The evacuation of the inhabitants in the neoliberal world-class city As I write these words, the London Real Estate Forum is under way in Berkeley Square – within, we are eagerly told ‘a 25,000 sq foot pavilion space, bespoke designed by Carmody Groarke’.  For the pleasure of partaking in such a prestigious […]

It’s ‘business as usual’ as glass prisons continue to be constructed in London, encasing the ruins of the 1980s in an attempt to put a gloss on the failings of the system.  After all, they say, ‘Economic growth is key’. The rest of us have a better handle on reality, […]

“Sarah” (not her real name) gets ready for work with her normal care and attention.  With a last check of her phone she leaves and, closing the door behind her, fixes the special blinkers that mean she can easily avoid catching anyone’s eyes (should, for a moment, she forget to […]

Throughout the course of Mathieu Kassovitz’s seminal realist film, La Haine, the writing on a billboard in the streets of Paris is altered. What at first promised “The world is yours” is reappropriated, with spray paint, to counter-propose: “The world is ours.” Our considerations of these statements explore the basic assumptions, […]

Sean Bonney’s Urban Commons Since Los Indignados, OWS and the Arab Spring, symbolic popular occupations of urban space have once again asserted themselves as important ways of expressing dissent in cities. Recent marches in Sao Paolo and the occupation of Taksim Gezi Park, Istanbul, took place, whether they were articulated […]

A wage, these days, is increasingly hard to come by, and increasingly precarious when found. The proliferation of agency work, zero-hours contracts and underemployment is well-documented. Microtasking, where people are paid per task to work from home for tech giants like Amazon, is perhaps the most developed form yet of […]

Judgement Day, August 4th 1997. The day that the human race was wiped out by Skynet, a man-made advanced artificial intelligence which judged the continued existence of the human race as an unnecessary tactical error. The machines we built to save us, destroy us. This is the history of the […]

“The problem is not to make political films, but to make films politically” – Jean-Luc Godard Art is not political because of its messages, or because of the way it represents something. According to Ranciere, art is political because it participates in the division of the sensible – (re)distribution of […]

This piece was featured in OT21, which examined the politics of work – You can read it in full below. The Importance of Work Work, we can’t really avoid it. Human civilisation has been built on work, the labouring of many billions of people throughout history has created the cities, farms, industries, […]

Why Strike Debt? Because today most debt is illegitimate and unjust. Most of us fall into debt because we are increasingly deprived of the means to acquire the basic necessities of life: health care, education, and housing. We are forced to go into debt simply in order to live. ‘We […]