In the spirit of my Aphex in Wonderland, I bring you a series combining the classic animated film The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and the album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robot by the Flaming Lips. This is part one out of 15.
Satire: Democracy’s Most Unexpected Enemy
A 2009 study found that people tend to interpret ambiguous political satire according to their own views and self-image. This has enormous implications for satirical programs mocking democratic behavior, produced by media conglomerates that support Internet censorship. (The following is an essay that I was not able to place with a magazine, but still wanted to share with the world. Feel free to re-post on your blog or website, in accordance with the Creative Commons license. Just give me credit and link back here.)
“The revolutionaries of any decade will become the reactionaries of the next decade, if they do not change their nervous system, because the world around them is changing. He or she who stands still in a moving, racing, accelerating age, moves backwards relatively speaking.” – Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising (1)
On Thursday, December 1, 2011, Stephen Colbert addressed the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill currently under consideration in U.S. Congress, on his late-night political satire program The Colbert Report (pronounced “Cole-bare Ree-pore”). Fight for the Future, a group coordinating the push against SOPA and Protect-IP (a similar bill being considered; the “IP” stands for “intellectual property”), says that such a bill would allow the government to shut down websites for any copyright infringement, while making it a felony to stream copyrighted content without permission. (2) According to PCWorld, the government could also restrict access to foreign sites with the help of Internet service providers (ISPs), or block advertising and payment services from working with the sites. (3) The result, as anyone with a cursory understanding of the issue can predict, would be a drastic reduction our free speech rights and possible damage to the DNS system upon which the Internet depends.
Let’s Prevent American Internet Censorship!
FightForTheFuture.org (click image to visit site) has information and suggestions for fighting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)
[Note: This post has been censored by the author in protest of the "rogue sites legislation" (i.e., Internet censorship) currently being considered by U.S. Congress. The full text will be made available soon.]
Dear Internet friends,
As you may already know, I create audio/video mash-ups by crossing older films and music videos with newer music, with varying levels of editing to the original visual content. In a sense, it has become a hobby of mine over the past few years, and I find it very rewarding. My own activity has been inspired in some ways by the mash-up culture more prevalent in music during the last decade.
Excerpts Galore
Pieces of my manuscript-in-progress are suddenly scattered all over the web, so I wanted to provide an update in case you’ve lost track. The third excerpt that appeared in Beatdom issue 9 is now online at their website.
A shorter version entitled “Kerouac: A Psychonaut in Denial” just appeared on Reality Sandwich this week. If you’re not quite ready for the long version, you might want to check that one out first.
As a reminder, the fourth excerpt appeared on Reality Sandwich in September. And I’m happy to announce that the fifth excerpt will be published in Beatdom issue 10 sometime in the next month or two. For more information about my book, please visit nickmeador.org/madness.
Reality Sandwich Runs My Next Book Excerpt
On September 19, the web magazine Reality Sandwich published the fourth excerpt from my book-in-progress. I titled it “Doublethink and the Mental Construction of Reality.” It’s actually the third excerpt to appear on their website, but the fourth overall. The third excerpt overall appeared in Beatdom Magazine earlier this summer.
Because I condensed a 22,000-word chapter into a 3,900-word excerpt, it’s a pretty heady piece of reading. And because I had to take it out of the context of my book, it’s mostly abstract information. However, those who read this and the Beatdom piece together will likely notice many important parallels. Continue reading →
Mary y Moi
I created this audio/video mash-up on September 4, 2011, with minimal editing to the original footage:
