American Manchild

I grew up surrounded by American manchildren. Not physically, in the Australian small town where I spent my childhood, but on the television screen – the babysitter of my generation.

There, I watched a variety of actors repeatedly playing the same character. In film after film, Adam Sandler, or Jack Black, or Will Ferrell, or Pauly Shore, or any number of less famous names; would repeat the shtick of an immature man deficient in both empathy and self-awareness; whose hero’s journey involved the grand challenge of acting like a normal responsible adult. Most of the time they would just about bumble their way through, with a few good laughs along the way, and inevitably they would be rewarded in the end by getting together with their beautiful love interest. I couldn’t count how many of these movies there were. They all blur into one.

Meanwhile, on weeknights, a slightly different trope was played out again and again. There, in American suburban sitcoms, we observed the battle of wills between selfish, immature men and their long-suffering wives. Looking back, these shows seem even more endless. Married With Children. Home Improvement. Everybody Loves Raymond. King Of Queens. I’m sure there were more. And it wasn’t just the number of different shows – each one of these programs ran every week for years. In all of them, the male lead characters were horrible people. But inevitably they were the comedian while their wife was a straight actress. So the men got all the funny lines, while the wives’ onscreen role was mostly complaining (the bit where the wife presumably slaved away raising the children and doing all the housework was generally not shown).

In cartoons it was the same. The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad. I think these were meant on some level to be parodies of the classic sitcom trope, but let’s face it – as children we didn’t really get the irony. And as the years have gone by I have come to understand that often irony is just a cloak for saying the things you really believe but socially re not supposed to.

Once I became an adult myself, I essentially swore off American TV shows and Hollywood movies. So I can’t comment much on the state of things today, though I know from the occasional waiting room TV set that many of these shows are still being aired. I suspect not much has changed. This trope existed long before my childhood (National Lampoon movies being one example), and I know it continued after I tuned out (for a while there Seth Rogen taking over as the alpha manchild).

One thing I do know for sure is that I am not alone in having grown up surrounded by these characters. These were some of the most popular films and TV shows, watched by tens of millions of people around the world. For a generation (particularly boys, but probably also girls), the hundreds of hours we spent watching these men was a significant part of our enculturation.

Now on some level, I think most of us understood that even though these characters were funny, you weren’t actually supposed to act like that. Occasionally their behaviour would be called out by another character, but more importantly most of us had enough actual good influences in our lives to figure out that these characters were to be laughed at but not emulated.

But then again, some days I have my doubts. Especially when I cast an eye towards the USA’s other great theatrical export – politics. There, the uber-manchild is riding a wave of public devotion completely unfathomable to so many of us. It seems increasingly likely that come November, the American manchild will once again hold the office of the most powerful political figure in the world.

Could it be that our onscreen role models have played some part in the popularity of Trump? That when we emerged off the couch to the real world, we found out that you couldn’t just do the manchild and have everything work out like the movies? We were promised wealth, comfort, beautiful partners, zero requirement to work on ourselves, and a canned laughter track to affirm even our lamest wisecracks.

In contrast, the world of being accountable to others and enduring the responsibility of relationships, employment and family life is such a drag. It’s enough to make you resent the world for its broken promises. Here, Donald Trump emerges as a saviour for the entire manchild identity – living proof that we should be able to do what we want, say what we want and get everything we want.

Beyond Trump though, there are so many aspects of our modern condition that bear traces of manchildren – internet trolls and the general empathy drought online; the strange pockets of the internet where incels and alt-right adherents gather to share their grievances; our affluent culture’s widespread victim mentality; the popularity of anti-feminist stand-in father figures like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tait. What about the rates of domestic violence and sexual assault? Or the widespread mental health epidemic – a maladjustment to the world most horrifyingly exemplified in the 630 (almost all male) individuals who committed mass shootings (wounding four or more people) in the US last year. Somehow or other, a great number of men around my age have become a seething mass of resentment, a danger to themselves and the people around them.

All these things are complex, and you definitely can’t lay the blame for it all on a comedy trope. And yet this is our world we live in, and we all should be asking what on earth are we going to do about it? Part of that will surely be asking how we got to where we are. And maybe, just maybe, some responsibility lies with all that television that we watched instead of study, dinner table conversation and actual interactions with adult role models. I hate to say it, but probably a lot of boys spent more time with the manchildren on TV than with their actual fathers.

So what could we do differently? I personally think less TV and movies is a good start, but the popularity of those things seems pretty entrenched. More good adult role models is surely a good answer. The lack of male teachers in school is often commented upon, but let’s face it – teachers already have way too much on their plate, and the nature of school means the kids who need good influences the most often have an antagonistic relationship to their teachers. This is where we could be arguing for the priority of the family in the face of our economy – demanding a widespread reduction in working hours so workers have more time for both parenting (this might make for better developed children and parents) and also volunteering in the kind of community spaces where kids can encounter a range of adults.

A more immediate response is to try to change the way we interact with with television (and movies, and youtube, and social media). Watching a screen is not inherently worse than books or fine arts. But it’s just such a passive medium. It’s not even really the case that we watch TV most of the time – TV just plays for us while we sit on the couch in apathetic compliance. And then when it ends something else plays straight after – if not the one you are given, there are many more channels available at a push of the remote control. Streaming online has just amplified this – there is no break at all, the next episode begins playing just as the last one finishes.

Maybe some kids are encouraged to do some kind of active reflection on each TV show and movie they watch before they go on to the next one, but I know I wasn’t and I suspect you weren’t either. I don’t even think of this as a practice specifically for children – all of us could do with some kind of reflection on what we are absorbing daily through our screens.

How much difference might this make? Maybe a more engaged audience would demand better TV and movies. We could start consciously recognising the way our behaviours and beliefs are shaped by what we see on the screen – both the content and the ads. It might help to encourage and normalise critical and reflective thinking – to go beyond just what we watch and begin asking the big questions about what kind of people we want to be and what kind of what of world we want to live in. Maybe even, at some point in the future, it could even get us to a point where the American manchild is something that exists only on TV.

Policing away the right to protest

It was a pleasant, sunny, New Zealand Wednesday morning. I was helping my friend to load up a trailer full of rubbish from their farm and take it to the local dump. Just as we were about to leave, we received some unexpected visitors – a couple of members of the New Zealand police.

It was not our load tying technique they were interested in. Instead they announced they were there to see me. Having the police turn up at my door is not an entirely unfamiliar experience, but this certainly came as a bit of a surprise. I had been in New Zealand two months, but had hardly left home – taking the opportunity to relax and help with some farmwork. But the conversation continued to get stranger. “We’re here to talk about your political activism” the cop said. Turns out the New Zealand police knew quite a lot about me.

The officer told me she had read some of my articles (she said they were good, though I admit it is possible she was just trying to butter me up), and also understood I was a journalist. “Seems like you travel a lot,” she said, “does your wife Rebekah travel with you too?”

The conversation continued on for a bizarrely long time with the cop trying to prise out information about environmental politics in New Zealand that I really couldn’t answer, until finally we could palm them off and resume our journey to the dump. Afterwards though, I did regret not pushing harder as to how and why they had come to the middle of nowhere to talk to a random Australian about politics (when I asked how they had found me, they denied my theories and changed the subject).

I assume that my name was flagged at immigration either due to my criminal record or my history as a political agitator. Maybe it was down to Australia and NZ both being part of the “five eyes” intelligence sharing network. The international intelligence system had worked well except for one thing – I had no involvement at all in any kind of protest activity in New Zealand.

Normally I wouldn’t bother writing about a visit like this. It wasn’t particularly taxing, I don’t think a persecution mindset does any good for anyone, and it is easy to let stories about police interactions slide into tough guy bragging. I am, after all, a repeated criminal according to the law and so should expect some policing. But I thought I would relay it publicly because I think a lot of people simply wouldn’t believe that this kind of thing happens.

Police and intelligence agencies have spied on political activists in one way or another for generations. It’s probably a bit less often now than at the heights of cold war espionage mania, but who really knows? Matters like this generally aren’t made public until well after the fact, and modern technology makes surveillance much easier than in those days. The justification is either that activists commit crimes (though the minor offences we commit publicly surely don’t justify the money and effort that goes to surveillance) or that we are a threat to economic activity and counter national interests. But whose interests are we talking about? Generally (though I will admit, not in the case of myself in NZ), activists are citizens of a nation too, and have a right to try to influence society. At this stage in history it’s surely not too much of a stretch to say that civil disobedience style protests are a valid form of civil discourse – allowing individuals and groups to counter the power of the state.

At a time when the media is frequently full of tales of the global battle between forces of democracy and autocracy, we should be asking what this means at home. If governments are concerned about democracy, we should be doing everything we can to support political freedoms and build civic institutions capable of giving ordinary people the same power as big corporations. Decades of climate inaction have ably demonstrated the fact that our captured state is unable to do what is necessary to protect its citizens and natural environment.

Instead, in Australia in the last couple of years we have seen a growing clampdown on environmental protests, a concerted attempt at not just punishing, but preventing protests.

Let’s start with New South Wales – the state that has led the way in terms of restricting protest recently. This has mostly been due to the presence in the state of the group Blockade Australia. In late 2021, in response to the first Blockade Australia (BA) protests, frequent climate disrupter Sergeio Herbert was thrown in prison (he was subsequently released on appeal). At the same time, NSW police decided that rather than charging people with the crimes they were actually guilty of (trespass, disrupting infrastructure), they would make up the ridiculous charge of “attempt to injure or kill”. This didn’t hold up in court, but by early 2022 the NSW government had passed a new law making the temporary blocking of a major road an offence punishable by two years in prison.

In March 2022, Max Curmi was put in jail for trespassing at Port Botany. In April Andy George was sent to jail for disrupting an NRL football game, and Violet Coco became part of the first group charged under the new traffic disruption law (by the end of the year she had been imprisoned but also was subsequently released on appeal.

But all that was just warming up. In June, as Blockade Australia prepared for their next mobilisation, police turned up at the property some of the group were renting. This was no ordinary raid. Two police in camouflage gear snuck into the property through the bush. Upon being discovered, they refused to provide names and explanations – instead calling in reinforcements. By the end of the raid, all electronic equipment had been seized, and everyone present had been arrested (two of them – Max Curmi and Tim Neville – were refused bail and held in prison for three weeks without having been found guilty of any crime). The police immediately began a serious PR attack, claiming that violent protesters had threatened the safety of poor innocent police.

When the protest happened anyway, every single person taking part was arrested and charged with the new legislation despite the fact they were basically just attending an everyday street march. Every one of the 20+ people arrested were given bail conditions banning them from the entire city of Sydney and prohibiting them from contacting each other – an extraordinary restriction of the freedom of movement and association for people who had not been found guilty of any crime and in fact were only charged with minor infringements. The one protester who actually did majorly disrupt traffic, Mali Cooper, was rearrested for breaching bail because she dared to stop to sleep at a relative’s house after she had been ordered to leave the city immediately. When Mali eventually went to court in Lismore, she was released with no penalty.

I have written in the past about how bail conditions like these are a total misuse of the law. Police and courts strung out these particular cases for almost a year until April 2023 – when the protesters walked away with minor fines. The extreme bail conditions were in effect the entire time.

Amazingly, NSW police still had further to go. In late October, the International Mining and Resource Convention (IMARC) was held in Sydney. The convention had previously been held in Melbourne, where it was regularly met with protests. NSW police were going to make sure that no such democratic outbursts happened on their turf. In the fortnight before the convention, they turned up at the homes of over 40 environmental activists, the majority of whom had exactly zero involvement in organising protests against IMARC. They warned that serious consequences would come from anyone doing any illegal protests. When about 20 people braved the circumstances to turn up, they were outnumbered by approximately 200 police.

By the end of the year, NSW had made headlines for their policing of protest when Deanna “Violet” Coco became the first person jailed under the new legislation. She was sentenced to 15 months in prison but was released on bail when granted an appeal, and in March the prison sentence was overturned.

But NSW was not alone in bringing in new laws to restrict environmental protest. Victoria and Tasmania both did the same in 2022 – Victoria with new “safety laws” for logging coupes and Tasmania finally bringing in the aggravated trespass laws they have been trying to for years.

In Queensland, where it should be noted that new laws threatening prison for environmental activism were brought in as recently as 2019’s “Dangerous Attachment Devices” act, activist Kyle Magee was given a suspended prison sentence in April for stopping Adani’s coal train, and in October protests against the Land Forces weapons expo were the subject of an extremely heavy police presence. In 2023, there was a Queensland Blockade Australia mobilisation where more activists were refused bail only to be released on appeal.

By then other states well and truly joined in the repression. In May 2023, The South Australian Labor government’s first response to protests outside the APPEA petroleum industry conference was to rush through parliament severe anti-protest laws, while the Western Australian police spent the year searching the homes, confiscating the property, and even pointing guns at a small group of activists protesting gas corporation Woodside’s work on the Burrup peninsula. In July, Tasmanian forest activist Collette Harmsen was sentenced to three months prison for repeated forest protests.

Since then we have seen the use of restrictive bail conditions against activists completely normalised even for the most minor political offences. In January 2024, Queensland police showed they are not letting up, doing a series of early morning raids of people’s houses using the justification of trumped up charges in response to a quite tame office occupation protest.

All this adds up to a concerted effort at stopping protest that cuts across state borders, across political parties and across the supposed separation of powers between police, courts and legislature. Though there was some critique of this in the media (few have catalogued the incidents in the way I just have), in general the response has been a disinterested public and more escalation from law makers and enforcers,

The surveillance, restriction of association, pre-emptive policing and passing of new legislation makes it clear that the policing of activism is not merely about punishing those who break the law. This is about the combined powers of the state working to stop protesters from organising together before they can do anything illegal.

As you can probably guess, my belief is that we need to push back against this kind of repression. My main reason is that we need to insist that protest – and civil disobedience is a proven effective method of protest – is vital in and of itself. When access to media, money and political parties is so disproportionately weighed in favour of particular interests, there needs to be an ability for other points of view to be publicly expressed. It is hypocritical for media and politicians to pontificate about protecting democracy in Ukraine and Taiwan while showing no concern for the health of democracy in Australia.

The climate crisis is a perfect example of the need to protest. Does anybody believe we would have got the climate action policies we have managed in this country without years of committed protest? Left up to themselves, our small-target politicians and their resource extracting financiers would never have done anything. The continuing unwillingness or inability to take the steps everyone agrees is necessary for the climate crisis is further proof that we need protest to force politicians to do even what they have already agreed to do.

One reading of what is happening is that there is already a clampdown on protests in tandem with the actual effects of climate change, which are likely to bring about all kinds of changes that affect the status quo in various ways. This is only likely to increase as those effects worsen – we saw during the COVID pandemic how quickly governments will turn to authoritarian measures when normal circumstances are disrupted. As we enter a time of uncertainty where environmental and economic crises meet with shifting global power dynamics, we are only likely to see this increase – a shutting down of the ability for ordinary people to influence the society around them just as we will need it most.

Of course the thing about free speech is that we have to support it even for those we disagree with. Much more popular than actual free speech is the usual “free speech for those I agree with, repression for those I don’t” model of rules for discourse. The response of many in the media and general leftist political sphere to government restrictions on anti-vaccine protests showed how terminally unpopular free speech is – previous laws against anti-abortion protests similarly have been passed with overwhelming support from the “progressive” sections of media and politics. These help to normalise the use of police and legislation to shut down protest.

But free speech and the right to protest is not just of theoretical importance. Protest has historically been responsible for so many gains in the causes of human rights and environmental protection. And as wealth becomes more concentrated in the hands of less people, I for one feel we need to be on the side of ordinary people’s voices being heard if democracy, equality and sustainability are to have any chance.

That means vocally pushing back against the political and media sensationalising that leads to repressive laws. But also it means doing it – protesting, resisting, building movements of change. It can be an exhausting and frustrating experience, and what I have mentioned in this article is proof that there are sometimes pretty serious consequences to face. But we will need the courage and belief to keep going and keep the right to protest alive not as a theoretical concept but a tangible reality. Because a world without protest would might make some police and politicians rest easy believing they have done a good job; but for our planet and most of its occupants it would not be good news.

My top ten songs from 2023

Part of my new years’ ritual is compiling this list. This year I had listened to less new music for various reasons, and was a bit worried I wouldn’t have enough songs for the list. But once I dug up a shortlist I realised I was very fond of these tunes that had somehow accompanied my life this year, and it was very hard to cull them down to just ten. So thanks especially to the artists who make the list, but really thanks to everyone out there who is trying to write music that means something.

Shonen Knife – Girl’s rock

Shonen Knife are genuine rock’n’roll trailblazers – forming an all-women punk band in the early 80’s when that was definitely not the done thing for Japanese women. Four decades on and they are still going strong.

Their new album Our Best Place has plenty of their signature Ramones style riffs, twee cuteness, and songs about food (Spicy Vege Curry is one of their best ever). But this tribute to breaking down gender barriers and embracing the liberating potential of the DIY spirit is simply magnificent.

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David Benjamin-Blower – Kindness is a solid stone

In this age of algorithmically dictated tastes, what a joy it still is to get a personalised musical recommendation. I ran into a friend this year. I don’t know him that well, but a couple of days later he sent me a message saying “I heard this song and thought you’d like it”.

He was right. That song – David Benjamin-Blower’s The Soil – became the track I listened to this year more than any other, and I still put it on when I need a bit of inspiration. It doesn’t qualify for this list, but fortunately we also got two whole albums from David in 2023, with his typical mix of environmentalism, politics and christian symbology.

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Lucinda Williams – Stolen Moments

Lucinda Williams is one of my all-time favourite songwriters. Sadly I didn’t discover her until my 30’s, but Lucinda is proof it’s never too late – her career masterpiece was recorded in her mid-40’s, and she is still going at age 70 despite a stroke in 2020 that left her unable to play guitar.

Her albums (and her singing voice) are maybe not quite what they were in her prime, but getting new music from an artist you have closely followed is like hearing from an old friend. And Lucinda is a personality as well as a songwriter – there is always a lot of her life story in the songs and reading interviews with this strong but kind-hearted woman is always a joy.

Death has been a repeated songwriting theme through Lucinda’s career. And it provided the subject matter for the best song on the new album – Stolen Moments is a beautiful rumination on her friendship with the late Tom Petty.

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Fake Names – Delete Myself

Beware the supergroup! Combinations of already famous musicians rarely add up to more than the sum of their parts. Fake Names have some real pedigree in some of the most iconic punk bands ever – Minor Threat, Bad Religion, Fugazi, Embrace, Refused. To be honest, their music won’t ever be likened to those formidable names, but it made me smile because of how it reminded me of another band from their CV – singer Denis Lyxzen’s 2000’s band The (International) Noise Conspiracy.

As a teen, the Noise Conspiracy introduced me to more than just the joys of Swedish garage punk – their music was dense with political references and their album liner notes came with associated quotes and recommended readings for each song!

A lot of things have changed since then, but Denis still manages to believe enough in the power of political punk to keep going. Something about Fake Names helps me to do that too.

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Lemon Myrtle – in bed

I am sometimes surprised that, given the amount of talk about generation gaps these days, there is seemingly little discussion of what I consider to be one of the defining changes of my lifetime – our steady transformation into half-human half-smartphone cyborgs.

WA singer-songwriter Lemon Myrtle is a welcome exception. Her album hi hello none of this is real i love you bye was an extended exploration of the lives of us eternally online folks “deep inside the cyberdream”. The album is not really political folk music lecturing on the dangers online tech, more an honest evaluation of how it affects our day to day lives. The minimal, short, lo-fi songs on the album often resemble impulsively created social media posts or voice messages sent to friends.

Lemon Myrtle was a new discovery for me this year, but I’m glad to hear someone exploring in a small way one of the great existential questions of our time.

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Phil Monsour and Rafeef Ziadah – Define (Song Not Forgotten)

One political issue dominated the last quarter of 2023 – Israel’s bombing of Gaza into rubble.

Of course most of us here in Australia maybe saw a lot of it in our news and social media, but it didn’t affect our daily lives very much – something I thought about at times as I rode around the city consumed with the trivia of day to day life while 25,000 people were killed just for existing in a city they were born in and have never had an opportunity to leave.

Still, many of us did our best to do something. I attended as many rallies as I could, but my main contribution was making radio shows where I spoke to people from Palestine about life there under occupation and what their hopes were for the future. I made five shows through the year on the subject, three after the beginning of the war. And inevitably, for musical breaks in those shows I would play Brisbane folk singer Phil Monsour or Palestinian poet in exile Rafeef Ziadah. By the end of the year they had collaborated again.

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Gurridyula – Country Boy

In 2020, I was part of a group supporting Wangan and Jagalingou Cultural Custodians blocking the access road to Adani’s Carmichael coal mine. For five days we blocked the road, and when the police finally came to kick us out, Wangan and Jagalingou man Coedie McAvoy treated them to a live performance of a rap he had written. Staring down a line of cops, dropping bars of truth, it was the kind of stage rappers dream of and I’m pretty sure it was his first public performance!

Fast forward to 2023, and Coedie is still resisting Adani – for almost 900 days he has been camped out on Adani’s mining lease as part of the Waddananggu ceremony. He is still writing rhymes too – 2023 saw an abundance of songs spilling out from his little recording studio in that bush camp.

His lyrics are typically dense – packing in details of his culture, the system that oppresses them and his own campaign for sovereignty and land rights. But my own personal favourite was his most simple – this one telling the joys of being connected to, living on, and protecting Country.

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The Rockefeller Frequency – This Modern Life

After a few years of travel and that whispering voice in your head that maybe your getting too old for these late nights; I currently feel very disconnected from my local punk scene – a subculture that has given me so much musical enjoyment and inspiration over the years.

Evidence of this is that despite The Rockefeller Frequency playing a lot of gigs in Brisbane in 2023, I’ve never seen them play even once. Thankfully, at least I’ve still got 4ZZZ, who gave this song a good thrashing in 2023. It ended up at #4 in the year end 4ZZZ Hot 100 – one of five Brisbane punk bands in the top 10!

Community radio can be a mixed bag sure, but what a privilege it is to have a station committed to playing local non-commercial music, as well as the political content I try to contribute to. And a station that keeps me at least a little bit connected to my local punk scene.

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Carsie Blanton – Out in the Streets

Don’t know if you were paying attention, but 2023 was quite the year for arguments about politics and country music – part of the general culture war that is turning the USA into a crazier place every day.

Jason Aldean hit #1 in the pop charts with Try That in a Small Town, mixing pro-gun lyrics with a video reacting against Black Lives Matter protests. It was replaced at #1 by a country protest song out of the blue – Oliver Anthony’s viral youtube hit Rich Men North of Richmond. It was a remarkable feat by an unsigned artist who is recovering from addiction and mental health issues, but the battle lines had been drawn – and Oliver’s pretty standard tale of struggling battlers and greedy elites became the subject of attempted co-option by Republican politicians and all kinds of outraged takes from the progressive online commentariat.

On the other hand, there is a whole host of country artists writing political music from the left. The most famous example this year was Dolly Parton, who wrote the odd but cool World On Fire. Tyler Childers’ very moving video for In Your Love depicting a same-sex love story has over 8 million views on youtube. Long-term country voice of protest Iris DeMent made the beautiful Workin’ on a World song and album (that song probably should have made the list except I somehow missed hearing it until the start of 2024!). And Carsie Blanton released this tribute to being out on the streets – there were plenty of good reasons in 2023 to do just that.

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Songs of Disappearance – Australian Frog Calls

In some ways 2023 was a year featuring less music than usual for me – few live gigs, I didn’t buy many albums, and a busted phone meant that for a while I was even without mp3s on headphones.

But music is everywhere if you look for it. And in 2023 I could enjoy the sound of the flowing river and the call of a lone mopoke lulling me to sleep each night in rural New Zealand, the grunting of koalas and the doinga-doinga-doinga of cicadas while camped on the Murray River picking fruit, the call to prayer blasting out of the mosque across the road in Kurdistan, the whistling magpies and occasional owl hoots on my suburban street.

And then there was this recording of endangered Australian frogs – genuinely one of the most beautiful pieces of music I heard all year.

Voices from Palestine

Here’s a collation of the radio shows I have made over the last few months speaking to people in and from Palestine.

I haven’t written as much on this blog in 2023 as in previous years. Part of the reason is that I spend quite bit of time each week making the Paradigm Shift radio show on 4ZZZ. This year the show also became a podcast – another time commitment but a long overdue concession that podcasts have overtaken radio as the dominant medium for audio news and commentary!

So anyway, here are four shows I made over the last three months of 2023. Covering news from Palestine is not new for the Paradigm Shift, but it took on a new urgency as Israel’s occupation has gone from heavy repression of the lives and movements of Palestinian people to all-out slaughter of Gaza. These shows don’t report on the bombs and deaths, but they do speak to people about the lived experience in Palestine – to show why and how Palestinian people attempt to resist occupation, and why the situation before October 7^th should not be described as “peaceful”.

Human Rights in Palestine

Went to air a week before Hamas’ deadly attack and Israel’s brutal response brought the Western world’s focus to the Holy Land. Useful I think for depicting what Palestine in “peacetime” was like.

We talk about the ongoing dispossession, oppression, resilience and resistance of Palestinian people. We get an update from Lee Rhiannon who has just returned from Palestine, hear about the importance of Palestinian dakbe dancing from Sameer Ellagta, and replay an interview with Olfat Mahmoud – a legend of Palestinian humanitarian work who has sadly just passed away.

Originally broadcast 29/09/23

Voices From Palestine part 1

We hear from on the ground in Palestine. Usama Nicola lives in Bethlehem in the West Bank, and I spoke to him about living under occupation, what the last six weeks of war has been like, and what his hopes for the future are.

Originally broadcast 17/11/23

Voices From Palestine part 2

We are travelling virtually to Palestine again. We talk with Mona, a Palestinian woman working with Community Peacemaker Teams in occupied Hebron; and Shoshana, an Israeli Jew living in Australia who has been taking action to resist her nation’s bombardment of Gaza. We also speak briefly with Phil Monsour about Palestine solidarity in Brisbane.

Originally broadcast 24/11/23

Christmas in Bethlehem, 2023

A Christmas special – we try to get some new insights into the meaning of Christmas by speaking to Usama Nicola who lives in Bethlehem in the occupied Palestinian territories. We also delve into some of the radical messages in the biblical Christmas story with theologian Dave Andrews.

Originally broadcast 22/12/23

Life after facebook – a social media exit strategy

Some time late last year (who remembers these things exactly?), I reached the milestone of 15 years spent using facebook. Coincidentally but I think providentially, at the same time my wife and I went to stay on a low tech farm for two months and I took probably the longest break I have ever had from scrolling and posting on there.

I didn’t miss it, but I do still think there are useful purposes that facebook and other social media platforms serve. What it did do is give me some time to think about it all – this thing I have always been critical of, yet have now spent thousands of hours over fifteen years using – and generating content and revenue for.

I don’t think facebook has gotten any better over that time, though it has certainly changed a lot about us users and how we relate to each other. Most of those changes have been side-effects of what is facebook’s main project – growing its own business and the wealth of its employees and shareholders.

We have had this ably demonstrated by the platform’s shifts in direction over the last couple of years. In 2021 Facebook made the dramatic announcement that it would be pivoting to create “the metaverse”. As far as I know, there was never any consultation with facebook’s users – those who literally generate all its content – whether any of us want “the metaverse”. In the end public disinterest seems to have finally defeated the tech frontier delusions of Mark Zuckerberg, but then the seeming shelving of the metaverse idea also occurred with no consultation. It should be noted that in March this year, as public discourse started to properly grapple with current and future threats created by Artificial Intelligence and the need to put limits on its development, Zuckerberg announced facebook’s next grand idea is to “create a new top-level product focused on generative AI”.

Both the failure of the proposed metaverse and the decline of Twitter/X since Elon Musk’s takeover showed that these supposed genius tech billionaires actually don’t know how best to run a communications platform that works for people. But that won’t stop them doing what they think will get them the most money and power; or their users being dragged along into it because the sheer scale of these platforms and the way they have steamrolled other pieces of social infrastructure means we are stuck with it.

For this reason, I have been thinking more seriously about an exit strategy. I honestly believe that for the sake of its own growth; facebook intentionally tries to maximise its control over our attention, our communication, our relationships and our own thoughts. If we don’t want to go along with that, at some point we will have to quit. But to leave, I think it’s worth thinking about what useful functions facebook gives us (the reasons we find it hard to leave!), and what other methods we have of achieving them. Ideally, we could leave facebook and feel that decision makes our life better off, not worse. This is going to be me sharing some of my thoughts.

Before we go any further, I will just note that facebook is the only social media platform I refer to here because it’s the only one I have personally used. From what I can tell, there would be some small differences and a lot of similarities when it comes to other platforms. I certainly have no desire to sign up to any other existing social media platform. Of course there are still alternatives being created (Mastodon being the most high profile example). But if it is your desire to, you could take the ideas I share here and translate them to whatever other platform you use – I’m sure there are plenty of similarities and probably a few differences. But for now, let’s talk about facebook.

THE GOOD

Here are some of what I think are the useful functions facebook has served, why it has managed to be as extraordinarily popular and durable as it has.

* Keeps us in vague contact with friends/acquaintances

For the first few years I had a facebook account, I was mostly inactive. It was when I started travelling that I really started using it. Though facebook is a very bad way to maintain close friendships it’s quite a good way to maintain acquaintanceships. There we see who’s got married, had a baby, moved town, quite often who has died, and random other scraps of info we glean to keep aware of people we rarely see.

* Allow public-facing parties to reach those interested in them

For musicians, artists, political groups and other public institutions; social media offered an unparalleled opportunity to bypass the gatekeepers of commercial media and connect with their potential audience. Originally this was by the process of having people “like” your page and see your posts, then as facebook became more algorithm-driven it could be seriously amplified by followers sharing your post and your reach expanding. Unfortunately, then facebook brought in sponsored posts (otherwise known as “paid advertising”) and your reach nosedived unless you paid for these posts. Still, most of us still connect with far more people running facebook pages than we would relying on traditional media channels.

* Acts as a news source

It’s not always the most nuanced or factual news coverage, but quite often facebook is the first point where we hear about newsworthy events. And for whole swathes of information that is not considered worthy of coverage by commercial media, social media is an incredibly useful way of getting passed around. Alternative news sources have existed in various forms for a long time, but for people of my generation (all of my involvement in radical political spaces has come since being a facebook user), it’s hard to imagine just how we would have got a lot of our information over the years if not for social media. Even for someone like me who is involved in creating independent media outside of online platforms, so much information for stories I have made has come from facebook, as has a lot of the reach for media I have created.

* Sharing content we find personally interesting

People always recommended books, music etc to their friends. But has there ever been a time when it was quite as easy as on social media? Well to be honest, the answer is yes and no. Facebook revolutionised the ability to share articles/audio/video and then immediately discuss it. In some ways it might have made it a bit too easy, meaning we don’t critically analyse things before sharing or responding. But more to the point, in recent years this function has quietly disappeared from facebook as the algorithm acts against any posts that are likely to take users off the platform and into other corners of the internet. Once upon a time I would have said this was what I liked facebook for, but to be honest I can hardly recall seeing any articles or videos on facebook that I found interesting in the last few years – despite the impeccable tastes of my friends! People who still want to use facebook for this now have to resort to “gaming the algorithm” eg. posting a selfie with a link to an article in the comments.

* Organising/discovering events

Who even has a paper calendar to write events on? Whether it’s private parties, artistic happenings or protest rallies; facebook these days is first port of call for both organising and discovering events. This aspect of facebook has been remarkably effective, the main problem being that the dominance of facebook has slowly killed off every other method we had of discovering and promoting events. With facebook’s powerful and mysterious algorithm now very influential in what information we see, this has come to mean facebook’s influence on our lives extends beyond the online realm and into the physical world.

* Messenger service

Who among us can say they have never lost all their phone numbers and had to use facebook messenger to contact their close friends? Messenger has made it much easier to contact old friends whose details may have changed, and generated the peculiar etiquette of sending SMS only to your more intimate friends and messenger to your acquaintances – even if you have their number.

* Local Community groups

I’ve never actually used these much, and many people who do find that like a lot of “community” things, it sounds better in theory than in practice once you insert the actual people! But the groups where people can post to other residents of their town or suburb about lost pets and various local matters certainly seem like a useful thing – especially when you consider the breakdown of physical gathering spaces and neighbourly connections that has been a gradual trend for a long time. In general, social media and the internet seems to be a de-localising force. These groups are one exception, and it could be worthwhile to think about what other ways there are of keeping local connections.

* “Shitposting” memes etc

It was only a decade or so ago that I first heard the word “meme” used and had to ask someone what it meant! Most memes are pure ephemera, read and then instantly forgotten. But this kind of creativity and humour has been one of the distinctive cultural contributions of the social media generation, and who can honestly say they would prefer life without memes?

So that’s a bit of a rough list of the things I appreciate about facebook. Notice I haven’t included the general “status updates” of small talk and photos of yourself/friends/food – even though this constitutes a large proportion of what actually goes on in the social media realm. This kind of small talk relating with others is a basic need for friendships and community; but I think we could already do this kind of thing perfectly well before facebook existed – in fact better when it was just us connecting with people we appreciate without facebook’s mediation. I think one of the great harms social media has done is co-opt the idea of “friendship” and apply it to the disembodied, infinitely vast, competitive sphere of the algorithmically controlled newsfeed. It is the curse of our times to be incredibly connected yet perpetually lonely, trying to fill our longing for human contact by typing into the void.

Now you’ve got me started. Well I guess while I’m going, let’s talk about some of the issues I have with facebook.

THE BAD

* We have no control or accountability

I already touched on this. Its not just that we are facebook’s customers, we are the ones who actually generate the product. And yet we are left at the whims of “The Algorithm”, an AI computer program whose main task is to work out what products to advertise to us and also happens to be one of the most powerful entities in the world.

* Facebook as a site for sharing information seems to be failing

As I mentioned earlier, what was once the primary reason to use facebook for many of us – sharing articles/songs/videos from the internet – has virtually disappeared as facebook has done everything in it power to hide external links and keep us using its platform. Some information does get through, but what about its quality? Under the steady influence of social media, we have become a people incredibly sure of things we know hardly anything about – losing our critical thinking faculties and slaves to our confirmation bias.

* Public discourse also seems to be failing

Early on in the life of social media, there would frequently be news stories about how norms of civility were failing online because of the lack of face to face empathy. That is still true, but is also dwarfed by everything we have seen since – increasing tribal divisions in society, mass public shaming becoming normalised and celebrated, tidal waves of abuse and harassment, increasing censorship and intolerance of differing ideas. Since the “fake news” campaigns of the US 2016 election, through Qanon and the covid culture wars, it has become increasingly clear that social media echo chambers allow people to exist on totally different planes of reality from each other. This has undoubtedly led to a more fractured society, but it is also a serious blow to the beliefs of people like myself – who think that in a society where the rich and connected have disproportionate power over how most of us are able to live, the best counter are mass movements of people working together for our common interests. Ask yourself – does that kind of thing seem more or less likely now than fifteen years ago?

* Social media has destroyed a lot of the other avenues for civil society.

It’s ten years now since the Arab Spring, the so-called twitter powered revolution. Since then, social media has been involved one way or another in every significant political movement; but that’s mostly because it’s involved one way or another in all of our lives. There were political movements and revolutions long before smartphone apps, and as I just said I’m not sure we have gained much politically. In some ways we have less avenues for communication than we did before – even face to face gatherings are often replaced by online events. Even the rest of the internet seems like a quaint idea compared to the immense power of vast online platforms. The convenience and ubiquity of facebook has given extraordinary power to a monolithic and opaque online platform that has little accountability and acts fundamentally in its own interests. I personally think it is slowly changing us ontologically – time spent in the disembodied realm of the online world leads us to believe that thoughts and ideas are more real than physical actions. That’s another story, but there’s no question that one of the reasons leaving facebook is hard is because it has swallowed up so many of the institutions that enable public and communal life.

* Even by capitalism’s standards, facebook is unethical

How does facebook actually make its billions of dollars? With no price tags on public display, the truth is that all their money comes from deals made far from public view. When these do occasionally sneak into our sights they can be pretty shocking.

Cast your mind back to 2017, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. Facebook had sold users’ personal data to political parties for campaigning – undermining both personal privacy and democratic institutions. The so-called “facebook papers” leaked in 2021 showed how the company was aware of its role in disseminating false information but kept making decisions based on what is most profitable. In 2012 they famously conducted an experiment to see what the emotional responses would be to facebook intentionally doctoring users’ newsfeeds. Facebook also hoovers up the rights to everything posted on the site – content it did nothing to create.

All these are unethical, but many in the corporate world would say they are just good business. It’s facebook’s monopolising tendencies that fly in the face of free market principles and put facebook outside the realm of capitalist ethics. When the “hidden hand” of the market – the guiding principle of free-market economics – relies on there being healthy competition, you can’t have companies like facebook buying up competitors like Instagram and Whatsapp. Facebook has not only done this with impunity – they are almost certain to keep doing it. Earlier this year, when generative AI started to garner a lot of intention, facebook instantly announced it was going to start recruiting AI engineers to grow its business in that direction!

Everything we post on facebook is generating profits for a company that most definitely does not deserve our free labour.

* The state of always performing has destroyed our mental health

The last couple of decades we have lived through what has been called a “mental health epidemic”. Rates of depression, clinical anxiety and ADHD are skyrocketing. This has coincided with the introduction, spread and ubiquity of the smartphone and social media. Those two things could be unrelated, but I personally would be very surprised if that was the case. My belief is that the anxiety of always performing for a theoretical online audience (like permanent stage fright!), of having most of your social interactions ranked by a metric of likes and views, of theoretically being connected all the time but actually being alone, of experiencing low level addiction and everything that goes along with that; has decimated the basic necessities for mental wellbeing. And it’s not just me either – loads of studies have said this, including ones instigated by the social media companies themselves.

* It’s just not providing for my needs any more

None of the above issues are exactly new, but I have kept using facebook over the years because mostly I have found the good things outweighed the bad. But increasingly I just don’t feel this is the case. My notifications are filled with things that have nothing to do with me and I don’t care about. My newsfeed doesn’t provide me with the kind of news I am looking for. Even on the pages I run, I have little motivation to post because you have to do so according to the algorithm’s desires and I already feel like there’s too much online content and too little real life action. This is somewhat embarrassing to say, but I feel like a big part of the reason I still use facebook is because I no longer have the alternative sources of connection to my friends that could take its place. It’s when I got to that realisation that I really started thinking it was time to get off.

WHAT’S NEXT?

So I guess my question is: how can I leave facebook, but be in a position where my relationships and community are better off for me leaving, not worse off? This means thinking about alternatives we can create and put our energy into – things that hopefully can serve our social needs without turning those needs into profits for a company that doesn’t actually care about us or see our lives and communities as anything more than data to be harvested.

Because they are the attributes I care most about, I am going to focus on a few traits of facebook: maintaining friendships, sharing information with our networks and an avenue where community organisations can communicate with the public.

* Friendships

My time on facebook has taken me from my early 20’s to my mid 30’s. During this time one’s social situation generally changes a lot, though my generation have had social media thrown into the mix to add more change. It’s so bizarre thinking about the fact that people I haven’t seen since high school (fully half our lives ago) are still theoretically connected to me via social media.

One of the reasons it is hard for so many of us to leave social media is that we are often quite lonely, and what social interaction we have has been subsumed into the platform. It is a sobering realisation when you go a while without using facebook and notice that hardly anyone ever calls, texts or arranges to hang out just to chat and catch up. Hard as it is, in the end I would say this is more reason to quit. The illusion of a wide range of relationships while we each individually broadcast to the social media universe is not the same thing as edifying and mutually beneficial relationships.

In that way, I think one of the things we need if we are to do away with social media is a renewed effort to communicate in the old fashioned way – dinner parties, hangouts, kids play dates, phone calls, letters. It’s something I have traditionally not been that good at personally, and I think a lot of us are not that used to having to put in the kind of effort this requires when you can just get out your phone and start scrolling. But this is something about myself I want to change.

In terms of acquaintances, it’s hard to picture anything that could replace the role facebook currently plays. When humans were less transient and our relationships less dispersed, social gossip would have filled this role – I have spent time in communities where this is still the case. If you could somehow select an option that all you wanted was life updates and not all the other things that fill up your newsfeed, I would probably prefer that. But that’s half the point – we don’t get to choose what we see. In the end I don’t think liking a photo of someone’s new baby is really the same thing as being in a relationship. Maybe shedding that illusion will be a challenge to work harder to maintain real friendships that count.

* Sharing information

One aspect of friendship that facebook, for a while a least, seemed to enhance was sharing information with our networks. By this I mean the things that don’t necessarily come up in our everyday small talk – topics we are interested in, projects we have been working on, art we have created.

I personally think this is a great thing. I think it makes for better friendships and individuals. And we all consume a lot of media – isn’t it better if we are getting some of it from our friends and community rather than just the tastes of adverisment-funded corporate media? But the thing is, I just don’t think facebook does it any more.

At some point that damn algorithm decided that links to external sites did not keep us scrolling. Suddenly we stopped seeing them; written content was limited to a one paragraph status update or simplistic memes, the most common artistic medium the selfie. At one point my newsfeed was so full of videos I didn’t care about that I actually sent facebook a complaint email.

To some extent I think other social media platforms are better at sharing information than facebook – people share articles on twitter or reddit, and put their art on instagram. But I personally haven’t been tempted to sign up for more social media – I already feel like it takes up enough space in my life.

One of the symptoms of the newsfeed scroll is that we are all overburdened with information. Information has become worthless in a lot of ways – worthless because it only leads to more scrolling and not to any real life action, worthless because the disembodied realm of social media means anyone can post any irrational thing without pesky reality getting in the way of our beliefs, worthless because it becomes all supply and no demand and no one is deeply interested in anything, and worthless because the dominant medium of quickly written and ephemeral posts means that little thought goes into either creating or receiving.

Once again, I think the ideal alternative to this is actual face to face repeated meetings, where we try to learn together and work out how to apply it to our lives. I’m conscious though that many of us are time poor and disconnected, and that digital media is useful in this context.

The place where this thinking has led me to is email. It’s a very malleable medium, where there are a number of structures that communities could set up themselves, with no need for a commercial platform (besides ones’ own email provider) to mediate or control it. You could set up a discussion group, or a shared list of email addresses that everyone sends individual emails to, or anyone at any time could grab the addresses of their friends and start sending out their thoughts. There are also more structured platforms like substack that seem to be becoming more popular – probably in response to the limits of social media that I have already spoken about.

The obvious shortcoming of this thinking is the fact that every person I know already gets more emails than they have the time or desire to actually read. I think this is mostly an overflow of the information deluge I was criticising a couple of paragraphs ago. If we were to withdraw our attention from social media platforms, we quite likely would dedicate a bit more time and interest to our inbox.

But key to thinking about this is that I think changing medium should come with a change in how we think about information. I am the kind of person whose email ends up on the contact lists of all kinds of political groups and charities. As a result I generally receive dozens of emails a day, most of which I delete without reading. Periodically I do a cull, where I unsubscribe from basically all of them and start again. So much for the glorious communication revolution hey?

Part of the culpability for this situation I attribute to social media, with its emphasis on short but plentiful grabs that say nothing much. When facebook changed to basically force pages to pay for advertising, many groups instead focused on email – but they did so without really changing the content of their posts.

The response I would like to see is a qualitative change in what we communicate. I am imagining that rather than churning out numerous missives which we have not put much effort into, we instead store it all up for one bigger, more curated email. It could look like anything, but I’m imagining a personal email could give a few life updates, topics we have been thinking about (and where that thinking has led us), share some links we have found interesting, art/craft we have been creating if we are so inclined, maybe what music/books/films we have been enjoying.

If I received that from a friend, I can imagine not only making the effort to read it, but even looking forward to them arriving in my inbox from friends who are making them regularly. Imagine that! It could be like that experience none of us from the social media generation can even contemplate – the trip to the mailbox full of anticipation for what letters we might have received.

There are a couple of other issues I can think of: one is that if we were to use a mail platform to send, it may well end up in the spam folders of our intended recipients. Some email providers also have procedures in place to stop anyone sending emails to large list of recipients. These are a couple of logistical things, which if we tried hard enough probably aren’t impossible to get around.

Another issue is that this kind of medium offers only an intense level of engagement. Emails of the kind I just suggested would take a bit of effort to create, and it may well turn out that not everybody wants to hear that much info from their friends. We would not have the kind of casual contact facebook provides. That would be a loss, but to me that is kind of the point.

Similarly, we would not have the kind of reach we currently do for the info we share. I personally have over 2000 facebook friends, and the “share” function offers the possibility of reaching many more, but I do not envisage there are that many people wanting to read emails I might send.

But maybe that’s ok. Maybe we never actually communicated with all those people in any real tangible way, but we have been carrying the forlorn hope that we could. Email would most likely make for a more human-sized communication; on a scale comparable to the number of people we can actually maintain real relationship with. Who knows? This might actually be a gain if we find we have better communication with that smaller number.

It would also be a slower format without the instant spreading and live streaming of facebook. Similarly, I’m not sure this is the same loss in practice as it is in theory. If we are just sitting at home or somewhere else looking at our phone, exactly how much difference does it make if we see something as it is happening or a few days later? We have been convinced by the social media hype machine that instant is a virtue, but that doesn’t mean it actually is.

Of course there are other ways to communicate with friends. A couple that I can think of (anachronisms from another era though they may be), that I am already involved in making, are blogs and zines. Zines in particular are something I am hoping to put more effort into. Giving out a paper zine is quite a different exchange to posting something on facebook – I have always felt such a kinship to others who make zines, even if the subject matter is very different. Those paper publications seem like artefacts to be treasured; the difference between that and the emptiness of social media interaction is something I really want to highlight.

I don’t know if all that made a convincing argument, but regardless I am personally thinking seriously about setting up an email list in an attempt to share in a more conscientious way with my friends without an unethical corporation profiting off our interactions. So I guess this is an invitation to get in touch if you would like to go on the list!

* INDEPENDENT MEDIA

Remember those heady days when social media was going to transform politics? How cringeworthy those stories seem now with hindsight. The Arab Spring hasn’t really turned out that great over the long haul, but there was always something a bit awry about Western news reports that attributed those political movements not to the organising capabilities of actual Arab peoples, but instead to American internet platforms.

That same year, many of us actually trying to organise radical political movements were grappling with what it actually meant to be part of political events that grew out of rapid social media growth – the crazy mix of political ideas thrown together that was the “Occupy” encampments. But mostly, Occupy was a layover from a previous era of organising with its tactics of mass physical gatherings and claiming of public space. The next year we got a better insight of what online political activism would look like in the long term – the “Kony 2012” video being shared by millions of people with no theory of how to actually stop the phenomenon of child soldiers in Uganda and no real inclination to do anything about it.

Social media has gone on to have an immense influence on how we do political organising, but it’s very hard to quantify if that has led to improvements. I think it has certainly increased the amount of political discourse, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into tangible political action or positive change. Meanwhile the medium of social media – finding ways to monetise every human interaction, enriching private capital while paying low wages, and obsessed with the hierarchies of celebrity culture – has only acted to entrench the capitalist status quo.

I have thought for a long time that movements for social change need to wean ourselves off social media. I have always justified our complicity with the philosophy of “people are on social media, therefore so should we be”. But I think the problem is that so many other facets of our movements have died out, meaning that we are only on social media – just one more plank in building the dominance of these platforms.

For effective social movements we need to get off our screens and out meeting people in physical spaces and shared projects. But we also need some kind of mass communication to reach beyond our already existing networks. I really believe that independent media is a vital part of the ecosystem of social change. And it seems like online communication is only going to become more dominant in the future, so for sharing information we need to work out what good use of online technology looks like.

I think one thing that should be prioritised is an online presence that is separate from social media platforms. We don’t want our communication to be dependent on the whims and priorities of mega rich corporate social media companies, nor do we especially want our efforts to go further towards building the profits and social control of these platforms. As well as a freedom in the design and content of the site, this also means our information is accessible to everybody with an internet connection, without needing to sign up for an account. It also means that as online platforms change (eg. Facebook being left behind for tiktok by younger users, Elon Musk ruining twitter, etc.), we can just keep concentrating on what we do well rather than having to change everything.

If we want to still use big platforms, at least for now there is some potential for us to do both by sharing content on social media. But I for one really think we should be looking to build alternatives and shed our dependence on social media.

When I think about alternative models, I can’t seem to do much better than look back into the past. To a period just before the rise of social media and smartphones, to a time when the revolutionary online platform people talked about was Indymedia.

As I understand it, Indymedia was basically what we now call a “wiki” – people submitted articles/news/events and a volunteer collective of editors would approve the posts. It is famously linked to the big anti-globalisation protests of the early 2000’s, though it existed for a long time and was used by many different groups and people.

I think there are advantages to using this kind of format. One is that the wiki format is common and proven to be sustainable through sites like wikipedia. Another is that hopefully the format can spread around some of the workload involved in making a project like this happen – it would require a few heavily committed people to hold it all together, but at least in theory the content generation could be shared around the entire community that uses the site.

Here’s a possible model: a central website has a few categories – news, analysis, multimedia, community calendar. There could of course be more. There is then a webform where people and groups can upload their own contributions – media releases and updates, articles, videos, podcasts, events for the calendar. There would be a simple process for a central collective member to approve or decline a submission based on whether it meets the site’s editorial guidelines (which would also be publicly displayed). I’m imagining that it would be somewhat localised (which would be the only way to make something like an events calendar workable), but there could exist a network of these sites that could share content.

If this were to function well, I think there could also be a hard copy element, where periodically a paper newsletter is printed with highlights from the website which can then be distributed to locations around town.

At the very least, I think an interactive calendar of events happening would be a very worthwhile addition to our ability to create cultural alternatives to the corporate behemoth. A few years ago I approached a friend and suggested we start a weekly email of radical Brisbane events. It wasn’t that much work, and managed to run every week for a couple of years until I left town for a while. There was a lot of appreciation, and even a couple of people saying they felt like they could actually quit facebook now. The dependence we have built on facebook for promoting events is shocking and certainly harmful to our efforts of creating interesting and welcoming subcultures.

There are of course a few obstacles I can envision for a project like this. One is that this project has basically already been tried once in recent history and it was pretty much killed off by social media then. I must admit that I haven’t heard masses of people crying out for an indymedia revival, so even though I personally think it would be good, it may be that there just isn’t demand for this kind of thing. Many other projects have been attempted and failed though and many more will in the future. So I guess if it falls apart through disinterest that would be ok.

Another hurdle is that any project like this requires a fair bit of volunteer labour, both in the collective and from the community. People do not always have a lot of time and energy for these kind of things, especially over a long period of time. But the format I have suggested I think at least spreads the workload round a bit. If we could capture a fraction of the time and energy people currently devote to social media that would go a long way towards sustaining the project. Possibly there could be some kind of paid element through a grant or crowdfunding, but my own feeling is that money in these contexts often creates more problems than it solves – so I think that would have to be a carefully thought through decision. In the end, work can be rewarding and energising as well as well as tiring and depleting, and hopefully if the project took off that would be its own reward.

Similarly, the project would require some kind of group to run it – one that purely for efficiency I think would have to be a somewhat closed collective. This could create issues with hierarchy and gatekeeping, but more pertinent I think are the inevitable interpersonal conflicts that arise when a group of people get together to work on a political (or any!) project. From what I’ve heard, this was at times an issue in old indymedia collectives. What can you say? There is no perfect solution to interpersonal conflict, but I do at least hope that the dynamic of a group working together towards a tangible shared project can lead to less arguments than the disembodied realm of social media politics – where ideas mean everything and relationships nothing. Who knows? Maybe even working together could be a good thing, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and each individual is blessed by the working relationships and friendships.

I certainly have no guarantee that the above format would work as a successful website, but I am certain about the importance of building independent non-profit media and of trying to rebuild those institutions outside of corporate social media. I also think it’s important to ground this media in face to face community, especially as we face a media world which generative AI is possibly about to take into the realm of the surreal. I personally have been involved with Brisbane community radio station 4ZZZ for a decade now and will continue to for the foreseeable future. I love radio and 4ZZZ, but I also think our society’s media consumption is overwhelmingly digital and we need to be building online spaces that suit our needs as alternative media producers and audiences. I intend to try to support anyone else who is attempting to do radical media and think that doing these things co-operatively gives us a much greater chance of surviving and thriving.

SIGNING OUT

Congratulations on (nearly) making it to the end of this long article! While there is some analysis here, my rationale for writing this was not to generate another theoretical treatise. I personally genuinely want to get off social media and want to at least attempt the alternatives I have suggested here. To that end, if you are also keen for these things are have other ideas on the same subject, I want to hear from you. Please feel free to get in contact with me and we can talk about ideas and projects. I hope for anyone who has read this that it has stimulated some contemplation about how things are and how they could be – to me the effort of writing this would be vindicated if it got more of us thinking deeply and discussing these topics.

The world is an amazing place full of extraordinary potential, but our ability to see new possibilities is limited further by every moment we spend within the parameters of corporate-owned social media. But these platforms don’t own us (yet), so let’s get together to create the kind of social networks and media we really want to see. See you in the real world!

Protest Banners – a digital exhibition

I’ve been thinking a bit about art and protest recently, and it got me contemplating banner painting – an underrated medium of visual art that is linked directly to tactics of collective and confrontational political action. Of course there’s lots of ways of doing political art and they all have different virtues, but not many are as tangibly connected to frontline protest. I have always thought a good banner adds a lot to the morale of a protest action, as well of course its main purpose of communicating in a split second what the whole thing is about.

All this got me recalling the banners I designed while living at Camp Binbee and organising protest actions to disrupt the construction of Adani’s Carmichael coal mine. Most of the physical banners are now discarded, but I’m putting them up here as a celebration of the banner as an artform and hopefully an inspiration for us all to think more about its potential. Anyone will a sheet of fabric and paint can make a banner, though I will admit that all the ones you are about to see were designed on a computer and traced onto the fabric with the aid of a projector.

Thanks to everybody who helped paint them – the act of making banners is almost always a collaborative activity which facilitates quality conversation and allows for the involvement of anyone regardless of how much artistic ability they presume to possess. Here’s to the banner – a wonderful medium for political art.

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Targeting individual companies who were either working with Adani or considering doing so became one of the trademarks of that campaign. This banner was made for an action at pipe company Iplex, though we then used it many more times in different places by altering the brand name! We also had to keep changing the number, as the tally of companies who publicly distanced themselves from Adani climbed over 100.

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It was the 40^th birthday of the Terania Creek protests – the world’s first concerted direct action environmental campaign, and the birth of a great tradition of Australian environmental blockading. We celebrated in the best way possible – by locking on to Adani’s drill rig! In this action we were trying to link our action into that tradition – a piece of our history we should be proud of and that helped shaped the country we live on.

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One of my favourite banners ever, though I don’t seem to have any good photos of it! This one was a collaborative effort – between myself as a designer and a whole bunch of artistic hippies at camp who did a much better job of painting the coral than I ever would have. Also, I 100% stole the slogan off a school strike sign I saw in Hobart!

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The legal case between Adani and activist Ben Pennings is still ongoing, over Ben supposedly stealing commercial-in-confidence information for the sake of the campaign. The unfortunate truth for Adani is not that they were up against one espionage genius, rather it was that companies everywhere had whistleblowers who didn’t want their labour going towards ruining the planet. This banner was to show off the fact that we kept turning up at every company linked to Adani, even when the information was not yet public. For the design I went for a 1950’s detective comic/film noir style. Usually if the process designing a banner makes me chuckle, I think I’m onto a good thing.

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We were blessed to have some amazing kids bring their enthusiasm and energy to camp at times. When this crew from North Queensland told me they wanted to paint a banner, I thought I’d better come up with a design to match the occasion! Unfortunately, this banner never made it back up north with those kids because the police confiscated it. I hope the cops at least appreciated it.

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We did quite a few visits to the Siemens office at Mackay, as the German electronics company considered whether to do Adani’s rail line signalling system. We couldn’t dissuade them, even with this lovely banner, a placard written specially in German, and another humourous action where we listed Siemens’ integrity for sale on ebay to the highest bidder.

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We did heaps of actions blocking coal trains as part of the campaign – so many that at one point coal hauling company Aurizon tried to sue FLAC! It would take more than that to stop people of conscience taking action, and in the end Adani’s first three loads of coal were stopped by activists (including myself) on the tracks. I’ve always thought that monochrome graphics make for very striking images, but you know what it’s like when a group of people get paint and brushes out – they want to use every colour of the rainbow. So my black and white train on this design became some kind of demonic locomotive with red eyes! But I’m including this banner because a good pun never goes astray on a banner – and two puns are always better than one.

The Supply Crisis and Degrowth

Normally I’m the type to skip straight past the finance section in the news, eyes glazed over. But in the second half of 2022, as whispers of economic crisis and global recession got louder, I figured I should try to get my head around what was happening in the world of economic markets and reserve banks.

This article is not the place to get a detailed analysis, but it seems the issue is a “supply crisis” where not enough stuff is being made (“supply”) to meet the consumer demand. This is due to a mix of factors including: covid enforced factory shutdowns that slow down production of all kinds of objects, natural disasters affecting food harvests, sanctions against Russia affecting oil and wheat markets. With few options at hand, governments through reserve banks are raising interest rates to stop the flow of credit into the economy and therefore restrict people’s spending (“demand”) power. The combination of the two seems likely to stop economic growth around the planet, bringing about a “global recession” – which will have further flow-on effects to the economy if companies lose profits, lay off workers, who then have less money to put into the economy, etc. Of course, the losses will ultimately be most felt by those who had the least to begin with, who also had the least power to control how any of this happened.

I don’t know enough nor do I have the desire to write an analysis of our economic situation and government responses. But what I do want to point out is that if we take a step back, we can see that the “supply crisis” is hardly an overnight development.

Look at the causes I just mentioned. Natural disasters? We have known for a long time that the resource extraction demanded by our ever-growing economy is likely to lead to increased natural disasters, but we had neither the desire nor the ability to stop. The wave of disasters we have seen in recent years (and the costs) seems likely to continue, and to plan for the future not accounting for this seems extremely foolish. Our food system, meanwhile, is hardly sustainable anyway – prices are kept low by environmentally unsustainable farming practices, but at the same time vast amounts of perfectly edible food is wasted at each step of the supply chain. It is quite likely we will have continuing issues regarding food production.

What about energy prices? Well for one our energy use is driving us towards environmental crisis no matter what the price. Our extraction and distribution of these valuable resources is also driven by the greed of a few unscrupulous companies rather than a proper analysis of human need. Then there’s the Russia situation. The fact that our own lives have been affected by sanctions placed on Russia’s war-mongering government leaves us with the unpleasant but unavoidable conclusion that it is our global demand for fossil fuels that has in fact financed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the extreme imbalance of power that has developed in that country. You can extend that analysis to Iran, Qatar and Saudi Arabia – all oil exporting countries who have been in the news for human rights abuses in 2022.

Then there’s the manufacturing issues. The situation we are in, where global manufacturing is concentrated in a few countries, didn’t happen by accident – it was a deliberate move by companies to move operations to where it was cheapest by avoiding environmental and human rights legislation. When the cramped and unsafe environments created for maximum efficiency turn out to be perfect for spreading disease and their closure affects the world; it’s not an unfortunate accident – it’s the direct result of decisions made by those companies.

I could list other examples, but my point is that if we look at the situation holistically we see that our “supply crisis” has been going on for a long time and will continue to for the foreseeable future – we just happen to be at a point in the turning of the wheel where we Western humans are the ones on the receiving end of an ever-destructive system.

We will probably continue for a while to hear about various responses to our current situation, but there is one possibility you are unlikely to see mentioned by any mainstream voices. That is the idea of “degrowth” – that maybe the real problem is not our economy contracting, but our economy growing.

You won’t hear it because in our religion of economic growth, degrowth is the ultimate blasphemy. Economic growth is our only metric to measure the progress of humanity, the governance of nations, whether a job is a worthwhile use of our time, the value of objects, whether we are useful and successful individuals.

But economic growth is hardly a universal good. It in fact is permanently running a race against our use of our planet’s finite resources. It continues to drive increasing greenhouse gas emissions, even as the world has come to see the necessity of decreasing these for the sake of our climate. It has relied on and perpetuated an exploitative and unjust global political situation. It has removed the human scale from our economy (a word once derived from the Greek term for “household”) – taken basic needs like food and housing and turned them into scarce commodities by the invisible magic of financial markets. It has developed technologies that crush the possibility of artisanal work, but then forced us to slave our lives away in esoteric and obscure jobs that we’re never sure are contributing anything meaningful to the world. At times it actually takes rational individuals and lures them into its own insanity – people investing their money in crypto-currency and Non-Fungible Tokens in full knowledge that these things have no real-world value.

In contrast to this, degrowth is a philosophy that has the possibility to intervene in our perpetual financial crisis and to liberate us from the madness of insatiable economic growth. But in a world thoroughly indoctrinated in the religion of economic growth, it is not one we are likely to hear from political parties or corporate media. Imagine the popularity of a politician promising us all less money and less fancy new gadgets. The voices proposing degrowth are left on the fringes, written off as crazy while inwardly cursing the fact that our coercive system forces our complicity if we want to survive.

But degrowth is still possible – at a societal level and at the very least on an individual level. We can work less hours, buy less stuff, share more, refuse to be a passenger on the kamikaze flight of economic growth. Then we can personally enjoy some of the advantages that come from living in pursuit of real life needs and joys rather than abstracted monetary growth. The less time we spend in service to the mighty dollar, the more time we have for the things we really care about – raising good families, working on the causes we most believe in, following our passions and curiosities. By figuring out what we really need; and how we can build resourceful networks and communities to support each other; we can free our lives from the worst dictates of economic growth and be a witness to the rest of society that another way is not only possible, but beneficial.

At the very least, those of us living for degrowth have little to fear from the fallout of a global recession. It is a life spent building a different kind of wealth, one that can not be suddenly crushed by the irrational and indifferent hidden hand of financial markets.

Degrowth is quite possibly going to be the ultimate destination for a system built on an uneasy foundation of environmental and human exploitation. If that happens, we as a society will have to choose between the destruction of financial crashes or a situation where the losses are equitably distributed and where it is humans, not the abstracted “economy”, that we act to protect. In a world of permanent financial crisis, voluntary degrowth may help us to find a way out

My top 10 songs of 2022

Another year ends, and the little break before we get back into our routines is a chance for reflection. For me, this involves looking back at the year and what music I loved. I have to admit, 2022 was a year when seeking out new music played a smaller role in my life – getting married and clocking up thousands of kilometres of travel didn’t leave much time for it! Still, it wasn’t hard to find ten new songs that impacted me for different reasons through the year. I also reviewed a number of albums (including some of the artists on this list), but here are my favourite songs.

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King Stingray – Let’s Go

It’s a corner of the country not many Australians have ever been to; but the community of Yirrkala in East Arnhem Land has produced some extraordinary music over the years – often the fruit of collaboration across languages, cultures and skin colours. Most recent is King Stingray, whose debut album of joyous “Yolngu surf rock” came out this year. I was lucky enough to see King Stingray’s wonderful live show at the National Indigenous Music Awards in Darwin, as well as listen to their newly released album while driving the highways of the Northern Territory – the perfect context for a song like Let’s Go. Ours is a vast and multi-faceted country; what a pleasure it is to go out and see it, and to hear people sing of it.

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No Rego – Shortcake

Arriving in Perth in May, I got to catch up with friends I hadn’t seen in a few years, and I got a reminder of what one of the great joys of punk music is – watching your friends get on their instruments and rock out. That feeling stayed with me every time I listened to No Rego’s joyful thrash; though by the end of the year their music had taken on a different meaning after the death of band member Riley. But that’s one of the things about punk’s DIY attitude I guess – when we are gone there all kinds of things we can’t do, ultimately the legacy of our lives will be the things we did.

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Big Thief – Spud infinity

Generally one type of music I try to avoid is indie music played by New York hipsters. Especially when said New York hipsters try to imitate country music! But I was forced to confront my prejudice this year after hearing the irresistable tunes of the latest Big Thief album (called, improbably, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You). Not only had Big Thief managed to make beautiful sounding country rock, the whole thing was infused with a light-hearted cosmic philosophising which is much more fun than just yet more songs about infatuation and heartbreak. The whimsical approach to both music and lyrics reaches its peak on Spud Infinity.

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The Songs Of Tom Smith – Dumpster Dive Dinner Party

The prolific and varied musical projects of Tom Smith have been a presence in my life for a few years now, and I love his approach to songwriting and music making. Dumpster Dive Dinner Party is my favourite song of Tom’s yet, though let’s face it I am a bit biased with the song being about one of my favourite activities. You won’t get a nuanced analysis of our wasteful society here, just a celebration of the life that can be happily lived off the excess: “A freegan never goes hungry, a freegan always has friends / nothing should go to waste, everybody shares“.

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Doggie Heaven – Berghain

I was lamenting to a friend early in the year how out of touch I felt with new local bands these days. He told me to check out Doggie Heaven, though as it turned out they hadn’t released any music at the time and it took me most of the year to get a chance to catch them live. When I did though, I was glad for the tipoff. Doggie Heaven live are a wonderful experience – lush sounding synthpop (with a delicious 80’s guitar tone), the transfixing sight of lead singer Izzy dancing, and an unexpected humour running through their melodramatic lyrics. Berghain just pips its equally funny b-side Haircut as my favourite.

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Hurray For The Riff Raff – Rhododendron

Alynda Segarra (aka Hurray For The Riff Raff) with each album has got further from her hillbilly musical beginnings – a progression that certainly continued with this year’s Life On Earth record, full of synthesizers and a new glam image. But I think the most emotionally affecting songs are still the folkier ones. On Rhododendron, Alynda is looking back at her youth as a train-hopping punk – a time full of wild flowers and wild experiences. Maybe not everyone resonates quite as much as I do with lines like “fell asleep in a field of corn, woke up to a sky reborn”. Still, nostalgia does no good for anyone – “I can’t look back, lost it all on this one way track”. And what exactly does the cryptic chorus refer to? I don’t know, but this was a song that with each listen gave me a bit of an emotional thud in the chest.

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Etran de L’Aïr – Tahawerte Ine Idinette

One of 2022’s somewhat unexpected cultural events was the rise of of daily online puzzles. One that my wife Bek and I got into is the geography puzzle Worldle, a game whose primary purpose seems to be to remind us westerners how little we know about Africa. Fortunately, at least it’s possible to keep up with the music of that vast and fascinating continent thanks to the hard work of record labels like Sahel Sounds – who put out the wonderful new album from Etran de L’Aïr, the star wedding band of Agadez, Niger. It’s a classic slice of Tuareg party rock, all hypnotic snaking guitar lines and relentless rhythms. Another reminder of the cultural treasures that lie hidden in Africa for those willing to seek them out.

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Thelma Plum – The Brown Snake

In September I got back to Brisbane after five months on the road, just in time to hear Thelma Plum’s song about returning to Brisbane and its beautiful winding river (which locals for many generations knew as Maiwar). How was I supposed to resist? I would find myself singing this song as I rode along the river. Maybe I’d been smitten, bitten by the brown snake.

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Outright – Tyrants and Vultures

Ahhh, the subtle beauty of passionate and well-played hardcore punk. There’s nothing like it. And find me a better hardcore band in the country than Outright. Crushing riffs, intense vocals, pummeling drums, righteous politics, true belief in the gospel of punk. I got to see Outright in Brisbane in October, and what a joy it was to see a band still with their energy even as we all enter middle age – still helping out other bands, touring, running a DIY record label, proudly repping the vegan straight edge lifestyle, all the while playing ferocious music. Punk’s not dead.

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Teresa Dixon – Here we go again

I feel like it’s a running theme through these descriptions; but I still long for musical community even though getting older, significant time living in the country and covid lockdowns has made it a bit harder to find. I first heard Teresa Dixon’s Here We Go Again the best way you can – travelling down to Tasmania to play at the Hobofopo festival, I was getting a ride in Teresa’s car when she asked if I wanted to hear her new song on the stereo. As it turned out, this beautiful and touching song is about loneliness and the difference a friend can make in hard times – particularly relevant to the last few years, but something we all feel at some point. “I need a connection, somewhere I fit in / Right now I don’t feel at home in my own skin / Can I please call you my friend?“

A month of living with the mining industry

It’s been just another month in the life of the fossil fuel industry – digging up stuff out of the ground, making loads of profits, tax dodging. If you’ll pardon the pun, you know the drill. But for those of us who closely follow the news and its coverage of the mining industry, it hasn’t quite been just another month. It’s been a month that showcases the full width and depth of the industry’s depravity, as different reports come out that peel back the PR to reveal its true character.

Let’s start in Egypt, where governments and civil society leaders from around the world gathered at COP27 – the annual soiree of climate change discussion. Most of the news coverage about COP has focused on the passing of a resolution agreeing developed nations should financially compensate the poorest countries for loss and damage caused by climate change. This is welcome news, but has somewhat obscured the other big report released at COP – the “High Level Expert Group on Net-Zero Commitments of Businesses, Financial Institutions, Cities and Regions” findings on whether promised climate plans of corporations were actually realistic.

Turns out, and this won’t surprise many of you, the net-zero plans of fossil fuel companies would have done more for climate action had the paper they are written on been left standing as trees. UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres declared “The problem is that the criteria and benchmarks for these net-zero commitments have varying levels of rigour and loopholes wide enough to drive a diesel truck through. We must have zero tolerance for net-zero greenwashing. It is rank deception. This toxic cover-up could push our world over the climate cliff. The sham must end.”

The hypocrisy highlighted in the report is very familiar to Australians, where countless proposed new fossil fuel projects are in various stages of development, helmed by companies who have pledged net-zero.

The report had several pertinent recommendations, including: net zero pledges actually be in line with official scenarios limiting warming to 1.5℃; that they include emissions cuts rather than relying on carbon offsets; and that they cover all greenhouse gas emissions, including those occurring along a company’s supply chain and through the use of its products.

In the end, no resolution was passed regarding corporate greenwashing at COP27. Some would say that this is because trying to stop people talking about climate action while not actually doing much would put everyone at COP out of a job. But I’d like to take this moment to point out that amongst the delegates at COP were 636 fossil fuel lobbyists – up 25% from last year, and more than any single national delegation bar the UAE (many of the UAE delegates of course were fossil fuel lobbyists!). The fossil fuel industry was better represented at COP than the combined total of the 10 countries most affected by climate change.

One of the companies present at COP27 was Glencore – Australia’s biggest producer of thermal coal. Glencore’s representatives probably didn’t need to pick up a travel guide for the trip to Africa, a continent they are very familiar with. Earlier this month, Glencore plead guilty in British courts to charges of bribery in the African continent. They were fined £281m, which is quite a lot of money, though significantly less than the $1.1 billion Glencore had been fined in the US earlier this year for bribery and market manipulation. British judge Justice Fraser said corruption was “endemic” within the African oil trading desk of Glencore – the company’s employees and its agents had given bribes worth $27m to unnamed officials in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea and South Sudan, causing harms worth $128m. Senior Glencore employees signed off on cash withdrawals used for the pay-offs.

How do we measure the true cost of Glencore’s actions? You can put a dollar figure on how much the company paid and how much profit they got out of it, but what about the social cost? Here is one of the world’s biggest corporations going to some of the poorest countries and using its immense wealth to entrench inequality in the African continent by bankrolling corrupt regimes. In South Sudan, 7.7 million people – two thirds of the population – are currently malnourished through natural disasters and conflict. Glencore is returning record profits from stealing Sudanese resources, which of course when used will only make the climate crisis worse.

For most of us, paying over a billion dollars in fines and reparations would be quite a hit to the hip pocket. But Glencore paid a $4bn dividend to shareholders last year as it reported record adjusted profits of $21.3bn – so you might say it’s just good business.

Glencore was also in the news in Australia last week, one of six companies named in documents tabled in parliament by independent MP Andrew Wilkie that detail how coal companies in Australia are using “fraudulent” coal quality reports for their exports – paying scientists to lie about the quality of their coal and paying bribes to overseas officials to keep the matter secret. Wilkie said “this has allowed them to claim, for years, that Australian coal is cleaner than it is, in order to boost profits and prevent rejection of shipments at their destination“.

Those of you with good memories may remember the approximately one million times in recent years that industry and government have justified Australian coal exports on the basis that the coal is better quality than overseas coal and therefore good for the environment. Turns out those claims belong on the fiction shelves alongside the same companies’ net zero pledges.

Thus passes another month of lying, cheating and bribing from the fossil fuel industry, although this one was a bit different from the usual in that someone actually called them out on it. For most of us who watch the mining industry with any degree of attention, these revelations come as no surprise. Around the globe, the mining industry thrives with a combination of silver tongue, astute power plays, and brutal violence to opponents when it thinks it can get away with it.

One of the most depressing lines in all these reports came at the end of the article about Glencore’s bribery conviction. Lawyer Iskander Fernandez said the conviction may prevent Glencore bidding on some public contracts, and some of their shareholders are angry at the lost dividends this has all caused. But “bar the above, there is nothing else that would prevent a company from moving forward and carrying on with its business.”

That business, presumably, will still include their trademark “endemic corruption”. At this point it’s probably worth remembering too what the normal – non-corrupt – business of the mining industry is: find resources they did nothing to create, make billions of dollars profit digging them up, then claim no responsibility when it turns out their products are driving the world towards catastrophic climate change.

No one doubts that there are principled people with good intentions working in the mining industry. But that’s all the more reason to point out the big picture of what that industry actually does. Those people’s hard work ultimately goes towards ruining the world’s democratic institutions and natural environment, while sabotaging attempts to actually improve either. Our survival at this stage depends not on any minerals we can dig up, but on the hard work being done to restrict the destructive power of big mining corporations – like the examples I just mentioned.

Just another month living with the fossil fuel industry I guess – defending our lives and planet from a morally bankrupt but astonishingly powerful nemesis, who keeps telling us how much of a favour it is doing us all.

Queenslanders cop the bill for Land Forces

It was a seemingly innocuous Thursday afternoon in South Brisbane. Picnickers relaxed in the parks, commuters rushed around on their different modes of transport, hospitality staff around their kitchens. And military vehicles began loading into the Brisbane Convention Centre. Actually that last bit is maybe not that usual. The vehicles were being readied for the Land Forces Defence Expo, an international weapons sales conference that was staged between October 4-6. Land Forces was held at the Convention Centre due to the generosity of its “host sponsor” the Queensland state government.

As the vehicles began to enter, something else unexpected happened. Two young women jumped on top of an EPE Hunter Wolf small unmanned military vehicle which was being towed into the centre. It would have been a surprise to many, but obviously not everyone. Because instantly, from the South Brisbane police station, eight police officers appeared to surround the vehicle, drag down the women and arrest them.

It was the first, but certainly not last, appearance of the 2022 Land Forces police taskforce. As that first Thursday evening (six days before Land Forces actually began!) went on, more and more police appeared. They drove laps around the Convention Centre, stopping to question anyone loitering nearby. They parked up outside Musgrave Park, stopping and searching every vehicle that exited the park or Jagera Hall. And then, late that night, they appeared in convoys flanking trucks that drove through the suburbs of Brisbane up to the back dock of the Convention Centre. They weren’t there just to keep an eye out either – with lights flashing, sirens blaring and motorbike cops speeding ahead to block intersections, the convoy raced through red lights at about 80km/h.

Most of the large weapons being displayed on the Land Forces shop floor probably made it into the Convention Centre unimpeded that night. But it wasn’t mission completed for the cops. As protesters gathered over the weekend for a program of workshops and entertainment, police were constantly lurking nearby. Cop cars frequently sat parked outside the protesters’ base at Jagera Hall. Most drivers leaving there were “randomly” drug and alcohol tested, their cars inspected for defects. My wife’s car was one of those stopped one night – a traffic cop crawled under the car until he could find a reason to write a ticket, tyres worn on the inside being the justification he was looking for in the end. For those unfamiliar, this is an extremely common tactic of police trying to restrict protest. I have scarcely ever in my life heard of cops inspecting cars for defects in any other context, but it is entirely to be expected at a protest – where police are not supposed to actually stop you from protesting but will look for any other avenue to restrict or arrest you.

By the Tuesday morning, when the Land Forces expo actually began, the police and private security presence had reached its apex. There were beat cops, traffic cops on motorbikes, Tactical Response Group in bullet proof vests, police negotiators in polo shirts.

They weren’t just hanging around the Convention Centre either – about a kilometre away, cops pulled over a car and trailer. They obviously had done their homework/surveillance, because it was indeed headed towards Land Forces with a hot pink model tank ready to block the entrance. They arrested two people who were in the car, and detained and questioned a few onlookers. At times during the conference protesters ventured into the nearby Southbank precinct to try to engage visitors in a bit of candid conversation. To their surprise, they found the entire area awash with police waiting to intervene. One person was arrested for public nuisance in Southbank.

Meanwhile, back at the Convention Centre you could be forgiven for thinking it was not a defence expo but a fence expo. Three temporary fences had been successively erected outside the main entrance – a one metre barrier by the stairs, then two three metre cyclone fences, the second one made opaque by sheets of blue plastic covering the entire face.

Amazingly, an hour or so into the convention and security decided that wasn’t enough. So they erected a new fence and told protesters they had to move to the other side. Local councillor Jonathan Sriranganathan refused – saying that a public footpath does not cease being public footpath just because one erects a temporary fence on a whim. Police disagreed, and our local government representative was arrested for trespassing on government property.

The arrests over the subsequent days were for similarly minor infringements – fake blood (easily washed off) spilled on the walls of the convention centre or a car containing former defence minister/current weapons industry lobbyist Christopher Pyne; an intellectually disabled woman arrested for public nuisance. Protesters attempting to push the line to any extent were quickly met by the many police present.

The next morning I arrived early. There weren’t many protesters there, but police were ready all the same. At one point I was standing alone holding a sign, surrounded by seven cops. Other police were milling about keeping an eye on the rest of our small group, while two security guards patrolled each of the Convention Centre’s many locked doors.

There was a kind of poetic justice to the Convention Centre being made to look like a militarised checkpoint – bringing home to Land Forces delegates the reality of what their products are used for around the world and a small taste of the humiliating reality of that being your day to day experience. But ultimately, security checks may be an inconvenience for those who pass through them, but their real purpose is felt by those they exclude – in this case Queensland citizens who were footing the bill for Land Forces but not privy to seeing what deals get done there.

That day, a small group of protesters kept vigil at the convention centre (of course accompanied by police and security), but the majority of the Disrupt Land Forces crew hit the road for a tour of weapons facilities around the city – including, I should note, a protest at NIOA led by Warlpiri elder Uncle Ned Hargraves against NIOA’s contract supplying guns to police like the one that killed Yuendemu teenager Kumanjayi Walker. A convoy of police cars was dispatched to dutifully follow us to each location, and of course by the end of the day’s trading at the expo they were back to man the exits.

The third day was much the same – a squadron of security guards watching the convention centre from very early in the morning, joined by several dozen police from about 7:30am. This at least provided a ready audience for the morning program of folk singers performing a repertoire of anti-war songs, though they were maybe not the most enthusiastic crowd. Brisbane’s iconic tea pourer Ollie was also stopped and searched, police letting him go when they found his morning tea trolley did indeed only include china cups and jam drops.

As the convention drew to a close, the riot cops finally had something to do – protesters blocked the exits and police came to eventually clear them out. A couple of arrests and one more evening standing guard, and the cops could finally knock off, though extra security remained for the sizeable packdown operation over the next few days.

I spoke to one police officer at the end of Land Forces who confirmed my own analysis – “I think last year they got caught a bit by surprise by protests, so this year they were a lot more planned”. Part of the plan, presumably, was to get as many cops as possible from around the city and pay them overtime to stand around at the Convention Centre or sit in a car outside Jagera Hall. It also involved a team of trained negotiators. From what I have heard, the inside of the centre was heavily patrolled as well, and the fact that there were two distinct uniforms worn by the many security guards suggests a whole new security company was contracted to the Convention Centre just for Land Forces. What else did the security plan include? Surveillance of protesters? Presumably at least to a basic level. What does all that add up to? One insider source said there were 600 police at Land Forces!

I guess when it comes down to it one would say all those police successfully did their job. Protesters were unable to replicate the disruptions to the conference from last year or the media coverage that came with it. But at what cost? Of course we don’t know the specifics, but at a rough estimate I would say a lot. Will we ever know? Last year the local MP Amy McMahon asked in parliament how much the state government had spent on Land Forces. She was fobbed off by Labor, and is likely to be again this year.

How can the state government justify this expenditure? What deals could possibly transpire at Land Forces that would enable recouping this money? And what kind of deals? I’m not sure that our government bribing multinational companies by throwing money at their sales conference is the kind of business we want.

But also, a government is not a business meant to invest money in order to make more. What social good does Land Forces do for the people of Queensland? The hundreds of private companies at Land Forces provide very little immediate benefit for most Australians and a very negative social cost in many places around the world.

One of those costs, of course, is the policing of protest. Many of those weapons sold at Land Forces will go to governments who use them solely to repress their own people – a fact we were reminded of during Land Forces by the presence of West Papuans and Palestinians talking about their occupied homelands. The weapons industry entrenches injustice and corruption around the world by allowing governments to crush dissent. The bottomless purses of military expenditure means the system is always stacked against everyday people who try to challenge the status quo – no matter how worthy their aims are.

I couldn’t help but reflect on this as I stood at the Convention Centre surrounded by armed police watching my every move. While Land Forces promised to show those who went inside the cutting edge of weapons technology, those of us on the outside got front row seats to see what militarisation of society looks like in Queensland in 2022.