The Army of the Republic by Stuart Archer Cohen is one of those rare books that should be on the shelf of every activist. Cohen tells the story of an insurrection in the United States through the eyes of a militant, a corporate CEO and a nonviolent protest organizer. The Army of the Republic is a powerful imagining of what might have happened if the activists at the WTO in Seattle 1999 had been backed up by armed insurrectionaries. And while the book does not shy away from exploring the allure of violence and its potential positive use, Cohen also asks his readers to reflect on the deep, ethical dilemmas that come with insurrection.

One of the best contemporary novels about activism published in years, The Army of the Republic explores the limits of violence and the potential for insurrection. While ultimately Cohen personally embraces the nonviolent protest model for social change, his book leaves the debate open.

Cohen spoke about his book and the ethical dilemmas of violence in a recent interview with Adbusters contributing editor Micah White.

ADBUSTERS: What has been the reception to your book?

STUART COHEN: It has been very mixed. A review in the New York Times really pissed on it. And to me it seemed like the reviewer willfully misread the book. On the other hand, the community that has been most supportive has been the libertarian community. I think the book angers people and makes them uncomfortable because it is close to what has been happening.

I’d say generally that a lot of people are made uncomfortable by the fact that the urban guerrillas in the book are not portrayed as monsters or terrorists but rather as people who are responding to a situation. It’s been accused of romanticizing terrorism and that sort of thing.

AB: It seems to me that your book is one of the first to seriously consider the idea that an insurgent movement could play a positive political role because it forms a fringe that empowers the mainstream movement. Do you think insurgents in America could play a positive role?

SC: That was one of the questions that I set out to answer when I started the book because I had seen a lot of insurgencies in Latin America. I wondered, “Well, is it ever justified to kill the corner policeman to make a better world?”

I would say that the fringes define what the middle is. I don’t think that violent resistance can be controlled or that you can control the reaction to it. And it is usually more negative. Usually there is a more peaceful way to get things done. But I don’t think the urban guerrillas in the book are completely wrong either. It is a gray area. Measured on the whole it usually brings much more misery than it’s worth. And I think you can tell from the book that my position is that activism – that middle way – is important.

It is a tough question and I haven’t completely decided.

Is there a role for insurgents? Oh gosh … I’d say only in a really, really extreme situation and I’m not sure that the one in the book really merits the violence of the insurgents. I think in the book there is still a space for civil resistance to operate. And I think in the book the insurgents provide an excuse for the regime to become equally violent.

But there is a point where you feel like you must act. When they assassinate businessman John Polling in the beginning of the book, it is great. But by the end of the book the insurgents are abducting people and killing the people’s children by accident. And that is invariably what ends up happening, no matter how careful you are.

AB: It seems to me that your book tries to redeem protest movements of their post 9/11 failures. And the primary argument of the book appears to be that only a mass movement can achieve the change that we want.

SC: Yes, definitely. What happens is that extremist groups like the urban guerrillas in the book are invariably painted as terrorists by the mainstream media, which is in essence state media. And so they always lose the battle of the story. And that is what happens with all the urban guerrilla groups in the book. So what happens is that they typically get more and more separated from the mass movements.

The guerrilla groups I studied the most were in Argentina: the Montoneros and the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo. And I interviewed some of those people and read their autobiographies and biographies. These groups always start out trying to organize people and then repression forces them to become violent because their ability to organize gets pushed underground when the government comes down on them. They become violent when they are not able to exercise their rights.

But once you go underground you no longer have contact with the mass movement: the people in the factories, in the streets and so on. It becomes harder to maintain that contact so that you think you are fighting for the People, with a capital P, but you become cut off from those people. That is what happens with the urban guerrillas in the book.

I think it is the mass movements, finally, that make the gains.

AB: Do you feel optimistic that protests can become effective again?

SC: Yes, I do. Not every protest is going to be successful. The protest I studied the most for the book was the Battle of Seattle, WTO 1999. I talked to some of the organizers and read a lot about it. That protest was successful because they were using strategies that had been used before but were not well known. And they had a police chief who was pretty fair-minded, who did want to go in and just brutally crush the protesters.

One conclusion I came to about that protest is that you wouldn’t have heard a word about the WTO if people hadn’t broken windows. And not everybody agrees with me. But my personal feeling is that if you don’t get some extremists who go out and break some windows then nobody cares. It is sad to say but breaking windows is a symbol that people really care. And I have trouble advocating that because the state, on the other hand, is obligated to keep order. You have to ask yourself whether the state has a duty to all its citizens to keep order. And so those kinds of questions are going to be in opposition.

I don’t want to advocate civil disorder and smashing stuff. But I do think civil protests have a place. And sometimes, unruly protests have a place in the whole spectrum of citizens voicing their opinions.

AB: Can violence play a positive role in contemporary politics?

SC: That’s a tough one … because if I say yes to that then I am also saying yes to right-wing violence. I’d say there is a role for civil disobedience, and there always will be. A lot of the activists I talked to drew a distinction between violence against property and violence against people, and I think that is an important distinction. It gets murky very quickly though. You and I might rejoice when people destroy Monsanto’s next franken-gene, for example, but how do we feel when some white supremacist burns down a black church in Alabama? We are happy when Greenpeace blocks a whaling ship, but what about when people block an abortion clinic?

It is hard to lay down a rule. I think there is always a place for civil disobedience. That is what I will say.

AB: What is intellectually rewarding about your book is it presents these types of ethical dilemmas and does not resolve them fully.

SC: Yeah, and I was not able to resolve many of the dilemmas myself. I think in some cases violence is justified but it is not justified in the book, yet.

AB: Do you think that we are moving toward a kind of cultural civil war in America? Will the events you describe in your book happen?

SC: I’m mixed about it. Right now I’m working on an article called “Revolution from the Right” and my take is that there is zero chance of a popular revolution from the right. However, I think there are other dangers. The right wing usually seizes power through coups and they may use popular Brown Shirt movements – we got a taste of that with the Tea Party Movement. I think if Obama fails, or if there is a major economic meltdown all bets are off. And this last bout of economic collapse was nothing, I’ve been in countries when they’ve had economic meltdowns and it is a whole different reality: the banks close, people go out and burn the banks, police are everywhere and there is a 6,000% inflation rate so stores don’t even put prices up … that’s what real economic collapse looks like.

I think events could play out like in my book. I think the right wing could easily seize power either through an election or a fake election. I think privatization is the next big goal. If the corporates can get a pro-corporate, right wing government in power then it will play out like in the book. All our manufacturing is already offshore; if you are not making anything, where is the money? It is in services. Suddenly you can turn the highway into a service that you must pay for. Water is the service that is exploited in the book.

In this country we’ve never had a media whose sole purpose was to foment hatred like we do now. It didn’t even exist during the McCarthy era. I don’t know how well a democratic society can survive that.

AB: What do you hope to achieve with your book?

SC: I want people to wake up and realize this is what democracy is. I want people to think about what democracy is. I wanted to think about the idea of armed struggle, the idea that you can go and just get that one bad guy and take him out with a sniper rifle. This idea is very appealing on the right and the left.

There are two cautionary messages: First, once you start the path of violent resistance, you cannot control it and it comes with a lot of unintended consequences. The other message is directed at the corporate elite: “You can get everything you want, but there are some real consequences of that.” And this book is about those consequences.

Micah White is a contributing editor at Adbusters and an independent activist. He lives in Berkeley, CA and is currently writing a book about the future of activism. www.micahmwhite.com or micah (at) adbusters.org

The curious interplay between our imagination and external reality gives credence to the argument that the struggles over the mental environment are the future of activism. By protecting our mental environment we change external reality more quickly than any number of direct actions. But to make such an argument in today’s materialist, secular and scientific world requires the courage to imagine a different way of thinking.

Three hundred and seventy years ago, René Descartes sat down in a comfortable chair, with a candlestick on his table and his feet warmed by a fire. Closing his eyes, he gave free reign to his imagination. “What can I know for sure,” he wondered, “if I doubt everything?”

Modern philosophy began in this moment, with Descartes leading us through a series of thought experiments in which the rejection of all dubious knowledge leads him to discover the only knowable fact, famously expressed as “cogito, ergo sum”: I think, therefore I am. The freedom to imagine and to doubt all conventional wisdom and traditional truths was, thus, the first step in building our modern world-view.

The primacy of imagination in the construction of modern philosophy cannot be denied. A well-known criticism of Descartes’ imagination experiment is that it divorced the mind from the body and drew a barrier between the internal world of thoughts and the external world of reality. This mind-body separation occurs in Descartes because of his will to accept only what is absolutely knowable. To prove that the mind makes mistakes and cannot be trusted, he utilizes his imagination to interact with and falsify external reality.

Take, for example, an odd moment where Descartes imagines robots walking the streets. Near the end of his Second Meditation he writes, “if I look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the men themselves… Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men. And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgment which is in my mind.” In this moment of uncanny apprehension, seeing a man but imagining him to be an automaton, Descartes asks for certainty and rejects the evidence of his eyes because it can be influenced by the wanderings of his mind.

But what if he had not asked for certainty, had set aside the principle of non-contradiction, and accepted that what he saw at first as men were later automatons and then men again. In other words, what if we affirmed the position that imagination is constitutive of reality, not as a corrupting force but as an indispensable aspect.

If only Descartes had known how to imagine with his eyes open. The power of our imagination is so great that, even without the aid of hallucinogenic drugs, we can choose to see things that are not present or change the color of an object that is (as Edmund Husserl documented phenomenologically). Likewise, Martin Heidegger writes in Being and Time that our moods color the world around us. For example, on a bad day it seems as if the world is darker, the trees are weeping and the clouds grimacing. But if we suddenly get some good news, the world lightens up and the clouds look more like smiling faces than menacing grimaces. Thus, if our moods are being artificially influenced – through advertising, for example – we can expect that our external reality will also be influenced. From the perspective of mental environmentalism the concern is not with the imagination’s impact on external reality but on external reality’s impact on imagination.

We must dispel immediately the notion that our mental environment is unique to each individual. Just as we share our natural environment, we also share our mental environment, which is crafted through the culture we consume – the television shows we watch, the websites we frequent and the symbols and concepts that comprise our thoughts. (Heidegger referred to this shared aspect as our “they-self”.) Thus, the mental environment is not something entirely within us but is instead something that is outside of our complete control and shared among a culture. The danger, and opportunity, here is obvious. If there is no strict division between my internal world and the external world and if I am not in complete control over my internal world then the way the world appears to me is contestable.

In other words, if we engage in an activism of mental environmentalism it need not be construed as a politics of solipsism, or an attempt to dodge the imperative of “direct action”. Instead, developing another way of thinking that places the role of imagination back into the forefront and denies the right of corporations to influence our mental environment may be the most effective strategy of cultural insurrection in the twenty-first century because it directly influences the manifestation of our natural environment.

Micah White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters and an independent activist. He lives in Berkeley, CA and is currently writing a book about the future of activism. www.micahmwhite.com or micah (at) adbusters.org

Experts agree that we are experiencing perilous climate change that calls the fate of our experiment in civilization into question. As severe weather strikes one continent and mysterious die-offs occur in another, the death rattle of the natural environment grows louder. “Where have all the fireflies gone?” we wonder, and then the scientists confirm that they have noted their absence as well. Once the so-called experts step in and the media assures us that abnormal things are indeed happening, we suppress our alarm and resume sleepwalking through ironic consumption. Is this the only way we can experience climate change?

“Experience” is a word we use everyday so it should be easy to define what it means. Some would argue that to experience climate change is to acknowledge its existence. They see experience as living through an event, and they hope to weather what awaits by maintaining the lifestyle that brought us this historical, ecological moment. Those who treat an experience as something to be survived see climate change as something that can be dealt with using the tools of advanced technology, international diplomacy and public education campaigns. “We can get through this,” might be their admirable motto and most of our society could be counted as their supporters.

But “experience” has another meaning that we ought to consider. The words “experiment,” “expert” and “experience” are related: an expert is often someone who gains experience through experiments. The expert need not be a scientist; we also gain experience by submitting ourselves to life-experiments like outdoor adventures, risky activism or dangerous thinking. After one of these experiences, we’ve transformed ourselves and come closer to our full potential. Experience, it seems, has some connection to a test that puts our self into question.

It may not be a surprise to learn that the common root which “expert,” “experiment” and “experience” share is the Latin word experiri, which means “to put to the test.” In fact, we can go one step further and say that every experience is a dangerous test. I do not say this without cause but instead am referring back to the Latin root experiri, which comes from periculum meaning test, trial, risk, danger or, as it is commonly translated: peril. The other meaning of the word experience is thus to be in peril.

Those who understand experience in this second sense will grasp climate change as a perilous existential and civilizational trial. Nature, via climate change, is charging us with ecocide and we must respond if we want to avoid the death sentence. It is no defense to cling to life as it was before today in the hopes of surviving the weather of tomorrow – that is merely blind denial to the trial taking place.

Instead, we must put our selves, our minds, our souls and our way of life under review. We can respond to the charges brought against us only by renouncing the industrial, consumerist worldview that brought us to this catastrophic point. To experience climate change is to be called to take part in an experiment after which the world as we know it is forever changed.

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 culture jammers, how can we live in a world that is poisonous to our souls, harmful to our minds and at odds with our ideals? Common sense tells us that we have two options: either imitate or hate the world. But if we remain stuck within this binary opposition, we will lose ourselves. If we imitate the world we sacrifice our core beliefs. If we hate the world we succumb to being reactionary and lose the passion that grounds our affirmation. What then can we do? This is the question that Seneca, the great Stoic philosopher, posed nearly two millennia ago. And his answer speaks to today’s struggle of being culture jammers in a consumerist society.

Roman mass culture was as ruinous to Seneca’s ideals as consumer society is to ours. In a well-known letter to his friend Lucilius, Seneca writes that exposure to crowds and the entertainment they consume ought to be avoided because within the crowd we lose our inner resolve for living a good life. “To consort with the crowd is harmful,” Seneca writes in Letter VII of Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, “[because] there is no person who does not make some vice attractive to us, or stamp it upon us, or taint us unconsciously therewith. Certainly, the greater the mob with which we mingle, the greater the danger.” To prove his point, Seneca tells of his experience watching a midday gladiator show after which he returned home feeling “more greedy, more ambitious, more voluptuous and even more cruel and inhuman” than before.

In our era, Seneca’s observation will often be rejected on the presumption that his critique of mass culture is based on an aristocratic and antidemocratic philosophy. Proponents of this position will argue that Seneca’s dislike of crowds is due only to a prejudice toward common people and that his position is therefore not worthy of consideration. But this argument misses the deep philosophical insight that Seneca proposes: that there is a correlation between the culture that surrounds us and our inner life. If Seneca is correct then the culture jammer has legitimate reason to be concerned about exposure to mind-fucking advertising, violent and pornographic television and deceptive news because these cultural forms are destructive to ourselves. In other words, Seneca’s stoic philosophy provides another way to ground mental environmentalism.

But to culture jammers, it will come as no surprise that the culture we live in has an impact on our mental environment. That is, after all, the starting position for the mental environment movement. The pressing concern is how to resist the dominant culture in such a way that our ideals remain intact and our will to fight stays strong. And it is on this question that Seneca is most articulate. For Seneca, we must be on our guard at all times. He writes: “much harm is done by a single case of indulgence or greed; the familiar friend, if he be luxurious, weakens and softens us imperceptible; the neighbor, if he be rich, rouses our covetousness; the companion, if he be slanderous, rubs off some of his rust upon us, even though we be spotless and sincere. What then do you think the effect will be on character, when the world at large assaults it!” But Seneca refuses to accept the common sense answer that we ought to either imitate or loathe the world.

Instead, Seneca proposes that we develop a parallel culture in which we commune among ourselves to strengthen our opposition to the dominant culture. Seneca’s counsel is simple: “Withdraw into yourself, as far as you can. Associate with those who will make a better person of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve.” While this advice seems simple, it is actually the most difficult to accept because it foregoes the principles of mass participation and mass culture that underlie the majority of contemporary politics.

Seneca challenges us to imagine a positive cultural movement that focuses first on building small communities of resistance that are impervious to the influences of mass culture. Seneca encourages us to be like the wise man, who when asked “what was the object of all this study applied to an art that would reach but very few” replied, “I am content with few, content with one, content with none at all.”

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

“Let me tell you the story of a man killed by advertising.” So begins Émile Zola’s satirical Death by Advertising, a short fiction story published in 1866 that describes the swift decline of Pierre Landry, a naïve believer in all claims of advertisers. What is remarkable about this story is not just that Zola had developed a compelling – and widely read – critique of advertising a hundred and forty years ago, but that within his imagined world we glimpse the beginnings of the mental environment movement.

Pierre Landry is a caricature whose purpose is to show both the absurdity and the dangerous consequences of incessant advertising. He was brought up reading and admiring newspaper and billboard advertising and taught to believe the claims made by advertisers without question. Pierre’s purpose in life is to take full advantage of the proclaimed “Golden Age” of industrial progress. To do so, he decides he ought to follow the prescriptions of corporations entirely. “I’ve already planned how I want to live,” declares Pierre in a speech that precipitates his early demise. “I intend to keep up with progress and enjoy all the advantages of the modern world without any further question. I want a blissfully happy life and for that, all I need is to consult the newspapers and posters, night and morning, and do exactly what they tell me. It’s an infallible guide to true wisdom and happiness is guaranteed!”

Pierre may be a fool but he is a man of conviction as well. Suffering hardship after hardship due to the sham, flimsy products he purchases he persists in his belief that by “choosing the products most enthusiastically praised and recommended in rhapsodic terms by the publicity men, he could claim, with legitimate pride, that he was using the most advanced products of the most highly developed civilization in the world and had thus solved the problem of attaining perfection.” Therefore despite buying swampland, building a paper-thin mansion, losing his hair and suffering health problems due to pharmaceutical experimentation, Pierre continues on his path until, consuming a final quack medicine, he dies – sacrificed on the altar of the “Great God Advertising.”

Zola’s story can be read as two separate, but related, critiques of advertising. The first, which I have outlined above, is that the primary problem with the uncritical acceptance of advertising is that it results in purchasing untested and deceitful products. I call this the “Unsophisticated Consumer Argument” and argue that it continues to be the primary anticonsumer argument in circulation today. Many of us deny that we could be Pierre Landry because we believe we are sophisticated consumers who shop critically by consulting online reviews, our friends’ opinions or professional advice. Thus we accept Pierre’s worldview that new is best, but distance ourselves from his naïvety even to the point of claiming that we neither consult nor are influenced by the claims of advertisers. That this critique of advertising ultimately fails to undermine consumer society is obvious. Even if we are smart shoppers, we are still shopping.

But there is a second, more convincing anticonsumer message proposed by Zola that I believe may be one of the first articulations of the mental environment movement. Zola writes that Pierre suffered mental damage just as he suffered physical pain because “advertising attacked his mind as well as his body.” After purchasing every book favorably mentioned in the newspaper, Pierre’s bookshelves “groaned under the weight of his collection of rubbish recording all the stupidity and corruption of the age … The outcome of all this was to turn him into a moron …” It is here that we find a critique of advertising that goes beyond questions of sophisticated consumption and hits the heart of the issue: the mental effects of the junk thought.

Like junk food can make us obese, junk thoughts and advertisements can make us moronic. But unlike fast-food, the consumption of which must always be intentional, fast thoughts hit us unawares: as we walk down the street our eyes scan billboards whose carefully-crafted imagery change us on a subconscious, spiritual level. We are, in a literal way, poisoned each time we see an advertisement and that is the essential danger of a consumer society based upon advertising.

Some of us are like Zola’s hapless foil in our insistence on having the newest gadgets. Others are like Pierre Landry in their uncritical acceptance of whatever they see on television. The sad truth is that we are all spiritually similar to Pierre Landry. The truth that Zola glimpsed a hundred and forty years ago is that advertising has poisoned our minds and corrupted our culture. As we march toward collapse, the question remains whether we will go passively toward our death and remembered only as a foolish civilization killed by advertising, or whether there remains within us a spark of clarity from which a mental environment movement may catch flame.

Micah White is a contributing editor at Adbusters and an independent activist. He will be giving a talk on the mental environment on September 19 at 6pm at the Napa Nest in Napa, California. www.micahmwhite.com or micah (at) adbusters.org

A debate whose outcome may have profound significance for activism is simmering at the edges of the Left. What makes this a squabble worth attending to is that both sides seem equally matched: their theorists are brilliant, their proponents are passionate and their networks are distributed. And at the center of the debate is a question of vital importance: insurrection or revolution.

Insurrectionary anarchism is rarely talked about because it pushes the boundaries of political good taste. The few authors who do openly promote the movement are often jailed. In 1977, for example, Alfredo M. Bonanno was imprisoned for 18 months in Italy for writing Armed Joy. Thus insurrectionary anarchism has traditionally been pushed to the margins of political debate and ignored … until now.

Most of us are aware of the revolutionary model that relies on a mass movement of disaffected people storming the gates of power and seizing control in an organized manner. This revolutionary model exists in opposition to the chaotic, spontaneous and violent impulse underlying insurrectionary anarchism. And usually, the debate is over before it begins and revolutionary praxis wins by default.

But with the publication of The Coming Insurrection and the arrest of the alleged author of the text insurrectionary anarchism is picking up a readership. Some 27,000 copies have been sold in France and more are being purchased every day through Amazon in the States. It has even inspired additional tracts such as Preoccupied: The Logic of Occupation. With insurrectionary anarchism finally reaching a wide audience, a debate among radical political theorists was inevitable.

The first signs of this discussion can be found on Znet in a blog entitled, “The Coming Insurrection or the Arrival of Suicidal Nonsense?” by Chris Spannos. Although Spannos disagrees with the authors of the text, his post is commendable for being one of the first to take it seriously enough to argue with on a philosophical basis. I expect that we will see a growing number of thinkers weigh in on the question of how to carry out the overthrow.

I believe the debate over the merits of The Coming Insurrection can only lead us in the right direction because the question it raises – how to bring about vast, systemic change – is the single most important question we ought to be considering. So, download a copy of The Coming Insurrection, read Spannos’ critique and weigh in below with your thoughts.

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

In the midst of the Roman Saturnalia – a public festival of drunkenness and debauchery lasting several days in December – the stoic philosopher Seneca wondered how a person dedicated to living a life of voluntary simplicity ought to act. Should he publicly rebuke society for its excess by refusing to partake in the revelry; or should he take off his toga, throw a dinner party for friends and share the gaiety of society at large? For Seneca, the answer was not an easy one – while one path represented an affront to one’s friends, the other was an insult to one’s ideals.

In typical stoic fashion, Seneca resolved his dilemma by balancing two extremes. The solution was to neither fully reject nor fully accept society. In letter XVIII of his Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium, he writes, “Remaining dry and sober takes a good deal more strength of will when everyone about one is puking drunk; it takes a more developed sense of fitness, on the other hand, not to make oneself a person apart, to be neither indistinguishable from those about one nor conspicuous by one’s difference, to do the same things but not in quite the same manner.” The goal was not to embrace the cynic’s rejection of society nor the hedonist’s acceptance, but instead to live on the edge of the two opposing viewpoints – to live committed to one’s ideals and to strengthen oneself against the temptations of excess consumption through exposure, not avoidance.

Although Seneca was a stoic philosopher who preached voluntary simplicity, he was also an extravagantly wealthy adviser to the infamous Nero, the tyrannical and decadent emperor of Rome whose lifestyle was antithetical to Seneca’s philosophy. It was clear to Seneca that he lived a life of contradiction, but unlike other ancient philosophers – such as Diogenes the Cynic who chose to live on the street in open renunciation of society – Seneca chose another path.

Seneca believed that living a moral life did not consist of rejecting the world, but of doing away with the fear that motivates our frenetic consumption: the fear of poverty. In a letter every culture jammer should read On Festivals and Fasting, Seneca counsels a friend that the path to inner peace is to adopt a ritual of practiced poverty: “appoint certain days on which to give up everything and make yourself at home with next to nothing. Start cultivating a relationship with poverty. For no one is worthy of god unless he has paid no heed to riches. I am not, mind you, against your possessing them, but I want to ensure that you possess them without tremors; and this you will only achieve in one way, by convincing yourself that you can live a happy life even without them, and by always regarding them as being on the point of vanishing”. In this way, Seneca hoped that the fear of becoming poor in the future would be banished and that the self would be liberated in the present to live a more genuine life.

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

With Bluetooth headsets attached, iPods blocking out the world and tiny netbooks stashed near to hand — some of us are choosing to augment our bodies with wearable computers, becoming other-than-human. These technologies are touted as beneficial (or at least benign) and promise to expand the powers of our bodies and allow us to surpass the physical limitations of being organic. Now people can gossip on the phone without using their hands, distract themselves with ear shattering music while in a silent library and share pictures of being on a beach while on the beach. No longer only human, the cyborgs among us have hooked up their nervous systems to machines, unknowingly laying the groundwork for a coming clash of civilizations.

If we take only one lesson from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, it should be that technology is not a tool but a way of revealing the world. Heidegger believed that the danger of technology was not in its uses but instead in its ability to create a frame through which the world appears flattened, altering the way we know and think. In other words, if the only technology you have is a hammer then you will only see nails. That is why, watching cyborgs in the park, eyes glued to mini-screens as they text and walk, earbuds plugged in, I wonder whether the pixilated world they are experiencing is not radically antagonistic to the one I inhabit.

As increasing numbers of humans choose to supplement themselves with machines, it is possible that the primary clash of civilizations in the years to come will not be between East and West, but between Human and Cyborg. Those who have become addicted to the constant buzz of being connected will always face opponents who still believe that the world experienced through a screen is in some way deficient; lacking in the sublime splendor of undesigned reality.

These two perspectives, the human and the machine-human, cannot peacefully co-exist for long because the frame through which the cyborg sees the world is one in which the mystery of existence has been programatically obscured. Cyborgs are like the novice gardener who rips up seldom blooming flowers thinking them to be merely weeds: unable to value the richness of a technologically minimal world, machine augmented humans unconsciously trample what they cannot appreciate.

The challenge is how to embrace being fully-human not out of a nostalgic desire to go backward but instead a fervent will to move forward – to embrace again the dream of a enlightened humanity who reaches toward wisdom and spiritual fulfillment not through repeated consumption of silicon chips but instead through simple, meditative living.

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

The brand liberation movement scored a major victory this week in Europe by gaining a seat in the European Union’s Parliament. With a final tally of 7.1% of Swedish votes, the Pirate Party is the world's first – and only – political party with a pro-piracy platform to win electoral legitimacy.

The official platform of the Swedish Pirate Party is threefold: 1) Reform copyright law by decriminalizing all noncommercial copying and publicly encouraging the use of peer-to-peer networks, 2) Abolish all patents and 3) Respect the right to privacy by putting an "emergency brake" on the increasing surveillance of citizens. On all other questions, the Swedish Pirate Party has chosen to remain neutral.

The victory of the Pirate Party is a cause for celebration because it’s a step toward an artistically freer and more creative society. But the pro-piracy movement is not enough on its own. We must also be concerned with who is producing culture along with the medium by which it is communicated. If we allow this nascent brand liberation movement to stand for nothing but the free exchange of information, it will be co-opted by mainstream politics, and ultimately, capitalism itself.

The Pirate Party is the first step toward a “Mental Environment Party,” whose platform is concerned with cleaning up our polluted mindscapes by revoking the right of corporations to speak. A step toward a full critique of consumer capitalism that sees advertising for what it is – pollution – while challenging society to reject the passive consumption of corporate financed culture in favor of the active creation of local meaning.

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

Speed is the motor of consumer capitalism. The faster we consume, the more we consume. For the neoclassical economists who measure quality of life by the flow of dollars alone, a frenzied and confused consumer – assaulted by constant advertisements and prone to impulse purchases – is the ideal human being. But the ecological catastrophe brought on by this frenetic consumption suggests that the only viable way forward may be moving at a snail's pace.

By now most of us are familiar with the "slow movement," which, borne in protest against the McDonaldization of Italy, proposes that slowness is a virtue. Although the slow movement is still largely synonymous with food, it is not limited to gastronomy alone. The Tobin tax, for example, places a levy on foreign currency exchanges in an effort to slow down global capitalism. Workplace slow downs use active strikes to counter the dehumanizing speed of industrialization without jeopardizing peoples' jobs. Another arena of anti-speed activism is slow travel.

On a gut level, most of us probably feel that the pace of modern life is too fast. The Internet connects us with the whole word in milliseconds. And when we need to be somewhere physically, we hop on a nonstop flight traveling at speeds exceeding 500 miles per hour. It takes a mere six hours to travel from New York to San Francisco, the same amount of time it takes an ox to walk twelve miles. We have seemingly done away with the limitations of distance. But all this speed has significant environmental and cultural consequences. The death of distance has introduced the decline of difference – the homogenization of the world and the disposable mindset.

We must embrace an alternative vision to a world made tiny by the speed of travel. Traveling from New York to San Francisco should not take six hours, but six days. In this recession-afflicted economy, locality is starting to matter again. "Staycations" – local bicycle tours, kayak vacations, camping – are a great travel option with a reduced carbon impact. It may no longer be possible to avoid travel altogether, but perhaps it's time to rethink the speed of consumption and embrace slowness and the indirect path.

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