Translated by Nikos Gatzikis

____________

Marxist theorist Mark Fisher (1968–2017) posed a critical question: “Are cultural resources running out in the same way as natural resources are?” (Fisher, 2009). Through an analysis of cultural production over the past fifty years, he argued that the popular culture of Western societies has ‘frozen’ in the 20^thcentury, with the present characterized by timeless repetitions, revivals, and a striking lack of innovation.

According to Fisher, the 20^th century was defined by the parallel development of technological and cultural forms: the emergence of new technologies allowed for formal changes in pop culture, giving it a distinct chronological “signature”(Fisher, 2009). As examples, we can consider how the synthesizer became emblematic of the music of the ’70s and the ’80s or how the ‘rough’ assembly of samplers characterized ’90s rave music.

However, from 2000 onward, this trend disappears, and technological progress becomes disconnected from cultural production: technology continues to advance in leaps, but popular culture remains stagnant, clinging to its old forms. In fact, as Fisher notes, new technologies often serve not to produce new cultural forms, but to more faithfully reproduce old ones.[1] In this way, today, technological innovations “have tended to be parasitic on old [cultural] media” (Fisher, 2009).

If Fisher diagnosed a cultural landscape trapped in an endless loop of the past,Generative AI is not just another instance of this inertia – it is its logical conclusion. I argue that applications for text, image, and sound production—such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Soundraw, which utilize data from human activity to generate content—exemplify the tendency Fisher identified.

To make this parallel clearer, we must first examine Fisher’s arguments more closely.

In the texts included in Ghosts Of My Life (Fisher, 2014a),as well as in his blog k-punk, Fisher argues that the Western culture of the 20^thcentury was essentially modernist, rejecting the past and striving to achieve some formal innovation. Moreover, in contrast to the elitist and largely inaccessible modernism of the first half of the 20^thcentury, the period from 1960 to 2000, which shaped Fisher’s aesthetic perception, was marked by the emergence of a “popular modernism” with mass appeal (Fisher, 2014b). The examples Fisher usesare mainly drawn from British music: 1960s psychedelic rock, 1970s punk, 1980s post-punk, and 1990s rave.

In contrast to this era of unprecedented innovation, the popular culture of the 21^st century has abandoned modernism. Cultural forms no longer rebel against the past, but embrace it and repeat it. Thus, the“nostalgia mode” of postmodern capitalism (a term by Fredric Jameson) exhibits a “formal attachment to the techniques and formulas of the past, a consequence of a retreat from the modernist challenge of innovating cultural forms” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 11).

The examples that can be used to support this idea are endless. Fisher points to the disappearance of the ‘retro’ genre in music, a category that has stopped making sense, since, today, everything is somewhat retro and essentially timeless. Thus, Adele and Amy Winehouse—whose “recordings are saturated with a vague but persistent feeling of the past” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 14)—were not considered retro, but entirely contemporary.

Fisher also refers to the inability to identify the distinctive “sound” of the 2000s or 2010s, as well as the sterile appropriation of rave by bands like the Black Eyed Peas (Fisher, 2014a, p. 180) or mod by groups like Blur and Oasis. Rather than genuine tributes, he argues, these repetitions were “confidence tricks which borrowed yesterday’s inventions and half-heartedly passed them off as today’s swagger” (Fisher, 2014b). In the 2020s, one need only look at Hollywood, which increasingly resembles an Ouroboros, endlessly regurgitating its own past through sequel after sequel, spin-offs no one asked for, and countless remakes.

But how can we explain the disappearance of popular modernism in the 21st century? Why has pop culture stopped drawing on the creativity of technological advances? According to Fisher, the main reason is the transition of Western societies from the social democracy of the post-war period (welfare state, relative safety) to the neoliberal era ushered in by Thatcher and Reagan (expansion of the market sphere, dominance of managerial logic). This shift coincided with the transition from Fordist capitalism (stable employment in a specific space with limited hours) to today’s post-Fordist capitalism (precarious work with flexible hours, work that you take home, pervasive anxiety).

This transition brought significant changes to the production and consumption of art, and Fisher argues that these changes are responsible for the stagnation of contemporary pop culture. Regarding production, neoliberal capitalism “has gradually but systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 15). With the erosion of the welfare state, free tertiary education, and both private and public spaces (low rents, squats), the “indirect source of funding” that enabled experimentation in 20^thcentury pop culture has disappeared. Today, most artists are pressured “toproduce something that [is] immediately [profitable]”and thus turn to “cultural products that resembl[e] what [is] already successful” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 15).

At the same time, in terms of consumption, the audience of pop culture ends up desiring the reproduction of familiar forms, demanding ‘more of the same.’ The neoliberal condition of general uncertainty compels usto seek security in “established” cultural expressions, while the “besieging of attention” imposed by the technologies of communicative capitalism makes us “demand quick fixes,” such as the “easy promise of a minimal variation on an already familiar satisfaction” (Fisher, 2014a, p. 15). In this way, Fisher argues, neoliberalism is the primary mechanism behind the freezing of pop culture.[2]

I feel that Generative AI represents the culmination of the creative enervationthat Fisher diagnosed. Artificial intelligence is anachronistic by nature, inherently bound to the cultural production of the past. Its function is to metabolize the data of human activity (literature, painting, music) in orderto produce combinations of words, pixels, and sounds that satisfactorily respond to a given prompt.

Indeed, AI is very capable. ChatGPT can write a good paragraph “in the style of Woolf,” Midjourney can generate a good image “in the style of Monet,” So-VITS-SVC can even make songs with Tupac’s voice. But they cannot revolt. They cannot rupture. They cannot escape the weight of the pastand bring something new. Paraphrasing Fisher, we might say that “the law of [AI] is that everything comes back” (Fisher, 2014b), whether it be writing styles, artistic techniques, or even the dead themselves.

Thus, if AI artists are selling images online, if Kanye is releasing AI music videos, if Hollywood is considering using chatbots to write scripts and if inspired dissertations are already being drafted by ChatGPT, the result is utterly void. The only thingAI can do is ingest what has already happened and regurgitate it as formula, as undead forms that refuse to disappear. In this sense, Generative AI is the perfect realization of capital’s necromanticdream: culture that consumes itself endlessly, resurrecting the past while preventing the emergence of the new.

It follows that debates about AI’s “intelligence” or “consciousness” are absurd. The fact that we recognize our own reflectionin AI says more about us than it does about it. The ability of AI-generated self-help books or young adult fiction to selldoes not mean that AI writes ‘like a human’ – it means that, for decades, many humans have been writing, reading, and thinking like machines.

Thus, when we speak of AI’s (present or future, actual or virtual) “consciousness,” this tells us nothing about the algorithm’s“intelligence”, but insteadreveals how much we have mechanized our thinking, how much we have distancedourselves from our own bodies, our own experiences, andour own creative capacities, to the point that we now see our image reflected in binary code.

The moment we disconnect consciousness from the emergence of the new is the moment we surrender to the sterile timelessness of capitalist non-sense.

_____________

Haris Kalaitzidis

References

Fisher, M. (2014a). Ghosts of my life: Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures. Zer0 Books.

Fisher, M. (2014b, January 5). Going overground. k-punk. https://k-punk.org/going-overground/

Fisher, M. (2009, April 15). Running on empty: The lack of innovation in pop music suggests that we are experiencing an energy crisis in culture. New Statesman. https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2009/04/culture-technology-energy-rave

[1] Fisher cites the example of HD televisions, where “we see the same old things, but brighter and glossier” (Fisher, 2009). In the 21^st century, we might consider how Hollywood uses CGI to make aging actors appear younger (e.g., Robert De Niro) or to resurrect them entirely (e.g., Carrie Fisher).

[2]If Fisher’s analysis has a limitation, this ishis tendency to overwhelmingly focus on neoliberalism without situating it within the broader tendencies of capitalism and the oscillation between the contractual and the authoritarian poles of the state. As a result, and even though Fisher insists that he is not proposing some nostalgic return to social democracy, his work—or, at least, many interpretations of it—struggles to shake the sense that things ‘were better back then’, and that the main problem in today’s world is neoliberalism. I suspect this was one of the reasons that led him to take up one unviablepolitical position after another: engaging with accelerationism and left cybernetics in his youth, becoming enamoured with Syriza, Podemos, and Corbyn later on, and attacking the “neo-anarchist” tendency of horizontalism and rejection of parliamentary politics.

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These panics aren’t new—my generation was accused of abandoning feminism in favor of Girls Gone Wild — but they do take on unique iterations as the political and cultural landscapes shift. And it’s valuable, I think, to keep redefining what we even mean by the term, to suss out where and what the stakes are, and to interrogate to whom we’re looking for answers. 

Too often, I see these questions addressed in silos. Most of the takes I reference above come from culture writers who have a strong handle on policy, or from policy/politics people who have a decent handle on culture. The radical Lefties are tweeting or zine-ing or Signal-ing their ideas, and often get left out of the larger feminist conversation. The academics are doing their obscure thing in journals that less than a dozen people will read. I consider myself to be adept in three of these realms – the academic, the radical, and the cultural, with a begrudgingly decent handle on what’s going on in mainstream politics. And since I teach Feminist Studies, I am thinking about these questions constantly, from a variety of angles. 

I don’t have answers, but I do have thoughts. And the first is that, of course, feminism is not a monolith. Hand-wringing essays about the state of feminism first need to clarify which tendency of feminist thought, movement, or identity they mean. 

When I teach Feminist Studies, we spend 15 weeks with writers who mostly disagree with each other, other than on the fact that sex and gender are positionalities that deserve attention. We go through an overview of the “waves”: the first wave feminism was about Voting Rights for women, and this was parallel to the fight against slavery (some suffragettes were also abolitionists; many were not). Second wave feminism covers a lot of disparate views from roughly the 1960s-1980s, and involved attention to women and work (middle-class white women wanted access to the white-collar workforce, women of color were like, ‘hey we’ve been working in your homes, we have different demands when it comes to work!’). The second wave also coincided with the Black Power, anti-Vietnam War, and gay liberation movements; some feminists overlapped in these circles, many did not. It is in this period, beginning roughly in the late 1970s, when the Sex Wars began—this is the name given to the debates that split feminists on questions of pornography, kink, sex work, and other sexual practices. Third wave feminism also contained many different facets: on one end there was the (largely, though not exclusively white) riot grrrrl movement of radical punks fighting rape culture through zines and sex positivity, as well as more radical ideas surrounding transformative justice emerging from women of color organizing in anti-racist spaces; on the other end there was the beginning seeds of Girl Boss Feminism, and generally attention to “choice” and “empowerment” (e.g. Sex and the City, Ally McBeal, Girls Gone Wild, etc.).

Fourth wave is often described as “third wave, but on the internet,” and also with more attention to intersectionality. We are, arguably, in a fifth wave, which is an extension of the fourth wave, but in a post-Trump, post-#MeToo, post-George Floyd, pandemic world. (Importantly: I always begin my feminist waves lesson by naming that thinking and culture-building around sex and gender existed pre-colonization in more expansive ways, and that the waves are a decidedly Western, academic snapshot of gender and sexual liberation.) 

It is extremely important to reiterate that most versions of feminism that we have today do not have actually radical aims, even if the people involved are discursively critical of systems like capitalism and white supremacy. It is unsurprising to me how quickly and easily feminism has been co-opted because it’s not inherently interested in interrogating the root causes of systems of domination, especially if we continue to place its origin in a voting movement that occurred in the midst of chattel slavery and not long after violent colonial displacement. In addition, a lot of people think feminism is whatever ‘feminist nonprofits’ are up to, and nonprofits are counter-revolutionary forces that inevitably squash structural change. 

Columnist Michelle Goldberg — decidedly a liberal, but also someone informed about radical feminist movement history — names something true: “much of feminism right now fits into two broad categories: discourse and NGOs,” she writes. In an interview with Ezra Klein, she bemoans, to her credit, that if someone asked where they could go to get involved with feminist organizing, she’d tell them to write a check to NARAL. In that same interview, Klein asks her what else, other than reproductive justice, does ‘feminism’ (even if it is only a label) care about? Goldberg goes on to talk about thinking more expansively about reproductive justice — from domestic workers issues to SNAP benefits, and also talks about the relationship between feminism and trans justice. 

But historically and contemporarily there are feminist movements that (or at least feminist thinkers who) are committed to radical liberation. Angela Davis and Elaine Brown insisted on bringing feminist analysis to the Black Power movement; the Combahee River Collective did the same in their socialist organizations. Women, trans and queer people have always been a part of anti-capitalist and anti-state organizing—and women, trans, and queer people (especially of color) have always been harmed by capitalism and the state — and it is their lived experiences that give us a feminism with teeth. The Black, Brown, and Indigenous feminists, anarcha-feminists, and Marxist feminists are still doing feminist work today, but it is often in movement spaces that aren’t seen as explicitly feminist (like Marxist, anarchist, or Indigenous organizations). Or, they are not ‘organizing’ in a coherent way, and are instead practicing survival in a way that Saidiya Hartman describes as “waywardness.”  

So there is the feminism of the NYT and NPR policy analysts who focus on #MeToo, Roe and Dobbs, representational politics in media government, “transgender issues”; there is the feminism of the radical Leftists who are invested, from different angles, in similar things (fighting rape culture, ensuring safe abortions for everyone, abolishing the government and cultivating community skills in people of all genders, fighting for gender liberation beyond the binary, and, I would add: attention to sex work and sexual liberation, though there are very disparate views on what liberated sexuality means). In this more ‘political’ sense of things, there are wins and losses and a lack of clarity on who is doing what for what ends. 

And then there is the terrain of culture, which is what Marxist scholar and organizer Stuart Hall argued was a worthwhile “site of struggle.” Culture—a nebulous concept, but what I’ll limit here to popular culture in the form of movies, TV, internet, and, as Goldberg shorthands, ‘discourse’ — is before and after and in between what happens in the streets, in organizing spaces, and in government meetings. 

And so it is worth considering: what does girl culture have to do with feminism and, for those of us invested in it, with liberation? Should we take ‘girl dinner’ and Barbie as seriously as we take Roe and MeToo? I think, if nothing else, we should consider how they are in conversation, without falling into binary panic/defense modes. 

In one of my favorite responses to the Cristo piece — the one cited above which spends the bulk of its argument on the idea that girly culture signals the desire of women to exist in a time “before feminism”— Claire Fallon and Emma Gray write: 

“While in theory girlhood precedes the adult concerns of feminism, in reality, these concerns often intrude into the lives of girls, many of whom must negotiate sex and sexual identity, enter and navigate the workforce, access abortion care, and deal with misogyny that limits their lives from the moment of their birth. Many of us began to work out our own feminist politics as children, and associate the aesthetics of girlhood strongly with our first forays into questioning the patriarchal structures around us. Girlhood offers certain comfortable, universal markers, but not all girls are the same, even if they’re wearing the same color and going to the same concert. One girl may live in near-total political ignorance; another may develop a sharp socialist feminist critique of the world she is growing up in; yet another may go down a reactionary path.” 

These particularities are key to how we continue to move forward with building movements, political theory, and engaging with the various tangles of the discursive. How do we grapple with cultural forces that may encourage problematic consumption habits while also acknowledging that fashion, music, movies, and other products we engage for pleasure don’t necessarily imply that we are dupes of patriarchy and capitalism? 

Some of the most righteously dedicated anti-capitalist, anti-state activists I know are girly, bimbo-leaning sex workers. A young woman who runs a popular Taylor Swift fan account was imprisoned for refusing to join the Israeli military. Queer femmes have long been wearing floofy dresses to the riot. The idea that “girliness” precludes a commitment to liberation is a view that is not only narrow about gender, but also about justice. A popular feminist writer, for example, called for the stigmatization of glitter (with important evidence that it’s very bad for the planet), saying that the ultimate goal would be federal legislation, and urged us to call our state reps. What limited imagination it shows to anchor our ire in cultural pleasures and to reify that the state—an entity that enacts violence on people at home and abroad everyday— is our best solution. I am not saying we shouldn’t interrogate our consumption habits — we absolutely should, and I was actually convinced to never consider a glitter purchase again — but I am invested in a much more expansive political project than attacking expressions of femininity and bolstering legislative representatives. 

I learned cultural criticism via British Cultural Studies, in which people like Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams turned to media, subculture, and popular culture to wrestle with what it meant for radical change. These folks celebrate the possibility of resistant media— even if it was at risk of cooptation, they argued it was still evidence of counter-hegemony. Which is to say, they believed that consumers had agency — “there are no masses, only ways of seeing masses,” said Williams— who could live with contradiction (feminists reading romance novels was an early articulated example of this) and still be, for example, down for revolution. In contrast, the Frankfurt School, led by theorists like Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, insisted that popular culture was a propagandistic distraction from revolutionary struggle. In short, as Douglas Kellner explains, “British cultural studies would valorize resistant moments in media culture and audience interpretations and use of media artifacts, while the Frankfurt school tended, with some exceptions, to see mass culture as a homogeneous and potent form of ideological domination.” 

I have always been a cheerleader for a BCS approach to culture, probably because I was raised on movies and television, and my love of media has not kept me from spending the last 20 years in anarchist and other radical organizing spaces. Similarly, my relationship to girliness has really only strengthened my commitment to radical politics. I wrote a whole book about how my femme gender is completely intertwined with my working-class upbringing, and so then also my commitment to anti-capitalism. When I giggle at ‘girl dinner’ memes, or feel influenced by bow trends I am, maybe, treading close to the edge of ironic misogyny and toxic consumerism. But I am also having fun. And then I am switching over to the Signal thread to strategize with my comrades about how to ensure we protect our space from nazis. 

So where does this leave us with feminism? I think Cristo is right that “feminism is a bit adrift,” and that, as she notes: 

“It doesn’t help that the major touchstones of the past several years — MeToo, Donald Trump, COVID, Dobbs — are fucking miserable, and the cultural objects that accompanied them have tended to be correspondingly somber or pedantic. We’ve seen an explosion of rape-revenge plots, and cynical, emaciated protagonists dissociating through their lives.” 

Indeed, the cultural tone of ‘feminist’ media has been, for many years, dour— the most buzzy films of the past few years that focused on women’s lives included the dismal Promising Young Woman, Women Talking, She Said, and on television, Euphoria. But for Cristo, the turn to levity and ‘girlishness’ in this year’s buzzy media like Barbie—and I’d add Bottoms, and Poor Things—is a problem. She insists the turn to girlhood is “an opting out.” Instead, it seems, she’s arguing for serious grown-up feminists to stay the course with the miserable, in every facet of our lives. 

Can we unpack the cultural phenomena that, on their surface, appear to be an opting out — from bows to Barbie, from Taylor to tradwives — and discern what is legitimately reactionary, and wrestle with the stakes from there? And rather than determining the stakes from a liberal concern about what it means for the next election, the kind of feminism I care about can be a tool to reflect on what it might mean for more radical visions of the future. 

I don’t know how much value there is in feminism as a coherent movement anymore—not when so many marginalized genders feel isolated from the focus on ‘women’ (see TERFs), not when so much of the thinking is funneled through nonprofits who treat their feminist workers like garbage, not when it remains overwhelmingly white, not when it often does more to harm than help sex workers (see SWERFs), not when it too often colludes with the state rather than envisioning ways of being outside and against it. But we also can’t deny attention to the ways in which capitalism and white supremacy interact uniquely with sex, sexuality, and gender. 

I’d like to turn to another artifact of culture as a potential offering. In Shiva Baby, the debut film from Emma Seligman, the queer Zoomer who went on to bring us Bottoms, Danielle (Rachel Sennott) reminds us, hilariously and perfectly, what feminism really is and ought to be. In a very common ‘what kind of job are you going to get with a feminist studies degree’ conversation, Danielle responds stressfully:

It’s a lens! Patriarchy shapes our lives as foundationally as capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy, but it has been too easy for feminist movements to turn gender into an additive identity rather than an affront to power systems. 

There’s been a lot of pushback against nuance lately, and for important reason: there is no need for nuance in genocide. But that’s not a good blanket strategy for wrestling with the complexity of most of our contemporary ills. Which is not to say taking a clear stance against capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy is in need of nuance, but that addressing the unique particularities of how harm impacts us in distinct ways — based on gender, sexuality, geographic location, and so on — would benefit from an analytical framework. For me, that means looking to theorists—the formal kind and the organic kind— who articulate ways of seeing the world with attention to power and oppression at the intersection (or even more helpfully, the assemblage) of gender, race, class, and so on. I value a feminist lens, but importantly a feminist lens that is also always-already anti-capitalist, anti-state, and anti-white supremacy. And then I consider what that lens can offer to whatever unique situation I’m unpacking in its very particular context. 

My hope for feminism is that it can be a tool like this, a lens we can use to assess harm, and, an aid to the plurality of overlapping revolutionary struggles—as well as a tool for survival and care in everyday life. And a part of this care, this process of reclamation, certainly needs to involve a revisitation and transformation of the period in our lives when we first learned about the deadly reality of patriarchy: girlhood.

_________

Raechel Anne Jolie (she/they) is a writer and educator based in Cleveland, Ohio. She holds a PhD in Critical Media Studies, with a minor in Feminist & Critical Sexuality Studies from the University of Minnestoa. Her writing has appeared in The Baffler, Bitch, Teen Vogue, In These Times, among other publications. Rust Belt Femme is their first memoir and received recognition in NPR’s Favorite Books of 2020, was a finalist in the Heartland Bookseller’s Award, and was the winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction.

SOURCE: radical love letters

https://raechelannejolie.substack.com/p/girl-culture-panic-and-the-failures

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Οn 1 January, Jair Bolsonaro will be sworn in as Brazil’s 38th president. He has expressed open disdain for the indigenous peoples of Brazil, and it is no exaggeration to say that some of the world’s most unique and diverse tribes are facing annihilation. Genocide is defined by the UN as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Large-scale mass genocides rightly receive global attention, yet countless others go unreported and unpunished because the victims number only a few hundred, or even a few dozen.

Right now, deep in the Amazon rainforest, a small tribe of survivors is on the run. They are the Kawahiva, an uncontacted tribe of just a few dozen people, the victims of waves of horrific attacks which have pushed them to the brink of extinction. We know almost nothing about them, except that they are fleeing chainsaws in a region with the highest rate of deforestation in the Amazon. Brazil’s first ever investigation into the genocide of an uncontacted tribe was launched in 2005, and 29 people suspected of involvement in killing Kawahiva were detained but later released, including a former state governor and a senior policeman. The case stalled for lack of evidence.

The Kawahiva’s territory lies near the town of Colniza, one of the most violent areas in Brazil, where 90% of income is from illegal logging. Survival International, the global movement fighting for the rights of tribal people, has recently called for increased police protection for the team responsible for protecting the Kawahiva’s land. FUNAI, Brazil’s Indian Affairs Department, has been prevented from properly carrying out its work in the area due to violence from illegal loggers and ranchers, leaving the tribe exposed.

Preventing a genocide of uncontacted people is not a priority for Bolsonaro. He once said: “There is no indigenous territory where there aren’t minerals. Gold, tin and magnesium are in these lands, especially in the Amazon, the richest area in the world. I’m not getting into this nonsense of defending land for Indians.”

Indigenous peoples are frequently regarded as obstacles to the advance of agribusiness, extractive industries, roads and dams. As more rainforest is invaded and destroyed in the name of economic “progress” and personal profit, uncontacted tribes become targets – massacred over resources because greedy outsiders know they can literally get away with murder. These are silent, invisible genocides, with few if any witnesses. The news often only emerges months, if not years, later.

The UN convention on genocide came into force 70 years ago, yet entire tribes continue to be exterminated by the dominant society in order to steal their land and resources. Symbolic of this is the “last of his tribe”, a lone man living in a patch of forest in Brazil’s western Amazon region. We know nothing about him except that he rejects all contact, and survived waves of attacks carried out in the 1970s and 80s against his people and his neighbours, the Akuntsu tribe – of whom just four survive. No one has ever been prosecuted for these genocides. This impervious mentality harks back to the wild west of the 18th and 19th centuries, when Native Americans in the US were slaughtered by the colonists. Indeed, Bolsonaro himself has declared: “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry wasn’t as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the Indians.”

The majority of the world’s 100 or so uncontacted tribes live in the Brazilian Amazon. They are aware of the outside world, use and adapt outside goods for their own purposes and may engage sporadically with contacted tribes nearby. Their hunter-gatherer lifestyles require vast and acute botanical and zoological knowledge. With this unique understanding of sustainable living, they protect some of the largest and most biodiverse forests on Earth.

Uncontacted people make homes, love their families, tend the landscape, and, like any of us, want to live well and in peace. Where their rights are respected they continue to thrive, but all face catastrophe unless their land is protected.

The largest area of primary rainforest under indigenous control is the Yanomami territory, which straddles part of the Brazilian border with Venezuela. It is home to around 32,000 Yanomami, including some groups who are uncontacted. A “epidemic” of goldminers have illegally invaded the territory to pillage its riches, bringing disease and death to the tribe.

In May, Yanomami reported that two uncontacted members of the tribe had been murdered by miners. FUNAI had closed its protection post in the area due to a lack of funds and, while prosecutors have ordered the post to be reopened, the authorities have not yet investigated the killings.

Bolsonaro opposed the creation of the Yanomami territory in the 1980s, calling it a “crime against the motherland”, and a “scandal”. He affirmed his beliefs in 2017, saying he regarded the creation of the reserve as “high treason”, and there are murmurs that this is an area already in the crosshairs of the new administration.

Bolsonaro intends to take FUNAI out of the justice ministry and into a newly created ministry for women, family and human rights. This is a move sure to weaken the department’s efficacy and clout – it has already been undermined by huge budget cuts. Bolsonaro has appointed Damares Alves as the new minister, an evangelical preacher and congressional aide who co-founded Atini, a controversial group that evangelises in indigenous communities and is subject to an investigation by public prosecutors for inciting racial hatred against indigenous peoples.

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Yesterday night people from Void Network had the great chance to meet with the friend, director and a cultural activist Iara Lee. After 12 years of contacts and colaborations through interent Iara Lee arrived for first time in Athens for participating in events of Solidarity to the Struggle of Palestinian people and screening of her new film. 

We spent the night talking enthousiastic about everything, drinking all over Exarchia, in social centers, anarchist squats, cafes, a dubstep club night, an underground queer festival and the occupied park of Exarchia. For Sunday night in Europe it was a great night… 
With Iara Lee we share our hate for capitalism, economic and political elites, all governments and states of this world, the rage for slavery, genocide and war, the common understanding that existing billions of people in this world that are ready to fight back exploitation, misery and enslavement. We have to face the question:
How we wil find the best way to meet on the streets of this planet?… How we will co-ordinate our ideas, actions and cultures of resistance?… How we will learn from each other’s efforts, failures, success and hopes?
The struggle for Total Freedom continues as long the sun will shine on Earth’s blue sky


Iara Lee [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iara_Lee] is a Korean Brazilian film producer and director based in New York City. She is better known as the director of the documentaries Synthetic Pleasures and Modulations, as well as for her involvement with the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla“, in which at least nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed by Israeli naval forces.


Void Network during the 90s was responsible for free public screenings of the films Modulations (1998) and Synthetic Pleasures (1995)
by Iara Lee all over Greece and now we are happy to announce the open collaboration of Void Network with Iara Lee for free public screenings of her new film “Cultures of Resistance” all over the world and in all countries exisiting active cells and collaborations with activists and social aware people. “Culture of Resistance” is an inspirational film featuring interviews, stories, arts and dreams from refugees, cultural, social and cultural activists, fighters for justice and liberation, revolutionaries of the mind and heart, poets, musicians, street artists and all kinds of people from 25 different countries. All of the them i social conflict, all of them in suffering, allof them in class and social war.
We invite all our friends to see the trailer of the film “Cultures of Resistance” by Iara Lee, the complete video from the attack of Israelian army against “Gaza Freedom Flotilla“, and the 5 parts iterview of Iara Lee at the United Nations conference after the murder of 9 international activists by Israelian Army during the attack to “Gaza Freedom Flotilla“ campaign and humanitarian aid peace boats. 
Please communicate with Void Network on our email : voidinternaional@gmail.com 
for organizing free public screenings of the film in squats, social centers, infoshops, libraries, universities, public spaces e.t.c.


see the trailer of the film here:



Cultures of Resistance: The Official Trailer from Cultures of Resistance on Vimeo.

for more info about “Cultures of Resistance” here:
http://www.culturesofresistance.org/

The post “Cultures of Resistance” by Iara Lee / Announcement of new period of Collaboration of Void Network with Iara Lee appeared first on Void Network.