Life as an Extreme Sport

the sound of protest

November 25, 2004 Kelly ...and everything else, Autumn 04, CHID 370, CHID 390 PF

I’ve been wondering for a while now what the point of protesting [fill in the blank] is — what purpose does it serve? For example, protesting the recent bombings on Falluja isn’t going to stop the bombings; the largest protest in history didn’t stop the attack on Iraq, so why is a smaller protest going to do anything? I now think that the point is to prevent marginalizing from happening; by getting out and creating enough of a ruckus that the media — one of the creatures of the virtual that helps perpetuate mimetic circulation — covers the event, people who hold an alternate view are suddenly no longer marginalized, but instead are taking over the very mechanism that is attempting to silence them.

Critique – Media Virus and Memes

November 25, 2004 Kelly ...and everything else, CHID 370

The idea of a meme is something that has always offended my sensibilities, without ever really knowing why. Obviously its most colloquial use, such as “LiveJournal-memes” is not accurate in the Dawkins-sense of the word, or the way that Dennis Rushkoff would like to see the word used. Memes are simply supposed to be one of three variants of a virus, be it a publicity stunt, a co-opted virus, or the self-generated virus. Rushkoff argues that in all instances, the virus has some sort of “sticky surface (akin to how a genetic virus works) that then allows the infection of something else into the cell or organism (with the organism in a meme being culture itself). Rushkoff uses words like datasphere to name this interconnected, technologically adept organism, and then goes on to use chaos theory to describe how it comes into being. And this is where he hits on what bothers me about memes to begin with: why bother? Yes, why bother. All Rushkoff is doing is watering down Apadurai’s concepts of ‘spheres, with the technosphere becoming the datasphere and using network theory repackaged to describe the chaotic yet “natural” behaviour of his datasphere. It’s simply reframing and rephrasing cultural dialogue and mimetic circulation in a trendy term and selling it to the masses — in fact, this selling to the masses is a key to Rushkoff’s conception of the origin of memes to begin with. In a nutshell, Rushkoff is arguing from a post-modernist view that looks at media through an ironic lens, and sees only the surface feedbacking to the surface, creating endless fractal loops that never go any deeper than the last feedback iteration.

The funny, or perhaps even ironic, thing, is that the LiveJournal-meme is probably the closest to what a meme should or would be. In this virtual space, someone posts a quiz or questions that their friends then read and repeat, with their friends reading and repeating, et cetera, as it spreads through-out this particular node of the network. For example, Person A posts a series of questions with answers, clearly fashioned as a “fill in the blank” style question. A recent one circulating was formatted something like this:
1. My LJ name is _________ because _________.
2. My friends list is called _________ because _________.
3. My user picture is _________ because _________.
Under these series of questions, Person A then repeats the question with the blanks filled in. Through years of schooling, we instantly recognize the form of the questions as fill in the blank, and proceed to do so. Persons B, C, and D all read Person A’s journal and repeat the questions and blanks in their journal, where Persons E-H see it (sometimes several times, as many people read similar journals). In relatively short fashion, the three questions have taken off like wildfire through the pocket of the virtual known as LiveJournal.

Using the terms of network theory (“node”, “network”) is important, because what we are seeing is not a meme but the creation of a non-human hub or connecting point in a complex social network. In general, these nodes are considered to be people, but in this case the hub is the series of questions itself. Instead of one person forming more and more connections until they trip some critical point and become a hub (a place of high connections), the questions themselves become a place of high connection. Graph theory often looks at this sort of connectivity in terms of static places, but in this case the hub is a non-corporeal concept.

If we speculate that there are multiple networks interfacing with one another — a wetworks or meatspace style set of nodes, hubs and connections, the connectivity of certain spaces, and a third, conceptual and non-corporeal network of ideas — we can stay within the confines of established interdisciplinary sciences to explain continual mimetic circulation without focusing on co-opting ideas that only weakly manage to portray the potential of the ideas.

In reality, where the idea of the virus applied to mimetic circulation comes into play ties back to the idea of sticky surfaces and syringes for injecting the viral particles. Instead of a virus allowing subversive memes to infect the culture, new symbols arise that allow other people to co-opt said symbol for their own purpose. The sticky surface of Michael Jackson’s latest legal problems allows people who have pet issues that can be related to the legal problems to use that as a starting point, a highly connected hub, for their own dissemination needs.

The Day I Culture Jammed

November 25, 2004 Kelly ...and everything else

It all started with a casual comment by my office-mate, Jonathan. He wondered if I knew anything about Monday’s organized “fun,’ and assumed I might because I knew one of the people organizing the event, Raz. I didn’t know, and Jonathan immediately forwarded his copy of the relevant data to me. A few hours later, Raz mailed a list I participate on, asking if anyone was a Lyndon LaRouche fan. A simple question, no loaded statements; then he sat back and waited to see what would happen. Already knowing what was happening, I mailed him and congratulated him on an idea well-conceived, and thought that would be my extend of involvement. Instead, Raz mailed me back and pulled on both my allegiances as a Chiddie and as a Burner; “participate!” he ordered.

And so I did.

For those of you not familiar with Lyndon LaRouche, he is a perennial presidential candidate well known on college campuses for his rather ‘unique’ supporters, who try to sell books titled “Children of Satan III,” are fond of carrying signs accusing Dick Cheney (or whomever they disagree with) of being the antichrist or other charming sentiments, and will often follow you as you walk by, trying to engage you in conversation. If you do disagree, with them, it’s common for the supporters to start yelling that you’re a fascist or nazi. Put succinctly, they’re rather batty and quite annoying.

Raz and company had decided to do something about this.

They all gathered in the Honors lounge, it being primarily an Honors project, and then marched out to set up shop near the LaRouchies. This setting up shop primarily consisted of agreeing with everything the LaRouchies said, handing out flyers that explained various things (including how to protect yourself from the mind control waves of toasters, how obvious it is that Dick Cheney is an amphibian, and offering free goats while supplies lasted), waving signs,… and wearing tin foil hats, inviting other people to make their own hats to protect themselves from the evil, mind-control aspirations of Santa.

You see, it’s all about Santa and his jolly boots of doom.

I joined up around 1, 1:30, and promptly made my tin foil hat, ditched my bag, and started taking pictures. As amusing as it was to take pictures, especially since, by the time I showed up, the LaRouchies had given up arguing and made their own tin foil hats, I felt that I was missing out on the prime point of the event. So I put my camera away, grabbed a sign saying that mind control had kept Gary Coleman out of office and that toasters were controlling your mind, and started marching around, passing out flyers, following people walking to class, and generally getting into the spirit of things.

Wyoming does not exist. Wyoming is a state of mind. Demand accurate mapmaking now!

By 1:45pm, there were enough of us that we were making it difficult to walk through our thick crowd. The executive decision was made to do one more thing that the LaRouchies enjoy doing: marching and singing to a different location. As one, we picked up and marched away, singing March to heaven 2007 vote for Lynda RaLouche, as well as repeating our favourite slogans as loud as possible.

We were very loud.

We made the journey to the HUB and reassembled. We were numbering several dozen at this point, and anyone wanting to get into the HUB had to run a gauntlet of our signs.
Space escalators to Mars now!
Support global air conditioning!
Why are there no “B” batteries?
Dick Cheney eats kittens!
Support the candidate that supports breakfast!

I’m certain we were the bane of existence to the other groups in the HUB; one packed up shortly after we got there, and the other group made sure to complain loudly near us.

We had run out of flyers, but more appeared and we quickly folded, then went back to running after people walking by, insisting that they learn how to stop the insanity. It was around this time that I learned what my most effective chant would be: toasters are mind-control agents of Santa! Only you can prevent mind-control! Unplug your toaster now! I started to follow people, at this point having switched to the sign stating that Cheney ate kittens, asking if they had toasters. Sir, sir, excuse me, sir? Do you have a toaster? Sir! Your toaster is controlling your mind! You must protect yourself Make a tin foil hat, sir! Sir? Sir! It was also around this time that I learned some people had no taste for satire, as I was actually spit on. Spit on! Can you believe that?

Actually, what I couldn’t believe was how many people actually took us seriously.

At 2:30, we rallied for one final group chant and then dispersed as quickly as we had come together. In the span of minutes, the HUB was silent and you would never know anything had happened. I had a good laugh, posted my pictures online, to my friends list in LiveJournal and (as promised) to both a contact at the Honors club and on the UW community on LiveJournal. I assumed this was the last I would hear of it, save with the folks I had actually participated in the project with.

You know what they say about assuming…

Tuesday afternoon, I returned from class early to finish a few things before going home. I found a message from Emily telling me that I had made BoingBoing. “Eh?” I thought; I assumed that somehow my school blog had hit the front page, and I was curious what they had picked up. So I loaded up BoingBoing, and holy crap that’s my face I’m on the front page of BoingBoing as in memeME oh holy crap they linked to my gallery. I laughed, and thought “well, here goes my 15 minutes…”

Coworkers and friends spent the next few hours telling me I was on BoingBoing. It was fun to watch it spread, and to point it out to friends who don’t regularly read it. My main concern was that my server be able to handle the traffic, and I was largely grateful I hadn’t been identified in the picture.

On Wednesday, I was stopped over a dozen times between my office and classroom, as people I didn’t know recognized me from the front page of BoingBoing. They all wanted to stop and tell me how cool the protest was, how much they enjoyed it, and what was it like to be on the front page of a site like BoingBoing. I got to class, and got applause. People stopped me on break to congratulate me on an idea well implemented, and I noticed that I had to start shifting to explain that it wasn’t my idea, and that I was just the picture they’d picked. A simple cog in a larger wheel.

I left school and assumed it was done. What have we already learned about assumptions?

On Amtrak this evening, over half a dozen people have come up and said “hey, aren’t you the tin foil girl?”

In the span of two days, I’ve culture jammed, I’ve been on the front page of a popular blog, and I’ve watched how ideas move through our cultural sphere and take on a life of their own. My 15 minutes are ticking down; by the time I get back from Portland it will be well and over, and I will be left with the feeling of accomplishment, the rush of recognition, and the realization what an important function satire has in our society.

And how much fun it can be to run around with a tin foil hat on your head.

Ethics and Materiality

November 19, 2004 Kelly ...and everything else, CHID 370, MHE 401

Indeed, there is no body as such; there are only bodies – male or female, black, brown, white, large or small – and the gradations in between. Bodies can be represented or understood not as entities in themselves or simply on a linear continuum with its polar extremes occupied by male and female bodies… but as a field, a two-dimensional continuum in which race (and possibly even class, caste, or religion) form body specifications.
-Elizabeth Grosz

In contrast to the body, embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment. Embodiment never coincides exactly with “the body,” however that normalized concept is understood. Whereas the body is an idealized form that gestures toward a Platonic reality, embodiment is the specific instantiation generated from the noise of difference.
-N. Katherine Hayles

It has occured to me, over the course of reading Hayles’ book How We Became PostHuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, that the field of ethics, and specifically of bioethics, is all about realizing the data made flesh. Or, to be less obscure, it’s about realizing that while we’re all individuals, we also are all connected with one another. The arguments about multiple and conflicting autonomies make no sense if you take the modernist concept of each of us being a separate and unattached beings. Likewise, the postmodernist, disembodied concept of self also has very little play, because beneficience (and again, autonomy) is often tied to a physicality that postmodernity prefers to ignore. It’s when we get to this material poiesis, this materiality of data made flesh, that we have a system that acknowledges both the physicality of the body and the connectivity of the, for lack of better word, soul, or self.

the little engine that will

November 10, 2004 Kelly ...and everything else

I’ve had another paradigm shift in the last few weeks. The first major paradigm shift was over the summer, when my internal monologue “switched voices” – it’s CHID-time all the time in my head. Or, less cryptically weird, my internal monologue has switched to what I long ago dubbed “academia” as it’s nativespeak, as opposed to the dialect called “normal”. (At least two other dialects exist – “g33k” and “sign”. There was a third, but like all unused languages, it’s dying and will soon be gone.)

The second paradigm is one of… well, I just added Steven Shaviro’s blog to my list of “things to read”, and doing so didn’t create the usual tremor I associate with, well, associating with people who are. More. Who’re educated. Have written books. Held great ideas in their heads, and then turned around and shared them with anyone willing to listen.

And I still awe at this. But in a different way, a way that makes people like Shaviro or Mitchell or Doyle or White (and on, and on) accessible. Instead of awe inspired by a feeling of never being able to, never being good enough, it’s an awe informed and inspired by the belief that I can.

Category: …and everything else

the sound of protest

Critique – Media Virus and Memes

The Day I Culture Jammed

Ethics and Materiality

the little engine that will

Random Quote

Seek And Find. Maybe.

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