We at Austin Autonomedia have updated our challenge to participants of this year’s SmashXSmashWest, building upon last year’s Insurrection Challenge to call for a more generalized Hooliganism Challenge.
We have issued an updated bingo sheet to pair. Happy Smashing!
This is a call, a dare, a provocation to everyone at SmashXSmashWest, event organizers and attendees alike. Your mission, which you have already accepted by receiving this transmission, is a challenge to make SmashXSmashWest a festival of hooliganism. SmashXSmashWest cannot become simply another DIY festival, or an activist echo-chamber where we simply regurgitate the comfortable ideas that leave us impotent in the face of our enemies. To practice hooliganism is to infuse the art and politics of SmashX with tangible practices of ungovernability, spreading signals of disorder to undermine the metropolis. Practicing hooliganism at SmashxSmashWest is an opportunity to flex and build these muscles of ungovernability, to undermining the webs of social control that the technocrats of SXSW want to build. We know that SXSW is a unique time to flex these muscles, because the strain the festival puts on the city and its policing apparatus opens up unique opportunities to strike with greater effect and slip away with ease. By practicing and developing these skills now, by pushing ourselves beyond our comfort zones, our over-identification with social roles like “artist” or “activist,” and the sad comforts of simplified radical ideas, we will begin to hone the skills, experience, and creativity necessary to keep fighting the march of control that is advancing against us.
To Everyone:
- Get with your friends/crew/organizations and figure out what you can do to introduce a little disorder to SXSW week. Put some freak performance art on a busy street corner, play a weird game like capture the flag in a park or hotel, ruin the vibes at a bougie bar, drag a couch or a scooter into the street somewhere inconvenient.
- Step outside your normal social scene. Cross-pollinate and activate outside of the identities of “artist” or “activist.” If you normally just go to shows, find a way to connect to some “political” event (a talk, workshop, training, protest, etc.) If you normally just organize with “Activists,” go to a show and connect with people to make schemes with.
To the Artists: Most political art activity has taken the form of benefit shows and awareness-raising events. Challenge your self, stretch your muscles, and break down the divide between art & action:
- Combine your show with some workshop or training that builds up community skills. Know your rights, direct action training, harm reduction, or more! Make the show free or cheaper for those who come to the workshop.
- Use your events as an opportunity to spread tools for ungovernability: lasers, umbrellas, shields, bats, spray paint, etc.
- Throw a renegade show that lives up to the name. Put your DJ booth in a box truck or a float and get mobile, blocking streets or buildings as your dance around the city. Pop up with a speaker system and throw a rager in front of some evil building (even better if it’s not downtown).
To the “Activists:” The activist scene has been in a clear moment of demobilization. Everyone feels how empty the ritual of yelling downtown is, but no one has been able or willing to plan an alternative. It is time to try again, to set new directions and experiment with new tactics:
- Plan protests outside the city core! Find targets like offices, major streets, the homes of the powerful, and go get rowdy where they aren’t expecting you to protest.
- Organize an event without using social media–circulate an anonymous flyer or pull together your networks to cause some unexpected disruption
plan your action with more content than just chants and marches. Figure out how you can maximize disruption to meet your objectives, apply pressure, or simply feel the power of striking successfully against this world: blockades, occupations, marching into buildings, lockdowns, & more! - respect people’s autonomy! stop peace-policing and repeating the cops orders to the crowd in the name of protecting people. De-fanging your protest and encouraging compliance defeats the point of radical resistance; a courageous crowd is a crowd that can keep itself safe. If you’re wearing a uniform and facing the crowd in the name of “safety,” who do you really serve?
- plan your actions or protests to be simultaneous with other actions, shows, or events. Multiple simultaneous events in different places maximize disruption, fluidity, & stretch thin the police’s resources.
To the crowd at protests: don’t come to protests as passive spectators or bodies in a crowd. Reclaim your agency and figure out how you can act at a protest to open up new disruptive possibilities:
- don’t fall in line unthinkingly behind protest martials or self-proclaimed leaders, and challenge them when they exert their authority over people
- organize in your crews to offer something to the action: bring medical supplies, masks, umbrellas, a sound system, shields, spray paint, & more.
- look for opportunities during the protest. A storefront that’s not being guarded while a big crowd passes by; lead a break-away march down an alley or side street; drag things into the street behind the protest to help protect the crowd and increase disruption.
To the crowd at shows: You are not just passive consumers or spectators! At SmashX, you are an active participant, hooligan, and agitator, so act like it:
- Talk to people at the show about what’s going on in the world, about SmashXSmashWest, and ways you can take action to defend your lives and undermine our enemies
- Show up at a show to hand out zines and flyers. Bring a table and distro if you want (its a great way to make friends and have a thing to do if you’re socially anxious)! Find other people who share your ideas and desires and stay connected beyond the show.
- Bring your mischievous toys to a show so you can sneak out and hit up any interesting enemy infrastructure nearby (cameras, offices, banks, etc…there’s plenty around)
The attached bingo sheet is not a prescription or incitement to any particular action. Anyone can act in ways beyond what the bingo sheet says as well. It is just a little game for mapping our predictions and speculations, and evaluating our hooliganism. Send short written reportbacks and, when secure/wise to do so, photos from the results of your freaky deeds to us at austinautonomedia [@] autistici [dot] org.
Keep Austin Criminal,
Austin Autonomedia