Goodbye Southby: The 1st Annual SmashXSmashWest in Review

Austin Autonomedia: Keeping Austin Criminal

Strolling down the thumping, plastered downtown streets that SXSW treat as its campus, you are likely to have a free can of “C4” shoved in your face. This energy drink named after an explosive is the perfect symbol of what the festival-conference has to offer: a cloying and too seamless blend of brand consciousness, work cultism, consumerist reverie, and militarism. The can is a bomb lobbed at you– but one you are meant to gleefully let blow you up to improve your status and efficacy within the capitalist-imperialist project.

Watching Southby’s lanyard wearing throng drink down these noxious narratives left us with a seething desire to knock the can out of their hands, to shout the truth to the heavens, to shake some sense into the world around us. And so we did.

Whether answering SmashXSmashWest’s call for Divestment and Disruption or following their own paths, autonomous crews of protesters, revolutionaries, and hooligans made their presence known downtown last week, ripping through layers of self-congratulatory spectacle to reveal the conference’s deep cynicism, moral bankruptcy, and harmful consequences within Austin and far beyond. Here are the interventions we know about.

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Reportback from #StopCopCity Solidarity Demo in ATX

A picture of 3 banners in front of an office building. The first one on the left reads "We'll Flex on Pavetex" with a drawing of a masked person flexing their arm. The second reads "Drop the Contract Atlas" the third reads "Fuck you Lonnie, Atlas sucks"

Anonymous Transmission

Greetings from central Texas. This Thursday a few forest freaks made their way over to the Atlas headquarters for a noise demo. Atlas is a billion dollar company whose subsidiary Long engineering has been building cop city. We came with noise makers and banners expressing our affection for Atlas CEO Lonnie Joe Boyer and their other subsidiary Pavetex. A heavy police presence was waiting: a few thugs on the ground, some more thugs on the parking garage, and they even brought a drone out. It looks some people over at Atlas might be getting a little nervous. We also noticed that Atlas took their company name off the office sign, comical, frankly.

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“How Far We’ve Come”: Austin in the Streets Against Attacks on Abortion Access

Anonymous transmission originally published on It’s Going Down. We have swapped out some of the media at the end of the article.

The memory of 2020 is still around and led to a pretty inspiring demo in Austin, TX. Crowds protesting the ascendance of patriarchal state denials of abortion access, have shown their boldness, and openness to creativity and confrontation. If the movement can produce new targets, confront the police, and disrupt the infrastructure of the anti-abortion movement, they may produce a crisis to which the State has to respond.

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Austin Police Association President’s Car Vandalized

On May 10th, we found out that Ken Casaday–president of the Austin Police Association, and director of the anti-homeless organization Save Austin Now (which was responsible for the passage of Prop B, the renewed camping ban), had his car vandalized.

We love getting good news on a Monday. We hope the culprits disappear, never to be found. If they are, we hope people will mobilize to defend & support them.

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Call for Decentralized, Autonomous May Day Actions!

A flyer of white background with black text. Text reads: "Decentralized & Autonomous Action. Against Displacement, Police, & Property. Find your COVID Pods, Affinity Groups, or Vaccinated Friends. Act Together. May Day 2021. Center of the flyer has a black & white photo of someone dancing in frot of a burning car during a protest.

An Anonymous Transmission

The Message

More than a year and a half into a set of escalating crises–a global pandemic that has bled the poor and working classes dry while enriching the ruling classes, a globalizing insurrection against anti-Black police violence, a State whose violence has not ceased with a simple change in the figurehead–we remain at a crossroads. The way things are is not sustainable. We feel this deeply in every aspect of our lives: physical, spiritual, social, emotional. We reject the tyranny of working long hours to barely meet our basic needs. We denounce the extraction, exploitation, and hoarding of the land’s precious gifts. We deny the manufactured necessity of police, prisons, and surveillance.

The experiences and struggles of the past year–from mutual aid networks & rent strikes to riots & autonomous zones–have fundamentally transformed us and our local conditions. One the one hand, the growth of local organizing networks and the explosion of insurgent strategies has expanded the window of possibility for autonomous activity in the city. On the other hand, the weight of over a year of furious organizing, the heigtening of internal contradictions and conflict amongst organizations, and the slowing down of the waves of local insurgency have sapped much of the energy that propelled us last year. Finally, we look ahead to an oncoming struggle around multiple proposals to criminalize homelessness, heigtening antagonism to the police and the regime of property they serve, and a summer which many predict will be hot and riotous. It is amidst these conditions that we offer this proposal for May 1st.

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The Rundberg Rebellion: A Retrospective

Austin Autonomedia: Keeping Austin Criminal

Revolt, of the sort that exceeds the form of permitted street marches and sign-waving rallies, has rarely manifested in Austin’s streets. As such, its occurrences–such as the wave of activity that came with the George Floyd rebellion–deserves attention and uplifting in our historical memory. Four years ago, at the beginning of the Trump’s term, one such revolt manifested in the Rundberg area in North Austin.

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Keeping Austin Criminal: An Insurgent Review of 2020

Austin Autonomedia: Keep Austin Criminal

2020 was a year of insurgent milestones in Austin–an explosion of autonomous initiatives, a proliferation of insurrectionary tactics and revolt, and the weaving together of new connections between fragmented worlds inhabiting this territory.

We’ve decided to forefront some of the highlights of this year, to celebrate the high points of this year and look forward to the next one. This is not a claim to a comprehensive review of the activity of this past year, an attempt at in-depth analysis and critique, nor a claim to what projects/initiatives/actions “mattered” or not–it’s merely a reflection of things that we have found on our radar, find inspiring, and wish to highlight and remember. We encourage any fellow insurgents reading this to put out their own analysis and perspectives about the event of this year, whether through our page, your own platforms, or wheatpasted on the walls of the city.

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Protestors Scare Austin Police Association President Out Of His Home

An important message from Ken Casaday, president of the Austin Police Association. This comes after two protests at his home, in respond to Casaday’s general advancement of police violence and his atrocious comments regarding the murder of Garrett Foster.

Original here

 


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What We Know About Logan Bucknam

Austin Autonomedia: Keeping Austin Criminal

On the evening of June 27th, a group of protestors who had assembled to counter a “Blue Lives Matter” demonstration was attack by a white man in a car who aggressively drove into the crowd. Witnesses reported the man pointing a gun at protestors as well. While no shots were fired and nobody was injured, APD briefly took the man into custody and then let him go (while, shortly afterwards, arresting a Black protestor). Here’s a collection of information about the man believed to be responsible, selected from a handful of tweets and information collected by Bat City Antifascist Front.

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Deep In The Heart of Texas: The Car Demo Form as Attack on Economic Circulation

An anonymous transmission from a participant in the Rent Strike ATX car demo on May Day

On May 1st, a caravan of around 30 cars proceeded down I-35 as part of a May Day car demonstration hosted by Rent Strike ATX. Some cars bore banners and signs reading “Rent Strike,” and “Justice for Mike Ramos,” while others amplified various parts of the 5 demands which have been popularized nationwide (including free healthcare, freedom for prisoners, no debt, and homes for all).

This communique offers a participant’s perspective on the events of this May Day demonstration—both evaluating its local significance and the contribution it makes to evolving national experimentation with the car demo form. It is a response and extension of the strategic conversation initiated by friends in Atlanta around the car demo form, with analysis that still speaks deeply to a local context. This piece aims to cultivate, deepen, and inspire forms of autonomous action that can strike directly at the settler-colonial economic system which, with each passing day, reveals itself more and more to be a death cult for many of us. May the experience of this demonstration offer strategic clarity to others seeking ways to intervene in our exceptional moment, whether in so-called Austin or anywhere else across this world.

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