Complacent’s been a leader in online activism and community building but has also been an initiator of creative stunts that have continually challenged the protest status quo.

From dousing hoards of shoppers in pools of dollar bills to piling partiers into trains, Complacent Nation’s record of bombastic assertions shows that its upcoming finale on July 29th will be nothing short of explosive.

Creator of Complacent Nation, Will Etundi, shares his sentiments:

After a long run, Complacent Nation is finally coming to an end. How did this activist organization begin?

Complacent Nation was a personal project that I started six or seven years ago. The idea behind it was to make protests sexy and attractive. Instead of being anti-everything, it would be an engaging street party that would get people out and excited about an issue.

What activist organizations were you working with before Complacent?

I was involved with reclaim the streets for several years, and out of that there was still something missing. I really believed in direct activism and in community organizing, which I did for my day job at the time. But, for my night side, I wanted to do something that was a little bit more focused on culture.

Why the cultural focus?

What I noticed with all these protests was that the protesters would be telling people what was wrong and that they needed to change things, and people would watch the protestors with their Starbucks coffees and their gap jeans and not be phased. They’d look at us protesting and they’d be completely satisfied. I felt their attitude was, “Why would I want to change this lifestyle I have? I’m completely comfortable.” In order to get people to recognize the message of community organizers and activists we had to first get through that culture of complacency. That’s where compacent.org came from.

Who does Complacent Nation deem complacent? The people on the outside of the protests? The regular New Yorkers?

There’s a whole spectrum of people who are on the fringes that don’t agree with everything that’s happening right now. They see that there are some major things gone wrong in our society, from environmental issues to social issues, to economic issues, but they haven’t quite found the place in themselves to step into the streets to become activists or to become organizers. They haven’t made that commitment yet. What I want to do is get to that fringe of people, to really focus on the younger side of that fringe, from age 20-35, and get them excited in a way that’s fun and engaging and works within the rubric of what they understand as far as media messaging, parties and excitement. From there it segues into a more progressive local movement.

Why do you focus on youth? When I think of complacency I think of older people whose minds are already set in their ways and who tend to have a lot of power at the polls.

It’s mostly because the youth are the people I feel I can reach out to. I don’t know how to reach out to 65 year old people in the Midwest. I really focus on media and culture in New York City. It’s the media capital of the world, after all, and one hopes that what you do will have a ripple effect outside of the city.

In retrospect, do you feel you’ve achieved what you planned to?

Not really, no. It’s an endless type of thing. Challenging culture is an open question. There’s really no attainable, quantifiable goal. Also, I started when I was twenty years old. It was a place to experiment on different ideas on how to get a message out or how to shock people. It’s been six years of experimentation and I’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. Somehow through the whole process a significant following has developed. I’ve decided to take all of those assets and lessons learned and start a new project and do it in a really intentional and focused way.

What were some of the things that worked and didn’t work for getting a message out?

What worked great with reclaim the streets and with Complacent Nation was inspiring people to go out and do their own thing. We did video projections on the fourth of July two years ago of images that people had sent in. The images were of what the new America looked like to them. This was right after the Iraq war started. We then produced a video which we posted online that showed people how to make their own video projections. This got a huge response and we got lots of emails from people all over the country who were inspired to do their own video projections. Outside of everything else, that’s the most important thing that can happen because it can create an exponential effect.

Do you look to inspire everyone in the political spectrum to act on their beliefs or do you hope to inspire those with political beliefs similar to your own?

A lot of both. I’d say it’s like 60/40. The main goal of Complacent Nation has always been to create a dialog. When one side is too dominant, no matter which side it is, it’s going to lead to a bad situation. One of the problems of the left is that it doesn’t allow itself to be challenged by outside ideas. It listens to itself too much. When conservative people get as inspired and riled by us as progressive people, that comes out to something that is hopefully positive. But, the goal of the entire process has always been to inspire progressive political thinking and that’s mostly what has come out of our work.

Tell me about one of your projects.

One of our boldest projects was the money project, which was the opening project of Complacent Nation. The idea with this project was to challenge traditional activism, but also to challenge ourselves. We did it on the day after Thanksgiving, which is also the biggest shopping day of the year. This is also the day when fur protesters go out in front of Macys and hold up signs with bloody animals on them and scream at people. I always saw that as the antithesis of effective protest.

The anti-fur protestors you mean? Why?

Because the anti-fur people are so alienating and they push so hard against people and act so self-righteous by holding up these signs in these little tight police pins. There’s a lot of fur protest I respect, but that I don’t. In fact, I’ve seen people react to them and then go and buy a fur just to spite the demonstrators.

What was the money project about, then?

I started it off by throwing a huge party the week before Thanksgiving where everybody was asked to pay $7 in one dollar bills and they weren’t told why. We then stamped each dollar bill, which ended up being about $3,000, with the word “Satisfied?” Then we crumpled up the bills and stuffed them into a big black bag, put on a suit and a mask, and went to Herald Square and 34th Street around the corner from the anti-fur protestors, under the shadow of Macys and Toys ‘R Us. We stood on a telephone booth and threw the money out onto the street for about 15 minutes. It created quite a scene. It was kind of a young, crazy act.

When compared to the fur protestors, though, your stunt was much less obvious in purpose.

The idea was, the people who were there were scrambling for these falling dollars. When they get them they read “Satisfied?” on them, and they start to think. That moment when they see that word breaks the trip between Toys ‘R Us and Macys. They grab the falling dollars and are then asked this question. So there’s that moment for the people there. But, the whole thing was filmed and was put on the site.

So, it was a combinatorial protest that kept on making an impact even after it was over. Interesting.

The video clip went around the web and it kind of explained the concept a bit more. That sparked a lot of discussion. The main focus was to get that idea out there online and to get people engaged in the discussion in a way that doesn’t force the questions but inspires thought about questions like: What is activism? What is protest? What is consumer culture? Some people were deeply inspired, even more so than I expected them to be. A lot of people, too, were deeply pissed off, mostly because they thought we could have used that money for something more beneficial. But the best part was that a lot of people thought that the whole thing made their ideas seem feasible to actualize.

And do you feel that activism is taking a step in the right direction by being more focused on the after-effect than on making obvious impacts while they occur?

I don’t really know what to say about activism. No one really knows what to do or what works. I felt during the elections and the Republican National Convention that we did everything we could possibly do and it didn’t work. We worked the full spectrum of approaches, from really savvy media work to community-based organizing. We worked towards direct action, but unfortunately it’s hard to see what came out of all that. Though an infrastructure was built within the community, it was hard to see any kind of quantifiable goal being attained. It’s easier to organize people in the internet age, get people moved much more quickly, but to what affect is yet to be determined.

Your new focus now in your life after Complacent Nation is?

It’s going to be TheDanger.com. It’s continuing a lot of the ideas of complacent, only with a much sharper focus. The thing I always felt challenged by with Complacent Nation was that it had this accusation in the name. When I started it, I was kind of looking in as well as looking out. It was self-referential, implying that we have to challenge ourselves but that we also have to challenge those around us. It was this complex fuzzy idea that worked, but what I’m looking to do now is something much tighter and much more specific with a more clear story arc.

Why call it TheDanger.com?

TheDanger.com is all about life at risk. Through risk we grow. Through risk we bring change. It’s about thinking or talking about ideas that don’t necessarily make us comfortable. It’s about dangerous art. It’s about dangerous moments.

Encouraging risk, then?

Encouraging risk and the whole spectrum of what that means. It’s not just about physical risk but about challenging the status quo and ideas that we accept at face value. I think that right now we’re a nation sick on safety. We are a people who are trying to live with integrity in a world that’s clearly gone awry. I think that protest, especially since the war and the RNC, has gotten to the point where we’re so anemic that we can’t possibly be affective. Marching in the streets isn’t making any change. It isn’t exciting anybody but people are still doing it. Its time to try something radically different, and that’s what TheDanger.com is about.

Do you practice what you preach in the sense that you allow yourself to be submersed in the ideology of right-wing conservatives?

Yes. I read a lot of stuff on the web about conservative viewpoints. The launch of this project is that we’re going to get a veggie oil bus and drive across country, thus exposing ourselves even more to that other side. But our goal is really to engage this nation with danger.

How are you going to do that?

We’re going to do poster and sticker campaigns that we’ll spread across the southern cities and the west. We’re going to spread literature about alternative fuels and environmental literature and the culture of oil in America. The big idea with TheDanger.com is that we have an illusion of safety in this country. We are destroying the world with the way America is living right now. Any kind of idea of safety or security is totally false. If we don’t start engaging in that fact in a very real way, then we are endangering ourselves even more. We have to change the way we’re living. And if it takes a small group of people taking major risks to do it, then that’s what we’re going to do.

Danger is kind of a scary name.

People should be scared. I mean, I’m not going to try to convince every redneck out there that change needs to occur, but I want them to feel a little bit challenged. If they pick up one of our newspapers, or even if they don’t, we’re just putting it out there. We’re not going to affect every person in this country, but that’s not really the goal. Another thing is that we want to go to these communities and rally with the radicals that are living there just to give them a show of support and make them realize they’re not alone in their views.

When are you going to start TheDanger.com?

It’s starting on July 29th with One Night of Fire.

That’s going to be the kickoff event?

Yes. This isn’t public yet, but One Night of Fire is going to be the last Complacent event. It’s going up in flames. It’s going to be a phoenix ritual.

What will One Night of Fire entail?

One Night of Fire’s going to be a massive renegade street event. It’s going to be one of those things that’s on a scale that could be either a complete tragedy or an amazing life experience, with not a lot of room for anything in between. It’s going to be a lot of people, a lot of music, a lot of fire spinners, a lot of fireworks, and a lot of fire. It will be done as safely as can be, but there’s no permits. No permission.

Where?

It’s starting at an undisclosed location, will continue through the trains, and end at a different location.

How can people find out about where it will be?

You can get on the Complacent email list. On July 28th people will be told where to meet. The idea behind it is that fire is a metaphor for liberation. It goes along with Bastille Day and July fourth. July is a month for celebrating liberation and independence. A lot of those ideas have been perverted over the last couple hundred years, but there’s a root there that’s engaging and exciting and true.