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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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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
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PLUS the News Dissector's Weblog. CorpWatch.org counters corporate-led globalization through education,
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*Scandal: Wal-Mart, P&G Involved in Secret RFID Testing *
/American consumers used as guinea pigs for controversial technology/
Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble conducted a secret RFID trial involving
Oklahoma consumers earlier this year, the Chicago Sun Times revealed on
Sunday. Customers who purchased P&G's Lipfinity brand lipstick at the
Broken Arrow Wal-Mart store between late March and mid-July unknowingly
left the store with live RFID tracking devices embedded in the
packaging. Wal-Mart had previously denied any consumer-level RFID
testing in the United States.
"It proves what we've been saying all along," says Katherine Albrecht,
Founder and Director of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion
and Numbering (CASPIAN). "Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble and others have
experimented on shoppers with controversial spy chip technology and
tried to cover it up. Consumers and members of the press should be upset
to learn that they've been lied to."
The Sun Times also reported that a live video camera trained on the
shelf allowed Procter & Gamble employees, sometimes hundreds of miles
away, to observe the Lipfinity display and consumers interacting with it.
"This trial is a perfect illustration of how easy it is to set up a
secret RFID infrastructure and use it to spy on people," says Albrecht.
"The RFID industry has been paying lip service to privacy concerns,
calling for notice, choice and control. But companies like P&G, Wal-Mart
and Gillette have already violated all three tenets when they thought
nobody was looking. This is exactly why we oppose item-level RFID
tagging and have called for mandatory labeling legislation."
[....]
Additional Information:
SunMicrosystems to open RFID Test Center
MediaChannel.org
