Use them as you see fit.
Skilluminati:
We live on a planet with 6 billion humans, and most of them are uninformed and ignorant. Here in the United States, despite high standards of living and abundant material wealth, the situation is no different.
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Don’t mistake this for crowing about how dumb people are. This is a serious and intractable problem. The vast majority of voters in the United States are dangerously ignorant and easily manipulated.
Here’s the moral quandary: is it ethical to use deception in order to control these people? If you don’t do it, guess who will? Karl Rove. Rick “not about the issues” Davis. The same paid operatives who have been running the real power structure of the United States since John Rockefeller and Edward Bernays were alive.
Here’s the logistical problem: how can you and I compete against multi-million dollar budgets? The business of spectacles, like any other, is a business that runs on money. Those who have money shape the spectacle, and the rest of us are consigned to…well, meaningless critiques on obscure websites.
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As I said at the outset of this project, “my interest in 5GW (5th Generation Warfare) is rooted in it’s potential for positive social and cultural change.” I am investigating warfare for the same reasons I investigated psychology and marketing — beacuse the tools of social control will be less damaging when they’re widely distributed. Executives who have power over millions of other humans are inherently dangerous — millions of humans with executive control over themselves is where we’re headed this century.
The dinosaurs of governments and corporations and media conglomerates and think tanks and universities — the old legitimate White Control System — will not let go quietly and politely. So I think every future mutunt has a common-sense obligation to learn how to disable and disarm them as effectively as possible.
Matt Mason, The Pirate’s Dilemma:
Disruptive new D.I.Y. technologies are causing unprecedented creative destruction. The history of punk offers us valuable insights into how this new world works. Punk was an angry outburst, a reaction to mass culture, but it offered new ideas about how mass culture could be replaced with a more personalized, less centralized worldview.
Punk has survived in many incarnations musically—it became new wave, influenced hip-hop, and conceived grunge and the notion of indie bands. But more important, its independent spirit also spurred a do-it-yourself revolution. D.I.Y. encourages us to reject authority and hierarchy, advocating that we can and should produce as much as we consume.
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Punk had high ideals—it looked aggressive and scary, but through its angry critique of society and subversion of it, it sought to change the world for the better. Punk capitalists are using the same techniques, subverting a world full of empty corporate gestures, manufacturing businesses and products with meanings that attempt to inject substance back into style. Punk injected altruism into entrepreneurship, a motivator of people long overlooked by neoclassical economics. Not only that, punk made the idea of putting purpose before profit seem cool to an entire generation. It manufactured new meaning in an area where it was really needed.
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Hip-hop has forged such a strong connection with so many, it can create change like no music scene before it. “I don’t think there is any place it doesn’t exist,” says Daymond John of the movement he grew up with. “Hip-hop artists are addressing the U.N. It could actually overthrow governments. This is the communication of the poor. Music is one of the most powerful ways people communicate with each other. There is no limit to this.” Hip-hop has proved to be a great way to generate money, but it’s now in a position to generate some serious social change, too.
Chang also cites studies such as the UCLA freshman survey that points out that “the hip-hop generation’s rate of participation in voluntarism, in political protest and in activism on a wide range of issues is much higher than that of the baby boomer generation during their youth.. . . The myth of an apathetic generation—one even upheld by some of our youngest public intellectuals—is one of the most baseless and insidious lies of our era.”
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Today’s flash mobs are the digital Situationists, increasing the peace, subverting the norm, and making us laugh. Each one is different and unique; the only thing they have in common is their transience. But flash mobs are just one new phenomenon; many things are becoming just as temporary. Nanocultures rise and fall in months. Goods are ever more disposable. Owning something is becoming less important than the right to access it. Gibson was right: things that used to be meaningful no longer carry the same weight. Youth cultures and fads have become marketing tools, but deeper underground, something else is happening.
Instead of the subversive words of youth cultures such as punk and hip-hop, the actions of a new breed of nanomovements and subversive systems are sweating the smaller stuff, tearing old models to shreds, and finding new ways to construct meaning and movements. The nanos still add up to something. It seems depth is a thing of the past, but again, this is just how it looks on the surface.
Welcome to youth culture’s great disappearing act.
The Art of Memetics:
In contemporary society examining survival pressures means looking at the socioeconomic system within which people are embedded. Memes that make their host unemployable have smaller potential populations, and contravening the social mores and norms endangers the host’s survivability and reduces the meme’s communicational effectiveness. It is detrimental to memetic survival to promote behavior that destroys the host’s ability to maneuver in a social space.
However, there is no reason to assume memetics requires language to operate. All identity construction, in addition to being a kind of bricolage, is also existent only within a social context. You do not have an identity without some kind of community formation against which to project that identity. This community space is also a theater in which performance and stress builds connections….The propaganda of the deed is most commonly pictured as terrorism, but can mean any dramatic or awe-inspiring action designed as communication. In the past the actions only affected those who were physically present. If those not present were effected it was via a retelling or textualizing. Today’s media environment in which events and actions are filmed, associated with various emotional markers through juxtaposition and shown directly to many people repeatedly has widened the impact of these types of communication. It is against this backdrop of our current communication structure that terrorism has gained its modern power and prevalence, as it is one thing to be told that hundreds of people have died in an event, but it is quite another thing entirely to be shown the event in all its drama, movement, and color.
You don’t convince someone by pushing what you believe against what they believe. It is when their belief system is questioning itself that you can lean in and offer what you want them to do or believe as the answer to the instability. Point out contradictions inherent in their belief system and they themselves may throw it out of balance. Get them to question one end of their beliefs using another end and then offer your meme as the solution to the feelings of doubt.
Adorno and Horkheimer, The Culture Industry:
Those who are so absorbed by the world of the movie—by its images, gestures, and words—that they are unable to supply what really makes it a world, do not have to dwell on particular points of its mechanics during a screening. All the other films and products of the entertainment industry which they have seen have taught them what to expect; they react automatically. The might of industrial society is lodged in men’s minds. The entertainment manufacturers know that their products will be consumed with alertness even when the customer is distraught, for each of them is a model of the huge economic machinery which has always sustained the masses, whether at work or at leisure—which is akin to work. From every sound film and every broadcast program the social effect can be inferred which is exclusive to none but is shared by all alike. The culture industry as a whole has molded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product. All the agents of this process, from the producer to the women’s clubs, take good care that the simple reproduction of this mental state is not nuanced or extended in any way.
Jay Abraham, Techniques of Stealth Marketing:
Education is a powerful marketing technique. Educate your prospective buyers about everything (including a few of the bad or less positive aspects of your product or service) and you’ll sell to almost twice as much people as you do now.
The Psychology of Entertainment, Wyer and Adaval:
The images created by the entertainment media, whether encountered in a darkened movie theatre or in sitcoms, soaps, news reports, and advertising, do appear to blur the lines between reality and what we perceive it to be. These images can have a persisting influence on people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behavior in ways that we have only recently begun to uncover. O’Guinn and Shrum (1997) paint
a compelling picture of the consequences of excessive television viewing. They find that heavy viewers of television are more likely than infrequent viewers to overestimate the frequency with which individuals drive luxury cars, have swimming pools in their backyards, or manifest other characteristics of an affluent lifestyle (see Shrum, Burroughs, & Rindfleish, this volume).
These effects occur in part because people are typically unmotivated or unable to identify the sources of information they have acquired (Hasher, Goldstein, & Toppin, 1977; Jacoby, Kelley, Brown, & Jasechko, 1989; Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993). Thus, they fail to distinguish between their memories for actual events they have read about or personally experienced and their memories of fictional events they have seen on television. Consequently, they often retrieve and use these latter events to estimate the likelihood that the events occur in daily life. In many instances, people are unaware of the biasing influence of the media on their estimates. But even when they are conscious of bias, they do not know how much they should adjust to compensate for it (Petty &Wegener, 1993). Consequently, they can often fail to adjust enough or, at other times, can adjust too much.
Bob Altermeyer, The Authoritarians:
I have discovered in my investigations that, by and large, high Right Wing Authoritarian students had simply missed many of the experiences that might have lowered their authoritarianism. Take that first item on page 59 about fathers being the head of the family. Authoritarian followers often said they didn’t know any other kind of families. And they hadn’t known any unpatriotic people, nor had they broken many rules. They simply had not met many different kinds of people or done their share of wild and crazy things. Instead they had grown up in an enclosed, rather homogeneous environment–with their friends, their schools, their readings, their amusements all controlled to keep them out of harm’s way and Satan’s evil clutches. They had contentedly traveled around on short leashes in relatively small, tight, safe circles all their lives.
Interestingly enough, authoritarian followers show a remarkable capacity for change IF they have some of the important experiences. For example, they are far less likely to have known a homosexual (or realized an acquaintance was homosexual) than most people. But if you look at the high RWAs who do know someone gay or lesbian, they are much less hostile toward homosexuals in general than most authoritarians are. Getting to know a homosexual usually makes one more accepting of homosexuals as a group. Personal experiences can make a lot of difference, which is a truly hopeful discovery. The problem is, most right-wing authoritarians won’t willingly exit their small world and try to meet a gay. They’re too afraid. And “coming out” to a high RWA acquaintance might have long-term beneficial effects on him, but it would likely carry some risks for the outgoing person.
A New Spin on Groups: The Science of Chaos:
Butz explains that, during stable periods in their lives, individuals are able to achieve a fixed, yet transitory, sense of self. However, these periods remain stable only until the psyche encounters novel material, which it is unable to integrate within its current mental configuration. When the mental apparatus is disrupted, chaos ensues, followed by a period where the organism reorganizes at a higher level of complexity. This process seems compatible with that inferred in Freeman’s brain research mentioned earlier. As the organism develops higher and higher levels of complexity and adaptation, it alternates between periods of stability and chaos. However, as Butz notes, the chaotic periods are far less frequent than are the stable ones.
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According to Butz, psychic chaos and subsequent self-organization signal a creative gestation period wherein the psyche reorganizes itself to accommodate or integrate novel material. Both Butz and Jung discuss the link between chaos and creativity, recognizing what so many others have—that psychic turbulence is a necessary condition prior to new insight or creation of a new psychic structure. As an artist might struggle with containing chaos to create, so too must an individual in the throes of psychic upheaval manage chaos while undergoing a transformation.
During chaotic periods, the unconscious issues forth symbolic images or mandalas. These mandalas, containing symbols of the self, are expressed in a mathematical structure. They appear to be compensatory. Mandalas both express and create order in opposition to ongoing psyche chaos. Butz concludes that “these symbolic representations of the transitory self may also act as a container to focus chaotic experience toward an organized state. As a consequence, the mandala (Fig. 4.2) or the symbol seems to function as an attractor that brings about order. “What is fascinating about these mandalas are the incredible similarities they have to the fractal images so prevalent in the geometry of chaos.
Culture Jamming:
Meanwhile, the question remains: How to box with shadows? In other words, what shape does an engaged politics assume in an empire of signs?
The answer lies, perhaps, in the “semiological guerrilla warfare” imagined by Umberto Eco. “[T]he receiver of the message seems to have a residual freedom: the freedom to read it in a different way…I am proposing an action to urge the audience to control the message and its multiple possibilities of interpretation,” he writes. “One medium can be employed to communicate a series of opinions on another medium…The universe of Technological Communication would then be patrolled by groups of communications guerrillas, who would restore a critical dimension to passive reception.”
The Power of Persuasion, Robert Levine:
Psychological disarmament is what often sets the stage for persuasion. One of life’s crueler ironies is that we’re most vulnerable at those very moments when we feel in least danger. Unfortunately, the illusion of invulnerability pretty well defines our resting state. Even when there is no manipulative outsider pulling our strings, most of us have a tendency to view our futures with unrealistic optimism. Studies have shown that people generally approach the threats of life with the philosophy that bad things are more likely to happen to other people than to themselves. With uncanny faulty logic, most people will tell you they’re less prone to become victims than everyone around them.
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Research shows that if you subject people to weak versions of a persuasive message, they’re less vulnerable to stronger versions later on, in much the same way that being exposed to small doses of a virus immunizes you against full-blown attacks. In a classic study by William McGuire, people were asked to state their opinion on an issue. They were then mildly attacked for their position and given an opportunity to refute the attack. When later confronted by a powerful argument against their initial opinion, these subjects were more resistant than were a control group. In effect, they developed defenses that rendered them immune.
The PFLD 