THE ECO-MISANTHROPE
MANIFESTO

Margherita Giacobino

This manifesto addresses all living beings – animals, plants and microorganisms – who share the consciousness that humanity is the more infesting form of life on the planet, and are determined not to bear it any longer, and to take action to save the Earth in the only possible way: by the elimination of the human race.

The only way to put a stop to extinctions is to de-humanize the world.

Nature contains every gender and sexuality, from hermafrodite snails to gay gorillas, from spore reproduction to home-delivery of pollens by bees, and every kind of social organisation, from the fierce red ants to the pacific meerkats, living in communities where kids are raised by aunts and uncles. The human being is the only one who classifies, eliminates and limits, and then he calls ‘natural’ what he chooses. Enough with the human imperialism!

Actions will be taken simultaneously on multiple fronts. Here are some examples:
Giant carnivorous plants will station themselves in shopping centers, and operate mainly in the rush hours, when human consciousness is at its lowest level. Earthworms wil abstain from work, refusing to digest earth, by now indigestible, and will move instead towards the banks’vaults, where they will proceed to transform banknotes into humus. Zombie fireflies will migrate from country’s graveyards and spread insomnia amidst urban populations. Camembert molds will multiply overnight and colonize kitchens. Yeasts will ferment into stomachs making them burst (this action is already going on, experimentally, in all advanced countries, after the film Alien spread its crypto-propaganda). Pets will exploit their mutation abilities for innovative kind of fights, whose main actors will be piranha poodles, killer rabbits and female buffaloes who will produce ‘enriched’ milk for overdosing mozzarellas. All this in preparation for the final attack, when nanoparasites will infiltrate telephone cards, wiping out their memories in a few seconds.

THE MISANTHROPE’S
GOOD ADVICES

Margherita Giacobino

Are you feeling cyberqueer, post-human and pre-mixed up, and prepared to fight to affirm your non-creed? Here are some useful suggestions:

1) Grow a beard. If you’re born a woman, take enough hormones for a 15 inches growth. Use a conditioner for softness, but don’t wash too often so as not to weaken hair.

2) Prepare your equality claims, i.e. If you’re born male, you want clitoral orgasm and intrauterine pregnancy. If you’re born female, you want to be a sperm donor. (These are preliminary steps toward more ambitious goals, like laying eggs.)

3) If you are tone-deaf, you want to sing at the Metropolitan Opera in the role of Tosca. Remember: nobody’s tone-deaf, and the difference between genders is a trite feminist scheme.

4) At the gym, request a training for neglected muscles (sphincters, pelvic floor, alar base of the nose, earlobes). Avoid conformity; when on exercise bike, pedal with your arms.

5) With your friends, organize creative flash mobs where you strip in front of the Merriam Webster’s editorial office, asking for vowels to be abolished, because they are gender-biased. From now on, you’ll speak only Hebrew (where, as you know, vowels don’t get written down) as a step toward the use of truly p*l*t*c*ll* c*rr*ct l*ng**g. But, in order not to be mistaken as a sionist, take care to plait a kefia in your beard.

6) Integrate plastic surgery to your daily life, have an i-phone implanted in your intestine for intimate selfies (useful also for prevention), and a palmar trigger so you can change your sex quickly, even during PTA meetings, through a simple extro-or-intro-flection of your genital apparatus.

7) When you are tired, or want to perform a more explosive fight, you can directly enroll as an Islamic terrorist, seeing as you’re already furnished with a beard and a trigger.

THE SOPHISTICS
STILL IN LOVE

Francesca Maffioli and Laura Marzi

They’re just songs

Lady Gorgia
Protagora, what if we talked again about love?
This time I will question you about this unmoved mover, in its most desirous, most desiring conjugation.
Lets’ start: when desiring, it happens that one desires the Other in order to enjoy him, or her, but it also happens that one let him- or herself be desidered, or chooses to desire so as to be desired, or to pursue another desire. One desires for countless reasons, but also for no particular reason: one can desire for the mere desire to desire.
My dear Sophistic, where does it lead us, all this desiring? And where do we lead it?
And what place is left, in all this desiring, to the Other? Is any place left?
Or the question is to leave to the Other the liberty to position him- or herself where (s)he pleases, near, beneath, over, beyond us? In the space of retroactive jealousy, of the dream of a possibile future, or in the present of waiting?
Tell me, praythee, in all this pondering… where does the desire go?

Lady Protagora
Gorgia dear, presently my heart’s desire is a flowery bed, where to find sleep, thus eluding your shrewd questions. But then again, the desire to give you an answer makes me rub my chin in deep thought, because you always know how to prod my curiosity. We certainly have an object of the desire, who can be near, beneath, over or beyond us, as you so well say; and who can disappear or change its ways, even maintaining its name. Then, in the foreground we have the subject of desire, and she’s usually deemed to be well aware and determined. And in the middle, methink, there is a certain reality: the Subjugate to desire. Half object and half subject, she chooses to desire, but she wants a job, a lover or a destiny whose characters depend from her personality or from talents, over whom the Subjugate to desire has not complete control. They depend from time, who make you consider your job good and worthy to be durably pursued; from fate, who can make you meet an Antonia or a Marcus Antonius at a rite, on the agorà, or on a route whence you cannot turn back.
So, desire is not only a state of will: in itself, it depends! From your level of consciousness, from the type of woman you are, from the Moira… It depends.
As evidence of my cogitations’ high merit, dear Gorgia, hear this: we’ll have an illustrious successor from Spain, whose name will be Jarabe de Palo, who will use my excellent speculations to compose an axiom. The aruspices allow me to give you a sample, here and now: ‘Depende, todo depende…’

Nightdrones

bulander

It had entered his bedroom smashing the windowglass. At first it probably fell on the floor – there were burns on the carpet – but then it rose again and began that devastating thrashing around that was responsible for the wretched state the flat was found in by Dr Simpleton, criminal law researcher. Collapsed chandeliers, broken knick knacks, the pasta-and-beans pan of the previous day toppled, its contents spilled on the floor till under the scholar’s desk. Then, maybe in a fit of vandalic rage, the drone had pounced on the computer’s big screen, shattering it and thus terminating its wild race: there it was, motionless, on the scarred and burned keyboard. It must have run out of batteries. It looked like a huge, lifeless insect.
Simpleton stood there, frozen, still in its raincoat, wondering on what had happened. The phone rang.
“Hallo, Amazon here. Mr Simpleton? Unfortunately one of our drones has lost control, its sensors went out of order, and it must have entered your flat. The system tells us that its batteries have run out, so it should have landed somewhere. Could you be so kind as to check its serial number? It should be 74189326h slash Ober comma sai sai.”
Simpleton wanted to scream:
“Go to hell! Damn you and your drones! I’ll sue you!’ but anger was choking him to the point he couldn’t emit a sound, so on the other end the Amazon woman repeated: ‘Hallo, hallo, Dr Simpleton, can you hear me? Ober comma sai sai. You want me to spell it? Oscar, Bertha, Edward…”
It was not so often that a drone went out of control, nor was this the worst setback of Amazon substituting bikers with drones for home-deliveries. The worst setback was the buzz of thousands, tens of thousands drones flying over the rooftops, over people heads, sometimes so thick they darkened the sky. Many people couldn’t sleep, because deliveries to stores, restaurants, hospitals, public buildings, dormitories, night clubs, barracks, were made at night. People started installing double glasses, double windows, but it was useless, the buzz was too loud and it could became deafening when, due to strange atmospheric-acoustic occurrences, the different buzzes created a resonance.
There had been serious riots when Amazon had fired almost 15 thousands delivery bikers, all of them graduate and fluent in English. People had grown to like those youg people and stood up for them when they assaulted City Hall, why the Mayor had welcomed the arrival of drones.
“At last we can compete with Hong Kong!” had declared the Mayor to Radio Penury.
The intervention of the police, with armored vehicles and fire hydrants, had been brutal. Alfonso Joint, nicknamed Coppi, was clubbed on his head and received a cranial trauma and internal injuries. He often lost his balance, and was forced to give up biking. From the garret he shared with a Pakistani, he could effortlessy reach the rooftop. He wanted revenge.
He had secured a really techonologically advanced slingshot, with which he threw steel marbles against drones. He had already shot down about sixty of them, particularly the ones delivering heart pills to the landlord, who lived in a big flat on the first floor. Nor did he spare the ones who brought curlers to the peroxide blonde on the floor below, whose tv set was blaring every night. To cover the buzz of drones, she said.
It was 2054, the 23rd December, the drones were delivering Christmas trees. Some had got loose and fallen on the head of pedestrians, in Mazzini Street a big one, six meters long, had broken the windshield of a Mercedes running at high speed. The driver had lost control and hit a store window. Two window-dressers had found an instant death. A squad of special drones had been charged to bring the figures of the Living Creche to the church of Saint Santino della Rocca. The one transporting the ox had collided with another, and the poor beast fell on a group of Chinese turists. One was dead and two seriously injured.
After the repeated accidents, the director of Amazon Italian branch was forced to call a press conference.
“This year we made 2 millions and 365 thousands deliveries with drones. Of these, only 0,24% are failed – for various problems, mainly inaccurately copied addresses. Of the above 0,24%, only a paltry percentage is related to collisions with other drones or with human beings. Our main conncern is security. Some of our customers grow really fond of their drone. Mrs Track, for one – a retired rail employee – requests her deliveries be made always from the same, whom she calls affectionately “Cutie”. Isn’t that so, Mrs Track?”
Connected by videoconference, Mrs Track confirms.
“Yes, he’s a dear, the only thing he lacks is words.”.

The boss design

Federico Zenoni

These few sketches and notes, which come out from a major international design studio through the back door (www.vendiamoancheilculo.cos) are exceptional for their crudeness and winning-side partisanship.
In these times of bloated International crises, which will put millions of jobs at risk and test the workers’ union solidarity, the most creative and brilliant of designers show their cards, overtaking the already well-known tendency of design to satisfy and amuse the priviledged and ruling classes.

The Subordinate Chair – 1
This seat, with its original but rigid design, is a brainwave for the Management Office; reserved to the inferior levels, subordinate, occasional, casual workers, or temporary-employees, allowing them to take an ergonomically inferior position, with a respectful and hierarchical deference in front of the Manager’s writing desk.
Materials: metacrilate or welded metal body; pre-painted in these colours: sepia, black, dung, clear guano.

The Trade Union table – 2
Formally perfect in its traditional design, this meeting table was designed for the trade union representatives session, so they can be present but not see documents or reserved and compromising dossiers, as seen in sketch C.
Materials: top and leg in silver birch, or Bubinga, Cereira, Doussiè, Eucalyptus, Frakee, Imbuia, Kotò, Louropreto, Makoree, Elm, Padouk, Rosewood, Tuia, Regal Walnut, California Walnut, Canaletto Walnut, Plume Walnut, Briar Walnut… whatever you want.

The Spy-PC – 3
When every network-system or software is useless at checking the workers’ jobs, here is a very useful PC-station with one inclined mirror-lens. Also by passing quickly in front of the PC-station it is possible to see if the workers are indeed working or are they just surfing the internet.
Materials: polycarbonated extruder and glazed non-reflex mirror with the effect of a “zinoidal carbon lens”.

Materials Glossary (for plank-head)
Planks – Basic material for the assembly of heads.
Exstrusion – The extruder is an intruder used to abuse, but under the lamp-shade there is my blade, so go away or I’ll rain on your day, or else I’ll call the cops or get my pops!
Frakee – Typical tropical tree, grows beside Makoree, covering an undergrowth of Kotò, yippie!
Guano – A product rich in phosphorous and nitrogen coming from natural deposits of bird excrements commonly used as a fertilizer.
Metacrilate – A metaphisical material, onthologically it could be described as a “monad” in the scenery of “Crilates”.
Polycarbonated – See “Termoforming”.
Pre-painted- The “Pre-painting” is a yoga practice which works like this (more or less):
First worker : “Bollocks! We gotta paint all them?”
Second worker: “Okey dokey, grab a seat and we’ll see…..”
Termoforming – See “Polycarbonated”.
Wengè – Rare and precious wood, very dark; in Botswy language “Wengè” means “Entrè”

* The English translation, by John Mc Cann M.A (Irish musician),
was bargained with drum lessons by the author.