[Dryerase] The Alarm!--Consuming the revolution

[The Alarm!Newswire]

Consuming the revolution

By aaronius
The Alarm! Newspaper Contributor

Ché Guevara T-shirts. Gandhi posing for Apple, The Gap spray-painting 
its own storefronts. The revolution will not be televised—but it will 
be commercialized. And at this rate it won’t be long until we have 
Michael Moore’s head on a Pez dispenser.

It is frustrating that the creative models used to guide and inspire 
our cultural movements so often lend themselves to commodification. 
It’s bad enough that our messages generally face total media blackouts 
(think of recent anti-war activity).

But the situation concerns far more than just exposure, and though I’m 
not trying to deconstruct the culture industry in all its complexity, I 
can point to a few elements that may not seem obvious at first glance:

What strikes me as a characteristic attribute of being politically 
radical these days is that we have to resist the temptation to 
vicariously live out our political tendencies through the purchase of 
cheap, mass-marketed consumables designed to appeal to those soft-spots 
in our hearts reserved for snapshot memories of a time more subversive.

We need to end the commodification of subversion. Creating dissonance 
in mass culture is absolutely necessary—do it now or lead a long and 
boring life. If we lose the critical ability to separate our real lives 
from the lives we watch on TV or the characters we play in video games, 
we might as well go full throttle and replace our brains with silicon.

But wait, we are those people on TV and in the video games. Those 
characters are reflections of us, right? What the f**k is going on here?

I’ll tell you: It’s like being under surveillance and knowing it.

We know that no matter what happens, we will continue to see images of 
ourselves on television screens and in magazines. So we pretend not to 
notice or not to care or both, but in the end accept it as how the 
machine works and go about our daily lives.

Simply put, that needs to change, and there are two main ways I see 
that happening. One is to start reducing the number of hours we spend 
directly experiencing mass media (which is obviously demanding a hell 
of a lot); we’re totally addicted to computers and television, so it 
will be hard to break away.

The flipside of the addiction, though, and my second point is that we 
do tend to have a very keen sense of how to use technology, and thus 
can create our own media independently.

This is happening in Santa Cruz all over the place. The Alarm!, Santa 
Cruz Indymedia, Free Radio Santa Cruz (96.3), and even Santa Cruz 
Community Television all operate independently of the corporate status 
quo, and similar examples can be found in cities across the country. So 
the dissolution of corporate media is already occurring before our 
eyes—we just need to pause and recognize it for what it is.

Actually, we need to go a step beyond recognizing that alternatives to 
conformity exist—we need to make the practice of creating alternative 
media a habit of our daily lives. The more of us that do it, the more 
difficult it will be for our revolutions to be sold back to us as a 
mass commodity. We’ll be paying less attention to the television and 
more attention to what’s really going on in the world so that we can 
report it to our communities.

And taking back media doesn’t end with news, either. News is just the 
beginning of the coup. It continues with the takeover of every other 
sector of the culture industry—merchandizing, marketing, distributing, 
you name it. The challenge is to remain independent every step of the 
way and to never sell out.

There was once a time when selling out was the only option and to think 
otherwise was naive. Now the inverse is true. Culture no longer exists 
within a vacuum of power. Once you can produce your own media, the 
power is all yours.

Aaronius is founder of the Santa Cruz Independent Media 
Center(http://santacruz.indymedia.org/) and is an independent 
videographer. Email him at aaron at cats.ucsc.edu.

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