10
edits
Changes
Added own full meeting transcript, as links to forum.nin.com are now dead. Edited "video" section to indicate videos are no longer available at the old OSR site.
==Video==
Video formerly available on http://www.opensourceresistance.net/. Includes pre-concert meeting footage. A fan transcript of the meeting can be found [http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?56,842850,857006#msg-857006 here]which now redirects to 42 Entertainment's Year Zero page.
Number: [[Year_Zero_Numbers#24.11.2|24.11.2]]
==Full Meeting Transcript (unofficial)==
Amy. Michael. Russ. Jessica. Yuki. Laurel. Andrew. (Farrell?) Cheryl. Leah. Ray. Elaine-- two Elaines? One Elaine. We have Elaine. Michelle. Taryn. Robert. Carl. Margie. George. Crystal. Diana. Ryan. John. Hal. Adrian. Travis.
What the hell were you thinking? Just wanna start by saying: you're all dead. You were seen gathering around a piece of protest art. A shady guy in a van gave you resistance-themed material, and you took it. In public. Without knowing who we were. What if he was FBI? NSA?
We gave you phones. Cell phones send a signal out to the network every ten seconds or so. Remember after 9/11, there was a bioterrorism scare, some guy sending anthrax spores through the mail? The FBI caught him by triangulating on his cell phone signal.
So. You self-identified as dissidents. You kindly agreed to carry tracking devices on yourselves. You showed up for a resistance meeting and you signed a waiver that gave us permission to do anything to you. You allowed yourselves to be hustled onto a van. You let us take away any way of communicating with the outside world that you had. We then drove you to an unknown location and led you down into this room. If this was Nazi Germany, I would walk out that door laughing, and fucking Zyklon-B would start hissing out of the ventssssssssss. Learn the lesson, guys. In a real resistance, you don't get a lot of second chances.
Look, you've seen some scary websites about what the future might become. Me too. So let's start by saying you're not crazy, and I'm not crazy, and go from there. 'Cause like most people, I need a kick in the ass to change. I mean, I was sort of politically aware, I guess, but mostly than meant I read the Drudge Report every now and then, and felt guilty if I didn't get around to voting on Election Day. Then a while back, some people I know stumbled across a, uh...call it a transmission, a few broken pieces of the future. It's some scary shit. It shook my belief that, you know, "it can't happen here". The other weird thing was, we thought we recognized some things, a couple of names, a sentence style, or a piece of art, the sound of a clip of music. So we sent some of this stuff around to some people we thought we recognized. Obviously we didn't say, "dude, look! You're being beamed back from the future!" Because none of us want to be getting in on this Nurse Ratched and the psychiatric shit. What we did instead was we sent a piece of work to the person we thought created it, with a note attached like, "Hey, is somebody trying to copy your style?" Like that.
For instance, we sent a music thing to a certain artist and said, "hey, this sounds like something new. Is it a bootleg, or is it maybe someone trying to leak something out of the studio on you?" Couple days later, there's something in my inbox from this artist. The subject line is "how the fuck did you get this?" Turns out he had written the exact words down in a notebook a few days ago. He hadn't even started recording the song. The rest you know. We've been trying to find as many of these transmissions as possible, trying to get them out, and people are waking up to this shit! I mean, they're painting street art, they're writing songs. I'm involved with a website called Open Source Resistance, maybe you've seen it? Yeah!
Is this the future? I don't know. I sure as hell hope not. How about you?
Unfortunately, that future is closer than you think. Think about what you all have witnessed in the last few years, right here in America. In the aftermath of 9/11, the current administration has done unbelievable damage to civil liberties. If you are not a U.S. citizen and the government decides, God help you, that you are an enemy combatant-- which they can define pretty much at will-- they can throw you in jail and keep you there forever. Is there anyone here who is not a U.S. citizen? (points) Hey. Just being here at this meeting might be sufficient cause to call you an enemy combatant. Okay? If we were the Feds, we might have set this up to scare the shit out of everybody else, but you? You don't go home tonight. You get a one-way ticket to fuckin' Guantanamo Bay.
What about those of us who are citizens? Tonight, you're lucky. But what if there was another 9/11 attack? Big terrorist attack, something bigger even, something, say, right here in LA. Lots of people killed, big chunks of the city evacuated-- do you seriously think the Feds wouldn't extend the Ashcroft laws to make catching terrorists a priority? Listen, I don't want to have my plane hijacked by Islamic terrorists either, I'm not crazy. But in the big picture, there aren't lot of those guys, and they don't have a lot of money. The government has lots of money, and guns, and cops, and lawyers...you don't want them to get in the habit of using that shit on you. Keep them honest. Use your voice. Be heard.
So what are the ordinary, real things we can do to make a difference? Listen, you don't have to be Gandhi to get involved. If politics seems big and vague, cut it down to size. You don't have to stop the war in Iraq, but maybe you think you ought to give a shit about Iraq, but you just don't. Listen, I grew up in Orange County. When they built State Route 241 back in the 90's, I didn't pay attention. They said it would make the commute a lot easier, and I was all for that. Then they bulldozed right over the Laguna Hills. They literally cut the top off the hills and dumped the fill dirt in the valleys. They mutilated the place that I grew up. So now they want to build a southern extension to 241. They want to bulldoze it right through the San Mateo Creek Watershed, which has eleven federally recognized endangered species. They want to run it up to San Onofre State Park, and the Donna O'Neill Land Conservancy, and they want to wipe out the last piece of pristine coast in southern California. Which, by the way, would also wipe out Trestles, which surfer buddies of mine say is the best (place to ???) Do I look like a surfer? No. But I joined the Surfriders Association because those were the guys who were fighting the hardest against this thing, because it's local and they give a shit.
(crowd: yeah!)
Yeah. The last Attorney General threatened to sue the TCA if they went ahead with the 241 extension. If you give a damn, when you go home tonight, send an email to (? ?) Jerry Brown, our new Attorney General, and tell him you want him to do the exact same thing. That's all you have to do, just start it. That make sense?
Look, I'm not asking you to be Gandhi. I'm just asking you to stop and recognize what matters to you, and make the same effort to actually change your world that other people do to vote on American Idol. All I want is this: WAKE UP AND GIVE A SHIT. Open your eyes and pay attention. Don't just swallow the spin, everyone's fucking spinning-- governments, gangsters, the Fortune 500, the guy next door. Do not swallow what they are shoving down your throat. Wake up and give a shit! And for God's sake, please, do not blindly fall for the line of bullshit that I am giving you right now. I do not want you to buy what I am selling! What do I want? I want you to...
(crowd: wake up and give a shit!)
Nice.
Do your own thinking. Find out where you stand on things that matter to you.
I had this really nice thing that I was gonna say, about how glad I was that you all showed up tonight, and all that shit...let's skip the bullshit. The future is ours to change. We'd better fucking get on it.
It's time to move.
==Eye Witness Accounts==