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.




4
Feb 12
Buying in or selling out? The greatest dilemma ever told (#medialit)
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:
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!