4 February 2011: "Will the Egyptian D.I.Y. helmet become a relevant alt fashion trend in 2k11?"

This post is about the event. Though obviously well-informed and more than merely capable of weighing in on a wide range of problematics as they erupt and emerge in the course of events and practices in the fraught nexus of everyday life, Carles is typically wary of entering into international political debates, preferring to hew to the concerns of speculative philosophy, technology, and applied aesthetics. As he admits in this post on the revolution under way in Egypt, "I am not really familiar with issues that exist in the real world (especially the non American suburban Arab world), mainly just alt issues that exist on the internet." Nonetheless, recent developments in the Mediterranean region has prompted Carles to end his silence on the questions confronting the multitudes in the global South, many of which are only now confronting the postcolonial legacy left in the wake of easing of Cold War tensions.

Carles frames his analysis in terms of the ad hoc safety procedures developed spontaneously by participants in the protests in Egypt: "the #1 meme of the riots has been the zany helmets that protesters are wearing in order 2 protect themselves from bricks / bullets / bombs / miscellaneous projectiles," he observes, pointing out the effects that real-time mediatization is having on the nascent protests in situ, namely that protesters are brought to a reflexive awareness of themselves as such. Much has been written and said about the degree to which internet technologies have contributed to the techniques and tactics of organizing and implementing dissent; Carles, by highlighting the centrality of the "meme" to organic revolutionary praxis, importantly raises awareness of the specific forms of commodification by which political resistance can pass virally and nodally throughout social networks. The immaterial laboring of the global masses has fused the general intellect into a fearsome entity for destabilizing moribund regimes. The power of protest belongs to the commons regardless of the corporatized means by which that power adapts itself in its flows. The outraged, improvisational spirit of the Arab street, Carles believes, will initiate "a relevant alt trend that sweeps thru the Eastern world, and eventually hits the west by storm."

As Gramsci recognized in his seminal Prison Notebooks: "All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals ... The problem of creating a new stratum of intellectuals consists therefore in the critical elaboration of the intellectual activity that exists in everyone at a certain degree of development, modifying its relationship with the muscular-nervous effort towards a new equilibrium, and ensuring that the muscular-nervous effort itself, in so far as it is an element of a general practical activity, which is perpetually innovating the physical and social world, becomes the foundation of a new and integral conception of the world." Thus by wearing their humble yet inspiring helmets to enter into the great struggle against tyranny and capital, these ordinary yet extraordinary anonymous Egyptians place their names alongside the great insurrectionists of history.

And so it is that Carles issues a stern challenge to the muscular-nervous efforts of his readers in the West: "Have yall ever 'raged against the machine' in alt diy art & craft helmets?" The message: Do not be content to sit on the sidelines; seek solidarity with the global protest of the multitude. Carles urges that his readers harness the power of the collective innovation processes on display in the assemblage of images he has presented. He also warns subtly that we should not be anything but unflinching in our willingness to critique the protesters themselves in order to hone their dialectics for the coming struggle with counterrevolutionaries and other atavistic hangers-on of the now-deposed regime. In the most pertinent example, Carles admonishes a protester who bears only a cardboard box for protection: "Entry level cardboard box over head bro. Dude needs 2 step it up." One cannot bring a proverbial knife to a gun fight. One need not even cite Lenin's corpus for the innumerable exhortations of preparedness on this point. Carles wants to make sure that, with the eyes of the world fixed once again on the possibility of political change instigated from "below," no one forgets this important truth: The revolution has no entry level.