17th of January 2016

.... Back to 2008...

The post it note campaign was certainly a lot of fun.  We jumped from station to station sticking 'There are too many cameras' by every cctv camera we saw, and lining tube train windows with excerpts of Nineteen Eighty Four.  The correlation between the book and our modern times is well worn these days but back then it felt like a truly radical move.  This was also the time before Facebook became our most shared public space. 

Since then we do all our radical thinking in safe little circles of online friends who we know already agree with us.  One of my problems with online activism is that you have to know it exists before you can find it.  Street activism on the other hand presents new ideas to people who may not have thought about those things before.

Although hardly paradigm changing, my hope was that the post it note action would wake the people of London up so that they could see the invisible bars that kept us enslaved by comfort and consumerism and begin a revolution.

Nowadays, I've given up this idea of waking other people up.  At some point I realised - people DO know - there is no way they cannot. But for what ever reason, through their beliefs, their investment in the system or simply fear, they are not interested in looking outside of the giant cardboard box.  Some people just can't stand to be wrong.  Its too painful to have invested ones entire life to something that is designed to serve a system designed to exploit you and then to admit that you never really were in charge of your own life. 
Instead of waking people up, now I use my energy to mostly find 'The Others'.

In this day and age its easy to find what Neil Kramer calls 'The Others'. An online search will find you a multitude of people who agree with your point of view- whatever that may be.  But what is harder is to find evidence of alternative thinking in the 'real world'.  Even though the internet is part of our world I can't help but feel it still has a separate existence from the rest of social discourse.  Things that are said on the internet, perhaps not surprisingly, have a transient, impermanence feeling about them and tend to merge into the unending mass of information. Nothing is significant because everything is significant.  Yet, when we see information in solid for, through posters, or newspapers, it has a deeper sense of real, of being solid, that makes it more profound.

Some people revel in the 'freedom' the internet gives us to communicate with lots of people at the same time from the comfort of their own homes.  However, for me, there is nothing like meeting up face to face with fellow thinkers, poets and activists and sharing energy and breath with real people...