intellectual properties

QOTD: horizontalism

this was really beautiful to read, whether you take it for your personal life or political life or occupation:

My personal perspective has to do with the idea of freedom, this idea of discovering that we have collective knowledge that brings us together, gives us strength, starts the process of discovery. This is beyond revolutionary theories, theories that we all know and have heard so often, theories that are all too often converted into tools of oppression and submission. Constructing freedom is a learning process that can only happen in practice. For me, horizontalism, autonomy, freedom, creativity, and happiness are all concepts that go together, and they’re all things that have to both be practiced, and learned in practice.

I think back to previous activist experiences, and remember a powerful feeling of submission. This includes even my own behavior, which was often excessively rigid. It was difficult for me to enjoy myself, and enjoyment is something sane that strengthens you. Under capitalism, we were giving up the possibility of enjoying ourselves and being happy. We need to constantly break with this idea. We have life, and the life we have should be lived today. We shouldn’t wait to take power, so that we can begin to enjoy ourselves in the future. We should take it now. We begin by believing in what’s possible and then we push aside all of those things that don’t allow us to create this possibility.

— neka, a member of an unemployed workers’ movement

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/100/horizontalism.html

also awesome from issue #100:

Because history doesn’t move in straight lines but surges like water, sometimes swirling, sometimes dripping, flowing, flooding–always unknowable, unexpected, uncertain. Because the key to insurgency is brilliant improvisation, not perfect blueprints.

–The Rebel Clown Army Manifesto

my Wells Fargo story (every day is bank transfer day)

i closed my large corporate bank accounts and switched banks in November to the New Resource Bank in SF, but hadn’t closed my Wells Fargo acct because I had to resolve some autopay links, etc. The balance has been below $100 since November. Then WF started charging me $12/month to keep the account open. So today I went to the bank to ask them to stop charging me the fee, without mentioning my NRB switch or any threat to close my acct (not antagonistic is my point). And, long story short, they said they couldn’t stop charging me the fees. There was $32 in that account today. And on Feb 10th they are going to take almost 1/3 of that out in fees if the account stays open. I have another bank account, but they don’t know that. What about the single mom, or poor old lady, who really only has $32? WTF Wells Fargo.

It wasn’t that the Rep didn’t try to help me. Because he said he could do nothing about the fees, he tried to open me a new account – a STUDENT account, since it only has $3 monthly fees. But that’s what’s messed up, is that the employee felt the new bank rules were so strict that he had to go that route, that i would have to cancel the account i’ve had since 1998 and open a totally new one instead of just STOP CHARGING ME THE FEES.

Anyway, I’ll be closing my account with them now. And if you still haven’t switched yours, think about it. EVERY DAY IS BANK TRANSFER DAY.

5.6 Million Americans Have Switched Their Banks In The Last 90 Days
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/02/02/417054/americans-moving-banks-90-days/?mobile=nc

occupy everything. (post #11)

last night at the salon, a nice older woman sitting next to me asked, “so what happened with the Occupy? why did it all go so bad? it makes me so sad, i watch the news and i want to cry. i wanted good things to happen.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/the-first-casualty-of-fairness-is-the-truth/2012/01/30/gIQA2VYneQ_blog.html

“You know what you don’t see much of these days? Those moist-eyed bloggers’ odes to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Gosh, remember the columns telling us these people had a noble political agenda? Seems like just yesterday the lefty bloggers were picking through polls, telling us the American people embraced the OWS gang. But then protest turned to filth, and high-mindedness turned out to be just plain-old stench.

To write such loving tributes to OWS took extraordinary discipline, I suppose. Not to actually look (or smell) and determine who the real Occupiers (as opposed to the Occupiers refashioned for the readers of the New York Times and the Nation) were must have taken real will-power, especially since the encampments in major cities (as in the District) were only a few blocks from the journalists’ offices. Had they taken a peek or inhaled on the way to work they would have discovered the real Occupy movement.

Zack Munson reports: “There are lots of bearded folks (male and female), lots of dirty tents, some college students, the unemployed, the career homeless, some white people dancing out of rhythm to rock music played over a loudspeaker. The ‘movement’ itself is still a jumble of anti-capitalist/police/government rhetoric and pointless noise and pungent smells.” Oh, well, who wants to write about that?”

it’s true.  i haven’t wrttien about OWS/OccupyOakland in over a month, but it is not because i think the shine wore off to reveal a bunch of dirty hippies.  in fact, the opposite is true. i think once the new smell and initial popculture interest wore off, who was left was a bunch of super invested people who have since then been heads-down entrenched in making things happen, not out there in the camps but in smaller working groups, in meetings, behind closed doors. see: the Alternative Banking Working Group, for example.

and despite all the negatives, the movement has been effective — causing democratic change on issues local and global, from healthcare to home evictions to school funding, not only in the higher-profile cities like New York  and D.C. but also in small towns across the U.S. …. not to mentioned having kicked the door open for a lot of other progressive non-Occupy NGOs and social and cultural groups to take a stand. The Media, of course, chooses to only focus on the the bad apples.  this is true for nearly every single aspect of society, not just OWS, and everybody knows it. so why don’t people question what they see on the news more often?

i told the woman at the salon to try to look up other places to read about Occupy, and that while i am not actively involved much  personally, i know many amazing, hardworking people who are and i know, without any question or doubt, that they are doing good things with the right intentions.

“The breadth of this movement is one thing, its depth another. It has rejected not just the particulars of our economic system, but the whole set of moral and emotional assumptions on which it’s based. Take the pair shown in a photograph from Occupy Austin in Texas.  The amiable-looking elderly woman is holding a sign whose computer-printed words say, “Money has stolen our vote.” The older man next to her with the baseball cap is holding a sign handwritten on cardboard that states, “We are our brothers’ keeper.”

The photo of the two of them offers just a peek into a single moment in the remarkable period we’re living through and the astonishing movement that’s drawn in… well, if not 99% of us, then a striking enough percentage: everyone from teen pop superstar Miley Cyrus with her Occupy-homage video to Alaska Yup’ik elder Esther Green ice-fishing and holding a sign that says “Yirqa Kuik” in big letters, with the translation — “occupy the river” — in little ones below.” – Compassion Is Our New Currency

last weekend in Oakland  there was another Occupy vs. OPD clash when Occupy tried to take over an empty building.  before you keep reading,  WATCH THIS VIDEO.

the press and City Hall reported that the Occupiers were breaking into buildings and harrassing police and that, 6 months into the movement, all this is is a temper tantrum on the part of entitled youth and rabblerousers who should find better uses for their time and stop being a public nuisance.  but here is the perspective from Occupy:

http://occupywallst.org/article/regime-change-oakland/

“In Oakland, thousands of active community members chose to engage in true democracy by supporting the real and pressing needs of the people. The state, which supposedly represents these people, exercised extreme police brutality and violence to protect the 1%’s vacant assets. The explicit goal of the action was to build community—to open a desperately needed community center with a library, medical care, free education and emergency housing in a city that has suffered massive budget cuts, high unemployment rates and ravaged public schools. In response, the city government poured hundreds of thousands of dollars, bullets and canisters of tear gas into declaring open war on these parents, students, workers, artists, teachers, children and veterans. These people’s only offense was to believe so deeply in the American tradition of democracy, self-sufficiency, and sacrifice for the next generation that they were willing to put their bodies on the line to make this nation the empowering democracy that we know it can be.”

And here is a journalist’s first hand account of the situation, and being unlawfully arrested: http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/01/journalists-arrested-occupy-oakland

so yeah, there are obvious issues with people taking over public buildings and setting up DIY healthcare units etc.  not up to code, health violations, blah blah blah.  but what i don’t understand is why the City can’t just,……let them try? see what happens?  wouldn’t that cost FEWER CITY DOLLARS AND RESOURCES than hiring an outside army of police to shoot rubber bullets at citizens, people trying to create for their communities what the government has neglected to protect or provide?

which leads me back to reiterate that the main success of this movement has been to get people to WAKE UP.  maybe they’re waking up to an American Dream Turned Nightmare, but if that’s the case then if Occupy stands for anything it’s this: STAND UP AND FIGHT. OCCUPY EVERYTHING that matters to you.

The Ultimate Culture Jam

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/100/spiritual-insurrection.html

“We awoke one morning to the dark realization that humanity is being dragged into a black hole of ecological, financial and spiritual catastrophe … that our democracy has been seized by a corporatocracy … that every day two hundred species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become forever extinct … that a deluge of advertising is sleepwalking our civilization to the brink of insanity … and that unless we fight back in the most visceral and creative way possible all will be lost.

And yet, what sets our struggle apart in 2012 is that we are not fighting to save a distant future. We are not trying to prevent some terrible event that is still to come. This is not about our unborn grandchildren. Instead, many of us sense that the threshold has already been crossed; the tipping point has already happened and what we are fighting for is our present. We are living in that tragic moment of eerie stillness where the fatal damage has been done, widening cracks can be seen, yet the edifice still stands and business as usual continues … but for how much longer?

Our days may be shadowed by this dark realization, but there is reason to be deeply optimistic for “where danger is, grows the saving power also.” Never before has the tantalizing possibility of a Global Spring, a worldwide people’s insurgency for democracy, seemed as close. For perhaps the first time in human history, we just might be on the edge of an everywhere-at-once revolution against the financial fraudsters, corporate lackeys and the ideology of consumerism that has brought the Earth to the precipice of collapse.

In this, the era of the total and transcendent indignato swarm, we look to each other, not to the masters above, to find out what it will take to pull off the ultimate culture jam: spiritual insurrection.”

this post is to be continued, in the vein of CULTURAL TRANSFIGURATION: OCCUPY ART.

stand up democracy and good use of internet

you may or may not have noticed, depending on how you read this blog, that this site was blacked out on Wednesday in protest to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) . there has been much debate about intellectual property rights and copyright infringement and what constitutes fair use and what is piracy. it’s a complex subject. but most people i know thought that it was the wrong tool trying to fix the wrong problem, and ill-defined at that.  and if there’s one thing americans love as much as TV it’s the Internet! and so there was a digital uprising as well as a flood of phone calls to Congress, enough to overload their systems.  and hey, look at that: it worked!

i’m not going to go on and out about it but to say YES! WIN! and that if you are angry, feel disenfranchised, don’t like the way something is going, DO SOMETHING.  a movement is only people moving.

semi-sequitur:  There is a great docu about music and the internet you should watch: PausePressPlay.

everything is fine keep shopping

BUY NOTHING CHRISTMAS

#OCCUPYXMAS

tday pilaf

tday pilaf, originally uploaded by amyleblancdotcom.

(or, what i just came up with from ingredients i had in my house)

1.5 cups pearled barley
3 cups veg broth
+
1 cup fresh cranberries, diced (not frozen, not dried, not sweetened, not canned, not refrigerated: fresh, whole and TART)
1 diced honeycrisp apple
+
1 cup raw almonds, smashed, sauteed
1/2 lb broccoli spigarello, sauteed
1 cup veg broth
sesame seeds, white and black
1 spoonful chopped garlic
1/2 white onion
1 tbsp earth balance margarine
1 tbsp olive oil
salt/pepper to taste

mixed together. warm in oven.

vegan and all organic except for the cranberries, olive oil and seeds

Bank Transfer Day / Month / Year

http://www.facebook.com/Nov.Fifth

even if you didn’t get your affairs in order in time for today’s action, you can still do it anyway.

Americans opened 650,000 new credit union accounts last month:

http://thinkprogress.org/special/2011/11/03/360804/650000-americans-credit-unions/

whether or not it affects the big banks bottom line, that’s a lot of money going back into local banks and communities. and that is good no matter how you cut it or what day you move your money.

if you have 6 accounts and business lines of credit etc. and think it’s too much work to do it all yourself, just walk into a credit union or small local bank. i guarantee they will help you.

FAQ: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/11/how-to-move-money-big-banks-credit

Ephemerisle: Worth Your Investment?

Ephemeralization, a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller, is the ability of technological advancement to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing”.

Some futurists think only theoretically and wax philosophically about the possibilities for humanity from the comfort of their libraries and leather chairs, rarely, if ever, testing their assumptions.  Others only read the directions on the box, if that, and head out into unknown territories with little more than power tools and some rope to answer such questions as “Is ephemeralization possible?”and “If climate change causes global flooding, could me and 10 of my friends live on a boat?”

Hundreds of years of literature (Lord of the Flies, Robinson Crusoe ), movies and television (Survivor, Cast Away, The Book of Eli and obviously Waterworld) have traditionally concluded that, with limited resources, human nature eventually retrogresses into an Orwellian unfun form of protective tribalistic survivalism, not any kind of Utopia.  But most futurist works do not take in to account the emergence and determination of modern survivalism-IS-fun types who take such conditions as a meta and physical challenge to investigate the possibility of non-violent ephemeralism (one exception being Huxley’s Island, a specifically written utopian counterweight to Brave New World, the pair of which I encourage every Burner and Ephemerialist and Futurist to read).

The term “futurist” is also misleading, as many current prognostications about the future involve a complete lack of computers and robots and are not unlike the happy, healthy, self-sufficient cultures of indigenous tribes and vikings of yore (only a light sprinkling of which still exist today). As many dystopian novelists and revolutionary, countercultural and experimental communities of the 1960s have asked: could we ever get back to a balanced, natural state if necessary, or have we gone too far?

Anchored just outside of Stockton, CA in the expansive and windy network of natural and unnatural waterways of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the most important question the floating festival Ephemerisle, now in its third year, wants to investigate — besides whether you would live or die — is this: Can being trapped on an island be FUN?

On June 9, 2011, False Profit sent a recon team to this local real world test of such theories and questions regarding emphemeralism in the particular context of seasteading. About 20 boats were tethered together to form an island, thereby forming a community of approximately 200 residents of various ilk. Community and connective platforms were built, and collective energies and resources were pooled.  The result was 4 days of sunning, swimming, dancing, diving, teaching, sharing, and learning within an enthusiastic, ambitious and industrious community bent on creating their own world.  As a contribution, we brought a boat full of speakers and DJs.

Learnings:

1. “Missing the boat” isn’t an expression for no reason. However, if you do happen to miss the boat, do not give up. There are other ways to reach your destination. Having a stash of cash or other highly valuable tradeable goods helps. A lot. River people can be very helpful if properly persuaded.
2. Driving a boat isn’t hard, but you do have to pay attention.
3. Dropping anchor sounds easy — you just throw it overboard and your boat stops moving, right?  WRONG.  Due to collective ADD and inability to commit, we moved our boat approximately 7x, so we are experts on how hard it is to drop anchor.
4. If you want freedom, do not tie yourself to anyone. Literally or figuratively. Otherwise you may end up listening to lectures when really you’d rather be having a danceparty in your underwear on the roof.
5. High speed watercraft are highly enviable and worth procuring.
6. Pirates are easy to distract. See item 1.
7. Blasting other boats with a wall of sound is an effective method of takeover, so if you don’t have cannons, have subwoofers.
8. Aquatic wildlife is way easier to catch and avoid than mainland predators (e.g. the prismatic leopard of the temperate rainforests of northwestern america). The only non-avian fauna spotted were river otters, and they’re just cute.
9. Put sunscreen on your ass if you’re going to lie around naked.
10. I’m On a Boat is not that hyperbolic. It really is like that. If you’re on a boat with us, anyway.  Champagne wishes and caviar dreams.

Conclusions:  Ephemeralization seems possible, but we will still need GPS to figure out where the hell we are unless we all learn how to read starmaps.

Recommendations: Invest. More boats + more people = more fun at Ephemerisle 2012.

dylan (non-resident), jess, nicole, whit, me, lydia (visiting), jay, larisa (newest recruit), ben (1st mate), eric, jordan, alex

Sidenotes:  Growing up in the Great Lakes State on the shores of Lake Michigan surrounded by inland lakes, you would think I’d have spent a lot of time on boats as a child.  But alas, no one I knew had a boat, or, at least, invited me to come on it.  I recall being on boats only once or twice as a child. So I know nothing about boating.  Particularly, I did not know that I would still feel the world rocking gently back and forth two days after disembarking, but perhaps that is specific to the workings of my inner ears and not a global experience. Secondly, I realize that this is not so much a summary of the experience as a literature review.  But honestly: you don’t do a lot while on a boat.  That’s the point. So other than the above there’s not a lot to report that would make any sense at all if you weren’t there.  So if you really want to know what happened, join us next year on a motherfucking boat.

we can be heroes

watch this:

link: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/living/2010/04/01/cnnheroes.krishnan.profile.cnn

and then, for anyone interested and feeling generous (or, like me, maybe wishing i could be so selfless as to give up my job and everything i have to help others), the website for his foundation is http://www.akshayatrust.org/index.php and you can donate here via PayPal: http://www.akshayatrust.org/donation_foreign_currencies.php

i’m certain every little bit counts.

QOTD: transfiguration

“We are all agents of transfiguration,” Tutu told the congregation at Grace Cathedral during its Sunday morning service. “Go forth and transform your personal relationships, your community, your world, so it becomes hospitable to joy, to justice, to freedom, to peace.”

–Desmond Tutu @ Grace Cathedral, SF, 3/6/11