Good Trouble is “a digital publication about the movements standing up and fighting for a better world. It looks through the lens of arts and culture at the stories of individuals and groups around the world pushing for equality, liberty, justice and climate sustainability. It celebrates resistance with all its beauty, humour and contradictions, because life is messy and serious business can be fun.”

So no wonder, they featured my collaborative work with Sabine Taeubner THE SCHOOL OF POPULISM (follow your pet):

OBEY YOUR CUTE, FURRY MASTERS: THE POPULISM OF CAT GIFS

Have you ever wanted the complex nature of populist political strategies and their inherent danger to democracy explained to you via the medium of psychedelic cat GIFs? Yes, us too, so it’s lucky that FollowYour.Pet has come into existence.

Boris Eldagsen & Sabine Taeubner, two artists from Berlin, have identified “10 populist strategies and demagogic methods that have been recently employed in politics.” They’ve then identified the most popular web content (take a guess) and employed this as a method of seeding their explanation of these strategies out into the web at large, with the aim of drawing people back to their site in order to further popular understanding of these demagogic tools. Obey your cute, furry masters.

“Cats run the internet,” said the artists in an email. “They appeal to our emotions, short-circuit our brain and go directly into our unconscious conditioning. Just as populism does: It appeals to deep instincts to blow our minds.”

For cat GIFs and demagogic strategies in abundance, FollowYour.Pet

RODERICK STANLEY

Writer and editor based in New York.