May Day - The Art of the Prank

Alright you wild cats, nimble dreamers and jammer tacticians,

In a sudden about-face, the United States has conceded a victory to Occupy and moved May”™s G8 summit to Camp David, an impenetrable military base in rural Maryland. Wow! Looks like the specter of 50,000 occupiers ready to swarm with a list of demands has turned the climactic Showdown in Chicago into a humiliating G8 Backdown. Bravo! Splitting the G8 and NATO summits was a deft move”¦ but now we”™ve got a major tactical rethink on our hands.

Continue reading “Adbusters Calls for May 18 Global #LaughRiot”

Occupy pop culture: A lesson in détournement
by Natasha Lennard
Salon.com
March 8, 2012

Borrowing from the French, occupiers turn figures from the cultural mainstream into symbols of dissent

Credit: nycgeneralstrike

TV-show writers, pop culture purveyors and peddlers of general stuff-we-don”™t-need didn”™t take long to latch onto the Occupy brand. The language of the 99 percent is popping up in sitcoms and terrible pop songs; the word “Occupy” now adorns a neon green Swatch. It”™s probably beside the point to mention that revolutionaries in Egypt and Greece are fighting on without the help of branded watches; this is America, after all “” what did you expect?

But Occupy supporters are taking from pop culture too. Not in the obvious sense of message amplification and popularization, but by helping themselves to items from the cultural mainstream and flipping them on their heads for propaganda purposes. To see what I mean, check out this video attributed to “nycgeneralstrike”:

Continue reading “Occupy Détournement”