samwallman
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too bad if your name becomes a verb
🕑 Added 2022-03-24 19:26:15 +0000 UTCHey mates,
Last week i finished this comic about the history of boycotts, how special they can be, their limitations and so on. The first boycott ever organised was against an upper class brit called Captain Charles Boycott. an entire village in Ireland turned their back on him when he upped their rents following a famine. Basically a multi-industry, massive criss-crossing solidarity strike, but just against *one guy* lmao. a general strike rly, but only visible to one person.
I rly enjoyed working on this, fun to do a shorter punchier thing after getting through the sludge of making the longform book.
I will print it up as a zine soon enough, and mail out a bunch of copies to u guys. Meanwhile pls dont share this email around tho, because the comic hasn’t actually come out yet, The Nib who commissioned the piece might have further edits and cld get pissed im not sure.
I drew this street poster for the campaign against the massive gas terminal that they’re planning to build in Corio Bay, Geelong, where I grew up:
I have put a more ~universal~ version of the design on the ‘downloadable art’ section of my website (it's also on the Just Seeds site), in case other campaigns want to add their own text and use it for different purposes, feel free it has a "creative commons" license :
Below is this month’s drawing for Overland, it’s kind of stupid but it was relaxing n playful to draw at least!!
Drew this for some comrades in Adelaide who have seen a huge increase in nazi stickers around town, and wanted to print up something proactive to cover them up with:
A few different unions were involved in printing them, and distributing them to members. I think they’re gonna post me some as thanks for drawing it, so if u want a couple let me know and i’ll post some on. or if u want a stack u can print some yourself if u want
https://www.samwallman.com/downloadable-art
Some other unions in South Australia had this drawing of Scomo printed up as stickers in the lead-up to their recent state election.
There was some shitty tory politician lady on the ABC on election night who mentioned the sticker, calling it a disgusting disc, cheers to the CEPU comrade who handed it to her at the polling booth and to Alex who let me know that she mentioned on the telly, it was a buzz to hear that it pissed her off. I know we want to win things and build power but it’s also okay to kind of just want to piss off our enemies right, “is your hate pure Eddie” etc
I also drew the below simplistic anti-Scomo drawing, based on an old street poster style of illustration by Robbie Conal, who has been doing these portraits of politicians for nearly 40 years
Which attracted this (fair enough) comment from some rando on facebook:
I get what they mean, it’s sometimes annoying that my practise has to be trapped in the realm of “the image”, vision is v limited being so inherently surface level, sucks that movie villains are always fugly etc, but ALSO if we can’t depict the goblins that rule our lives as goblins well then i don’t know!!!!
My bf’s little sister shat herself with joy recently when she realised that the words ‘heart’ and ‘earth’ are spelt with the same letters / mean the same thing, it was very cute. Also she loves her rubik's cube so we made this for her
It’s rare that i do a ‘kid friendly’ drawing, so i thought i’d also chuck it up on my website if anyone wants to print it out for a young earth lover that you know, its available here along with the last several images in this update.
if you’re into “people’s art” or whatever u call it, i highly recommend making a cup of tea and sitting down for a while with this database of posters about Palestine, there are a huge number of them collected on this website and scrolling through them has a pretty amazing cumulative effect, esp if u click *Scroll full size* so they fill the screen nicely: https://www.palestineposterproject.org/list_posters
They recently added my ‘Fight Apartheid from where you stand’ piece to the database
ABC’s Compass just did a profile of old mate Safdar Ahmed, its a very moving episode about his approach to comics-journalism, his muslim death metal band Hazeen and art making as therapy / a healing process. u can watch it on iview here. also, the exhibition that Safdar, Nicky and I had earlier this year in Sydney 'Panels that Transform: Comics and Activism', can now be walked through online via this neat virtual exhibition thing, eat ya hole out metaverse.
speaking of the metaverse, a new dystopian privilege theory just dropped..... this quote is from US billionaire Marc Andreessen who is very invested in Zuckerbergs vision. the quote was found by good egg James Hennessy (whose free Substack about technology is always interesting). Hennessy's words follow Andreessens:
“Your question is a great example of what I call Reality Privilege. This is a paraphrase of a concept articulated by Beau Cronin: "Consider the possibility that a visceral defense of the physical, and an accompanying dismissal of the virtual as inferior or escapist, is a result of superuser privileges." A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date... the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege -- their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.
The Reality Privileged, of course, call this conclusion dystopian, and demand that we prioritize improvements in reality over improvements in virtuality. To which I say: reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don't think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build -- and we are building -- online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in." - Andreessen
"Not really sure where the “5000 years” part comes from, but anyway. It’s a very honest statement of intent from someone that is trying to reshape the tech industry and by extension society more broadly. It’s also strange way of building a moral justification for a future that most would agree is mostly driven by commercial, not humanitarian, impulses.
Most people laughed at the wholesale lifting of the word ‘metaverse’ from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, where the virtual world is a fleeting escape from a horrible reality. Here we have one of the flagbearers of that prospective future saying, “Yeah, that’s exactly it – and that’s good!” Implicit also is the idea that the developing world isn’t going to get much nicer, and that an escape into the digital is the only path forward. Hence the trollish deployment of the word ‘privilege’.” - Hennessy
My old friend Hugh D. A. Goldring wrote the below about the metaverse soon after Zuckerberg put out that creepy walk-through video... i don't heaps agree with his concrete fatalism, the future isn't set in stone but this vision is still worth considering imo:
"At first only very annoying people will use meta. And then as the technology improves and it becomes the default platform for retailers and public bodies people will be compelled to use it to access things that used to be available elsewhere. Then it'll hit a tipping point where everyone you know is in there especially since it's going to be engineered to be addictive. And as the user base grows the revenue will grow with it so they'll have the money and user feedback they need to make it suck less.
But it won't. It'll suck more and more but it'll swallow society anyway because it sucks more efficiently.
Either that or FB is too big to pull this off and some other company is going to do this. But there can be no question it's coming. Watch the trend lines because somewhere in the next 20 years the awfulness of capitalism and the climate crisis will converge with the improving user experience of some metaverse or other and after that point the general consensus will be that it's better to be online. We're already well on our way."
here's a drawing of my friends dog to end on a lighter note!!!!
