Carnivalesque Rebellion

Tactical Briefing #1 from ADBUSTERS:

Between November 22-28 the whole world will light up with seven days of Carnivalesque Rebellion!

Think of it as an adventure, as therapy, as Buy Nothing Day times a hundred … think of it as the World Cup of global activism – a week of postering and pranks, of talking back at your profs and speaking truth to power. Some of us will poster our schools and neighborhoods and just break our daily routines for a week. Others will chant, cut up their credit cards in big box stores and pull off theatrical stunts that provoke mass cognitive dissonance. Others still will drop stink bombs in strategic locations and engage in the most visceral kind of civil disobedience.

In all, millions of people around the world will walk out of their schools, offices and factories for a week and live!

To pull this off, we need to learn from the failures of the recent G8/G20 protests. A few sensational and spectacular acts of violence (police cars on fire, window smashing) will not provoke the kind of global mindshift that our world so desperately needs. And neither will sitting at home yelling at our screens. If our Seven Days of Carnivalesque Rebellion are to succeed we’ll need a plethora of actions that cannot be dismissed as petty acts of vandalism, that genuinely challenge the power of megacorporations, that make people think about the climate tipping points now descending upon us and that highlight the perversity of a system that has brought us to the zero point of systemic collapse.

What would you do if you could mobilize thousands of connected protesters in cities all over the world? Send your best ideas for coordinated acts of civil disobedience to memewarriors@adbusters.org and we’ll share the most compelling ones in subsequent briefs.

To get the ball rolling here’s a personal plunge you may want to take right away: Vow never to walk into a Starbucks ever again. Instead, search out the most interesting indie coffee shop around where you live and work … get to know the people who own and run the place and get your friends and co-workers to join you there. Individually this may feel like a drop in the bucket, but if all the 86,000 of us in this network do it collectively, then we can begin to shift power from megacorporations to our friends and neighbors.

This little shift in our lives is a good way to get in the mood … and during the week of rebellion in November, these indie coffee houses will become our meeting places and bases.

Step 1 - are you willing? Down where I was vacationing, not a Starbucks in sight. A Dunkin Donuts but also enough places to "keep it local."