Arawak City Ludic Society

Originally posted on the RAAN forums before we opted-out of network participation.

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This is a draft my group, Revolt Against Work (RAW-RAAN) is working on for a new initiative in our area. It might serve as an aid to figure out what you want to do, if you desire above group affiliate activities that break with typical anti-authoritarian group activities and might open up more potential to cross-pollinate with "workers against work", anti-authoritarians and other like minded individuals.

As an individual affiliate (solitarian) or closed propaganda group activities:
1. Study local media and institutions.
2. Study the borders of the neighborhood and focus attention to it.
3. Study history of the area and how it has been changed as it has developed.
4. Poster neighborhood with work abolitionist and anti-institution thoughts.
5. Poster challenges to the various "communities" in the neighborhood.

As above, but with an open propaganda group + public outreach and discussion
1. Form a club that regularly meets (1 hour weekly?) in the neighborhood for various discussions using a rotating format. Collect voluntary donations to maintain an office (computer w/ printer, paper, ink, staples, staple hammers, packing tape, etc.), literature available during meetings, a P.O. Box, food and drink service (if at a for profit establishment) or provide space-rent costs for the time/space used:
A. Primary document discussions. (examples: RAAN P&D, Network of Domination, Abolition of Work)
B. Open discussions (share personal stories of work, oppression, exploitation, domination, etc. individuals find in life.)
C. Specific document discussions.
D. Neighborhood and surrounding news discussion. Development, work, government interventions, problems with reactionaries, leftists, etc.
E. Action news discussion. What is going on outside the neighborhood as well as within that seems interesting and seems to challenge our subjected being.
2. If there are any active labor struggles or community activities, attempt to join in, observe and perhaps communicate with people, giving business cards or flyers for the club to the interested only (i.e. avoid "newspaper political organization" behavior).
3. Engage in neighborhood walks (touring) and various outdoor activities: cookouts at neigbhorhood parks, near neighborhood canoeing, treasure hunt or great race style games, etc.
4. Collaborate with others to write handbills, zines, essays that can be offered for during discussion group times.

We are still working on this draft and what we think might be possible given our own situations. I'll add more to this should we have anything to report.

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The concepts discussed here have much to do with many of the recent projects RAW-RAAN has worked on, but mainly through small group dynamics. That is, the small group experiences the game of graffitism with real world consequences, aiming not to create art, but to use the (game) world as a medium of communication.

Employing methods of "narrowcasting", that is propaganda (or media) produced within certain locations with the consideration of specific audiences in mind, we market our ideas, our communications to those that may happen onto it. This is contrasted against "broadcasting" which is an attempt to expose media to as many people in mind. Certainly even with broadcasting, the demographics of the audience is taken into consideration, but with broadcasting, the hope is that the audience is passive and perhaps on the Internet, watching television or listening to the radio.

With Internet media, the idea of narrowcasting can somewhat be seen. The audience broadcast marketing is aimed at would be those that would most likely happen upon the media, but the attempts are done largely through manipulation of Internet viewing trends, rather than physical perception of the world. They use mediated observations. Rather than viewing the people and observing them in their habits or perhaps seeing how people have manipulated their space, such as with cut fences and beaten paths, they view instead the history of commodity or medium and how people interact with the commodity or the medium.

Revolt Against Work is well aware that much of our media, our propaganda, is spread thin and in areas that few would venture into, which is what our new direction with our draft initiative is attempting to overcome. Our posters have been geared towards certain locations where the homeless, the graffitist and the working have, at times, been seen walking. When that isn't always the case, their indirect influence, the beaten path, has told us the story that there are people coming through the space and so our media has the capability of being viewed.

In this new initiative, I am taking much of my new observations, which are influenced by my entrance into Alcoholics Anonymous and Drug Treatment and hoping to take advantage of this knowledge by targeting spaces where such people would be at. They could be more susceptible to influence being that a former alcoholic and/or drug addict has a difficult time discovering a new way of life, which is encouraged by the AA program. Old friends are encouraged to be given up along with old habits, both of which can trigger relapses, so new friends and new habits are embraced as essential features of finding a life without drugs and alcohol.

We must say that while delinquent cultures have shown to be affected by graffiti and radical postering, we offer the hypothesis that there are entire worlds of people being thrown into group settings that are more open to being affected, though perhaps not to the point of behaving illegally. Columbus radical academia has taken the approach of geography being the new field to "be in"..though the newness of this is several years old, its history has also shown that several academics which are known to observe radical graffiti propaganda has written on the subject and acquiring masters degrees, if not doctorates, in fields using this knowledge, thus they too are a target audience and indirect influence. This becomes filtered and spread within OSU academia, though watered down, using with their own interpretations from the Ivory Tower given towards the Ivory Tower, rather than necessarily spread through broadcasting or spread in the same manner (i.e. spreading radical graffiti) as they observed.

Revolt Against Work takes the small bits of evidence and direct and/or indirect knowledge of these academics and their works on geography and space manipulation as a success in propaganda by observing some feedback from it. However, the problem now appears to be these academics are concerned more with the technique of graffiti rather than its message. This too was perhaps something Debord observed with the post-situationists, where the techniques of the situationist became primary, while the message was either ignored or filtered by the beholder.

We admit we aren't the only ones offering messages through graffiti and through postering. There are others, which may have little to no influence from us and perhaps have been influenced by other sources. Crimethinc convergences, hipsters, the Sporeprint Infoshop, Internet media, Graffiti culture and other such things also deserve some credit in affecting people to give some level of feedback or communication on graffiti. Also to note, the use of "Arawak City" which started from the founders of Revolt Against Work, has continued, though here we also don't deserve full credit. In the 90s there was the Arawak City Anarchist Collective, which we have no direct knowledge of. Instead, the Arawak City Brain Trust, which we founded and then later split from as the RAAN Fraction, continued to have an influence on the culture of opposition in town.

The problem here, is that legitimacy was sought by some, including emailing a tribal representative of the Arawaks to ensure that appropriating such a name was not offensive. The RAAN Fraction objected to this legitimacy as it recuperated the use of the term, made it safe to use and thus further dilute. However, we must also say that the feedback given by the Arawakan representative was positive, should anyone question why colonizer-subversives throw around the term, should that matter to leftoids or the overly sensitive. From 2006 to 2008 there was a brief campaign to meme-bomb city council and the mayor (Mayor Coleman) to change the name of the city of Columbus to "Arawak City" by members of RAAN-Subvertistas and associates. Needless to say, Mayor Coleman went from giving mild interest in the term to feelings of insult and insecurity, saying "I don't know why people keep bothering me about that!" in frustration.

Some zines and a poster were created demanding the name be changed as well as a challenge of kickball thrown out by the friends of Arawak City, RAAN-Subvertistas and others towards city council and the Mayor. The winner of the kickball game was to determine the fate of the city's name. The Mayor and city council had declined the challenge. Another challenge that was repeated over and over was the destruction or occupation of the Santa Maria. While no actual initiative was taken, it was spread throughout left and hip communities that a desire to sink the boat, a real sized replica of the ship, was desired. T-shirts with the ship sinking were created with the name "Arawak City" and the "614" area code of Columbus printed on it. The other competing meme was to dress as pirates and/or ninjas and occupy the ship, then fly a pirate flag...perhaps even hold a mock battle between the pirates and ninjas. This too never occurred, but mention of it went well beyond our circles.

The group, Revolt Against Work was formed in response to this dilution of our desires as we felt the interpretations we offered were recuperated time and again. Splitting from open group formations and attempting to garner more members, we stuck with a small group of trusted people and continued our graffiti and poster campaigns away from the more heavily populated areas of town, focusing in our local area. We would not get credit for our ideas and since they were recuperated, we saw the need to find another path, which has proven to be difficult to maintain with more real life time restraints and debilitating events in our personal lives. As spoken about before, we've observed how people were affected in some degree. With our work abolition postering, we've had less success, mainly because we were not a part of communities that could give any sort of feedback. We could only witness that our posters would be torn down to know that at least someone had observed them. Most graffiti placed in easily observed public spaces was also quickly removed or painted over.

So now our new initiative hopes to take another step forward. Rather than amping up the militancy, as some tend to do when they want to be seen as more effective, we've opted to start a strategy of openness and attraction. The hypothesis is by offering temporary spaces for people to directly communicate with us, to us and/or about the subjects we desire brought up, that something will happen. This is teamed up with the concepts of ludic, pervasive and/or situationistic games, which sometimes are about spreading radical propaganda and other times about experiencing/practicing immediatism, finding peak experiences and creating our own legends within such groups. We seek to continue the propaganda of work abolition, of general holidays, of encouraging subversion, sabotage and destruction, of challenging institutions, but we also seek to provide space for people that have little to no exposure to these concepts. We don't desire to overwhelm, so while we might have a club that discusses work issues, the play ethic and so on, we also maintain our personal autonomy, so we don't need to compromise or dilute our viewpoint in the process of this new initiative. By doing this task, we will find more unmediated responses from others which can reflect positively or negatively on what we are doing so we can more directly observe how we affect as well as effectiveness of our propaganda.