Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

[sabotabby]

I guess everyone has seen this video of Glenn Beck trying to explain Operation Payback to his viewing audience:

"Billy Bragg -There Is Power In A Union" (Watch on YouTube)

[Sorry, I can't find a transcript. I am going to do my best to post transcripts for any video I post; consider it a New Year's resolution.]

The thing that gets me, beyond that Glenn Beck has not heard of D&D, is that the entire narrative framework here is so over-the-top. I mean, just look at the players: Assange (Chaotic Neutral*, and ripped right from the pages of the Millennium Trilogy), Bradley Manning (Lawful Good turned Chaotic Good), 4chan (Chaotic Neutral turning into Chaotic Good before our eyes), and Beck (Lawful Evil. I want to say Chaotic Evil but his utter irrationality is not actually relevant in this particular conflict.) The conflict here is at a global level, a life-and-death struggle, both for individuals and for nations. But at the same time, let's admit it, it's a bit cartoonish, you know?

Meanwhile, just outside the centre of the empire, my life is pretty stable, so it makes reading the news a bit surreal. Everything we conspiracy theorists on the left have speculated was true actually is, everyone is finding out about it, and—like I've always said about the conspiracy narrative—not doing anything about it.

I just read one of those insufferable books about the future (The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason), which seems hilariously outdated less than three years after its publication. It predicts a hypercapitalist libertarian utopia of youth nanocultures that will somehow result in a fairer, more just world. I think the idea of nanocultures has actually come and gone. Meanwhile, I edited a book last weekend that started out as a grim dystopia marked by paranoia and omnipresent surveillance, and it seemed less like a cautionary tale and more like a story about present-day London.

The things we thought were kind of silly two years ago are accepted fixtures of reality now. Think of Bruce Schneier's TSA contests; many of the hilarious security measures that readers proposed are now in place in American airports. Howard Beale's sociopathic clone is allowed on TV to rant, and, like his less-colourful fictional counterpart, is ridiculously popular amongst the sorts of people who still watch things on the TV.

Goddamn it, I know I've made this complaint before, but won't someone think of the near-future dystopic fiction writers? We can't write that fast.

* He'd get a promotion to Chaotic Good were it not for the rape accusations. It is totally possible to be a hero in one area and a villain in another. I mean, Gandhi slept naked with 13-year-old girls and was penpals with Hitler.

Comments

[lienne.livejournal.com]

:(

[http://users.livejournal.com/_ex_cowboy/]

what do students protesting against tuition hikes in the UK have to do with Wikileaks? does he realize that most people in ACORN likely have very little awareness of much less association with anonymous and 4chan? no he doesn't. was he trying to appear sincere and reasonable or was he falling asleep?

i highly recommend watching the 3 part carlos rather than the theatrical release. the news footage about the political events of that era make the film even more engaging.

[sabotabby]

Does he realize that the first four groups he mentions are all the same group?

It's like a party game, really: "Okay, now pretend to be Glenn Beck describing 4chan to a 70-year-old white guy who has been afraid to walk out his front door since desegregation. Annnnnd...go!"

[http://users.livejournal.com/_ex_cowboy/]

he makes false associations so fast and efficiently that you need to pause and rewind to try to figure out how the hell they correlate outside of being stuck to Beck's board with chalk arrows furiously pointing at them.

i still don't understand the tea baggers and right wing libertarians talking about Soros and the elite but someone like Beck who made more than $20 million this year is a working class rodeo clown?

[sabotabby]

Not to mention that he's talking about "violent revolution" like it's not something that the teabaggers openly advocate and that Beck himself doesn't advocate in his "factional" book.

[theonlytwin.livejournal.com]

I read an interesting article drawing parallels between media reactions to the London student protests and operation payback, the just of which was does protest of this kind incite too much sympathy for the thing being protested/aggression toward the protestors? It ruled no, not really, freedom of speech is too important and the flaw lies mainly in mainstream media and it's representation of such things.

I am still in London. I was meant to be in Belgium but the fact the weather shut heathrow down and gatwick is over crowded led to eurostar being double and triple booked. I got me a refund. The traindrivers are striking, so it's very difficult to leave the London area. There are more cops around than there were last week, partly because of Christmas (drunkenness, pickpockets, general crush) partly because of rumpled surrounding a student anarchist reprisal of sorts.

Yeah, living the dystopia, a bit. Surreal in its mundanity.

[sabotabby]

I never got the "well, if you protest too loudly, you'll alienate people." As if the majority of complacent fuckheads were ever swayed by tone, or ever inclined to sympathize with protesters. It doesn't matter how polite your protest is; someone will take issue with it. So you might as well be aggressive.

[kellista.livejournal.com]

i know, right. then at least you get to vent a little rage. thanks for the post, by the way. i have been bedridden for days and needed to chuckle at the pathos.