always practice security culture in all radical spaces.

(This is the 4th attempt at this post; the first three were removed by DMCA takedown requests in 2013. The following is the original text.)

this week-long tumblr experiment has proven, cops can look and act just like real people. This act of mimesis allows them to walk among us, to live in human spaces, and do amazing human tricks like speak or take selfies.

But, do not be fooled. Cops are not people. Cops are objects of force to guard capital.

Sure, selfies lend a humanizing lens to cops, but anything requiring an external humanizing effort is not organically human. Is a motorcycle-riding circus bear a human? Is a dog walking on two legs and wearing sunglasses a human? What about a waterskiing squirrel?

Selfies are the affectation of social commodity wherein commodity mirrors the social character of the product of labor, in this case, the self. The triumvirate in a cop selfie fleshes out the assumed police authority in just a quick snap. Considering that all value is created by labor and labor creates a product, the value of police labor is derived through utilizing the police uniform (badge, gun, baton, pepper spray, handcuffs, patrol car, sirens, apprehension; or the tools of production), thus the uniform is the commodity as it mirrors the social character of the product of police labor—suppressing the agency of the majority working class by imposing the will of a minor ruling class; authority too, is expressed through compliant and submissive recognition of the uniform and the qualities imbued to its host. This is the fetishism of commodities. Cop Selfies are illegitimate selfies complicit in the fetishism of violence by the guards of capitalism, maintained by the State with illegitimate authority.

What then is the subject in a cop selfie, the commodity form or the corporeal extension of a cop? Trick question, cops cannot be subjects, as expounded by Evan Calder Williams in Objects of Derision. Cops are active hostile objects used to protect capital, first and foremost. If you’re still unsure of this, try challenging a capitalist notion and you’ll be met by a cop.



Smash the police state, smash the cop selfie. Kill the cop in your phone.