indie is dead. and it won.

"Indie doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s dead. Which is OK, because it won. Open source, Twitter. Indie won. Etsy. The irresistible decline of major labels and network TV and corporate publishing. Indie won. We won, but at the cost to many folks personally of suddenly becoming unnecessary. This was most visible in the last few years in the magazines like Punk Planet, Kitchen Sink, Clamor. But it’ll come for us all.

You see, to the extent that indie meant anything, it was as its root word, independent. It was about seizing the means of production. Independently produced. Aesthetics can be imitated, ethics faked, attitudes mimicked, but large bureaucracies could not possibly replicate the indie production process – how could they seize the means of production? They already had it! And now the means of production has devolved yet farther down, past the indie publishers and indie record labels and pirate radio stations of yore.

This is not to say we’ve entered Nirvana. Just because we’d seized the means of production in the 1990’s didn’t mean that poverty had been eradicated, racism ended, and the intellectual property land grab thwarted. We all have to use the tools we’ve been given, find value in, rather than discard, the tools of the past, hold feet to the fire, undermine monopoly, and so on. All things we tried to do with the means of production we seized in the 90’s, we have to continue do with the means of production that technology has handed to us in the 21st century. Moore’s Law is value-neutral, apolitical, amoral, just like Gutenberg’s press. Its how we use it."

[link]

pop nihilism

"One such campaign, 'Whopper Sacrifice' – in which Facebook users were rewarded a free Whopper for deleting ten friends from their account, has been the most precise incidence of 'pop nihilism' to date. The underlying premise of the campaign was that the majority of one’s relationships are expendable, the Whopper serving as a material excuse to manifest this belief. The Whopper’s presence in the campaign was purely symbolic. The true appeal of the sacrifice was not the faux-nourishment of a hamburger, but for participants to relish in the misanthropic destruction of the social contract.

These campaigns are intentionally polemic – eliciting disgust in many, while others feel compelled to come to their defense. CP+B have torn a page right out of Ballyhoo in the sense that they aren’t selling hamburgers, they are selling the spectacle of advertising’s demise. Agencies who take this route and profit from its fleeting popularity will go down in history as advertising’s robber barons, those who cashed in on the medium’s social capital before it went bankrupt – signifying the moment advertising realized its own mortality and began to eat itself.

from Pop Nihilism: Advertising Eats Itself

killing us softly

"Jean Kilbourne's pioneering work helped develop and popularize the study of gender representation in advertising. Her award-winning Killing us Softly films have influenced millions of college and high school students across two generations and on an international scale. In this important new film, Kilbourne reviews if and how the image of women in advertising has changed over the last 20 years."

did you know?

the 'broken window' theory + environment management

New Scientist has an excellent article about some research at the University of Groningen that empirically proves the 'broken window' theory.

"People become more disobedient in environments plagued by litter and graffiti, research has shown. They can be tempted to trespass, drop litter, and even steal money if they perceive from their environment that it's OK to break rules (...)

The researchers conclude that one type of antisocial behaviour leads to others, because people's sense of social obligation to others is eroded. 'When people think they can get away with it because other people already have, they do,' says Keizer."

Gareth Kay, head of planning at Boston's Modernista!, adds some great insight to the subject and discusses how the results of the research could uncover the new role of communications and advertising in the public space, as tools for managing the environment.

"So, perhaps we should think about communications as being more about environment management, creating an environment where people are more likely to behave in a favorable way. About seeding the right environment where behavior is more likely to take hold. Which puts us squarely back in the culture business..."

scuppie, the new yuppie

click for larger images

SCUP·PIE /skәp·e/n. (Socially Conscious Upwardly-mobile Person)

1.A person who desires all the best life can offer and strives for those goals in a socially conscious manner.

2. One who is dedicated to the pursuit of peace, happiness and cash (not necessarily in that order).

3. Someone ‘green’ -- i.e. one who understands the love of money does not preclude the love of nature...and vice-versa.

"Failla’s goal is to have Scuppie take its place in the American lexicon as the natural evolution of the Hippie-Preppie-Yuppie progression. To accomplish this, he has launched a national promotional campaign and is currently penning “The Scuppie Handbook: A Practical Guide to Living Well while Doing Good."

[via The Scuppie Handbook]

sun vs. son

"Like all of the pagan gods, [Jesus] was
a mythological figure. It was the political
establishment that sought to historize
the Jesus figure for social control".



"Religion can never reform mankind
because religion is slavery".

- Robert G. Ingersoll, 1833 - 1899

"We don't want to be unkind, but we want to be factual. We don't want to cause hurt feelings, but we want to be academically correct in what we understand and know to be true. Christianity just is not based on truth."

- Jordan Maxwell

from zeitgeist, the movie.

i want to be him when i grow up

Dr. Ottenheimer did not offer any answers. He did not even help me discover my own answers. Instead, he helped me find questions I had never asked before. The answers to such questions were just more questions. And so he launched me on a lifelong quest, question after question after question.

Mike Wesch, 2008 U.S. Professor of the Year.


+++++++++


His blog: Digital Ethnography. You may know him from one of his videos on Youtube. He's fantastic beyond words and makes me believe that it's ok when the world seems fuzzy. Because it is. And it should be.

african-this, african-that

...afro-this, afro-that (and the american “African American” is even worse) is a racist way of talking. An Egyptian is african. A boer from South Africa is too. The same applies to Tunisians, Moroccans, and Algerians. “African” does not mean “black”. But even if all africans were black, it would be racist to address such wide variation of people (even fenotypically speaking), originated from the biggest continent on Earth, by only one word. Yorubas are not bantu, malineses are not bundos, hausas are not gege. They are people with different histories and often tainted by millenary animosity. To call a mulatto – the child of a white american with a black Kenyan – an “African American” is a historical rudeness. Those expressions are “way worse than any other espontaneously adopted by people. Using them is adopting the vision of a slave trader.


"...afro-isso, afro-aquilo (e a forma americana “African- American” é ainda pior) é um modo racista de falar. Um egípcio é africano. Um bôer da África do Sul também. O mesmo para Tunisinos, Marroquinos e Argelinos. “Africano” não quer dizer “negro”. Mas mesmo que todos os africanos fossem pretos, seria racismo designar povos tão variados (inclusive fenotipicamente), oriundos do maior continente da Terra, por uma só palavra. Iorubanos não são bantos, malineses não são bundos, haussás não são gege. São povos com histórias diferentes e muitas vezes tingidas de inimizades milenares. Chamar um mulato filho de uma branca americana com um preto do Kênia de “African-American” é uma grosseria histórica. Essas expressões são “muito piores do que qualqer outra adotada espontaneamente pelas pessoas, como você diz. Usá-las é adotar o olhar do traficante de escravos."




(this is a quote by Caetano Veloso, posted yesterday on his blog, addressing IN FORM OF A POST (ah!) a comment made by my friend / twin, his #1 fan and follower, and now also – officially – the happiest man alive.)

cultural literacy and the "i'm a PC" campaign

Here are some excerpts of a brilliant post by one of my favorites, Grant McCracken, on the Mac vs. PC phenomenon.



Our culture has long been predicated in a simple distinction between the mainstream and the avant garde. This construction helped us understand the bourgeoisie as a group of people committed to convention and la doxa. They are, so the stereotype tells us, nervous nellies who are most reluctant ever to depart from their slavish conformity. Thank God, says the stereotype, for the avant-garde. These are risk takers who care nothing for convention or materialism, who bravely throw their personal comfort and safety to the winds in pursuit of artistic truth and social justice. (...)

Sometime in the 1990s, something happened. Our two-part system exploded. Now in the place of an inside mainstream and an outside avant garde, there was a great fragmentation. The mainstream lost its ability to police the tastes and believes and behavior of most people. The avant-garde lost its ability to control the restless, experimental margin. Both hegemonies lost their coercive power. (...) In the place of our founding duality, there were many groups who deferred neither to the center or the margin They simply went their own way. Yes, of course, they could hear the impatient scolding that came from center and edge, but, no, they weren't much interested. They were now prepared to go their own way. Respectable? Who cared? Hip? Who cared? The distinction was dead. (...)

What I did not see was that there was a cultural opportunity. I did not see it, at least, until Crispin Porter + Bogusky rolled out there "I am a PC" spot. But of course. Why didn't I think of that! There was a third position, created by the great cultural flowering of the 1990s. If Apple was avant garde, the path was clear for Windows to be the new alternative to the alternative. It could step out of the old contest that left it a clueless and bumbling mainstream play. It could embrace the great cultural efflorescence that emerged of the1990s and make itself a brand too concerned with real difference to care about merely hip difference. It could embrace real diversity instead of the single, predictable difference that comes from being cool. It could embrace authenticity instead of a pose. (...)

This is what cultural literacy is good for.