Douglas Rushkoff - Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace

May the Best Meme Win

It's by using the technologies and pathways laid down by promoters of control that cyberians believe they must conduct their revolution. The massive television network, for example, whose original purpose was to sell products and--except for a brief period during the Vietnam war--to manufacture public consent for political lunacy, has now been coopted as a feedback mechanism by low-end home video cameramen. Coined Video Vigilantes'' on a Newsweek cover, private citizens are bringing reality to the media. When a group of cops use excessive force on a suspect, chances are pretty good that someone with a camcorder will capture the images on tape, and CNN will have broadcast it around the world within a couple of hours. In addition, groups such as Deep Dish TV now use public access cable channels to disseminate convincing video of a reality quite different from the one presented on the network newscasts.

The gun used to be the great equalizer,'' explains Jack Nachbar, professor of popular culture at Bowling Green University, in reference to camcorders. "You can say this is like the new six gun, in a way. It can really empower ordinary people.'' Police departments now bring their own video cameras to demonstrations by groups like DIVA (Damned Interfering Video Activists) in order to make a recording of their own side of the story. The new war--like Batman's media battle against the Joker--is fought not with conventional weapons but with images in the datasphere. The ultimate weapon in Cyberia is not the sword or even the pen but the media virus.

The media virus is any idea that infiltrates the host organism of modern society. It can be a real thing, like Mark Heley's Smart Bar, which functions on an organic level yet also acts as a potent concept capable of changing the way we feel about drugs, health care, and intelligence. A virus can also be a pure thought or idea, like Gaia'' or "morphic resonance,'' which, when spread, changes our model of reality. The term virus itself is a sort of metamedia virus, depicting society as a immunodeficient host organism vulnerable to attack from better'' thoughts and messages. A virus contains genetic code, what cyberians call "memes,'' which replicate throughout the system as long as the information or coding is useful or even just attractive. Cyberian activists are marketing experts who launch media campaigns instead of military ones, and wage their battles in the territory of cyberspace. How the computer nets, news, MTV, fashion magazines, and talk show hosts cover a virus will determine how far and wide it spreads.

The public relations game is played openly and directly in Cyberia. As we've seen, people like Jody Radzik, Earth Girl, and Diana see their marketing careers as absolutely compatible with their subversive careers. They are one and the same because the product they market--house culture--is a media virus. The fuel that's going to generate the growth of this culture is going to be trendiness and hipness,'' Radzik says. "We're using the cultural marketing thing against itself.'' So, to be hipper and trendier, people buy Radzik's clothing and are exposed to the memes of house culture: fractals, chaos, ecstasy and Ecstasy, shamanism, and acceptance. Making love groovy.

But older, more practical generations cannot be so easily swayed by fashion or hipness. Cyberians who hope to appeal to this market segment use different sorts of viruses--ones that are masked behind traditional values, work ethics, and medical models. Michael Hutchinson, author of The Book of Floating, Megabrain, and Sex and Power, makes his living distributing information about brain machines and other stress-reduction devices. He is a tough and determined New Yorker dressed in local Marin County garb: pastels, khaki, and tennis shoes. Similarly, the cyberian motives behind his stress-reduction'' systems are dressed in quite innocent-sounding packaging.