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What is a Whirl-Mart?
The action is comprised of a group of anti-shoppers ranging in size from 1 to 50 members. The ritual consists of activists/actors arriving at a Wal-Mart, Toys-R-Us or another chain superstore at 12-noon on the first Saturday or Sunday of the month and proceeding to push empty shopping carts slowly and silently through the aisles. Eventually, all of the participants locate one another and form a single-file chain of anti-shoppers which weaves, wanders, and whirls throughout the store for about an hour. It is a collective reclamation of space that is otherwise only used for buying and selling. It is a symbolic display of the will to resist the capitalist ideology.
'Whirl-Mart' is an experiment that can be approached from several different angles. As a work of art, it examines and blurs the boundaries that have been established between performance art, protest, living sculpture, and direct action. As an action of resistance, it utilizes the power of silence in occupying private consumer-dominated space with a symbolic spectacle. As a ceremony, it is a counter-ritual to shopping that transforms the super-store and its wall-to-wall array of products into a surreal and colorful cathedral. And what the heck-- it's just darned fun!
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Rally of One Peace can begin with YOU NEPA BLOG Blog by & about Northeastern Pennsylvania: issues, events, discussion, photos WatermelonPunch.com NEPA Whirl-Mart's web host xradiograph what Michael does when he's not "fightin' the man" SurfScranton.com 1,000+ regional links
National & Worldwide
Whirl-Mart Ritual Resistance International Whirl-Mart HQ World Changing Models, Tools, and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future Critical Mass Critical Mass is not an organization, it's an unorganized
coincidence. It's a movement ... of bicycles, in the streets. Rev Billy's Church of Stop Shopping Lots of great scripts from/for performance interventions
with a heavy focus on Starbucks. Commerce
Jamming Commerce Jamming source page. AdBusters A global network of those who want to advance the new social
activist movement of the information age. Commercial Alert wants to keep commercial culture within
its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting
the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and
democracy. No Media Kings Jim Munroe's guide to doin' it for yourself Booksense.com Internet book search that sends your order to your nearest
independent bookstore. Starbucks Delocator Search that helps you locate locally owned alternatives to Starbucks
Media
The Independent Media Center is a network of collectively run media
outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth Project of the Independent Media Institute, a nonprofit
organization dedicated to strengthening and supporting independent and
alternative journalism. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the first to identify
threats to our basic rights online and to advocate on behalf of free expression
in the digital age. Declan
McCullagh's Politech Politech is the moderated mailing list of politics and technology.
Topics include privacy, free speech, the role of government and corporations,
antitrust, and more. MediaChannel.org The global network for democratic media.
PLUS the News Dissector's Weblog. CorpWatch.org counters corporate-led globalization through education,
network-building and activism.
Dow Chemical is going to court this week in India. Not as the defendants
for their ongoing responsibility for the Bhopal disaster, but as the
plaintiffs: Dow is suing the SURVIVORS of the disaster for protesting at a
Dow plant, and--we're not making this up--they're demanding US$10,000 from
them... about 10 years of wages at local rates.
After the 1984 gas leak, which has killed 20,000 people to date, Union
Carbide abandoned the factory site and fled India. For 18 years since, the
toxic wastes left by Union Carbide have been bleeding poisons into the
groundwater and affecting the health of the people living near the
factory. Dow merged with Union Carbide in 2001 and paid up for Union
Carbide's asbestos liabilities, but it refuses to do the same for Bhopal.
A virtual sit-in is simply an automated way of sending lots of traffic to
a website. Activists around the world park their browsers on a page which
does nothing more than automatically load the bhopal.com site several
times a minute. In the same way that a real-world sit-in disrupts traffic,
the virtual sit-in makes the target site less responsive and slow.
Eventually, the site may become so crowded with protestors that it stops
serving information completely.
The virtual sit-in will be located at The Yes Men's hugely successful
spoof of Dow's website. Dow has been
playing whack-a-mole with the DowEthics.com site, launching several
abortive legal attempts to shut it down, only to have new activists set it
up in a new spot on the internet. Other parts of the site explain more
honestly why Dow refuses to clean up Bhopal and why image is everything to
Dow.
MediaChannel.org
