Whose Tweets? Our Streets
:A New Poster and Zine for an Offline Media Offensive
Last week, Elon Musk personally banned us from Twitter at the request of a far-right troll. Musk is not introducing “free speech” onto Twitter; he is systematically suppressing the voices of those who oppose fascism while welcoming the most notorious Nazis back onto the platform. In response, we invite you to make the streets of your community speak out with a new poster about capitalists like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. If there’s one medium that billionaires will never control, it’s wheatpaste.
But first—why has the world’s richest man thrown his lot in with fascists?
The best theory we can come up with is that fascism in general and anti-Semitism in particular offer the most convenient means to redirect anger that would otherwise be directed against the capitalist ruling class. Over the past three decades, the amount of wealth controlled by the world’s richest man has increased by almost ten times. As the billionaires get richer, the rest of us get poorer and more desperate. If not for conspiracy theories about the “wrong” people having all that power, the obvious fact that it is unjust for anyone to hold so much power would be inescapable.
Musk didn’t set $44 billion on fire because he thought he was going to make money on one of the world’s notoriously unprofitable platforms. It was worth it for him to spend billions buying Twitter in order to shape public discourse according to his personal interests. As for what those interests are, we can deduce them from the voices he has removed from the platform and the voices he has added back to it. Billionaires like him and Donald Trump would prefer the rest of us have to fight brainwashed fascists than have our hands free to take on the system that creates such imbalances in wealth and power in the first place.
To address this situation, we’ve dusted off a classic motif of ours and designed a new poster. We invite you to plaster the walls of your community with it—in a strictly legal way, of course.
Click on the image to download the poster.
In addition, in case you prefer to paste up posters the old-fashioned DIY way rather than just buying wallpaper paste or spray adhesive, we have made a zine version of our Field Guide to Wheatpasting—please print these out and distribute them to anyone who might be interested in communicating on a platform that isn’t run by a pro-fascist billionaire!
You can read the contents of the zine in full online here.
Click on the image to download the zine.
The text of the poster follows.
They Don’t Give a Fuck about You
For every billionaire, millions go hungry. That’s what creates billionaires: the concentration of wealth in a few hands. When you hear about a billionaire running for president or a billionaire buying Twitter as you pass homeless encampments on the way to your second job, make no mistake—it’s all connected.
They’ll tell you anything to make you believe that your problems are your own fault, to pit you against each other, to get you to work a double shift so you can make more money for them. But however hard you work, they take home more than you do. That’s the nature of capitalism.
They tell us they want to preserve free speech, that they offer us “opportunities,” that they’re here to protect us. Then they buy up the ways we communicate, fix the algorithms, determine what we see and hear. They sponsor fascists who attack anyone who criticizes them, spread lies to foment ethnic and religious strife. They want money to be the only thing that has value so we can’t dream of anything else.
We deserve a world in which people are respected for what they share, not what they take for themselves. The real problem is the system that creates these inequalities in the first place. Rather than competing to be the ones who exploit and oppress, let’s abolish the means by which they do.
For a world without tyrants or tycoons!
Another version of the poster. Click on the image to download the poster.
