“In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.” - Ursula le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

A city is a maelstrom of communication. Mired in advertisement upon advertisement, billboards and vast screens, on vehicles and shop fronts, every inch of space is sloganised, privatised, commodified. A city is a maelstrom, in particular, of corporate communication.

The PCSC Bill’s anti-trespass elements shrink the public’s access to private space, whilst public space is consumed more and more by the market. Next time you’re out, try to look around you without facing the private sphere; without being confronted by a car for sale, or bank account, or some new Uber rip off, each vying for your innermost wants and needs. Modern advertising is the largest and most effective propaganda machine ever created in human history. 

As a result, walking through a city, or town, or even many villages and parts of the countryside, you can begin to feel an overbearing sense of alienation. Long enclosed, taken, stolen, exploited. This place, its messages and stories, its words and symbols, do not belong to me, to us, but to private interests and investors. The world I live in is not mine; my home, TV, fridge is full of products, advertisements, slogans, which I must invite into my life to live. 

You find yourself becoming the world communicated to you; a living commodity, selling yourself in job markets, property markets, dating markets. Commodified in your labour and your leisure. Your phone, that device which lances through every aspect of your life like a second nervous system, learns you till it knows your dreams, then sells you back to yourself, simultaneously learning and making you. What David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession” has created what Guy Debord calls an “abundance of dispossession”- in other words, the world you inhabit is being stolen from you, and you
are reminded of it everywhere you look.
You begin to feel alienated even
from yourself.

Stickering it to the man

Stickering, then, is a source of radical joy for many. This space is my space! These slogans are my slogans! These drawings are my drawings, and I put them wherever I want! As Krupets and Vasileva write in their study of stickerers in St Petersburg, “Stickers are helping young Petersburgers build special relationships with the city, transforming it into their space: their home, their gallery,” theirs. Much like graffiti, or banner dropping, or subvertising, stickering breathes life into a barren lamp-post, vacuous advertisements for life insurance,  pissy back-alleys, concrete motorway bridges. The alien feels less alien when you’ve plastered yourself all over it. 

Politically, too, it’s been a way for fringe activists to slice through established communications routes. There isn’t a party political broadcast for the Solidarity Federation, and it’s not easy for the London Anti-Fascist Assembly to get a billboard campaign, nor do the Autonomous Design Group have many households putting their signs in the window around election time. 

As a result, stickering becomes a site for a living, fiery discourse, meeting you as you commute to work or do your shopping. The vacuous marketing strategies of the metropolis are subverted into angry appeals to the pedestrian conscience, each demanding your rage, empathy, dignity, in a cornucopia of ideology, a harsh ecology of various resistances, each debating each other. 

Of course, it’s interactive, democratic- the conservative passerby sees a “trouble with your landlord?” sticker and spends a futile minute of his time trying to rip it off with his fingernails; the immigrant school kid getting the bus scratches racist bile off the stop with their keys; the social ecologist re-sticks an Ursula le Guin quote that was unpeeling and
gets on her way to see a friend. 

Shooting the messenger

Enter the pandemic. City streets, usually filled with people vaguely absorbing vacant messages, are now emptied of people and filled with poignant messages- stay home, stop the virus, protect the NHS, protect your family, and so on. It’s what one sociologist called “heterotopic times”- other worldly, life flipped on its head- especially in the UK, US and Brazil as their governments presided over some of the worst death rates in the world. 

It created a superstructure of legislation,
a whirlwind of powerful, and often incomprehensible policy. Some of this policy, like banning assembly, is being enshrined into law, converting lockdowns from necessary, semi-consensual restrictions into a state of violent permanence. Police have taken lockdown restrictions to increase the violence of their methods, with stop and search rising 40% during lockdown, and all 270 prosecutions made under the coronavirus act dismissed, calling into question both the
act and the police response. How do you raise stop and search use by 40% when so many more people are staying indoors? 

For many people, it became clear that, much like (and interrelated to) the alien city, the world they were walking through- legally, medically, economically- was one they had a frighteningly small amount of control over. Most people feel disempowered to make changes to the legal and economic worlds they live in- labour movements, political parties, activist groups have been brought to their knees by a hostile media,
police and financial countermovement.

Possessed by what is not

As a resistance’s roots are systematically cut, it begins to regrow in many absurd forms. For instance, rather than challenging people exploiting the crisis, certain groups and individuals began to question the existence of the crisis at all. A group of people started making their own reality, rhetoric, stories around coronavirus- one which they could control, comprehend, and gain power through. In a world of immeasurably criminalised and broken resistance, it paved a new way to fight against the powerlessness they felt, out of old conspiracy theories and perverted anarchisms. Four distinct and intertwining movements arose- anti-lockdown, anti-mask, anti-vaccine, and complete covid denial. 

The foundations were already there- fascist, libertarian and other far-right groups were already mobilising, gathering the vulnerable and herding them into their marches, demos and social media pages. Far right governments, like Bolsonaro in Brazil, the Vox party in Spain, Modi in India- all were (are) dead set on denying the virus, its extent, the necessity of lockdowns, or even masks. Capital was putting pressure on each corridor of power they could find to ensure markets continued to expand as normal- to avoid, or at least mitigate, the “new normal”. 

It’s only natural that out of these powerful top-down movements, with a powerful cultural bedrock of ableist individualists, also came a grassroots social movement that mirrored it. Painfully subverting all narratives from health officials into a convoluted, provocative amalgamation of sloganeering, theories and bad-faith arguments- the covid “truther” movement was born. 

Walking through Piccadilly Gardens once, I stopped to watch a covid “truther” rally, where speakers ranted their latest borrowed tales from a niche quack doctor about masks throttling toddlers. A woman began to speak, who said she wouldn’t usually speak, talking about “how good it was to hug people again,” to live without lockdowns and the virus, to leave her house and free herself of this confusing plague. She was the first earnest speaker I’d seen there- lockdown had broken her, and she’d found, through online forums, conversations with the like minded, and stickers, a quack liberation. 

As these rallies were slowly broken down and (to some extent) criminalised, and explicit covid truther movements were forced to flee from big social media platforms into encrypted or further right forums and chatrooms- in Gab, Telegram, Dosbods- covid deniers found themselves with a furious new message,
and limited means to spread it.

A thorn without a rose

From this underbelly came the mobilisation of a “decentralised” printing press which could distribute itself into every corner of the digitised world. Stickering, our old subversive friend, became the means of seizing public space and public attention, without the power structures of censorship in many other public forums. 

Send in the quacks (or at least, their mouthpiece). The White Rose is an international network of covid denial spread across (primarily) the western world. They’re apparently decentralised, but they still seem to have a core of activists who design and send out the stickers to the Telegram chats. They have clear roots in fascistic groups like Project Veritas, The Hundred Handers, alongside links to far-right social media platforms such as Gettr, Gab, and Dosbods. Even without that, their members (in their much promoted telegram groups) continually reference antisemitic tropes (the New World Order being a favourite), and beyond fascists their demographic tends to be libertarians, new-agers and seasoned conspiracy theorists. Within their ranks are also people new to all these camps, fresh blood looking for material escape from the pandemics condition. 

It’s been much remarked- to much uproar- that they stole the name of an anti-fascist German resistance group during the second world war, who were sentenced to death for distributing flyers. It doesn’t end there- they have stickers stating “The Nazi’s had a phrase that covered all abuses of the state- it’s for your safety!” Much of their rhetorical power is rooted in careless, brash, insensitive hyperbole around oppression, which makes the message stick out impressively from the sanitised messaging of most organised media campaigns. Masks are poetically called “muzzles,” vaccinated children is named as child abuse, and one sticker set simply states: 

Experimental

Genocide

Assisted Suicide

Depopulation

Extermination

It might get an edgy Ginsberg wannabe a £5 book voucher at a poetry slam, but the streets give it a different look. Put across adverts of smiling, artificial faces, drinking things you can’t afford and wearing clothes you’d have to sell your car for, it’s an incredibly striking contradiction. The alien, numb, maximalist bodies you’ve been desensitised to are given scratched-off stuck-on voices that scream murder. Much like the Doctor Who episode “Rose” where the mannequins start disintegrating people with lazers, the intensive yet inoffensive advertising world is made intensive and offensive. 

A series of quack doctors have taken over our streets, our friends, relatives and co-workers hearts and minds, devoured feelings of neglect, and spat them out on every surface they can find, rhetorical saliva corroding skulls and infecting our capacity to fear, to feel neglect, to cope. Using stickering’s capacity to transform and reclaim the conversations littered across the walls of our cities, quacks have taken advantage of a broken labour movement and a fractured activist scene to create their own hollow stories, which promise control, liberation, and respect.

Nightmares of fiction from nightmares of reality

Rejecting quack doctors, as long as they stand against communities helping themselves against covid, is a call for disability justice, racial justice, and anti-fascism. It means the ability for immunocompromised, elderly, and other vulnerable people to live in peace, and takes people out of miserable quagmires of conspiracy and falsehood. However, it’s important to remember that whilst this movement has only harmful answers, it also asks significant questions of the pandemic response. How can we trust a profit-ran vaccine programme from pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, or GSK, who played such a fundamental role in the opioid crisis? How can we trust states not to take advantage of lockdowns to push further police powers? How can we trust employers and job centres not to let us starve whilst we can’t work? How can we trust the messaging which torments every surface, infiltrates every part of our lives with messages which do not serve us, and only serve to take our money & commodify our rest? And how exactly can we fight back, with a heavily weakened labour movement, and activist groups being dramatically criminalised? 

To all questions but the latter, we can’t. Distrust and disempowerment forms much of the paralysing fear and rage that feeds the “truther” movement- nearly every sticker preaches on liberty, autonomy, and rights. Authority is smothering- particularly, for example, for many global majority
communities in the UK, which have been hardest hit by the pandemic and are also some of the least vaccinated. But so many are up against medical racism and a system of employment which puts them disproportionately as underpaid, vulnerable “key workers”- how do you put your faith in a system directly opposed to your needs? To your health? To your life? What if that system is shown on every surface, every street you walk down, every corner of the internet? And what if that system is in charge of a pandemic response?

What is to be done?

The obvious response is to work against it. In this sense, this moment has so much revolutionary potential, yet so little, such damaged revolutionary infrastructure. This leaves space for the White Rose, the Hundred Handers, and other groups, to fill the power vacuum and build their own “revolutionary” infrastructure- in online communities, a printing press, and an activist network. The most significant move, then, would be to create y/our own, decentralised, counter-offensive.

There are larger than life (yet possible) solutions, which you can find in theory and practice around the world and through time- abolition of advertisement, a true people’s healthcare system, seizure and abolition of state and capital, and so on. But in this case, destickering the propaganda arm of the White Rose and their fascisitic ilk, alongside building y/our own ways of subvertising, is a way of building power and reclaiming space for real, important discourse about our autonomy over our lives, as opposed to another advert for a sofa you don’t need. Buy stickers and posters online (try the Autonomous Design Group), use wheatpaste (google it- it’s easy) to make your own stickers, even take a leaf out of the white rose’s handbook and buy your own Brother printer. Stickering, graffiti, subvertising, the banner drop- these are attempts to build a world where what we communicate to each other is ours, decentralised, not dependent on your wealth or power but on having something to say. The good, the bad and the ugly- these walls are ours. 

In small ways, we must build infrastructure upon which we can reclaim our lives. Infrastructure which isn’t based on lies, fascism and ableism, nor state and capital, but communal, militant care. A huge part of this is in communication- seizing the mic from advertising barons and quack doctors, who control the narrative of our cities, homes and private lives. 

In sum- No more quack doctors!The rich and ancient history of nail art is little documented. Ancient Babylonian military leaders commanded the services of up to ten servants to paint their nails, with the aim of instilling fear in their enemy; in Egypt, during a similar period, the colouring of nails was reserved for the Queen, whose attendants used henna to dye nails a desirable, rust coloured hue. Embraced by the elites, this decoration was provisioned by their servants (or manicurists). The 1980s saw both a broad feminisation of the workforce, and an influx of immigration of Korean and Vietnamese manicurists to the US and UK. These compounded to create a proliferation of more affordable female, immigrant run, walk-in salons. As was true of ancient times, it broadly remains a working class, immigrant, woman who files and polishes their clients nails into what are often seen as superficially frivolous status symbols. While the invention of DIY polish in the latter half of the 20st century allowed women to adorn their own nails at home, this act of self-care largely remains a two-person job. 

From 2014 to 2019 we saw a definitive 56% increase in the number of nail salons in the UK. More accessible than ever for the consumer it was, and is, importantly also easy for one to become a nail tech. You can walk away from a day long course in manicure, helpfully free in Scotland with the intention of qualifying people struggling to find a job into stable employment, with an entry level qualification allowing you to ultimately start your own business or seek employment that very same day. 

Yet this level of qualification is just the necessary base coat (indulge me) for a career in nail art. Narratives that perpetuate the perception of nail art and manicure as an unskilled job are unproductive and, ultimately, dangerous. Women’s work has long been undervalued and therefore underpaid, under the guise that the skills involved are innate. If women have always cleaned, groomed and provided care, both physical and emotional, in their domestic environment with no recompense, then it is only too easy to pay very little for these same services when performed in the field of employment. For many immigrant women these attitudes are compounded by racist perceptions that they are only qualified for unskilled work. Vietnamese women workers in the nail industry have suffered at the hands of these violent associations. Where a strong association is made between race and types of employment, attitudes that the skills involved are in some way natural or easily learnt are exploited to excuse systematic underpaying.

The breadth of skill necessary in the provision of a manicure wasn’t clear to me until I started performing it myself. The provisional nail art of ancient Egypt (some well-placed beetle juice or ground up leaves) is long gone. Expensive, and sometimes high-risk, equipment and products are involved. The worker’s hand today, is replaced by a whirring hand file, and the simple application of shellac polish has been replaced by demand for long acrylic nails, that necessitate the forming of plastic polymers to extend the natural nail. All the while perfectly toned conversation must be upkept, complete with recollection of the details of the client’s lives- often achieved, I found out during my training, by making physical notes to self- ‘Janice- Mallorca holiday, sister’s divorce’. Perhaps not as organic as we’d like to think. Often unacknowledged, this is emotional labour: resembling a transaction reminiscent of a therapist and their patient, a job that’s exponentially better paid. This is not to say your, frankly intimate, hour spent holding hands with your nail lady is without any authenticity or genuine warmth, but many of us know, from experience, that customer service requiring a smile can be exhausting, and therefore should be acknowledged as such. This is another example of a skill women, especially women of colour, are required to learn earlier than men, and with more severe consequences. 

In 2020 the Tiktok algorithm gifted me a video of the first iteration of the fully automated manicure. Sceptical of my source, I investigated ‘the robot manicure’, a distinctive alternative to the emotionally supportive, artistic, nail tech. Company ‘Clockwork’, currently based in San Francisco, have in fact created a manicuring machine that scans one’s nails and then paints them accurately with your colour of choice. Seemingly, only a stone’s throw from scanning your mood and deciding a fitting colour for you. In equal measures alarming and appealing, this demonstrates a potential future of automated beauty services, as we’re seeing across manufacturing and services. 

My mind goes to Aaron Bastani’s luxury communist utopia, aided by ‘full automation’. If we had a shortened working week, alleviated from undesirable, low paid jobs by machines, a manicure provided by a robot seems like just the sort of luxury we’d embrace. It leads us to question that if the reality of the budget people can allocate to a manicure does not match what manicurists deserve to be paid, is this a welcome, more ethical alternative? Or does it suggest an unwelcome dehumanisation of services that are important because of their, very human, root in self-care and expression? Then there are practical flaws with this automated utopia: the robot manicure can only paint the nail, not file shape or form it. Technology, health and safety hold back this robot dream from filling the boots of the human nail tech.  

In the cost of living crisis we are surviving today, where we choose to spend our income is especially pertinent. Perhaps a manifestation of ‘the lipstick effect,’ where cosmetic sales rise in times of financial crisis, whilst elsewhere spending declines- people continue to get their nails done, despite everything. This suggests that manicures matter, and in turn, the work and value of those who provide them. I would argue there is no need to inherently problematise the purchase of a manicure; there is, however, a need to better appreciate all that is involved in the service, paid or unpaid. If we keep this in mind, a work culture that has been historically and systematically and ignored
might just have its moment.