July 26, 2004
The missing link between the Avant-Garde, Fascism and Marketing?
by Liza Sabater
ChangeThis via Corante > The Importance of... > Department of Pretentious Bullshit.
Ernest Miller (with the help of commenter lofi-rev) thoroughly pulls the veil off yet another fascist use of social media; this time brought to you by Seth Godin. Read Miller's post and especially follow the links to Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis' critique of ChangeThis. Both point out at how the project is actually a step-backward with its use of their "manifestos" as a new kind of push-media.
Why do I use the word fascist? Jarvis' comment of this project as being undemocratic reminds me of a line from Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction : "The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property." Just to refresh your memory, Benjamin fisks Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto to reveal its core consistencies with Fascism and, in a way, differentiate Avant-Gardism from Communist thought. At ChangeThis we find that :
- Property is anti-superstitious and anti-fundamentalist thought that can only be provided by a chosen few and not by the interaction --and disregard for authorial authority-- of the many.
- This property will be respected by being disseminated through controlled social networks that do not allow for the technological facilitation of argumentation.
- Along those same lines, the property will be digitally reproduced with PDFs, a technology that ensures copying but allows for complete aesthetic control of the message because, you know, the masses want beautiful typesetting and eye-catching pull quotes.
Blogs are bad in the ChangeThis manifesto because they atomize the property of ideas by allowing the masses to comment, change, fork, mash and even distort the 'integrity' of what they believe are "original" thoughts. Interesting. Not only do they use a blog for disseminating these PDFs but they actually have a staff that, without a hint of irony, maintains the project's blog, Read and Pass.
Posted by Liza Sabater in Blogs, Marketing, Politics, Publishing, Social Networks, Social Networks
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