Housing isn’t affordable anywhere. And gentrification and displacement are phenomena everywhere. At least in what’s called North America.

So this graffiti could be anywhere and everywhere.

Yet there’s something particularly heartening when tagging takes on a homespun flair and speaks with a regional vernacular. As if spray paint, in its own humble way, can conjure a sense of place, a sense of home, that can’t be commodified. That in fact, is at cross-purposes with capitalism’s homogenizing logic, where the local vernaculars of how people have built housing for their own use and of their own crafting that fit the social and ecological contexts for millennia get demolished, and in their places rise up profit-based boxes of gray and glass condos.

So this graffiti, with its down-to-earthness, slang, and misspelling, captures something of the Midwest, including the rust-belt rage over the material abandonment and climate devastation that hit here many decades ago now. Rising rents and hipster art galleries and all the other trappings of this contemporary wave of theft and dispossession have come more slowly here in the flyover land. But make no mistake, it is here too—in this place being remade into a brutal copycat of the “property is theft” that is rearing its head anywhere and everywhere.

#MakeArtMakeTrouble
#ReappropriateOurWorld
#LandBack #HousingForAll
#CommonsNotCapitalism
#ArtOfResistance

Because I have way too many #ACAB photos on my phone (part 7 of 7)…

You don’t hate Sundays, you hate capitalism. And cops too.

#CommonsNotCapitalism
#CareNotCapitalism
#AllCopsAreBad
#AutonomousCommunitiesAreBeautiful

(photo: the kinds of conversational graffiti one is relieved to see on the drab walls of the many pedestrian underpass walkways on the stolen lands of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, summer 2022/5782)

Because I have way too many #ACAB photos on my phone (part 6 of 7)…

You don’t hate Saturdays (especially if you’re Jewish, like me), you hate capitalism. And cops too.

#CommonsNotCapitalism
#CareNotCapitalism
#ShabbosNotStates
#AllCopsAreBad
#AutonomousCommunitiesAreBeautiful

(photo: one of the many beautiful ways that #FTP has long been expressed on the walls and streets of Exarcheia in Athens, Greece, as seen on a walk in the “before” times of November 2019)

Because I have way too many #ACAB photos on my phone (part 5 of 7)…

You don’t hate Fridays, you hate capitalism. And cops too.

#CommonsNotCapitalism
#CareNotCapitalism
#AllCopsAreBad
#AllCatsAreBeautiful
#FelinesNotFascists

(photo: an adorable sticker of a glittery anarchisty kitty who also hates cops, as spotted on a wall while on a purrfect walk with a human friend in Tioh’tia:ke/Montreal in summer 2022/5782)

Because I have way too many #ACAB photos on my phone (part 3 out of 7)…

You don’t hate Wednesdays, you hate capitalism. And cops too.

#CommonsNotCapitalism
#CareNotCapitalism
#AllCopsAreBad
#AutonomousCommunitiesAreBeautiful

(photo: until policing is abolished, it bears repeating, as seen on the stolen lands of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal in summer 2022/5782)

Because I have way too many #ACAB photos on my phone…

You don’t hate Tuesdays, you hate capitalism. And cops too.

#CommonsNotCapitalism
#CareNotCapitalism
#AllCopsAreBad
#AutonomousCommunitiesAreBeautiful

(photo: way-to-go tag seen on a rambling walk about a year ago, in early autumn 2021, with my friend @lokimon in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal)

Because I have way too many #ACAB photos on my phone that need sharing…

You don’t hate Mondays, you hate capitalism. And cops too.

#CommonsNotCapitalism
#CareNotCapitalism
#AllCopsAreBad
#AutonomousCommunitiesAreBeautiful

(photo: sticker seen in October 2022 on the redecorated gazebo at the entrance to @defendatlforest aka #StopCopCity)