Crimethinc's J20 Protest Simulator

from crimethinc.com

After extensive research, we’ve prepared an interactive narrative simulation—a Choose Your Own Adventure game—based on the experiences a person could have participating in the black bloc march against Trump’s inauguration and the notorious court case that followed it. Obviously, this is a work of historical fiction—we know you would never participate in a black bloc, dear reader—but we have meticulously constructed the narratives from the details of real events. We hope it will serve an educational as well as historical function.

Click Here to Play

The simulation doesn’t reflect the story of every single protester or arrestee, nor does it systematically account for the dramatically different experiences people had interacting with the police and court system according to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and physical mobility. However, we collected narratives from a variety of vantage points, and the advantage of this format over the linear reportback model is that it allows for multiple perspectives and layers of reality.

The game is scored along two axes—risk and solidarity. Risk assesses the degree of danger you expose yourself to via your actions in the streets and your decisions in the legal process; solidarity measures the extent to which you disrupt Trump’s inauguration and contribute to the safety of other protesters and defendants. Try playing to minimize your risk while maximizing your solidarity score; then, as a learning exercise, see what happens when you try to maximize the risks you expose yourself to. The lessons of this game may not hold true for every demonstration or court case in the future, but they do roughly reflect what happened in Washington, DC on January 20, 2017 and afterwards.

Starting on January 20, 2019, we will publish a series of articles discussing the actions on J20 and the legal struggle that followed it. Stay tuned!

To learn more about the demonstrations during Trump’s inauguration and the court cases that followed:

DefendJ20—The support website for J20 defendants

DisruptJ20—Report on the blockades that morning

J20 Live Updates—Our live coverage of anarchist resistance during Trump’s inauguration

There are 9 Comments

"You decide not to go to Washington, DC on January 20. Who wants to get tear-gassed and end up on a government watch list? Maybe you’ll go to the local Women’s March on January 21. Maybe you’ll spend the entire Trump presidency indoors, hiding under your bed.

In August 2017, you find out that Trump’s Department of Justice is attempting to subpoena the IP addresses of everyone who has ever visited disruptJ20.org—all 1.3 million of them. Just visiting that website has made you a suspect."

lol no, coz I was reading it behind Tor without javascripts, and also not using Facebook for activism. Come up with some better argument against not going to D.C. on January 20th.

YET... even with all the Alt-Right stalking and investigating on him, they still haven't found the guy who punched Richard Spencer. 4chan fascist idiots thought for a moment they found him, but failed https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-dead-guy-4chan-blamed-for-punching-ric...

So yeah, this particular guy was indeed in D.C. for some action (who knows, perhaps he was already a D.C. resident!), but the fact he didn't rely on your herd politics made him very hard to catch, yet extremely successful at the same time. Here's another invitation to crime-think on how individualism pwned you, once again.

You really showed crimethinc. Theyre so dumb for not adding a clarification about tor or every other thing someone trying to be a dick on the internet could pick out.

Oh and that is some great insight on the risks of punching someone vs going to a publicly announced black bloc. Youre a smart cookie.

lol wow yeah i can't believe that crimethinc didn't provide a limitless array of choices to represent every single individual's experience in this GAME.

why would they need to? i mean we all know there is only one best, right, correct way to be a proper strugglistx. this game simply teaches us what that way is. amirite? fuck yeah!

what the hell is up with crimethinc these days? I wish they would return to the good old days of traveling all over the country handing out fart bongs and copies of Evasion. what the fuck went wrong with them?

You can't just give away fart bongs, it's unsustainable! Gotta get a thousand broke millennials to each send you a patreon dollar that they definitely woulda/shoulda spent on groceries if they still believed in tomorrows!

I heard Wolfi is doing a new translation of Evasion, it's gonna be the fart bong event of the decade.

Remember to call in to the show with all your best troll material and see if you can hang in the kitchen with the snark heat!

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