Head Cleaning

Tycho over at Penny Arcade has been writing about the vile art of stealth campaigning on the Internet. While some people get all panicky-wanicky about chimeras, this is the thing that gets my dander up.

First, it was spammers, free-market assholes who decided long ago that your email needed to be clogged with offers to increase penis size. Next, it was trolls, those obnoxious shadowselves on the Web who exist only to go into message boards to derail the topic with half-ass invectives. You can find them around poliblogs if you care to look, and if you want to see a bunch of grownups devolve into screaming partisan apes.

Now, thanks to Tycho's spying eye, there's uncovered a new breed. Power hypers. Super plants (hrm, back to chimeras again), hired to take up several accounts on a numerous message boards to casually promote whatever they have to. Films, video games, other consumables. It's been done in bars here in America for years, and the practice is not a stranger to shopping malls. Think pro-corporate guerrilla theater.

What bothers me about these corporate-backed stealth shills is that I've given up on TV and radio and even movies as being ad-free zones. Ads are everywhere, even when you don't think about it. Commercials on TV or in magazines at the gym. There are ads in the newspaper I work at. Ads on billboards I drive by in my car, which is a rolling ad if you want to get all meta about it. When I have my iPod and I'm in the gym, people can tell by the snow noodles I have leading up to my ears that, yep, he's got an iPod. Perfect non-logo advertising. Yet, all those adverts are out there, overt, arguably honest. When you read a newspaper there's a visual demarcation between the sea of text and the graphics of an ad. In TV, the ad appears when the actors aren't on stage (although that's slowly changing, take Coca-Cola's product placement in "American Idol"). You can tell ads in magazines immediately. All sorts of visual cues.

On Internet message boards, the medium is still text, so the blurring of someone's personal commentary and viral marketing takes on a sinister feel, as if we're being tricked into a diluted reality of corporate truth. Or maybe it's a symptom of the cause. We've entered a stage in communication where everyone can have their say. Everyone's baggage and research is on the table. You can believe it or not. At this point, we've evolved a set of filters in our brains to accept that there's certain tribes. Democratic tribes, Republican tribes, "Lost" tribes, iPod tribes, Kanye West tribes, and so on....devoted to the cause and being pain to the heretics haters who troll the boards. In a way, it was simple. Walk into a poliblog or a brand's message board, and you got where everyone stood. Spend enough time, and you get to decipher the ballet of the faithful and the outcasts, tearing into each other in a moebius strip of false patriotism, bad logic, and that empty-calorie wit of snark. Predictable.

With the subtle injections of corporate-fueled comments, the filter gets all shaky, breaking down into a series of ratty holes and you wonder who has been fucking with your perceptions. You got fed another commercial, against your will, under the radar. No defenses ready. It's all dishonest, but your growing victimhood of having the mindbomb advert all over your clothes won't get anything clean. You can't unthink what you got fed to you. Meanwhile, a piece of you darkens to think that the sneaky bastard who pwned you is off doing it all over the Web, hiding under a million aliases. You wanted at least a fair fight. You get tired of the government lying to you, as well as the mainstream media failing to be informative. Instinct alarms in your head keep you away from the American media. You can whitenoise government officials. But the Web, where you hang out, where you hope and pray and want there to be a meritocracy, that's been hit with by a corporate graffiti artist and you're just sick of everything being branded, everything being a commercial.

A year ago, I figured out that the 21th century is going to be a battle over spiritual, mental, and physical colonization. Stealth hype like this may not push it over the edge, but it's part of an invisible trajectory where people are going to say "enough." What's going to be interesting is how it'll play out here in the states, where 70% of the economy is consumer spending. If people stop paying attention to the ads in a desperate attempt to clear their heads, what's next?