before you encourage people to get arrested as a form of protest, think
And even if you think you’re just in for a dull afternoon because you’re ‘privileged’, you could be very wrong. What you could be in for is trumped up charges, months of court proceedings, your identity leaked to the media, intelligence agencies monitoring your phone, your name in an anti-terrorism file, and much more.
Protesting and taking action involves necessary risks, including at times the risk of arrest. When we decide to take action against the state, we accept that that might have unpleasant consequences, or life-changing consequences. But we limit those consequences when we can.
Which is why activists prepare, meet without phones, encrypt their online communication, wear masks and gloves, organize a legal team, organize jail support, make sure every activist knows not to talk to police, etc etc.
Because our lives matter, and because the more of us are safe and free, the better we can fight on.
Think before you choose a form of ‘civil disobedience’ that involves the certainty of arrest. That is not your only option and organizations that tell you that this is how activism must be are lying to you. There are more effective ways to resist and people that can help you do it. You can disrupt the system with a good chance of getting away with it.
Before Jarret Stopforth takes his first sip of coffee, he adds cream and sugar to mask the bitterness.
But then, he thought, why settle for a regular cup of joe? So the food scientist decided to re-engineer coffee, brewing it without the bitterness — or the bean. “I started thinking, we have to be able to break coffee down to its core components and look at how to optimize it,” he explains.
Stopforth, who has worked with other food brands like Chobani, Kettle & Fire and Soylent, partnered with entrepreneur Andy Kleitsch to launch Atomo. The pair turned a Seattle garage into a brewing lab, and spent four months running green beans, roasted beans and brewed coffee through gas and liquid chromatography to separate and catalog more than 1,000 compounds in coffee to create a product that had the same color, aroma, flavor and mouthfeel as coffee.
