In 1976, when Milford Earl Thomas was in sixth grade and living in Arab, Alabama, he enlisted his family's Super-8 camera as well as the cutter and splicer they used for family movies to make his first film, Dracula Roams New York. His dad was the cameraman and the main action of the film was Milford pacing along the side of a chicken house—his set for a dark New York alley—wreaking havoc and destruction on the city. The scene reminds me of an old essay by Michael Warner, which describes a young John Waters delightedly conscripting his toy cars into horrible crashes and shouting, "Oh, my God, there's been a terrible accident!" But Warner eschews easy psychoanalysis of this private event, suggesting that Waters' pleasure is based on his "identification with publicity." Instead of casting this kind of publicity as a facile type of obsession with public relations, we might think about the various ways of being public, or as Warner suggests, counterpublic.

On December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi sets himself on fire after the police confiscate his only means of survival: the fruits and vegetables on his cart. His act of self-immolation lights the match that ignites a mass movement of revolt and demands for democracy, justice, and equality. It is the beginning of the Arab Spring. Throughout January 2011, protesters begin gathering in Tahrir Square in Cairo. After only a month of intermittent conflicts with the military, the situation reaches revolutionary proportions. By February 11, 2011, the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who had served as the country's supreme autocrat since 1981, after replacing assassinated president Anwar el-Sadat, resigns. Since these initial leaps onto the world stage, demonstrations have taken place around the globe. From the anti-austerity protests of Athens and Bucharest to the reformist movement in Tel Aviv to the anti-corruption protests in Moscow to the uprising in London, the movement of people toward social action has been vast, surprising, and historic.