Who, the People?
Who counts as the people, and how can that definition be revised and updated in shifting historical circumstances?
Astra Taylor
Astra Taylor is a writer, documentarian, and organizer. Her films include Zizek!, a feature documentary about the world’s most outrageous philosopher, and Examined Life, a series of excursions with contemporary thinkers including Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, Cornel West, Peter Singer, and others. Both movies premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Taylor’s writing has appeared in The Nation, the London Review of Books, n+1, the New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She is the editor of Examined Life, a companion volume to the film, and the coeditor of Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America. Most recently she is the author of the book The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, winner of a 2015 American Book Award.
She helped launch the Rolling Jubilee campaign and co-founded the Debt Collective. She is a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow and is working on a film about democracy. Her twitter handle is @astradisastra.
Missing Perspectives
May 10, 2017
Links from YouTubers in the refugee diaspora.
Begging Pardon
November 21, 2016
Edward Snowden himself has never directly asked for a pardon. The former NSA contractor and CIA employee-turned-whistleblower maintains that he would be willing to return home from Moscow to be judged by a jury of his peers, and even serve time in prison, if there were a chance ...
Who Speaks for the Trees?
On the corner of South Finley and Dearing Streets in Athens, Georgia, the small college town where I grew up, there is a tall white oak, and a small weathered stone plaque that reads:
The Tree That Owns Itself is a beloved local landmark, one I visited many times as a child. ...
Our Friends who Live Across the Sea
A bronze, life-size male figure carrying a suitcase mounts a massive set of stairs to a jetliner that does not exist. He is slightly hunched, frozen mid-step. Whatever the statue was initially intended to signify, today it is a metaphor for the six thousand people who now ...
Against Activism
Almost a decade ago I attended a conference called “1968” at a nondescript college in New Jersey. Mark Rudd, a student radical turned community college math instructor living out his retirement in New Mexico, delivered the keynote. Taking the podium, he reflected critically ...
The Dads of Tech
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Audre Lorde famously said, but let Clay Shirky mansplain. It “always struck me as a strange observation—even the metaphor isn’t true,” the tech consultant and bestselling author said at the New Yorker ...
Hope and Ka-ching
Everyone is equal at New Era Windows Cooperative, a factory on the southwest side of Chicago. There is no owner to answer to because everyone is an owner; there are no outside shareholders to choose a board of directors. There is no boss because the workers fired him.
I paid a ...