Seizing the Media

"IMMEDIAST projects are against all forms of coercive communication, cultural monologue and media control. We acknowledge non-violent public insurgence as a legitimate response to sustained violations by media and state. We recognize the air as public property, and the signals that travel through it to be the domain of the public."

Asian philosophy instructs enlightenment. But given our daily exposure to a barrage of persuasive messages, monologues, sales pitches, come-ons, and uninformative hyper-sensational news, common sense and intimacy are tough enough a struggle to maintain.

We can each see how extended exposure to television and mass media dulls people with a sense of numbness and nausea. From every public space a monologue of coercion penetrates our senses and rapes our attention. Wherever we look, wherever we listen, wherever we go: the pornography of billboards, bus side placards, subway cards, glaring storefront signs and displays, the glut of junk mail, stupid fly-by beach planes and blimps, coupons, obnoxious bumper stickers and breast pins, embarrassing service forms, plastic banners and ribbons, absurd parades, street-corner handouts, windsheild wiper flyers, matchbook ads, business cards, screaming radios, the daily papers, every nanosecond of television, the package wrapped around everything we buy—from the label in our underwear to the robot computer that calls us in our homes—only the upper atmosphere and the ocean floor offer any sanctuary from America's ecology of coercion. At every turn the monologues drone on, imbedding the psychological mutagens that coax us to become pathetic customers and unquestioning flag wavers. At every turn we are under subtle attack.

The media serve the interests of the State and other corporations, but never the interests of the public. The media's screen of aggression and seduction is designed to mesmerize and captivate the largest possible sector of population whose attention is then sold like scrap metal to advertisers and gang raped by their slogans, jingles, and manic images. Protected by an uncrossable media moat, agents of the State profit from war and relax behind a web of information laws, censorship powers, and vapid explanations that swat the public of detailed intelligence and mass resistance.

So long as we do not control our own government, our own state, and our own broadcast media—the mirror with which we reflect on the reality of lives—we will continue to be forced to see fun-house mirror distortions of ourselves projected onto a dumpster of products that promise to make us each desirable, sophisticated, and correct. At every turn we are under attack.

The State controls information, debt, and violence and targets collective identity. Corporations control commodification, work, and media and target individual identity. Both deploy the same psychological strategies for embedding the public with their messages and directives. Never were their common strategies more transparent than when US disinformation and propaganga service, the infamous USIA, decided to step-up its psy-warfare campaign against the people of Cuba in the Spring of 1989. Until then, attempts to psychologically destabalize the Cuban people were concentrated in the broadcasts of Radio Marti, the Florida based, Government owned pirate radio station that to this day illegally transmits propaganda and disinformation into domestic Cuban radios. In the Spring of 1989, the USIA added images to their psy-war arsenal and began transmitting tele-broadcasts from a hot air balloon controlled from the Key West signals station. Sibling of Radio Marti, the project was dubbed TV Marti.

A few things are to be held in mind here. First, after the Creel Commission saturated Americans with pro-war propaganda during WWI, the level of public disgust was so intense that laws were enacted forbidding the State from ever subjecting the public to its propaganda again. Thus, the USIA's Voice of America propaganda broadcasts that we can hear today in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Prague, we are protected against hearing here on our own turf. Propaganda is so disorienting and confusing that Americans have actually passed laws forbidding it here in its crude verifiable forms.

The fact that we must now face and destroy is that advertising, entertainment, and news have become the government's Trojan Horse into the psyche of the public. What was TV Marti's first propaganda broadcast aimed at the minds of the Cuban people? MTV. Think about it: The USIA's first broadcast of tele-propaganda delivered MTV's corporate rock videos! At every turn we are under attack.

There is much more to this piece here.

"Don't blame the media; become the media." ~ Jello Biafra