Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Ed Zitron yelling abuse at CEOs for twenty-three minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Slib2bbMs4

the city shivers, like a giant beast, covered in snow and fog. lights in modern glass skyscrapers and decrepit soviet blocks alike make the air glow. cars move in circles, like rats racing against each other. music — fiery guitar solos of rock, punchy hip-hop kicks and snares, and butter smooth rhythms of jazz; vocals and rhymes in english, kazakh, russian — spill in the streets of almaty from cars, bars, night clubs, and instruments and mics of street musicians.

tonight, the city lives.

you know what's worse than "please see our discord for download links"

when you have a documentation site

that documents every other step of the process

apart from one absolutely critical step

In all my years on blackblogs I have never received a single comment. I don't think the overly complex apparatus of Wordpress is useful at all; a static HTTPS host with a bit of space for occasional illustrations and a blog generator on your Whonix laptop would do just as well. The hard part isn't the technology, it's the legal risk; very few hosts are willing to take anonymous users via tor and allow political content; for no money, even less.

It is difficult to reach people without the Internet nowadays, but the state of the Internet for activism is abysmal. In most of the North, any revolutionary position can now be framed as terrorism--in many cases, following the lead of the USA land of free speech, without due process. And even if you can find a stable, supportive host, any web search will only ever return the Platforms, anything not in a walled garden is now deep web. Most orgs around me have given up and risk doing it on Substack or (of all places) Instagram. Spicier things can still go onto indymedia or the library, but these are more like shared communiqués/archives, not places where your group has a presence, a territory.

There's also the fact that all URLs break whenever something like blackblogs gets taken down. The idea of a political *DNS* host seems even less likely to find, useful though it would be.

A hot girl thing to do would be to host solarweb-style, on a low-power device you own that you take steps to a) anonymise the uplink via some Tor or similar connection, and b) rig to self-destruct any data in case of cop (are there good ways to do this? shadow encrypted partition and if you boot into the decoy one, it safe-deletes the hidden one? but if I was tasked with doing a search like cops do, I would try to investigate the devices on the spot and still plugged.)

When I say that demos don't really do anything other than diverting energy, that there's no point in begging for the goodwill of our rulers (and threats that are never followed up is just the macho way of begging), the retort I get most often is that demos help radicalise people, build connection, show solidarity. Even if the demands are never listened to, it feels good to do *something*, to have agency.

Does it, though?? They're kinda terrible at that too though??? I don't see people energised by demos, I see them push themselves to go joylessly to the marches, "como quem dá-se ao carrasco", with the attitude of a religious penitence, a moral duty, inevitably leading to the well-known extreme rates of burnout. Connection is a joke, people cop-jacket everyone and only ever trust their little cliques, every potential recruit is kept at arm's length, it's borderline impossible for an immigrant to find at a demo people to go back home together let alone the level of opening and interdependence that comradeship would require.

Displays of solidarity I think is the least bad one, sometimes it can be helpful to see support for you on the headlines, particularly for heavily persecuted causes like Palestine or sex work, or invisibilised ones like Kurdistan or anarchists in Ukraine. But even then, is this really the best way to show solidarity? How many demos even make it to a headline, and is the effort worth those few seconds of feeling seen? Compared to receiving a letter when in prison, a visit, material support?

I suppose there's a point in taking a stance *locally* for global causes, e.g. when you march for Palestine you can see the relief on the face of every single non-German person you pass by, because this massive genocide whitewashing doesn't hurt just the targets of genocide, it vicariously hurt all of us watching it. (Though what we have to deal with, German cops and unconvincing gaslighting, is peanuts compared to, you know. Literal fucking ethnic cleansing. But it's not *nothing*, to be the witness to it, to live in the belly of the beast).

But once again, is that the best way to reach out to marginalised ppl around you, to march with slogans and worried faces? What if you, dunno, sit by the station with a guitar and play happy resistance songs? Proposition all the libraries and cultural spaces you can find until you find one willing to host poem readings from Palestinian writers? Make friends with refugee families and learn some Arabic while offering a sympathetic ear? Offer your professional skills for fundraising efforts? Start a fundraising effort? Set up a little infostand challenging media narratives, armed with facts, zines, a smile and a lot of diplomacy? Bring those supportive banners to the legal hearings of criminalised immigrants rather than distant protests? Go visit cultural centres, get to know people, then act as a bridge between scenes (e.g. talk with both queer Palestinians and traditional queer orgs to invite the one to speak at the other)? Bake vegan+halal cookies and bring to the Palästina-tresen? Spot a person wearing a kufiyyah or watermelon pin and, look I know this is my most extreme and controversial proposal by German standards, but: fucking open up to a stranger, tell them "I stand with you"?

If the goal is to show solidarity, or to build a revolutionary personality, or to make bonds, then I challenge you to this exercise: If you stay home rather than going to the demo, what else could you do to advance those goals? If 5 or 30 or 100 people drop out from the demo and spend the same amount of time and energy on another activity--what kind of other activities can you imagine? Do you think they'd be more or less effective than calling the cops to inform them that on such and such day 1000 ppl are going to walk around holding signs?

i need your help. "Drums of Death" by FKA twigs scratches an itch in my head. Do you know other glitchy songs like that one?

Another cool thing, I have been working on is the redesign of the timelines. The different sections should now be better organized and easier to read.

"What else do we forget about the pandemic? We forget how mesmerised we were as nature rebounded, how clean the air was in the absence of industrial scale human activity. We forget that carbon emissions fell at the sort of pace required to avoid cataclysmic climate change. We forget that no-strings cash payments saw child poverty in America plunge to record lows, that the UK slashed homelessness with schemes that found homes for people sleeping on the street.

We forget that there really was a sense of global solidarity, that the reflection demanded by a pandemic opened up spaces for us to consider truly radical and permanent change. Remember build back better? There really was a sense that the coronavirus, as we all knew it then, could be the catalyst for a better word.

It couldn't last because of capitalism. This isn't some glib statement, it is literally why such promises could never be fulfilled. Because such promises required redistribution and structural shifts to economies that billionaires don't want shifting."

https://www.donotpanic.news/p/five-years-on-a-covid-retrospective

Discovered a new live music night at a tiny venue near me.

The bands are followed by a robot wars tournament.
With "live battle music".
And a second-hand vinyl record sale.
And an open mic.
And retro video games.

Overwhelming.