Dear readers,

How are you?

We’ve spent the last month, like everyone, wondering what the hell happened after that terrible week when everything collapsed. But we regrouped, and now we’re back ... and forging ahead as best we can.

Most of us are still in shock, trying our best to move from anger/depression toward some kind of acceptance. But what does it mean to be an adbuster in a world without ads; a culture jammer when there’s no consumer culture left to jam? Well, we put out the word that we were working on a post crash issue, and the word spread. And the letters started flooding in, from all over the world. This issue is a compilation of your poignant, freaky, angry thoughts. Like us, you are starting to make sense of this crazy new world.

Looking back now on “the good old days,” as the era before S11.2 is endearingly referred to, it sure feels like we activists did protest too much. We were always anti-everything and pro very little. We kept on saying, “A New World Is Possible,” but we didn’t have the vision and guts to build it. I remember how just about every “progressive” magazine I read before the crash was stuffed full of lefty whining, without a single action or solution proposed.

But not everyone here is raking over the ashes of history. A few bright sparks are running around saying:

“Fuck your postmortem.
... OK, so capitalism crashed, the megacorps we hated so much are gone, and you can’t buy a can of Coke anymore. So what’s your problem? Isn’t this the world we always dreamed about? Isn’t this what we were fighting for all along?”

These fired-up young anarchists will be our new leaders. They have an almost pathological, taboo-like disgust for the old world and – Coke or no Coke – they’re determined to never let it rise again. The price was too high, for all of us, for everything. Their world is about bioregions, true-cost farming, keeping every corporation on a very tight leash and building a new media that delivers truth. And they swear they’ll never again let national governments or global institutions tell them what they can or cannot do in their communities.

We’ll try to put out another issue before Christmas. Keep your letters and stories rolling in. We’ve just had a collective near-death experience, but with it has come a powerful new urge to live. Every day, more and more of us are finding something very real, very concrete to fight for and maybe, even, to die for. That old Situ slogan “Live Without Dead Time” really means something now.