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    Beautiful Trouble: Pocket Edition
    Beautiful Trouble: Pocket Edition
    Beautiful Trouble: Pocket Edition
    Ebook175 pages1 hour

    Beautiful Trouble: Pocket Edition

    By Dave Oswald Mitchell and Andrew Boyd

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Banksy, the Yes Men, Gandhi, Starhawk: the accumulated wisdom of decades of creative protest is now in the hands of the next generation of change-makers, thanks to Beautiful Trouble.

    Sophisticated enough for veteran activists, accessible enough for newbies, this compact pocket edition of the bestselling Beautiful Trouble is a book that’s both handy and inexpensive. Showcasing the synergies between artistic imagination and shrewd political strategy, this generously illustrated volume can easily be slipped into your pocket as you head out to the streets. This is for everyone who longs for a more beautiful, more just, more livable world – and wants to know how to get there. Includes a new introduction by the editors.

    Contributors include:

    Celia Alario • Andy Bichlbaum • Nadine Bloch • L. M. Bogad • Mike Bonnano • Andrew Boyd • Kevin Buckland • Doyle Canning • Samantha Corbin • Stephen Duncombe • Simon Enoch • Janice Fine • Lisa Fithian • Arun Gupta • Sarah Jaffe • John Jordan • Stephen Lerner • Zack Malitz • Nancy L. Mancias • Dave Oswald Mitchell • Tracey Mitchell • Mark Read • Patrick Reinsborough • Joshua Kahn Russell • Nathan Schneider • John Sellers • Matthew Skomarovsky • Jonathan Matthew Smucker • Starhawk • Eric Stoner • Harsha Walia
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOR Books
    Release dateMay 1, 2013
    ISBN9781939293169
    Beautiful Trouble: Pocket Edition

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    • 4/5
      Let me start this review by saying that I am not planning on starting a violent revolution. You can call off the black helicopters.

      This book is split into multiple parts, talking about Tactics, Principles, Theories and Case Studies of activism, starting as early as the '50s and ending as recently as 2010. So, there is a large timespan and a large span of different types of activism that this book is dealing with.

      This book is not so much a comprehensive manual (each of the 2-3 page chapters could probably expanded into its own book) and more of an overview, with references if you are interested in further information. It features some very interesting concepts, and I'd love to see some of these ideas in modern protests.

      The book deals almost exclusively with nonviolent techniques, which I like a lot (I dislike violence, no matter how justified you may feel about it in the situation).

      If you are an aspiring activist (or just interested in the concepts behind activism), definitely give this book a read. I picked it up for $1 when it was on sale, but, in retrospect, it's probably worth paying full price for it. The eBook version is somewhat harder to read than the pdf (or, probably, the paper version), but it's still possible.

      So, yeah, if you are interested, give this book a try.

    Book preview

    Beautiful Trouble - Dave Oswald Mitchell

    TRAININGS

    INTRODUCTION

    Human salvation, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. argued, lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted, and recent historical events are proving him as prescient as ever. From Montreal to Madrid, from 350.org to the 99%, the realization is rippling through the ranks that, if deployed thoughtfully, our pranks, stunts, flash mobs and encampments can bring about real shifts in the balance of power. Large numbers of people have seen that creative action gets the goods — and have begun to act accordingly.

    In even more concentrated form than the 450-page original (published in Spring 2012), this abridged version of Beautiful Trouble lays out the core tactics, principles and theoretical concepts that drive creative activism, providing analytical tools for changemakers to learn from their own successes and failures. The book is one part prankster manifesto, one part Greenpeace-esque direct action manual, and one part training guide for mass organizing and emancipatory pedagogy and practice.

    Creative activism offers no one-size-fits-all solutions, and neither do we. Beautiful Trouble is less a cookbook than a pattern language.¹ Rather than dictating strict courses of action, we instead offer a matrix of flexible, interlinked concepts that practitioners can pick and choose among, applying them in unique ways that may vary with each situation they may face.

    The material here is organized into three different categories of content:

    Tactics

    Specific forms of creative action, such as a flash mob or an occupation.

    Principles

    Hard-won insights that can guide or inform creative action design.

    Theories

    Big-picture concepts and ideas that help us understand how the world works and how we might go about changing it.

    Each module is linked to related modules, both in these pages and online at beautifultrouble.org, creating a nexus of concepts that are infinitely expandable.

    We encourage readers to explore our website, www.beautifultrouble.org, which is more than simply an appendage to the book, but in fact stands as perhaps the fullest expression of the project. In an easily navigable form, the website includes all the book’s content as well as material that, due to constraints of both space and time, we were unable to include in either print edition. We hope the website will grow to become a hub where artists and activists converge to share ideas, archive case studies, and hash out best practices.

    With the participation of readers, the body of patterns that constitute Beautiful Trouble could continue to evolve and expand, keeping abreast of emerging social movements and their tactical innovations. Indeed, we’ve included on the website templates for each content type, and the capacity to submit or suggest modules on the website.

    Beautiful Trouble is not just a book and website, it is also a growing community of experienced activists and artists using the book to train the next generation of troublemakers. In the do-it-yourself spirit, the website also has an array of accessible curricula and slideshows that you use to roll your own trainings.

    Millions around the world have awoken not just to the need to take action to reverse deepening inequality and ecological devastation, but to our own creative power to do so. You have in your hands a distillation of ideas gleaned from those on the front lines of creative activism. But these ideas are nothing until they’re acted upon. We look forward to seeing what you do with them.

    —Andrew Boyd & Dave Oswald Mitchell, February 2013

    TACTIC: Creative disruption

    Contributed by Nancy L. Mancias

    COMMON USES

    To expose and disrupt the public relations efforts of the armed and dangerous. Particularly useful at speeches, hearings, meetings, fundraisers and the like.

    If a war criminal like Dick Cheney or a corporate criminal like former BP CEO Tony Hayward comes to town, what’s the best way to challenge the spin they’ll put on their misdeeds? Often, the scale of the misdeeds and the imbalance of power are so great that activists will forgo dialogue and move straight to disruption, attempting to shut down or seriously disrupt the event. Disruption can be an effective tactic, and has been used successfully by small groups of people, often with little advance notice or advance planning.

    The problem, of course, is that not only does the target control the mic, the stage, and the venue, but even more importantly, as an invited guest or the official speaker, s/he has the audience’s sympathy. A poorly thought-out shout-down or disruption can easily backfire. The target can portray themselves as a victim of anti-free speech harassment, thus gaining public sympathy and a larger platform. The challenge is to disrupt the event without handing your target that opportunity.

    Sometimes an oblique intervention that re-frames the target’s remarks or forces a response to your issues without literally preventing anyone from speaking can be more effective than just shouting down someone. When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi held a rare town hall meeting in San Francisco in 2006 during the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, CODEPINK demonstrators — angry that Pelosi was not pushing for a cut-off in war funding — waited until the Q and A session, then surrounded the stage with their Stop Funding War banners and stood there, silently, for the remainder of the meeting.

    The creative use of a sign or banner can help you avoid the it’s an attack on free speech trap. In effect, you’re adding an additional layer of speech; you’re engaging in more free speech, not less. Song can also be used in this way. A 2011 foreclosure auction in Brooklyn, for instance, was movingly disrupted by protesters breaking into song. Song creates sympathy.

    Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum being glitter-bombed at a Town Hall forum in late 2012 by LGBT rights activists. Not only did the initial hit of glitter creatively disrupt his meet-and-greet, but the continual presence of glitter on his person put him and his homophobic and anti-LGBT sentiments in a decision-dilemma. Photo by REUTERS/Sarah Conard.

    A creative disruption needn’t be passive. When Newt Gingrich came to the Minnesota Family Council conference for a book signing, a queer activist dutifully waited in line and when it came to his turn, dumped rainbow glitter over Gingrich, shouting, Feel the rainbow, Newt! Stop the hate, stop anti-gay policies as he was escorted out of the room. The video documenting the event see PRINCIPLE: Do the media’s work for them went viral and the disruption gained international press attention, sparking a wave of LGBT activism. The tactic of glitter-bombing even made it into an episode of the TV show Glee.

    Theater is another way to disrupt without disrupting. When Jeane Kirkpatrick (Reagan’s Ambassador to the UN) came to UC Berkeley in the 1980’s, activists staged a mock death-squad kidnapping. Soldiers (students) in irregular fatigues marched down the main aisle barking orders in Spanish and dragged off a few students kicking and screaming from the audience. Others then scattered leaflets detailing the U.S.’s and Kirkpatrick’s support for El Salvador’s death-squad government from the balcony onto the stunned audience.

    As these examples show, it’s critical to tailor your disruption to the specific target and situation. Often, you can be more effective if you step out of the combative speech box and consider alternate modalities, like visuals, song, theater, and humor.

    KEY PRINCIPLE

    PUT YOUR TARGET IN A DECISION DILEMMA: Well-designed creative disruption should leave your target no good option. If Nancy Pelosi had acknowledged or engaged with the protesters, she would have only elevated their credibility and drawn further attention to their message. Had security cleared out the silent activists, it would have looked heavy-handed. Had she left the scene, it would have been seen as a capitulation. Her least worst option, and what she chose to do, was continue with the event — whose meaning was then reframed by the silent protest signs around her. A well-designed creative disruption puts you in a win-win — and your target in a lose-lose — situation.

    TACTIC: Debt strike

    Contributed by Sarah Jaffe and Matthew Skomarovsky

    If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem; if you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.

    — John Paul Getty

    COMMON USES

    To fight back against financial exploitation when many people are crushed by debt.

    What does non-cooperation with our own oppression look like? Sometimes it looks like Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus, and sometimes it’s less visible — for instance, a coordinated refusal to make our monthly debt payments.

    With wages in many countries stagnant since the 1970s, people have increasingly turned

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