Have you ever met those people that loved Fight Club a little too much? For the most part, they're harmless, but then there's the occasional Chilean artist/master-criminal that goes and steals $500 million worth student-debt records, burns them to ashes as an act of civil disobedience, then places those ashes in a container and calls it art.

Fight Club was a pretty great film (and an even better book), there's no denying that. But have you ever met those people that seemed a little too into the Project Mayhem mindset that Chuck Palahniuk philosophized and that Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden glamorized?

The kind of people who have this quote in poster form on their bedroom wall...

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For the most part, these people are a bunch of harmless pseduo-intellectuals latching onto, most likely, the first iterations of existentialism, minimalism, and humanism that they ever encountered.

But then there's the occasional Chilean artist/master-criminal that goes and steals $500 million worth student-debt records, burns them to ashes as an act of civil disobedience, then places those ashes in a container and calls it art.

It happens.

And it did late last week when, the Washington Post reports, a young man named Francisco Tapia (pictured above) who goes by the name Papas Fritas (translated to "French Fry") hijacked debt-related documents from the for-profit Universidad del Mar in Chile and set them ablaze in a fiery glory. In a video posted on YouTube, he explains:

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“It’s over. It’s finished. You don’t have to pay another peso. We have to lose our fear, our fear of being thought of as criminals because we’re poor. I am just like you, living a shitty life, and I live it day by day."

He ended his statement by saying, “This is my act of love for you.”

Now Chile's education system has been in the toilet since it was commoditized and privatized in the 70's, and only recently have political leaders begun focusing their attention on reform, but this Durden-esque act of rebellion may actually have done its job and opened up a barrel of (all-singing, all-dancing) monkeys...

On top of the student demonstrations petitioning the government to sanction for-profit schools, the Santiago Timesreports that the university must now sue each student individually to secure a repayment of the debt but the students are now arguing the incurred debt was illegal anyway and are refusing to pay it.



https://twitter.com/Rusiohead/statuses/466668912365805568

"Art that moves along with the struggles of the people, is a weapon loaded with future"

I guess it's only after you've lost everything, that you're free to do anything.