evitablefate:

Adam Curtis (in an interview with The Register)

At a time when there isn’t anything to give you confidence beyond yourself - you live in the “empire of the self” - then it is inevitable that you will seek those like you, because it will give you a sense of collective purpose. It will give you a sense of collective security.

And that’s exactly what the internet is about - “If you like this book, others before you have bought these books…” And it works to create those little circles. All those little radio stations which tell you, “If you played this, other people have played this…”

On the internet, you’re constantly monitoring other people’s choices to see what those people who you think are like you do, and they say, “OK I’ll do that to be like that”. And what that leads to, again, is Balkanisation.

And it’s what advertisers rather like, because it gives them a definition.

The Century of the Self, parts 1 - 4

New York Times: Americans think of the Canadian center as socialism.
Douglas Coupland: Pretty much. To have a healthy culture you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don’t have that, your culture becomes a parking lot.
NYT: How would you define the current cultural moment?
DC: I’m starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the words they want to read and the music they listen to. You don’t have the broader trends like you used to.
NYT: Sure you do. What about Harry Potter and Taylor Swift and “Avatar,” to name a few random phenomena?
DC: They’re not great cultural megatrends like disco, which involved absolutely everyone in the culture. Now, everyone basically is their own microculture, their own nanoculture, their own generation.

pieto:mkarmstr:

Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage (Track 1), Columbia Records (late 1960s)

Asch Conformity Experiment

aka Group Think vs. YOU.

This 4min video shows how easy it is to conform, even against your own perceptions and experiences.

You experience this mental bug in: Politics, Society, Religion, Corporations, Peer Groups, etc…you know, the real Great Beast…

Think, Think, THINK.

Rfiddler zapper kills RFID tags dead, the hard way

• Sure, there may be a number of relatively easy ways to destroy or disable an RFID tag (tossing it in the microwave, for instance), but where’s the fun in that? There are plenty of good times to be had with this so-called “Rfiddler” built by Codeninja though, which disables tags (and potentially anything else in its sights) by emitting a strong electromagnetic field — not to mention some sounds that will cause anyone standing in its vicinity to take a few big steps back. Head on past the [link] for a video, and hit up the link below for the complete parts list if you’re interested in building your own….

pieto:

The empty debate on the spectacle - that is, on the activities of the world’s owners - is thus organised by the spectacle itself- everything is said about the exten­sive means at its disposal, to ensure that nothing is said about their extensive deployment. Rather than talk of the spectacle, people often prefer to use the term ‘media’. And by this they mean to describe a mere instrument, a kind of public service which with impartial ‘professionalism’ would facilitate the new wealth of mass communication through mass media -a form of communication which has at last attained a unilateral purity, whereby decisions already taken are presented for passive admiration. For what is commu­nicated are orders; and with perfect harmony, those who give them are also those who tell us what they think of them.

from Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (Section III) - Guy Debord

• DEARBORN, Mich. (AP) - There’s a swirl of activity in a spacious, modern kitchen as final meal preparations are made.
• An older man tries to swipe a felafel off an appetizer plate but instead gets a loving hand slap from a woman. The happy, well-dressed guests move to a table full of food in a dining room adorned with Middle Eastern wall-hangings.
• It’s an inviting, if idealized, dinner party scene from any Arab-American home at least that’s what the CIA seeks to convey in the first television commercial of its kind. The agency, in turn, hopes it’s an inviting message to U.S. Arabs.
• “Your nation, your world,” a male voice says with a Middle Eastern accent, as the frame moves outside and pans out to show the party through a window of a gleaming, high-rise building. In seconds, the shot zooms out to an image of the U.S. from space. “They’re worth protecting.
• “Careers in the CIA.”
• The commercial, which the agency plans to debut on mainstream and ethnic TV stations and Web sites nationwide within the next few months, represents artistic and technological leaps for the agency. Until now, its print, broadcast and Web advertising has focused on the variety of career options and the diversity among its ranks, but the agency hasn’t used a storytelling approach to sell its message.
• Daw Alwerfalli, a mechanical engineering professor at Lawrence Technological University in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, said he liked the casual approach. An added benefit and point of pride for Alwerfalli: His son, Tamer, was among the actors.
• “It’s talking to anybody it shows that the CIA cares about the integrity of the family in general,” Alwerfalli said.

Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?

via 15 Interesting Cold War Vintage Ads

• The secretive US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has awarded arms globocorp General Dynamics a $10m contract to set up a network of psychological-warfare “influence websites” supporting the Global War On Terror. France and Britain are specifically included as “targeted regions”.
• SOCOM’s Joint Military Information Support Command, which “orchestrates a 24/7 multi-media campaign formatted to the cultures and languages of relevant audiences” in “what has become a tough, entrenched war of ideas” has deployed what it calls the Trans-Regional Web Initiative (TRWI). Specs on the programme were issued last year (pdf) and earlier this month General Dynamics was awarded $10,116,177 to run the Initiative for the first year.
• The SOCOM psywar sites will be run much in the same fashion as any normal web-media portal. There will be “indigenous content stringers and editors” within “targeted regions” providing 24-hour “original features, news, sports, entertainment, economics, politics, cultural reports, business, and similar items of interest to targeted readers”.

clothedinsky:zoomar:

Ronald McDonald feeding on the American public.

Pic via Ms. McDonald

• Yes we can and Hope we can believe didn’t sound quite like the Sixties; they sounded more like the Seventies’ tin-eared counterfeits you would hear on Quinn Martin productions whenever a crime trail might lead Cannon or Barnaby Jones to a go-go club. There was nostalgia, though not for the dangerous and authentic historical moment, but for the regurgitated mush of the first nostalgia.
• And they earned Obama the White House: perfect for a relaunch of that establishment hit factory which hadn’t topped the charts since Let’s Roll! and Bring ‘Em On (Get it on). But Obama is a President like Franklin Roosevelt only in the sense that the Monkees were a pop group like the Beatles. A radical departure from “beltway consensus” was as unwise, to his producers and Chicago entourage, as letting Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork write and perform their own material. Iraq, Afghanistan, Bernanke, Blackwater: a new house singer may bring his own interpretation, but the song remains the same.

• A presidential candidate opposed to the Iraq War is elected and enters the Oval Office. Yet six months later, there are still essentially the same number of troops in Iraq as were there when his predecessor left, the same number, in fact, used in the original invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Moreover, the new president remains on the “withdrawal” schedule the previous administration laid out for him with the same caveats being issued about whether it can even be met.
• That administration also built a humongous, three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar embassy in Baghdad, undoubtedly the most expensive on the planet. Staffed with approximately 1,000 “diplomats,” it was clearly meant to be a massive command center for Iraq (and, given neocon dreams, the region). Last weekend, well into the Obama era, the Washington Post reported that the State Department’s yearly budget for “running” that embassy — $1.5 billion (that is not a misprint) in 2009 — will actually rise to $1.8 billion for 2010 and 2011. In addition, the Obama administration now plans to invest upwards of a billion dollars in constructing a massive embassy in Islamabad and other diplomatic facilities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Here, too, there will be a massive influx of “diplomats,” and here, too, a U.S. command center for the region is clearly being created.
• What’s striking are the continuities in American foreign and military policy, no matter who is in the White House. The first-term Obama foreign policy now looks increasingly like the second-term Bush foreign policy. Even where change can be spotted, it regularly seems to follow in the same vein. The New York Times, for instance, recently reported that the controversial “missile defense shield” the Bush administration was insistent on basing in Poland and the Czech Republic is being reconsidered in a many-months-long Obama administration “review.” While this should be welcomed, the only option mentioned involved putting it elsewhere — in Turkey and somewhere in the Balkans. At stake is one of the great military-industrial boondoggles of our age. Yet cancellation is, it seems, beyond consideration in Washington.

• Here are some words and images used by right-wing political and media figures as signals to the patriot and Tea Party constituencies, signals used to organize the throngs against health care legislation, environmental reforms and all things identified with President Barack Obama.