
#ReOccupy
Tactical Briefing #8
Hey all you jazz players and re-occupiers out there,
Imagine this: It’s midnight, November 3rd. Every American’s fingernails are gnawed to the quick. Trump holds a razor-thin lead. If the counting stopped here, he’d eke out a win of the popular vote.
If Trump tries to steal the election, what will you do? What role are you prepared to play in this historic showdown?




Adbusters #151
Siege on the White House
Find out more about the #WhiteHouseSiege in this landmark issue . . . and be a part of history.
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The Pulse Newsfeed
Google is watching. Here's what it knows about you

In 2018, an Irish technologist named Dylan Curran downloaded the information Google had collected about him. All in all, Curran found, the corporation had gathered 5.5 GB of data on his life, or the equivalent of more than three million Word documents.
In an article for the Guardian, Curran wrote that within this trove he found “every Google Ad I’ve ever viewed or clicked on, every app I’ve ever launched or used and when I did it, every website I’ve ever visited and what time I did it. They also have every image I’ve ever searched for and saved, every location I’ve ever searched for or clicked on, every news article I’ve ever searched for or read, and every single Google search I’ve made since 2009. And . . . every YouTube video I’ve ever searched for or viewed, since 2008.”
In addition, Curran discovered that Google keeps a detailed record of what events he attends and when he arrives, what photos he takes and when he takes them, what exercises he does and when he does them. And it has kept every email he has ever sent or received, including those he has deleted.
— Barry C. Lynn, "The Big Tech Extortion Racket," Harper's Magazine

The Hypocrisy of Bilious Barr and Pompous Pompeo

American statesmen have breathed a lot of fire over the passage of Hong Kong's draconian, dissent-crushing national-security law. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in particular has been keen to lash out at China, the territory's increasingly overbearing parent-state. Blustering bully Pompeo has claimed that, in passing the law, China's reigning Communist Party "chose to crush the freedoms and autonomy." of Hong Kong's citizens. Doubtless, the legislation is chilling and authoritarian. But in the ever-more autocratic U.S., just how deep does the hypocrisy run? Just last week, it was revealed that William Barr's Justice Department encouraged federal prosecutors to seek sedition charges (max. 20 years jail-time) for violent protestors at racial-justice demonstrations. It is exactly the sort of charge that many activists in Hong Kong are facing for advocating democracy. Pompeo and Barr claim to support dissidents in Hong Kong. But they condemn the very same in their own country. The current administration's rhetoric regarding Hong Kong, it seems, is not about principles. It amounts to little more than political pomp and posture.

Welcome to the Machine

Google "social media is ..." Depending on where you live, your search might return vastly different auto-completed results. Fun. Cool. A way to connect. A waste of time. Bad for you. A bogeyman. Addictive. Dangerous. Destroying democracy. A cancer.
Social media is ubiquitous. And it is facing mounting scrutiny due to the societal harms — disinformation, electoral manipulation, radicalization — which it not only allows but, by design, encourages. Even Netflix is (perhaps not disinterestedly) sounding the alarm on its big-tech peers with its new documentary, "The Social Dilemma."
In the film, tech-industry insiders and outside observers explain social media's greatest inherent evil — its unparalleled capacity to make people depressed, angry, ignorant, and divided — by manipulating real-world behavior in accordance with profit-driven algorithms.
But more than anything, the film argues, social media is addictive. Prof. Edward Tufte: "There are only two industries that call their customers 'users': illegal drugs and software." And that's not by accident. The more you use, the more money social-media companies make.
But how exactly does something free make money? In the end, something must be sold. And that thing is — you. Your attention, tracked and manipulated by countless engineers and sophisticated A.I., is sold to advertisers to the tune of billions. Today's tech companies are among the biggest, richest, most powerful in history. And yet they are almost entirely unregulated.
Social media companies know how to exploit your weaknesses. And they do it without oversight every day, every hour, every minute, every second. It's not a matter of what's good for you — it's a matter of what's good for stockholders' wallets. And as minds are narrowed to pinpoints, conspiracy theories go mainstream, and vitriol is stirred up online, they are only getting fatter. Welcome, citizens of Dystopia, to the machine.

BlackSpot Collective

Today we are 13,000 strong. Tomorrow we will be 100,000. The day after next, we could amass a billion people — enough to spark a world revolution in how we live, love and think.
The Blackspot Collective
Activist wing, Adbusters Media Foundation
ADBUSTERS #151

Find out more about the #WhiteHouseSiege in this landmark issue . . . and be a part of history. It all starts on September 17th.
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Belarus
On Monday, masked men snatched Belarusian opposition figure Maria Kolesnikova off the streets of Minsk, stuffed her into an unmarked minivan, and drove her to the southern border. After arriving around 4am Tuesday morning, she ripped up her passport; as a result, border guards would not allow her to be sent across into Ukraine. Kolesnikova's kidnapping comes off the back of mass gatherings Sunday, when 100,000 marched through the streets of Minsk to President Lukashenko’s residence. Dressed in the nation's pre–Soviet era colors and waving flowers in the air, protestors have been disputing the legitimacy of last month's election for over four weeks. In place of striking journalists at Belarus' state news network, Putin has sent in personnel from Kremlin-funded broadcaster RT to prop up Lukashenko’s brutal regime. Brussels, London, Washington and Ottawa have made tepid calls for the preservation of democracy. The fate of the country hangs in the balance.

Circulating on social media:
"Footage of an Israeli soldier kneeling, George Floyd–style, on the neck of a Palestenian senior protesting in the West Bank."
Read More...

#BLM Street
I sensed then, and this belief would grow as the years went on, that the lifeblood of the movement was not going to be the spokesmen – the schooled, sophisticated, savvy upper crust who might be best at speechmaking and press conferences. They would be the leaders, naturally, but it was going to be the tens of thousands of faceless, nameless, anonymous men, women and children – men like my father, women like my mother, children like the boy I had been – who were going to rise like an irresistible army as this movement for civil rights took shape.
— John Lewis, from his autobiography, Walking with the Wind


David Graeber,
David Graeber, the anarchist intellectual whose early efforts in Zuccotti Park made Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement, died Wednesday. He was 59.
Read More...
#WhiteHouseSiege Tactical Briefing #3

Trump is trying to steal the election . . . it’s got many of us pretty rattled . . . and things could turn very ugly very quickly as November 3rd approaches. Lawyers are already in court, mounting pre-emptive strikes and preparing for the scorched-earth scenarios likely to come.
Meanwhile white supremacists are waiting in the wings, spoiling for a violent showdown.
#WhiteHouseSiege Tactical Briefing #2

Time is short. Shall we rely on William Barr to interpret the law justly, in the interest of all Americans? On the police or military to drag Trump from the White House when he loses? On the grace and civility of the alt-right hordes and white supremacists? Of course not.
By now it’s clear that Trump and his sycophants will do anything to prevent Joe Biden from taking office, including crippling the Postal Service. There is no limit to their cynicism, no end to their corruption.
#WhiteHouseSiege Tactical Briefing #1

It’s been nine years since we set off the political earthquake of #OccupyWallStreet, laying siege to NYC’s Zuccotti Park and inspiring thousands of similar protests around the world.
The Occupy anniversary arrives September 17th, 2020. And it may be the perfect day to trigger another global big-bang moment — a massive collective action of the sweetest kind of disobedience.

You are Stuck.
Dear people of the Adbusters Media Foundation,
We are Afra van den Hoogen, Mila Vuckovic and Nick Verkroost; three first year students of the Audiovisual Media-studies at the University of the Arts in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Last semester we followed a subject about 'culture jamming', for which we created a poster about this subject.

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