History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
~ James Joyce, Ulysses

For two weeks I saw As everywhere. On tshirts, broken signs, torn stickers… or just lying there, on the ground.

Never actually the Avenger’s A, except in my mind’ eye. What connections was my unconscious making?

There are three heroes in Joss Whedon’s movie: Phil Coulson, Natasha Romanova and Clint Barton.

Then there are the projections of the Collective Unconscious: the vicious sky god, the rage monster, the personification of the techno myth and enCAPsulation of the Amerikan Fighting Spirit.

And the Villain? Witness the speech of the embodiment of the Patriarchy, and all Forces of Control:

And sadly, reality proved this to be true… with the Disney arm of Global Capitalism delivering this Patriarchal  message:

The Disney Store is selling Avengers t-shirts for women with the slogan “I Need a Hero” and “I Only Kiss Heroes,” and an Iron Man t-shirt for boys that reads “Be a Hero.” This sends a harmful message about who can and cannot be a leader in this world. These shirts promote the idea that men and boys are meant to do the saving, and that women and girls are the ones who need to be saved.

Which is completely absurd because the *core hero* of The Avengers is Natasha Romanova (aka Black Widow). She recruits the Hulk, tricks Loki into revealing his scheme, and basically saves the world. As Alyssa Rosenberg describes her for ThinkProgress:

Black Widow, given a personal stake in the fight when Loki brainwashes Hawkeye, tells the villain who wants to know if she’s in love with him, “Love is for children. I owe a debt,” and leaves it at that. Her refusal to clarify leaves room for Loki to speculate, and ultimately to reveal more than he intended. All sorts of skill sets matter in a conflict this big and complex. And without making her a victim or a lesser member of the team, Black Widow’s reactions are a regular reminder that superheroics and space invaders have real impact beyond the financial support of the Cinematic Demolition Industrial Complex. Watching her come back to herself after being badly beaten in a fight is a reminder of how damaging these powers can be when applied to ordinary people. And hearing her tell Captain America in an unconvincing deadpan “It’ll be fun,” when she tries a hugely risky gambit without the protection of enhancement or godlike abilities makes the enterprise seem more serious. These things may be entertaining as hell to watch, but they’d be terrifying to actually carry out.

Ian Grey does an excellent job parsing through the reviews the film got, where seemingly every male critic saw only the Michael Bay-esque aspects of the spectacle presented, and missed the apparent subtly of Black Widow’s role because she wasn’t shouting about it, just getting it done. Witness the entertainment marketing complex displaying a complete lack of critical thinking… almost as if the role of reviews in the press is to repeat the message of the dominantor paradigm, regardless of the truth of the content being promoted.

Natasha is the embodiment of heroism: highly trained, empathetic, cognitively agile and unhesitatingly able to make ‘the sacrifice play’, literally in Cap’s face. And that deserves to be repeated until it sinks in:

Now, post-movie The Avengers we have Jonathan Hickman writing up a storm in the new run of Avengers (and New Avengers) comics… delivering, at core, this message:

Taking the FULL COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS and showing it to us… to build a better tomorrow, together, today. A Mythic Global Frequency.

Tune in and WAKE THE WORLD. Because it’s asleep at the wheel of history and we have figurative seconds to change course if we wish to avoid the coming Crash.

“Drones: Protection When You Least Expect It” by ESSAM (full rez here)

I’ll let Gawker do the talking:

Essam Attia is the New York street artist responsible for placing fake NYPD ads reading “Drones: Protection When You Least Expect It” around town. In September, he gave a video interview to Animal NY, with his identity and voice obscured, in which he discussed this project and his art in general. Wednesday morning, the NYPD arrested him at home.

The NYDN reports that he’s charged with “56 counts of criminal possession of a forged instrument, grand larceny possession of stolen property and weapons possession,” the last (and possibly worst) charge coming because cops found an unloaded .22 pistol under his bed when they arrested him. On a practical level, Attia was not the most careful art criminal. He signed his work “ESSAM;” and he told Animal that he was a “a 29-year-old art-school grad from Maine, who served in Iraq as a ‘geo-spatial analyst.’” It probably did not take an incredible amount of police work to narrow down the possibilities.

Still—great work by the NYPD to prove Essam’s point: you are all being watched. Poke humor at the ALL SEEING GOVERNMENT EYE, and it will make you pay. IT KNOWS ALL. In the Animal interview, author Matt Harvey noted, “He agrees that there is an inherent irony in his spoofs: the very fact that the NYPD (which claims to be strongly pursuing him with their ‘counter terrorism squad’) hasn’t caught him yet, is proof that we have not reached a state of Orwellian control.”

Ah…. cancel that.

[Photo via Animal]

Today’s future present history lesson (or how the Internet developed an immune system lol):

Created by:
Open-Site.org

The new totalitarianism of surveillance technology [GUARDIAN]

TrapWire: The Truth Behind The Hype [STORIFY]
My Abraxas and TrapWire Saga [Tim Shorrock]

How to Make an Invisible Mask for Video Cameras [WIKIHOW]

DARPA-Funded Researcher Can Take Over Android And Nokia Phones By Merely Waving Another Device Near Them [FORBES]

#cryptoparty

When reality resembles one product of the Nolan brothers (Person of Interest), how long until it’s a Bane’esque “fire rising” taking centre stage?

North Korea builds EMP munition [DEFENSETECH]

Stallman really gets going from 6m30s.

From Pruned, who riffs on this nicely, ending:

Elsewhere, graffiti artists will independently fill in the dead zones. Or maybe not to patch up the network, but rather as part of a collaboration with sound artists to create a pop-up pirate radio station to broadcast an improvisational audio documentary of the local area. During times of protest, they could be used to burst through whatever electromagnetic kettling the security forces might be using to prevent the crowds from organizing and reaching critical mass. If there’s no graffiti antenna nearby, just whip out a Spray On Antenna Kit to reclaim the public spectrum.

This “video of last year’s cyborg dance intervention at the Tijuana border crossing” comes via Chris N. Brown:

The 30-minute piece follows hacker Isaac Wilder and his Free Network Foundation from providing internet access to the Occupy activists in Zuccotti Park, to their aspirations for user-owned fiber backbones; and includes commentary from journalist Melissa Gira Grant and author and media critic Douglas Rushkoff.

(Photo: David Mercato, Reuters)

A caravan of about 50 adults and children ended a 1,000-mile, 100-day trek through Bolivia at the protest near government offices in La Paz on Thursday. Scuffles broke out and pepper spray was used after the group were blocked by riot police, who stopped them reaching the legislature and presidential palace to petitioning MPs and the presidential palace for a tripling of the £91 monthly state subsidy for disabled people. The protesters tried to break through the lines using their crutches and wheelchairs but were forced back in a melee in which several people were injured and four detained. The protest organisers then declared a hunger strike by 10 adults and a round-the-clock vigil by the rest.    (Via:  The Guardian)

This is probably about as balanced & well-rounded look as you’re going to get (better even than the excellent look at The Weather Underground):

IF A TREE FALLS: A STORY OF THE EARTH LIBERATION FRONT is the remarkable story of the group’s rise and fall, told through the transformation and radicalization of one of its members, Daniel McGowan. Part coming-of-age tale, part cops-and-robbers thriller, the film interweaves a chronicle of McGowan facing life in prison with a dramatic investigation of the events that led to his involvement with the ELF. Using never-before-seen archival footage and intimate interviews — with cell members and with the prosecutor and detective who were chasing them — IF A TREE FALLS asks hard questions about environmentalism, activism, and the way we define terrorism.

By Poster Boy NYC.

Awesome picture of the day comes to us from Poland:

higher rez here.

WTF Video of today comes to us from… (go on, watch it first)

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an updated, and suitably bold, plan from Open Source Ecology, the team behind the The Real Life Civilization-Building Kit:

Lovely bit of culture-jamming from the streets and ATMs of San Fran by the Rainforest Action Network:

The stickers also encourage BoA customers to “Stop doing business with Bank of America until they start behaving responsibly” and have the URL to our new blog, which we’ve just launched along with The New Bottom Line:BankruptingAmerica.tumblr.com.

We’re using that blog to track all the ways BoA is bankrupting America, hence the name. We’ve received so many submissions it’s clear to us that this website was badly needed. There are lots of grievances to be aired with regard to how Bank of America is conducting its business these days, as it turns out. (Not that that’s terribly surprising.)

via Mission Mission

“The copyright war was just the beginning…” Watch as Cory Docotorow extends the copyright struggle into a 100year battle. Stay for the extra QnA (30mins in) where he addresses many of the issues of the day.

via BoingBoing

See Also:

• Charles Stross draws the lines – accurately – between #SOPA and the Coming Insurrection

It is more important than ever, as nearly everything seems on the brink of collapse and/or rapid change, that we honestly examine the past and present state of our culture and society. To acknowledge what counts as progress and what does not.

This film, Miss Representation, looks like a good step in that direction:

(E.C.C.O assures me this is unrelated to my recent McLuhan kick.)

via Jerem Morrow

If the young are not initiated in to the village, they will burn it down just to feel its warmth.
– African Proverb

This vernacular video documentary does an almost perfect job sketching out the complexity of the situation in the UK.

Which brings us to the F-word: FERAL:

In the sense of “abandoned by – or escaped from – society”, “living outside the mainstream”, “beyond the control of rules, regulations and accepted norms”, even “gone wild”, feral seems quite a reasonable choice of word to describe something big and faceless such as an economy, the media, or even, at a pinch, a powerful and privileged elite. But when you start applying it to people (youths, yobs), or to a disadvantaged group of people (an underclass), it’s somehow different. Then feral becomes, intentionally or not, dehumanising. Use it in that way and you’re comparing humans to animals. Which isn’t, can we agree, a very nice thing to do.

As Paul Raven tweeted, this is “the worst sort of Othering”, and why we shall never cease repeating here There Is No THEY!

Why do transnational extremist organizations succeed where democratic movements have a harder time taking hold? Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist extremist, asks for new grassroots stories and global social activism to spread democracy in the face of nationalism and xenophobia.