Media

All this while, and all your life, you are seeped in media. Boiled in advertising, char-grilled with television, fried with a bit of radio and sautaed newspapers, served with diced music and a dressing of novels, magazines, videos, DVDs, theater visits, cinema visits, billboards, text messages, websites, forums, chat-channels, pop-sci books, lectures, lessons, telephone calls and docudramas. Almost all of them designed by the conspiracy for the same purpose and reason as the fairy tales, the morality tales, the stern-police-warnings and the military orders.

Every time you read in a newspaper a story about something you actually understand, something you witnessed, something you know, it’s wrong in the detail and misleading in the interpretation. Yet every time you read something you don’t know about, you believe them! You think it’s important to keep track of their overarching Newsweek story-arc, even though you know it’s a useless soap-opera that will only touch your life when they make you go and fight their wars for them. You argue about issues, because they were in the newspaper. Then you forget them when they’re not. Remember the Crack epidemic? Is there more crack around now than during the height of that panic or less? Do you worry about it more or less? I mean really! You’re acting like a goddamn thoughtless copying undead memebot.

The blatant mistakes, misquoted speeches, unreasonable assumptions, biased interpretations, silent manufactured consent, and fucking celebrity news is just the overt message. It’s the stuff you know you should be critically-thinking about but can’t be bothered in your hopeless overworked brain-dead inert void-think stupor. No, it’s the metaphors, the subtext, the subliminal messages and morals, the codified references and unintentional conspiracy sub-hypnotic control trigger phrases — the stuff you don’t even notice because you’re so utterly in the conspiracy’s thrall — that is how they’re really programming you.

You don’t think about why they chose their focus, heck they don’t even think about it much. The reporters and diplomats and politicians and actors and writers and chief grips and makeup people and stand-ins and musicians and copywriters are just as enthralled with each other, and the conspiracy at large, as you are.

The newspapers are all copying each other, desperately competing to get that story first — there’s billions of stories but they’re all looking at the same misdirection. Like a dumbfounded magician’s audience they’re carefully examining the sparks, smoke and flashes and not even noticing the assistant walking calmly out the fire exit.

How do they compete with each other? By watching the news-wire. Story chasing comes down to internet surfing. ALL the newspapers are two-thirds the same, often word for word, press releases and puff pieces, promo and spam. Just something you can read so you don’t have to think.

The movie producers all make the same fucking movie. Over and over again, and over and over again. Often with the same goddamn name and the same bloody script. Then they even have the cheek to repeat each of them, again and over again at some harmonic televisual frequency that stops people even caring and leaves them parroting it back when they finally do meet a real person.

Look at adverts. You can’t help but do so. They’re on every wall, every screen, every tree, every lamppost, every movie, every book, every magazine, the faces and lips of every person you meet. Heck, they’re even on the schoolbooks and they’re in your own head. The advertisers already know this stuff I’m telling you. They’ve read books on neruo-linguistic programming, hypnosis, credulity, credibility, brain function. They’ve measured things like customer response and you, you greedy sucker, even cooperated. “Would you like to fill in this customer survey? You might win a better drone-mobile to take you to your wage-slavery.”

The whole advertising model is a leech. A blood-money thirsty machine, cranking out conspiracy meme-control. The advertisers rip out your “eyeballs” and feed them to their customers, their clients, who then push up their prices and make you pay for it. Thousands of copywriters, advertising executives, sold out musicians, corrupted film-makers, fame-whores, yuppies, designers, models, photo-editors and idiots, all sucking your money, your attention, your time, your motivation, your individuality and your slack. Spinning you into advertigo, all so that you can get “free” “programming” from the OTHER branches of their co-conspiring media factory.

Only, of course, the difference between advertising and the other media is a line so blurred and slight that there’s no word for the non-advertising media. Movies make enough to run their canteen from just agreeing what brand of phone their hero will use. Kickbacks? No! It goes on the advertising budget. Product placement is the rule because you want to look as cool as your hero, that dumbass xeroxed Romeo. It’s there because you think being more like yet-another-lame-lovestruck-heroine means wearing the same designer clothes as she does. You’re about as conscious as the comic-book characters who’s brand choice you copy. Worse yet, you live in a world so full of carbon copy soulless repli-droids like you that you’re right. It does make you look cool, to them!

It makes you fat, it slows down your metabolism like a mediative trance, it beams their radiation directly through your soul-windows to the back of your brainpan. It won’t listen, it won’t talk back and it’ll censor anything too controversial or challenging. Yet chances are you stare at it, ignoring the people you’re with, for hours and hours and hours every week. Oh, television is so addictive you’ll even watch the same show over and over again on Bravo or Gold — only the adverts change — but will you admit you have a problem? No, you sit and watch ‘reality’ shows, passive voyeurism on criminally boring wannabe celebs. You know they’re edited into caricature, you know there are people outside who aren’t so dull and repulsive they have to get onto national television to get some attention. Yet still, you sit and watch, probably so slack-starved you can’t face the thought of going outside and having to interact back.

You could go out, strike up a conversation with a stranger, give them this book, learn something that isn’t spoon fed to you by the CON, but you’d sooner tune into some soap opera. After all! You wanna know if that fictional made-up girl gets that fictional made-up boy to react with her doubly fictional made-up jealousy provoking kiss with that other fictional made-up beefy guy. You’d sooner watch the “news” and learn about someone in pointless high office, or suffering on the other side of the globe. You can’t really talk to those people. They won’t judge you, they won’t hate you because you’re so fucking dull, way more boring than you imagine the stars of stage and screen are. Heck, even duller than most of them actually are.

You’d sooner watch the game coz, well, it’s exciting! Our boys — who you’ve never met and never will meet — might beat their rivals — who you’ve never met and never will meet — at a sport you haven’t played since school and were never very good at anyway!

You can’t escape their noise anywhere. And you’re so used to it you don’t even want to.

While you’re driving in their metal mass-produced family-sized droid-carrier, you have at your fingertips a dozen “free” conspiracy-controlled radio stations. All playing the same bland, unoffensive, pretend conspiracy pop-rock. Sure, you’re at the controls of a ton of steal and plastic moving at sixty miles an hour and need every bit of wit at your disposal to keep from crashing and killing yourself and others but you need the distraction!

Otherwise you might think?

The radio stations all accept money, payola, to play some records and then pay cash back out under horribly complicated copyright laws to the record labels that paid them to play it. Meanwhile they charge “advertisers” to pimp their shops and TV shows and cars and toys and utterly useless crap, and you think you can tell the difference? Bollocks! There’s no more difference between Radio 195-point-X-FM and Radio 321-point-Y-FM than there is between one arbitrary retro tune they play and the next bland manufactured buzz. No difference between that and the adverts they splice it with. All of ’em tied down, gift wrapped, polished and owned. Crappy copies of things that had a spark, once. Before your pointless birth.

Pop music is as much about fashion as it is about music. More badges for your brain, more labels for your lifestyle. A catwalk for people who think catwalks are for fashion dupes. You may even think you don’t care, but the colour of your jeans fades up and down with everyone else’s. How can it not? Every time you walk into a shop it’s full of tee-shirts and jeans — all the same! You can’t even get unfashionable clothes unless you dig ’em up from a charity shop. And that wouldn’t drive the fashion machine. People might think you’re poor.

You may think that the web is the answer: Remove the conspiracy by removing the conspiracy media control! Put the memespace in the hands of the people! If everyone can publish, somehow the conspiracy can’t control it! But pah! Poo poo! The people are the conspiracy, even the bloggers*. Sure, they’re independent of obvious conspiracy control, but they’re just a gaggle of uncultured hopeless dupes, just as fooled and unthinking as you are. A million voices, all shouting the same incoherent unimaginative bland bullshit. Is that going to help drown out the conspiracy noise? You’ll just take more of it in. If you actually write you’ll just increase your delusion that it matters!

All the media is a mirror, even the stuff you write yourself, and when you look into you are hypnotized and genotypically cursed to see there not what you are, but what you are supposed to be. And then icopy it. Maybe even write about it.

* - /*spits*/

On To Chapter Ten