being a relatively short book, Afflicted Powers is a difficult one to summarize. Retort* sets for itself the immodest task of identifying the … Continue reading

Posted in #Occupy, Everyday Life, Guy Debord, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Peace, Power, Primitive Accumulation, Spectacle, Terror, The State, Violence | Comments Off on Afflicted Powers

Occupy Volume, Occupy Verticality

#Occupy. Where does it go from here? How ‘bout up? I’m not 100% serious, but it’s been fascinating to see how #Occupy has expanded occupation to mean more than parking our collective butts on a flat—or at least, horizontal—and usually … Continue reading

Posted in #Occupy, City, Everyday Life, Henri Lefebvre, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Power, Spatiality, The State, Violence | 6 Comments

#Occupy Poster Art

Besides being a personal obsession of mine, poster art has a long history in radical movements for social change. I’m particularly interested in how images and art are able to communicate AND generate solidarity across social and geographical divides. One … Continue reading

Posted in #Occupy, Art, Networks | 4 Comments