The cultural manifesto of a couple of professional, habitual, line steppers. Marketers by design - but in reality, we just wanna write great stories and turn them into content gold.
A few gems from the #BlackPrivilege tag on twitter.
Hip Hop Stand Up - Adam Yauch Park.
(via filtermagazine)
The day of reckoning has come for the old mainstay of email. All user accounts have been migrated to Outlook.com where some fancy new features await.
Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur
The Cointelpro Papers by Ward Churchill & Jim Vander Wall
Publicly and sensationally accused by the FBI of being the “revolutionary mother hen” of a BLA cell conducting a “series of cold-blooded murders of New York City police officers,” Shakur was made the subject of a nationwide manhunt in 1972. On May 2, 1973, she, BLA founder Zayd Malik Shakur (her brother-in-law) and Sundiata Acoli (s/n: Clark Squire) were subjected to one of the random harassment stops of blacks on the New Jersey Turnpike for which the Jersey state troopers are so deservedly notorious. Apparently realizing who it was they’d pulled over, the two troopers — Werner Foerster and James Harper — opened fire, wounding Assata Shakur immediately. In the fight which followed, both Zayd Shakur and trooper Foerster were killed, trooper Harper and Sundiata Acoli wounded. Both surviving BLA members were captured.
Assata was, however, charged with none of the killings which had ostensibly earned her such celebrated status as a “terrorist.” Instead, the government contended she had participated in bank robberies, and the state of New York accused her of involvement in the killing of a heroin dealer in Brooklyn and the failed ambush of two cops in Queens on January 23, 1973. She was acquitted of every single charge in a series of trials lasting into 1977. Meanwhile, she was held without bond, in isolation and in especially miserable local jail facilities. Finally, having exhausted all other possibilities of obtaining a conviction, the authorities took her to trial in New Jersey in the death of trooper Foerster. Despite the fact that Sundiata Acoli had long-since been convicted of having fired the fatal bullets — and medical testimony indicating her wounds had incapacitated her prior to the firefight itself — Assata Shakur was convicted of first degree murder by an all-white jury on March 25, 1977. She was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The travesty imbedded in all this was unmistakable, and Shakur’s circumstances remained the topic of much discussion and debate. This became all the more true on the night of November 2, 1979, when a combat unit of the BLA set the prisoner free from the maximum security building of the Clinton Women’s Prison in New Jersey. It is instructive that this organization of what the police and the FBI were busily portraying as “mad dog killers” appear to have gone considerably out of their way to insure that no one, including the guards, was hurt during the prison break. For her part, Assata Shakur — now hyped by the Bureau as “the nation’s number one terrorist fugitive” despite the state’s failure to link her to any concrete “act of terrorism” — was quietly provided sanctuary in Cuba where she remains today.
Check out this funny infographic on the 7 types of digital marketer.
Krista Franklin, Manchild in the Promised Land,
March 2008, mixed-media (watercolor, paster, book paper)
© Krista Franklin
The streets are always watching.
We Spoke to Barret Brown from Prison
Since my initial piece on Barrett Brown about a month ago, there has been a small development in his case. Barrett, of course, is the journalist who is popularly mislabeled as a spokesperson for Anonymous and is facing a century of hard time in a federal prison for threatening an FBI officer, hiding evidence that obstructed his warrant, and sharing a link within an IRC chat room that contained the stolen credit card information of Stratfor customers (a security company that had 5 million of its internal emails stolen from them). While Barrett is still sitting in a federal prison waiting to see a judge, news broke last night that Barrett Brown’s mother pled guiltyto her own charge of obstructing a search warrant. She hid Barrett’s computers from the FBI and is now facing $100,000 in fines and six months of probation.
In addition, Jeremy Hammond, the hacker who is accused of actually hacking into Stratfor has been sitting in prison for 13 months without trial. His case was further delayed when it was discovered that the original judge who was appointed to try Jeremy is the wife of a man whose data was compromised by the Stratfor hack.
A couple of weeks ago, Barrett Brown called me from prison to talk to me about his case. We discussed the winding intricacies of his story in two 15-minute bursts, which was all the time the restrictions of his imprisonment would allow.
VICE: A lot of people say that you’re the spokesperson for Anonymous. What do you say to that?
Barrett Brown: I’m not. For two years now, I’ve denied that publicly. Every time I’m asked, it turns out that I’m not. The first thing people find when they google me should be a D Magazine article in which I explained that. No one is the spokesperson for Anonymous. It doesn’t work that way. I wouldn’t want that position if it were a position.I don’t necessarily agree with everything Anonymous does. I don’t necessarily like a lot of Anons. I was very supportive of the dynamics that Anonymous represents. I’m very much an advocate (and continue to be) of these new sorts of communities to express yourself on the internet and the next move I’ll be making is deploying some communities—a little more structured than Anons’—to perpetuate themselves, and grow, while maintaining Anonymous’s core qualities. I’ve identified with Anonymous very closely for two years now, but one of the interesting things to me is how all the articles refer to me as the self-proclaimed spokesperson for Anonymous. They all copy off each other.
You did also call yourself Cobra Commander at one point.
Oh yeah, I called myself that after the NBC Nightly news called me the “underground commander in a new warfare.” Which is just a ridiculous thing to be called.Yes, it sure is. What do you think of your 100-year sentence?
I’ve known for a long time that I was going to be incarcerated. There are several documentaries where I say that I’m going to jail at some point. You just can’t do these things and not fall on the radar of the FBI without retaliation or reprisal. I don’t want to talk to you about the case or the people involved at this point, but obviously I’m not terribly worried about it.Why aren’t you worried?
Just because of my knowledge, I know how long they were in there monitoring our stuff… I know what documents and records of my activities are available. They’re trying to claim that I intentionally tried to spread credit card information, but I was opposed to that. And I was on record being opposed to it. They’re just not aware of that.They don’t have their shit together in terms of going through what they spied on me regarding… and I obviously know what’s there in that evidence, so… I’ve always been opposed to spreading credit cards.
