revolution

I’ve been slowly making my way through First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, which I picked up while browsing the Strand back in the spring and then purchased as a supplemental counterweight to the delightfully light/fun Shantaram. Žižek isn’t really breezy, but he’s certainly brilliant, and more importantly willing to ask pretty hard questions.

The book is part dissection of the contemporary neoliberal status quo ideology, and part argument to revive the idea of (haunting music) Communism. It’s already delivered a few gems, such as this explanation of the uselessness of the modern Leftist opposition:

In the good old days of Really Existing Socialism, a joke popular among dissidents was used to illustrate the futility of their protests. In the fifteenth century, when Russia was occupied by Mongols, a peasant and his wife were walking along a dusty country road; a Mongol warrior on a horse stopped at their side and told the peasant he would now proceed to rape his wife; he then added, “But since there’s a lot of dust on the ground, you must hold my testicles while I rape your wife, so that they will not get dirty!” Once the Mongol had done the deed and ridden away, the peasant started laughing and jumping with joy. His surprise wife asked, “How can you be jumping with joy when I was just brutally raped in your presence?” The farmer answered: “But I got him! His balls are covered with dust!”

A lot of the rest is somewhat remedial for anyone with a critical eye for the world: how a “kinder” — or more recently “greener” — capitalist status quo has taken hold and is recycling its opposition into its own system, etc. The interesting piece to me is not this critique, but the argumentation to seriously (re)consider the Marxist alternative.

Žižek argues that the financial collapse was the final end of “Captialism” as a meaningful thing, and that emerging post-financial-collapse iteration of the World Order — big industry bailouts, a more culturally sensitive consumerism, enough social safety net to keep people complacent but not to really redistribute wealth — is really a sort of corrupt consumerist/cronyist Socialism, still rife with inequality and on a collision course with ecological catastrophe, and of course suppressing the still-present specter of Communism.

I don’t buy all of his arguments. Some are just wrong — for instance the contention that recent famines are indicative of insufficient food production, when in fact modern famines have emerged within an abundance of resources; the problems being distribution and ownership. Others feel like a bit of a reach — appeals to post-humanism, fear of genetic manipulation, generally appolcalyptic thinking. However, the main thrust is undeniable:

• This 21st century post-capitalist elite-supporting socialism may be socialistic, but it’s still primarily oriented around property and the preservation of existing holdings.
• As a result, vast and immoral inequality of life-chances looks set to persist through the coming decades.

• And of course nothing meaningful is being done to address any of the planetary-scale issues which, if they break in a bad/sudden way, will cause the inequality to rapidly escalate into a dystopian world so polarized and divided we can hardly imagine it today.

The last third of the book, which is what I’m still reading, explores the emancipatory notion of Communism as a way of freeing ourselves from this fate. Maybe there will be some aha! moment at the end, but I somewhat doubt it. Still, it’s got me thinking.

At this time, I feel it’s an appropriate time to peer into the cultural consciousness via Star Trek and some wonderful people from Iceland. First, Picard:

And now, Iceland:

The Best Party, whose members include a who’s who of Iceland’s punk rock scene, formed a coalition with the center-left Social Democrats (despite Mr. Gnarr’s suspicion that party leaders had assigned an underling to watch “The Wire” and take notes). With that, Mr. Gnarr took office last week, hoping to serve out a full, four-year term, and the new government granted free admission to swimming pools for everyone under 18. Its plans include turning Reykjavik, with its plentiful supply of geothermal energy, into a hub for electric cars.

Their campaign video gives a good taste of the vibe:

It reminds me of Jim Henson and the muppets somehow. Comic, but also earnest. I like it.

Now my own position is ticklish. As was pointed out by a feisty old relative last fall in the midst of a debate about Health Care Reform, “You’re in business for yourself. You’re a capitalist, right?” In some ways, yes, though I more or less agree with Žižek’s thesis that “Capitalism” has lost all but a tribal/totemic meaning. Though, I think that’s how the question was posed, as a sort of cold-war “with us or against us” formulation, which I think is totally dated, but c’est la vie.

Anyhow, I’m certainly an entrepreneur, and a businessman of sorts — I’m with the invaders, no use in trying to hide that; but at the same time I disagree with some of the things they are doing. I would ultimately prefer to live in a more equitable world less oriented around material things, one with more of a sense of whimsy, exploration, and fun; a world where we might actually reach the stars rather than successively raping one another down in the dirt.

On that path I don’t believe we can eschew economic self-determination or the competition it implies. Nobody really believes that command economies are coming back, but neither are we at any “end of history.” There’s got to be a better way to run things, both pragmatically in terms of creating wealth more efficiently, and morally in terms of distributing it equitably. My guess is without compelling and radical ideas which aggressively challenge the status quo in a progressive way — as opposed to the virulent reactionary opposition we see popping up on the Right — we’ll end up with a bunch of bland technocratic hand-waving, until of course that fails at which point the reactionary forces won’t hesitate to fill the gap.

The most compelling moment for me in the Best Party video was where Gnarr proclaims, And, and we won’t accept mediocrity, because we want The Best. Another world may be possible, but hope is not a plan.

As per Žižek, those who believe in this possibility — whether they’re Communists or not — must begin again at the beginning, and continue to try: “Try again, fail again, fail better.” This is the only way progress is ever made.

Revolution in central Asia. Just FYI.

I’m wearing this fly new hoodie I got from the artist who did that “Act Like Ya Know” poster that I liked. Rage is not revolution, but it might be a precourser.

I think it’s important to recognize that when we talk about political extremism in Estados Unidos, the far Right is much larger, organized, well funded and (critically) well armed and prepared to shed blood compared to the Left. They are a strong movement which has embraced increasingly violent and eliminationist rhetoric, especially with regards to Muslims in the wake of 9/11.

It’s been years since eco-radicals even burned down a lumber-yard — which is ultimately just property crime — but anti-choice radicals still kill doctors and “militia” members (or anti-tax hardliners) blow up buildings in protest of what they perceive to be tyranny.

The political right has been fueled by fear and anger for decades. The chickens are coming home to roost.

The real problem is that I don’t get along with a lot of tech people. It reminds me of how when I was in acting school I found I didn’t like many actors. Here I am in a space, a culture, a zone where I seem to be getting some traction, and I’m increasingly frustrated with my nominal peers.

In particular I find the crossover between geeks, hipsters and entrepreneurs — a flavor that runs strong in SF — to be especially nettlesome. There’s a kind of passive-aggressive form of snobbish competition which emerges around these kinds of people, a sort of nerd machismo. I don’t really have time in my life to contend with machismo, and the un-manly brand is just annoying.

Cue the record-scratch sound effect. There’s an undeniably enormous element of “I am the things I hate about other people” at work here. I’m a geek, entrepreneur, hipsterish in style, and possessed of my own stinky brand of macho bullshit. The opinion-piece colliery to thinly-veiled autobiographical content is perhaps thinly-veiled self-loathing?

Maybe, but there’s also something particular to my structural-hole-bridging personality that I think prevents me from really clicking into a truly deep groove with any given set of people. My persona is playing twister with the universe, and I’ve always got a food or a hand on some other dot. Never all at home.

It’s an old gripe. There’s not much I can do about this but live through it, to keep transcending whatever games I can. Noticing things one hates about oneself in others is a growing moment once you realize that’s what’s going on, and opportunities are created every time I can see my way past one of these things, to a higher purpose or more integrated whole. This is where you level up as a person, I think.

I am my own man, which is a vastly privileged thing to be. I have, as they say, First World Problems. And although I know I am not like other people in my circumstances, and probably not in my composition, I believe at a core level that I could be anyone, and everyone could be me. Not literally, but situationally. I think we can all be “our own people”, and the world would keep on churning, maybe quite a bit for the better, if we were.

Which makes it particularly jarring when I’m forced to the realization that all this internet goodness isn’t changing human nature, or at least if it is, it is evolving us more even slowly than a W3C spec (cue rimshot). People are still largely the same: shallow, scared, narrowly self-interested: very much not their own people. We may be moving gradually towards a brighter future, but in the mean-time I’m confronting the very things I hope to change manifesting themselves in the very space that I thought would be home base for said changing. That’s a mouthful, but hopefully you catch my drift. It’s a bummer, man.

I don’t subscribe to the notion that people are inherently anything more complex that social pattern recognizers who like to be well fed, safe, sexually satisfied, and part of a community. Beyond that — and even sometimes in the face of that — we are what we believe, what we learn from observation and emulation, what we come to know in the spaces between us and others.

Human nature, such as we reference it, can change. It can change in pretty big ways and with impressive relative speed compared to, say, geology or genetics. Specifically, as soon as we gain insight into ourselves, our selves themselves are changed; a sort of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle of the psyche. It’s one of the reasons I don’t find those “simulation theories“ very philosophically interesting. Epistemology often comes down to pretty basic decisions — what do you believe — and I fundamentally don’t subscribe to a mechanistic/deterministic model for humanity. We’re an organic, emergent phenomena, and thus a constantly moving target. We can’t simulate ourselves accurately because if we did we wouldn’t be us.

And so one can argue that the generation coming up and the generation that’s gotten on board with the internet thing have evolved in fundamental ways. Our assumptions about communication and geography are different, as are our understanding about how knowledge and truth are obtained. I think these shifts are more or less for the better, but in and of themselves they don’t seem to have led to very different behaviors other than the phenomena of internet usage in and of itself. We retain the same patterns of action otherwise; a politics dictated by an elite class of of insiders and talking heads, a social milieu defined by those who are in and those who are out, an economics that is on the way to creating a permanent generational underclass. All of these things should and could be changing, but they aren’t. At least not yet.

Under such circumstances, one can begin questioning the strength of one’s small-d democratic beliefs. I can idealize a world of egalitarian brotherhood and harmony among peoples, but what if peoples themselves aren’t so into it? What if they prefer starfucking, holy wars and reality television?

As an upper-middle-class college-educated straight white male, it’s hardly my place to judge anyone, but it would be really cool to see something unexpected in the next year or so. I’m always optimistic and constantly hopeful.

So, the news from the centers of power is grim. Exceedingly grim. The Democratic Party is, as an institution, putting on a world-class clinic in organizational dysfunction. In complete control of the government, they have failed to make any significant achievements over the course of a full year. Their only big move, last winter's stimulus plan, has been roundly understood to be too timid, and as a result the economy, while still existent, is in a prolonged "jobless recovery" limbo.

Then last week's one-two combination of truly devastating news. First the pseduo-aristocratic nomination of a Kennedy-family apparatchik to succeed old Teddy in Massachusetts going down in flames to a right-winger in a pickup who flat out wanted it more. Scott Brown did five times as many public events as Coakly, had a hot-shit new media team (running Drupal), and surged at the end to take the win. That's Edward Kennedy's seat, going to a rather immoderate Republican, and bringing an end to the 60-vote theory of power in the Senate.

Republicans Seize 41 - 59 Senate Majority

That seems ridiculous, but it's more or less true. As a fighting entity, the Democratic Senate is somewhere below slime-mold in effectiveness. They lack any coherent vision, and the leadership simply does not have the will to utilize power. Obama's plan of rational and honest engagement with his opposition has yielded zero policy results, and his inability or unwillingness to strongly define himself or his agenda as anything other than "the establishment with brains" has resulted in an epic collapse in his polling numbers. Meanwhile, unemployment remains at 10% and people are fucking pissed off that Hope and Change appears to have been merely a slogan, used to elect a very eloquent chump.

Against this backdrop, the Supreme Court has ruled once again that Corporations are People and have 1st amendment rights to political speech, meaning they can now spend unlimited sums on influencing the outcomes of elections. Organized Labor being a shadow of its former self, it seems the near-term outlook of the US political system is pretty damn dim. Established economic interests are going to continue dominating national politics for the foreseeable future, likely until some external/existential event forces larger-scale change.

In terms of how this plays out, I think the Democrats are going to get shellacked in the upcoming 2010 elections, which will likely result in increased timidity on their part should they retain majorities. Net-net: two years of gridlock in DC. While the economy will likely improve organically by the time 2012 rolls around, it seems unlikely that it will really get zooming since the ability of the state to effectively re-orient things away from massively unproductive activities like tract home building and financial skimming appears to be nil. People will still be upset, underemployed, angry, and looking to blame. Meanwhile the coalition of unlikely voters who rallied behind Obama in 2008 are demoralized and may stay home, as unlimited corporate money pours in to fill the void.

In brief, the Black President is looking down the barrel of a one-term legacy with no policy achievements. His putative successor on the right would almost certainly lack substantive remedies to the problems of our time — "let the market sort it out" will, um, not work — but would almost certainly possess a will to utilize power and a savvy team of political manipulators. The hegemon becomes most militarily active in its period of decline.

While I hope to be proven wrong — there's always a hope in my heart that we'll have an awesome montage-worthy darkest-hour-turnaround, but I can't do anything about it but hope — the vegas line favors a real shitshow. Even if we get a crappy beachhead of Health Care Reform, that's all we'll get, and we'll likely have to wait for generational turnover to get a chance like this again.

Thus: back to the drawing board. In the emerging environment, agents of change will need to move laterally, so simply/directly set about acquiring power and building parallel institutions to the establishment. We will need to out-compete large corporations to regain control of the state, or possibly to obsolete the state by finding other ways of doing for ourselves. Either way, no small task. Demographics are ostensibly on our side, but without a lot of organizing that won't mean much. We'll need to develop a whole set tools and the reasons to use them if we're going to have much of a chance.

Thus: mission statements.

This is an experiment, a process of becoming. I don't know the answers, but I have a sense of the questions. I know the future will be different from the past, and I'm though with waiting for that to be defined by anyone else. The sooner we start living the way we want the world to be — the more contagiously, courageously and publicly we do this — the more influence we can have over the changes to come.

And change is coming, no doubt about it. It's time to roll the dice, shoot the moon, bet the farm; because if not now when? If not us who? If not this, what? Risk is our business, fortune favors the bold, and I believe right-thinking people can take over this planet and usher in a golden era if only we have the will to do so. I want more power and more freedom and I want to bring joy to the people around me, to people around the world.

I take it on faith that a better world is possible, one in which all humans lead good lives, where we all work less and play more and no-one dies for stupid tragic reasons like a lack of clean water or mosquito bites. I take it on faith that war is an unnecessary evil, and that we can (indeed, must) recognize a shared fate as a species, and learn to get along together. I take it on faith that it is our destiny to explore the universe, to unlock its secrets, harness its energies, to dive deep, to fly high, eventually to live on other worlds. I take it on faith that the rate of human progress is more or less up to us, and I want to get there faster.

This is where I develop my theory and keep track of what happens when I try to put it into practice. This is where the structural hole becomes a node, where we cross the streams. This is the story of the rubber and the road, of what happens when you stop taking things on faith and start taking them into your own hands.

Power crisis in Iran. Revolution? It’s certainly something. Seems for real, with all of the opposition candidates (including conservative former head of Revolutionary Guard) calling Friday’s election stolen. Leading opposition candidate now under house arrest, and state forces clamping down on foreign media, jamming BBC satellites, locking down cellphone networks and internet access. Rumors of tanks, and video of riot police on motorcycles in the streets:

More:

Also, according to eyewitness accounts, gunshots could be heard last night until 3am in Elahiyeh, alongside chants of “God is great!” from people on their rooftops. This was a widespread tactic in the 1979 revolution, in which people were urged to take to their rooftops and shout “Allah-u Akbar.”

On the nerdly front, this is also fascinating. Far moreso than last year’s action in Burma, this is a revolution with an online component. Iran is much harder to seal off information-wise and so word is leaking out anyway. For anyone wondering how Twitter is good for anything, click here and wait for 10 seconds, when it will say something like “16 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see them.” Also good for pressuring old-school media.

Also different from Burma, the powers that be care about their ability to use networks as well, so there are spontanious denial-of-service attacks from the opposition. Goodness knows what will be possible once someone teaches people how to use popular benchmarking tools.

I hope it turns out well for the forces of Liberal Social Democracy, and with a minimum of bloodshed. We’ll see.

Some friends of mine have compiled a truly excellent video that explains (in about 30 minutes) the whole economic kerfluffle with the banks. If you’re curious about this, I strongly suggest you watch it:

Go fullscreen for a hulu-style experience!

The takeaway I agree with, and which I can explain with all sorts of business-like logic (and with plenty of slaps at Larry Summers), is that a more active and decentralized marketplace for finance offers us much better opportunities for both long-run stability — what Krugman and others have called “boring banking” — and continued innovation in terms of how to creatively set up deals to make things possible.

I think both are important, and the best way to get there is to not have a few giant mega-banks control the market. There’s no reason we can’t have a simple cap on scale — e.g. no single institution can have more than x% of the action, or else they have to figure out a way to spin off and divide amoeba-like — and still reward innovation and hard work in the private sector.

At long last, notes from my trip to South America.

3/8/09 The Great Escape
Passport scanned and security passed — metro mix-up rebounded w/cab score; Islam on the radio, honk-honk-honk at the girlblonde in VW Golf taking a slow approach to a fast merge. I am all but flying.

Body is sore from conference uptempo over the past five days. Animated action and nightly partytime reminding me I’m up against the three-oh and have lost a bit of bounce. It’s not just gutfat and buttsag, you know. The blood and organs feel their age as well.

An enlivening experience. Opening. Got a chance to kick it with my old colleague Mr. Moger for a bit — he’s tapped into the Beautiful People scene in government; it exists, I tell you: smart girls in paddington bear coats working for homeland security and the whole bit — as well as dear Howard Park, who gave me a lot of info and advice for Argentina.

It’s a funny thing. I’ve been un-attracted in general of late, and I find myself resenting the pressure to be someone or something, to sizzle, saddle up the savior faire and lead some freaky charge. Like that bit in Cool Hand Luke where he gets upset at the other inmates for living through hi,.

Seems like a symptom of depression, feeling put-upon like this. Means I don’t actually see myself in these ways: wild, fun, sexy, free. From whence came this beat-down creature of routine?

The first love is self love and without the zing and pop for my own enthusiasm for me, it turns out to be a bit much to maintain, the facade. Nobody likes living a lie.

So the stage is set, yet again, for re-invention, timed to coincide with an escape from the usual routines. And reading of old dead David Foster Wallace and the Icelandic Banking Crisis, and thinking of the slow revolution we live in, the turning of another cycle in The Great Transformation, I feel for a minute like a pretty special little guy.

But seriously, our old models are dead, and the reason I’m alone is because I haven’t loved myself enough to accept the same from anyone else, which is why confident happy people annoy me, and why in my history I get crazy lucky before reeling in a big fish. The unconsciously confident great dane of a man, scarfing up the world as his due.

And in this spirit will I find my bride of the revolution, because unless/untill I believe I can change the world (again), I’ve got a zero percent chance of attracting a mate with similar interest. How my workaday life fits in is an unknown, but in the buzzing afterglow of Drupalcon it feels like an imminently solvable problem.

3/9/09 Morning in S. America
Floating now over unknown country, an organic and gridless expanse of mottled green, brown and blue, drinking in the turgid riches of another hemisphere along with my semi-bland airline coffee.

Ambiensleep was a win. Big challenge of the day is to locate the Berquebus catamaran to Montevideo. Next up is customs, and the we find out just how degraded my spanish has become.

—-

BA like beautiful, sweaty, pre-boom New York City. Shared a cab into the city center w/a pretty pediatrician who was on my flight from DC. Mealy-mouthed self-conscious hush spanish at the sandwich place. Just enough to communicate. Mission is sunglasses.

Mission accomplished.

Passed through park with a great ancient tree which would have been killer for climbing in its prime. Now long limbs span over the parks stone walkway, propped up and braced at various strategic points. A living monument, in it for the long haul.

Passed a street protest, red banners and a giant Che, stalled along a narrow street where giant steel police barracades and riot cops blocked the way. Folks up front are ready for action — clubs, facemasks, a weary air of resignation — and warned me off taking photos of the cops.

Socialism is a real thing here, and people talk openly and seriously about class struggle. I’m more and more convinced that my revolution is different. Organizing Alynski’s “Have a little, want more” types. You revolutionize what you know.

The problem is that the putative “have a little want mores” are pretty comfortable back in the states. The infinity of consume lust notwithstanding, it’s unclear what they might actually want more of.

One path to address this is traditionally through vanguard-building, or through a long march to institutional control. That is, a motivated revolutionary elite gradually (or quickly, in the event of a coup) assumes control of existing levers of power, putting them (we hope) to better use.

This is both open to egregious watering-down, and prone to all the blind spots and pitfalls of elite organizational tactics. Just look at team Obama, opaque and cautious, tinkering with the existing machine as if all we need is to change the oil. Open source revolution this is not.

What might it mean when the servers liberate the champaigne from first class? Is it a blow for freedom, or just another greedy little score? Well dude, we just don’t know.

The “wanting more” must transcend the material plane, or at least the monetary. The Cuban revolution was possible in part because they really did bring health and literacy to the people, even in the midst of the struggle. No small feat. Our own American Revolution succeeded not because people wanted to stop paying taxes, but because the taxes they paid (plus everything else the crown demanded) were stifling real innovation and self-improvement.

The best revolutions focus on this kind of uplifting and liberation action, not on the destruction or overtaking of an existing order. The best revolutions are in a core and moral sense democratic — they widen the circle.

The US and most other “developed” places are set at most (and hopefully) for incremental progress and development, caring better for their people, creating and learning more, helping to solve big systemic problems like climate change, etc.

The emerging new global players (heavyweights like China and India, but also Brazil and a whole host of others) are on a faster track, and also unripe for fist-in-the-air revolution of the old type. Criminal cartels and indigenous liberation movements may challenge for local control, and unrest will continue, but a big takeover of collapse feels unlikely.

In the remaining pejoratively-termed “third world,” places getting mined and logged and not much else, who knows. The authorities are strong where there’s money to be made, and elsewhere the sheer poverty and wrechedness of life is a tragic damper on any sort of progress. Hard to have much of a revolution when your road is an open sewer.

So then maybe the hot spot is in the in-betweens, in the way we work as co-captains of Spaceship Earth, beyond our respective national boundaries. With ubiquitous global communication (including and implying commerce), we don’t have to rely on heads of state and elite gatherings in Davos to conduct diplomatic relations. Perhaps the big “want more” has something to do with being global, being free in that new way. Bears thinking, at least.

3/10/09 Montevideo
Disaster strikes, or rather adventure. No Marko at the dock, quite likely because of daylight savings, or because they don’t let people walk in, only out. In the city center now securing food, shelter, etc. Friendly guy at the internet cafe. Hippies. Looks like I’ll make it.

Great success! We meet at Independence Plaza. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

In the morning, meatloaf for brakfast and quick tutorial in local language:

• Todo bien: literally “all good,” but used a lot particularly in Uruguay
• ta-ta-ta: the equivalent of “uh-huh” or “sure”
• ¡Barbéro!: “barbarian”, meaning pretty fucking cool
• Ayeva: that’s how it is

• Muy importante: “very important”, but seemingly said a lot w/local flavor

It’s a shopping/mate day. We walk the heart of the city, saying goodby to Hotel Splendido and its many beauties — Hostel Barbie and the heartbreakingly lovely and gracious proprietess. The streets are alive and bustling.

Antique table trade in the plaza constitucíon, relics of the last regime. Stately old men smoking pipes. The many babes of Montevideo. We search unsuccessfully for mosquito netting, but Zya finds some summer clothes at the hypermart — 30 small clothing shops/stalls crammed inside a larger commercial building, like that parking lot on Lower Broadway.

Callemocho clinic at the sidewalk cafe where the waiter is the Hileme of Uruguay, and made a special trip to the store to get us some ketchup. A great hung-over mate day in the city.

Last night’s events were celebratory scotch in the “presidential suite,” awkward anti-oogling of Hostel Barbie, steak and wine dinner, room beers, hop on over to the Casino Raddison where we win about 600 pesos at roulette and a video slot called “Turkey Shoot” what mixed funk music with cracker sland, then out to the sidewalk cafe to blow the winnings on a shot of Johnny Walker Blue, followed by beer and a giant meat plate, then more beer (supercheap) across the street, with discussions of how we might have to heavy in on some pathetic Napoleonic machismo — we’re the world police, and were with the gays, bitches.

Morning came with a loud rumble and sticky parch, but we found our way to soufflet, espresso and meatloaf breakfast (muy importante). That closes the loop on the past 24 hours.

Currently on the bus to Punto del Diablo, observing the front of Uruguayan commerce flow by: lots of piles of firewood, cellphone stores, chineese cars, election posters, martial arts studios, bicyclists, pre-fab pools, solar power/water-heating. It’s an interesting mix. Dirt roads off the side, and the omnipresent litter, but still very modern in feeling.

—

(And now the coffeshop is closing. More notes later.)

Whoa. The revolution comes in violet, too:

AT LEAST 30-40 MORE STUDENTS JUST STORMED THE THIRD FLOOR OF KIMMEL, PUSHING PAST THE GUARDS WHO TRIED TO TRAP THEM IN THE STAIRWAY. STUDENTS ON THE INSIDE FORCED OPEN THE DOORS OF THE DINING HALL, PUSHING AGAINST NUMEROUS GUARDS, AND PULLED THE REINFORCEMENTS THROUGH THE BLOCKADE AND INTO THE DINING HALL.
THE STUDENTS OF TAKE BACK NYU! ARE NOT GIVING IN, WE ARE ONLY GROWING STRONGER. WE DEMAND NEGOTIATIONS – NOW!!!

http://takebacknyu.com/

Sheer awesomeness.