"DOW...doh!"

image as thought up by me and crafted on mike cupcake’s computer as i was schlepping about soho with a gentleman at the time.

if you need an explanation, dow chemicals are one of the official sponsors of the london 2012 olympic games. in 1999, they merged with the union carbide corporation – the pesticide manufacturing outfit responsible for the bhopal disaster in 1984 from which over 25,000 deaths have been attributed to. neither dow or union carbide has properly apologised for the human and environmental disaster [notwithstanding a token £290m settlement paid out in 1989]. india continues to manufacture and have financial stakes in the production and sales of pesticides.

Dr D, this wheatpasting vandal I know, rings up. “You still doing your telly things?”

Yes.

“What you doin tonight?”

Erm…. I scrabbled around for a camera.

“Wanna meet me at six or seven around [redacted]?”

So after I convinced Emily James to come out shooting with me, we met D on Curtain Road in East London. Then we made this film:

A bit of spraymount, a bit of Photoshop and an A3 printer later, these “laughing cavaliers of anti-capitalism” set out on their bikes to a few of Nye Bevan’s greatest creations. I followed closely behind and made this:

Many thanks to FG, JL, EJ, WJ, all at Channel 4 and ZCZ. And that cocking coalition government that gives activist art a reason for being.

Edited by the inimitable James the Vacuum Cleaner and made with the sort of cheek you can’t help but slap, these films are intended to show that protest can – and should – be creative with a sense of humour.

Although regular Santacon devotees will bleat about this event being a non-political affair, I’d love to see you argue the politics out of what is effectively a sozzled situationist derive in fake beards.

[Click here until the video becomes available: http://randomacts.channel4.com/#view/132]

Left Bank Show 02.12.2011 [Hannah Hull] by Resonance FM

He gave a rousing sermon livelinked with our friends in New York City.

We went off to an independent coffee place called Get Coffee on Fleet Street [run by a former Starbucks employee] and recorded an interview which has since been lost to the ether of technology…. He agreed to do it again via telephone when he got back to Brooklyn. And this is our conversation for my show, The Left Bank Show, on Resonance FM 104.4.

Left Bank Show 18.11.2011 [Reverend Billy] by Resonance FM

A series of Home Office proposals could ban protests during the London 2012 Olympic games. In reaction to the longevity and scale of recent Occupy London takeovers of public and private space at St Paul’s Cathedral, Finsbury Square and a former UBS bank, ministers are reported to be drafting legislation loosely based on part 3 of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 – paying particular note to restricting tents and “sleeping equipment” for up to 90 days around exclusion zones. Police and “authorised officers” will be allowed to disperse protests quickly. Presumably with “reasonable force”.

Don’t be too shocked or too quick to compare this to Beijing 2008. Then, the Beijing Organising Committee banned all foreign visitors and non-Beijing-resident Chinese from attending, watching or applying for the right to demonstrate in authorised protest zones. Athens had protest zones in 2004. So did the Salt Lake City Winter Games in 2002.

The reasoning behind these restrictions is always to “preserve the festivity” of the Olympic experience. And security. Always security. In London’s case, security means Britain apparently waives its own rights and customs to allow America to oversee its own security operations, laying on 21,000 private security contractors and enforcing the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006.

That allows police and “enforcement officers” the right of entry to private buildings suspected of contravening legislation on Olympic advertising. This includes: “advertising of a non-commercial nature” and “announcements or notices of any kind” paying particular attention to “the distribution or provision of documents or articles, the display or projection of words, images, lights or sounds, and things done with or in relation to material which has or may have purposes or uses other than as an advertisement”. In other words, protest.

Artist Peter Kennard, noted for overtly political art in a public context says: “The Secretary of State has regulations banning ‘advertising in the vicinity of the Olympics’. How big is a vicinity? Words fail me and because I make public art in the ‘vicinity’ of the Olympics it might be safer for me if both words and images continue to fail me until after the Olympics”.

A London swamped with police, security officers and spy drones might just dampen all the fun. Providing you sing along with the hymn sheet laid on by the Games’ sponsors and ignore the £9.3 billion price tag, you’ll be fine. But if you argue that a corporate agenda and exploitation is being sold under the auspices of uniting the world under sport and “generating jobs”, you might be in trouble.

The proposed legislation and the laws already in place only serve to secure the profits made by those with heavy financial stakes in the Olympic Games. These corporations read like an anti-capitalist wet dream: McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Dow, G4S, BP…. They may bring jobs to an area, but totally undermine the community-building that encourages grass roots businesses and the local relationships and interactions that stem from that.

It’s interesting to note that the Home Office sees protest as a threat. They’re not only worried about homegrown “domestic extremists” with a grudge against capitalism but international groups seeking to use the Olympics as a platform to air their grievances about authoritarian regimes around the world. Syria, China and Bahrain spring quickly to mind. So instead of giving an example of a functioning democracy where everyone gets a voice and can practise free speech, Britain hides dissent in an attic like it’s an invalid child.

The idea that ministers are considering bans on protest off the back of a global Occupy movement further legitimises the idea that these restrictions are directed at those who oppose one of the greatest and most murderous regimes of the world…capitalism.

So here we go. I hate the Olympics. Arrest me.

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This article was first published in the Index on Censorship. Reprinted with permission from the author [ie., me].

“Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police.”

That was Sunday. The swell of internet-driven murmuring rage brought Project Griffin’s 33-word definition of anarchism and its appeal to dob in your Chomsky-reading neighbours to front page news on the Guardian.

Twitter tweeps retweeted shortened URLs prefixed with disbelief and Facebook folk guffawed about handing themselves in to Belgravia police station. Here was a document from the Metropolitan Police that, in one dinky box decorated with clip art, pushed McCarthyism to the local businesses and public institutions the newsletter went out to. The reds under your bed were back. But this time they wanted a smaller state. No state. A bigger society. A Big Societ…oh. Erm.

Queue the crash of arguments pointing out that the likes of Alan Greenspan, the American Tea Party and David Cameron are proponents of smaller states and stateless societies. Running alongside that is the Orwellian scenario of thought crime. Because you are an anarchist, you should be reported as dangerous. You are here being mentioned alongside Anders Breivik –– the bad man who killed all those people in Norway. You are here mentioned alongside terrorism. It says so. Right here.

Within 24 hours, police issued a climbdown blaming bad wording. “The Metropolitan Police service does not seek to stigmatise those people with legitimate political views. People purporting to be anarchists have caused criminal damage this year to business premises, and government buildings in Westminster. The message we were trying to convey was to gather information on criminal acts to help us prevent crime and bring offenders to justice.”

Here was a document that seemed to have copied and pasted its definition of anarchism from the first line of Wikipedia. Here was a document that, on the same page, asked people to report all sightings of a yellow dot topped with Arabic script as an Al-Qaeda symbol and misspelled “beach volleyball”. Like a badly designed school handout that’s gone a bit wild with a text box, it would be laughable if the consequences weren’t so serious.

Okay. It’s still laughable. But the subtext of their climbdown isn’t. It’s nose-on-face clear that policing priorities lie in the protection of commercial interests and business. Project Griffin is a “product” for raising “awareness of crime and terrorism issues within the business community”.

Opening a document by declaring the UK’s threat level from international terrorism as “substantial” in bold red letters and closing it with the mantra “if you suspect it, report it” in a bright red box cements paranoia. What the Counter Terrorist Focus Desk has done is equate anarchism with terrorism –– a calculation that criminalises a philosophy. By doing that, they have engendered fear. And to do that is an act of terrorism.

As threatening as the word seems, anarchy is rooted in unwavering optimism because it trusts individuals to come up with ethics and freedoms collectively. At the heart of the myriad of anarchist philosophies is a fundamental belief in fairness.

What Project Griffin has taught the wider public is that there is a section of the establishment with dangerously simplistic views of politics. It is the section concerned with running around the yard like a dog barking at anything that moves in the name of vigilance.

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This article was first published on the Index on Censorship, 02 August 2011

Adam Curtis is a documentary filmmaker and academic who is best known for his use of videomontage to relay sociopolitical analyses of the modern age. His films include The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares. His latest project is a three-part BBC internet series called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. Leah Borromeo is a journalist and filmmaker who quite likes Curtis but, unlike him, would never have the balls to carry a bag that featured pictures of Westmoreland terriers. The irony of writing for a magazine called Tank has not escaped her.

Leah Borromeo: How important is popular culture to your filmmaking?

Adam Curtis: I don’t actually use popular culture, I use popular-culture techniques. I once did a story about how radical psychotherapy theories of the 1960s became the basis for modern consumer capitalism. It was part of my series The Century of the Self, about the relationship between ideas of psychology and ideas of marketing and politics. I took radical encounter groups and showed how those ideas morphed through the 1970s until they became what we call “values and lifestyles marketing”.

I discovered this group of Californian nuns who were encouraged to go through group therapy. They ended up challenging each other – challenging authority. The convent split and you ended up with a bunch of radical lesbian nuns who are still there. It made me laugh. It illustrates a funny, touching truth about the ridiculousness of it all. It shows the shift from collectivism to individualism. Then I found footage in the BBC archive of the nuns before the therapy and suddenly I had a story!

LB: So you’re a storyteller?

AC: There are lots of wonderful things on the internet, but the one thing that can never, ever die is, “I want to tell you a story.”

In All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, I have a go at internet utopias. Internet utopians think we can make our own stories up, or have multiple endings in which you make the choice. That’s naïve. What you see on Twitter and Facebook is the modern equivalent of what, under Stalin’s time, was socialist realism.

LB: I’m not sure I understand – you mean instead of buxom fieldworkers and strapping steelworkers we now have lots of people communicating in 140-character thought bubbles?

AC: Twitter is a happy little universe where everything is incredibly innocent and comes from within you. Well, no it doesn’t! What shapes your feelings are the structures of power around you. The tubes down which your feelings go are built by large businesses – these businesses shape how you see the world. It’s not manipulation, it’s just the way the world works. The way we see the world is as much shaped by the structures of power around us as the feelings we have within us. What shapes those feelings is reflected by the ideology of our time: that there is nothing more sacrosanct than our inner feelings. These days, the idea of immersing yourself in something grander than yourself is alien.

LB: So there’s no chance of changing power structures?

AC: The most intelligent way to tell a story is to show how individuals play – like the radical lesbian nuns. Then you pull back and show the circumstances in which people find themselves and show the architecture of power. You should look at Tolstoy, because he writes detailed scenes about individuals and their feelings but, in the next chapter, pulls back and shows how those feelings are contexualised in the bigger picture. He shows how the two play against each other. He shows a battle from a character’s perspective and then shows it as being part of the mass of history. I find that very exciting. You’re only really going to write good stories on the internet or invent new ways of storytelling if you pull back and do a Tolstoy. What we need is a little less Wes Anderson and his miniaturist style, a little more Tolstoy.

LB: So what about the revolutions where we all join together thanks to the internet?

AC: I went back and looked at the revolutions where the internet rose up as a voice: Georgia, then the Ukraine, then Kyrgyzstan. Those revolutions have absolutely failed. The people in those countries are actually less free than they were in 2003. In Ukraine, for example, [Viktor] Yanukovych is back in power and dismantling the structure of democracy. Well done the internet!

The problem with the internet is that they think that just organising something will lead to revolution. You don’t create revolutions like that, you create revolutions by organising for ideologies and beliefs that people fight for.

LB: What are your politics?

AC: I don’t have politics. I’m completely modern. I have none.

LB: So power obsesses you?

AC: I grew up in an age where society got more complicated and power stopped flowing through Westminster politics, but moved instead through areas like science, psychology, consumerism. They all shape the way we think and feel about ourselves. All I’ve ever really wanted to do is pull back and show people how power flows through those things.

LB: If you don’t have a political agenda, why do you do what you do?

AC: Because I like telling stories. I like showing off that you can take boring, abstract things and make them larky and fun.

LB: And you turned to videomontage because?

AC: It’s fun. Trash. Pop. That’s all it is. It also means I don’t have to go and film things myself. It’s a good discipline because it’s all you’ve got. The way I work is that I know the area I’m working in and I know the stories I want to tell. I sit down with the material I’ve got and cut something I like and then think, “How can I use that?” And that product changes how I tell the story.

LB: Do power structures keep you in a job?

AC: Yeah. We live in an age where we’re encouraged to believe that the individual is the centre of the universe – “Where do you want to go to today?” is the great slogan of our time. You’re unaware of the powerful forces going on around you. I point that out to people. I don’t have an agenda, because I don’t think anyone has an agenda these days.

LB: Really? Even the student protests in the UK and the marchers against cuts?

AC: To be ruthless, what are they marching for? They’re marching to keep the world they’ve got there. It’s not a revolutionary idea about how to change the structure of power. What’s happening is a bureaucratic row about how you keep the diminished proceeds of a broken system better allocated. That has been the distinguishing feature of our politics since Tony Blair. It’s a managerial, bureaucratic politics that says, “This is the only system we have; there is no alternative. How do we manage it best?” The difference between the parties is their definition of best. It was a wonderful march, but it was a bureaucratic row.

LB: Were you on it?

AC: Yes.

LB: Does individualism bother you?

AC: Well, yes, it’s static. It sells the idea that “it’s just me”. You don’t change the world through “just me”. You can reorganise the world through “just me”, but not change it. We’re all librarians now, whether on Flickr, when you upload and tag your photos, or on Facebook. I find this narrowness depressing. Because I like ideas. I like ideas that inspire you and take you somewhere else.

LB: We haven’t really had many “ideas” of late though, have we?

AC: Good or bad, the last radical politicians you had were Thatcher and Reagan. What they did was tear down the middle-class elites who had grown up as a result of the state in post-war years. They allowed a powerfully aspirational class to break through. That class is perfectly happy now and they want everything to quiet down and be all right. Just like France in the 1830s. We had a big revolution, let’s settle down. Periods of conservativism are also periods of great hypocrisy. And out of great hypocrisy comes great art. I’m still waiting for the new Madame Bovary to come along.

LB: You wouldn’t think of coming up with those ideas yourself?

AC: That’s not a journalist’s job.

LB: A hundred years from now, how will we be viewed?

AC: Ayn Rand believed that there was nothing but the individual and reason. At the end of her life, a journalist asked if she was scared of death. She replied, “You don’t understand. I won’t die. The world will cease to exist.” What she meant by that was that the world is in your own head, your own creation. It will be said that this was an age that had no consolation beyond the death of its own people. We’re frightened of change because we fear our own death and that hampers political change. They will ask why these people are so frightened.

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This interview was originally published in Tank Magazine’s Summer 2011 edition.