Wow! This is an interesting book!
It was merely fascinating – ‘we can change the World’ – until I came across this paragraph about INFOTOXINS:
“The marketers, spin doctors and PR agents who produce this propoganda realize what we as a society hate to admit: Disinformation works. Do an overwhelming number of respected scientists believe that human actions are changing the Earth’s climate? Yes. OK, that being the case, let’s undermine that by finding and funding those few contrarians who believe otherwise. Promote their message widely and it will accumulate in the mental environment, just as toxic mercury accumulates in a biological ecosystem. Once enough of the toxin has been dispersed, the balance of public understanding will shift. Fund a low level campaign to suggest that any threat to the car is an attack on personal freedoms. Create a “grassroots” group to defend the right to drive. Portray anticar activists as prudes who long for the das of the horse and buggy. Then sit back, watch your infotoxins spread – and get ready to sell bigger, better cars for years to come.”
Wow! That sounds a familiar tactic! So I went back to the beginning of the book and read more carefully!
Kalle Lasn first sat up and took notice when:
“This did not fully hit home for me until 1989, when a spate of nightmarish environmental stories suddenly appeared on the news: acid rain, dying seals in the North Sea, medical waste washing up on New York beaches, garbage barges turned away from port after port, a growing hole in the ozone layer, and the discovery that the milk in American mother’s breasts had four times the amount of DDT permitted in cow’s milk. In that year, a critical mass of people saw the light and became “environmentalists… The premonition of ecocide – planetary death – became real for the first time, and it terrified me. It still does.”
So I read on. Lasn identifies the mechanism behind consumer capitalism and accuses ‘being cool‘ as the Huxleyan “soma” behind modern cynicism, and how this is perpetrated by ‘the dark side of cool’, when we watch too much TV and don’t bother to vote, become compulsive shoppers and ignore the existentialist terror of big business spending our children’s inheritance. Lasn calls this post modernist malaise and strongly argues that we all wake up and ‘unswoosh‘ this hypnotic Lemming like tendency to dream on as the World dies around us.
Culture Jam is a book containing a manifesto to ‘detournement‘ – a ‘perspective-jarring turnabout’ to shock us all out of ‘cool‘.
Lasn recounts the drear history of corporations becoming more important than people:
“President Abraham Lincoln foresaw terrible trouble. Shortly before his death, he warned, “Corporations have been enthroned… An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people… until wealth is aggregated in a few hands… and the Republic is destroyed.”
Lasn reports the legal event that “would not be understood for decades” – the Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific Railroad:
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, was a United States Supreme Court case dealing with taxation of railroad properties. The case is most notable for what it did not hold, but was later misunderstood to have held–namely, that juristic persons are entitled to protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Lasn explains:
” In the post-World War II era, corporations continued to gain power. They merged, consolidated, restructured and metamorphosed into even larger and more complex units of resource extraction, production, distribution and marketing, to the point where many of them became economically more powerful that many countries. In 1997, fifty one of the World’s hundred largest economies were corporations, not countries. The top five hundred corporations controlled 42% of the World’s wealth. Today, corporations freely buy each other’s stocks and shares. They lobby legislators and bankroll elections. They manage our broadcast airwaves, set our industrial, economic and cultural agendas, and grow as big and powerful as they damn well please.”
Lasn continues:
“We, the people, have lost control. Corporations, these legal fictions that we ourselves created two centuries ago, now have more rights, freedoms and powers than we do. And we accept this as the normal state of affairs.”
So I read on, more and more certain that I know this stuff, deep in my innards, and then Lasn surprises me again. He quotes David Grossman‘s book ‘On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society‘ and the incontrovertible link between TV violence and real-world crime:
“More than two hundred (scientific research) studies have identified a clear cut cause-and-effect relationship, and every credible agency from the American Medical Association to the Surgeon General‘s Office to the United Nations has accepted this conclusion. Yes this news has somehow escaped most American parents (or parents elsewhere in the World)”
So much for evidence based social policy!
So Lasn says we have to take back our lives from these evil infotoxic meme wars, and in a new Media Carta, we have to become true Meme Warriors.
I’m in! How about you?