Tag: sideshow

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Dancing in the Streets: Reflections from Rundberg (2025)

An Anonymous transmission, with An editorial note from Austin Autonomedia:
In February 2017, a spontaneous protest in response to ICE raids under a Trump presidency evolved into a party/riot that took over the intersection at Rundberg and Lamar. In 2017, anarchists and revolutionaries participated and reflected on this experience.
In February 2025, a protest against ICE raids under a Trump presidency on Rundberg announced via TikTok evolved into a party/riot/sideshow that took over the intersection and Rundberg and Rutland. In 2025, anarchists and revolutionaries again participated in, and are now reflecting on this experience.
In this transmission, we see another round of reflections on an anti-ICE rebellion on Rundberg, which builds upon our previous collection of reflections on the 2017 Rundberg Rebellion. We encourage these reflections to be read together to draw out the similarities between the moments we find ourselves in, and their differences. It is rare that we get to reflect on, compare, and contrast such similar conditions and truly consider, and actualize, what we might do differently. Some of the similarities are obvious–the location, the ways people slowly progressed from a sign-holding rally to a party that overtook the intersection itself. We might imagine that the location was not accidental, but that the memory of the 2017 revolt lives on and so drew people back to this intersection.
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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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