Category Archives: Video

Fox occupies insanity

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[article and video link]

I know that I’m preaching to the converted, but it’s always good to have case studies. In light of FAIR‘s research concerning the dearth of Occupy Wall Street coverage, it appears the corporate media backlash (and hence denial about the economic crisis) is firmly entrenched. The above clip from Fox New’s The Five smugly dismisses OWS based on the poor performance of an OWS participant, Harrison Schultz, who was hammered by the flak master and neuro-linguistic programmer, Sean Hannity (follow this link to an amazing breakdown of how it’s done). In the Hannity segment titled, “Occupy Insanity,” first try watching the interview with Schultz without sound (the background shots were quite selective, focusing on the acts of a very small minority of violent protestors). Then listen to how Hannity skillfully redirects any serious critique of the system to focus on abhorrent behavior.

The Republicans’ recycled one-liner response to anyone exercising free speech–Get a job–will continue to substitute for any genuine commitment to democratic discourse. It’s not by accident that Fox News producers go out of their way to find the least experienced, inarticulate examples from the movement in order to create a straw man that can be easily torched. By contrast, consider this thoughtful discussion on Democracy Now! that presented diverse views about the movement. Can you imagine any of these panalists being interviewed on Fox? Chances are no, not only because Fox would never allow anyone so articulate to air his or her views, but these guests are wise enough to avoid letting themselves get cannibalized by Fox in order to become fodder for future propaganda. I ultimately don’t know Schultz’ motive, but I think it was a mistake (and perhaps a big temptation to be on TV) to give Hannity a forum to exercise his magician’s skills.

As evidence for how little Fox and friends comprehend what is happening outside the walled studio, they refer to Schultz as a leader of the movement. Strange, I didn’t know OWS has leaders or spokespeople. Regardless, it’s clear that this kind of media coverage is a diversion to avoid talking about real issues. It is to Fox’s detriment that they are unwilling to grasp the truly unsustainable nature of the situation and to patronize young people by yelling at them to get a job.

This kind of playbook response is well anticipated. As is the case with any activism that challenges the status quo going back to the 1960s, corporate media typically marginalize the protestor’s claims through flak. They discredit these claims through association with the counter culture (“they’re not like us,” “they are not reasonable people,” “they are lunatics”) and radicals (“anarchists,” “socialists,” “communists,” “Hamas” affiliates, “anti-Semites,” “Nazis,” etc.). They impose a narrative that portrays them as childlike (“petulant,” “spoiled”), naive (“they don’t know what they want”), aiding the enemy (Chavez, Hamas and the Ayatollah “love them”), and destructive (“they want our stuff,” “they will destroy capitalism”). This is not to say that sympathizers in the corporate media don’t exist. Nonetheless, those seeking serious discourse about the world’s problems won’t find much of it in a media environment dominated by conflict-driven infotainment spectacles that consider shouting matches democratic discussions.

I believe it is pointless to expect a reasonable discussion or debate in the corporate media. I think it is far better to continue creating alternative media that works towards building the new paradigm of participatory democracy and media. If you need a good example, go no further than this documentaryy, which offers fantastic insight into the Aikido move that we need to make around mainstream media.

On this note, consider the wise words of Bertrand Russell:

Perhaps the essence of the Liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue, not intended to replace the old one but only to supplement it. The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:

Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.

When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

Quote source: Brain Pickings

If I wanted America to fail… I’d share this video

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[Video Link]

In what can be seen as the evolution of propaganda, for better and for worse the networked public sphere has been Konyfied. This means that slick aesthetics and creative storytelling combined with social networks has the potential to spread any message far and wide.

No doubt, Kony 2012 did inspire eco-communicators to think of new ways to spread the concept of sustainability. But we have also been broadsided by the likes of a video produced by Free Market America, “If I wanted America to fail” (posted above). It pushes a right-wing anti-environment business agenda with slick, youth appeal aesthetics (I can’t wait for the mash-ups!). Though I find this kind of propaganda somewhat disturbing, I’m not sure if it works. It uses a confusing language of irony that contradicts its own messaging. Psychologists have remarked how conflicting it is to say something like “Don’t do drugs” because “don’t” and “do” in the same sentence usually cancels out the negative (“don’t”). By combining “If I wanted American to fail” with all the the actions they don’t support, they in fact are encouraging those behaviors! But then again, most rightwing propaganda is designed to be a mind-frak anyways, so maybe that’s their intention.

Just to be clear, the video offers to expose the “extremist” agenda of environmentalists (and by implication the Occupy movement as well), yet the views expressed here are really those of extremists who are ready to let the planet fail at the expense of an outmoded ideology. The reason why free market radicals are now doubling down on their madness has to do with a psychological need to reinforce an entrenched worldviw in the face of utter contradiction. How can they ignore, for example, that the economic crisis since 2008 basically demonstrated that the free market cannot survive without government intervention or subsidies, or that every year the scientific consensus gets closer and closer to near unanimous acceptance that climate change is caused by humans? Friends, denial ain’t a river in Phoenix (it’s a dry riverbed!).

Apparently Fox doesn’t like the video either, not because they disagree with the main premise (see video below). Rather, it’s because they think it’s a little too over-the-top to convince the non-believers. How’s that for the kettle calling the pot black!

My media literacy wish list for Earth Day

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Surviving Progress trailer [video link]

Just as every month is Black History Month, every day is Earth Day. To mark this year’s passing, Alternet.org features a fabulous review of nine environmental documentaries that bring ecology to the center of our cultural awareness. In particular it led me to Surviving Progress, a necessary critique of our current notion of “progress.” Based on the book, A Short History of Progress, this film has been called a mash-up of Koyaanisqatsi and The Corporation. I’m all for anything that problematizes our notion of technological evolution.* Moreover, I feel this is an area of critique generally lacking in media education. For one, youth media educators could problematize how mediamaking devices are produced and disposed of. Media lit educators focused on textual analysis could zoom in on how technology works as a trope for a variety of values associated with consumption and unlimited growth. Along these lines, here are some more suggestions for ways media education can be greened:

Discourse analysis: Media literacy has pioneered techniques for analyzing the way media frame and discuss issues, both visually and textually. Since discourse analysis can be applied to news and propaganda, green media educators can use this tool to examine how a critical issue like climate change is covered in the news, or how to detect greenwashing. Claims makers–from BP to GreenPeace–vie for public attention. What strategies do they use, and what systems enable some voices and not others?

Semiotics: Basic media literacy is a primer for the deconstruction of symbols. Often times semiotics is used for studying representation, in particular racial, gender, and cultural stereotyping. Animals and living systems are also used and stereotyped in a variety of ways. Why and for what purpose?

Marketing: Media literacy techniques have mastered deconstruction, drawing attention to nearly 30 different persuasion techniques used to manipulate and hook our attention. The primary technique, emotional transfer, is represented by how marketers (or propagandists for that matter) generate feelings in order to transfer those sensibilities to brands. But the various emotions generated by sex, fear, and humor are tied to more ancient needs related to our connection with living systems. Media literacy could point out that when advertisers are playing with our emotions, they are trying to tap into deeper experiences of authenticity and resonance that can be fulfilled by activities that don’t require consumption, and could even tie into our primary need to connect with humans and nature.

Ideology: This is usually applied in the form of critical media literacy, and aims to challenge the claims made by corporations and governments. In the age of Occupy, much attention will be applied to the way in which economic values are propagated through media. To this extent it is absolutely necessary to examine those discourses surrounding growth and consumption, and how they lead to debt on multiple levels: personal, social, and ecological. To what extent are both economics and ecology ultimately two sides of the same coin?

An additional dimension can be explored: different media promote a range of environmental ideologies–beliefs about how we act upon the world– spanning from anthropocentric to ecocentric perspectives. What implications do these different worldviews have for ecology? Moreover, given that most media literacy aspires to greater democratic participation, it would be good to examine the kind of democracy we believe in. Is it anthropocentric, or could we work towards what Vandana Shiva calls Earth Democracy, which incorporates living systems?

The Cultural Commons: Educators pushing for media justice can link the enclosure of the techno-communication system by telecoms and media corporations with the enclosure of culture. IP law, anti-piracy legislation, and corporate mergers all have the effect of limiting democratic participation and access to cultural resources. This process began with colonization and witch hunts, which eliminated indigenous and female participation in order to promote patriarchal control. Now these processes are extending to the enclosure of all ideas: it is the colonization of our interpersonal realities. This can be challenged by highlighting the importance of open culture, reformed copyright laws, and a less restrictive approach to sharing.

Intertextuality: People should not just think about ecosystems, but think like ecosystems. This means looking at our mental models and learning to think in terms of systems, relationships, and connectivity. Our social networks do this naturally, but what about media texts? Traditional media literacy tends to focus on single texts (like an alcohol ad), but what if we looked at texts as if they were a node in the media ecosystem? The way the web makes all texts open works does that for us. Consider how Kony 2012 became a dialog between many different texts produced by a vast range of critics and supporters. Or how a WikiLeaks document becomes linked to a Web of ideas and practices. Or look how we make sense of a film like Avatar, with its linkages to various genres and tropes from other films, and then how fans and activists remixed and spread various memes from the film.

Gadgets: As mentioned, media education programs rarely critically engage the tools used to make media. We should celebrate the creative process and promote the empowerment of media making, yet we should not take our eye off the fact that the gadgets we use have an increasingly negative impact on global ecology and social justice. Can we get away with making critical documentaries without also examining our own complicity within this production system?

Phenomenology: Most media literacy looks outwardly to ask questions about what media do to us. Sometimes the question is changed to focus on what we do with media. But what about the manner in which media influence our cognition–for better or for worse? How does media engagement impact our sense of space, place, and time? What are the “splaces” we are engaging? How might this experience of extending ourselves into media networks impact our sense of planet? How can we become more mindful of our attention so as to not lose ourselves in the dreamworlds of other people’s design (Kony 2012 seemed to be quite hypnotic in that sense)?

Alternative Cultural Practices: There is a tendency among many media educators to focus on the negative aspects of media. But we also need to support positive media practices. After all, media are a necessary means for solving problems. While I fully endorse critical approaches, I also would like to warn against too much negativity that leads to learners feeling powerless and victimized. We need to pull people towards aspirational solutions. This is a slightly different take on problem-solving pedagogies that focus on how to fix problems. Rather, we should encourages learners to create solutions. The difference is subtle but important. What we are aiming for is supporting lifelong learning skills that build towards sustainable cultural practices that can envision a positive response to a very wicked problem.

These suggestions are part of a larger project I’m working on to re-orient media education towards a green worldview. These points barely scratch the surface of what I’ve been developing. If you are interested in joining me or offering feedback, please comment below.

Happy Earth Day!

* For what it’s worth, to question technology is to not be anti-technology. Hopefully people will come to realize that thinking critically about technology is not a desire to go back to the Stone Age, but rather to consider the boundaries and limits that can be placed on how technology fits within the context of ecology and human experience, and not the other way around.

How clean is the data cloud?

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[link]

An excellent report and article detailing the dirty secrets of the cloud.

As I report in my forthcoming book:

What the BP case shows is that media decolonization requires decoupling our media from the carbon economy. For those of us who use computers and networks, this will mean a transitional period, since currently our consumption of electronics and energy use are increasingly large sources of C02 emissions. In fact, computer networks now produce more carbon emissions than the airlines industry. A Google server farm will use as much electricity as a city of 250,000 people, so efforts by companies like Google to transition to renewable energy is absolutely necessary. But with the exponential growth of the information economy, we may be drowning in data anyway. For example, some communications scholars argue that data clouds, bloated software, redundant archiving, and media rich data centers are pushing the overall planetary impact of physical data storage to unsustainable levels (“The Internet Begins with Coal” titles one report about network power consumption). They suggest that it will become increasingly necessary to ration data, meaning that people should be sharing copies of media rather than having to access them from multiple clouds. Unfortunately, the current push toward cloud computing by dominant corporate providers Balkanizes the net into data fiefdoms, leading to less compatibility and sharing.

As long as we perpetuate the current fossil fuel regime, the belief that unlimited data is harmless to the biosphere will remain intrinsically bound to the creed that information is weightless and immaterial. This situation, the researchers argue, parallels our treatment of the oceans, which are being pushed to the brink of ecological collapse because people have assumed their capacity for producing food and absorbing pollution is limitless. Not only is linking computer and network usage directly to their impact on the environment a crucial step toward green cultural citizenship, it’s a radical challenge to a status quo predicated on tightly restricted intellectual property. Proprietary control of data is the ultimate tragedy of the commons. Ultimately, only a culture based on a cultural commons that values sharing resources would ensure that the next wave of computing doesn’t result in black clouds in our atmosphere.

Here’s a GreenPeace link to take action.

Control the means of reproduction: Media-tech innovation @ #OWS

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[link]

The Webzine Motherboard offers this fantastic glimpse into how a group of techie activists seek to revolutionize networking. In an effort to create software/hardware that matches the concept of the Occupy General Assembly, the Free Network Foundation is taking McLuhan’s aphorism to heart: the medium of an independent P2P network is the message.

In their own words:

  • We envision communications infrastructure that is owned and operated cooperatively, by the whole of humanity, rather than by corporations and states.
  • We are using the power of peer-to-peer technologies to create a global network which is immune to censorship and resistant to breakdown.
  • We promote freedoms, support innovations and advocate technologies that enhance and enable digital self-determination.

Chipotle grammy ad

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[video link]

Just in case you didn’t watch the Grammy Awards (I didn’t either), it featured this commercial, which is a fairly good example of ecological communication. By explaining a complicated system with concrete symbolism, this is a good demonstration of how advertising techniques can promote positive thinking. Chipotle, which you may have seen featured in the documentary Food Inc., wants to highlight its “food with integrity” program that promotes the humane treatment of animals and a decentralized food system. The soundtrack features Willie Nelson covering Radiohead. Wow!

For more background info about the ad, Esquire provides in-depth coverage.

Here’s a bonus video. The following vid is the opening sequence for Food Inc. Notice how the narration and visuals are a kind of food media literacy.


[video link]

#Kony2012: Viral cause célèbre

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If you can’t see the video, click here.

By the time you read this, it will be old news. The Kony 2012 meme has probably already exploded and splattered across the various portals, screens and networks of your sphere. Today everywhere I looked, there it was: my favorite blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook wall, speakers of my office mate’s computer, and the hallway of the university where I work.

With its vast, instantaneous spread and quick linking without thought, this obviously made me curious, not just to learn more about the issue, but also to think about this as a phenomenon and lesson in the power of social media.

Admittedly the whole thing made me feel suspicious. But rather than indulge my critical tendencies, I thought it would be good to acknowledge that the people behind this project (Invisible Children) probably mean well and are doing what they think is the best solution to solve a terrible problem. So what follows are my initial thoughts about its positives, and then some reflections on those elements that make me guarded.

What it does right:

Demonstrating collective action around an idea, using a clear message, slogan and image. A successful campaign that has drawn attention to an area that usually is considered peripheral. Generating debate and dialog about best practices and methods. Showing the organic and open character of the internet in which an idea can be promoted and contested. Clever and persuasive use of cinema for the greater good. Connects global problem with local reality. Effective harnessing of empathy. Nice slogan: “Where you live shouldn’t determine whether your live.” Makes the political personal. Good use of social marketing by telling a story rather than just showing facts. Powerful design and packaging strategy.

Things that make me wary:

Presents a neoliberal/neocon vision of political activism, reducing it to brand politics not unlike focusing on the arrest and elimination of Osama Bin Laden as a means for solving a much bigger, systemic crisis. Pseudo-empowerment based on flattery of the activist. Politically safe action that reinforces existing power relations. Not very Afro-centric. Promoting the role of the US as global police force. Threatens to be meme of the week, and little more. Too self-referential, self-congratulatory, and ego-driven. Orientalist in that dark Africa is once again a means for the purification of a white man’s soul. A little too emotionally manipulative, bordering on the group pressure tactics of religious cults. Potential abuse of slick design and packaging strategy to mask larger complexities.

This story is unfolding rapidly. To get more context, check out Visible Children and The Guardian.

Disruptive agents: Gilding, Shiva, Klein and Mason school the world

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I just got through watching Paul Gilding’s talk, “The earth us full,” which opened up the 2012 TED conference. Based on his book, The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World, he uses the talk to look squarely into the eyes of the global intelligentsia to deliver a firm message: face the fear, sadness, and denial about the inevitable decline of civilization as we know it, and get on with rebuilding. The growth economy is no longer sustainable, we must obey the laws of nature.

From the vantage of those suffering under economic hardship, Vandana Shiva argues that the ecological and economic crisis are one and what we need is not austerity but voluntary simplicity:

“Forced austerity makes the poor and working families pay for the excesses of limitless greed and accumulation by the super rich. Chosen simplicity stops these excesses and allow us to flower into an Earth Democracy where the rights and freedoms of all species and all people are protected and respected.”

Naomi Klein, who has shifted her orientation towards climate change, wrote a terrific piece in The Nation last year, “Capitalism versus the climate,” that underscores the idealogical battle waged by climate deniers (or should we call them “science deniers”?). In a recent interview, Klein argues that whether or not one chooses to mitigate the problem comes down to worldview:

“The Yale cultural cognition project has looked at cultural worldview and climate change, and what’s clear is that ideology is the main factor in whether we believe in climate change. If you have an egalitarian and communitarian worldview, and you tend toward a belief system of pooling resources and helping the less advantaged, then you believe in climate change. And the stronger your belief system tends toward a hierarchical or individual worldview, the greater the chances are that you deny climate change and the stronger your denial will be.”

What can kickstart the planetary mobilization to shift our economic and ecological priorities? It has already started. If you haven’t yet had the chance, dig into Paul Mason‘s recent Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions. A journalist and economics editor for the BBC, Mason travels the world’s emergent insurrections to give us an explanation and insider’s glimpse into the forces shaping rapid social change. From Greece to Egypt, from London to Madrid he shows the interconnection between these global uprisings and why they are succeeding (he also points to the dangers and traps that lay ahead). I plan to do a longer post about the book later–it is so full of ideas and insights that I haven’t properly digested them quite yet–so I’ll leave it to you intrepid explorers to follow the links and check it out for yourself (for starters, click here for a talk he gave based on the book at the London School of Economics)

Lorax forced to shill for consumerism

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If you can’t see this, please go to the link here.

Universal Pictures’s Lorax can’t get any love. First, grade schoolers attacked the film studio for a lack of environmental materials on its Web site, then Fox’s right-wing host Lou Dobbs accused it of conspiring to undermine capitalism, and now environmentalists are up in arms about the merchandise and commercial tie-ins associated with the film (including disposable diapers, Double Tree hotels and IHOP). As to be expected, Dobbs’s rant is rather juvenile compared to the sensible response of kids faced with living in Fox’s demented universe. As for the tie-ins, read on.

The latest outrage is the emergence of a “Truffula tree friendly” SUV ad for a Mazda (posted above).
In response, the best quip comes from Mediate: “Having The Lorax shill for a sport utility vehicle is like using clips of Requiem For A Dream to sell diet pills, it goes completely against the spirit of the source material!” Appropriately, Jason Bittel offered this little Dr. Seuss-esque ditty:


A Lorax-branded combustion engine? I mean, seriously?

Not a hydrogen? Not an electric?

Not even a Thneed-sponsored cross-breed?

…

Whoever is in charge of branding

For the Lorax’s mula-making machine -

Have you read the book you’re hijacking?

Did you misinterpret what it means?

Buying in or selling out? The greatest dilemma ever told (#medialit)

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CRASS: There Is No Authority But Yourself (click here if you can’t view it)

During my media ethics course this week I launched into an epic rant that frightened some students.

The diatribe was inspired by a recent controversy covered by Boing Boing about the (mis)appropriation of a logo belonging to the infamous punk band, Crass (click here for the initial post and here for the follow-up). The backstory is that some fashion designer in London, Hardware, blatantly ripped off the Crass logo to convert it into some apolitical fashion icon (if you compare the current Hardware Website with the logo posted at Boing Boing, you will see that Hardware hastily fixed their plagiarism problem). Concurrently, for our class we watched The Greatest Movie Ever Sold by Morgan Spurlock (maker of Super Size Me), which has the subtitle, “He’s not selling out, he’s buying in.” In a nutshell, Spurlock made a movie about branding and product placement by branding and selling his “doc-buster” to advertisers. The question for my class about the film–and what spurned the epic rant–was, Can a critical film about marketing use branding to make its point?

I’ll get to Spurlock’s film momentarily. Returning to Crass, the logo controversy led me to YouTube where I found a documentary about the band. Watching it reminded my of how in the early 1980s Crass had been such an ethical influence on me as a young punk rocker. Crass fans were considered “peace punks” that were into the scene not for style, but to participate in oppositional politics and an alternative social movement. As an anarchist collective Crass practiced what they preached. Whenever they performed they donated whatever was left after expenses to local charity. They were truly a not-for-profit endeavor that wanted to live by their principle, “There is no authority but yourself.” In retrospect this phrase is not in-sync with ecology, which eschews such pronounced individualism, but the basic anti-authority stance is still valid.

Our culture should not be dictated by an economic ideology that has taken over virtually all realms of life (see the book Monoculture for a good overview of this point). Relatedly, I asked the class if it were anachronistic to have a strong anti-commercial stance that contradicts the prevailing paradigm that views privatization and the commercialization of public space as gospel. I have found that many students these days seem to accept the blanket marketing of their lives as the price for doing business as usual. Many have internalized the age-old justification for screwing over anyone: it’s just business. Indeed!

At Boing Boing commentators criticized Xeni Jardin (who posted about the Crass controversy) by arguing that it was hypocritical to promote open culture and remixing but then not apply the same standards when a fashion designer does it. My response is that we’re not talking about an absolute ideology that can’t differentiate between an open and closed commons. Crass were about sharing and generosity. Corporate theft from punk rockers is the opposite. It’s evil. There is a difference between fair use and plagiarism, which comes down to intent. What is the purpose of the appropriation technique? You can tell the difference by observing which act is participatory and which one is not. This is the thin red line of dissent versus exploitation, and fair play versus cheating.


Trailer for The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. Click here if you can’t see it.

Which brings me to Spurlock’s documentary, a film that I essentially experienced as a major mind fuck. On the one hand, it does exactly what it sets out to do: it makes transparent the entire process of selling out. So in the process of making a film that is potentially a critique of marketing, the filmmaker must sell out. How does one reconcile this contradiction? Is it even possible? Has media criticism devolved into self-mockery?

One way for me to respond to this film is to go back to the problem of “postirony.” The term, coined in Alex Shakar, appears in the book The Savage Girl. It is described as follows:

“…Our culture has become so saturated with ironic doubt that it’s beginning to doubt its own mode of doubting. If everything is false, then by the same token anything can be taken as true, or at least as true enough. Truths are no longer absolute; they’re shifting, temporary, whatever serves the purpose of the moment. Postironists create their own sets of serviceable realities and live in them independent of any facets of the outside world that they choose to ignore….Practitioners of postironic consciousness blur the boundaries between irony and earnestness in ways we traditional ironists can barely understand, creating a state of consciousness wherein critical and uncritical responses are indistinguishable. Postirony seeks not to demystify but to befuddle, not to synthesize opposites but to suspend them, keeping open all possibilities at once. And we marketers, in forging a viable mode of postironic consumerism, must seek to foster in the consumer a mystical relationship with consumption. Through consumption consumers will be gods; outside of consumption they will be nothing: a perpetual oscillation between absolute control and absolute vulnerability, between grandeur and persecution.”

One way this insidious phenomena manifests itself is in the way marketers have appropriated culture jamming into their repertoire of manipulation. The classic example is Sprite’s Obey Your Thirst ad campaign that features celebrities making fun of themselves selling products. In media literacy parlance, these are the “wink, wink” and “flattery” persuasion techniques that essentially argue, “we marketers know we are full of crap, and we know that you know that we are a bunch of bull, so buy our product anyway!” Thankfully many see through this, but these techniques also do a lot of idealogical work. Essentially, this approach turns grassroots media activism and education into market research, undoing and refracting our legitimate critique into a hall of mirrors (for example, watch how this Fed Ex ad uses media literacy deconstruction techniques in its Super Bowl ad). In this way, capitalism has the incredibly capacity to absorb critique and then turn it on its critics (Occupy movement, watch out!).

So where does that leave us with Spurlock? The truth is, I think the film is a great tool for discussion, or what I like to call an “object-to-think-with.” For that, I believe it has educational value. I believe he is sincere and treats the subject with a lot of respect. (Check out Spurlock’s TED talk for more insight into his thinking about the film.)

But I still remain incredibly uncomfortable with its “truth in advertising” approach. My discomfort is grounded in an old school punk mentality–as outdated as it may seem–that there are lines that should not be crossed. One cannot “market” the revolution, as one major label A & R guy once promised Crass (they politely refused). What is at stake is the cultural commons, which is “all that we share.” As long as there is a commercial barrier between us and the access point to that shared space, then buying in really means fencing off. I still believe that there should be noncommercial spaces that are free from the nefarious influence of corporate power. The more we succumb to the temptation to allow corporations to mediate our methods of critique and engagement, the more we erode our capacity for culture to grow, learn and evolve. No one but a corrupt legal system bequeathed these corporations the right to take over our cultural life. Why do we continue enabling them?

OK, rant over. Thanks for listening!

Occupying Times Square: From 99 theses to 99% thesis

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Archived Live Stream of Occupiers holding a General Assembly in Times Square. Link for video embed

On Saturday I was enraptured by Tim Pool‘s USTREAM live cast of Occupy Wall Street’s recent action.* As Occupiers played Red Rover and Frogger with police across Manhattan, all was captured live and uploaded into the planetary Net. Like the live cast of the Occupiers getting kettled and arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge a few months ago, it was a riveting reprieve from the old, predigested form of media we grew up with.

As I watched I couldn’t help but feel that this is a collective, emergent version of Martin Luther’s protest in 1517. Like the 95 theses he posted on the church door that later was reprinted and widely disseminated with the new media technology of that period, likewise we are now seeing an unprecedented diffusion of an alternative paradigm that challenges the power structure. But this time it’s the 99% thesis. Whereas Luther challenged the corrupt authority and abuse of power by the Roman Catholic Church, we are now doing the same against domination and colonization of the planetary commons by corporations.

The fact is, since the 1980s I’ve seen these kinds of actions over and over again, but they never gained traction like they are now. The difference is probably that so many people have been pushed off a cliff that the propaganda system in place can no longer shield people from the truth at hand: that the corporate takeover of the commons can no longer be sustained. We have reached the limit and end of the old system and we are currently in a transition into a liminal state in which all the old thought forms that were codified during the past 500 years are becoming destabilized.

This is made visible in the above clip, which is an archived stream from the Saturday protests. It’s the moment when the protestors, after dodging the NYPD throughout Manhattan, spontaneously organized a General Assembly in Times Square. Using the “people mic,” they “testified” as to why they are part of the Occupation movement, all the while bathed in the surreal glow of corporate propaganda.

Times Square is the quintessential spiritual center of the corporate project. Once the seedy underbelly of New York’s deviant unconsciousness, since Giuliani’s reign as mayor the open space of 42nd St. has been transformed into a kind of dystopic hydra of capitalist enclosure (privatization/fencing off). A mix of surveillance and marketing uber alas, Times Square has become an open air television studio that invites anyone to enter and be mediated by the planetary corporate rulers. This, I would argue, is part of its lure. A hybrid of advertising and reality TV, I know of no other place on Earth where Disneyland, advertising and mass media cohere into a pulsating hum of mediated insanity. Not even Las Vegas can achieve such a distinction. And like moths to a flame, people are attracted by the very thing that could ultimately destroy them. To paraphrase Benjamin, not since the Nazis has our own alienation and self-destruction been made to look so beautiful.**

Yet as police stand by to protect holiday shoppers and business as usual, a handful of Occupiers bear witness to this insanity (thereby labeled by the system as lunatics). Here, as the embodiment of Earth’s spirit, these brave souls momentarily disrupt the pulsating spectacle. Whilst in the past numerous crazies have attempted such sacrilege against this colonizing machine, something has changed.

We are being heard. And it’s resonating.

It’s happening despite the luminous power of Times Square and its tentacled financiers in Wall Street. A people’s mic, which is a spontaneous form of direct democracy and speech, utterly contradicts the communication forms of advertising in which psychologically tested and honed messages are pushed into people’s mindspace. The occupiers wage guerrilla war against that mechanism through the deployment of prefigurative politics that pull people together with a shared senses of responsibility and reciprocity. Their collectivity, community and ritual becomes an alternate form of mediation that deprives the corporate powers of their ability to colonize human energy.

For the moment the system seems invincible, its vast architecture of light and information permeating public space. It can only succeed when no other world can be visualized or imagined beyond it. What you see here is a new kind of collective imagination taking shape. Behold, participate, smile and look around. Raised consciousness is coming to a live stream near you.

* Here is an insightful interview with Tim from Current’s USTREAM channel.

** If you think I’m stretching the analogy too far, I consider the rapid rise of Co2 emissions changing the very chemistry of our atmosphere as a far worse crime against humanity than anything achieved by the worse totalitarians of the 20th century.

Ericsson’s smiley-faced vision of a totalitarian future?

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Ericsson’s “Networked Society ‘On the Brink’” ignores some big questions. Is a life of more data really a better life? I agree that some of the trends the video describes are appealing, but I also fear that this little propaganda film by one of the world’s largest mobile companies is really encouraging people to view themselves as data gadgets rather than as human beings. For example, its vision of education is that we get to watch more lecture videos on the Internet. And healthcare is a matter of quantifying the body’s functions.

What is made to look so forward thinking and innovative strikes me as repackaged technological totalitarianism. While Ericsson promises to be paradigm-shifting, this is still about good old-fashioned consumerism. The tipoff is the dreamy soundtrack, which is always a cue that media companies are inviting us to uncritically enter into their fantasy world. I would be more optimistic if they talked about the possibility of the networked society as a means for dismantling global capitalism and organizing regional occupations.

To be fair, the company does have an assortment of sustainability and social responsibility commitments (check here for their self-assessment). Nonetheless, are these measures compatible with the deep cultural changes necessary to create a sustainable world? I don’t have the answer, but I remain suspicious.

Divided (mind) we fall

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Click here if you can’t see the video

In a new RSAnimation, psychiatrist Iain McGilchristc revises the great divided brain debate, something I discuss in my book, Mediacology. To recap, in the ’70s the idea that the left and right brain hemispheres serve different cognitive functions entered into popular culture (represented by books such as Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain). In The Global Village, Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Powers run with this concept, arguing how different kinds of media favor or bias the cognitive processing of our brains. Reading and writing are distinctly left brained, whereas nonlinear media like TV and music are favored by the right hemisphere.

Leonard Shlain presents his main thesis

Many authors posit that writing has turned us into an overly rational and patriarchal culture. In the Alphabet Versus the Goddess, neurosurgeon Leonard Shlain argues that writing mimics the same mental processes of hunting: the pen replaces the spear.

McGilchrist doesn’t contradict these arguments. Rather he points out that it’s not an either or situation. Sight and sound are processed by both sides of the brain, but what happens is that the left hemisphere handles detailed and focused thinking, whereas the right hemisphere deals with field-like vision or hearing. Consider how we differentiate between seeing and watching, and listening and hearing.

What I find intriguing about the animation (a mix of both right and left brain media), is the possibility that sustainable behavior comes from cultivating right brain thinking. This is what I argued for in my book, but this video does a much better job of articulating how that’s possible. My main point was that traditional media literacy was mainly left-brained, because it focuses on reductionist deconstruction techniques, whereas new media involve right brain skills, and therefor should be incorporated into the concept of media literacy.

He points out that the right brain’s job is to inhibit immediate responses to situations so that we can use our wit and empathy to work out solutions. It also helps map and simplify the world so that we can make better sense of it. Metaphor, implicit meaning, body language, embodied experience, and a disposition for living rather than mechanical reality characterize the right brain approach to the world.

The machine model is self consistent because it made itself so. It’s what he calls the “Berlusconi of the brain” because it controls all the “media”– the right hemisphere doesn’t have a voice. The left brain model of the world is like a hall of mirrors, a reality bubble. And this is exactly the kind of problem I see in media theory which rarely challenges the mechanical model of cognition and communication. This is also why I believe media theory has not significantly tackled ecology (not in the “systems” sense, but in the sustainability sense).

Finally, McGilchrist argues knowledge within the left hemisphere is a closed system that demands perfection. By contrast, the right hemisphere’s understanding of the world is an open system.

In the end, it’s not reason versus imagination, he says, but both working together. You can’t have one without the other. The problem with our current world system is that it’s based on a closed, machine-like model of the world built by an unbalanced, and ultimately, insane mind. To restore sanity, we need to re-balance how we perceive the world and ourselves.

Privatizing the cultural commons

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I love this graphic, which sums up quite visually the intent behind the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The trade agreement, which has been negotiated in secret, represents how corporations are trying to enclosed and privatize the planetary cultural commons. You can read more about it here, or you can watch the video below (if you can’t see it, go here):


Say no to ACTA di QuadratureDuNet

Berlusconi’s fiddle

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The above clip from Fox News (link) cleverly inserts riot footage from Rome, making an erroneous connection between Occupy Wall St. and the antics of violent protestors in Italy. Such footage is meant to scare viewers and to discredit the thoughtful and nonviolent people who pose a serious threat to the system. As I go on to explain below, violent insurrections like the one on Oct. 15 have essentially sabotaged the occupy movement in Rome (for now).

Saturday Oct. 15 was an internationally coordinated event meant to extend the momentum of Occupy Wall St. In Rome, when we first arrived at the launch point (Piazza della Repubblica), the energy was fantastic. Lots of excitement. People felt energized, but the mood was bit dour as well. The day before Berlusconi had survived another no-confidence vote. The demo was massive–I heard that it was as high as 700,00 people, though that figure seems a bit exaggerated. All I can say is that from where it started it took over three hours for all the people to enter into the march.

After about 45 minutes of moving slowly while serenaded by all kinds of sound systems blasting the protest classics, once we began seeing the hooded black block infiltrate the crowd, we decided it was time to leave. One of them even threatened to punch me when I tried to take their picture.

Trying to leave proved difficult, however. The police had cordoned off the side streets, making it impossible for anyone to exit the march. We ended up having to backpedal upstream to get out of the demonstration. I took that as a very bad sign because it seemed to me that the police were forcing everyone into a pressure point. Sure enough, fifteen minutes after we exited all the burning and smashing started.

Local articles have pieced together a confusing picture. A theory among many is that the massive riot that quickly exploded was a highly coordinated and well-planed urban warfare strategy. Various kinds of projectiles were strategically placed and hidden at different points along the streets. There was a very large group (at least 100) that cut the demonstration in half at the precise point that the front group had arrived at march’s final destination. The police did not do very much at the beginning and let the rioters go about as they wished. Some claim police inaction was out of fear of being libel, as was the case in the aftermath of Genoa (indeed, the hashtag for the militants to coordinate each other was #genoareloaded). The police officially say they held back out of concern for people’s safety. This, I find dubious, since when I tried to leave the police wouldn’t let me. There were also reports of “ultras” (soccer hooligans) entering into the fray (apparently this is par for the course–they are professional rioters, after all).

Many of the black block kids were quite young (minors) and from all over Italy. It was clear that they were well prepared and had tactics. Rumor has it that they were trained in Greece. What their goals were remain a mystery to me, because at the end of the day, the government and police are the victors: an opportunity to initiate a peaceful occupation was sabotaged and now the fascist mayor of Rome is calling for a suspension for all marches during the next month. This means that Fiat auto workers who were planning a big demo are now prohibited. Jasmina Tesanovic asks the right question, a chi giova–who bennefits? My impression is that police and the black block need each other the same way that Christians and Satanists are co-dependentent. They define each other’s actions and reality. I suggest they go have it out in the Colosseum and let the rest of us participate in something productive.