A return to active service
Feb. 9th, 2011 09:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vostoklakeMemes - or, to use Leninist terminology, "ideas which seize the masses" - are more powerful than any organisation. Actually, let's face it, all the most influential organisations are memes first and bureaucracies second - or, in the case of al-Qaeda, not an organisation at all, just a meme. Lawrence Miles foretold this in This Town Will Never Let Us Go.
There was at least one guy on Auckland's anti-Mubarak rally on Saturday wearing a V for Vendetta / Guy Fawkes / Anonymous mask. I wonder who wets themselves with insane glee more every time that happens - Alan Moore or the Wachowski siblings? (One could actually argue that the Wachowskis, what with two reasonably influential movies, have done more to bring revolutionary consciousness to the masses of the West than anyone outside of Noam Chomsky.)
And I remember when no-one but a tiny faction of internet nerds would have gotten the reference. But that's the point at which the memetic universe of the intarwebz - and thus the main noosphere of young people - are so far ahead of the language spoken by our rulers. Similarly, when young people in Malta spraypainted Pedobear onto a poster of the Pope, the mass media didn't get the reference. Similarly, so many "radical leftists" don't understand what Anonymous / Wikileaks / open source / the Pirate Party mean in terms of good honest Marxist categories such as "the forces of production overthrowing the relations of production" or "the self-organization of the advanced workers".
So anyway, I have been offered an opportunity to participate in a project that will combine radical-left politics with cutting edge cultural/memetic science, and even be relevant to my music - the kind of thing that I've been waiting for for a long time. When that goes live, consider it my return to active service as a political activist.
There was at least one guy on Auckland's anti-Mubarak rally on Saturday wearing a V for Vendetta / Guy Fawkes / Anonymous mask. I wonder who wets themselves with insane glee more every time that happens - Alan Moore or the Wachowski siblings? (One could actually argue that the Wachowskis, what with two reasonably influential movies, have done more to bring revolutionary consciousness to the masses of the West than anyone outside of Noam Chomsky.)
And I remember when no-one but a tiny faction of internet nerds would have gotten the reference. But that's the point at which the memetic universe of the intarwebz - and thus the main noosphere of young people - are so far ahead of the language spoken by our rulers. Similarly, when young people in Malta spraypainted Pedobear onto a poster of the Pope, the mass media didn't get the reference. Similarly, so many "radical leftists" don't understand what Anonymous / Wikileaks / open source / the Pirate Party mean in terms of good honest Marxist categories such as "the forces of production overthrowing the relations of production" or "the self-organization of the advanced workers".
So anyway, I have been offered an opportunity to participate in a project that will combine radical-left politics with cutting edge cultural/memetic science, and even be relevant to my music - the kind of thing that I've been waiting for for a long time. When that goes live, consider it my return to active service as a political activist.
