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This is how uncool I am: until I read about Klout at Wired.com, I had no idea what it was. In case you are an Internet loser like me, Klout is a service with a proprietary algorithm that scores how much of a net “influencer” you are (its tagline: “Klout is the Standard for Influence”). Upon my first try, I scored a measly 16, which classified me as a “dabbler.” A 50+ score is for the super savvy, whereas 20 is the average for most users. But when I “liked” one of their partners, WWF, I jumped to 45, making me a “networker.” With such a drastic increase with one Facebook like, I find their scoring methods suspect.

Ultimately I don’t really give a damn about my rank, but at first I have to admit that my initial score left me feeling like one of those kids in the park that no one will play with. Then I got a quick high from my score boost, fulfilling my inner desire to be liked and connected (these are part of the psychological motives that Sherry Turkle writes about in Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other). Now that I have been confirmed as an insider (albeit by some kind of software glitch–I’m more likely still a 16), I have to ponder the meaning of this status.

Is it too simplistic for me to say this is just another popularity contest in which the jocks and cheerleaders prevail? Or is it revenge of the geeks? Is this wisdom of the crowds? Or just a measure of the mobs?

The first thing that makes me suspicious of this entire phenomenon is how it defines its particular ecosystem of cool. The only way to generate a score is to connect Klout to predetermined social networks that it dubs worthy. They mostly happen to be corporate platforms (Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, LastFM, etc.). There is no way to link my Klout score with my personal blog or presence within independent media communities. Nor does it measure my role within my own communities of practice. It also doesn’t gage my capacity for cultural citizenship. It merely measures how much of these activities have been filtered through the balkanized Web. In this sense, it may just reinforce the branding of social relationships and lead to a kind of digital fascism.

All media systems can be gamed. Klout just allows you to do it for dominant social media platforms. This is both good and bad. If you are a band, writer, activist, musician, etc. it’s good to have a tool that gives feedback for the kind of reach you have. As the graph above indicates, it has a matrix that defines different levels of participation, which allows one to make an action plan for attention.

It’s really hard to get a sense of how quality is measured, however. In fact, it really only shows us quantity. It appears that the algorithm rewards gratuitous and excessive networkers, even those who like to tweet when they are taking a crap. In the end, this just may very well be a refined engine for networked hubris.

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.

The Occupy Rose Parade octopus (click here if you can’t see the embed video)

Local news coverage by CBS (click here if you can’t see the video embed)

As a native Angeleno, one of my annual rituals is to watch the New Year’s Day Rose Parade. Though I have never witnessed it in person, I have checked out the scene in Pasadena the night before and know many artisans who design and build floats for the annual parade. This year was no different, with the exception that I wanted to share the nostalgia with my kids. However, now that I’m a bit of an ex-pat, I see things that were part of my past with a slightly defamiliarized perspective.

As the parents of former students have told me, media literacy ruins TV watching for the family. Though I wanted to convey my enthusiasm for the artisanship of Rose Parade floats to my daughter, I couldn’t remove my critical hat. I became highly sensitized to the more troubling aspects of the event’s televised broadcast. Before watching it I was keenly aware that an Occupy group planned to tail the parade with their own anti-corporate message, so I was hoping to see if the network coverage (in this case, NBC) would mention or cover the Occupiers. What transpired should be of little surprise to any seasoned media watcher.

The parade coverage opened with a flyover of a Northrop Grumman’s B-2 stealth bomber, ironically dubbed the Spirit. In a sense, Spirit is an apt name for it represents the “spirit” of a particular mode of thinking (as in zeitgeist, which means “spirit of the age”). At a cost of $1.5 billion each, the B-2 represents the absurdity of our social structure in which our government pays outrageous sums to an elite group of military contractors at the expense of a withering infrastructure. Anthropologists and historians of the future will note how incredibly insane such a social system is. Meanwhile, parade commentators Shaun Robinson and Al Roker fawned over the bomber arguing that for most of the audience it was the main attraction. Such death technology warship should not be surprising given that one of NBC’s primary shareholders is the military contractor General Electric.

The rest of the broadcast represented a seamless integration between the values of the military industrial complex and totalitarian capitalist ideology. The parade’s Grand Marshall, J. R. Martinez, is a bit of a rising media personality whose notoriety comes from his experience of overcoming the psychological damage of getting 40% of his body burned while deployed in Iraq. While I admire his perseverance and resilience, none of the discussion of this man’s tragic circumstances get contextualized by how unnecessary it was in the first place. No doubt, with stealth bombers getting applauded by pop culture punditry and parade organizers, these dirty little details need not be aired publicly. Martinez is a perfect metaphor for the denial of our sick system: get burned and disfigured and then turn it into corporate motivation for how to transcend the adversity of Empire’s reckless global behavior.

Meanwhile, each parade float was a mini-ad for its corporate sponsor. It was obvious that Roker’s canned commentary was essentially ad copy penned by the corporate overlords. Meanwhile, interspersed throughout the coverage was a noticeably higher ratio of advertising that mostly hawked product discounts and financial services for the newly poor. Though subtle (or not if you are media savvy), this was truly a hegemonic spectacle selling the ideology of the 1%. Good thing the Occupiers were there to counterbalance the message. Yet.. if you watched NBC, such a perspective didn’t exist. It was eliminated from the parade’s coverage.

This is a blatant example of how alternatives get excluded by the traditional power structure’s media system. Luckily, we no longer exist in a reality bubble of top-down communications. The complex ecology of our current social media allows for alternative perspectives to be shared horizontally. This is not to say that Occupy Rose Parade was entirely ignored. The LA Times and local news stations mentioned it, and those who were in attendance at the parade certainly had a chance to be exposed for the first time to the Occupy message. Not surprisingly, some critics disparaged the protestors for degrading a family event with politics. But in light of the parade’s default message of corporate and military domination, to not see the entire event as political represents a triumph of ideology.

Let’s hope that those who fail to see the political nature of mainstream media spectacles increasingly become the minority. Transforming and educating for a new perspective means we have lots of work to do. To begin with, its time to occupy the spirit of our age. I keep harping on the Occupy theme, but I believe it represents a concrete alternative to the mode of communication propagated by the hyper-capitalist take-over of the cultural commons.

The miracle of this animation is that Zizek was condensed into ten minutes (here is the whole lecture). But even in this short burst we get a dense critique of cultural capitalism, a stark rebuttal to the kind of ethical capitalism that is being peddled these days through the likes of Starbucks. I have been grappling with my innate distrust of the claims made by the likes of the mega-chains like Wal-Mart and Starbucks who are dipping their toes into the kinds of activities we have long advocated for: fair trade, organics, etc. Zizek argues that there are contradictory aims of a Birkenstock wearing multinational that perpetuates the system that is creating the problem in the first place. It is like the viscous cycle of a medical system in which the drugs we take to cure us make us sick. What I see happening on the ground is that corporations are taking over the commons, and there is little debate as to whether or not this is really healthy for the world. The net result seems to be a re-feudalisation of society and the creation of electronic apartheids across the globe. Throughout Europe and the US the public is being stripped of hard-won services and benefits, yet we are paying more taxes? And for what? To pay off interest to the banks who are making profits that are utterly absurd. Where is the social good there? I am oversimplifying, I know, but something really stinks. My only hope is that this final grab will backfire, and that the facade of cultural capitalism will be stripped away to show the ugly face of primitive accumulation for what it is.

Via Open Culture

I’m an old fan of Douglas Rushkoff, who is one of our most generous public intellectuals. I appreciate how he keeps the Gen X flame lit. In this nifty little Webcomic from Seth Kushner Rushkoff covers some key points from his current book, Life Inc., and themes from his Frontline documentaries, The Merchants of Cool and The Persuaders. In the above panels he riffs on a few motifs that I’ve been playing with: slowing down, mediating less, doing more with people outside the Internet, and engaging in organic and slow media.

As Wired.com points out (Report: Teens Using Digital Drugs to Get High), there is a new hysteria about a craze called “i-dosing.” As the story goes, teens are encouraged to put on headphones and to listen to ambient tracks on the Internet that induce feelings of pleasure and ecstasy. God help them! As the Wired article points out, the phenomena is getting the attention of some concerned folks who worry that this is simply a gateway to some other drug, like marijuana or LSD. Never mind that this is much safer than a much more pressing addiction: our insatiable appetite for war and petroleum.

Indeed, their fears are likely confirmed by the graphic on the signature i-dose track (posted above), “Gates of Hades” (you have to let it run a little to see it). If anything I find the electronic pulse on this track annoying. I much prefer a Tibetan bowl, Balinese gongs, chanting ohm or my favorite: a live Sonic Youth feedback jam. But hey, who can fault teens for wanting to transcend the hellish nightmare we call school and American consumerism.

The fear of teens evading the control of the capitalist/Church mind trap is normal in America. During a time when corporations have hijacked democracy and are poisoning the planet, there’s never a better moment to whip up hysteria about how race music/rock/rave/Internet are abducting our children.

Incidentally, the article’s comments are hilarious. My favorite comment comes from Zombowski, who put it this way: “I can’t figure out how to get the music into the needle. Do I shoot it up with an old record player?”

One of my earliest posts on this blog was about Tila Tequila, whose initial claim to fame was being the most “friended” member of MySpace. My initial shock was her insistence that success was due to her punk rock DIY approach to celebrity. Anyone who knows anything about punk (that is, from direct experience), celebrity and punk are like BP oil swirling in the Gulf of Mexico. Unless, of course, you are geniuses like the Sex Pistols (and Malcolm McLarin), who exploited the media as a kind of guerrilla warfare. Now that John Lydon (AKA Johnny Rotten) self-parodies on reality TV shows (I still love the guy– you’ve got to see Filth and and the Fury for some insights into his character), it seems like the media has won the war.

Enter Lady Gaga. As Nancy Bauer writes in her NYTime philosophy blog post, Lady Power,

“Gaga wants us to understand her self-presentation as a kind of deconstruction of femininity, not to mention celebrity. As she told Ann Powers, ‘Me embodying the position that I’m analyzing is the very thing that makes it so powerful.’ Of course, the more successful the embodiment, the less obvious the analytic part is. And since Gaga herself literally embodies the norms that she claims to be putting pressure on (she’s pretty, she’s thin, she’s well-proportioned), the message, even when it comes through, is not exactly stable. It’s easy to construe Gaga as suggesting that frank self-objectification is a form of real power.”

This is a symptom of something I’ve written quite a bit about: postirony, a toxic byproduct of a peculiar American brand of pessimism that gets its sea-legs in Film Noir, but finds full expression in the commercial exploitation of Gen X cynicism. Postirony is a little hard to define, but is essentially irony turned in on itself: such as selling T-shirts that say “Your rebellion is my marketing strategy.” Thus we get to the perennial debate explored in Bauer’s piece: is the self-conscious exploitation of sexuality by female pop stars an act of empowerment? This discussion began in earnest with Madonna, and in particular her celebration by media critic Camille Paglia, but threads through Tila Tequila’s claim to DIY fame to Lady Gaga’s faux-performance art schtick. Bottom line: the music sucks and we’re venting far too much hot air about the subject (this post guilty as charged).

(You might be interested in Mark Dery’s take on whether or not Lady Gaga is stupid.)

But I have a larger project in mind, one that is tangentially related. After reviewing some of the comments at BoingBoing regarding Xeni Jardin’s post of a videotaped interview with a Gulf boat captain’s exposé of turtles getting fried by BP’s controlled burns, I was particularly saddened by the tone of respondents whose only (written) response to the horror was to joke about the futility of compassion for nature. I’m sure this can be psychoanalyzed to reveal that these cynical posts are actually masking a great deal of pain, but there is too much ironic disposition in the cultural atmosphere to even broach the subject. This may be specific to the kinds of readers at Boing Boing, whose writers are probably a bit dismayed by the pessimistic responses to their generally sincere concern for social justice.

Boing Boing’s writers are cut from the same cloth as punk. Mark Frauenfelder is a veteran zine publisher, and his maker ethic is true to the spirit of DIY. The openness of Boing Boing, and more broadly speaking libertarian Net culture, includes creating space for media freedom fighters like Douglas Rushkoff. But I was utterly dismayed by the overly cynical responses of Boing Boing’s readers to Rushkoff’s call for DIY participatory media democracy (I couldn’t find the link in their archive). I’m horrified by the thought of ever living up to the expectations of such a nasty bunch of readers who are more concerned with cleverness than dialog. Alas, trying to stick out from the fray through tricky turns of phrasing laced with cool bits of humor is what counts in the neoliberal economy that celebrates individual achievement above social cohesion.

Which brings me back to Lady Gaga. I’ve tried my best to ignore her, but every other TV and radio ad has her music in the background, and not a day goes by when my favorite news sites don’t feature a picture of her on their front pages. I’m forced to ask the perennial question of “why?????” But the answer is deceptively simple, and can be reduced to economic discourse: the bottom line is that it makes money. We can argue all we want about the celebration of fan and pop culture, and pooh-pooh the elitist critics for pointing out that we are arguing over the quality of dog crap. So be it. But I’ll go back to something I read when Lady Gaga was just first getting attention. Her big artistic epiphany happened while performing in college. Everyone one was ignoring her until she stripped to her undies. Suddenly the audience took notice and the idea stuck, albeit its expression has been elaborated to the extreme.

Now, I don’t get why someone like millennial it girl Kate Perry–another student of Madonna who learned that it earns interest to kiss a girl and show a lot of cleavage–can get away with calling Lady Gaga’s latest video, Alejandro, “obscene” (OK, I do read Huffingtonpost’s gossip page), when she can do a video with porn-maker Snoop Dogg while simultaneously giving head to a lollypop and sporting a Jesus tattoo on her arm. Honestly, when I began writing this, I didn’t mean to end with Kate Perry. I didn’t even know who she was until last month when suddenly I saw her image everywhere. Initially I thought perhaps her fame was due to some hidden song-writing talent, but discovered after a few quick views on YouTube that there was no there there. Sugary pop is as old as Coca-Cola advertising, and there is nothing to report here of any particular interest other than to reiterate the point that this whole philosophical exploration began with an inquiry into why it is we care to talk so much about the marketing of mammary glands under the pretension of writing about culture.

I suppose I’m engaging in another American tradition, the flipside of all this, iconoclasm, which puts me on the side of fundamentalists and their ilk who hate all images because they are somehow bodily and inherently sexual. Indeed, the lone commenter on my Tila Tequila post was a rabid Christian who obsessively tracked Tila and Suicide Girls in the name of god. Given that Kate Perry is a good Christian, I wonder how this will play out among the true believers who may have not realized that Christ can also be sold with a pair of bosoms. Madonna, who loved to play the Catholic card, got some good mileage out of that one. In this sense, we could say there is nothing more rich in pop culture homilies than the mixing of sex and religion. Indeed, at the source this whole discussion is religion. After all, who speeketh? The priests of our age: marketers. And we have gotten on our knees to pray, once again, to their holy sermons. Such is the life of blogging.

OK, so I’m a little pissed about the World Cup.

I don’t subscribe to satellite or private service in Italy, and only have access to public TV, for which I pay a 100 Euro annual tax. RAI (pubic TV) is only broadcasting one World Cup game a day, which means I have missed many matches, including last night’s crucial game between Ghana and Uruguay. The Net in Italy is now thoroughly filtered so I cannot access live streams from the BBC or ESPN. This is all because the big media monopolies have agreed to gate off large chunks of media, essentially privatizing a global event that arguable belongs in the planetary public sphere.

Incidentally, who pays to train the national teams competing in the World Cup? We do! This is like corporations patenting inventions from public universities.

Burlusconi and Murdoch are big jerks!

Two different visions for the World Cup

Living in Italy it’s hard to ignore the World Cup. Everyday at the local market people want to know my opinion about the England-USA match-up on June 6. That’s fine by me. I’ve got the bug too.

What I find fascinating is how a single ball can so inspire the collective imagination, which is brilliantly captured in the above Nike ad (the first embedded video). Taking a page from Lost, the ad flashes sideways into alternate realities based on the results of the play. Aesthetically the ad captures the global zeitgeist of the World Cup’s fever dream.

Speaking of balls…

Using the soccer ball as a point of discussion, a section of Piere Levy’s Becoming Virtual explores the “anthropological object,” which highlights the possibility for using the World Cup’s gameplay as a visualization for a larger project: global ecology.

Building on French philosopher Michel Serres‘ work on “quasi-objects,” Levy draws on the image of a soccer match to concretize how collective intelligence can emerge around the movement of an “anthropological object,” the otherwise unspectacular soccer ball. There are different levels of engagement: the stadium and its spectators, who cannot directly act on the ball, but most certainly can charge the energetic field of the gamespace (as the general debate about the vuvuzelas testifies). On the field, there are the players, of course, who directly engage the ball. Then there are those of us with our nervous systems extending into the gamespace via the cameras that capture the action and transmit it through cyberspace, satellite and broadcast.

With the scene set we can see that though the ball is itself an artifact in its own right, once it goes into play it becomes a point of relations, propelling collective intelligence into action. No single player can pick up the ball and puncture it or run away with it. The ball becomes a tool for which we can think with and respond to in relation to other people. In play it is collectively conceived, a fulcrum for a billion people to relate to and with each other.

Now, imagine if that kind of collective action revolved around the most important ball of all: Earth.

Certainly the commercial, creative and civic energies that go into the World Cup are not currently directed towards our blue ball in space. Yet, as Levy wholeheartedly wants to do with this particular thought exercise, we can humanize/eco-ize the virtuality experiment that we as a global society are engaged in. He suggests that cyberspace can be such an object to think with, one that offers the pedagogical potential for engaging us in building intelligent communities. Obviously at this current moment the BPs of the world are firmly entrenched in the political, military and financial matrix of global power, but they are not poised for the necessary intelligent response to what the ecosphere, and humanity, is calling for. The Greenpeace ad (the second embedded video) is a step in this direction.

Of course, unlike a soccer ball, we don’t need to kick Earth around any more. In Levy’s words:

“Technology virtualizes action and organic functions. Yet the tool, the artifact, are not merely efficient things. Technological objects are passed from hand to hand, body to body, like a baton in a relay. They create shared uses, become vectors of knowledge, messengers of collective memory, catalysts of cooperation.” (p.165)

Is Challenger the official car of the Tea Party? Here Dodge is desperately pandering to the extreme right, an indicator that American corporations have no scruples when it comes to salvaging its business model. Indeed, this is a zeitgeist ad for the American political landscape: a failed ideology can only salvage itself through the appeal of fascist aesthetics.

Indeed, muscle cars are like tea Partiers on steroids, trouncing the landscape as they chase off the foreign occupiers with a false sense of self-confidence. Sorry to say this folks, but the Brits have you by the balls right now. BP will gladly fuel your Challenger for you at a special discounted rate of specially repurposed Gulf oil.

George Orwell, Walter Benjamin and George Washington are somewhere shaking their heads right now while chasing quaaludes with a stiff brandy.

So much for freedom.