I remember when the call to “be green” had some revolutionary potential: it served as a rallying point for those of us who felt that corporations were trashing our planet in favor of short-term profits. By demanding that corporations go green, we hoped to draw attention to the long-term consequences an economic model based on infinite growth had on our planet’s finite resources. Although “being green” was never clearly defined, it had something to do with acting in accordance with nature. The implicit argument was that the current way of doing business was essentially not green. Looking around at advertisements today, however, I notice that the corporations who claim to be the most “green” are the same ones that we hoped the environmental movement would defeat: oil companies, large-scale developers and warehouse-size shopping centers.

The other day I passed a huge fleet of machines cutting down trees and digging a massive hole in the ground. Before I could even start to think about the physical destruction of the natural environment, I saw a sign explaining that this was actually “Green Construction.” I felt comforted for a moment and then I realized that I had been tricked: there is nothing green about construction. There are two competing visions of what it means to be green: the original meaning and the appropriated meaning.

The original vision of “green” was that it would represent a cultural and economic shift – a point from which the future would look drastically different from the past. To imagine a green future was to imagine a world that did not resemble our own because we had, as a civilization, turned away from the path of industrialization. The second, more contemporary, meaning of being green is the one appropriated by the mega-corporations. According to this definition, anything permitting the continued, linear progress of industrialization is green. For corporations, any system that will enable humanity to continue to consume and ravish the earth forever is considered green. This definition creates the oxymoronic and paradoxical situation we have today: the top global polluters claim to be green.

We wanted a revolution but corporations want more of the same. So how is it that the green movement was so easily appropriated? My suspicion is that the appropriation of the green movement represents the death of traditional environmentalism. It demonstrates that concern over the desecration of our physical environment is important but not primary.

Advertisers appropriate every revolutionary idea and use them against us. We ask for a “greener” world and we get million-dollar ad campaigns calling our dying world green. As long as corporations are able to lie to us through glitzy advertisements, our desires for change will always be in vain. Only a movement for a clean mental environment, one that silences corporate communication, can give us the intellectual clarity to address the environmental problems that face us as a species.

Let’s clean up the info-toxins polluting our worldview and then stop the physical-toxins poisoning our world.

Micah White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters and an independent activist. He is writing a book on the future of activism. www.micahmwhite.com or micah (at) adbusters.org

As air strikes and rocket fire rained down on the Gaza Strip and southern Israel last December, a different kind of battle was set off on this side of the Atlantic. These combatants, armed with words in the place of weapons, wield rhetoric fraught with political baggage to burnish their arguments and discredit those of their rivals.

Likening Israeli control over Palestinian territory to the conditions found in South Africa under apartheid has become increasingly widespread, and student campaigns calling for divestment from companies that supply and support Israel are popping up at academic institutions. And last month, over 40 cities worldwide reportedly held events commemorating the fifth annual "Israeli Apartheid Week."

Using the word "apartheid" is controversial, but that's the point. Jimmy Carter used it in his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu has long compared the plight of Palestinians to that of black South Africans under the notorious regime.

"Language can be used in a political context just as it can in a marketing context," says Burt Alper, strategy director of Catchword Branding in Oakland, CA. Political branding, with its use (and misuse) of language and spin - once the purview of advertising - has now migrated to activism.

The goal of both advocates and critics of Israeli policy is to "get people out of the fog," Alper says. "When you use a loaded term, you are encouraging people who are in the middle to not just take a stance but take a stance against conventional wisdom, which tells us in this case in the US that Israel is the victim."

Comparisons, however, are seldom clear-cut: Arabs in Israel, for example, can vote and hold seats in parliament – unthinkable achievements for blacks living under South Africa's apartheid regime. Yet just as '70s-era laws in the US mandating police officers to meet certain height and weight requirements were not overtly sexist but excluded women in practice, realities on the ground reflect stark distinctions between Jewish and Arab counterparts.

If it is technically inaccurate, employing the word "apartheid" could be self-defeating, warns Johan D. van der Vyver, a South African-born professor of International Law and Human Rights at Emory University in Atlanta. "There is a political stigma attached to this word comfortably recognized in international law as a crime against humanity," he says, and it could turn people off instead of luring them to join the cause. Carter's use of the word may have even been detrimental to his message, as attention focused more on his terminology rather than the book's content.

The rhetorical battle has also manifested into action. A student group at Hampshire College in Massachusetts made headlines in February when it claimed victory in getting the school's board of trustees to change its investment policy in companies – such as Caterpillar, Motorola and General Electric – that the group identified to directly or indirectly "contribute and support Israel's military occupation."

While school officials quickly fired back that the divestment decision "was not made in reference to Israel," the students received a flood of requests from other universities across the country to help launch similar campaigns. In 1977, Hampshire College became the first institution of higher education in the US to divest from South Africa, and the group hopes its actions – or at least the publicity it produced – will set forth such a precedent again.

Comparing the Israeli government to the South African apartheid regime is "one sided anti-Israel propaganda," says Roz Rothstein, International Director of StandWithUs, a pro-Israel organization based in California. Others argue that it is unfair to single out one country when atrocities are committed everyday by a multitude of governments.

Divestment, the extraction of investments from one entity in order to pursue profits elsewhere, is at its core a neutral business term. Apartheid literally means separateness in Afrikaans. While these words may have signified little to the American public before 1948, they now hark back to the legally sanctioned and deliberate institutionalized racism that ruled South Africa for decades.

Divestment campaigns may end up doing little to change policy anyway; "If you boil it down, divestment campaigns occur because they make people feel good," says Usha C.V. Haley, a divestment expert and Asia Programs Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Though they are widely praised as dismantling the South African apartheid regime, Haley's survey of 322 American companies operating in South Africa over seven years found that most companies left the country because of a direct hit to their earnings – not political pressure. "Sanctions and boycotts unfortunately take a shot-gun approach to influencing multinationals," she says. "But it takes the ability to wield a scalpel to affect [their] profits directly." Economic tactics will not likely have an effect of influencing operations in Israel, she contends. "They will instead deflect the opposition to some symbolic measures and continue as before."

Whether the situation on the ground in Israel and Palestine reflects that of South Africa under apartheid will likely remain a point of contention for years to come. Ultimately, to what degree the divestment campaigns economically impact Israel and the companies that support it may be less important than what the labels of this conflict are able to produce in the minds of the American public and international community. If the rebranding attempts are successful, half the battle may already have been won.

Esmé E. Deprez is a New York-based journalist with a passion for covering foreign policy, business and politics, www.esmedeprez.com.

The trouble with abstract thought is that the concepts we play with in our minds often become preferred to the real upon which these concepts were originally based. As soon as we draw a picture, or take a photograph, of a bird we often no longer care whether the bird continues to exist. The picture is, in our visual society, superior to the chirping bird. This trait of our world-view leads to a despairing and paradoxical situation where our cultural storehouse of symbols, imagery, art and concepts increases in direct proportion to the death of our planet, living beings, other world views, beautiful landscapes, etc. It is for this reason that we should reject the Kindle and hope for its failure: the Kindle ultimately tends toward making books superfluous and replacing them with the mere appearance of books. The Kindle is not a book. It is instead a machine mimicking the external traits of a book while destroying the essence of the book: the trace of the author, the community of readers and the call to deep, meditative reflection.

There are many different levels on which to attack the Kindle. One tactic, which is always bound to failure, is to say that the Kindle is not good enough. This argument generally accepts the premise of the Kindle but argues that for whatever technical reason, the Kindle is a bad product. This is the worst kind of argument to make because it clears the way for Kindle to go through several new iterations, each step taking it closer to "technical perfection" and making these arguments absurd. Instead, we must reject the Kindle even if it manages to overcome all the technical objections to its use.

Instead, I propose three arguments that try to strike the essence of the Kindle. The underlying principle of each position is that the Kindle is not a book, that it is instead a computer that displays text in a (ostensibly) readable manner. It may seem absurd to point this out, but let's define our terms once again: the Kindle is a text-displaying computer that uses electricity; a book is a series of physical pages bound together and covered in permanent ink which requires no energy to display. Now we may proceed to the three arguments against Kindle.

Argument one: The Kindle destroys the trace of the author. After the death of the individual author, books continue to live. They carry the trace of the authors life and thoughts on the page and show this trace through the physical existence of the book. If you hunt for books in bookstores instead of libraries, you may not realize that every age has bound its books differently, used different papers and inks and decorated the page in various ways. The materiality of the book gives us a taste of the author and the time when the book was made. Each book is different and an avid reader can often remember the color of their favorite book or the feel of its pages. The Kindle destroys this because it divorces the text from the book. It displays every book the same. While the text on the screen may changes the physical object in one's hands stays the same. This has some troubling consequences for our relationship to the author's words because what the Kindle really displays is one long book -- simply a long stream of endless, digitized words.

Argument two: the Kindle destroys the community of readers which books engender. The Kindle has been devised by a society that wants to make profit each time a text is read rather than each time a book is purchased. In the old system, once I bought a book I owned it as an object. I could read it as many times as I liked and give it to friends who may give it to their friends. That is the basis behind public libraries, we all share books because we understand that there are more books we'd like to read than we'd ever be able to afford to read. This creates a community of readers who circulate books amongst themselves for the benefit of all. The Kindle is the end of that, no more sharing books, no more public libraries, no more sitting in a bookstore and reading a book without buying it. The Kindle is a prison for words.

Argument three: the Kindle denies the call to deep, meditative reflection. Books have a magic power in that they can draw us into the world of the author and make time pass quickly while we are immersed in the text. The book is the ideal format for presenting complicated, philosophical arguments that require the reader to pause between paragraphs and reflect. The Kindle is the opposite -- it is merely a television for reading text, a computer that will distract us. Furthermore, the adoption of the Kindle will destroy the culture of reading that sets aside sacred places for study: libraries. The Kindle makes these special places unnecessary because it argues that the library will be carried in our pocket. But with the loss of quiet study places for the public will come the loss of the public's capacity for quiet study. This is why some commentators have already reflected that the Kindle is best for trashy novels. But if the Kindle becomes widespread, all we will have is trashy novels.

I present these three arguments in honor of Digital Detox Week. I will post no more blogs this week but instead hope that you have a great seven days offline.

Micah White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters magazine and an independent activist. He is writing a book on the future of activism. www.micahmwhite.com or micah (at) adbusters.org

The battle between online pirates and corporations is heating up. In the last few days both sides have had significant victories. The pirates have proven yet again that they have guts after a version of the newest X-Men film was released onto The Piratebay, the world's largest pirate website, before it was released in the theatres. But the corporations are fighting back in States such as France and Sweden which have passed laws that will, if unopposed, inaugurate the death of the internet dream. No longer a wild frontier, unsettled and open to future possibilities, the fight against online piracy is justifying increasingly draconian measures that will put our online behavior under the corporate-capitalist microscope. Under the pretense of monitoring whether we are downloading pirated culture, corporations have engineered a symbolic coup in which the spirit of the internet has become inverted. The capitalist bullies are taking back the playground, unless we fight back. The only way forward, toward the original dream of censorship-free communication, is to build mainstream support for online piracy based on the argument that piracy is a litmus test for authentic culture.

The French plan to lock down the Internet involves, predictably, collusion between the State and corporations. According to the New York Times, "The law empowers music and film industry associations to hire companies to analyze the downloads of individual users to detect piracy, and to report violations to a new agency overseeing copyright protection. The agency would be authorized to trace the illegal downloads back to individuals using the downloading computer’s unique identification number, known as its Internet Protocol, or IP, address, which the Internet service providers have on record." In other words, all French internet traffic will be turned over to private corporations who will sift through every website visited, email read, and late-night IM conversation had looking for "illegal downloading". If a user is caught three times, then their internet connection is disconnected, permanently. Such an audacious internet surveillance scheme would probably not have passed had it not targeted an activity few of us are willing to stand up and publicly endorse. That is precisely the reason we must do so: if online piracy is the backdoor by which control of the internet will come, then we must openly acknowledge what many of us already secretly believe -- that online culture should be free and remixable, the laws of capitalism shall not apply here.

Piracy... the word sends shivers up the spine as it evokes hungry Somali pirates seizing cargo and holding hostages. But online piracy is not the same, to make a copy is not a depletion, but a multiplication of the original. Online piracy, we should really call it online replication, is a beautiful thing for it offers an easy litmus test for authentic culture. Take, for example, two hypothetical films: one made by struggling idealistic art students and the other by a big name director backed by a major studio with a multimillion dollar budget and nationwide advertising campaign. If each film was pirated and watched by a million people we could reasonably expect that the film students would be ecstatic (without an advertising budget their film would have been doomed to the art house circuit) while the big name director would be furious. Why? Because the film students are doing it for art while the director is doing it for the money. This is, in simple terms, what I believe the political potential of piracy to be -- piracy allows us to quickly ascertain the authenticity of a cultural product. Roughly, we could say that an authentic cultural production would be one that does not suffer from piracy because the artistic goal is in line with remix culture. Let us endorse the artists who support piracy and pirate the ones who don't. In this way we will be helping authentic culture while destroying inauthentic, capitalist culture.

There is no swifter way to bring about the de-commercialization of art than to undercut the profit motive. Likewise, there is no better way to promote a blackspot culture than to actively copy and distribute the cultural productions that speak to us and the future we'd like to build. If we pirate everything, how will the artists get paid? That is precisely the point: piracy opens up the possibility of imagining new ways of being and new ways of supporting the potential of art to change the world.

Micah White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters magazine and an independent activist. He is writing a book on the future of activism. www.micahmwhite.com

Attention: What does the blackspot mean to you? If you have something to share that will further the blackspot philosophy, write it up in under 300 words and send it to micah (at) adbusters.org.