Date: Sat, 5 Jul 2003 21:26:34 -0700 (PDT) From: Amy Alexander <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: <nettime> Google's Weapons of Mass Destruction
i understand how it can be annoying if the same joke arrives in one's inbox repeatedly, but i think we shouldn't overlook the power of a meme as a form of political resistance. i've received this one from people who don't usually seem to question the war; it seems to be hitting a nerve beyond the "preaching to the converted" crowd.
the meme is quickly moving beyond email circles into mainstream media - reuters et al are now reporting it... search now for weapons of mass destruction...
http://news.google.com/news?q=weapons+of+mass+destruction
as to whether the redundant forwarding is a symptom of info- or cyber-dependency: the interesting thing is that each time someone forwards it, it means that the sender has just received the message for the first time - in most cases, the people who receive something like this repeatedly are cyber-veterans with large cyber-social-networks, whereas the senders are not very entrenched in cyberculture (otherwise, they'd realize it was redundant and not send it.)
so, whatever one's feelings on the dark humor, this seems to be something that a lot of people from outside the usual net-active and politically-active circles are hooking into. there's a lot of social discomfort in the states about anti-war discussions since one can be shunned by one's peers as a traitor. so memes and dark humor can be icebreakers for a lot of people to start discussing these issues, and that really needs to happen...
- -@
On Fri, 4 Jul 2003, Bill Spornitz wrote:
Co-Info-Dependents;<...>
I have enjoyed the e-rhythm washing ashore as this little info-fluff has arrived in my inbox about twice a day since it first came out on metafilter, or slashdot, or al-jazeera, or whatever, about 6 days ago.
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Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2003 02:23:09 -0400 From: Keith Sanborn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: <nettime> Google's Weapons of Mass Destruction
Even my father sent me this one and I appreciate the critique wrapped in humor, but it's also another kind of a Trojan Horse: if you happen to buy one of the books on Amazon.com that the creator of the site links to, then he gets paid. Again, we have a form of clever advertising, something the brits are quite good at. Political critique that gets paid; or is it just someone wanting to get paid who uses political critique as a hook? Not much worse or radically different than the "un lapin" website selling tee shirts and I'm a fan of the latter, though I've never bought the tee shirt.
To paraphrase a 20th century advertising jingle: it's two, two, two things in one.
It's enough to drive one back to arguments about superstructure and substructure in an ancient Marxian vein.
But it's not about advertising being bad; that's a given. It's about masquerade and data gathering. I imagine it will be frequently imitated. But this is an interesting case where the search engine is detourned, but then the politics are recuperated by a commercial impulse. Usually, they aren't planned into the same package. It seems like another permutation of what Debord called "the integrated spectacle" and may even represent a new tactic--if not a new strategy--for commodifying dissent.
Keith Sanborn
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