A specter is haunting America, the specter of a withered imagination, of a commitment to the gray, the obtuse, and the dangerous. This is the specter of dead desire and faded dreaming, and it is the glorification of the office cubicle and the tower block, the official seal of approval and the proverbial same old, same old.

Enough! We say! We are tired, sick and tired! Against this specter we have found one another, and we have affirmed a common rejection of this injurious condition that has turned everyday life into a dull conformity, where utopia is the picket fence and the television set, and where the closest the individual gets to political radicalism is the stale air of a ballot box.

Do you not see it, comrades-to-be? The words spoken before us are true: in a society that abolishes all adventure, the only adventure becomes abolishing that society.

Against this monopolization of our everyday life, the Committee for the Liberation of Autonomous Amusement* asserts its nine-fold deprogramming platform for the coming society:

Deprogramming platform

Never work! The bosses have always profited on the backs of the workers, be they the material laborers of the sweaty brow and calloused hand, or the immaterial laborers of cubicle isolation. At our expense they have profited, traded us pennies for the discipline of our bodies. Don’t vote! To participate in that disgusting charade they call “representative democracy” is to affirm an order that does not care for us. It’s their boots on our backs, but it should be the other way around. False information will produce real events. Contemporary life is colonized by the intertwining Spectacles of the media, consumerism, and artificialization, reducing reality to mere simulation. Feed it back to itself! Access to all rooftops! The architecture of the urban is both boring and oppressive, and we feel its reverberations in everyday life. Open them up! Access points for all rooftops, and bridges to connect them all. Make the city a space of imagination. Free knowledge for all! There is no such thing as individual knowledge; all knowledge is produced and reproduced in the social, through collective exchange, experimentation, and interaction. We call on the immediate closure of all academic journal websites, and the revocation of copyright and trademark laws. Corporate reparations! You see it everyday: people walking around in designer clothes, your eyes drifting to the unavoidable logo. Corporations have to pay for advertising, be it on the radio, television, and billboards. Make them pay for this advertising, too. Demand closure! We demand that all government offices and media headquarters be closed and turned into communal space for the arts, participatory media, and spaces for self-governance. No more taxation; use the current money to ease the transition. Liberate the streets, parking lots, and megastores! We need space for carnivals, dancing, united people’s summits, nanopolitical sessions, autonomous marketplaces and collective sharing, and for scientific experimentation – when knowledge is freed, the possibilities will be endless. and most importantly, Never stop deprogramming! Comrades, there is a world to win, and nothing to lose but boredom.

*The CLAA is an open name, welcome to appropriation. Feel free to fold-up, adapt, mutate, disavow, and/or circulate.