Metahaven - Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? Memes, Design and Politics

CAN JOKES BRING DOWN GOVERNMENTS?
MEMES, DESIGN AND POLITICS
METAHAVEN

Strelka Press

A Definition of Now , Metahaven, 2012

1. INTRODUCTION

May 2012.

Im sifting through a bunch of old records, and the smell of dusty cardboard and vinyl, softened by the summer heat, fills the decrepit record store. Passing through the same old Michael Boltons and Ultravoxes, I pause at an album by George Clinton, the legendary founder of Funkadelic. The album title is Some of My Best Jokes Are Friends . It was released in 1985.

A few hours later, Im browsing the internet looking for evidence of political reform in Europe after the financial crisis. There is almost nothing; its the same old system obsessively staring at its own growth, or the lack thereof. Except for Iceland. Its constitution was rewritten by crowdsourcing - a trendy word for getting direct input from as many people as possible. The country brings its own corrupted bankers to court, where it has some trouble getting them convicted. The mayor of Reykjavk, Jn Gnarr Kristinsson, is a comedian; his party, the Best Party, became popular by parodying ruling politicians. In a pleasant combination of dispassionate rationality and raving madness, Iceland - a state with the population of a small city - seems a laboratory for reinventing politics. In Italy, a new kind of populist movement is gaining ground, headed by the comedian Beppe Grillo. His slogan Vaffanculo (Fuck off) has hundreds of thousands in its grip; his performances are entertaining political rants that promote self-organization and human values. Grillo is against Italys participation in the euro currency and, by virtue of that position only, fits into Europes centrist-totalitarian media discourse as a dangerous politician. His weapon is comedy, and what makes it effective is its natural juxtaposition to both the pompous common sense of technocratic bailout rule and the perverted, corrupted oligarchy of Berlusconi. Yes, Grillo is a merciless populist; but thats not why he is popular popular enough to come third in Italys February 2013 elections.

On Twitter, I find an essay by the Deterritorial Support Group (DSG), a think tank band of London-based graphic activists. Goatse As Industrial Sabotage links perverse internet images to political graphic design from the 1970s. DSGs thesis is as strangely plausible as it is, in a political sense, hilarious.

A friend reminds me of Ethan Zuckermans Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism. It holds that a digital platform where many people exchange pictures of cute cats is also an excellent place for political activism: if the state were to shut it down, people would protest because they could no longer exchange pictures of cute cats. (More likely, if this did happen, they would find another platform to exchange pictures of cute cats). Zuckerman contends that it is inherently fruitful to embed messages of political activism within widely popular online platforms, so that subversive content cant be easily isolated by authoritarians.

A question shapes itself in the early morning hours. Is it possible that graphic design has only one thing left to do, which is posting itself on the internet? And to go a little bit further is it possible that jokes have an untapped political power, which was historically always present but never so useful and necessary as now? Could, then, the leftovers of graphic design be turned into jokes? Might through this re-allegiance design rediscover actual societal impact ? Can jokes scale? Can they supersize? Can we laugh so loudly at those in power that they fall? Can jokes, in fact, bring down governments?

November 2012.

We are told this is a time for tough decisions and certainly not a time for jokes. Governments of liberals, centre-right conservatives and social democrats have declared austerity throughout Europe. Their policies are a cocktail of the once-opposed extremes of their respective ideologies: there will be reduced public services (hail neoliberals), and there will, at the same time, be higher taxes (hail social democrats). Injustice is now fair .

Austerity is promoted and imposed by a techno-financial superclass of managers. The austerity elite does not live in the countries where its regimes are imposed, and it most certainly does not live in the social circles affected by it. Where its rule is the harshest this superclass goes by the name of the troika . Comprising the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission (EC), this roaming triumvirate of experts specialises in summary judgments of EU countries.

Austerity is potentially unlimited . It has no boundaries . No austerity elite is willing to say: until here, and no further. The humanitarian crisis of austerity is none of its business.

In unleashing austerity on its constituents, the political superclass has opened up a Pandoras box of disastrous consequences. It has awakened and emboldened powerful enemies. Not just of austerity, but of democracy itself.

Politicians in Europe are more afraid of financial markets than of their own people. Financial markets exercise a form of direct democracy over our lives everyday via the stock exchange, the bond markets, the ratings agencies, the banks, financial service providers and their products. While people may have their say every four to five years in parliamentary elections, they produce at best parodies of regime change. When financial trader Alessio Rastani, in a BBC interview, famously asserted that governments dont run the world, Goldman Sachs does it left the presenters in a real state of shock. Did it really? The BBC journalists were actually surprised that it is profitable to cripple countries, as Rastani assured them was the case. Indeed, as of July 2012, no less than five key European financial executives are former employees of Goldman Sachs: Peter Sutherland, the Irish Director-General of the World Trade Organization; Italian prime minister Mario Monti; Greek prime minister Lucas Papademos; Petros Christodoulou, who leads Greeces national debt management agency

In 2009 British author Mark Fisher coined the term capitalist realism to describe this paradigm of government. In a (still) notionally democratic system a state of permanent crisis, either looming or actual, is normalized. Capitalism is then established as the only viable political and economic system to the extent that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. This analysis is right on the money, literally. The political system, practice and governing ideology of capitalist realism functions as a frameset, which forces its political opponents to speak the same language. By means of such a discourse an interplaying set of words, meanings, symbols and implications (a system, indeed, of making sense of the world) any alternative (by the oppressed) must first be rendered in the language and protocol of the oppressor.

There is, at first sight, nothing too funny about the death of social democracy. Luxury for everyone is now financial oligarchy against the masses. Pretty much everyone except the occasional oligarchs beautiful daughter is doing worse than their parents did, in terms of job prospects and job security, whereas social development is stifled by an over-regulated and monetised public sphere. In the Netherlands, for example, alongside grave austerity, and despite millions of square meters of vacant office space being available as part of this countrys real estate bubble, squatting has been declared a criminal offense. Countries the West looks up to for their economic growth, such as Brazil, Russia, India and China, invariably show much steeper rich-poor divides than any Western government of the past 20 years would have deemed acceptable. It is a statement of fact that we have entered a world of drastic inequality its political compass pointed toward much more of it. Graebers 99% vs. 1% binary became one of the Occupy movements dominant motifs exposing how fundamental social inequality has become to Western governance. Worse, this ideology of resource distribution cannot be expelled from there by the conventional political and media channels.