Now that I’ve emerged from my symbolic journey through the desert that took place over the last few months, I need to start cracking away at a variety of topics that have sparked my interest lately. The timeliest of those topics is WikiLeaks, a site that I heard about a few weeks ago via an NPR column. Now that I Google search for it, I see it was actually a partner article (from a group called Foreign Policy), and they made it sound like it was already old news on April 8.

In other words, a video of an American helicopter shooting down a group of non-militant people in a suburb of Baghdad accrued more than two million views on YouTube within five days of being posted online (that happened on 4/3/10). It now has more than six million views. This is the way that information will be distributed in the future, and the distribution itself is almost more interesting than what we see in the video. After all, put in a different context, this could be a scene from a popular Hollywood war movie.

But this is “real life.” This is a group of American marines murdering innocent Iraqis who were “suspected” to be looking for trouble in the streets. Two of them were professional journalists (Reuters photographers) carrying large cameras under their arms, which by a far stretch could be made out to be automatic weapons. If there had actually be a battle going on (and if more than two were carrying large black objects), one might be able to argue that it was an honest mistake — collateral damage in the “fight for justice” while we “bring freedom to the world.”

However, these people were walking casually down the street. There was no warfare in sight. The helicopter simply requested permission to shoot down these “targets,” quite simply because they were out looking for targets. As many have likely already commented, the scariest thing is how absolutely ordinary these events seem to the marines in the helicopter.

The ghost of Bill Hicks is chuckling on my shoulder right now. “I told you fuckers! What do you expect when you give a bunch of emotionally stunted and overly aggressive Americans access to the most expensive toys in the world?! They’re gonna do exactly what those war video games and movies brainwashed them to do: kill everything in site with a grin on their face.”

Yes, Bill. Thanks, and we miss you… very dearly.

It turns out that WikiLeaks is actually based in Sweden and run by a group called the Sunshine Press — a “non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public” (Wikipedia has much more information about them). And they have a separate site for this specific video: collateralmurder.com. Essentially they published this video after Reuters used Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to obtain it.

Personally I think this will be one of the most important stories of the year. This is the inevitable path of technological advance. Truth will demand to be acknowledged. I think that’s why Obama is pressing for universal access to high-speed Internet, even though he bowed to the bail-out demands from banks and auto companies. He knows there’s a hypocrisy to his actions, but he also knows that the intelligence capabilities of the general public are reaching a point where they will become superior to any one secret agency.

Of course, information will never come without a price — even if it’s free of cost to the public. From journalists on the war front (139 were killed in Iraq from 2003 to 2009, according to the Collateral Murder page), to a group like the Sunshine Press (who, according to information on their Wikipedia page, have already been the target of censorship, surveillance and/or attacks in various countries worldwide), this type of service is going to take a lot of courage, cooperation and hard work.

Currently their biggest problem might be fundraising. As it says on their site:

We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release to a world audience. You can change that and by doing so, change the world. Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another ten thousand hands and $1000, a million.

So if you’re a fan of truth — not just “fact-based journalism” coming from mainstream media (which, because of near-universal corporate affiliation, is weakened by conflicts of interest), but the kind of truth that is going to reverse the downward spiral of civilization — and you have some money to spare, consider sending it their way.

Of course, many would argue that Wikipedia or some other resource really marked the beginning of what I’ve deemed the “first-ever golden age of journalism.” But I’m not so sure. Wikipedia is great for that purpose, but you really have to know what you’re looking for. I think we’re going to see a very rapid growth of specialized reporting sites like WikiLeaks that have a specific focus or unique way of gathering and distributing content — content that is vital to the interests of the American public, rather than to the interests of the American oligarchy. Either way, we have a lot to look forward to in this area.

In case you haven’t yet seen “Collateral Murder,” here’s the clip from YouTube.

I feel like everything I’ve been working on is suddenly coming together with a new clarity. On March 18 NPR ran an excellent interview with Tom Burrell, who worked in the advertising industry for 40 years and just published a book called Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority.

I find Burrell’s story to be so interesting because he worked much of his adult life on the other side of the smoke screen, without even realizing the harm his industry inflicts on society. The other reason I want to read the book is that it seems to be parallel with The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan’s landmark 1963 book in the modern feminist quest. What I mean is that the brainwashing of and about African Americans is likely very similar to the brainwashing that contributed (or still contributes, depending on your opinion) to the feminine mystique.

Burrell explains that, in our materialistic society — especially to those who are struggling financially — the only apparent path to status and recognition is to buy stuff. This phenomena is worsened by the way popular culture depicts wealthy African Americans only as MTV stars and professional athletes. It sounds stereotypical to suggest that an ethnic group could share a common desire for Escalades and mansions — but that’s the intent of the ones doing the brainwashing, so it must be addressed. As one caller says, her son assumed that their dentist would be white, because “if he was going to be black he’d be a rapper or basketball player.”

You can listen to the interview with this embedded player. My post continues below.

Later, in response to a caller, Burrell says “what that brainwashing does is gets you to a point of being so insensitive — or desensitized, that you become unconscious of what is going into your head, what you’re seeing and what you’re hearing. You also become a party to the brainwashing, or black people become a party to the brainwashing. But that’s the nature of brainwashing. You join in and become your own victimizer.”

Neal Conan points out that the Cosby Show was a notable example of black people being portrayed in a positive light — which is exactly what I was thinking as I listened. I used to love the Cosby Show, partly because the Huxtables seemed to be a healthier, more balanced, and more well-rounded family than most that I knew in suburban Detroit (most of whom were white). Just the fact that the dad was a doctor and the mom was a lawyer seemed cool to me. That kind of thing was so uncommon, for any ethnicity. But Bill Cosby was in charge of that show’s production, and he clearly had his priorities straight.

Probably my favorite part of the interview is when Burrell discusses the way black people have taken ownership of the “n word.” He claims that using the word gives black people a false sense of empowerment, since they’re actually contributing to the problem. Every time the word is uttered by anyone, it furthers the desensitization.

Burrell says we have to “turn those images around” in mass media, and Brainwashed reportedly describes ways that can be accomplished. One idea relates to creating your own media using a personal computer, which is pretty much equivalent to one suggestion in my essay “Indecision Over Michigan“! Of course, I was talking about the broader effects of TV addiction, not just racial brainwashing.

The website for Burrell’s book, stopthebrainwash.com, features an interesting intro video as well as updates on his work. There’s also an excerpt from Brainwashed on NPR.org.

We went to FYE for the DVD and then to Hot Topic for the Alice products. I used to like Hot Topic in high school, but back in the ’90s it was quite a scarier place. Yeah, they still have the Slipknot t-shirts, but they also have Super Mario and Spongebob. And right now, the whole front section of the store is devoted to a Disney movie that hasn’t yet been released. Granted, it’s also a Tim Burton movie — but I doubt there will be anything too horrific about it.

This makes me think about our system of Capitalism, a topic that’s always poking my brain and, therefore, pops up on this blog quite often. I recently read an article by Douglas Haddow on Adbusters called “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization.” I wasn’t familiar with the web publication before; I followed a link there from Twitter. According to one comment on the article, Adbusters is a magazine that only hipsters read. Go figure.

One thing that Haddow brought up is the way marketers and advertisers prey upon hipsters, or those with any hipster traits. The concept of “the hipster” is elusive, so I don’t want to use it as a short-cut. I’m referring to young adults in urban settings who strive to feel cool, unique, and/or important, while at the same time inadvertently making themselves into sheep, indistinguishable from the herd, copies of many generations of rebels who were perhaps more authentic, or at least more successful in their rebellion.

As Haddow explains:

…’cool-hunters’ will also be skulking the same sites, taking note of how they dress and what they consume. These marketers and party-promoters get paid to co-opt youth culture and then re-sell it back at a profit. In the end, hipsters are sold what they think they invent and are spoon-fed their pre-packaged cultural livelihood.

Hipsterdom is the first ‘counterculture’ to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.

Of course the irony of this article is that it exudes the very style that it berates. Haddow spent more time on the “cool” tone of the essay than he did on the attempt to provide real explanations or solutions. Still, he makes plenty of interesting points — and the one I just quoted has stuck in my head the most.

When I visited Hot Topic, these words hit me even harder. I know Hot Topic isn’t a hipster store, but it’s growth was fed mostly by teenage angst, youthful rebellion, and vampire fetishes. Yet these days, Hot Topic feels kinda soft and pudgy. After browsing the Alice-ware, what caught my eye was a section of t-shirts featuring many characters from early ’90s TV shows. I’ve been saying for the past few months that a ’90s revival is imminent. The first signs were the neon glasses, bandanas, tights, and t-shirts at concerts and music festivals.

So I know this revival has begun, but it’s not building with the same momentum as last decade’s ’80s revival. Maybe it’s because ’80s music, on the whole, is a lot fucking cooler than ’90s music.

Walking into Hot Topic now, I feel like a ’90s revival is being staged on an automatic schedule. It’s as if the marketers and advertisers are simply working on a 20-year time lapse, hoping to manipulate the nostalgic tendencies within us all. Hot Topic had t-shirts, buttons, iPhone covers, and other trinkets featuring designs from many old cartoons, mostly Nicktoons (i.e. – cartoons from Nickelodeon). I saw designs from Rocko’s Modern Life, Rugrats (one shirt just showed Reptar wreaking havoc), and the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

But the best discovery of all was…(drum roll)…a Ren & Stimpy t-shirt! I may not have mentioned it here, but I’m obsessed with Ren & Stimpy. I watched it as a kid in the early ’90s, and now I watch it as an adult. I have seasons 1 and 2 on DVD, as well as seasons 3-5 in digital version. When I saw this t-shirt, I grabbed one immediately without any of my usual anti-consumerist twitches. I didn’t look at the price tag, and I didn’t check what country it was made in. I didn’t wonder what company was ultimately getting the profits, and I didn’t feel like I was being manipulated. But I did remember reading the article about hipsters, and I did consider that maybe it was a mistake to buy this t-shirt and allow this rather disgusting phenomena to thrive.

Then it occurs to me that I might deserve a break. It’s not like I hadn’t thought about Ren & Stimpy in 18 years. I watch at least three episodes per week — despite the fact that I’m 27. To reference another Nicktoon, I feel like Doug after the teen idol appropriates his style of clothes for a week. Doug looks like a silly dork when a new style arrives and he doesn’t conform, insisting that he had always worn those outmoded clothes and didn’t see any reason to change now. (Typing this adds so much dimension to that episode! Doug was a Christ figure in that story! He was crucified for standing against the crowd as an individual, a free thinker. He resisted the zombie mob as they chased down their fabricated coolness. He was an anti-hipster!)

Part of my thoughts here are influenced by David Foster Wallace (discussed here previously), and I haven’t even read Infinite Jest yet (though I heard Wallace killed himself in part because of the impossibility of a truly individual and unique life experience in the modern world). The point here is that Ren & Stimpy is an integral part of who I am. It’s insane, wacky, chaotic, and psychedelic — and I love it. (I even laminated a poster of the Space Madness episode, to salvage it from my bedroom decorations of youth, and displayed it in my room all throughout college!) And furthermore, I’ll probably still be watching it when the 2K revival begins and Spongebob comes back into style.

I don’t think I’m playing “the hipster” in this case, but the opposite argument could be made. I can tell you right now that this topic, the concept of modern rebellion in all its various incarnations, will dominate my thoughts and my work for years to come.

So while I can’t presently offer more explanations or solutions than Haddow did in the Adbusters article, I can at least suggest some food for thought. Is any kind of rebellion or revolution possible today? Were they ever possible? If we’re consuming these things because they’re sincere, genuine reflections of who we are, and not just superficial fluctuations in style and behavior — does that make it okay? Would it help to avoid mass culture, or to avoid outer culture altogether? If so, then how do we stop this Capitalist machine, which exists outside of us, and of which the hipster is so clearly a symptom (that’s the crux of Haddow’s whole article). The hipster is a side effect of the U.S. being a world superpower for nearly 70 years.

Maybe the solution lies in forging a future in which there is no world superpower. The trouble is that the only concrete change happens at the individual level. All attempts to orchestrate a large-scale agenda lead to political fanaticism and, naturally, zero net change.

But that’s enough for tonight. Hold onto your seats. I feel a torrent coming on.

Either way, I owe you a “light” post, and my idea of light is Wife Swap, an ABC reality show which I found through its syndicated version on Lifetime. At this point a large percentage of readers will probably be laughing out loud and/or navigating away from this blog. Please stay with me! I’m not crazy (and I don’t normally watch Lifetime — it was at a holiday get-together with family). This show must be discussed.

I had no idea that the show was first broadcast in the UK in 2003 and has existed in various incarnations since, both there and in America. To me it appeared to be the reason that reality shows were invented. The premise: two families with multiple opposing characteristics, habits, and beliefs trade wives for two weeks. During the first week, the guest wife has to conform to the lifestyle of the host family. Then in the second week, the wife gets to run the show. She creates new rules or guidelines based on what she feels would benefit the host family. It’s chaotic, painful, and hilarious.

I’ll break down the first episode that grabbed me. One family has about five kids who have to do many chores per day. The father doesn’t do any chores himself, whereas his wife does the work of three people, driving the kids around and running the house. And the 16-year-old daughter isn’t supposed to talk to the father after 9 pm because she’s “too emotional.” The second family only has one teenage daughter. The two bedrooms are lofts with no walls or doors, so there’s no privacy in the home. The father is at the beckon call of both wife and daughter, and does all the cleaning and laundry. And the wife is obsessed with her pets — 3 or 4 dogs and one goat — all of which are welcome throughout the house at all times. The goat even comes in her bed!

The reason I think this is the epitome of all reality shows is because, from the very start of that genre, the shows have presented anything but reality. They are usually some kind of competition, filmed in a way that makes it look more like a live show — i.e. like real life. But in Wife Swap, it doesn’t matter how they film it, or even if parts of it are scripted or “encouraged” by the producers (and I’m sure that does happen). What does matter is that the participants’ lives—especially the parents’ egos—are completely torn apart. They are forced to examine their weaknesses and how they are negatively affecting the people around them.

The possibilities are manifold. Fathers make their sons turn baseball into a religion, thus taking the fun out of it while making competition a lifestyle. A mother lets her daughter treat the father like a slave, because neither parent is brave enough to stand up to their one “baby girl” and make her grow up. Both parents let their three adolescent boys behave like depraved lunatics because they don’t want to stifle their creativity by imposing too many boundaries.

Naturally, it’s often highly rewarding when the guest wife gets to set the rules. In the “goat” episode, the animals get locked outside and the house stays clean for once. The teenage daughter gets a bedroom with walls, does her own laundry, applies for a part-time job—and smiles for the first time in the show. Back at the house-of-chores, each of the five kids get to pick out a small animal at the pet store, and the 16-year-old daughter is allowed to communicate with her father after 9 pm.

As for my other examples…the baseball boy gets to take guitar lessons, and his instructor refers to him as a natural talent at the instrument. The three adolescent boys—well, their lunacy pretty much stays the same, but their crack-pot science project-loving father stops setting such a bad example for his sons.

Once again, the point is that they have to examine themselves to better the situation for everyone involved. And if that becomes a norm in society, we’ll all be better off…even if the inspiration did come from a trashy TV show. However, since most people will never participate in a wife swap, we are introduced to a bigger issue. What the show really exposes is how the institution of marriage creates a static environment for bad traits, habits, and beliefs to flourish. This builds from the individual family to the whole of society, and explains why America is so sick and deranged.

Everyone—from OCD clean to farm animal messy; from commanding to easy-going; from muscians to sports fanatics; from high school-educated to advanced degree-awarded; from liberal to conservative; from north to south; from urban to rural—everyone needs to reevaluate their lives. Not once, but at regular intervals. It’s chaotic, painful, hilarious, and absolutely necessary for mankind to progress. And that’s why Wife Swap deserved discussion.

Here’s the first part of the “CA Elite vs. MS Redneck” episode (see “related videos” for parts 2-5).

Wallace actually discusses both fiction and literature from the 1950s on, but focuses on a few main points or theories. He asserts that the one thing tying together TV and fiction circa 1990 was irony (i.e. – “A statement that, when taken in context, may actually mean the opposite of what is written literally; the use of words expressing something other than their literal intention, notably as a form of humor.” – Wiktionary). He develops this argument by discussing why people watch TV in general, how TV got so ironic, and what happened when fiction tried to reclaim the irony throne it had held since long before ironic TV got so pervasive.

Part of the reason I found the essay so interesting is because, as an adolescent, I was an eager consumer of television. My time spent growing up can be mapped as a steady path from Sesame Street to Nickelodeon to Saved by the Bell to…well…to all the sitcoms aimed at people over the age of 12. Then I got to high school and realized that most TV shows are retarded (for lack of a better word). And things only got worse after that: Survivor and American Idol led the way for “reality” TV, while dumbed-down dramas still dictate a large portion of adult viewership.

Now, looking back, I’m sort wondering how it had gotten so bad before I was even born. Enter Wallace, who unforgivably calls TV a “malignant addiction.”

“By 1830, de Tocqueville had already diagnosed American culture as peculiarly devoted to easy sensation and mass-marketed entertainment, ‘spectacles vehement and untutored and rude’ that aimed ‘to stir the passions more than to gratify the taste’” (p. 36).

“Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests. It’s all about syncretic diversity: neither medium nor Audience is faultable for quality” (p. 37).

As you can see, Wallace didn’t let himself resort to calling TV an evil device intended for brainwashing or mind control. I’d rather not be so forgiving, but he argues the point well. Still, he doesn’t let TV off the hook for being capable of such high levels of manipulation, spread across the areas of psychology, emotion, and behavior.

“The modes of presentation that work best for TV…are unsubtle in their whispers that, somewhere, life is quicker, denser, more interesting, more…well, lively than contemporary life as Joe Briefcase knows it” (p. 39).

“The most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability” (p. 63).

“…Also, inversely, trains us to relate to real live personal up-close stuff the same way we relate to the distant and exotic, as if separated from us by physics and glass…” (p. 64).

After Wallace outlines the core of the problem, he introduces a subgenre called Image-Fiction. He claims that this style was closely tied to television, not only as a reflection of the various content on TV, but also in that it was an attempt to reclaim irony for the world of literature. The peak of this subgenre, according to Wallace, was the then-brand-new novel My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist by Mark Leyner. The work “incorporates elements of science fiction, cyberpunk, tabloid journalism, and advertising slogans; and as the book is also filled with TV and pop-culture references (e.g. to kung-fu films) and literary allusions it may be difficult to read without the wide-ranging knowledge of current affairs” (Wikipedia).

In other words, Leyner created a novel as random, flighty, and all-encompassing as TV itself. Unfortunately, though, Image-Fiction was (arguably) a fruitless effort.

“The reason why today’s Image-Fiction isn’t the rescue from a passive, addictive TV-psychology that it tries so hard to be is that most Image-Fiction writers render their material with the same tone of irony and self-consciousness that their ancestors, the literary insurgents of Beat and postmodernism, used so effectively to rebel against their own world and context. And the reason why this irreverent postmodern approach fails to help the new Imagists transfigure TV is simply that TV has beaten the new Imagists to the punch” (p. 52).

Wallace takes this as a dead-end for contemporary fiction, in that the lone device television (“E Unibus”) had become just as much a consumer and recycler of culture (“Pluram”) as it was an entertainment culture provider. These fiction writers couldn’t escape what Wallace called TV’s aura. But he also claims that rebellion in the face of institutionalized irony is pointless.

“…Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks” (p. 67).

I especially liked a quote from another author: “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage” (Hyde, p. 67). This reminded me of Pitchfork Media, and the essay I wrote about that organization – which brings up interesting questions about modern times, post-Y2K. Even if the Internet and other media have started to wean us as a culture from the grip of TV, do we still remain a society of ironic rebels with no clue how to construct a better future for ourselves? At the time, Wallace thought that having more control over content – the type, sequence, timing, etc. – would make no difference. Furthermore, he seems scared of the idea of anarchy, as if having any one device or organization determine his content input was a source of comfort. I’d like to think that the Web 2.0 explosion, with stars including YouTube, Last.fm, and Facebook, is a sign that people do appreciate having such control. But I’m looking at the subject 20 years later, so I have that advantage.

Wallace admits that his missing escape plan might be due to his lack of foresight or imagination. I have to agree with that notion, since I founded Supraterranean on the hopeful idea that we can further develop our creative ambitions through new forms of expression and interaction. This reminds me of The Matrix: once you stop trying to bend the spoon with your mind, you realize that only your mind can bend, not a metal object (…and after all, there is no spoon). We’re beginning, as a culture, to learn how to bend our minds, when once we had convinced ourselves (or had been convinced by TV) that it was impossible. What I’m trying to say is that, when we’re ready, TV will become obsolete. And that process is already under way.

But then again, I have been in a better-than-normal mood lately, so that could be swaying my conclusion.