You are in the Cage unscripted. Australia is on holiday. The Summer that Will Not End in our lifetimes has begun. It is hot. It is very hot. And the Endless Summer has just begun.
As we huddle in the air conditioning, or wallow in the kid’s wading pool draping wet towels over ourselves to survive the heat we also come to terms with the passing of the social democratic state. The social safety net built with the blood of the unionists, the suffragettes and environmentalists is being dismantled before our eyes.
While we will report and comment on its demise, The focus of The Cage is not to lament its passing but to find ways to build a new people power movement a movement built on community, a movement that operates independently to undermine the controls placed on us in the Cage, a movement that loosens those restrictions and builds a robust, hopeful, loving society that will outlast the death throes of capitalism.
We are here to agitate, educate and organize. We are here to build the post-apocalyptic society into which we bring the new-borns, the to-be-borns and each other. Not a cheery vision perhaps, but at real one, one of courage, one of robust abundance, one based on love, solidarity and the power within. We uncompromisingly refuse to enslave ourselves for the masters of the Cage, even as we use the infrastructure of the Cage to survive.
This project is not secret. There are few secrets in this era of total surveillance. Every phone call you make, every text message you send, every social media post you make is collected, collated and analysed. Our task is not to overthrow the emerging network of networks in which we are simply nodes, it is to engage, evolve and redesign it for a better future.