DESIGNERS, ARTISTS, WRITERS, ACTIVISTS, CODERS, TEACHERS, AND ENGINEERS
WE ARE THE PRODUCERS OF CHANGELESS CHANGE
WE PLEDGE OURSELVES TO THE APOLITICAL CULT OF "INNOVATION"
WE FACTORY-FARM CULTURE AND THEN SCRATCH OUR HEADS AT OUR STAGNANT WORLD
TODAY IT IS OUR DEFINITION OF INNOVATION THAT NEEDS INNOVATING.
TODAY WE MUST LEARN TO MAKE A CAREER OUT OF ABOLISHING CAREERS.
The following proposal is neither art nor trendy intellectualism. Rather, it is a necessary remedy to the problematic division between our political and professional lives. It is a model for combating today's structural violence by supplementing overt political dissent with the re-engineering of dominant social, economic, and political institutions.
HOW?
Practically speaking, this means productively engaging the technologies and organizations of our problematic present without falling back on traditional agendas of reform. It means leveraging our class status as cultural workers to promote, design, and implement more autonomous and sustainable infrastructure.
We do this by exploiting the internal operations of our own industry in order to induce mutation. By occupying administrative "grey areas" and overlapping markets we are able to pioneer alternative flows of resources, modes of governance, and collectivized institutions
Through the strategic appropriation of dominant ideology and infrastructure we are able to slip inside in order to manipulate, undermine, and commandeer.
What all of these projects share is an understanding of the future as pioneered by actors always already enmeshed in the domination they seek to reject.
By exploiting the marketplace's fixation on the chic and glossy, they have begun operationalizing provisional transitions out of current regimes of extraction, commodification, abuse, and marginalization. None of them are perfect, but perfection is not the goal.
These are models for innovation that refuse proprietary ownership and its resulting stratification. They challenge the role of the cultural worker as an appendage of postfordist economics. By hacking their own class status, these actors dismantle socioeconomic boundaries and shift current infrastructure towards postcapitalist, decolonial, ecologically restorative, community-led worlds.
