September 17th, 2018:

An online occupation
[OR A DIGITAL VACANCY]

WE
SHUT DOWN
BIG TECH
FOR A
DAY

Big Tech competes for one thing: our attention. They exploit our basic human instincts in the pursuit of unprecedented financial and cultural control.

Facebook claims to connect us, but promotes individualism to its most divisive extreme.

Amazon endorses endless consumption, prodding people to milk mother earth for all she’s worth.

Apple infiltrates every strata of our lives, with the HomePod to the Apple Watch, ensuring its role in everything we do.

Google outsources our desires, fears, and thoughts, narrowing the great mystery of life into a manipulating machine.

We are tethered, mind and body, to these technologies and the companies behind them.

What do we give up when we allow four corporations to define our human existence—our socialization, our storytelling, our sharing? How deep will they go when so far, we've been complicit in letting them dig?

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.

We unleash a one-day #FuckItAll flood of memes, posts, pranks, tweets, and statuses—overflowing with everything Silicon Valley wants to keep offline.

We crash their servers,
flood their feeds,
disrupt their algorithms.

How do we take on the largest and most corrupt corporate Goliaths to ever exist?

IN 4 STEPS:

1. Google No Search Day

The ONLY thing we search is:

We force the megabot to do some soul-searching. We see if it can tell us, the people, what’s really going on behind that insidious techno-curtain.

2. Boycott Bezos

We fill our Amazon shopping carts with giant orders, then abandon them before checkout.

We flood their servers with imaginary orders never to be fulfilled.

We create an uncanny lull on amazon.com.

3. Fine Facebook

We “Report a Problem” and attach an invoice detailing the personal cost of mental health and mutated memory, the hours of time wasted — billed to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

We demand payback for the billions of ad dollars Facebook has made from us over the years.

‍

We create a day of global reckoning!

Starting now, we subvert Facebook from within by changing our profile photos to #OSV memes…

4. Accessorize Apple Stores

We go to Apple stores and cover their glossy windows with subversive stickers, slogans, and symbols.

OR…!

You can turn September 17th into
DO NOTHING DAY

Partake in a one-day embargo against tech altogether. Leave your phone at home. Delete your social media accounts. Fuck Google Maps—ask a stranger for directions.

On September 17th, each one of us, in our own sweet way, will participate in a global takedown of Big Tech!

We’ll expose Silicon Valley’s ugly underbelly, thrust its fascist tendencies into the open for the world to see.

Take back control of our lives and minds,
on + offline…

We flip the power balance!

Make the Internet ours
again.

Spread the news like wildfire . . . slap these print-outs across big tech adverts, slip ‘em into the textbooks of yesteryear and the coat pockets of the utterly unsuspecting. Splatter #OSV memes across the face of social media.

Let’s light a fire under the dormant activists and galvanize a global army of data punks and meme warriors.

‍