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fatehbaz · 1 year

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Kurdish ecology. Indigenous seeds and food heritage. Palestinian edible plant archive. Ezidi foods and reverence for landscapes. The narratives of “exiled foods.” Suryani, Zaza, Kurdish, and Armenian displacement. Okra and mustard greens. Dispossession and native plants in Anatolia and the Mediterranean. Imagining alternative worlds and affirmative care structures. Landscapes breathing in slow, deep time. Seed exchanges and “entanglement of solidarity” across regions in defiance of military surveillance, industrial monoculture, and extraction. “Homeland is not where you were born, it is where you are fed.”

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Okra is strong and can survive the precarity of exile and migration: it can be found in a Bangladeshi vegetable stand in Rome, an Ezidi camp in Diyarbakır, or a guerilla garden along the highway in Kowloon. Okra is one of the world’s oldest cultivated crops, spread by the processes of colonization and the slave trade from Africa and India to the Mediterranean and westward to the new world. Its versatility makes it well suited for states of dispossession and survival. [...] The colonization and standardization of landscapes is always rooted in controlling the cultivation and erasure of localities. [...] Today, the same region [Anatolia and the Mediterranean] is inundated with wars and oppressions that destroy not only biodiversity but also the intangible heritage of ingredients and their narratives across our earth.

“Survival-with” and “through” is something of an entangled kinship that can be described as migrating ingredients, refugee seeds, and exiled foods. Works by artists Seçkin Aydın and Gülsün Karamustafa deal with forced eviction and exile from their homelands in different historical periods in the last century in Anatolia. Aydın is a Zaza minority from an evicted Kurdish town called Kulp (Diyarbakır Province). His work I can’t carry my grandma, i can also not eat her or wear her (2015) uses the metaphor of Aydın’s grandma keeping small fruits in his pocket during their journey of exile when he was a child. [...]

Karamustafa’s work Heimat Ist Wo Mann Isst (1994) depicts three spoons wrapped in an old cloth. The title means “Homeland is not where you were born, it is where you are fed,” which refers to cross-Balkan and Anatolian transnational migration.

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Practices of collecting and archiving heirloom seeds are a form of solidarity and resistance against extractive capitalism and industrialized agriculture. Such projects protect and aim to restore natural habitats and biodiversity. They are critical of dominant monocultural approaches [...]. How can we consider a more-than-human ethics around seed and seed heritage? How can we collect cross-narrative assemblages of seed heritage? [...]

Indigenous phenomenologies are essential for tracing food heritage and the ingredients that are tightly connected to local communities of Zazas, Ezidis, Armenians, Suryanis, Kurds, and others who are continuously exiled by force in the ongoing extracted landscapes of the Tigris. Often with colleagues we find ourselves discussing, for example, the giyayê xerdelê (mustard greens) that can be easily foraged in the hills of Heskîf, a millennia-old archeological heritage site that has almost been destroyed by the nearby Ilisu Dam, which justifies the expropriation of lands from Kurdish villages and from many nomadic shepherds who were forced to leave. Military surveillance of farmers and of the common grazing grounds of Ezidi, Suryani, and Kurdish villages leads to a loss of the network [...].

Kurdish ecology activists Bişar İçli and Zeki Kanay, who were banned from their municipality and their university positions by the Turkish government in 2017, started an agro-ecological solidarity commune in Diyarbakır. They archive, exchange, and create networks of seeds around the Tigris River basin, producing an entanglement of solidarity infrastructure among Kurdish communities against military surveillance and capitalism-led extraction in this region.

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Cineria, an Ezidi village near Batman, Turkey, was nearly emptied out in the 1980s due to conflict in the region between the Kurdish movement and the Turkish state. [...] Soil, stone, rocks, caves, and water are fundamental cosmological elements of Ezidi cultural practice connecting the past, present, and future. Each year the village hosts semi-nomadic Zaza shepherds who migrate from another southeastern Turkish city, Bitlis [...]. The Ezidis accommodate the shepherds for six to seven months in Cineria; both communities communicate using the Kurmanji language. [...]

Long walks through landscapes are a basic practice of Ezidi women, where they learn about the land and the cultivation cycle connected to Ezidi cosmology, which is about keeping and protecting ingredients, seeds, and healthy soil. Honouring nonhuman elements is fundamental to Ezidi cosmology. As Ezidi women walk through the landscape, they tell stories of dispossession, mourn for lost soil and seeds, and whisper continously: “av, agîr, erd, ba, roj.” [...]

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Palestinian geographer Omar Tesdell, who created the Palestinian edible plants archive, tells us that landscapes move in slow, deep time, and that all wild plants, seeds, and healthy soil are our heritages. These heritages will not only support our precarious societies but may create an ethical, responsible entanglement of resilient coexistences for our collective future. [...]

Following an okra plant through narratives, infrastructures, forgotten languages, and entangled exiles is not a metaphor. As artist Jumana Manna writes, we strive toward “imagining alternative/affirmative care structures that remain, within and beyond the current reality, aligned towards plant and human life alike.” Navigating through migrating ingredients, refugee seeds, and exiled foods, we witness and learn about extractive strategies, state-making, and slow violence.

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Text by: Pelin Tan. “Entangled Exiles.” e-flux (journal). Issue 131. November 2022. [Italicized first paragraph/heading added by me.]

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probablyasocialecologist · 1 year

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Today’s unending “War on Terror” flows directly out of imperial policies promulgated in the wake of the energy crisis of the 1970s. For example, in the Carter Doctrine of 1980, famously mild-mannered President Jimmy Carter declared the Persian Gulf to be an area of “vital interest” to US “national security” and stated that the United States would use military force to defend those interests. This imperial ideology has unleashed decades of violent mayhem against people in the oil-producing regions of the world while dealing a devastating blow to efforts to build transnational solidarity against exploitation.

Ashley Dawson, People's Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons

#peoples power #war on terror #energy #fossil fuels #middle east

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gravedangerahead · 6 months

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youtube

On Palestine, G4S, and the Prison-Industrial Complex Speech at SOAS in London

(Angela Davis, December 13, 2013)

Transcript from the book Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

When this event highlighting the importance of boycotting the transnational security corporation G4S was organized, we could not have known that it would coincide with the death and memorialization of Nelson Mandela.

As I reflect on the legacies of struggle we associate with Mandela, I cannot help but recall the struggles that helped to forge the victory of his freedom and thus the arena on which South African apartheid was dismantled. Therefore I remember Ruth First and Joe Slovo, Walter and Albertina Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Oliver Tambo, Chris Hani, and so many others who are no longer with us. In keeping with Mandela’s insistence of always locating himself within a context of collective struggle, it is fitting to evoke the names of a few of his comrades who played pivotal roles in the elimination of apartheid.

While it is moving to witness the unanimous and continued outpouring of praise for Nelson Mandela, it is important to question the meaning of this sanctification. I know that he himself would have insisted on not being elevated, as a single individual, to a secular sainthood, but rather would have always claimed space for his comrades in the struggle and in this way would have seriously challenged the process of sanctification. He was indeed extraordinary, but as an individual he was especially remarkable because he railed against the individualism that would single him out at the expense of those who were always at his side. His profound individuality resided precisely in his critical refusal to embrace the individualism that is such a central ideological component of neoliberalism.

I therefore want to take the opportunity to thank the countless numbers of people here in the UK, including the many then-exiled members of the ANC and the South African Communist Party, who built a powerful and exemplary antiapartheid movement in this country. Having traveled here on numerous occasions during the 1970s and the 1980s to participate in antiapartheid events, I thank the women and men who were as unwavering in their commitment to freedom as was Nelson Mandela. Participation in such solidarity movements here in the UK was as central to my own political formation as were the movements that saved my life.

As I mourn the passing of Nelson Mandela I offer my deep gratitude to all of those who kept the antiapartheid struggle alive for so many decades, for all the decades that it took to finally rid the world of the racism and repression associated with the system of apartheid. And I evoke the spirit of the South African Constitution and its opposition to racism and anti-Semitism as well as to sexism and homophobia.

This is the context within which I join with you once more to intensify campaigns against another regime of apartheid and in solidarity with the struggles of the Palestinian people. As Nelson Mandela said, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

Mandela’s political emergence occurred within the context of an internationalism that always urged us to make connections among freedom struggles, between the Black struggle in the southern United States and the African liberation movements—conducted by the ANC in South Africa, the MPLA in Angola, SWAPO in Namibia, FRELIMO in Mozambique, and PAIGC in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. These international solidarities were not only among people of African descent but with Asian and Latin American struggles as well, including ongoing solidarity with the Cuban revolution and solidarity with the people struggling against US military aggression in Vietnam.

A half-century later we have inherited the legacies of those solidarities—however well or however badly specific struggles may have concluded—as what produced hope and inspiration and helped to create real conditions to move forward.

We are now confronted with the task of assisting our sisters and brothers in Palestine as they battle against Israeli apartheid today. Their struggles have many similarities with those against South African apartheid, one of the most salient being the ideological condemnation of their freedom efforts under the rubric of terrorism. I understand that there is evidence indicating historical collaboration between the CIA and the South African apartheid government—in fact, it appears that it was a CIA agent who gave SA authorities the location of Nelson Mandela’s whereabouts in 1962, leading directly to his capture and imprisonment.

Moreover, it was not until the year 2008—only five years ago—that Mandela’s name was taken off the terrorist watch list, when George W. Bush signed a bill that finally removed him and other members of the ANC from the list. In other words when Mandela visited the US after his release in 1990, and when he later visited as South Africa’s president, he was still on the terrorist list and the requirement that he be banned from the US had to be expressly waived.

The point I am making is that for a very long time, Mandela and his comrades shared the same status as numerous Palestinian leaders and activists today and that just as the US explicitly collaborated with the SA apartheid government, it continues to support the Israeli occupation of Palestine, currently in the form of over $8.5 million a day in military aid. We need to let the Obama administration know that the world knows how deeply the US is implicated in the occupation.

It is an honor to participate in this meeting, especially as one of the members of the International Political Prisoners Committee calling for the freedom of Palestinian political prisoners, recently formed in Cape Town, and also as a member of the jury of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. I would like to thank War on Want for sponsoring this meeting and progressive students, faculty, and workers at SOAS, for making it possible for us to be here this evening.

This evening’s gathering specifically focuses on the importance of expanding the BDS movement—the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement called for by Palestinian civil society—which has been crafted along the lines of the powerful model of the antiapartheid movement with respect to South Africa. While there numerous transnational corporations have been identified as targets of the boycott, Veolia for example, as well as Sodastream, Ahava, Caterpillar, Boeing, Hewlett Packard, and others, we are focusing our attention this evening on G4S.

G4S is especially important because it participates directly and blatantly in the maintenance and reproduction of repressive apparatuses in Palestine—prisons, checkpoints, the apartheid wall, to name only a few examples.

G4S represents the growing insistence on what is called “security” under the neoliberal state and ideologies of security that bolster not only the privatization of security but the privatization of imprisonment, the privatization of warfare, as well as the privatization of health care and education.

G4S is responsible for the repressive treatment of political prisoners inside Israel. Through Addameer, directed by Sahar Francis, we have learned about the terrifying universe of torture and imprisonment which is faced by so many Palestinians but also about their hunger strikes and other forms of resistance.

G4S is the third-largest private corporation in the world—behind Walmart, which is the largest, and Foxconn, the second largest.

On the G4S website, one discovers that the company represents itself as capable of providing protection for a broad range of “people and property,” from rock stars and sports stars to “ensuring that travelers have a safe and pleasant experience in ports and airports around the world to secure detention and escorting of people who are not lawfully entitled to remain in a country.”

“In more ways than you might realize,” the website reads, “G4S is securing your world.” We might add that in more ways that we realize, G4S has insinuated itself into our lives under the guise of security and the security state—from the Palestinian experience of political incarceration and torture to racist technologies of separation and apartheid; from the wall in Israel to prison-like schools in the US and the wall along the US-Mexico border. G4S-Israel has brought sophisticated technologies of control to HaSharon prison, which includes children among its detainees, and Damun prison, which incarcerates women.

Against this backdrop, let us explore the deep involvement of G4S in the global prison-industrial complex. I am not only referring to the fact that the company owns and operates private prisons all over the world, but that it is helping to blur the boundary between schools and jails. In the US schools in poor communities of color are thoroughly entangled with the security state, so much so that sometimes we have a hard time distinguishing between schools and jails. Schools look like jails; schools use the same technologies of detection as jails and they sometimes use the same law enforcement officials. In the US some elementary schools are actually patrolled by armed officers. As a matter of fact, a recent trend among school districts that cannot afford security companies like G4S has been to offer guns and target practice to teachers. I kid you not.

But G4S, whose major proficiencies are related to security, is actually involved in the operation of schools. A website entitled “Great Schools” includes information on Central Pasco Girls Academy in Florida, which is represented as a small alternative public school. If you look at the facilities page of the G4S website you will discover this entry: “Central Pasco Girls Academy serves moderate-risk females, ages 13-18, who have been assessed as needing intensive mental health services.” G4S indicates that they use “gender-responsive services” and that they address sexual abuse and substance abuse, et cetera. While this may sound relatively innocuous, it is actually a striking example of the extent to which security has found its way into the educational system, and thus also of the way education and incarceration have been linked under the sign of capitalist profit. This example also demonstrates that the reach of the prison-industrial complex is far beyond the prison.

This company that provides “security” for numerous agencies as well as rehabilitation services for young girls “at risk” in the United States, while operating private prisons in Europe, Africa, and Australia, also provides equipment and services to Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank along the route of Israel’s apartheid wall as well as to the terminals from which Gaza is kept under continuous siege. G4S also provides goods and services to the Israeli police in the West Bank, while it offers security to private businesses and homes in illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine.

As private prison companies have long recognized, the most profitable sector of the prison-industrial complex is immigrant detention and deportation. In the US, G4S provides transportation for deportees who are being ushered out of the US into Mexico, thus colluding with the increasingly repressive immigration practices inside the US. But it was here in the UK where one of the most egregious acts of repression took place in the course of the transportation of an undocumented person.

When I was in London during the month of October, speaking at Birkbeck School of Law, I spoke to Deborah Coles, codirector of the organization Inquest, about the case of Jimmy Mubenga, who died at the hands of G4S guards in the course of a deportation from the UK to Angola. On a British Airways plane, handcuffed behind his back, Mubenga was forcibly pushed by G4S agents against the seat in front of him in the prohibited “carpet karaoke” hold in order to prevent him from vocalizing his resistance. The use of such a term for a law enforcement hold, albeit illegal, is quite astonishing. It indicates that the person subject to the hold is compelled to “sing into the carpet”—or in the case of Mubenga—into the upholstered seat in front, thus rendering his protests muffled and incomprehensible. As Jimmy Mubenga was held for forty minutes, no one intervened. By the time there was finally an attempt to offer him first aid, he was dead.

This appalling treatment of undocumented immigrants from the UK to the US compels us to make connections with Palestinians who have been transformed into immigrants against their will, indeed into undocumented immigrants on their own ancestral lands. I repeat—on their own land. G4S and similar companies provide the technical means of forcibly transforming Palestinian into immigrants on their own land.

As we know, G4S is involved in the operation of private prisons all over the world. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (CO-SATU) recently spoke out against G4S, which runs the Mangaung Correctional Centre in the Free State. The occasion for their protest was the firing of approximately three hundred members of the police union for staging a strike. According to the COSATU statement:

G4S’s modus operandi is indicative of two of the most worrying aspects of neoliberal capitalism and Israeli apartheid: the ideology of “security” and the increasing privatization of what have been traditionally state run sectors. Security, in this context, does not imply security for everyone, but rather, when one looks at the major clients of G4S Security (banks, governments, corporations etc.) it becomes evident that when G4S says it is “Securing your World,” as the company slogan goes, it is referring to a world of exploitation, repression, occupation and racism.

When I traveled to Palestine two years ago with a delegation of indigenous and women-of-color scholar/activists, it was the first time the members of the delegation had actually visited Palestine. Most of us had been involved for many years in Palestine solidarity work, but we were all thoroughly shocked to discover that the repression associated with Israeli settler colonialism was so evident and so blatant. The Israeli military made no attempt to conceal or even mitigate the character of the violence they inflicted on the Palestinian people.

Gun-carrying military men and women—many extremely young—were everywhere. The wall, the concrete, the razor wire everywhere conveyed the impression that we were in prison. Before Palestinians are even arrested, they are already in prison. One misstep and one can be arrested and hauled off to prison; one can be transferred from an open-air prison to a closed prison.

G4S clearly represents these carceral trajectories that are so obvious in Palestine but that also increasingly characterize the profit-driven moves of transnational corporations associated with the rise of mass incarceration in the US and the world.

On any given day there are almost 2.5 million people in our country’s jails, prisons, and military prisons, as well as in jails in Indian country and immigrant detention centers. It is a daily census, so it doesn’t reflect the numbers of people who go through the system every week or every month or every year. The majority are people of color. The fastest-growing sector consists of women —women of color. Many are queer or trans. As a matter of fact, trans people of color constitute the group most likely to be arrested and imprisoned. Racism provides the fuel for maintenance, reproduction, and expansion of the prison-industrial complex.

And so if we say abolish the prison-industrial complex, as we do, we should also say abolish apartheid, and end the occupation of Palestine!

In the United States when we have described the segregation in occupied Palestine that so clearly mirrors the historical apartheid of racism in the southern United States of America—and especially before Black audiences—the response often is: “Why hasn’t anyone told us about this before? Why hasn’t anyone told us about the segregated highways leading from one settlement to another, about pedestrian segregation regulated by signs in Hebron—not entirely dissimilar from the signs associated with the Jim Crow South. Why hasn’t anyone told us this before?”

Boycott G4S! Support BDS!

Just as we say “never again” with respect to the fascism that produced the Holocaust, we should also say “never again” with respect to apartheid in South Africa, and in the southern US. That means, first and foremost, that we will have to expand and deepen our solidarity with the people of Palestine. People of all genders and sexualities. People inside and outside prison walls, inside and outside the apartheid wall.

Palestine will be free!

Thank you.

#free palestine #palestine #gaza #angela davis #Youtube #Freedom Is A Constant Struggle

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argyrocratie · 2 months

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(...)

"To describe this situation we, the Permanent Assembly Against the War, have spoken of a Third World War. We repeat it. This means not only that the war is spreading, but also that its effects and logics go beyond the spaces where it is fought, affecting also social struggles. Even admitting that a new multipolar world is emerging from this scenario, we do not believe that more and new political managers of the capitalist social order will be favourable for social justice, or that they will renounce the logic of war. On the contrary, an even greater expansion of the logic of war could result.

Even in a multipolar world, we don’t believe that an autonomous antiwar position could emerge when workers struggles and social movements are buried under the weight of geopolitics, or reduced to supporters of authoritarian regimes, confessional political projects, or national politics. As long as we remain passive or take positions in favour of one or the other belligerent side, we are digging our graves with our own hands. It is more urgent than ever to form some clear positions and work collectively for the practice of a transnational politics of peace, finding our resources in the ongoing struggles and manifold acts of refusal which today fuel an expanding and long-lasting opposition to the war.

From the very beginning of the war in Ukraine, we have witnessed the lack of a strong, transnational movement against the war. We have been galvanized, in the first weeks of the Israeli blind revenge and politics of death and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, by the people who protested massively on the streets of the world demanding a ceasefire. This massive and spontaneous opposition to militarist horror is crucial, and, beyond humanitarian sentiments, it expresses a claim for justice voiced by a multitude of subjects, workers, migrants, women and lgbtqi+ people, who do not want to be oppressed and exploited any longer.

Yet, denouncing massacres is not enough if we want to fight against the war and its reproduction. This is why we need to support the claim for freedom for Palestine and the call for an immediate ceasefire by strengthening our transnational connections. We shouldn’t perceive the atrocities committed by the IDF in Gaza as a mere continuation of the 75 years of occupation, nor the ones committed during the Hamas’ attacks as an inevitable continuation of the Palestinian Resistance. The Third world war scenario connects Palestine, Ukraine, Yemen, and is more than the mere sum of many local wars: it is reshaping what is happening in Palestine beyond the history of a long-lasting experience of colonial oppression.

It is up to us to reshape also our solidarity with Israeli war resisters and the Palestinians who are killed, exploited and oppressed, as part of a stronger, transnational opposition to the war, fuelled by the force of collective struggles against racism, exploitation, and patriarchy which could not be reduced to nationalist claims, State politics or authoritarian religious projects.

(...)

A shift towards the right is also happening at the other end of the political spectrum: ”democratic”’ forces embrace militarism as an unavoidable choice while pushing for racist policies in the name of national security; as authoritarian and oppressive regimes present themselves as leaders of an emerging “multipolar” world, sections of the left advocate that tyrannical, authoritarian, and reactionary forces and regimes represent a progressive resistance to “Western imperialism”. Many of those who one year ago supported Iranian women shouting “Woman, Life, Freedom” are now supporting the so-called Axis of Resistance, thus legitimising a political Islam which is not a rival of capitalism and makes patriarchy a foundation of its projects.

Nationalism ends up being the language of those who fight for the end of oppression, whether this oppression is represented by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, by the West, or by the unbearable ethnic cleansing of the Israeli State against Palestinians. We take a firm stand against people being exploited and oppressed because of their nationality, since we know that all nationalisms are exclusionary and oppressive. For building a transnational politics of peace, we must confront all these contradictions: as Iranian feminists clearly stated, we will not pursue a collective liberation by choosing between national fronts, we refuse that our only chance is that to choose between the “bad and the worse”. A transnational politics of peace begins by refusing the imposition of belligerent fronts as part of the war logic, and to organize our side: together with workers, women and queer people, migrants who are challenging that logic beyond the war fronts.

As we clearly stated right after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war is limiting our possibilities of struggle, deploying its consequences beyond the horror of the battlefields. Movements for climate justice are increasingly repressed; war and militarism reinforce patriarchy and patriarchal societies reinforce a culture where violence against women and Lgbtq* persons are normalised. The ordinary disagreements of the European Union disappear when the war on migrants is to be fought. To practice a transnational politics of peace, we need to recognize that the war on workers, the war on women, the war on migrants are not side-effects but rather the everyday reality of the ongoing world war, which we must fight back.

This is why on February 24th, we will organise an on-line public meeting where voices from the different fronts of war can speak against the war, but also voices of those who, aware of its consequences, have taken a stance against the war. Together with class struggle organisations and social movements, together with war resisters and deserters from the various war fronts, together with feminists, migrants, precarious workers and environmental activists we aim to create an autonomous anti-war movement against the capitalist machine of death and despair. This event will hopefully also serve as a bridge towards the mobilization of March 8th, when we need to support the speaking out against the war in all the initiatives that are going to take place. We express our solidarity with our comrades in Kazakhstan, where the protests for March 8 have been prohibited."

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ot3 · 4 months

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for the ask game, 20 and 25!

20. What’s something you learned this year?

this year i learned about the existence of the tupamaros, a leftist guerilla group in uruguay that former president jose mujica used to be a part of. i havent dug into it yet but i nabbed a pdf of 'becoming the tupamaros - solidarity and transnational revolutionaries in uruguay and the united states' by lindsey churchill because it sounded super interesting.

25. Did you create any characters (in games, art, or writing) this year? Describe one

not really... i'm not an oc person for the most part. i enjoy character analysis but i often feel like im fundamentally incapable of Making Up A Guy that's anything more than just a cardboard cutout. maybe someday.

#ask meme

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years

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The horrifying tale of a blockchain-based virtual sweatshop

In 2004, my wife came home from the Game Developers Conference with a wild story. A presenter there claimed that he had set up a sweatshop on the US/Mexican border where he paid low-wage workers to do repetitive tasks in Everquest to amass virtual gold, which was sold on Ebay to lazier, richer players

The presenter was a well-known bullshitter and people were skeptical at the time, but my imagination was fired. I sat down at my keyboard and wrote “Anda’s Game,” a story about “gold farmers” who form an in-game, transnational trade-union under their bosses’ noses:

https://www.salon.com/2004/11/15/andas_game/

“Anda’s Game” was a surprise hit. It got reprinted in the year’s Best American Short Stories, won a bunch of awards, and Jen Wang and Firstsecond turned it into the NYT bestselling graphic novel “In Real Life”:

https://firstsecondbooks.com/books/new-book-in-real-life-by-cory-doctorow-and-jen-wang/

Then, in 2010, I adapted the story into For the Win, a YA novel about gold farming and global trade unions (led by the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, AKA IWWW, AKA Webblies):

https://craphound.com/category/ftw/

There’s an old cyberpunk writers’ joke that “cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion.” Alas, my parable-like stories about how digital technology enables the creation of new, high-tech sweatshops that arbitrage weak labor protections in the global south to worsen working conditions everywhere embodied the punchline to that cyberpunk joke. Over and over, these stories became touchstones for all kinds of global, digital labor exploitation and global, digital labor solidarity.

But sometimes, the stories don’t merely analogize to describe current situations — they end up very on-the-nose. Nowhere is that more true than with the blockchain-based, play-to-earn, NFT-infected gaming world, whose standard-bearer is the scandal-haunted Axie Infinity.

This week, my mentions have been full of “Don’t create the Torment Nexus” jokes referencing Neirin Gray Desai’s outstanding Rest of World story on the rise and implosion of the “play-to-earn” Minecraft/blockchain game Critterz:

https://restofworld.org/2022/minecraft-nft-ban-critterz/

Critterz was yet another one of those blockchain games, but they made a fatal mistake: they built their virtual sweatshop on Minecraft, whose parent company, Mojang (a subsidiary of Microsoft), banned NFT integration, stating: “blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our Minecraft client and server applications nor may they be utilized to create NFTs associated with any in-game content, including worlds, skins, personal items, or other mods.”

Very quickly, the in-game money issued by Critterz tanked, and players — both the poor people who actually played the game, and the rich people who bought the treasures they earned from them — ran for the exits.

Even without Minecraft’s ban on NFTs, play-to-earn is in serious trouble. As the sector seeks a new lifeline, some wild ideas are emerging, straight out of the Torment Nexus. For example, Desai talked to Mikhai Kossar, who consults on NFT games. Kossar proposed that the future of play-to-earn might be poor people pretending to be non-player characters to give richness to the in-game experience of wealthy people. They could “just populate the world, maybe do a random job or just walk back and forth, fishing, telling stories, a shopkeeper, anything is really possible.”

There’s another tech joke, that “AI” stands for “Absent Indians” — the gag being that the “AIs” you interact with in the world are actually low-waged Indian workers pretending to be bots.

Once again — and I honestly can’t believe I have to say this — that joke is a warning, not a suggestion.

Image: Jen Wang (modified) Critterz (modified)

[Image ID: A panel from the graphic novel 'In Real Life' in which Anda and Raymond are having a union organizing talk; the background of the panel has been replaced with a screengrab from the Critterz Minecraft world.]

#pluralistic

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toadstool-records · 6 months

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For Palestine is a collection of recordings from 53 artists in solidarity with Palestinian liberation.

100% of donations of For Palestine will support Palestinian organizing efforts worldwide and relief in Gaza, splitting between the Palestinian Youth Movement — a transnational grassroots and independent movement of Palestinian and Arab youth struggling toward the liberation of Palestine, and Anera’s rapid response relief aid: distributing hygiene kits, food, and blood donations in Gaza. Read More about Anera's efforts here.

Organized by GUNK (@hanapruz and @cecilianarose).

substack.com/@gunkyard

Photograph taken by Felix Walworth.

Incredibly proud to have some Toadstool Records artists be a part of this compilation ˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

🇵🇸 🍉

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rf-times · 1 year

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Hello, I'd like to share with you this article I read about imperialist feminism.

https://redsails.org/imperialist-feminism/

You're one of the only radical feminists out here who speak out against imperialism so I thought this might be of interest to you. It touches on a lot of things like criticizing “Beauty without Borders” campaign in Afghanistan and also about how Iraqi women were forced into prostitution due to US imperialism and many other such things.

I hope you enjoy reading this and sorry if you already read this before. Thanks!

Thank you for this brilliant article, I hadn't seen it before! Sorry for the very delayed response: this is very insightful and highlights the exact issues that come with an imperialist feminism: I recommend everyone has a read of it as it an angle that is rarely addressed here on tumblr. I especially think the analysis of NGOs is very pertinent. And a very good outline of colonial feminism, how it is cannibalising and an acknowledgement of how women in imperial centres have leveraged imperialism believing it to empower them and other women without denouncing feminism as a whole.

"The question we might ask is why this campaign is called “India’s Daughter” rather than “America’s Daughter” or “The American Problem” because, after all, not only is sexual violence against women a massive issue in this country but also, around the same time as the Delhi rape, in Steubenville, Ohio, a sixteen-year-old girl was gang raped and sexually assaulted by a group of men. Why didn’t this case become the focus of a documentary and global campaign?"

"the message is that rape, sexual violence, and other forms of female oppression take place elsewhere: in the Global South, in cultures that the West considers backward and barbaric, and not only is it not a problem here, but it the responsibility of women in the West to wage a moral crusade to rescue their Brown and Black sisters. This then is the logic of imperialist feminism in the twenty-first century, shaped by the deeply racist framework of the “clash of civilizations,” which is based on the idea that the West is a superior culture because it believes in democracy, human rights, secularism, women’s rights, gay rights, freedom of speech, and a whole host of other liberal values, whereas the Global South is barbaric, misogynistic, driven by religion, and illiberal. From this follows the “white man’s burden” and the “white woman’s burden” to intervene through any means necessary, including wars of colonization, to “liberate” less fortunate women in other parts of the world."

"It is not enough to simply talk about rape culture and misogyny here and “backward cultures” there, but instead to ground our analysis of sexual violence within the structural context of neoliberal capitalism and the ways in which it is restructuring people’s lives in various locations in the twenty-first century. When our feminism is based in an anticapitalist and anti-imperialist politics, we have a real basis for solidarity, one, moreover, that is rooted in material interests rather than morality and charity. At the end of the day, it is not beauty campaigns that are going to liberate women but their own self-activity and a politics of transnational solidarity based on a rejection of neoliberalism and empire."

More of my favourite passages from this essay to come!

#feminism #radical feminism #racism #imperialism

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