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braintag: Storm the Celebrity Studio and retake the universe

Here are my primary notes from my #sxsw talk. I’m going to get up and edit them in the morning with all 40 slides.

note 3.15.2010: more slides added. Thanks for all of the Tumblr reblogs and likes.

3.18.2010: Thanks to Chris for posting video of the session despite the room’s poor acoustics.

Hello, everyone, my name is kenyatta cheese.
I’m from Know Your Meme which is a real community based on the fictional Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies which is part of the non-fictional assemblage of writers, coders, mediamakers, and technologists called Rocketboom.

Know Your Meme is a community obsessed with the Documentation, Accreditation, and Understanding of how memes spread on the internet.

To that end we’ve amassed over 2100 entries in the Internet Meme Database. While most of them are unconfirmed, this should give you an idea of how much of this stuff is out there.

For each entry we document everything we can verify about how these things start, how these things gestate, and how they change over time.

Some people geek out over buses, others build collections of air sickness bags. We geek out over Ken Lee.

So I’m going to talk about internet memes as a phenomenon that is partially both anti-ego and anti-celebrity.

First, let’s have a quick refresher about Celebrity:

Celebrity (as we know it) is an invention of the 20th century.

I’m talking about people who are instantly recognizable because of their exposure through mass media. It’s an emergent process and it reflects a producer to consumer relationship that profits off of our scarcity of attention.

Sociologist Chris Rojek calls celebrity a replacement activity for religion. In particular he says:

“The collapse of organised religion, the absence of having saints or a God to look up to, for many people in western societies is being filled by celebrity culture - they are the new saints.”

So the attention we once gave to religion we now give to celebrities.

Postmodern philosophy killed God:

Star worship killed the saints:

And Lady Gaga is just killing it.

Celebrity is about the Producer-Consumer dichotomy, believing in the scarcity of attention, and is very much tied to the technologies of Broadcast. So of course, it is also tied to the Dominant Culture.

But there is a side effect of cultural hegemony. Control is never perfect. There is always a counterculture.

And in this space, that counterculture was alternative media. While some of it was aspirational — that is, it wanted to be just like the media it was in opposition to — for the most part it was:

Anti-establishment.

Anti-corporate.

Anti-capitalist.

Anti-market.

What made it so? Well, it was hard to make popular b/c it ignored cultural norms. It was also hard to exploit because a good portion of it ignored copyright. By rejecting the behaviors of the mainstream while re-appropriating many of their signs, they were able to carve out a space where their own ideas could exist.

But because it was often detached from the market, this also meant that it was hard to sustain. It was this spirit that laid the groundwork for internet memes.

So let’s talk memes. What is a meme? Memes are units of cultural ideas that propagate through media, messaging, content, and communication. Coined by Richard Dawkins (the guy who also coined the term ‘genes’). Memetics studies the spread of ideas (sort of) separate from linguistics, and separate from history.

Internet memes are just like regular memes except that they use the medium of the internet to propagate.

What’s the difference? Well, while the act of acquiring & passing on an idea IRL has a real cost (if I want to pass along a bible, I have to buy a copy first), the effective cost of sharing and spreading that information within the online ecosystem is near zero. Therefore, ideas often spread on their merit before anything else.

While internet memes are ideas first and foremost, they take several different forms. These include but are not limited to:

Image Macros (images with captioned text.)

Viral Videos.

Catchphrases.

Like their offline alt brethren, internet memes are anti-exploitative. That is: they often use copyrighted content that can’t be put back into the mass media machine.

Also, because authorship is abstracted out (and often given to an entire community) there is little to no central control over the message. This makes them resistant to corruption of meaning and form.

As part of the process, memes also mutate and iterate. Just because you’re first to a meme doesn’t mean that you get to determine how it will evolve. It can change without you. Last year’s ‘Kanye Interrupts’ started off as a viral video, became a video mashup, and then changed several times before eventually reaching a stable state of image macro + catchphrase.

But back to ‘celebrity’. Does anyone recognize where the title of this talk comes from? It’s a line from William S. Burroughs’ The Soft Machine…

“This is war to extermination - Fight cell by cell through bodies and mind screens of the earth. Souls rotten from the Orgasm Drug. Flesh shuddering from the Ovens. Prisoners of the earth, come out. Storm the studio.

His plan called for total exposure - Wise up all the marks everywhere Show them the rigged wheel - Storm the Reality Studio and retake the universe…”

It’s a statement of opposition to outside control of both our bodies and our lives, written for a 20th century equation. Like proletariat taking over the factory, it’s a marxist-anarchist call to storm the broadcast centers, and reclaiming the tools of storytelling and persuasion for our own.

But things have changed.

We’re not in the same century. We’ve built so much more. The broadcast machine remains very much the same but we’ve built an entire infrastructure outside of that.

So don’t burn it down. Leave the factory behind, that relies on tightly held control of message and copyrights, and escape the system that creates hegemony, celebrity.

BTW, this doesn’t mean that the factory won’t still be running. Lest anyone believe that the idea of celebrity will disappear within our lifetime, I leave you with this little gem.

Thank you.