Friday Night at 8: Brittney!

If it isn’t sex, it’s women in trouble, honest!

I get frustrated at work sometimes … my fellow secretaries, although quite intelligent and good women, are not interested in politics and when they do take time from their busy lives, they are more interested in reading about sex, relationships, Brittney Spears, Paris Hilton, and for a while there Whitney Houston was a big topic.  Oh … and now we also have Amy Winehouse.

What’s so compelling about these conversations?  What is so fascinating about reading and then talking about celebrity women in trouble?

This isn’t a new phenomenon, of course.  But our lamestream media (h/t lasthorseman) has market-tested these kinds of stories to a fine edge … and thus we will see a Brittney Spears story take precedence over the fact that America commits torture.

Read a book once by Norman Spinrad called Little Heroes about, among other things. the music industry.

In Spinrad’s not too distant future, a Los Angeles-based monolithic music corporation called Muzak has pretty much taken control of commercial music.

Muzak’s employee pool is made up of creative music-and-visual tech wizards coopted into the corporation so they won’t be competition –“voxbox” players who can reproduce any kind of sound or voice, image engineers, etc.

They also have hired masses of market testers.

The corporate heads (or “the pinheads upstairs” as Spinrad’s character, Gloriana O’Toole, calls ’em) decided with glee that they should create a completely artificial rock star and thus rid themselves of their pain in the ass human ones who cost so much money and are so ill behaved and arrogant.

It’s a great book, and I recommend it to anyone.

The first AI rock star, “Red Jack,” comes into being through the auspices of a 60 year old “Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll,” Glorianna O’Toole, hired by Muzak’s corporate president, Billy Beldock, a former acoustic drummer, and the last real musician who’ll ever see that corporate title.

Glorianna takes two very nerdy and conditioned, yet brilliant, young computer geeks, one a genius on the image banks and another a genius on the vox box, and tries to get them to create something subversive.  They are too socially unconscious, so she tries everything, alcohol, mild psychadelics, nothing.

Then a new piece of wizard tech comes on the scene, sort of an almost invisible “hairnet” of wires with a small breadbox at the back that tucks neatly under the neck.

This flash of technology produces a righteous trip and during said trip the three characters create the AI rock star Red Jack and he is revolutionary!

Through Gloriana’s efforts and her young and tripped-out tech wizardlets, Jack’s righteous rock & roll freedom call starts getting folks all freedom loving and stuff.

To make things even more complicated, over on the East Coast, the Reality Liberation Front, a New York City group of computer geeks led by an ex-Hell’s Angel and anarchist political philosopher, co-opt the Red Jack image for their own modern revolution, which entails basically showing tech-ignorant and clueless citizens how to easily hack the already rotten and dying financial structures of America (corporations) and creating “red ripe anarchy for all to see!”  No more electric bills!  Or phone bills!  Or credit card limits!  Yay!

This strange mix of circumstances starts messing up badly the financial system (already in the crapper) of the United States.  So of course the pinheads upstairs are alarmed!

On the one hand, they want the money they’re  making from Red Jack.  On the other, they are a little peeved that they are being sued by a whole lot of scary powerful organizations, some even in the government!

So they go to their market researchers, blackmail Gloriana O’Toole to create another AI rock star strictly on their specs, and she somehow gets her now feuding vox-box player and image artist to separately create a new AI rock star named Cyborg Sally.  The idea being that although freedom is attractive, sex has more power to distract.  And their object is to distract folks.

So Cyborg Sally appears and is very powerful due to the fact her creators were all in terrible moods and feuding during her creation.  She is a bad scene, jelly bean.

But it works.  Folks stop wearing Red Jack outfits and start putting on Cyborg Sally outfits.  The marketers had succeeded in their evil analyses, showing how this or that program would attract both men and women.  The pinheads upstairs are very happy at their success.

Of course the Reality Liberation Front and Gloriana O’Toole and many others are not so happy.  

Well this isn’t a book review, I haven’t even quoted from the book.

But I think there’s something about how our media does the same thing to us that relates to the brief encapsulation of this book I’ve presented.  Brittney Spears (and I mean as presented by the media, she’s just a human being IRL, after all) is re-imaged and repackaged to us as our present day Cyborg Sally, an artificial personality.  So is any other woman or man the pinheads upstairs think will grab us by the limbic node of our brain and keep us complacent.

The marketers don’t create the need .. they exploit needs that are already there.

To be completely audacious and needlessly cryptic and just for the hell of it … I shall proclaim (And who will naysay me?  Don’t answer that!) that here at DD we’re doing a better job struggling to respond to needs, rather than exploit them.  I believe both Gloriana O’Toole and the Reality Liberation Front would find us … interesting.  Yay us!

Have a groovy weekend, Dharmaniacs!