The Media Virus, My Problem Child

A slice from an essay by Douglas Rushkoff, taken from the book The End Of Trust, featuring Cory Doctorow, Edward Snowdon and Douglas Rushkoff. Published by EFF. 

When I first used the expression “media virus,” I thought I was describ-ing a new sort of total transparency; media would finally tell the stories that our controllers didn’t want us to hear. If a cultural issue is truly repressed or unresolved, a media virus invoking that issue can nest and replicate.
The perplexing thing—the part I didn’t fully understand until now—is that it doesn’t matter what side of an issue people are on for them to be infected by the meme and provoked to replicate it. “Look what this person said!” is reason enough to spread it. In the contentious social media surrounding elec-tions, the most racist and sexist memes are reposted less by their advocates than by their outraged opponents. That’s because memes do not compete for dominance by appealing to our intellect, our compassion, or anything to do with our humanity. The media space is too crowded for thoughtful, time-consuming appeals. When operating on platforms oversaturated with ads, memes, messages, spam, and more, memes need to provoke an immedi-ate and visceral response to get noticed. “The Clintons are running an occult child sex ring in the basement of a pizzeria.” In a race to the bottom of the brain stem, viruses compete to trigger our most automatic impulses.
Well-meaning and pro-social counterculture groups from the Situationists to Adbusters and Greenpeace have attempted to spread their messages through the equivalents of viral media. They cut and paste text and images to subvert the original meanings of advertisements, or the intentions of corporate logos. It is a form of media aikido, leveraging the tremendous weight and power of an institution against itself with a single clever twist. With the advent of a new, highly interactive media landscape, internet viruses seemed like a great way to get people talking about the unresolved issues that needed to be discussed in the light of day. After all, this logic goes, if the meme provokes a response, then it’s something that has to be brought up to the surface.
But we can’t engineer a society through memetics the way a biologist might hope to engineer an organism through genetics. It’s ineffective in the long run, and—beyond that—unethical. It bypasses our higher faculties, our reasoning, and our collective authority.
The danger with viruses is that they succeed by bypassing the neocor-tex—the thinking part of our brain—and go straight to the more primal reptile beneath. The meme for scientifically proven climate change, for example, doesn’t provoke the same intensity of cultural response as the meme for “elite conspiracy!”
Logic and truth have nothing to do with it. Memes work by provoking fight-or-flight reactions. And those sorts of responses are highly individual-istic. They’re not pro-social; they’re antisocial. They’re not pro-cultural; at their best they are countercultural. They can galvanize a particular group of people, especially one that feels under assault. If the group is genuinely vulnerable—such as #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, or #ArabSpring—then this solidarity, though usually emotional and oppositional, is still beneficial to the group’s identity and cohesion. But the very same memetic provocations work, perhaps even better, to galvanize groups on false pretenses. As long as the deep fear, rage, or panic is activated, it doesn’t have to be based in reality. Indeed, fact-based rhetoric only gets in the way of the hyperbolic claims, emotional hot buttons, and mythic claims that rile people up: blood and soil, black men will hurt you, foreigners are dangerous, Lock Her Up. The less encumbered by facts or sense, the more directly a meme can focus on psychological triggers from sexism to xenophobia.

--Douglas Rushkoff, The Media Virus, My Problem Child (Taken from the book The End Of Trust. Free Download Here.)

THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE (1967)

THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE, MARSHALL McLUHAN: SIDE A

THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE, MARSHALL McLUHAN: SIDE B

F FOR FAKE

Wikipedia: "F for Fake (French: Vérités et Mensonges) is the last major film completed by Orson Welles. Initially released in 1974, it focuses on Elmyr de Hory's recounting of his career as a professional art forger; de Hory's story serves as the backdrop for a fast-paced, meandering investigation of the natures of authorship and authenticity, as well as the basis of the value of art. Far from serving as a traditional documentary on Elmyr de Hory, the film also incorporates Welles's companion Oja Kodar, notorious "hoax-biographer" Clifford Irving, and Orson Welles himself, in an autobiographical role."

Passages from Finnegans Wake (1965)

"A half-forgotten, half-legendary pioneer in American abstract and animated filmmaking, Mary Ellen Bute, late in her career as an artist, created this adaptation of James Joyce, her only feature. In the transformation from Joyce's polyglot prose to the necessarily concrete imagery of actors and sets, Passages discovers a truly oneiric film style, a weirdly post-New Wave rediscovery of Surrealism, and in her panoply of allusion - 1950s dance crazes, atomic weaponry, ICBMs, and television all make appearances - she finds a cinematic approximation of the novel's nearly impenetrable vertically compressed structure.

With Passages from Finnegans Wake Bute was the first to adapt a work of James Joyce to film and was honored for this project at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 as best debut."

Movie embedded from ubu.com
Torrent available from Greylodge
Soundtrack available from WFMU

LIFE INC. By Douglas Rushkoff

I very greatly recommend Douglas Rushkoff's new book LIFE INC. How the world became a corporation and how to take it back. I would love it if very many people read this book, and then worked out a way to collectively act on it. Not to say Life, Inc. has all the answers, but it certainly raises great questions which could go a long way towards deconstructing the apparently intractable global financial "crisis," amongst other deficiencies of the corporatist landscape.

Rushkoff has been releasing an attention span friendly series of dispatch videos elucidating the main topics of the book. I very much hope that these ideas begin to inform the general socio-economic discourse. I don't at all mean to suggest that these are ideas everyone needs to believe, but rather that these are the topics we need to discus.





Beyond just the book and it's multimedia accoutrements, Rushkoff has also taken to the airwaves in the service of bottom up, locally organized, open source, participatory culture.

Archives of Previous Shows
Here's a recent episode where Douglas interviews Paul Krassner!

And hey, why not! Here's a great talk Douglas gave to the Institute of General Semantic,
"Don't Change Yourself, Change the World"


I've gotten to know Douglas over the last few years via the Maybe Logic Academy and consider him very much the real McCoy.

Here's a guy who can appear on stage at a Disinfo con w/ RAW & Grant Morrison, proclaiming victory for the "counter culture", while also winning awards for his PBS Frontline documentaries.

Rushkoff can write a cyberpunk, psychedelic comic book series like Testament for Vertigo, while also writing level headed media theory for the New York Times.

He can play keyboard in Genis P Orridge's Psychic TV & talk politics on NBC Nightly News w/ Brian Williams.

Douglas Rushkoff is a viral media explosion waiting to happen, hell he coined the phrase after all! His bright ideas are welcome on boingboing.com, time magazine, comic book resources, NPR, ONLY MAYBE, CBS Sunday Morning, etc, ad infinitum AND! on july 15th, the Colbert Report.

I don't think there are very many people about whom I could honestly say this, but if Rushkoff does well, I think we all do well, so I say he gets the big push. Good luck, Doug!

We're not in Milton Keynes anymore, Toto....

"All perception is a gamble" --Edmund Husserl

"Alchemist: We began in a fairytale and we came to life, but... is this life reality? No. It is a film. Zoom back camera. We are images, dreams, photographs. We must not stay here. Prisoners! We shall break the illusion. Goodbye to the Holy Mountain. Real life awaits us." --taken from Alejandro Jodorowski's "The Holy Mountain"

I noticed this post over at Dedroidify a couple of days ago, concerning photos of Harry Potter actress Emma Watson with "Be Emma" written in biro on her chest. This has caused some "mind-control" watchers to speculate that Watson "is" under some sort of control.

Dedroidify links to another site, called PseudOccult Media, which documents all sorts of media-types, particularly actors and fashion designers, photographers and models who have fallen under the "MK" (mind-kontrol, I'm guessing - after the infamous CIA program, MK-ULTRA) spell. The idea 'is' that the 'super-rich' and the "Illuminati" are finding these fame-hungry, abused souls and elevating them to 'star-status' to push the Illuminoid/rich cabal agenda. Mosbunall of them "are" groomed for slavery from a very young age, so the theory goes.

Benjamin Singleton, the bloke who runs the "PseudOccult Media" blog, goes through various TV shows and photo shoots, pointing out all of the symbols. A checkerboard floor has to do with masonic rituals, leopard/tiger print clothing and shoes 'are' the symbols of a sex-kitten slave, owls represent the worship of Molech, black/white patterns are suggestive of 'duality', having one eye obscured in a photo symbolises the "all-seeing eye", butterflies 'are' supposed to be Project Monarch. There's also plenty of numerology and letter symbolism thrown in for good measure. You have to know how to read the code, I guess. To me, some of these blogs almost seem like "Heat" magazine for paranoids. The bloggers seem sincere enough, though and they do go a long way to explain what they perceive as signals from the 'New World Order'.

Me, I dunno - mosbunall of it appears to be a "Thinker Thinks, Prover Proves" situation. If you're convinced that Britney Spears "is" mind-controlled, you'll find ample evidence to back up your suspicions. Likewise for fashionista photog David LaChapelle or Katy Perry. Then again, maybe they really 'are' under some sort of MK-ULTRA control techniques--I don't want to completely dismiss any of the bloggers as freakballs and nutjobs. I'm not sure if they're accomplishing their missions, either - if it's to make crap films and records, then I guess it's a resounding success. All facetiousness aside, I'm not really bothered if Lindsay Lohan spends her weekends at Area 51, making tin statues of Molech while dancing on a checkerboard floor..or if Disney's latest teen 'MK' opus makes trillions. I don't buy any (or intentionally listen to) Madonna or Miley Cyrus records. I don't really follow what fashions the "Pinks" (in Sub-Genius parlance) are into, or what their musical or film tastes would be. This may make me a 'blinkered' and 'sleeping' critter, according to these blogs. I agree that Disney product seems abhorrent, being as it 'is', a mega-corporation with profit-making as it's ultimate bottom-line, but I try not to contribute directly to it's income (some CDs I purchase may be linked to it somehow).

I find these theories, at least for me, raise more questions than they answer. If I were part of the "real" Illuminati - would I make these masonic & symbolic 'clues' quite easy to spot, for someone who's looking for them? Or maybe I'd do that to deliberately throw any potential sleuths off of my trail, while saving the real code only for the 'inner circle'. Also, why infiltrate the fashion industry? Most of the Pinks can't afford the haute couture clothes. I personally don't look at any fashion magazines and a cursory look at my wardrobe will bear out any doubts as to my fondness for avoiding the latest trends. I guess the shadowy ones have a fondness for teenage Western girls' cash...maybe they did some market research. I suppose it's just one more branch of the media to control. Why mind-control yokels like Cyrus and Spears? Are they more susceptible than intelligent writers and musicians? Pop tarts seem to have a limited shelf-life..why not someone who'll be around for awhile (maybe that explains Madonna)? To paraphrase R.A.W., if this "is" the power-elite - they seem to be a bunch of fuck-ups to me.

So it appears I'm safe from this insidious programming attempt.......oh no...they got Alison Goldfrapp too? Damn! I've got a few of her records. I may have to get rid of my Electric Light Orchestra Eldorado album also--I forgot to mention that The Wizard Of Oz "is" a huge mind-control touch-stone, according to the conspiracy theorists. Sheesh..even The Simpsons? I have to wonder if there's some sort of counter-conspiracy going on. I mean, I wonder what agenda the people that wrote that "W.O.Oz" site have? Another thing R.A.W. said was that he doesn't believe there's one over-arching conspiracy - but several going at once, looking to undermine each other. There does seem to be a bit of a right-wing X-tian slant to some of these sites and blogs--all this anti-Masonic/Bilderberger/royal family stuff and concern over the welfare of children in an almost patronising tone. Hmmm...that does lead into the murky depths of Mask/Anti-Mask and Chapel Perilous. If the concern over these 'celebs' allegedly being mind-controlled is genuine, why not alert them? It all looks to be very voyeuristic to me--just waiting for the fresh news story or photo shoot or music video to pick over the symbols and colours.

I'm not convinced by any of the above 'evidence', but it does seem to be an interesting reality-tunnel to explore for a few days. Overall, though, I'm keeping my sense of agnosticism keen--after all, it's all just maya, illusion..isn't it?