Contact Michael via e-mail.
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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Regional (NEPA)
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.
In 2001, Adbusters ran an issue titled “Design Anarchy” and since that
time its once orderly pages have been in a state of heaving agitation.
Every time I pick up a new issue I find myself wondering why. For a
while in the late 1990s and early 2000, under art director Chris Dixon,
Adbusters’ editorial design was exemplary. Even when it departed from
conventional magazine structures, its content and the relationship
between the parts was clear. The elegant, carefully composed design
helped to give even its wilder flights of rhetoric conviction and a
much-needed measure of authority.
The magazine these days is a collection of fragments seemingly
thrown together in no particular order. It’s not that the type isn’t
perfectly legible – there are no tiresome typo hi-jinks to “decode” –
but Adbusters is nowhere near as readable as it was. All of the
standard editorial devices have been abandoned. I’m looking at a page
in the January/February 2004 issue, carrying two columns of type.
There’s no headline or intro and you have to find the small italics at
the end to discover that it was written by someone called Kevin Arnold
(a new name to me, I confess). It may be fascinating stuff, and
scanning down I see that Garrett Hardin, author of the excellent
Filters Against Folly, receives a mention, but the layout itself does
nothing to suggest that we need to read this article. Elsewhere, I
start reading some apparently untitled text about the failings of
postmodern theory, thinking I’m in the middle, only to realise that I
have started, quite by accident, in the correct place.
A Concise History of Union Busting at Borders In their public communications, executives of Borders Books and
Music say that while they oppose unions at Borders, they respect the
right of employees to investigate the option, and they believe the best
path to discouraging unionization is through open and honest
communication.
The factual record is quite different. In reality, Borders
anti-union strategy features bullying, emotional manipulation and
retaliation against pro-union employees, and the refusal to bargain in
good faith with stores that go union.
This pattern has been repeated in many of the 12 stores that
have held union elections. The most notorious incident received a lot
of press coverage: it occurred in Philadelphia, where a pro-union
employee was summarily fired. Filmmaker Michael Moore publically
intervened on her behalf, while the IWW labor union picketed stores
nationwide; however, there have been other, less well-known incidents
during election campaigns and contract negotiations.
SWIPE addresses the gathering of data from drivers' licenses, a form of
data-collection that businesses are starting to practice in the United
States. Bars and convenience stores were the first to utilize license
scanners in the name of age and ID verification. These businesses,
however, admit they reap huge benefits from this practice beyond
catching underage drinkers and smokers and fake IDs. With one
swipe—that often occurs without notification or consent by the
cardholder—a business acquires data that can be used to build a
valuable consumer database free of charge. Post 9/11, other businesses,
like hospitals and airports, are installing driver's license readers in
the name of security. And still other businesses are joining the rush
to scan realizing the information contained on driver's licenses is a
potential gold mine.
Free Range Activism Website
The Free Range Network is a 'disrganisation' – a group of people who
work together because they have common interests. By pooling resources,
but without the additional 'organisational baggage' of a conventional
group structure, they undertake research and educational work in
support of grassroots activism in the UK.
This web site contains information evolved through the Free
Range Network and its partner groups. Some of this has been directly
created by members of the Network (all the the Network's published
information is available via the publications page). Some information
is included from other sources, in areas such as the virtual library,
because it's relevant to grassroots activists. This site also hosts the
major works of the Network – at this moment, The Community-Linux
Training Centre and The Salvage Server Project.
2003 was not a year of garden variety corporate wrongdoing. No, the
sheer variety, reach and intricacy of corporate schemes, scandal and
crimes were spellbinding. Not an easy year to pick the 10 worst
companies, for sure.
But Multinational Monitor magazine cannot be deterred by such
complications. And so, here follows, in alphabetical order, our list
for Multinational Monitor of the 10 worst corporations of 2003. [....]
MediaChannel.org
