Culture Jamming

And James Ferraro still keeps up the good cause, although, as James Ferraro does, he changes his sound about every other album. He seemed to have gotten pretty inspired by OPN and now composes.

just a fucking liberal not even a decent poseur

Fuck off, banksy was legit. Have you even watched his doc?

I thought baiting was banned on here

Muh Steve Jobs was a refugee too!

alt right was also hating on banksy a while back, you are the ones who are baiting you falseflagging pieces of shit

Everyone should hate banksy

He was pro-palestine and did anti-israel graffiti in Israel. "Muh Steve Jobs" boogeyman is just one step cut short from "fuck sandnigger rapefugees". Use your tankie flag when you post next time.

Banksy sucks tho

I didn't post that, that post deserved to be saged and it isn't discussion of effective culture jamming.
I don't really care if Banky was anti-Israel. His commentary is hypocritical basic garbage that just blames "society"– really nothing and no one in particular. There's very little depth other than his sometimes amusing inversions of power structures. You can paint fat cops kissing each other for so long before it becomes an empty and heavyhanded neoliberal spectacle.
He just mocks already mocked large corporations without inciting any actual alternative or means of resiting whatever the hell he's really trying to resist. His Dismalland is a prime example of this. "They're bad, but I won't tell you why. What if Mickey Mouse was really gross and raped children lol."

He is an artist. What else should he do? I think his work is interesting to say the least. I know he is "baah librul/succdem" but give him a fucking break. Is moaning about him really the peak dialectics of this place?

He was never meant to be a revolutionary, I can agree that maybe his methods are not cut out for spreading our message, hell, I can even agree with you that he was too vague, but when somebody goes out to say what he did was shit/subversive/malicious gets frustrated. I think he was OK as an artist. People like him can be useful to create good aesthetics for communes, movements and squats.

OK let's move on. I agree with this bit

We should really find good way to push our ideas in concise and funny ways. Not actually in support of ideology but rather to expose hypocracy of world around us. Taking ads of well-known companies to make funny compilations of them to show their capitalist hypocracy is a good one. Just need to find a good way how to dismiss going along with idpol and craft our own narrative.

That's a fair opinion. I know he thinks he's doing the right thing, but he's become so much of a meme it's hard to take him, and by extension culture jamming/street art, seriously

I know a lot of Holla Forums is against counter-memeing, but I think it could be very helpful if we're able to get people to start reading theory through it as well.

Not /ourguy/, but I find link related to be pretty damn effective.
youtube.com/watch?v=TM8L7bdwVaA
Pointing out a narrative can sometimes be enough.

that video was pretty good, reminds me this stuff
youtube.com/watch?v=YCeQLeQiRP4

Getting people to read theory goes hand in hand with memeing, but when focused on the person being memed. It hasn't worked that well with Marx, but I think the Stirner and his "spooks" meme has catched on, sometimes even with alt-right. I am actually sad that glitch art/vaporwave didn't catch on, these both had fair anti-capitalist meme potential.

Only solution seems to encourage more people to create OC. It's good if we got FB and Reddit in on this, sneakily. I run some meme page on FB that is doing quite good but besides habitual "lol depression" and unrelated, random irony, it's not much. I want to keep it that way though, that page gives me constant feedback on what type/content/style gets more likes and what gets less.

One can also have plenty of fun with culture jamming. See for example the various pranks associated with the Luther Blisset project or the whole career of British musical group KLF. Even the stupidest Holla Forums pranks, like making the Starbucks barista write 'trump' in one's latte, double as violations of the symbolic order. We should aim to turn Communism into a household brand among the consumers of the world. The brand that stands for the negation of all brands. Any media event can be hijacked for revolutionary purposes. Disrupt the illusions of the spectacle, reveal the ugly truth behind the glittering world of showbiz. Art is reification. There is no thing such as revolutionary art only revolutionary situations.

The dystopian cultural nihilist anti aesthetics of Tim and Eric, Everything is Terrible, or Million Dollar Extreme(yeah I know they are fash but you can't deny their effectiveness) can be pretty instructive. But it's also neccesary to go beyond mere nihilism, beyond the banality of the spectacle, hinting at revolutionary desires that remain unrealisable within the current order.

(Some examples of situationist pranks here)
lutherblissett.net

That's fucking hilarious, alt-right in their peak would never reach such levels, but I see the point that alt-right is having fun with their stuff, such as their plans to invade Tuvalu, some tiny island in pacific ocean. They autistically planned out the battle plan on 4/pol/ half a year back just as a thought experiment. I also think their Bogdanof Brothers meme was mostly about fun too, and some smaller media traced it back to alt-right despite that the meme had no right-wing message in itself.

Out of curiosity, do you think that stuff like this has potential?
youtube.com/watch?v=vgQai3IIMQg

This Simpsonwave thing is pretty interesting. There are lots of views for that particular channel, and the comments are weird as fuck. It's essentially people listening to music on background and complaining about being depressed, feeling nostalgic/sad and betrayed by the current world. I think it doesn't take much to get those people to make connection of their alienation to ruthlessness of capitalist world, for example.

no it needs a meme age resurgence

Lately, I've been obsessed with Walter Benjamin, an esoteric Frankfurt School outlier and his variety of messianic Marxism. Benjamin talks about this, the sense of Utopias lost, unfulfilled promises, the dreams and phantasmagoria associated with the past. This is the dream from which we have to awaken. I feel that's what Vaporwave was all about, memory.

I think simpsonswave actually has a lot of potential. I've long dreamed about making a leftist simpsonswave film, but I'm not nearly autistic or ambitious enough to sift through episodes for clips in order to build it.

I must have watched every single episode of the first seasons multiple times back when I was a kid. Things like that obviously impact your aesthetic sensibilities. The writers and animators had a thing for classical Hollywood films and many came from the underground comedy scene. Unlike later animated sitcoms who only imitated the Simpsons. Springfield is a window into the collective unconscious of Clinton era USA.

Spot on analysis. It's always worth noting too that these videos always use clips/shots from the first 8 so seasons of the Simpsons, prior to the show's rapid decline into corporate predicable, sterile, and robotic mediocrity that does little other than depict the cultural event of the month. I find it strange that the history of the Simpsons itself speaks to what Simpsonswave commentators complain about in their own lives.

People still bring up them burning the million quid. Probably some of the best at this kinda stuff but you need the capital to begin with to do stuff like that.

I think it's effective at exposing absurdity, and there's some obviously sick theory behind it too. The LBP manifesto is worth reading

They're reuniting this August after 23 years of absence as promised. It sounds like they're pissed about the way things have gone. Situationism may have hope yet

I'm not even a fan of their music but I'm interested to see where they go with their more art based stuff.

you mean detournement you fucking pleb

Where should I start with Benjamin?

Could you elaborate on that aspect of vapowave? Interested to learn more about how it criticizes capitalism.

libcom.org/blog/simpsonwave-nostalgia-sentiment-dystopia-09122016

This.

Thanks, giving it a read.

Are there any critiques of these Banksy types? I want to read more on modern aesthetics and how it goes hand in hand with capitalism.

bump

yo, I heard you like simpsonwave :) Have a really well made one.

I especially like this one because of how it critiques the fascist overtones of many 80s action movies, but also because it illuminates the enjoyment of maladaptive daydreaming of fascism by many ostensibly docile middle-class individuals like Homer Simpson (He IS a nuclear safety inspector after all, which is an engineer's position, even though he is thoroughly unqualified for the job and causes incidents that would have wiped out the town several times over, with a family and well-defined habits).

What I find even more interesting is the observation that the enjoyable ideas provided by such movies and the daydreaming of becoming such a public action hero, even if only in an image, causes a positive feedback loop that engages and enrages the enjoying subject: he wishes to be such a person who gains great power like Stallone or Schwarzenegger, but he is powerless to do so; he lives vicariously through his movies and imagination, and when a possibility of becoming such a fascistic "hero" arises, he latches on for dear life in the hopes that it will change his outcomes in life. He desperately wants to not be a failure (as an underemployed poster on such relatively obscure parts of the internet like Holla Forums, I am aware of the irony) but is afraid of hurting himself, because he does not wish to lose the little he has, and is personally too weak to throw it all on the balance to effect some positive change.

And such individuals are right in doing so. The state is on an endless search-and-destroy mission to find such individuals that are brave and dumb enough to openly oppose the state like that and is constantly finding new ways to pacify or neutralize them, through death or jail. Communities and systems that actively oppose the dominating neoliberal system are systematically eliminated or worn down through military and police means; though we are not at that point yet where we will destroy commodities and raw materials in order to end such communities (though some are tightly controlled, though all are under some kind of state control), but we are moving in that direction. People that may not fit into the system as interchangeable commodities are re-formed until they become that, and those who resist that have their lives become that much harder.

There is a way to fly under the radar; find the appropriate regulations and laws that give you as much state aid as possible, and use that as a bankroll to become self-sufficient to the point where you don't need to have a job anymore. I am not talking about becoming Tyler Durden here, stealing fat from liposuction clinics to make cosmetic soap, but even shit like dumpster diving for tech behind stores and office parks to sell on Craigslist for 30-40 cents on the dollar is good business. Even Wired has an article about it, and jinteki.industries from /cyber/ definitely had one as well while it was up. What matters most is being able to live and breathe freely, while finding a way to starve the capitalist system of fresh meat, that being new commodities, workers, and most of all, customers. If we can provide for ourselves what they wish to sell to us, that's when the game will finally end.

Honestly, it feels like Spectacle. It amuses and supposedly imparts information, but said information doesn't register. It is "commodified", consumed and discarded.