Author: Kilgoar

INTERNET — 4channers have recently astroturfed several false hashtag campaigns targeting feminists — campaigns which stand in stark contrast with 4chan’s usual targets in celebritydom. A false hashtag campaign is one which purports to be a grassroots movement, but is designed to divide and disrupt those it falsely represents. Examples of false hashtag campaigns originating with 4chan include #freebleeding (burn your tampons, ladies!) and more recently #endfathersday, but #cut4bieber represented Justin Bieber fans mortifying their flesh in order to draw Bieber away from his hedonistic pot-toking lifestyle. The false hashtag is a marketing tool picked up as a continuation of 4chan’s collective and ongoing hoax efforts, but these efforts have only recently been aimed at diminishing the power of feminists.

Hoaxcraft is something that few 4channers grasp even as they occasionally succeed, but it seems increasingly inspired by impossible ends — the expressed intent to guide conversations about women on the internet. This is not to say that there are no political consequences of a hoax, but they fall very far from the mark.

Narrative has an internal power, a power which reproduces itself, and the special power of the hoax is in the peculiar perplexity it creates — “Can this be real?” It is not worth telling for its deceptive, truthful-looking quality but rather for striking a seemingly contradictory balance between real and bunk. The misunderstanding that the hoax can somehow divide or disrupt a conversation about feminism is naive. This is maybe as simple as the mistake that the meaning (or effect) of an act is reducible to the author’s intentions.

The hoax will be read at face value and also immediately dismissed by some — this is not a division created by the hoax, and those who are fooled are anything but a symptom of stupidity endemic within a certain group. Anyone can be hoaxed at any time, given a certain narrative. Where the perplexity evaporates and its meaning falls either to true or false, the hoax loses its power, and this always happens. Hoaxes are incredibly transparent, especially ones which can only be injected into the collective consciousness by the combined power of a large group of people. Those who remain fooled haven’t been mind-controlled by the hoaxers any more than the Protocols of the Elders of Zion created anti-semites or HAARP hoaxes cause people to line their bedrooms with grounded Farraday Cages.

No matter how the hoax is read it does anything but devalue or divide feminism. This misunderstanding is maybe as simple as the common mistake that a multitude of meanings somehow constitute an absence of meaning. These hoaxes bring color, fun, something silly, something fruitful to talk about on an otherwise boring day despite their more sinister intentions.

For a piece of art to be popular on the internet today, a spark of novelty injected into the hopelessly derivative and easily recognizable is a prerequisite. The recursive “meta” wink and nudge, an unusual (especially ephemeral) medium, or a clever pun playing on the day’s top story are all bonuses. I was excited to hear Macaulay Culkin’s band, Pizza Underground, playing parodies of the Velvet Underground interlaced with references to Papa John’s and Pizza Hut, but behind the pizza masks and amateur covers, there’s desperation. There is an overabundance of content. From strained Maoist analyses of the Saiyan homeworld in Dragon Ball Z to Our God is an Awesome God (dubstep remix), there has never been quite so much banality.

In Cory Doctorow’s Makers this aesthetic event is played out not on Reddit or Twitter, but in a fictional 3d-printing boom. The short-lived economic surge it triggers, dubbed New Work, causes high levels of employment where the little guys creating this stuff make tons of money. Ultimately, this tide of derivative 3d printed junk recedes into a marginal nostalgia ride curated by users. Then the ride becomes very popular, only to be sabotaged and brutalized by a crazed Disney executive, desperate to keep his job. This is dangerous fiction, a place where friendly corporate entities battle mean old monopolists. Here, the tangible is as easily reproducible as the digital, so it stands in for it. The theme ride that takes users through an ever-changing algorithmic arrangement of 3d printed relics is like the front page of Reddit, or YouTube, but in the book it is a loosely organized not-for-profit collective run by a bunch of lovable guys where the upvoting and downvoting mechanisms bring out subtle narratives instead of sex, lies, and fatal epic fails. At times it is an absurd caricature of the conflict between rising internet entertainment powerhouses and aging entertainment industries given over entirely to depicting the likes of Google as a ragtag band of subversive and incidental freedom fighters. In the real world, it’s hard to see Google’s monopolistic, opaque advertisement partnership scams as a possible career path for millions — they cut this infallible publication off without giving any reason or recourse for appeal. Even the marginal utopia in Makers seems derivative, so full of brand names and buzzwords I wonder if Doctorow is getting product placement checks along with the income he gets for advising cryptography salesman, even as he suggests children aren’t “digital natives” unless they learn to use crypto. I suppose science fiction has never been the most lucrative industry, but one can at least hope for the kind of world depicted in Makers, one where infinitesimally cheap reproduction would benefit the creators of original content rather than those with a monopoly on the means of reproduction.

A photograph of a vacation bungalow in an exotic location showed off its glass floors — pristine windows into a perfectly lit pond full of gorgeous fish. This was one of the most upvoted images of the day, the perfect photography as much as the interesting architecture inspiring tens of thousands of happy clicks. However, in the comment section for this photograph, users upvoted less flattering images of the same ramshackle hut where there were no fish or glowing lights in the water. The artistry of the photographer, in the eyes of many commenters, was not even a possibility — the image was obviously doctored in photoshop (and that’s not an art to appreciate, either).

This is a milieu of snark. Nickelodeon WebHeads has children pressing buzzers in a game show, rewarding the kid who nails the precise moment some poor sap is maimed for life in a hilarious video. Best to be just another mark in the daily parade of glyphs referencing a set of popular characters, arranged in every permutation and medium imaginable. Each novel click is another grain of sand on a pile of ennui too big to fit in the Death Star, the Tardis, King’s Landing, or…

INTERNET — It’s been said time and time again that 9/11 inside job is the grandaddy of all conspiracy theories, although that term’s marginal flavor hardly applies when the majority of the world believes in it. If one is to assume that an all-powerful cabal is influencing major trends and beliefs across the globe, then it follows that the predominant 9/11 inside job narratives were a result of subtle manipulations of elite propagandists. Are they the Illuminati? Are they contracted out by the G7, Bohemian Grove, Koch Brothers (who control Alex Jones), or Bilderburgers? Most analysts agree it was likely the Koch Brothers or Bilderburgers who wanted to drive anti-government sentiments in order to cut corporate taxes because Alex Jones, their shill, visibly and actively promoted the inside job story in the earliest days. However, Stealth Propaganda, the atomic bomb of information warfare, exists and is responsible for millions of automated bots around the world which appear to be perfectly human facebookers or tweeters yet serve some other’s shadowy purpose. Recent revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and now Ukraine are proof positive that Stealth Propaganda is the most powerful, yet invisible, form of propaganda ever created. There is no way to know which parties are deploying it when, except to connect interests with results, and that can only even then provide guesses.

There are so few answers and these answers only lead to more and more questions. Could it be that Islamic Terrorism is in fact a real thing? Could, in fact, people hate this country from outside enough to want to blow up our precious towers? Why would they hit our businesses hardest, toppling the World Trade Center towers and leaving a much smaller hole in a military — not legislative or even executive — building? Why hasn’t Edward Snowden said anything about 9/11?

Everyone remembers the moments those towers fell, but who remembers the first time they heard the term Ground Zero, or 9/11? Ground Zero was a direct reference to nuclear weapons — weapons which have only been deployed on the Japanese by Americans. 9/11 is a brand name for a line of swag, an entire industry of merchandise, the date on which air travel became a permanently funeral-like experience, and most importantly the numeral encoded into our brains and into our phone system which automatically triggers an immune response from the police. As those towers fell, flags flew off the shelves, patriotism surged to an all-time high, but within a few years most Americans converted to the belief that the attack was a false flag. They had been deceived, and they knew their boys were sent to die for the oil companies and the weapons companies.

It was a win-win for big businesses. Everyone took a ride, most especially the pundits who made money at stoking hate for the government. However, it seems that the military may have shown its hand by hitting itself with a superficial blow while dealing the meaningful blow to the financial sector — which crashed by 2008. The CIA is also known to have strong ties and operatives working inside of Al-Qaeda, and some have even suggested Osama Bin Laden himself was a paid operative, only killed as a part of stagecraft to support Obama’s reelection. Because of the military’s relationship with private contractors and weapons manufacturers, as well as the CIA’s ongoing role in protecting American-owned business interests especially in Central and South America, it can be said that these government entities, on their own, are strongly allied with big business, but not the biggest of business — that is, the finance sector. In fact, those are the very type of banks and financial institutions that were destroyed when the World Trade Center fell. Wall Street, just one block away, was shut down for weeks.

The farther down this rabbit hole one goes, the more questions arise. But the one man who likely knows all the answers, Edward Snowden, has not said a word that could clarify anything. In fact, what he has said about internet surveillance is critical of the NSA, an arm of the government that is now in threat of being taken over by privatized for-profit intelligence contractors, the industry Snowden worked in before working at the NSA. Recent attacks, directed by FBI operative Hector Monsegnur (Sabu), against such private intelligence firms as Stratfor and HBGary show that this conflict between the government and private moneyed interests are anything but imaginary. Snowden, having had free access to the entire internet, must know much more than he is letting on. Many have accepted Snowden as a true hero without criticizing him, so much so that it seems yet another case of propaganda for big businesses. Is he merely a fearmongering crypto-salesman from the tech industry, or does he care about our freedoms and truth? Please Snowden, the people of the world want answers so we can finally write an authoritative history, a truth behind all the madness, propaganda, and robotic stealth shills.