Padhraig Nolan's Blog

Who Feedz the Feederz : Anarchy on the 46A



Among the visual dross and wasteful clutter of environmentally hateful corriboard leers which are currently blooming across our byeways, I spotted this nice little agit-prop-grafik on my morning commute. Can't say I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, but it struck me as a beautifully simple, integral piece of work - crafted, thought-provoking and opportunistic. The bubble reads "If you think it is humiliating to be ruled, how much more degrading is it to have to choose your masters?" and the credit is "Courtesy of the Feederz Department for Anti-Public relations." I'm not a sure if the 'choose your masters' quote can be attributed to Frank Discussion himself - any ideas?

The Feederz were one of those anarchist punk concepts that seem so terrifyingly elegant compared to today's cookie-cutter rebels. Lesser known on this side of the pond, for me they sat right in there alongside Jello Biafra, Throbbing Gristle, Crass and all those other Re:search performance-orientated anarchy/industry crossovers. Frankly, for a quiet teenager growing up in rural Wexford the discovery of these would-be destroyers of the free world was both exhilarating and quite bloody scary!

The assault rifle diatribes, blood spattered venues, ribald pseudonyms and General Shocktaktik feel a bit distant now, post-marilyn-manson-the-brand. Especially seeing as the capitalist-godhead-lackeys are doing such a good job of f*cking it all up themselves anyway. And yet?

We've seen renewed engagement from the anarchic spirit of late ; the Mayday riots in Turkey, Germany & Greece didn't get all that much coverage in the mainstream media. Always quite happy to propagate the 'self-styled anarchists' label in favour of the reason behind the protest - with nary any mention of 'self-styled democrats'. Of course outlets like Indymedia have their own editorial bias - but one of the legacies of our stuttering information age looks like the sure proliferation of smaller, idealistic nuclear media channels - information cells? - stealing a march on 'Big Media'.

Just not sure how one should approach a similar dismantling of 'Big Politics'? Other than with a Big Hammer, of course.