‘THEY LIVE / YOU WILL’

My colleague Bill Posters wrote an incredibly important essay outlining the main points of interest for the anti advertising, pro civic media movement. Please read it!

His writing shows us that while the out of home advertising industry acted as the fuel for neoliberal capitalism and helped sustain the post war growth of American consumerism, we have entered a new epoch that makes the incantations of billboards and bus shelters look quaint in comparison. Dataism and the rise of behavioral data collection, because of its accuracy and pervasiveness, threatens more than the sanctity of our shared public public spaces, but will likely influence fundamental aspects of our collective social behavior in ways that will drastically alter society as we evolve into the future. It's fucking scary. What happens when the data exhaust you produce is so granular that Spotify can accurately predict when you are in a bad mood? And what then when Spotify realizes that your consumption drops in those moments of aggression and actively makes decisions to prevent that behavior from diminishing your capacity as a consumer? Now extend that type of influence over all networks and all devices and you see a human being pushed and pulled in ways that it cannot see, and cannot control, all to increase ones predictability as consumer, and you start to see how over a few hundred years the nature of society is fundamentally changed as people become more and more tuned by the needs of those in control of the data we collectively produce. Like a meteor on a collision course with earth, you don't change a society by blowing it up, you send out a small satellite to slowly push the course of its direction over many years and watch as the final destination finds itself far of course. In one case we all sign in relief, in the other we loose our free will to the corporate entities that control the data of our lives. 

Nada, played by Roddy Piper, picks up a pair of black-rimmed glasses and puts them on, but these are no ordinary glasses, these glasses are X-Ray specs. Immediately they détourne all forms of corporate propaganda that he casts his gaze at—the billboard advertisements, magazines, and television programmes all change. All are subverted to reveal an alternative truth (in essence), making the invisible visible, revealing in the process the hidden infrastructures, architectures and power relationships that exist between corporate and state level actors—in the case of They Live aliens, and their subjects—citizens of the US. Everyone is asleep, Nada is awake.
More [HERE]