A guerrilla marketing campaign uses outrage to drum up social media and mainstream media coverage, and dramatically redirects the framing of a proposed tax increase to save the local library.

Hoaxing the people you want to support you is a risky proposition. But this time it paid off. (via)

Well done, Times of India. (source)

I love this image by illustrator Matt Forsythe. It nicely captures the spirit of the protests in Montréal last May. As The Globe and Mail notes:

“Those clanging pots, known as les casseroles, were initially seen as just another tactic, but a remarkable thing happened: Ordinary citizens armed only with kitchenware took back their streets from rock-throwers and riot police. They also pushed student and government leaders back to the negotiating table with fresh hope the conflict might end.”

You can download a high resolution version of the image from Matt’s website.

Here’s a nice video of les casseroles in action.

“Mythic accounts shorten the incubation time of social movements and omit the initiating efforts of government and political organizations. The myths develop and persist because they allow interested actors to package and contain a movement’s origins, explicitly suggesting that broad social dynamics replicate idealized individual conversion stories. They also allow actors to edit out complicated histories that could compromise the legitimacy of a movement or a set of policy reforms. These mythic accounts spread and persist because they simplify complicated social processes and offer analogues to the individual process of becoming active, but they may lead us to misunderstand the past and make misjudgments about collective action and social change in the future. We consider those implications and call for more research on the construction of myths about the past.”

It should be no surprise that nuance is lost as histories become narratives become myths, or that interested actors construct stories about past events to serve their current purposes. But then while simplified myths can be useful rallying points, I’m surprised how often some movement clichés come up — and how hard they are to dislodge.

First you ban them from your political convention, then you threaten their funding, now the puppets are rising up and fighting back with a Million Puppet March in Washington DC three days before the election. That should be some photo op — humor is a powerful tactic.

But why the Republican anti-puppet agenda? Is it the radical history of puppets? Or perhaps it hits too close to home?

(Protest image courtesy of Nikkolas Smith.)

Flipping through some old posters, this one from Australia’s Earthworks Poster Collective caught my eye. I love the humor and urgency, the pop of white ink on newsprint, and the appropriated and politicized style of romance comics. And though printed in 1979 it’s just as relevant today.

Obamacare is a huge leap forward for women’s reproductive health in the US. But it still casts contraception entirely as the responsibility of women. While birth control and tubal ligation are guaranteed and free, vasectomy is a patient responsibility that insurance companies may refuse to cover — despite the fact that vasectomy is essentially an outpatient procedure and has a much lower risk of complications than female surgical sterilization methods.

I don’t anticipate a groundswell of men demanding free vasectomies, but suspect a court challenge will eventually update the law. The high courts do love an anti-discrimination case when it affects white people and men.

Poignant cartoon from Steve Bell riffing on this influential Conservative poster from 1978. (via)

“Design is one of the linchpins of capitalism, because it makes alienated labor possible.

…

[W]hen it comes to design’s influence on social structures, the focus on consumerism distracts from something more significant and interesting. Design’s real power is that it makes relationships and divisions between people concrete. Without physical stuff to remind us of how we supposedly differ from one another, our hierarchies would be awfully ramshackle; stripped of our possessions, categories like “class” start to look like just a bunch of learned behaviors and confused ideas. Whether prohibitively priced cars, gendered garments, or separate schools for blacks and whites, social hierarchies are always maintained with the help of physical objects and spaces designed to reflect those hierarchies. Otherwise everyone’s claims of superiority and difference would be quite literally immaterial.

…

Once you realize that all designed objects carry this sort of encrypted information about the organization of society, something amazing happens: you suddenly stop feeling bored in home furnishings stores. Washing machines and cooking implements have a lot to say about norms surrounding domestic labor; office trash cans embody the values of a middle class that can’t deal with its own waste; alarm systems and porch lights offer a crash course in the popular phenomenology of crime. But these objects are not just passive representations of ideas about how society should run. They actively promote those ideas, validating certain prejudices and chastising us when our behavior deviates from certain norms.”

Read the rest.

The abstract follows (my emphasis added):

“We offer the first large scale, multiple source analysis of the outcome of what may be the most extensive effort to selectively censor human expression ever implemented. To do this, we have devised a system to locate, download, and analyze the content of millions of social media posts originating from nearly 1,400 different social media services all over China before the Chinese government is able to find, evaluate, and censor (i.e., remove from the Internet) the large subset they deem objectionable.

Using modern computer-assisted text analytic methods that we adapt and validate in the Chinese language, we compare the substantive content of posts censored to those not censored over time in each of 95 issue areas. Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collection action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content. Censorship is oriented toward attempting to forestall collective activities that are occurring now or may occur in the future — and, as such, seem to clearly expose government intent, such as examples we offer where sharp increases in censorship presage government action outside the Internet.”

You can download the full paper here.

Always interesting are the clever ways Chinese bloggers route around automated keyword filters using images, puns, and “homographs” — characters with different meanings that have similar shapes. This results in some massive “community management” mechanics: much censorship is largely manual labor on the part of hundreds of thousands of Internet police and “50 cent party members.”

I also find echoes of the Chinese censorship pattern resonate in the U.S. media landscape (including the design literature) though not as explicit censorship, per se. While criticism, dissent and rebellion are celebrated, commodified and institutionalized here (“Maverick for President!”), grievances that have potential to mobilize or stories about political organizing or collective action potential are harder to come by.

This year’s London games use two sets of pictograms: simple silhouettes for utilitarian communication and a more exuberant version for decorative applications.

In 2004 VirusFonts reinterpreted the Olympic pictogram in a series of satirical icons to puncture the heroism and reflect the bribery, political manipulation, drugs and greed behind the Athens Olympics. Last week they released a new set to reflect on the controversies and accusations leveled at the 2012 London games. The pictograms riff on the iconic style developed by Otl Aicher for the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Below, the full set of 2012 Olympukes:

Olympukes 2012 is available for download as a font and is free for personal, non-commercial use.

They’ve posted a lovely collection of poster designs, many in the spirit of Grapus and the Atélier Populaire. Here are some of my favorites below, linking to the larger versions.

The red square is the symbol of the Maple Spring and via Just Seeds I found Seeing Red Montréal, an ongoing documentation of red squares painted, stickered, and postered on the streets of Montreal.

It’s amazing waking up in Brooklyn to see the euphoric tweets and pictures coming out of Libya as people vote in their first free election for more than 50 years.

A few recent picks:

I now feel that the 70 days I spent in prison didn't go to waste ‪#LYelect ‬ ‫#ليبيا‬ ‫#تنتخب‬

One young man at station said he didny sleep all night, can't wait to vote, been at stn since 5am! #Libya #LYElect #Benghazi

93y old lady voting for first time in her life ‪#Gheryan‬ ‪#LyElect‬ ‪#Libya‬ pic.twitter.com/3QyyMVwg

You wouldn't know it, but this man told me after his vote "inside I feel like I am flying" pic.twitter.com/mKk2Sfn4

The purple is election ink, a semi-permanent dye applied to voters’ fingers to prevent double voting. Those inky fingers are something special today.

Update: September 13, 2012. The book is funded and in production! You can order it now at aisforactivist.com