You can make a potato into a battery by putting a piece of copper in one side, a piece of zinc in the other, and attaching wires to each. Add more potatoes or other vegetables to the circuit for more power.
You can suspend banners from helium balloons tied to power lines, if you want to make them particularly difficult to take down.
You can create a seam sealing two sheets of plastic together by cutting them with a hot razor blade—try this for do-it-yourself lamination.
You can get play your favorite music backwards for a new listening experience by taking a cassette apart with a screwdriver and putting the tape reel in backwards; better, record it onto another tape on the third or fourth channel of a four track recorder, then listen to the other side of the second tape.
You can compile a monthly calendar of events that include free food (art openings, city council extravaganzas, etc.) and circulate it to hungry people.
You can approach restaurants and grocery stores as a representative of a charity group, asking for their leftovers. You should be able to gather enough food this way to provide for a number of people—perhaps a free grocery program for a poor neighborhood, or a weekly communal meal in a public place . . .
You can establish a community garden, with lots open for people to grow their own food, or volunteer programs for them to participate and share in the harvest. Lots of people have yards that go untended, and there's always those abandoned lots . . .
You can put glass etching solution (hydrofluoric acid) on the windows of corporations or agencies that you think need a wake-up call, if a brick would attract too much attention; if you want to make it clear why you're doing it, try applying the solution through a stencil expressing your message! If a brick is called for, You can dress up nice, carry it in your purse, and apply it without ever having to take it out.
You can really wreak some havoc on videotapes in noxious corporate rental stores, etc. with a powerful magnet. The same goes for computers, of course.
You can short-circuit any electric or electronic machine by introducing salt water into it. Once upon a time vandals would do this to soda vending machines, causing them to spit out free soda and change.
You can save the "postage paid by addressee" envelopes you get in junk mail to send back stuffed with more junk mail—or, better, with love letters to whomever opens them, begging them to seek a better life.
You can soak the ink off some canceled stamps with alcohol—better, cover the stamps with a thin layer of soap or water-soluble glue before mailing; the addressee can soak off the soap or glue.
You can use lemon juice or urine as invisible ink—heat up the paper, and it will appear.
You can take the clear adhesive envelopes available free at unmanned Federal Express stations everywhere and put them up on the walls of city streets, corporate elevators, gas station bathrooms, etc. with secret instructions or maps to buried treasure inside.
You can protect yourself from the effects of tear gas by covering your mouth and nose with a rag soaked in vinegar or lime juice and wearing swimming goggles; when not wearing the goggles, put them on your forehead with the inside facing out, so they won't fog up.
By putting a weight at the bottom, You can insure that the big banner you drop from a building or freeway won't blow in the wind.
You can make massive inflatable structures out of thin plastic sheeting that folds up to a small size convenient for smuggling into unexpected environments. Even if you couldn't sneak a fan in, you could still spice up a street demonstration or public event by stretching one over a hot air vent on a city street—presto, a sixty foot missile silo towers over the Inaugural Parade.
You can make those paper stickers you scam from the local copyshop more weatherproof by covering them with clear packing tape.
You can go to stores that sell house paint and get mis-mixed buckets for little to no cost. Think of all the things You can do with paint. Make woodcuts with potato stampers, or linoleum, for example—or make a stamp out of shoelace with wire through it, shaped into a word or line image.
You can knit your own clothes in the time it would take you to earn the money to buy them prefabricated, and in much more pleasant environments.
You can keep warm in winter by lining the inside of your clothes with plastic—this will work best if you place the layer of plastic right next to your skin, although it will make you sweat a lot.
If you are traveling and need water, You can open the outside spigots at most gas stations and many other buildings with a good wrench. These spigots generally have one of two kinds of handles which can be attached to them for operation; you could carry both handles with you, for surefire access to water, if you happened to find them unremoved.
You can get drinks at fast food restaurants by retrieving a cup from the trash and asking for a refill.
You can find fabric (napkins, tablecloths, etc.) for making patches, banners, etc. in the laundry bins behind restaurants.
If quitting your job leaves you with more time on your hands than you know what to do with, try baby-sitting nights for single mothers—there are thousands of them longing for a chance to go out and have a good time. If you have a circle of dependable volunteers, you could organize an alternative day care collective—there's a real shortage of those these days.
If you have more food, shelter, time, energy, love than you need for yourself and the ones who depend on you, You can find others to share with. If you have a room empty in your house now that your daughter has gone to college, you could lend it to a homeless writer or traveling activist, for example—or if you have more sources of free bread than your team of urban hunter-gatherers can possibly take advantage of, you should see if You can get in touch with striking union workers.
You can write to companies informing them that you really enjoy their product, or that you were shocked to find you had purchased a defective item. They'll probably send you free coupons.
You can buy an expensive electronic video camera with a liberal return policy, and shoot all your footage and download it onto a computer before the return deadline, if you want to make a movie or documentary for free. You can do the same thing with fancy musical equipment for a few days of recording, or with . . .
You can get free press passes to attend concerts and similar events simply by approaching the promoters as a representative of the media. You'll probably get more privileged treatment than any of the paying customers. A press pass might also help you to get past security or even cross national borders in an emergency.
You can set up a fake activist webpage for the F.B.I. 0-o, to keep them busy and misinformed; at high-surveillance demonstrations, You can leave unmarked boxes and bags all around town, to keep the bomb squad busy and entertained—better yet, put little letters in the bags for them, or fragments that all together spell out a message.
You can improve your chances of being picked up and treated well while hitchhiking by dressing in dark pants and a white shirt with a tie and perhaps a name tag—that is, as a young Mormon on mission! Pick up some free Mormon bibles at your nearest tabernacle for authenticity. If anyone asks serious questions, what better form of cultural terrorism than to spread a little fun misinformation? This disguise might also help you to get away with other things .
You can protect your home from police dogs by laying down a thin line of cayenne pepper across each doorway. The dogs will pause to sniff it on their way in, and won't be able to smell anything else for a while.
You can make a hand warmer by filling a cloth bag with dry beans (and rice, or corn) and microwaving it. It should retain heat for a couple hours. If you get hungry, You can always cook and eat your hand warmer.
If you need to create a false identity in an emergency—for example, at a hospital, when you have no money or insurance—You can simply make up a name and give your social security number with the first five digits as they really appear but the last four changed. If you offer a distant false home address, it will take longer for them to find out you have played a trick on them.
You can give your friends tattoos with a clean safety pin and India ink. For branding, heat a shaped piece of coat-hanger with a small blowtorch.
You can make paper maché (for puppets, or uncommissioned public sculptures, or . . .) by heating three parts water and two parts corn starch until it becomes thick. Let it cool a bit, and apply it to newspaper to make it stick together.
You can make puppets for street demonstrations that double as shields for self-defense by reinforcing them—with an internal fiberglass base, for example. Cut in half, the larger-sized cylindrical traffic cones might be useful for this, and they are freely available.
You can make wheat paste by mixing three parts wheat flour and one part corn starch, boiling that in water (at proportions of two parts starch to three parts water), and cooking it down to a paste. Hurry to stick up posters everywhere with it before it dries. You can keep your wheat paste warm and wet longer in winter by carrying it around in a drink cooler. Try variations of the recipe until you find a personal favorite.
You can encourage strangers to share their brilliant ideas with you and everyone else (and make public space more interesting!), by wheatpasting fliers with wheatpaste recipes on them all around your city—along with a headline reading "call for submissions."
You can make stencils out of cardboard or clear plastic acetate and spraypaint your own artwork and ideas everywhere. Alternately, You can apply house paint through the stencils with rollers. You could make a "handicapped" stencil and make all the parking spaces at the mall handicapped spaces (this might be easier to accomplish if you had a flatbed truck with a truck top on it and a hole cut out of the flatbed for street access from inside). You could make a stencil a hundred feet long out of a roll of thick paper, and apply it on the street in two minutes with three people—one in front, unrolling, one in the middle applying the paint roller, and one in back, rolling up.
You can take those priority mail stickers they give out at the post office, stencil your own designs on them, and put them up anywhere in instants. The post office will send more of them to you on request—but beware, misusing them is a federal offense, of course.
Speaking of spraypaint, when you see billboards that make you uncomfortable, You can reverse the effect by adding a clever phrase or picture of your own. If You can't reach them, You can attach a spraypaint can to the end of a long stick and operate it by means of a lever and pulley, or put paint in a long-distance water gun (a "super soaker") and get your point across more simply. Try between three and five in the morning—the floodlights are often off then.
To apply paint from a distance, You can also fill up light bulbs or Christmas tree ornaments with it, and throw it. On an entirely different topic—has it occurred to you that the Achilles' heel of riot gear is that the wearers need to be able to see out?
You can remove advertisements (from the subway, the bus, the bus stop . . .) and replace them after adjusting them in subtle ways. You can do this with the labels on food products in the grocery store. For a more advanced project, try this with the name plates on businessmen's desks or professors' doors, or the commemorative plaques at historic sites. For post-graduate work, try kidnapping time capsules from corporate skyscrapers or universities and replacing the contents with information about what it was really like way back when.
You can make projection devices to project messages or images onto the sides of big buildings, to get a point across without actually touching them. A smaller scale, subtler application of a similar concept would be to remove the "WALK/DON'T WALK" screens from crosswalk signs and replace them with your own message screens.
You can set up short-range pirate radio stations by key intersections, broadcasting site-specific messages on popular frequencies around the clock, without attracting the attention a citywide pirate radio station would.
In street warfare, it might be useful to know that You can easily set the dumpsters outside of bars on fire—the bottles and cans inside all have the residue of alcohol on them, after all. Just douse the inside with a bottle of whisky or similar substance, push a couple of them where they need to be, and throw in a smoke bomb for ignition.
You can still get almost all the books you need at the library, especially if you ask them to order the ones they're missing. Many libraries also have free video borrowing, for movies. If You can't use the internet to get free recordings of your favorite songs, go to a local college radio station; act like you work there, and tape whatever records you want. For free cassettes, write to Christian evangelical groups asking for listening material.
If you are a high school student in the United States, chances are You can get your school to pay for you to take college classes, if the classes aren't available there.
You can set up your own library, with all the books and magazines and records and videos and clothes you and your friends already have available for everyone, so no one has to buy anything. Whenever a band comes to your town to play, have a part of the door money go to buying a copy of their record for the community to share.
You can find food, flowers, furniture, clothes, building supplies, and more precious things left out on the street in front of houses in the suburbs, or in dumpsters. You might have more luck finding building supplies at construction sites at night, though—or just wheeling them out the back door of a corporate "home repair" chain on a cart. You might be able to return some of the items you rescue—such as food that has passed the expiration date—for money or store credit. For a more thorough approach, track down local distributors—a juice distributor will probably throw out whole dumpsters of good juice before the expiration date, because they cannot be shipped to stores in time.
You can go to college campuses at the end of the semester and collect incredible amounts of discarded food, clothes, and furnishings—and all the bicycles that have been abandoned to rust on the bike racks, if you have a good set of wire cutters. You could start a "free bikes for kids" program with these. If you need more, dress up and go to the local police station—chances are they've already collected scores of forgotten bikes the same way you did.
You can establish a "yellow bike" program for your town: get a bunch of cheap bicycles, paint them all an ugly yellow color, and leave them around town at specified drop off points so people can ride them from one point to another. Voila! Public transportation that is both free and autonomous.
If You can get a password from a student, you should be able to use the computers at the local university for everything from email to printing out fliers. If You can borrow a student's meal plan card, You can go into a college cafeteria with a backpack and come out with enough food to feed yourself and some companions for a few days.
You can get a job working for a company you don't respect that has a resource you need (photocopies, food, information, art supplies . . .) and hold it as long as it takes to smuggle out what you want. A circle of friends could do this together, each supplying a different resource.
You can get as many credit cards as possible, run them all up to their limits purchasing useful materials, and then declare bankruptcy. If you wanted to, you could write them all letters announcing that you were acting to avenge all the families whose lives have been ruined by debt—though this might get you in trouble. Or, better: get together a circle of people who are committed to supporting each other; each year one will run up massive debts paying for the needs of the group, and then declare bankruptcy. There should be enough people in the group to cover the years until the bankruptcy period of a participant is over and the process can be repeated.
You can put on public puppet shows for children that get important information across to their parents as well. You might be able to arrange to give educational presentations at local schools, too. If you know students involved in a student group on a college campus, they can probably arrange a speaking engagement for you that would pay a significant amount of student funds—which could go to the worthwhile cause of your choice.
You can make a piñata in the form of a politician or monstrosity (such as the "free market," the "loyal officer," etc.) and have a piñata party at which, when sufficiently beaten, the piñata spills out party favors such as candies, little books, or invitations to the next special event. Try doing this in a public place during times of unrest.
You can make quite an impressive, arresting noise by shaking a large piece of sheet metal. These should be easy to find unattended at construction sites.
You can blow fire by holding a torch (an old 100% cotton t-shirt wrapped around a bent coat hanger) and spitting a cloud of paraffin lamp oil through it. Be sure not to swallow it, and have both water on hand to wash out your mouth and a towel to keep your face dry so you won't blow yourself up.
You can use the personal ads at the back of the local newspaper for a novel recruiting tactic: "Capitalism sucking the life out of you? BiWF, 27, non-monogamous, seeks lovers of life and liberty to form a revolutionary organization. Only those serious about playing need apply."
You can spice up a first date by resolving to get in trouble with the authorities for something dreadfully embarrassing by the end of it. Don't tell your date, of course.
If you have to work, You can organize a union with your fellow employees to gain a little leverage over your workplace. Once you pull off a sudden strike, or get support from a larger union organization, the management will be forced to take you seriously.
You can organize rent strikes to make your landlord take care of the problems with your plumbing, heat, electricity—but it would be far wiser to get together a circle of trustworthy people to invest in a communal living space together. In the city, you could use the space as a meeting place or center for the performing arts; in the countryside, you could grow enough vegetables to feed a lot of people. You can organize exchange programs with housing cooperatives in other cities, so You can move around if you like without having to rent from strangers.
You can give your friends massages on a regular basis. That can help everyone stay relaxed and feel close.
If your lover is a woman, You can find her g-spot by putting your fingers inside of her with your palm facing up and moving them in a beckoning motion exerting light pressure towards her belly. If he is a man, try the same thing a few inches further back!
You can practice a variety of daily rituals to get in touch with and establish power over your fears: try being naked with your friends and then strangers, being intimate with people of the sex opposite the one you are used to touching, walking alone down familiar and then unfamiliar streets blindfolded, starting frank conversations with strangers, climbing ladders on water towers—nothing can multiply your capabilities like confronting the limitations you have set for yourself.
You can take advantage of a thousand different little attempts people have already made to establish community—neighborhood associations, punk rock scenes, bowling leagues, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, church choirs, high school clubs, student organizations, knitting circles, hobby groups—as starting points for working towards larger, more radical, durable, ambitious communities.
You can travel across the globe, hiking or skateboarding or hopping trains or driving cars for cross-country delivery services or working as the saxophonist on a cruise ship, and everywhere you go you will find people looking for holes in the fabric of this so-called reality. Together, You can cut these holes—by masterminding unexpected street festivals, carrying out occupations and permanent rent strikes, playing music that blows the roof off the world, seizing chances to leap up and shout out truths no one dares to express, charging off into the unknown on wild, unheard-of adventures . . .
