Towards a Futurology of the Present
Marco Cuevas-Hewitt

‘Tomorrow never happens, man’ – Janis Joplinii

Has there ever been a revolution without its musicians, artists, and writers? Could we imagine the Zapatista movement, for example, without its poetry and lyricism? At this moment, I am writing from the specific location of the west coast of Australia, on land known to Aboriginal Australians as Beeliar Boodjar. Across the Indian Ocean, remarkable things are happening in North Africa. I listen on the internet to the songs of freedom being sung in Tahrir Square, as well as to the young hip-hop artists who provided the soundtrack to the revolution in Tunisia. But their YouTube videos are not the only things going viral. Significantly, their mutant desires, of which their music is an expression, are also beginning to ripple outwards. I feel it here at my kitchen table as I type, as viscerally as the caffeine flowing through my body. I also see it on the evening news in Spain and Greece. Perhaps the alterglobalisation movement never died, but was simply laying in wait. Perhaps we are only at the beginning. And perhaps there is little real difference in our movements between making music and making change; between the creation of art and the creation of new social relations through our activisms. Our common art is the crafting of new ways of being, of seeing, of valuing; in short, the cultivation of new forms of life, despite and beyond the deadening, ossified structures all around us.

Building Up an Institution of the Common
Interview with Gigi Roggero from Edu-factory

“What was once the factory is now the university” states the international Edu-factory collective, which started off as a mailing list of 500 students, activists and researchers worldwide. They argue that in today’s cognitive capitalism, we have experienced the transformation from organising knowledge from above to the capture and expropriation of common knowledge after it is produced. This appropriation and exploitation of knowledge produced in the common opens up for a possibility that lies in the autonomy of knowledge production. The fact that knowledge today is produced in the common also makes it possible for us to re-appropriate it. The Edu-factory’s attempt to create a global autonomous university is a way of reclaiming such common knowledge. Edu-factory writes, “Theoretical practice is always political practice, and political practice is not only theoretical practice”. They claim that there is no production of knowledge that is not political. Theory is always a field of struggle and in times of “cognitive capitalism,” perhaps one of the most important. We met with Gigi Roggero, one of the initiators of Edu-factory at the Labour of the Multitude conference in Warsaw to talk about Edu-factory, recent university and precarious workers struggles, and ideas of autonomous education.

Zombie 2.0 Subjectivity: A New Dromological Paradigm
Yari Lanci

At the end of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, the remake of the second film in Romero’s Living Dead series, the spectator is faced with footage from a videotape. Paradoxically placed at the end of the movie, and more precisely integrated with the end credits, the footage appears to work as the happy ending of the storyline. It follows the journey of the main characters, escaping the overrun mainland by yacht. The remaining survivors eventually reach an island. It takes only few seconds for the alleged happy ending to be transformed into a repetition of the same eschatological setting, with which Snyder had opened his movie. In fact, the island has already been infested by zombies. The contagion was faster than their journey to the island. The zombies are too fast to flee from. The survivors are not going to survive. The character filming the disembark is forced to drop the digital camera on the dock, and from that moment onwards the camera shows the scenes of the desperate attempt of the group to resist the running hoard of undead.