Na na na na na, na na na na na na, na na Na na na na na, na na na na na na, na na Oh yeah The grinding of the gears and the sheer rapidity of history developing at this very moment is as mind boggling as the outlook is bleak. Savio's 1964 speech represents a sort of turning point for what used to be called the counterculture. “What happened was that numerous enterprises,” according to Humanaesfera, a collective of communist and anarchist philosophers and thinkers particularly concerned with technology, created “visionary and utopian auras…that concealed their capitalist nature.” Facebook, Twitter and other such companies have created what they call “the laborization of existence,” in which “the distinction between work and consumption disappears more and more.” Posting ends up being work that, aside from a few influencers, the poster is not paid for; it’s the perfect scam. These threads can be seen in all aspects of our society, wherever its citizens have become wholly commodified accessories to the surveillance state. Nice as those rosy depictions and ideals were, capital and control quickly stifled the “wild west” of the internet; the hippie free-for-all, in American fashion, became big business. In this function, it’s designed to become addictive, to promote empty engagement with an engineered false sense of privacy. Such action on campuses and off are therefore a railing against structures that devalue life, that alienate, and that serve to reinforce an unjust system. As state funding dried up, in-state tuition at the UC Berkeley has currently ballooned to over $14,000 per year (over $40,000 for out-of-state students), and, as an increasing teaching load is taken on by underpaid adjunct and graduate student faculty, more and more money is funneled into the administration. To the editor: The article looking back 50 years to UC Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement and the specific focus on Mario Savio brought back powerful memories. As conservative economists and some liberal ones start weighing the benefits of reopening the economy against the expected loss of life, such questions are particularly salient. At the center of the “Bodies upon the Gears” speech is a mode of resistance that became linked in the popular imagination with its time: a call for civil disobedience—for sheer numbers—to put a stop to injustice. The machinery is as odious as ever, and at this very moment, we are witnessing bodies being thrown onto its gears. Early computing, and certainly the early internet, were meant to be free of the constraints of property and authority: a perfect, level playing field where culture could be shared and communicated, and community can be built. Governor Reagan had enough So the National Guard they pushed on through Tear gas and riot police On Telegraph Avenue. Perhaps, at last, there’s a growing sense of these relations on the part of the rank and file. And here, of course, Savio draws out the implications: “if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something—the faculty are a bunch of employees and we're the raw material…we’re a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to be…made into any product!” In a sense, Savio and the FSM aimed to unmask the liberal notions of what a university, ideally, was supposed to do, and point to its normative, and even class-reinforcing function. Lashawn Harrell. It’s what media-theorist and author of Team Human, Douglas Rushkoff, calls a “reversal of figure and ground,” where, instead of digital technology serving the user, algorithms and the logic of internet commodification have made the user serve it. In part, this leads to what Rushkoff calls “the Facebookification of the other”—rather than finding solidarity or connection, social media highlights divisions, creates out groups, preying on the basic social instincts of we humans. The Song Remains The Same. "Wretches and Kings" features Mario Savio 's "Bodies upon the gears" or the "Operation of the Machine" speech. The situation is ongoing; a day after 54 student worker strikers were fired on March 5th, the UC Santa Cruz campus was entirely shut down, leading to classes being canceled, and the union urging a reopening of negotiations. Savio was a philosophy student and became the driving force behind the Free Speech Movement that came to a tipping point on 2 December 1964. To quote Mario Savio, "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! It is the tenth track from their 2010 album, A Thousand Suns. Never has it been clearer that Americans are dependent on not only their doctors and nurses, but grocers, service workers, factory workers, delivery people, garbage collectors, meat packers, and workers in those industries deemed essential. Mario Savio And His Rage Against The Machine. His priorities during his campaign were two-fold—“to clean up the mess at Berkeley” and (of course) to get “the welfare bums back to work”—and these have basically become the priorities of politicians from both parties ever since. From Mario Savio's rage against the machine to a day-by-day chronology of a campus in turmoil, the Berkeley web contains a wealth of material about the Free Speech Movement: its genesis, its legacy, and the people who shaped it. Savio being dragged off by police/Nat Farbman/The LIFE Images Collection. The tempo of the song was set to 90 BPM. In the same way that Savio and his comrades could occupy university buildings and reclaim them to provide their own teach-ins (as they did following the “Bodies Upon The Gears” speech), anyone could engage in whatever way they saw fit (so long as they could get access to the technology, of course). Mario Savio, leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, is restrained by police as he walks to the platform at the University of California's Greek Theater in Berkeley on Dec. 7, 1964. Mario was active in resisting Reagan’s wars in Central America throughout the 1980s. Mock up video for new visperas song: Upon The Gears Mario Savio / Tiananmen Square 1989 All music by visperas www.visperas.co.uk. The promotional single was first obtainable on the band's official website and was streamed on Noisecreep. Imagine what he might think of Facebook? It's managed. As Savio would have it—and he was far from alone—when the cause is just, the many must take it upon themselves to struggle. Propaganda and the Weaponization of Storytelling. It was Reagan who oversaw tuitions being first imposed on the University of California system, kickstarting a trend in which conservative governance came to see campuses of hotbeds of incendiary, anti-American activity that needed to be cleaned up. 3: Fire Walk With Me, which was released on September 11, 2012 under the simplified title of "Wretches [Remix]". The Kent State Massacre . This week in California history, Mario Savio delivered his iconic speech on the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964. Rage Against the Machine — “Wake Up” There’s really only one way to finish a recap of The Matrix via its soundtrack’s highlights: With the song that ends the movie. To him, not only were student activist groups like FSM, SDS, and others seen as trouble, but the university system itself was problematic. Set against them, as noted by fellow campus activist and erstwhile California State Senator, Tom Hayden, were not only hostile, cold-war era Feds and police, but forces within the administration and the political establishment that would change the shape of the university system. There’s a stunning clarity to the way Savio characterizes the nature of this struggle: “Sometimes, the grievances of people are more…than just the law,” he said, “[they] extend to a whole mode of arbitrary power, a whole mode of arbitrary exercise of arbitrary power.” The sights here are set on the university as something that not only upholds an oppressive status quo in preventing rights to free assembly and speech, but that is, in itself, a kind of factory run, as all of them are in capitalism, as “an autocracy” (in this case under UC President Clark Kerr). 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