Culture Jamming, Digital Added Value and the Metaphysical Vacuum

The various options to gain influence on the mediated humans in virtual reality and computer games are good opportunities for the trend scouts of the entertainment industry: They are already waiting inside the Virtual Reality to meet their potential customers online. So called In-Game-Advertisement for Diet Coke and other brands and 'real' money transactions on eBay to buy virtual sneakers to wear in 'Second Life' are already a fact.

This is the old dream of capitalism coming true: The product has not to be manufactured, its pure image is requested by the hyper-consumers. So the code itself has begun to create added value. And that is exactly what the battlefield of the 21st century should be about: Let's Clash The Codes!

This postulation could also derive from the well known Italian author Umberto Eco, who wrote the essay 'Semiotic Guerilla Warfare' in the Seventies and described a 'semiotic guerilla' which is 'prowling from house to house and develops a critical interpretation of media content'. This would mean that the audience could be teached to understand media propaganda and to read the advertisement messages in their way. But is this really that simple?

Advertisement in public space can be simplified as an excitement of carnal desire, which the western philosophers like Platon, Fourier or Huxley claimed as the source of distress, hate and calamity. Their solution was to organise an instantaneous satisfaction in human societies. In our erotic overcharged advertisement culture this carnal desire is encouraged in an outrageous way, but the satisfaction shall be solved in privacy.

The vienna based author and cognition scientist Thomas Raab even goes a step further, by describing the overwhelming effects of the Debordian spectacle as an evolutionary deficit: 'Esthetic experiences for nearly everyone' are, according to Raab, 'the last chance for secular countries to add profit to the metaphysical vacuum which resulted in the raised knowledge of natural science in the human society.' So the integrated spectacle (of mass media and event culture) would be a twisted version of the mammalian game of protecting itself from hypothetical hazard by simulating affects in a safe environment.

The human evolutionary deficit is, in conformity with Raab, used to raise profits in a way that neither the consumer nor the producer can control, even if they are aware of those mechanisms. Culture Jamming is a resistance to that status quo.