Adbusters Media Foundation | Journal of the Mental Environment (original) (raw)
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Hey all you world-weary souls out there,
Don’t mope, don’t cry, don’t miss a beat.
There’s never been a more auspicious moment to launch the True Cost Party of America and slip our destiny into a beautiful new orbit.
You can be one of the catalysts who over the next four years makes it happen.
Join the Third Force Collective HERE NOW.
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The Third Force
Let's Start Wearing This Shirt
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
From Issue
175
The Nuclear Mindbomb Issue
Mindbomb
Courage
Mindbomb - Courage
WE KILL OFF THE TAX HAVENS
Where's all the fucking money? Ahhh . . . it's safely stashed in tax havens. $10T of it - a huge chunk of planetary wealth. When it comes to paying their fair share, the rich have seceded from the rest of humanity.
Cracking down on this is difficult but by no means impossible. Effective legal instruments to prevent offshore tax evasion are incredibly simple and could be rolled out overnight. All you have to do is make it illegal for banks to perform transactions with countries and territories that don't comply with rules on tax transparency. Problem solved. Instantly.
The real hurdle is political will. Our leaders, under pressure from lobbyists, will always avoid making this leap. They've got to be pushed. We the people of the world must send them an ultimatum they can't ignore.
So Friday after Friday after Friday, across the globe, let's make a show of our anger. Put some muscle into it. Let's occupy banks, stink bomb stock exchanges, and hang OUT OF ORDER signs on ATMs. Let's build up a global drumbeat of righteous fury. Let's introduce so much fuck-it-all turbulence into global finance that our leaders are forced to act.
WE CHASE THE SPECULATORS OUT OF THE TEMPLE
What is the capitalist algorithm but a machine that runs on money? The people running it are leeches, grifters who just sit on their asses moving money around - skimming off the top with bank fees, interest rates, mortgages, currency trades, payday loans and stock dividends. A lot of them are high-volume speculators using bots that detect fleeting price discrepancies and market patterns, and then place orders automatically.
About three trillion dollars a day is traded this way. It creates nothing of actual value. It's the ultimate financial circle jerk - an under-the-radar transfer of power on a massive scale. The whole thing is a ticking time bomb, and when it goes off, it's taking all of us with it.
There is a simple solution: A "hold" rule.
You place a legally mandated gap between the trade and its acceptance. When someone buys a stock, they have to hang on to it for some period of time - let's say 24 hours - before they can sell it again. Now people start looking at what it is they're buying again... the actual value of the stock rather than its role in the spasming chain of money-begets-money-begets-money. Nano trading: gone-zo. Insider trading: hog-tied. The intercontinental money ping-ponging between North America, Europe and Asia: hobbled.
Global finance: grounded.
The 24-hour holding rule works. You buy it, you keep it for a day. Elegant, simple, radical.
Of course, the coke sniffers of Wall Street will fight this with all the legal and lobbying power they can muster.
But fuck 'em . The tide is shifting. The moment is now ripe for us to win.
So Friday after Friday let's attack Big Finance with total abandon. The 24-Hour Rule . . . yes! . . . this is what We the People want . . . let's push it through!
WE FLATTEN THE MONEY CURVE
The outbreak of Covid-19 became a global pandemic because of airplanes. The virus shot around the world, instantly found new hosts, and replicated everywhere all at once. It was out of Pandora's box before anyone could shut it down.
Speculative money has infected financial systems in the same way. The speculative Traders are like superspreaders, and with no borders or governors or effective laws to stop them, the whole world is vulnerable.
The treatment for this disease is to kill off flash-bot trading, outlaw derivatives and credit default swaps, curb Wall Street's predatory appetites. . . reduce the money sloshing around the internet every day from 3−trillionto3-trillion to 3−trillionto2-trillion to 1−trillion...winnowingitdowntoamodest1-trillion . . . winnowing it down to a modest 1−trillion...winnowingitdowntoamodest500-million. We flatten the money curve until the virus dies off and we reach financial herd immunity.
But that's only the beginning. Next, we start tinkering with the fundamentals . . . we turn money into a public utility, like highways. You can drive from New York to San Francisco without paying any tolls - so why can't you send 100toyourmotherinLebanonwithoutsomeonelopping100 to your mother in Lebanon without someone lopping 100toyourmotherinLebanonwithoutsomeonelopping5 off the top?
Cutting the middlemen completely out of the equation: That's the grail.
You may think all this is a bit of an idealistic, romantic fools' game. Who could possibly take any of this seriously? But wait until the global temperature creeps up a bit more; until the heat domes and arctic blizzards become unbearable; until the next financial meltdown hits you hard and your life falls apart like it already has for hundreds of millions of people in dozens of failed states; wait until your bank won't let you in the door and your anger turns into panic - then you may suddenly be ready to take on the bloodsuckers of Big Finance and get behind a fundamental reform of the world's financial architecture.
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People are coming together online to craft new ways of influencing policy, wielding power and self-governing ourselves. We're moving beyond any domestic political paradigm and for the first time in human history, starting to think and act as a global community.
We are the advance guard — folks who yesterday were quite comfortable in their jobs, their families, their communities, only to be lurched awake to discover that they are victims of a corpo-capitalist Ponzi scheme beyond imagining.
We're not a political party. Nobody voted for us. We don't identify as Left or Right. Like any real breakthrough political force must be, we are a synthesis of opposites. From now on, politics will no longer be the usual slugfest between ideological shadow-selves. A third player with a radical new agenda has joined the fray.
From now on, politics will look like this:
Our elected governments, the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund will continue to function much as they always have. They will repair the roads, collect the taxes, run the courts, deliver the mail, give financial aid to developing countries and send peacekeepers to conflict areas. But now they'll have to deal with this unsilenceable new voice demanding systemic transformation on multiple fronts.
When we the people feel our leaders aren't paying attention, are mishandling things and veering off course; when the yawning gap between the haves and the have-nots grows too wide; when corporations become too arrogant, Wall Street too greedy, secrecy too pervasive and surveillance too invasive; when the norms, values and precepts that underlie our way of life are violated . . . that's when the Third Force rises up and sets things right.
— From Manifesto for World Revolution
Adbusters Issue #175
in Newsstands Worldwide
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A new dream. A new way of thinking. Take a mighty leap off the godless and immoral straight line and learn how to wobble again.
There are secrets to be revealed. Epiphanies to be had. Ways to opt out of corpo-capitalist mindfuck.
But to do it, you'll have to understand what Friedensreich Hunderwasser meant when he said,
"The straight line is godless and immoral."
Wait, what? Which straight line? Why immoral? And what's with the "g word" dropped in there like a dog on the dinner table.
Yet for some reason it sticks. It gnaws at your belly. It keeps popping up in your mind. When you reach for your phone in the morning. While brewing coffee. Chatting. Walking. Shopping. Eating. Canoodling.
And one day it hits home. You. Us. This. What you've come to.
The straight line is godless and immoral.
You have become a slave to your head.
The Modernist Project introduced logic, certitude and stability. Capitalism added layer upon layer of false consciousness. And then your smart phone rammed it all home.
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Now your neurons are fried. You've lost your empathy. You realize how cold, calculating and unfeeling you've become. Your humanity is buried under the numbing glow of a screen, the crushing weight of your credit card debt, the foreboding gloom of a heat dome.
You realize how prophetic Hundertwasser really was.
So you pivot.
You shut off the phone.
Every morning, you go to the mirror, take off your clothes, stare at yourself for five minutes.
You let the collars on your shirts fray, share your space with spiders. You learn to eat and drink and shop and live and love and think in down-to-earth new ways. You revel in the messiness of everyday life.
You step off the godless and immoral straight line and learn how to wobble again.
— Kalle Lasn
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It's been said that if you want to become truly wise, you have to make yourself a fool to the world's wisdom.
Everyone's born with an innate understanding of this. But then we grow up and get tangled in the straitjacket of what you might call conventional wisdom: The world is a big, ugly, dangerous place, with serious problems that require a serious mind to navigate. So we learn to fear mistakes and stop trusting our gut. We become prisoners to dogma and reason — jaded enemies of naiveté — and before we know it, we die long before we're buried.
To a kid, such sense is nonsense. They haven't yet forgotten what being alive is actually all about: Curiosity, wonder, and awe. Effortless play and ticklish joy. Radical trust and unconditional love. The deliciousness of watermelon on a hot summer's day. The thrill of an evening firefly hunt. Daydreams and finger-painting. I think in our rush to grow up and take on the world, we rob ourselves of seeing what a profound and holy thing life really is.
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That's probably why Jesus taught us that if we want to see Heaven here on Earth, we have to make ourselves like little children. Why the Eastern philosophies echo his words: Taoists point to the Uncarved Block as the way and Zen masters see children as "little Buddhas".
It almost seems too easy, but living isn't about becoming, it's about being.
Maybe there's no such thing as "ready for kindergarten". Maybe the real problem isn't how well or quickly our kids develop, but our insistence that everything should develop linearly. My gut tells me we've got things backwards, and when it comes to cultivating true wisdom, instead of teaching our kids, we should be learning from them.
— Daniel Younger
Alright, you redeemers, rebels and radicals out there ...
Since we launched Occupy Wall Street thirteen years ago, the world has become meaner, more vicious, more selfish and less human — an insidious degradation of our whole global system has set in.
Big oil, Big Pharma, Big Ag and most mega-corporations are now corrupt. Global finance is corrupt. Meta, Google and X are totally fucking corrupt. Our elections are vulnerable and our sense of truth has been contaminated. And presiding over it all, our world leaders are monstrous opportunists. They only care about staying in power.
Under their rule, we have zero chance of working our way out of the climate crisis and other existential crises we’re in.
So on this anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, let's fire up our revolutionary imagination and try something new. Let’s launch a #FuckItAllFriday Rebellion.
Let’s take one day of the week and just … reclaim it. Make it ours. Repurpose it. Rededicate it to the service of the human spirit and a sane, sustainable future. Weekdays we work. Saturdays we party. Sundays we rest. And now, in cities around the world, we turn every Friday into a raucous carnival of resistance.
Most of us will just have fun . . . play jazz, recite poetry, drink, dance, make crazy love . . . maybe we’ll stick a few OUT OF ORDER signs on ATMs and manifestos on bank windows.
But the rough souls among us will take some skin. They’ll let air out of SUV tires … snarl traffic … block highways … occupy banks and stock exchanges … stink-bomb chain stores and malls … throw pies at the internet mindlords and intransigent CEOs.
Together, we will take Extinction Rebellion to the next level and rage, rage, rage against a future that does not compute.
As temperatures soar, ecosystems collapse, and refugees multiply, our rebellion will grow into a drumbeat for a new world order. Friday after Friday, we'll make the cost of doing business as usual impossible to bear . . . until one day — maybe September 17, 2025? — it will become obvious that We the People of the world have the power to bring this corpo-capitalist doomsday machine of ours to a standstill.
Our leaders will cave. They will do as we say. They will huddle up in a world summit, declare a climate emergency and hatch a strategy to curb carbon emissions . . . and that’s just the beginning.
The beauty is you don’t have to do anything. Just go out every Friday and be in the flow.
Join the Rebellion HERE.
The Third Force
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.
From Issue
174
Beyond Left & Right
Free Palestine has struck a nerve. This is one of those rare moments when, across the globe, people find themselves aligned against some nakedly obvious injustice that just cannot stand.
It's 1968 all over again!
Back then, my generation linked arms in fury against the Vietnam War. Then came MLK, Stonewall, Mandela. Followed later by #Occupy Wall Street, #Me Too and #Black Lives Matter. These moments — always spearheaded by students — are magic. But the window for action is brief.
So what's our move?
If you believe as I do that that the stakes have never been higher — that we're spiraling into darkness, with only a few years left to save ourselves — then we must morph into a total fuck-it-all mode right now. We must shake up the web and take on all the institutions of the old-world order ... eat the whole fucking enchilada ... Have a crack at total world revolution.
Now that school’s back in session, don’t let the bureaucrats steal your fire with petty rules of conduct. Get out there and protest with untameable ferocity. Rise up and demand an end to the evil carnage!
This could be a tipping point moment for humanity, when We the People suddenly wake up to the power we have and start heaving the world in brave new directions.
Around here we call it the #FuckItAllFridays Rebellion.
— Kalle Lasn
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CHECK IT OUT
From Issue
174
Beyond Left & Right
In High Noon, Gary Cooper played the sheriff of a town terrorized by a killer and his posse. As the hour of the score-settling shootout approaches, he walks around looking for someone to stand with him. Everyone demurs. Nobody has the guts. Finally at High Noon, the sheriff stands alone. He squares off with the gang and shoots them down one by one. In the final scene of the movie, with Tex Ritter’s Ballad of High Noon playing in the background — Do not forsake me, oh, my darling — he tosses his sheriff’s badge into the dirt and rides out of town with the love of his life.
Gary Cooper was America. That was the kind of frontier justice the United States stood for and upheld post WWII. Hitler didn’t know enough not to mess with us. After that we led a rules-based world order that was prosperous, optimistic and full of grand ideals.
Now it’s High Noon in America once again.
Only this time a new sheriff has donned the tin badge and is roostering around thinking he’s the new Gary Cooper, here to clean up Dodge.
The shootout on November 5th could kick off a civil war.
— Kalle Lasn
From Issue
174
Beyond Left & Right
Defying the Straight Line
He couldn't stand straight lines and right angles, which aren't much found in nature. Things not made by us mostly curve. Nothing worthwhile is plum, level or square.
So observed Gaetano Pesce, the great Italian designer, who died at age 84.
From this man's brow burst organic, protoplasmic designs for things like bookcases and sofas, blazing with intense, saturated color.
One of them went supernova: the zaftig UP5 armchair, dubbed La Mama, was a shout-out to feminism. Women, he felt, are "victims of male prejudices and fears and stupidity." (As a young macho guy, he too was guilty of that same pig-headedness, he admitted, before he got knocked off that horse by a woman he adored.)
He kicked against a world the rest of us live in without giving it a second thought.
The design of modern cities appalled him. He chided the architects: what you've built is "the very image of non-freedom." In an exhibit for the Louvre, he made office towers out of meat, which gradually rotted until the stench became overpowering.
He started out nonlinear and just got gooier, until by the time he was in his eighties he was pretty much just liquid. "As liquid as time," he said.
I spotted a little spider dashing across the floor.
My immediate reaction was, “Damn, I gotta squish this sucker — can’t have creepy-crawlies nesting up in the house.”
But then I squatted down and saw what it was up to.
It was looking for food . . . stopping every few seconds to sniff something out . . .Whenever I got too close, it panicked and scampered off for safety.
Suddenly, I liked this creature. In uncanny ways, it had so many of the same kind of sensibilities and survival instincts that I have.
So I thought what the hell, it’s not doing any harm . . . why not share the house with it?
A two-state solution!
—KL
