Holy ghosts and talk show hosts
Are planted in the sand
To beautify the foothills
And shake the many hands“Plateau” by Meat Puppets
One of the earliest 19th Century anxieties about media had to do with their seemingly strange spiritual properties. Electricity was thought to enable us to communicate with spirits, cameras could capture ghosts, and we could now record people’s voices that would let them live well beyond their graves. Such is the strange, eerie quality of this new One Laptop Per Child commercial featuring the voice of John Lennon. It is the first commercial approved by Yoko Ono to allow the use of his apparition in an ad.
This is an unusual example of media being a kind of “hell” realm the Tibetan Buddhists speak of. In the Buddhist version, it’s occupied by hungary ghosts– entities with small throats and big bellies who can never eat enough and are perpetually starved. Now, I don’t mean to disparage Lennon in any way. He is most definitely one my greatest heros (despite the fact that this is a very un-punk thing to say). Nonetheless, there remains something oddly creepy about the electronic realm in which each and every one of us is entering into as avatars and extensions of our mental selves. The fact is that this world of “imagination” remains one within the capitalist enclosure, and is still disembedded from ecology.
What remains to be seen is if we can transform media hell into a kind of heaven, albeit I don’t like the utopian tone of the term nor the fact that advertising already purports to represent a kind of consumer paradise. I suppose my dream– If I were to imagine what this world of crackling electrons will become– is to turn it into a kind of sustainable permaculture garden full of biodiversity and ideas, buzzing with insects and sweet smells of earthen humus and rain dew. The alternative is to become that alternate version of our future selves that already occasionally manifests in the hell media realm: ashen aliens in search of our life-giving properties.
