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

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

In the beginning of 2009, student activists in the UK and USA resurrected the sit-in as an activist tool for the 21st century. By late February, there had been nearly thirty 'occupations' by students demanding divestment from Israel and increased funding for education. Many of the occupations in the UK were successful while in the USA the few that did occur were swiftly brought to an end by police repression. But there are now signs that another wave of student unrest is approaching campuses.

Three days ago, students at the New School for Social Research in New York City resuscitated the occupation movement and demonstrated to the world that at least a few activists still have guts.

According to the website of the New School activists, "Around 6 AM [on April 10th], a group of Situationist-inspired students of the New School entered their school, sealed the doors, climbed on to the roof, draped signs and occupied the building for several hours. Once on the roof, they shouted through a megaphone explaining their reasoning for occupying the building. However they were soon forced to retreat inside as police barricaded the doors and took control of the exterior building."

"To quote a flyer that was distributed outside the building, 'Their demands are simple: the resignation of President Kerrey and full control of the building.'"

"It was certainly the most exciting in a series of university occupations that have happened in New York City during the past four months. The New York Police Department responded as if a bank robbery had occurred, with literally hundreds of police cars, helicopters, riot police, and eventually tear gassed the occupiers inside the building. By noon, everyone involved had been gassed and arrested, indicating a much more hardline approach to university occupation than has been seen in the past few months."

One explanation for the swift severity of the police response is that these New School students were the ones who kicked off the last wave of student occupations in the UK and USA with their actions in December. Can we therefore expect another round of student activism to come?

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.

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.

I live in Binghamton, NY, a city of 45,000 located an hour north of Scranton, PA and an hour south of Syracuse, NY. A few hours ago, a lone gunman killed 12 people before committing suicide. His act puts Binghamton on the map, and is probably the only time an acting Vice President has ever cared to mention our city's name. Binghamton is now among the infamous casualties of the collapse of Western civilization, a distinction shared by places such as Columbine and Virginia Tech who have experienced the phenomenon of random mass murder. When shootings happened in other cities, I was unable to really understand why these things occur, but now that there has been a slaying mere blocks from my own home, I find that the answer seems clear: these killings are the result of the collapse of our culture, which pits us against each other in the vicious game of capitalism.

About a week ago, as I was walking into the local Giant grocery store, I watched a woman being arrested for shoplifting food. Ten years ago 23.7% of Binghamton's population lived under the poverty line and since that time the situation has only become more bleak. There are no jobs here and those who can leave are doing so, our population decreased nearly 5% between 2000 and 2006. The only thing keeping the Binghamton economy afloat is Binghamton University and when those students graduate they do not settle locally.

I returned to the Giant grocery store today to see the mood among average people and it was dismal. I listened to one man speaking to a Giant employee. "These things are bound to happen when the situation is so rough ..." he declared. "Well, I heard this was actually about immigration ... that's the rumor I hear," replied the employee. Why is that after each shooting, some cover story is concocted to explain away the fact that random individuals are opening fire on other random individuals? Let us confront the truth: these violent acts are the result of a culture in decline, a culture that worships only Mammon and does not care for the ones left behind.

Binghamton is a city left behind -- a post-industrial wasteland dominated by a handful of greedy capitalists and corrupt local politicians who maintain power through a singular lie. They have convinced this impoverished community that only jobs can save them and that since the local corporations control the job market we must follow meekly behind the local robber barons. As a Binghamton activist, I have had to deal with the local power-wielders after their collusion resulted in the expansion of an industrial dry cleaning plant into my residential area and I can attest that what Binghamton needs is the same as what we all need: a new, anti-consumerist culture which leaves capitalism behind.

Binghamton will most likely be forgotten tomorrow. But the truth of the event that occurred today will remain. Today Binghamton is serving as a model of the collapse of capitalism. I hope that tomorrow it serves as a representative of how a community can take back its culture and come alive once again.

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

Our collective mental environment is in a pitiful shape. Bombarded with advertisements, jolted by commercial breaks and distracted by multitasking, our spirit is under constant assault by capitalism. And at a time when we face the confluence of unparalleled global crises -- climate change, financial collapse, war and widespread foreclosures -- we do not have the mental clarity to act. We do, of course, respond and react but that is precisely the problem. In our reactions we betray our inability to propose a fundamentally different course of history. We still believe that there will be a technological solution to the problems we face and by accepting this basic premise we insure that the corporations will continue to dominate the horizon. What we need is a movement of spiritual rebirth that rejects the capitalist-materialist disenchantment of the world and instead proposes a vision in which mystery has a place.

All that is wild about the world has been systematically penetrated, catalogued and destroyed. The explicit intention of the scientific mindset, to pierce the mysteries of Being, has led to a world empty of excitement in which not even endless consumption can fill the void. We are both cut off from the natural environment, enclosed in sprawling concrete cities, and cut off from any previous philosophical or religious conception of the world that celebrated possibility, contingency and mystery. How would it change things if we rallied in support of nature not because of climate change (an abstraction identified by science and therefore conceivably able to be "fixed" by science) but instead because the nymphs Socrates felt at the river are no longer with us.

Just look at the left's demands for a new world: we want "clean" energy, full employment, a middle-class standard of living for everyone and "green" corporations. To acquire these desires, we insist that more scientific research must be funded. All our dreams for the future rely on scientists, technocrats, capitalists and the highly educated. That is a fundamental error. Unless the revolution can be accomplished by us, each of us as we are right now, whether we be poor or rich, educated or not, literate or not, then we will continue to perpetrate the myth that only Western style progress is the way forward.

What we need now is a spiritual rebirth that grants the magic back to the world. Only then, through the development of a parallel culture, will we be able to see that the way forward may be to go back.

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: do you have a blackspot idea? I would like to print an occasional guest post on this blog and I am now looking for submissions, if you have something to share that will further the blackspot philosophy, write it up in under 500 words and send it to micah (at) adbusters.org.

An offline revolution is quietly retaking leisure from the videogame behemoths that dominated the gaming world in 2008. In the thirty years since their invention, videogame consoles have penetrated into half of television-owning homes in America by claiming to provide the ultimate gaming experience. And yet, a steady resurgence of screen-free gaming is taking place that promises to develop a viable alternative to the machines. A sense of excitement is building as fresh ideas are coming from a group of international game designers working within several genres. All are pushing towards a cultural shift by challenging the place of screens in our social interactions by having a fun time without them.

We are beginning to experience the effects of a global paradigm shift in game design that occurred sometime in the 1990s. It has taken a decade for their creative spark to be actualized in a playable format but a few independent geniuses, working alone and unaware of each other’s hard work, are now bringing their games to the market amid a groundswell of support. From the vantage point of a recent participant in this burgeoning scene one can see that the games as a whole represent a triumphant rebirth of face-to-face friendships. After all, the unifying characteristic of these groundbreaking games is that they do not, and never will, involve screens.

Game creators such as Klaus Teuber (Germany), Mark Rein·Hagen (Georgia), Andrew Looney (USA), Kris Burm (Belgium) and others are inspiring families and friends across the world to rethink the rites of leisure. Each has demonstrated that offline gaming is a viable alternative to violent and overpriced videogames. Simcity has been eclipsed by Teuber’s Settlers of Catan; Rein·Hagen’s storytelling World of Darkness is bringing imagination to bear against computer-generated visuals; while Looney’s Zombie Fluxx is taking on cardgames and Burm is overturning abstract strategy with Project Gimpf. Together these games are an affirmation of a future where the games we play positively change the world. The unstated hope of many ardent gamers in the new scene is that the dislocation in perspective accomplished by looking at one’s friends instead of a screen may offer a key to how we can relink our atomized communities.

Arguably, the most innovative game work currently being done is in the strictly imaginative genres. When played, these storytelling games exercise parts of the brain that otherwise lay dormant in the unimaginative or the visually bombarded. Storytelling games trace their genealogy back to the fireside stories that have been told since before antiquity. Currently breathing new life into the genre of storytelling games is Rein·Hagen’s World of Darkness. Each session of a storytelling game is entirely created by the players who act out the story by collectively imagining a haunted world similar to our own. The only equipment necessary is a handful of ten sided dice that can be used to determine the outcome of imagined actions. A good game is one in which the players have an enjoyable time sharing the burden of creatively imagining. Most first time players have the sensation that playing the game is mentally exhausting due to the work needed to lucidly dream without the aid of a television. The brilliance of storytelling games is that they enable players to look at the world askew, providing the creativity we’ll need to replay the world.

Guy Debord, the Situationalist philosopher, once thought that he would be remembered primarily as a game designer. An early visionary, Debord believed that games might provide the revolutionary impetuous and tactical training needed by a new generation of activists. In 1977 Debord founded the Society for Strategic and Historical Games and designed Kriegspiel (Game of War), a boardgame that simulates complicated, strategic battles. He was so optimistic of the game’s future that he once declared, “[Kriegspiel] might be the only thing in all my work--I'm afraid to admit--that one might dare say has some value.” Debord’s game failed for being untimely: the world wasn’t ready. But if the recent reissuing of Kriegspiel and the unexpected rebirth of gaming is any indication, times appear ripe for a game to come along that changes everything.

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: do you have a blackspot idea? I would like to print an occasional guest post on this blog and I am now looking for submissions, if you have something to share that will further the blackspot philosophy, write it up in under 500 words and send it to micah (at) adbusters.org.