i like pam's politics. she has a sense of sincerity that is rare. but, unfortunately, she's sputtering underneath the evidence in front of her. but i think she's equipped to come to terms with it, eventually.

i think there's something to be said about the co-modification of dissent and i think it's a necessary consequence of the tactics being used. there's been much said about the use of social media or media in general. i think there's been less analysis regarding how people interact with media.

i think everybody understands the whole deconstruction of advertising, how it works on a subconscious level....and more importantly how easily it's co-opted.

activists have been jumping from one cause to the next, driven by the media that was supposed to be to their great advantage. it seems like it's less that activists have raised awareness using twitter and more that political dissent has been reduced to a type of fashion as a result of it taking over twitter. some kind of systemic analysis here is worthwhile.

idle no more? that went out of style a few months ago.

that speech could have been produced, verbatim, at an occupy (insert city) movement about a year ago. same issues. same approaches.

so, it is now the responsibility of social theorists to sit down and study the data regarding these movements and try and figure out some patterns. to me, it's obvious: viral marketing has a high initial return driven by the way it converts ideas into trends (and that kind of support is dependent upon it being a trend), followed by a slow slide into obscurity defined by the trend going out of fashion.

conclusion: this isn't a smart approach. it just leads to movements getting burnt out, exploited and co-opted.

as soon as it got to twitter, it became fashion.

as soon as it became fashion, it became temporary.

it's a systemic problem, one so profound it's enough to throw your arms up in the air and give up. you can't get their attention *unless* you use viral marketing techniques. yet, doing so *necessitates* that they'll abandon you by the next marketing strategy.

so, the bastards win.

well, maybe there's two hopes.

the first is deprogramming people. i've read very little foucault. the guy was a fascist, he just pisses me off. but, if you can capture them with a viral technique and then turn them off...

the biggest problem would be keeping them turned off. i've barely watched any tv over the last 15 years. i'm fully cognizant of the reality that my entire perception of existence would change dramatically if i opened myself back up to that kind of suggestive mind control.

the second is to somehow keep spitting out more and more effective viral hooks. but this is hard to contemplate, given that the competition is endless.