Department
The hour is late...
The time is at hand...
The Culture Wars have already begun.
The world we live in today appears to be much more socially chaotic and politically contentious than it did only yesterday. Seemingly overnight our planet's socio-political landscape has been rearranged into a nightmarish, dystopian mix of soul-crushing late-stage capitalism, social media intrusion, surveillance, and tribally networked identity politics. Welcome to the Culture Wars. The term "culture war" has been used to refer to the political discourse and actions surrounding issues that are rooted in dogmatically held, emotionally charged ideologies and factional reality tunnels.Originally, the term referred to the conflict between traditionalist, conservative values and social-democratic, progressive values... as predominantly demonstrated in the Western world. The late 20th and early 21st centuries witnessed the rise of a new, ultra-conservative movement, labeled neoconservatism. Neo-conservatives, or Neocons differ from their conservative predecessors... as well as their opponents... in that they interpret problems facing the nation as moral issues rather than economic or political issues. With the rise of the neocons, the culture wars have since escalated from a ideological cold war, to one that is white-hot.
"There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself."
- Pat Buchanan,
during the 1992 presidential election
Most battles in the culture wars are fought over issues such as LGBTQ rights, abortion, gun control, feminism, pornography, the sexual revolution, drugs, multiculturalism, the role of religion in American society, school prayer, the teaching of evolution... and the latest battlegrounds... immigration and climate change. Other battles come and go depending on what new moral panic is currently trending on social media.
Although the issues of the culture war target tribal affiliation and emotion, they are often employed by those who are not actually vested in the culture war... those who hold the pursuit of wealth and power as their primary value. They use the culture war as a means to get people to act against their own economic self-interest and to distract voters' attention.
Cultural Insurgencies
In the good ole' U S of A, a Trumpian, networked, open sourced, political insurgency dismantled the traditional two-party political system. As such, social networking has changed politics forever. An open source insurgency is a loose network that is composed of many individuals and small groups working independently, but united by a single purpose. In the 2016 presidential election, this single purpose was to elect Trump. He directed this insurgency by interacting with it. He accelerated the innovation of the insurgency by paying attention to it. His now-infamous Tweets and media mentions incentivized innovation and spread new ideas across the insurgency in minutes (not days/weeks). His brazen behavior fanaticized his core followers, known in newspeak as his "base."
A reactive, outraged form of political social networking rose up from the ashes of the collapsed two-party political system. Known as the Resistance, this reaction can be described as a bureaucratic, networked political orthodoxy... an open source insurgency in reverse. It uses social networking to exert pressure on people to accept the orthodox position (in this case, resistance to the Trumpian insurgency). Online orthodoxies grow through networked peer pressure and political correctness.
These two political networks, the Trumpian insurgency and the politically correct Resistance... are examples of the extreme polarization of factions within the culture wars. This political dichotomy replaces, yet mirrors the old, two-party system. For the most part, they generally fall along traditional left/right ideology. However... they are more insidious than the traditional broad-based party politics, in that they fuel racial, religious, ethnic, social, and/or cultural bias to form the exclusive, niche alliances of identity politics.
Abortion, gun rights, LGBTQ rights, separation of church and state, privacy, censorship... all pivot on definable polarities. Contemporary society has been coerced and consequently divided along essentially the same lines on these issues, squaring off as two (or multiple) warring groups... defined, not by religion, ethnicity, social class, or even political affiliation... but rather by ideological world-views. These ideologies drive the insurgency vs orthodoxy paradox.
World Entertainment Wars
Such battle lines are being exasperated by emerging, social media conglomerates that seek to dominate the world's infotainment sphere. The usual suspects... facebook, google, amazon... battle for dominancy of modern humanity's hand-held interface with a globally intact mass media landscape. Through intrusive, privacy-busting, personal data mining techniques, they insidiously target users, utilizing their own browsing history to not only sell them "personalized" products, but to sell their personal data to ambiguous, often shady third-parties, with ambiguous, often shady intent. Theft by data.
These insidious media entities partner with the entertainment and advertizing industries to market their "Brand" of pop-cultural propaganda to the public. Use of pop icons and social media "influencers" magnify the detrimental effect of unfiltered consumption of social media. Within a broader context, social media memes are the latest and greatest "shiny objects" of mass media. The great American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist: Noam Chomsky has named five filters through which mass media operate:
Ownership: Mass media firms are big corporations. Often, they are part of even bigger conglomerates. Their end game? Profit. And so it’s in their interests to push for whatever maximizes that profit. Naturally, critical journalism must take second place to the needs and interests of the corporation.
Advertising: The second filter exposes the real role of advertising. Media costs a lot more than consumers will ever pay. So who fills the gap? Advertisers. And what are the advertisers paying for? Audiences. And so media not only sells you a product... they are also selling advertisers you as a product.
The Media Elite: The establishment manages the media through this third filter. Journalism cannot be a check on power because the very system encourages complicity. Governments, corporations, big institutions know how to play the media game. They know how to influence the news narrative. They feed media scoops, official accounts, interviews with the ‘experts’. They make themselves crucial to the process of journalism. So, those in power and those who report on them are in bed with each other.
Flak: If you want to challenge power, you’ll be pushed to the margins. When journalists, whistleblowers, and other sources stray away from the consensus, they get ‘flak’. This is the fourth filter. When the story is inconvenient for the powers that be, you’ll see the flak machine in action discrediting sources, trashing stories and diverting the conversation to distract readers.
The Common Enemy: To manufacture consent, you need an enemy... a target. That identified common enemy is the fifth filter. Communism. Terrorists. Immigrants. A common enemy, a bogeyman to fear, helps corral public opinion.
In their quest to dominate the world's infotainment sphere, on-line advertising takes up hideous amounts of mobile bandwidth, worldwide. One study found that ad content accounted for up to 79% of all mobile data transferred. We refer to this exploitation of the infosphere as: Babylon Bandwidth. The masters of the airwaves clearly see the world's citizenry as consumers, or worse... commodities. They will stop at nothing to broadcast their disinformation... to impose their version of reality to suit their nefarious, capitalistic agenda.
Moving forward into our Brave Noö World, the culture wars... be they political, religious, social, and especially on-line... must not continue to befuddle world populations with divisive chicanery. Such divide and conquer tactics must be met with creative, enlightened resistance. We use the term resistance, not in the contemporary political sense, but in the historic sense. Historically, particularly in 1930's Europe, the resistance was an underground movement of liberation. Occupied populations, using stealth and ingenuity, defied their oppressive occupier's militaristic incursion.
Make no mistake, the blatant rise of racism, white nationalism, and gender & ethnic intolerance is every bit as brutally fascist as pre-WWII Nazis. Should the intrepid activist choose to engage these dark, cultural assaults... his/her tactics and countermeasures need to... not only push back, but do so with style. At it's best, such resistance should be creative, amusing and perplexingly instructional to the point of a Zen-like illumination.
One such smart, effective and entertaining example of intelligent countermeasures is known as Doppelgänger brand image (DBI). Modifying a corporate logo to illuminate, through "absurdist art appropriation" ...the corp's real agenda. This is a most effective and humorous way at striking back against the Empire. As always, we advocate a non-violent campaign in our resistance efforts. Never stoop so low as to use the Empire's own dark and sinister methods of tyranny and violence. Be smarter than that. Meet the dominator/predator paradigm with imaginative tactics... and beat them at their own game!
So where does this leave us in these world entertainment wars? Where can we obtain accurate, unbiased intelligence on global events? What sources can we rely on to provide us with the truthful, compassionate information we so desperately need in this socially chaotic and politically contentious world we find ourselves living in? Should you, dear intrepid reader, wish to enter the fray... a word of caution... to enter the struggle is to validate it. In the words of the renown Sci Fi visionary and neo-Gnostic, Philip K Dick: "To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox: whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire... it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies."
"How does one fashion a book of resistance, a book of truth in an Empire of falsehood, or a book of rectitude in an Empire of vicious lies?
How does one do this right in front of the enemy?"
- Philip K Dick
The answers to these compelling questions will not be found without the application of critical thinking, research, patience and above all, a willingness to consider the situation from all perspectives. This objectivity is essential in digging up the truth. Like an archaeologist, uncovering with wonder an ancient scroll, so too must the truly inquisitive respect the past in order to understand the present and glean insight into possible trajectories of our shared future. Above all, in this or any endeavor... Be Smart, Be Kind, Question Authority and Think for Yourself...
