A Plan for World Revolution in 2024

In our year-end brainstorming session, someone suddenly said, “The point is, There’s still hope!”

That’s usually a cue for the “Yeah!”s and the “Right On!”s to follow. But none did. No one knew what to say. Because no one wanted to lie.

So is that it? Is it over? Did we lose?

After decades of fighting the good fight, many activists have just … stopped believing. Our tactics have grown routine and repetitive. We’re exhausted and broke.

Meanwhile all around us brutal wars are raging, scores of nations are turning hard right, and world leaders have abandoned all hope of fixing the climate crisis.

There are two ways to say “Fuck it.”

The first way means: “We’re fucked." Just give up. Go huddle up in the woods somewhere.

The second way means the exact opposite. That "Fuck it" is the war cry of the student standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square, Ukrainians giving the finger to Putin, Palestinians standing up to marauding settlers in the West Bank. When you have nothing to lose, "Fuck it" takes on weird kind of power. It’s the last great act of furious defiance.

We choose Number Two.

This is where our heads are here at Adbusters, as we roll into this Year of the Dragon.

We say: Let’s get together for one last stand. Let’s pool our resources, totally rethink what it is we’re doing here at the tail end of the consumer-capitalist mindfuck, and try to trigger a World Revolution.

How?

By coming up with a global ritual that is just bewilderingly disruptive, radically out of hand.

FUCK-IT-ALL
FRIDAYS 

Here’s the deal: We pick one day of the week and just … take it back.  Make it ours. Reclaim it. Repurpose it. Rededicate it to the service of the wild human spirit and a sane, sustainable future. Weekdays we work. Saturdays we party. Sundays we rest. And now, Fridays we turn into a new kind of 21st century holiday:

A Global Day of Action.

Instead of working, we start the day by staring into the mirror, building up resistance in the circuitry of the heart. And then we hit the streets to sow inspired anarchic bliss.

We turn our cities into carnivals, our universities into hotbeds of revolutionary fervor, our supermarkets into staging grounds, our financial districts into fiery zones of contention.

We churn everything up!

Some of us write poems and shoot them into cyberspace. Others wander around editing media messages, detourning ads, posting ultimatums and manifestos on lampposts, singing in Starbuck's, taking our dog into the bank.

Ten years ago, everyone told us we were crazy trying to launch Occupy Wall Street, but it turned out to be one of the most powerful things we’ve ever done.

#FuckItAllFridays is an idea like that. It could suddenly fire up the imaginations of activists around the world, break the techno-capitalist trance and thrust our failing civilization in a brave new direction.

Or it could flop — but there's never been a better time to try it.


Channeling the malcontent in the air all over the world, we hit the streets on Fridays, injecting a new urgency, a new raucous energy, to our activism.

Then we keep picking up the pace, the tempo, the rhythm. Friday after Friday, here there and everywhere, we morph into a 21st century political animals: be fired-up all the time. We come up with a weekly eruption of We the People rage so incessant so visceral that world leaders will have no option but to act on our demands:

• Declare a Global Climate Emergency
• Halt all subsidies to oil companies
• Eliminate all tax havens
• Impose a 1% Robin Hood Tax on all stock market transactions and currency trades
• Move towards a global marketplace in which the price of every product tells the ecological truth‍

We zero in on a new grand narrative, a once-in-a-millennium mind shift, a radical set of micromemes, macromemes and metamemes . . . ideas so fundamental, so systemic, so profound that a sane and sustainable future is unthinkable without them.

We rewrite the basic code of what it means to be alive today. We hack into the hierarchical, top-down power structures that have ruled the world for thousands of years. We create a new bottom-up mindset, beyond the Left and Right — a new dream, a new way of thinking, a secret so fucking dangerous and beautiful that it opens up all the possibilities for governing ourselves in the future.

Join us . . . let’s get together and play jazz, discover new riffs, turn every Friday into a drumbeat for a new world order.

From Issue #