Urban Grimoire: Sabotage

Sabotage is among my favourite magical acts. 'Magical act?', you may say, but its nature as magic is shown by two things. The opposite of sabotage is compliance to external authority rather than a personally-defined authority, and also the frisson of horror that the word sabotage brings out in the compliant. What could be more magical than that?

There are three specific (and completely legal) examples of sabotage I want to consider. All are designed to stop the powers that be getting what they want. Perhaps I should say that these powers are what the New Testament would call the powers of this world: the powers militating against the world that we want, in witchy terms, or the world that ignores the Kingdom, in Christian terms. (Don't worry, if I haven't offended you yet, I'll get to you shortly).

1. The first, which is my favourite, is malicious compliance. The powers of this world want us to comply, but because they're self-centred can never judge the full consequences of this. There are few pleasures to compare with fully complying to the letter of a policy or law where this compliance has the opposite effect intended.

2. The second is exercising choice. This will sound like a funny one but the Achilles heel of capitalism is that it has to have the appearance of consumer choice built in while actually only a few individuals profit. In the past I've compared this to a game of Monopoly where to 'win' you build up streets and properties in particular colours. You sabotage this by buying streets in different colours which prevents everyone from getting a monopoly so that nobody can win. Out here in the real world people tend to moan that a few people are as rich as Croesus (or even defend them for their 'industry' lol) but still prop up this monopoly by shopping at their site. So the way to sabotage this is to put your purchasing power into alternatives, shopping elsewhere, using different software, and so on. Another example would be to shop in different shops if you can rather than stick to one. There is a reason retailers use tricks to get you coming back and call this 'loyalty': loyalty is Capitalist for subservience.

3. The final one is a way to sabotage our First Past the Post voting system which was designed to create a two-party system where political power only swings between two parties and nobody else can get the necessary majority to form the government, hence why successive governments have refused to reform the system. The way to sabotage this is never to vote for the first or second most popular parties in your constituency (you can judge what these are by looking at successive election results, and of course the exception to this is the Green Party which you should absolutely vote for because it fucking terrifies the main parties). Instead you would stubbornly vote for a minority party which is acceptable to you and continue to do so. At this point people will try to shame you into compliance by telling you that nobody votes for minority parties and you're wasting your vote. However there is a strange thing about human voting behaviour that people tend to vote for what their neighbours vote for, so by sabotaging the system you stand both to change your neighbours' behaviour without them realising you're doing it and horrify the major parties.

And what could be more magical than that?