#política

Ativistas ligados ao Occupy Wall Street querem invadir casas desapropriadas

A coisa está ficando séria. Ativistas agora querem invadir casas desapropriadas ou vazias. Diz o The Guardian:

Thousands of Occupy protesters across the US will occupy foreclosed homes today, in what organisers are describing as a “new frontier” for the movement.

In New York, Occupy Wall Street has teamed up with local activist groups to secretly occupy an empty home, and plan to hand the property over to a homeless family. Similar action is scheduled in more than 20 other cities.

Até agora, parte da classe-média consegue digerir o movimento Occupy Wall Street. Mas quando começam invasões de propriedades, a coisa fica impopular. Será o começo do fim dos protestos?

Sacrifique-se pelo capitalismo

(…) I want to suggest that we put in motion a similar undertaking: On January 16th, Martin Luther King Day, citizens from around the country should gather at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. Let’s call this macabre gathering—with luck and even worse times, it should be mammoth—”We Surrender” or “Restore Debtor’s Prisons” or “De-Fault Is Ours” or “Collateralize Us.” And plan on a mirthful day of mourning.

The basic idea is that we offer ourselves up, 99 percent of us anyway, on the altar of high finance as a sacrifice to the bond markets.

Steve Fraser sugere um novo tipo de Occupy Wall Street. Render-se e sacrificar-se pelo bem do capitalismo.

É claro que é brincadeira. Mas acontece de verdade no Tibet, com monges extremamente perturbados e confusos.

Se já é trágico na Ásia, imagine esse tipo de manifestação em New York. Iria desenterrar de vez o Michael Foucault (PDFzinho pra vocês).

Como desaparecer completamente

DisappearingJason Fitzpatrick, do Lifehacker, fez um resumão de How to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish without a Trace, de Eileen C. Horan. O livro ensina a apagar suas pegadas digitais, numa época em que praticamente tudo o que fazemos deixa um rastro on-line.

As dicas são — mais ou menos — as seguintes:

  • Diminua suas conexões sociais. On-line e off-line.
  • Use apenas dinheiro. Evite cartões de crédito e pagamentos on-line (incluindo caixas-eletrônicos).
  • Escreva seu nome com erros de digitação, entre outros truques para nunca ter a mesma identidade em dois lugares.
  • Lembre-se de que você vai perder a maior parte do suporte legal / institucional / psicológico no qual você costuma apoiar sua vida.

Esse tipo de artigo é interessante porque mostra que é tão difícil manter quanto se livar da identidade. Os dois processos demandam um cansativo gerenciamento de burocracias. Se isso é verdade no aspecto social e econômico, imagine no psicológico. Basicamente, é aquilo que fazemos a vida inteira: gerenciar burocracias de identidades.

Occupy Wall Street é um movimento contra as explicações midiáticas?

Mai68

Cada um vê o que quer no movimento Occupy Wall Street. Talvez essa seja a sua beleza. Na Slate, Dahlia Lithwick enxerga um movimento contra a mídia corporativa. Quer dizer: os que protestam não querem se explicar. Pelo menos não do jeito tradicional, que caberia na televisão e nos jornais. Achei essa interpretação com um gosto de Maio de 68. Mas sei lá.

What the movement clearly doesn’t want is to have to explain itself through corporate television. To which I answer, Hallelujah. You can’t talk down to a movement that won’t talk back to you. (…)

Occupy Wall Street is not a movement without a message. It’s a movement that has wisely shunned the one-note, pre-chewed, simple-minded messaging required for cable television as it now exists. It’s a movement that feels no need to explain anything to the powers that be, although it is deftly changing the way we explain ourselves to one another.

Think, for just a moment, about the irony. We are the most media-saturated 24-hour-cable-soaked culture in the world, and yet around the country, on Facebook and at protests, people are holding up cardboard signs, the way protesters in ancient Sumeria might have done when demonstrating against a rise in the price of figs. And why is that? Because they very wisely don’t trust television cameras and microphones to get it right anymore. Because a media constructed around the illusion of false equivalencies, screaming pundits, and manufactured crises fails to capture who we are and what we value.

Algorítimos como força política

Some point the blame at Twitter for censoring content, yet what seems to be happening is purely algorithmic. There’s often more than meets the eye when it comes to algorithmically generated Trending Topics.

Gilad Lotan mostra que a tecnologia tem seus próprios mecanismos de censura. De quebra, em artigo no blog Social Flow, discute o que são “tendências” e ativismo, a partir do ponto de vista dos scripts.

O que vestir durante um protesto?

Why are you protesting? “I’m here just to see what everybody else is doing. I don’t know if I agree with all of this. All these kids are trying to protest against corporations while they’re wearing Hollister and J. Crew and smoking cigarettes, which are the hugest corporations in America.”

“My shirt says ‘Bail Out Workers Not Wall Street.’ It’s actually a few years old, but I’m wearing it because Wall Street received trillions in bailout, while people are over their heads in debt and having a tough time paying bills. But I always dress like this. My shoes are Adidas. I got them for $20.”

“We’re a band called Environmental Encroachment. The leggings, I like to provide some hallucinogenic visual stimulation for people. Pretty much everything I’m wearing is supposed to be awe-inspiring and hallucinogenic. And it also feels really good to wear tights. ”

Jornalistas do New York Times circularam pelas manifestações do Ocuppy Wall Street perguntando o que as pessoas estavam vestindo e porquê. Interessante exemplo de como funciona a mecânica da mente discursiva, compondo cenários, criando amigos, inimigos e histórias.

O metamovimento

OccupyWallSt Getty

(Getty Images)

The Metamovement is a movement of movements. Not all these movements are similar; no two are exactly like; each can be readily distinguished from the next. The Arab Spring is part of the Metamovement; the London Riots were part of the Metamovement; protests spreading across America, under the banner of Occupy Wall St, are all part of the Metamovement.

Yet, just like in an epidemic, each outbreak triggers the next–and in that cascade can perhaps be traced the jagged outline of the shared DNA within each cell of the larger metamovement.

In other words, it’s not just about inequality–but the deeper failure of institutions. To let people–especially the young–redress inequality by whatever slender means they might muster, by creating new opportunities. At every turn, the people in the Metamovement feel not merely spurned and scorned–but suffocated and strangled by institutions every bit as unflinchingly lethal as a hangman’s noose.

Protestos se espalham em diversas partes do mundo. Nenhum deles parece articulado ao outro. Nem mesmo a algum tipo de teoria. Mas talvez eles tenham algo em comum.

Risco alimentação

A new map of food security risk around the world is, in some ways, depressingly familiar. Sub-saharan Africa leaps out as the place where the most people fear for their next meal, while the rich world has more to fear from obesity. But there’s plenty of salutary reminders and fascinating detail, like India’s food problems and the vulnerability of Spain. And it demonstrates the sickening, symbiotic relationship between lack of food and conflict: where one leads, the other follows.

Mapa da alimentação versus segurança nacional, no The Guardian.