We call on all bloggers to turn off their computers and cease to post from 17 to 30 August 2009.
Blogging is an indulgence of a self-perpetuating elite; those who can afford regular access to computers and the internet. Those bloggers who struggle against the reigning society find their work either marginalised or else co- opted by the bourgeois net establishment.
Blogging creates the illusion that, through activities which are actually waste, this civilisation is in touch with ‘higher sensibilities’ which redeem its exploitation of those who live outside the overdeveloped world. Those who accept this logic support the bourgeoisie even if they are economically excluded from the class.
To call one person a ‘blogger’ is to deny another the equal gift of vision. What a blogger considers to be his or her identity is a schooled set of attitudes; preconceptions which imprison humanity in history. Show solidarity with the wretched of the earth, those who cannot afford regular access to computers, don’t blog between 17 and 30 August 2009!
Blog Strike is a side project to the Art Strike Biennial, 18-24 August, Alytus, Lithuania.
And if you can’t keep your computer switched off during the blog strike, don’t get too sucked into text, watch the following film which explores the aesthetics of boredom instead: The Worst Video On YouTube Ever!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Comments
Comment by Michael K Manning The Queue For The Summer Sale At Harrods As If It Was A Picket Line on 2009-08-16 11:07:31 +0000
Right on sister! Right on sister, right on!
Comment by The Real Tessie on 2009-08-16 11:35:09 +0000
Michael don’t forget you promised to buy me that gold lame dress reduced from £5000 to only £3000! Shopping is even more addictive than blogging.
Comment by Blog Strike Action Committee - Long Melford on 2009-08-16 12:58:24 +0000
And any scabs out there can just flake off! Once the TCP soaks in, it is you who’ll be feeling blogged off!
Comment by Jean Baudrillard on 2009-08-16 13:30:56 +0000
The real has been replaced by its double: today emphasising that there can only be a simulacrum of activities that once threatened to destroy capitalism is the best way to undermine the symbolic order of the post-post-modern world…..
PS I’m dead and being a post-modern zombie is a groove sensation!
Comment by Indie Wanker on 2009-08-16 13:45:46 +0000
This is great – I’m gonna blog about it next week! Rock on!
Comment by Paul Giovanni £rd on 2009-08-16 14:42:07 +0000
How does this affect people who blog – but who don’t refer to themselves as being bloggers???
Are they still part of the elite??
Do they need to strike too???
Comment by mistertrippy on 2009-08-16 16:44:44 +0000
Yes, everyone should strike, no blog posts! However, I don’t expect everyone to strike, it’s more the psychological effect I’m going for, separate the hipsters from the squares, that sort of thing! But I’m not even answering comments on here after today!
Comment by Eric The Viking on 2009-08-16 17:08:09 +0000
I’m all for this – in my humble experience blogging just doesn’t compete with a hard day’s pillage and plunder!
Comment by Technorati Team on 2009-08-16 17:53:39 +0000
You can’t go on blog strike, if everyone did that then we’d loose a jobs! Don’t you know there’s a recession on? It isn’t easy finding a job in the current economic climate!
Comment by Blogged Off In Barking on 2009-08-16 18:55:05 +0000
No blog, no comment!
Comment by Jack Dash on 2009-08-16 19:05:08 +0000
Solidarity brothers, solidarity! We’ll keep the red flag flying here!
Comment by Joy Roberston on 2009-08-16 20:03:57 +0000
I guess summer is a good time to have a blog strike coz people use the internet less anyway and there is plenty to do outside, but call another in the winter and I’m sure it would get a chillier response.
Comment by Alex Comfort on 2009-08-16 20:13:53 +0000
What next? A sex strike?
Comment by Pamela Anderson Pretending To Be The Unreal Tessie Pretending To Be The Real Tessie on 2009-08-16 20:20:46 +0000
If you’re going on a blog strike, Michael and I are going on a comment strike, and we absolutely won’t leave comments on the blogs you don’t post! That’s a promise: no blogs, no comments! xxx
Comment by Christopher Nosnibor on 2009-08-17 09:14:51 +0000
I’ll be extending my participation to a blog comment strike… starting tomorrow.
Comment by Old Rope on 2009-08-17 12:32:50 +0000
Trip, your blog strike coincides with your jollies!!!!!! Old Rope, however, likes to pre-empt fashion and get onto shit early. Hence the Old Rope Blogstrike began some time ago and any holidays I may or may not have engaged in at this time were or were not purely coincidental.
The Old Rope Blog-strike will end at some undisclosed point in the future.
The Comment-Strike is a different matter. Comments are the picket lines of the blog-strike and the petrol bombs with “SCaB” daubed on them in grease.
Your oldest of Ropes,
Old Rope
PS Be wary of BlogUnion leaders doing deals with interweb bosses behind your backs and shafting you
Comment by Michael K, ignoring the Blog Strike almost as vocieferously as he ignored the Art Strike and the Sex Strike on 2009-08-17 13:14:49 +0000
Hey blog-strikes are just a tool of the dissatisfied elite. The rest of us are happy with small blessings like a roof over our heads (at intervals), a nice Shiraz (2 for £5 from the Sicilian mafia in London…see your local newsagent) and the odd square meal (although round ones are often just as good)
I’m off to start blogging, having resisted this tool of the barking elite for too long
Comment by raymond anderson on 2009-08-17 16:02:40 +0000
All for a sex strike. Flying over Wigan just now…Bombs Away!
Comment by Msmarmitelover on 2009-08-18 21:28:22 +0000
silly
Comment by Ian Breakwell on 2009-08-19 17:08:11 +0000
I would like to invite everyone to the UN-strikes. These events aim to undo the sanctity of doing nothing by UN-doing nothing. Free entry to the UN-void.
Comment by Old Rope on 2009-08-20 14:37:21 +0000
I undid my shoelaces before — does this count?
Comment by Msmarmitelover on 2009-08-22 23:59:39 +0000
Probably just gone on holiday.
Comment by skeptic on 2009-08-25 11:04:56 +0000
yeah, but pretended that he’s on “blog strike”. Pfffft
Comment by Dan (harpomarxist) on 2009-08-30 20:18:30 +0000
hi, a friend of a friend told me that they saw Stewart Home secretly blogging under the alias Rev. Arthur Jumbalaya on the texasminutemen.org forum… keep it under your hats…
Comment by Paul McCartney, still on Blog-Strike and moving on from sniffing Coke to snorting Fanta on 2009-09-02 14:43:42 +0000
Hey when I was in The Beatles, we did Performance Strike 1966-69 and Meat-Strike 1967-Forever. And somewhere inbetween Yoko’s mate in that DIAS thing steals the whole idea and well the rest is Art Strike history. And I’m totally with Stewie in feeling that quantity rather than quality is, like, a groove sensation. You only have to check my eighties and nineties back-catalogue on iTunes to realise I’ve been putting my weight behind this negation of bourgeois cultural tropes far longer than these pseuds in unpopular culture give me credit for.
Comment by Someone that blogged sometime ago on 2009-10-29 15:18:08 +0000
As a convinced extremist, I have went to a much longer strike than that, in fact is a comma…and is great!
Besides, commenters normally suck, over all if they are bloggers too.