10 years after June 18

It’s worth pointing out that today it’s a decade ago that the international protests dubbed J18 against the G8 meeting in Cologne took place in many cities around the world.
I was in London at the time for the protest there, organised by Reclaim The Streets, which was a pivotal point in the development of a possible revolutionary movement in the UK. What seemed to be a peak and the start of something new would soon decline and be suppressed. [Read more →]

The rise and repression of the free festival movement in the UK and some intersections with radical anti-politics.

This article is based on a series of talks held in Basel, Berlin, Graz and Rome in 2007, and has been revised for this issue of datacide.
It doesn’t attempt to present a definitive history, but follow some tracks of contamination and inspiration. Some readers will already be familiar with some of the described historical frames, others not at all. It was written in a way that should be accessible without prior knowledge in terms of the facts and factoids, but under the assumption of an understanding of the validity of counter cultures as possible antitheses to the capitalist culture industry.
It also leaves out many other strains that contributed to this antagonism, such as left communism, surrealism, lettrism, the situationists, communes, sexpol, anti-psychiatry, neoism etc, as it focusses on the festival.

“The festival is apt to end frantically in an orgy, a nocturnal debauch of sound and movement transformed into rhytm and dance by the crudest of instruments.” (Roger Caillois, 1938)
[Read more →]

RTS NYC began under the auspices of a giant iron hand- disembodied and reaching out blindly from the side of a hulking office building at union square- and a huge digital clock laid out like a racetrack across the same building, with green numbers that were increasing exponentially; at 2 pm the crowd was gathering, swelling closer to a critical mass. having anticipated a movement south towards the village, a heavy contingency of nypd thugs had taken up glaring positions along 14th street. i would have loved to see their faces once RTS whistles started blowing and the crowd turned north instead and poured down into the union square subway station, where a smiling girl handed out free tokens at the turnstile. thanks to the mta, party-goers, protesters, and assorted culture-jammers were transported quickly and (relatively) coplessly uptown, to that center of fucking consumer culture, TIMES SQUARE.
[Read more →]