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Occupy Wall Street's tiny Zuccotti Park inspired a global archipelago of Occupy offshoots (including a small but long-lived encampment in Hong Kong), but Turkey's Occupy Gezi and Hong Kong's more recent Occupy movement mark an inflection point. Sustained, fiercely local mass movements are tapping into and extending a new global language of protest. Both in Turkey and in China, fearmongers and propagandists blamed malicious foreign influences for the protests, but the reality is less sinister and more significant. Occupy is serving as an open-source template for dissent, a transparent and adaptable playbook for organizing global movements with diverse aims and values. By turns autonomous and hyperconnected, the template is an uncanny fit for our precarious, plugged-in life.

Modern linguistics is founded on a radical premise: the equality of all languages. "All languages have equal expressive power as communication systems," writes Steven Pinker. "Every grammar is equally complex and logical and capable of producing an infinite set of sentences to express any thought one might wish to express," says a recent textbook. "The outstanding fact about any language is its formal completeness," wrote Edward Sapir, adding elsewhere for rhetorical effect: "When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam."

Modern linguistics is founded on a radical premise: the equality of all languages. 'All languages have equal expressive power as communication systems,' writes Steven Pinker. 'Every grammar is equally complex and logical and capable of producing an infinite set of sentences to express any thought one might wish to express,' says a recent textbook. 'The outstanding fact about any language is its formal completeness,' wrote Edward Sapir, adding elsewhere for rhetorical effect: 'When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam.'. Adapted from the source document.

The suicide nets are still there. Foxconn, the giant electronics manufacturing subcontractor, installed them in 2010, a year when fourteen workers died after jumping from the ledges and windows of crowded dormitories. In addition to the wide mesh nets, stretched low over the streets of Foxconn's company towns, the corporation has twenty-four-hour "care centers," "no suicide agreements," and a psychological test to screen out potentially suicidal workers, charged to the job applicant. It has raised wages signifi cantly, but only in the face of runaway inflation, steep hikes in the minimum wage, and mounting worker unrest. Media attention and pressure from Apple, one of its main customers, backed up by a program of regular factory audits, seem to be driving incremental improvements in working conditions.

The suicide nets are still there. Foxconn, the giant electronics manufacturing subcontractor, installed them in 2010, a year when fourteen workers died after jumping from the ledges and windows of crowded dormitories. In addition to the wide mesh nets, stretched low over the streets of Foxconn's company towns, the corporation has twenty-four-hour "care centers," "no suicide agreements," and a psychological test to screen out potentially suicidal workers, charged to the job applicant. It has raised wages significantly, but only in the face of runaway inflation, steep hikes in the minimum wage, and mounting worker unrest. Media attention and pressure from Apple, one of its main customers, backed up by a program of regular factory audits, seem to be driving incremental improvements in working conditions. But the real Foxconn story is unfolding elsewhere. The Taiwan-based firm is rapidly expanding from China's industrialized coast into its vast interior, establishing new production facilities in impoverished provinces such as Henan, Hubei, and Sichuan, far from the labor metropolis of Shenzhen, a dangerous Detroit in the making. Major expansion is also underway in Brazil, India, Mexico, Malaysia, and central Europe, notwithstanding the strong presence of unions in some of those locations. In a dramatic inversion, the company announced late last year that it would soon start manufacturing in the United States itself. Energy costs, access to markets, public relations, and wage stagnation in middle-income labor markets are all part of the equation. The geography of expansion also reflects a global leveling: wages in America's "right-to-work" states, the European periphery, and the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries are increasingly entering a similar range. At the same time, the drive to automate is intensifying, with Foxconn CEO Terry Gou promising to have a million robots (dubbed "Foxbots") working the assembly lines within the next few years. Delivering flexibility and scale at rock-bottom prices, Foxconn keeps pounding out the very real underpinnings of the New Economy, remaking global manufacturing in its own image, as did Ford or Toyota in very different times and places. Foxconn stands as the archetypal industrial firm for today's planet of slums. Adapted from the source document.

Introduction / by Ian Johnson -- Prologue: "All you want is money! All I want is revolution!" -- Part 1. Beijing -- The performance artist -- The massacre painter -- The idealist -- The arsonists -- The captain -- The squad leader -- The street fighter -- The hooligan -- The prisoner of conscience -- Part 2. Sichuan -- The animal tamer -- The accomplice -- The poet -- The prisoners -- The author -- Afterword: The last moments of Liu Xiaobo -- Appendix one: A guide to what really happened -- Appendix two: List of 202 people killed in the massacre -- Appendix three: List of 49 wounded or disabled in the massacre.

Through audio diaries and interviews, former SSRC fellow Sienna Craig and her collaborators chronicled the experiences of Himalayan New Yorkers during the pandemic. Many Himalayans live in central Queens, the epicenter of the Covid-19 outbreak in New York City. This essay shares the many challenges faced by the Himalayan community, not least their struggle to be seen as a "community" with its own needs. But it also emphasizes the responses of Himalayans in terms of collective self-help and making claims on city government for attention and essential services. https://items.ssrc.org/covid-19-and-the-social-sciences/covid-19-fieldnotes/negotiating-invisibility-at-the-epicenter-himalayan-new-yorkers-confront-covid-19/