Change has to change in the sense
that change has always been happening.
There is something because 
there is change.
We will never swim twice
in the same river.
This is something,
a wisdom that unifies
all different traditions,
philosophical traditions of thinking
around the globe.
So change has always been there
And whenever people tell me,
"Oh, it’s utopian to think that
an other world is possible!"
I always say:
"But an other world
has always already begun!"
Our relationship
to the term change needs to change.
We’re caught in a moment historically
in which the idea of change
and our relationship to time 
has so compressed 
our thought process around change
that everything becomes change.
Everything is disruption,
everything has to change,
we’ve lost the ability to understand
that the term urgency,
the urgency of change
does not mean the immediacy of change.
What needs to be changed
is our conception
of who is in the world and
in what way they are in the world
and how do they count 
because I think
that as we’ve thought about
putting the pieces of our world together
we’ve struggled over history
to figure out what voices 
should be heard
and what individuals should have
a voice in the discourse
and in what way we figure out
how to organize our thoughts.
You know, my sense is that
the way we try to organize
is by categorizing things
and I think these very categories
have been the undoing of us.
And in particular
I am very interested
in the category
and construction of gender
and gender fluidity
and how it really serves
as an example  
by gendering things
and by putting things
into categories of gender,
we’ve really,
overlooked the reality of
what gender fluidity means.
We’re all pink inside.
I think we are
all the same inside,
regardless of
color and class
and sex and sexual orientation
and gender.
I don’t know if I believe in
equality per-say,
because I think that it is
just trying to get everybody
to want the things
that white men have had all the time
and I think that we need new structures.
But equity certainly,
I would like,
I would like an equitable world
free of 
sexual violence.
I want an end to rape
and I want an end
to gender based violence.
The most
constantly 
unnerving thing
is inequality in the world.
Everybody should be able
to have access to
a decent amount of food,
quality of food,
a decent shelter,
to clothing,
to the wherewithall to live
and to engage with others
and I think that
we should eliminate violence.
Again there are such terrible
inequities and suffering.
Education should be free for everyone
and it should be accessible
to everyone.
But not just education accessible,
all the terms 
in which education is given:
so much of them are already
so class based.
We don’t ever talk about class,
we love talking about sex,
we love talking about race in America,
but we do not talk about
the kind of class competences
that go into being able to perform
in a university setting,
the kind of preparation,
the kinds of ways 
that people are excluded
before they even open their mouth.
The incredible divisions we see
and experience in the country
the fact that we are post-race
I'm not just...I don't...
we're not post race anymore
thank you Donald Trump!
It's very clear 
it's all about race and class
but we are actually post-fact
and everything is about meaning
and we must be able to generate that
no matter who we are 
what we look like
where we live 
and in particular
if we are people of color.
There’s a sense of freedom,
by which I mean,
a sense of confidence.
Our world needs
to have more love in it.
I do, 
as corny as it sounds,
I believe that
if people were to love more,
to love each other more,
to develop
a more generous heart,
to develop a more generous spirit,
I think that things would be better
and would get better
in many many ways.
It’s not just increasing
the speed of transport,
of communication
and also of production,
of producing things
and also of consuming things
and throwing them away.
World changes at a higher pace,
right, talking about change again,
the rates of change increase.
It’s not just the rates of change,
of transport or traffic
or communication,
it’s the patterns of association:
who interacts with whom
and how do we interact.
It’s the forms of practice
and therefore also
the forms of knowledge,
the knowledge about everyday life
who is where
and who does what.
All these things
change at a higher pace.
“I cannot understand
why people are frightened
of new ideas.
I am frightened of old ones”
John Cage, 1988
Economy is stagnating.
We need new ideas.
We need to fight inertia,
indolence, idleness.
We need to organize social life
from its very fundaments.
We must change our habits,
our statutes, our constitutions.
Change has been too slow.
We must change change itself.
This is the road to success.
We must install 
the new Accelerated Change Laws.
The AC Laws declare that:
1.
It shall change, it shall increase.
The labor force shall be separated
from the means of production
so that the latter
can be accumulated incrementally,
exponentially, incessantly,
enabling uninterrupted investment
in scientific 
and technological research.
The change of change
will bring progress,
the progress of progress
will win the market,
the marketing of the market
will increase productivity.
The demos is always
heterogeneous, diverse,
lot of xenophobic elements
among the demos,
lot of ignorants.
A lot of parochialisms,
you also have a lot of cosmopolitanism,
a lot of globalism,
a lot of courage.
So the demos is not one thing.
But when it comes to the ability
of the demos to organize,
mobilize and bring power
and pressure to bear,
we certainly are in a crisis.
Our system is broken.
We’ve got 71% of people
who want universal healthcare
and you can barely get through
a reform bill with a weak public option
it is clear that lobbyists 
from the top,
pharmaceutical companies,
drug companies
have tremendous influence
much more
than the demos from below.
Inequality
has reached the stage
where mild-tweaking the system
is not gonna work.
When I say inequality,
we're talking about
inequality of outcomes,
incomes, opportunity,
health, everything.
That has now become systemic
in nature,
and you are not going to
 really attack
something that is systemic
as our inequality today,
something as deep
as our inequality today,
and something that's built up
over now half a century
unless you go deeper.
2.
They shall change,
they will not stay.
The produce we eat shall change,
the crops we plant shall change,
the commodities we sell shall change.
Nothing will ever be the same… again.
The genes we modify shall change
every five hours.
The produce we consume
shall change every five minutes.
The commodities we sell
shall change every five seconds.
The lack of
critical engagement
with the food that we eat
demonstrates the extent to which
the commodity form has become
the primary way
in which we perceive the world.
We don’t go further than
what Marx called the exchange value
of the actual object,
we don’t think about the relations
that the object embodies
and that we're afforded to
the production of that object.
So many people,
and especially people of my generation
are yearning for new ideas.
Ideas that move
beyond the old political distinction
between the left and the right, 
ideas that are much more radical
than what we are being offered nowadays.
Ideas like a universal basic income,
ideas like 
a radically shorter working week
and the most radical idea
getting rid of borders.
 3.
You shall change, you won’t remain.
Nothing shall change
unless you change,
so you will change too.
You shall change
your private properties
every month.
You shall change
 your life partner
every week.
You shall change
your personal wardrobe
every day.
You shall change your body.
You shall change your habits.
You shall change your IPhone.
Every contract will automatically expire
within a month.
Every relationship will be 
consensually dissolved
after a week.
Every screensaver will be randomly
replaced at the end of the day.
Change your settings.
Everything shall change!
The first question of course
would be for us to ask ourselves
is what is our world today,
what is the kind of world
we want to envision in the future
and more importantly to try 
and ask those 
who have been historically silenced,
voices that have been 
historically marginalized
and have been excluded 
from the vision of Enlightenment
and modernity,
success and creativity
and human flourishing
that came along with
the kind of colonial
and racist legacy we have today
and to establish practices
that can allow us to have new concepts 
and a new political imaginary in which
we can envision an utterly new world.
I think we need to rethink
the way we think about cruelty.
We need to become moral,
sensitive and aware
of the many ways 
in which we engage
in these practices.
Of course, rape is cruel
of course, displacement is cruel,
but there are all these small practices
we all engage in.
Accumulation is one of them.
With whom would 
the right minded man 
not sit down
to help the right?
And what medicine
would taste too bad 
to a dying man? 
And what baseness
would you not commit,
could you rid the earth
of all baseness?
And if in the end
you change the whole world,
for what task are you too good?
For what task are you too good? 
Sink down in the slime,
embrace the butcher,
but change the world it needs it! 
Who are you?
We shall not listen
to you much longer
as judges
but as students.
The more things change
the more they stay the same.
You the people have the power. 
The power to create machines,
the power to create happiness.
You the people have the power
to make this life free and beautiful.
To make this life
a wonderful adventure.
Then in the name of democracy, 
let us use that power,
let us all UNITE!
Let us fight for a new world,
a decent world
that will give men a chance to work,
that will give you the future
with old age and security.
At the promise of these things,
brutes have risen to power
but they lie,
they do not fulfill their promise,
they never will.
Dictators free themselves
but they enslave the people.
Now let us fight to fulfill 
that promise,
let us fight to free the world.
To do away with national barriers,
to do away with greed, 
with hate and intolerance.
Let us fight for a world of reason,
a world where science and progress
will lead to all men’s happiness!
The more things change, 
the more they stay the same.
I simply ask
that the right 
to learning
should be given to every child.
The moment machines 
pass the Turing Test,
properly
and you pick up the phone 
and you don’t know whether the person
you are talking to is a human being
or a machine.
The moment we are going
to have 3D printers operating
as public utilities,
you can send anything,
any blueprint to it
and it can print
from one pin to a motorcycle or a car.
The moment that this happens
we have not just the process 
of schumpeterian creative destruction
but we have a process
where economies of scale
and the whole logic
of corporate capitalism collapses.
And at that point
we have a major rupture 
of the political system
which has been completely depleted
of any semblance of democracy
will not be able 
to regulate.
At that point humanity
will be facing a juncture.
We'll either move to
a Star Trek-like utopia
where technology becomes our slaves
and we manage to utilize
its wealth creating capacity
for the purpose of the common good
which will be democratically determined
and not technologically
- remember Arrow -
or we are going to move
towards a Matrix-like dystopia
where humans,
independently aware that
they are the owners 
of these magnificent machines
or the masses who are miserable
and completely cut off
from productive society
will all become servants
to the machines
in exactly the same way 
that Mary Shelley describes
and Karl Marx
followed in 'Das Kapital'.
The choice
will depend on democratic politics.
The choice is everyone's.
"In this understanding
of an imagined fullness of love,
of a true, good love, 
love is virtually linked
to the inner-subjective conflict,
which ultimately demands change
and de-individualization
from the individual."
Hannah Arendt, 1929
Where have you been?
I was worried for you.
I was worried too.
We are not supposed to be here
at this moment.
But the mandatory divorce
was only a few days ago!
I know!
But they seem to be pretty rigid
about the implementation
of the new laws.
There must 
There must be a grace period!
They cannot expect it 
to vanish so quickly!
Maybe we should just exchange
we should just text messages 
it is too dangerous to meet!
I loved your texts
and all the pictures
you sent me!
But it is so much better
to have you here with me.
The law is the law,
and you know what could happen
if they find out...
I cannot live without you.
You will have to live without me!
What do you mean?
I don't understand you, 
I thought you loved me.
I do,
and I have something for you.
Here !
What is this ?
A cup!
A cup ?
Yes,
a cup to continue
the uninterrupted kisses.
What is this sound ?
I do not know ! 
But it may well be the Sittenpolizei!
I must go!
Do not forget the cup!
A cup!
A cup?
to continue 
uninterrupted kisses.
And so
I am continuing
uninterrupted kisses!
That is what I am doing!
Continue uninterrupted kisses!
I have to keep drinking!
And if the cup will ever break,
I will glue all the pieces back! 
Yeah!
I will glue it back! 
I will do the hard work 
of the mosaic,
because the work of the mosaic
is the work of love !
Flesh,
I felt beautifully dressed,
I wanted to wear those images,
all those changing images,
I felt like I could wear them
whenever I wanted,
the image,
the digital image,
inexhaustible,
inextinguishable,
the copy that had become
more authentic than the original itself,
you had brought life to it,
to it and to me,
but ended up naked
when you stopped sending images,
naked,
naked in my bare skin,
but can anyone ever be naked,
naked, like the naked body,
which is always and necessarily dressed,
always a portrait,
there is nothing
more caught in the image
than the naked body,
image of itself,
essence of bourgeois individualism,
the naked body,
the classical body,
the sculpture,
the painting,
the bronze,
there is no nakedness,
there is just being,
being and not being,
plenitude and lack
a being that is for itself,
flesh,
fullness,
and overabundance,
and a being that is for an-other,
a being in others,
and for others,
to be looked at,
with no smell,
and no touch,
and thus no flesh,
so perhaps you were right,
my image is too intellectual,
too cerebral,
an image caught in seeing itself
from the outside,
and we should try to make
an image from the inside,
from the body
and through the body,
so the skin will leave its flatness
and become flesh again,
flesh and tissue,
flesh and meat,
flesh and viscera, 
flesh and fruit,
flesh and taste,
flesh and health,
flesh and death,
flesh and decay,
flesh and living. 
I’d like to live in harmony
with every living thing.
In such a country
and at such a time
there should be no
melancholy evenings.
Even high bridges
over the rivers
And the hours between
the night 
and morning
And the long long winter time 
as well: 
all these are dangerous!
For in view of 
all the misery 
People just throw,
in a few seconds time
Their unbearable lives away. 
I’m only a child
and I don’t have all the solutions.
But I know I want you to realize,
neither do you
You don’t know how to fix
the holes in our ozone layer.
You don’t know how to bring
the salmon back up a dead stream.
You don’t know how to bring back
an animal now extinct.
And you can’t bring back the forests
that once grew 
where there is now a desert.
If you don’t know how to fix it,
please, stop breaking it!
I am only a child, yet I know 
that if all the money spent on war
was spent on finding
environmental answers,
ending poverty 
and finding treaties,
what a wonderful place 
this earth would be.
Climate change isn’t an issue
to add to the list 
to worry about
next to healthcare and taxes.
It is a civilizational wake up call.
A powerful message 
spoken in the language of fires,
floods, droughts and extinctions,
telling us that we need 
an entirely new economic model
and a new way of sharing this planet.
Telling us that we have to evolve. 
Our house is on fire!
For indigenous people
we’ve already been through
the apocalypse.
We’ve already been through
the dystopia. 
And we’re living in a dystopia right now
we’ve already lost hundreds of plants
animals, insects and habitats
we relied on and while the actual,
say a plant itself
may not be extinct globally,
it is extinct to us
when it is no longer accessible.
So in that sense,
we are not making decisions based on
the absolute dread of losing
an iconic species.
We’re actually trying to figure out 
how to rebuild our societies given
that we’ve already lost so much.
What needs to be changed in the world
is everything.
We have to
build a new civilization
in the ruins of the old one
as it collapses around us.
If we could 
construct some sort of survivable,
post-capitalist world
that part just really seems to be key,
Which is much more focused on 
steering and tuning energies in all
of their splendor and glory
away from aquisitional distraction
and into another direction
and to do it while we still have time.
The other option is maybe
the planet is for some other species
and we’re just preparing the way for,
I don’t know,
kind of octopus that can live on plastic
or something
that’s entirely possible.
Maybe our time is up?!
"All fixed, 
fast-frozen relations,
with their train of ancient
and venerable prejudices
and opinions,
are swept away,
all new-formed ones
become antiquated
before they can ossify.
All that is solid 
melts into air,
all that is holy 
is profaned,
and [wo]man 
is at last compelled 
to face with sober senses 
their/his real conditions of life,
and their/his relations
with their/his kind."
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848 
We feel the heat.
We
 C2F6    
feel the cold.
We are all on the same boat,
and the boat
CH4
is sinking.
All that is solid melts 
into air
And comes back to us as acid rains
And comes back to us
as carbon dioxide
And comes back to us
as greenhouse gases
An asphyxiating mixture
CO2
of wet and dry acid components
keep depositing all around us.
Precipitations have changed,
they are unusually acidic,
there
CCL2F2
are too many hydrogen ions
in this world:
on our fields,
on our crops,
on our skin,
on our lungs,
on our keyboards.
The rain is wet,
NO
the rain is dry.
We need more studies
But they must change, too.
All that is solid melts into air
And comes back to us as sulfur dioxide
And comes back to us as nitrogen oxide
And comes back to us 
as their endless combination
One and many,
many and one.
NOy, NOx, NOz
The nitrogen oxide pollutes
the molecules we breathe,
and even those they themselves breathe.
The rain is wet,
the rain is
NO  
dry 
We need more studies
NO
But they have changed, too
I did the change
You did the change
We did the change
Who did the change?
All that is solid melts into air
And NO comes back to us
as nitric oxide
And comes N2O back to us
as nitrous oxide
And comes back NO2 to us
as nitrogen dioxide
And comes back to N2O3 us
as dinitrogen trioxide
And comes back to us N2O4
as dinitrogen tetroxide
And comes back to us 
as CF4 tetrafloromethane
And comes back to us
as hexafluoroethane C2F2
And comes back to us
as sulfur hexafluoride SF6
And comes back to us
as nitrogen trifluoride NF3
NF3
SF6
C2F2
CF4
N2O4
N2O3
Adults keep saying,
we owe it to the young people,
to give them hope.
But I don’t want your hope.
I don’t want you to be hopeful.
I want you to panic.
I want you to feel the fear
I feel everyday.
And then I want you to act.
I want you to act
as you would be in a crisis.
I want you to act
as if the house was on fire.
Because it is!
Change is coming
whether they like it or not!
I think we all, at this table,
and many more people than that,
share that dream,
when Martin said that
he dreamed of a country where
his children would not be penalized
because of their color.
All of us believe that,
I think all of us are committed to that.
It is perhaps paradoxical,
but it is the American Negro,
who in this context,
based on the evidence has more,
has most faith in this country.
I myself always
no matter how bitter I became,
believed, as Harry puts it,
in the potential of this country
and the tremendous energy here
and the things we can achieve
if we will.
The importance of today,
in my mind,
is that for the first time
in our history,
and for the first time
in one hundred years,
the nation shows some signs
of really dealing with
its central problem
instead of
as it has been done for a hundred years 
avoiding it, evading it, 
deny it, lie about it,
pretending it did not exist.
The country will now have to
go to work,
and very hard work,
very dangerous work,
to change itself,
to achieve this dream, 
that Martin was talking about,
and if we do not achieve this dream
we have no future at all.
We’re into a new period of activism
and a new period of hope
which is to do what you can do
within reach
and transform everything
that you touch.
Everything that is
immediately around you.
Go ahead,
take responsibility,
and go there,
reach out and touch it.
Change it and let it change you!
You know, white supremacy,
homophobia, patriarchy…
We have to fight to change those things.
But as I see it,
also the art of change
is about art
being used to make change.
You hear some unusual music,
you go out for a while,
and you think wow 
that was really different.
I wonder what else could be different
around here.
And when people start thinking about
how things could be different,
that’s when change starts
and that’s when hope 
also becomes important.
"Birth
is both 
in the world
and a world's beginning.
Every body counts,
every body 
is a testament to hope.
The hope of the world
rests in the newborn infant.
The infant's hope 
resides in the world's welcome."
Sara Ruddick, 1989
At the beginning 
was the imagination,
with its capricious,
subversive nature.
But a charming guy
arrived on the scene
and promised to bring bread
to everybody. 
People believed him,
although he turned out 
to be more interested
in actually enriching
only some-body.
Market productivity
increased
but labor became boring,
repetitive,
alienating.
Until, one day,
a mob of angry kids 
stood up and cried:
"Let’s stop it!
All the power to the imagination!
No more one-dimensional [wo]men!"
And the guy,
being quite smart,
timidly replied:
"Let’s try it out!
Let’s be creative
and express ourselves!
We will get digitalized machines
to do the repetitive work
of the factories!
Yes,
that’s what we’ll do!"
And now 
we have too many images
and too little imagination.
Too many identities
and too little time to test them out.
Too many climate change studies,
and too little faith in them.
We asked
for more creativity,
but ended up
with too many screens
and not more vision.
Can there still be place
for imagination
in a world
where imagining
is always at the service
of the production machine?
Can you imagine
something new 
in a world
where 
every new
has already been sold
just on time?
And what
if imagination itself
proves to be
not a faculty that we possess
but the homologated
social imaginary
possessing us?
At the beginning
is the imaginal,
that space
which is neither
an individual faculty,
nor a social context,
but pure 
immanent
flux of images,
re-presentations
that are also presences 
in themselves.
Re-orientation of images
can then begin the revolution
of our time.
Re-innovation, 
Against Compulsory Innovation!
The old 
to create the new.
Strata of images
to digital dullness.
Lost words
to re-discover new,
living ones.
Re-innovation,
Against Compulsory Innovation!
A straight line,
against the phantasmagoria
of commodities.
Fixity,
against the constant flux of capital.
Cosmic love,
against bourgeois mortgage romance.
One globe,
so the interruptions 
are possible
again.
Re-innovation,
Against Compulsory Innovation!
The new,
through the same.
Eternal return,
against empty difference.
Bodies,
against flatness.
Touch,
against the excess of seeing.
A mountain,
against the sea:
next to the sea,
made by the sea.
