In the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, Astra Taylor was part of a group of activists that set up Strike Debt. Intending to raise $50,000 to buy up what they considered unjust and unnecessary medical & educational debt, they ended up with $700,000 which they used to abolish millions of dollars of debt. Heather Smith interviews Astra about the campaign. The two discuss democracy, anarchism and the challenges of building coherent momentum for enduring change out of the highly diverse eruptions of Occupy and similar anti-capitalist movements. Read the full interview here >>> .
Frustrated by the government’s lack of action to keep illegal loggers out of the Alto Turiacu Indian territory, local warriors from several tribes have taken it upon themselves to find logging camps, destroy equipment, and drive out the unwelcome intruders.
Reuters photographer Lunae Parracho reports on this indigenous search and destroy mission in the Amazon with Brazil’s Ka’apor Indians.
“It needs to be done in groups so we can hear it from each other. Then you realize that it gives a lie to the isolation we have been conditioned to experience in recent centuries, and especially by this hyper-individualist consumer society. People can graduate from their sense of isolation, into a realization of their inter-existence with all.” Interview with deep ecologist, elder and activist inspiration, Joanna Macy
The impending doom of billions of Indian and Chinese carbon consumers is often used by climate-action stallers as a kind of “what’s the point of cutting our emissions with this coming?” Another perspective is that there might be an effective future in the middle-ground between developing-world communities using renewable energy on the one hand – and on the other, the developed-world learning a few lessons on living with “less stuff to plug in”…
Whilst Social Media sites like Facebook and Twitter are under strict censorship, Internet users in China are circulating news on the protests in Hong Kong by copying and pasting articles into notes that can be shared as webpages or put into “notebooks” that users can subscribe to. Report by Lily Kuo and Ning Hui.
“Music characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats” …probably the only phrase from the legal statute to have been memorised by large numbers of people off their heads on drugs… The trigger for a lively protest movement 20 years ago was Section 63 of the 1994 Criminal Justice Act and its mission to criminalise free parties. Read more >>
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“Hierarchical organizational forms have been the norm through much of history, especially the last 2,000 years. Lateral organizations, or more egalitarian structures, have been the exception.” Change Agent Harold Jarche looks at David Ronfeldt’s TIMN framework for organisational evolution. (Tribal, Institutional, Market, Network)
“Africa produces its fair share of aspirational pop with glossy videos featuring fast cars and seemingly faster women. But peer under the hedonistic surface and you discover there are musicians all over the continent who are worthy successors to the griots, Africa’s traditional storytellers.” Article by DJ Rita Ray. Read >>
Techno, clubbing and pirate radio as political catalysts… Stories from B92 FM and Klub Industrija in the wartorn dissident underground of ’90s Belgrade. Article by Thomas Gorton & photography by Srdjan Veljovic
DJ-mix soundtrack to PfB. Put it on while reading or looking at the book, or else use it as a medicine wave: make a space to move, turn the lights down and the sound up, and take the journey as a dancer. Mixed by Polarone. Click ‘read more’ for track-listing.
Postcard: image & text based missive sent to friends by travelers. Babylon: (1) capital of Babylonia in 2nd century B.C, often considered the first city. (2) Rastafarian term for capitalist civilisation. Liberation:the process of seeking and embodying freedom for, and by, all peoples
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In the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, Astra Taylor was part of a group of activists that set up Strike Debt. Intending to raise $50,000 to buy up what they considered unjust and unnecessary medical & educational debt, they ended up with $700,000 which they used to abolish millions of dollars of debt. Heather Smith interviews Astra about the campaign. The two discuss democracy, anarchism and the challenges of building coherent momentum for enduring change out of the highly diverse eruptions of Occupy and similar anti-capitalist movements.
