Corporatism on Alterati

My first conversation about my current project “Corporatized,” conducted by Jason Lubyk, just went up as a podcast on Alterati. Everyone in my family was suffering from salmonella via Veggie Booty at the time, but I’m hoping there’s something coherent in there, as well.

From Alterati:

If you’re at this site, I think it would safe to assume you’re familiar with the works of Douglas Rushkoff, as his ideas have fueled those who work at the cutting edge of culture and media for the last decade or so. If you’re not, where the fuck have you been? (Go to his website, buy his books and prepare to have your mind stretched, perceptions realigned and reality clarified). Doug was very kind to take a few minutes out of his very busy schedule to chat with us via phone. We get deep into cult phenom The Secret, his next book “Corporatized: The Myth of Self Interest” and the influential mindfuckery of Muppet master Jim Henson’s trippy short film The Cube.

…Alterati link

Rule the Web

BoingBoing’s Mark Frauenfelder has been a great friend, ally, colleague and, most of all, inspiration to me for the past – gosh – fifteen years. So it is not without prejudice that I here officially and heartily endorse his new book, Rule the Web.

Mark and his wife Carla are the original ‘happy mutants,’ changing the world’s denizens from passive drones to delighted participants – one brain at a time.

Rule the Web is a surprisingly useful set of web tips, even for an old web fogey like me. I learned a dozen things I didn’t know in the first six pages, and am already making use of them.

At least go do a “search inside” and steal some tips if you’re not yet ready to buy. That’d count as a web tip right there…

Hilary Soprano: Ill-Conceived Media VIrus

The Hilary Clinton campaign’s Soprano’s satire is such an extremely ill-conceived effort at viral media that it demands comment, here. I believe that Bill and Hilary’s self-presentation as Tony and Carmela Soprano – however tongue-in-cheek – will mark the critical turning point in Hilary’s campaign. From a semiotic perspective, she has just “offed” herself.

As most visitors to this site will know, a media virus is a unit of media communication that gets attention by either breaking a rule of media, or standing out as a unique media combination. (The Rodney King tape got attention less because a guy was getting beaten by cops, than for the very fact that this scene was captured on videotape. The initial story was the camcorder.) A media virus uses this opportunity to release its code. (In the Rodney King tape, it was the racially charged event of a black guy getting beaten by white cops.) If the code successfully nests itself in the confused code of the audience, it will replicate rapidly until an honest conversation is provoked in the greater culture.

Making use of the story of the week – the Sopranos finale – was a clever enough attempt to exploit the first feature of media viruses. The fact that Hilarys’ campaign used the scene as a way of announcing its campaign song is a story in itself. Media loves stories about media, and so the clip spread from the Internet to CNN and the rest of mainstream TV.

What the campaign failed to take into account is the specific role that the Sopranos might play in establishing a new semiotic for the Clintons. What sort of symmetry might exist between the Clintons and this mob family? What actually happens in the Soprano’s scene?

Hilary Clinton put herself in the role of Tony Soprano. He is a sociopath and a killer, willing to do anything for power. Why would a candidate present herself in such a role? In this scene in particular, we experience the world of the Sopranos – maybe for the first time – in Tony’s point of view. And it’s not pleasant. What on the surface could be any of our lives, is revealed to be a paranoid and existential hell. Death could come at any moment, from any side. In the original scene, all we can think about is, where will the bullets come from?

Hilary and Bill Clinton have just made sure we equate Hilary’s ambitions and life with that of Tony Soprano (or, worse, Carmela – a woman who suffered her husband’s affairs in order to maintain the right to spend the capital he accumulates. Sound familiar?)

At best, the campaign understood all of this, and thought by playing it out in the open they could somehow neutralize the associations Americans already had about these two. But they did the reverse. Honestly, I didn’t think about Bill and Hilary this way until I watched the clip. And at that point, all the reservations that other people had about the couple became really clear to me.

No, this has nothing to do with policy. It’s pure symbolism. Representation. And – at least for the next few election cycles – that’s what will elect and disqualify candidates. Hilary Soprano. That’s not a media virus you want to messing around with.

changes and corporatism

The scarcity of posts here doesn’t reflect a scarcity of activity in the world of Rushkoff. But there has been a lot of change.

Testament, my comic series, will be coming to a close early next year. And I’ve put the next series on hold to focus on my family and my next big book on corporatism.

Everything else I’m doing both here online and in my writing will be focused on the corporatism investigation, and there will be lots of ways to get involved. This website is in the midst of a major upgrade. The main activity here will be to host a series of discussions and inquiries into the nature of agency and autonomy since the renaissance.

I’ll also be leading a seminar through the MLA (MaybeLogicAcademy – an online university founded by Robert Anton Wilson and others), tentatively called Technologies of Persuasion (based on my NYU course) – but it will also cover the systemic and market forces compromising our abilities to create communities, generate value, and challenge the status quo. I really will be depending on you this time more than ever before to help me find the best examples and articulate my case.

Off to Canada this week (to speak to manufacturers) and St. Louis the week after (to speak to media literacy advocates). Then we begin.