Culture jamming group The Yes Men strike again! This time, they've created a spoof fashion line called "adidas RealityWear," which they launched recently during Berlin Fashion Week. According to Philip Oltermann, writing for The Guardian:
A spoof press release, written by culture jamming activist duo The Yes Men and sent to fashion bloggers from a fake Adidas email address, announced a "revolutionary plan" for the German sportswear company, designed to "own the reality" of working conditions in the south-east Asian factories where many of its clothes are made.
"Guerrilla theatre is a form of intervention where acts of spontaneous, surprise performance in unlikely public spaces rupture the boring-as-shit, day-to-day reality for an unsuspecting audience," writes artist/instigator/author Bill Posters (aka Barnaby Francis) in his new book The Street Art Manual. — Read the rest
"'Disobedient Electronics' is a zine-oriented publishing project that seeks submissions from industrial designers, electronic artists, hackers and makers that disobey conventions, especially work that is used to highlight injustices, discrimination or abuses of power."
Watch comedian Sam Hyde take the piss out of TED talks at Drexel University's TEDxDrexelU. From Philadelphia Magazine:
The event concluded with Sam Hyde, billed as a "video documentary filmmaker and journalist from Brooklyn" who "recently returned from Mogadishu, the most dangerous city on earth, where he shadowed the heroic al-Mahamud women on their quest to clean up their streets and restore humanity to their war-torn country."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Maira Sutton has a long, engrossing account of the popular protest at the Dallas session of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a secretive treaty negotiation that includes a set of copyright rules that leave SOPA and ACTA in the dust. — Read the rest
Emmanuel Goldstein writes, "The coordinators of this year's Hackers On Planet Earth conference in New York have joined forces with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and have designated April as the month where 10 percent of all ticket sales will be donated to EFF. — Read the rest
The Guardian profiles the Deterritorial Support Group, a secretive guerrilla humour protest group whose goals include "full communism, with lulz as a transitional demand." They're an interesting blend of radical politics, po-faced irony, sectarian haters, and media pranksters — The Yes Men by way of the Weather Underground. — Read the rest
Update 2:The Yes Men deny responsibility: "If you'd like to see the human face of the human perspective—the perspective of the 99% victimized by our demented and out-of-control financial system—come join the occupation of Wall Street"
In this telling BBC clip, a news presenter is rendered virtually speechless as a stock-trader explains that for traders like him, a Eurozone crash would be a godsend, since someone always makes money in crashes; he then goes on to state that it doesn't matter whether governments intervene in the Euro or not, because "governments don't rule the world, Goldman-Sachs does." — Read the rest
"Captain Salas graduated from the Air Force Academy and spent seven years in active duty from 1964 to 1971. He also held positions at Martin Marietta and Rockwell and spent 21 years at the FAA."
Caleb alerted me to the news that the "National Press Club hosted some retired military/FAA people who calmly stated that a UFO shut down their missile silo and they were told never to talk about it. — Read the rest
The Open Video Conference in New York City is a two-day powwow for open web geeks, independent filmmakers, and everyone else.
This year's OVC takes place October 1-2 2010. With 60+ sessions on open source, HTML5, and participatory culture, the conference is bigger and better than before.
Zoran sez, "Earlier this week (12th Dec), a massive, peaceful protest of 100,000 people — the largest demonstration for climate justice in world history — was met with a heavy-handed response by the Danish police. Thousands of riot police swarmed the march route, blocked off streets surrounding large groups of protestors, and arrested almost 1,000 people. — Read the rest
A huge amount of email from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit was hacked and released onto the web, causing much rejoicing from the climate change denialists. They read through the corpus of email and found that the scientists working on climate change often have substantive disagreements with one another, which they debate vigorously in email, and cited this as evidence of a conspiracy to cover up dissent and present a scientific consensus on climate change. — Read the rest
Bradley Novicoff of Dangerous Minds writes about Collapse, a new documentary by Chris Smith (American Movie, The Yes Men) about impending global doom, which Variety called "an intellectual horror movie" that's "unnervingly persuasive much of the time, and merely riveting when it's not." — Read the rest
Here's Patrick Dixon, of Siemens, advertising as features all the things about RFID tags that I always thought should bother people the most. The first time I watched this, I figured it was The Yes Men having one over on the Ascent Business Leadership Forum. — Read the rest
In celebration of the long-awaited Pranks 2 book, RE/Search Publications is hosting Pranksfest parties in San Francisco and Los Angeles. ((Previous Pranks 2 post here.) The Bay Area event is this Saturday, November 11, at the San Francisco Art Institute. — Read the rest
