Insecurity and precarity have developed into normalized states in our living worlds. On the individual level we experience unstable labor conditions and the increasingly dispersed nature of social networks, while in geopolitical terms, terrorism and immigration have brought the rhetoric of securitization to fever pitch. Anxieties to secure ourselves imprint our lives in an omnipresent manner, ranging from interpersonal to international scale. The rise of these extraordinary measures of securitization is in this form and extent unprecedented in human history.
We currently live in a world of over 7.3 billion inhabitants, but what do we really share? Starting with our collective anxieties about the unexpected consequences of the “sharing economy,” this stream reflects on the short history of what has become the dominant and most pervasive contemporary meme in the field of exchange between human beings.
Five years after the tumultuous political events of 2011, which triggered a series of dispersed yet medially choreographed acts of resistance, the larger patterns and nature of global activism and individual action are in need of assessment and reinvention. From Tahrir to Taksim, from Occupy to Indignados, from the Twitter and Facebook Revolutions to the Blackberry Riots, the Anxious to Act stream confronts the events behind us as well as the fundamentally paradoxical challenges of action and activism in the muddy now.