Who wants to go extinct?
Activists fight for their neighborhoods and for the right to die out
At Public Seminar this week, two very different forms of radical contemporary activism meet center stage. In Japan, Jack Jiang follows an anti-natalist as he campaigns for humans to stop giving birth. In New York City, Chris Robé charts the digital organizing that’s helped tenants demand better living conditions.
Can we use video cameras to fight surveillance? Can we live better by dying out?
Anti-natalists Have an Image Problem
Jack Jiang
Asagi is neat, scrawny, quiet, and on-time. When I met him for the first time in Ikebukuro, Japan, he promised to take me to his favorite place in the city, which turned out to be a cemetery. As we wound our way between graves, Asagi stepped carefully, holding his camera and soaking in the landscape. “It’s calm and peaceful,” he explained. “And there are cats here.”
Documenting the Little Abuses
Chris Robé
Sunset Park is a little more than half a square mile, located on the south-west side of Brooklyn and is most readily accessible by the D train from lower Manhattan. In the 1980s and 1990s it was consumed by the crack epidemic like many working-class communities of color in the city at the time. Gang activity was rife. When I was walking home one night with someone who grew up in the area, he pointed down a side street to mark the location where he was shot as a teenager in the eighties. The police generally avoided the area. However, with rising gentrification, as upscale white residents have gradually infiltrated the area, police presence has increased. The price for an average townhouse has shot up from $746,000 in 2013 to $948,000 in 2015.