In this wild, frenzied moment we're living through, a simple sneeze into the wind can spin up tornadoes of change that rip through the world.
"Small things, seemingly minor actions or decisions, can have exponential effects, tipping the scales towards justice."
Ruha Benjamin, a Princeton sociologist, has a term for them: "everyday insurrections." These moments mirror the zeitgeist. They gain momentum until they bend the culture toward a new, more beautiful normal.
In San Francisco, an Uber driver grows pissed that he's making less and less money and still no benefits. He jumps on social media, drum in hand, banging his outrage. The outrage goes viral. Car-share drivers across the globe band together in a massive work stoppage. Uber is forced to cough up.
Down the I-5 in south-central L.A. a man is outraged because he can't find a fresh tomato without driving for 45 minutes. He realizes his neighborhood looks like crap: public spaces have been left for dead. He picks up a trowel and some seeds and, in the secrecy of night, goes to work on the medians and vacant lots.
He puts in flowers and vegetables. He transforms sidewalks into edible gardens. The city sics the cops on him for gardening without a permit. Where does he turn? The media. Boom! His gangsta-gardening insurrection gets instant traction. A renegade horticulture revolution is born.In these volatile times, a simple sneeze into the wind can spin up tornadoes of change that rip through the world.
In Chile, as the climate emergency looms, indigenous groups lead protests over social and environmental injustices, and soon there are calls for a nationwide reinvention. A new crop of democratically elected legislators rewrites the country's constitution to give rights to entities like "nature" and "future generations."
These are the "everyday insurrections" you never heard about.
And of course, there's the ones that lit up the sky: #OccupyWallStreet. #BLM. #MeToo.
So here's the question: What's going to be the memequake? The viral hurricane? The biggest media storm we've ever seen? The one the whole world unites around, waking up vast swaths of humanity to the radical equality of all humans and the existential crisis that threatens everything?
What will it be?
Maybe a Gaza-like holocaust will shake us awake to the real potential of a WWIII?
Maybe the soil will turn into ash, the sun will roast the crops and the water will turn acid in our hands. Our world will become so erratic, so painful, so apocalyptic that the people of the world will be ready to unite around a strong, revolutionary leader who calls for the creation of a true-cost global marketplace in which the price of every product tells the ecological truth?
Or maybe our breakthrough moment will turn out to be a psychic jolt from a next-level development nobody saw coming — like the discovery of intelligent life on another planet. Or the rise of another Buddha, Confucius, Jesus or Muhammad.
All we know is, to make it through the 21st century, something has to blow.
— Kalle Lasn
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The Internet was born a pure communications medium — like the telephone or the postal system. Nobody owned it so nobody could charge you for being on it.
Then we made a fatal mistake — we started allowing ads. This was the Internet's original sin. Communication mixed with commercialism. And the Net started evolving into what it is today: a massive toxic surveillance operation fueled by ad revenue.
But now imagine this: We impose a #DATAFEE. We ding the mindlords a fraction of a cent every time they harvest a bit of our personal data.
Then we impose an #ADTAX — we ding them another fraction of a cent each time they show us an ad.
These things add up . . . but this time in our favor, not theirs.
Pretty soon that avalanche of small fractions moving from one side of the ledger to the other will change the game. Just like that, Zuck, Musk, Bezos and the boys will no longer make billions of dollars off our backs . . . the money will flow back to us . . . and they will lose their stranglehold on our psyche.
Why not?
Why the fuck not?
If the hard Right can disrupt constitutional democracy and upend global trade, then why can't we on the hard Left heave surveillance capitalism in a brave new direction?
Truth is dying. Democracy lies in ruins. Hungry ghosts are on the prowl. But a post-party politics is now emerging, with a stunning new vision that will take the world by storm – and Adbusters 179's got the goods.
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The time for tiny tweaks to the status quo is over. We've run out of time for that. The only thing that will save us is massive buy-in to a major paradigm shift, a different way of living and loving on planet Earth. A lighter, looser, sparer one. More, because less.
Here's how people typically change their minds. They do it the way a climber scales a rock face, inching out beyond the last point of protection — so that if they fall, they fall only as far as what they last believed.
Our rethinks are not big stretches, in other words. Just variations on what we think right now.
So it's worth asking: in the year 2024, are humans actually able to throw over the side a lifestyle we've been raised to think is somehow our birthright? Are we capable of making a leap like that?
"It's just the way things are."
There are lots of things in life we never really give a second thought to. We do it this way because, well, that's all we've ever known. We assume that wiser heads than ours put it all in place.
Of course that's often bullshit.
A corporation has no heart, no soul, no morals. It cannot feel pain. You cannot argue with it. That’s because a corporation is not a living thing but a process — an efficient way of generating revenue.
It takes energy from the outside (capital, labor, raw materials) and transforms it in various ways. In order to continue “living” it need meet only one condition: its income must equal its expenditures over the long term. As long as that happens it can exist indefinitely.
When a corporation hurts people or damages the environment, it will feel no sorrow or remorse because it is intrinsically unable to do so. (It may sometimes apologize, but that’s not remorse — that’s public relations.) Buddhist scholar David Loy put it this way: “A corporation cannot laugh or cry; it cannot enjoy the world or suffer with it. Most of all a corporation cannot love.” That’s because corporations are legal fictions. Their “bodies” are just judicial constructs, and that is why they are so dangerous.
As a once-and-future free-range human, I’ve been thinking about how to shake off the commercial algorithms that have hacked into my life and are now driving it. The key, I’ve concluded, is novelty. Whether it’s true, as the ethobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna claimed, that the pursuit of novelty is “the only one way to live a truly progressive life,” it’s a mighty tempting strategy to air out. “From a species perspective, the job of each individual is to be unlike anyone who’s living or who ever lived,” McKenna wrote. “To do things, and react to things, in a way no one has quite done before.”
This is of course pretty much an act of cultural treason. There’s a reason Atomic Habits was a #1 world bestseller and nobody has written Atomic Novelty. Habits are safe. Flout them and people in charge start furrowing their brows, because now you’re likely to start breaking rules, too. Even the rules of the universe? Many smart people claim we don’t actually have free will, even though it feels like we do. I decided to engineer a day that tests that discouraging premise — a day where you chase free will around, trying to outfox it. The experiment wouldn’t really prove anything one way or the other. But it might yield some ... unexpected returns.
Young guy in a vest, holding a clipboard, came to the door.
His timing wasn’t good – we were busy. “Thanks, sorry, can’t today,” I said through the crack in the door.
“One minute, max,” he said.
“Sorry, man, no.”
It wasn’t clear what he was canvassing for, and I didn’t have time to find out.
But he wasn’t leaving. My No hadn’t registered. He’d actually stepped forward. He was half inside the house. Only his hind end stuck out into the cold.
“Listen, man. No! Look at me: No!”
He looked me in the face. Blinking like a carp.
I felt my fist wanting to go somewhere I’d regret. I redirected it into my pocket and found a ten—here, bugger off.
The guy didn’t take it.
When I first heard about "illiberal democracy," and what Victor Orban was doing in Hungary, I didn't give it much thought. Then when Marine Le Pen became a rising star in France, and a Nazi-tinged party started winning big in Germany, I just shook my head and hoped this far right trend would pass.
But instead, the dissolution of the liberal world order quickened: Narendra Modi transformed India into a Hindu dictatorship... Jair Bolsonaro pulled off a coup in Brazil... Javier Milei feverishly waved a chain saw around Argentina... and then, fuck it, unbelievable, Putin's tanks rolled into Ukraine... Bibi Netanyahu ripped apart the bodies of 20,000 children... and finally, the coup de grâce: Trump's landslide victory last November.
America in the 2020s is looking more and more like Germany in the 1930s. What are you going to do about it?
Remember how it felt back in 2011 when the crash hit? The desperation, the fury, the fire in your gut? That jolt-realization that the 1% doesn't give a shit about you?
Trump's actions in the first month of his presidency are way more destructive than the crash of 2011. This time, it's not just our livelihoods on the line. It's our dignity... our clarity of mind... our freedom... our whole 250-year experiment in constitutional democracy.
It's time to respond with a different tactic.
Trump is expecting rage. He WANTS you to blow a gasket — that means he's got you, he's in your head. So this time we don't take the bait.
Our most potent weapon is not rage but ridicule. Ridicule is irrational. It's infuriating. There's no defense.
So starting this Friday and every Friday thereafter, we go to Lafayette Square and ... dance our hearts out.
And at the climax of every dance, we turn towards the White House and raise our middle fingers in perfect unison. It's independence day, you ridiculous bastard, and this is our flag.
We're occupying YOUR head now, we're laughing in your fucking face. Get used to it.
#OCCUPYTRUMP
Every Friday.
Bring music box.
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Scientists used to think there were only six human emotions — anger, surprise, disgust, enjoyment, fear and sadness. We now know there is a seventh: awe.
Awe is the feeling, registering more in our body than our mind, that we’re in the presence of something so vast and deep and powerful that it swamps our present understanding of the world. A skyful of stars in the middle of nowhere. A soaring piece of art. An act of wild kindness, fugitively glimpsed.
Or an existential threat.
Awe is unlike anything else we humans experience. When it shoots through us, we enter a kind of altered state. We become superhuman, sleeper agents suddenly activated for a purpose we never prepared for, and barely understand.
Awe interrupts the trance, silences the static and replaces it with the clarity of mind to understand what our job is now.
The craving to be part of a bigger project, this is the “collective effervescence” Emile Durkheim spoke of: an energy and harmony that only happens when we huddle up on strong groups for a shared purpose.
People suddenly understand where they fit in the story of the world, now and going forward.
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