Spreading signals of disorder accomplishes a number of things. It
increases our tactical strength, as we hone a practice of vandalism,
property destruction, public occupation, and rowdiness.
It interrupts the narrative of social peace, and creates the indisputable
fact of people opposed to the present system and fighting
against it. It means the reason for this fight, the anarchist critiques,
have to be taken more seriously because they already exist in the
streets. In this way, the attacks create the struggle as a fact in a way
that would otherwise only be possible in times of greater social
upheaval and movement. To have this effect, the signals of disorder
need to explicitly link themselves to a recognizable social practice,
one that would otherwise be ignored or chopped up into disconnected
eccentricities of lifestyle. People in the neighborhood must
know that the graffiti and broken windows are the doing of “the
anarchists” or some other group that has a public existence, because
signals of disorder that can be isolated as phenomena of urban
white noise can be legitimately and popularly policed with techniques
reserved for inanimate objects and aesthetic aberrations;
they would rub us off the streets with the same chemical rigor as
they clean graffiti off the walls. ...
...Whenever we can break their little laws with impunity, we show
that the State is weak. When advertising is defaced and public
space is liberated, we show that capitalism is not absolute.