Keith Sanborn on Sun, 6 Jul 2003 14:23:52 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
Re: <nettime> Google's Weapons of Mass Destruction |
Even my father sent me this one and I appreciate the critique wrapped in humor, but it's also another kind of a Trojan Horse: if you happen to buy one of the books on Amazon.com that the creator of the site links to, then he gets paid. Again, we have a form of clever advertising, something the brits are quite good at. Political critique that gets paid; or is it just someone wanting to get paid who uses political critique as a hook? Not much worse or radically different than the "un lapin" website selling tee shirts and I'm a fan of the latter, though I've never bought the tee shirt. To paraphrase a 20th century advertising jingle: it's two, two, two things in one. It's enough to drive one back to arguments about superstructure and substructure in an ancient Marxian vein. But it's not about advertising being bad; that's a given. It's about masquerade and data gathering. I imagine it will be frequently imitated. But this is an interesting case where the search engine is detourned, but then the politics are recuperated by a commercial impulse. Usually, they aren't planned into the same package. It seems like another permutation of what Debord called "the integrated spectacle" and may even represent a new tactic--if not a new strategy--for commodifying dissent. Keith Sanborn # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net