Kriegspornographie, Propaganda und das Internet

--- Matteo Pasquinelli hat auf der Mailingliste nettime ein zwar noch nicht ganz ausgereiftes, aber doch interessante Punkte über die Enthauptungsvideos, die Folterbilder aus Abu Ghraib, War-Porn, das Internet und die Zukunft der Propaganda zusammenführendes Essay gepostet. Hier ein paar Zitate: The First Global War starts liveˆbroadcasting NY911 air catastrophe and goes on with video-guerrilla episodes: everyday from the Iraqi front we received videos shot by invaders, militiamen, journalists. In such a media war each action is designed before to fit its spectacular consequences. Terrorists learnt all the rules of a spectacular conflict, while the imperial propaganda, much more expert, has no problems to play with fakes and hoaxes (see dossiers about weapons of mass destructions). It is no more the burocratic propaganda war of the past. New media turned traditional media war into a media guerrilla, opening a bottom-up resistance front, a molecular front. Video cameras among civilians, weblogs updated by independent journalists, smart-phones used by American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison: each one represents an uncontrollable variable that can subvert propaganda apparatus. Video imagery produced by television is now interlaced with the anarchic self-organized infrastructure of digital networked media, that become dreadful distribution means (see the capillary spreading on the net of the Nick Berg's beheading video). Today's propaganda is used to deal with a connective imagery rather than a collective spectacle, and the intelligence sets up simulacra of the truth based on networking technologies. ... To hit western idolatry, pseudo-Islamic terrorism becomes videoclasm, prepares attacks designed for the live broadcasting and uses satellite channels as a resonance mean of its propaganda. Al-Jazeera broadcasts images of shot-dead Iraqi civilians, while western mass media remove these bodies in favor of the military show. An asymmetrical imagery is developing between East and West, and afterwards an asymmetrical rage also, that will break out backlashes in the generations to come. ... Abu Ghraib tortures pictures are the intestine nemesis of the machine civilization, running out of control of its demiurges. There is a machine nemesis but also an image nemesis: the Spectacle Empire has been defeated by the hypertrophy of the Spectacle itself, by an auto-erotic pornography, a greed for images. Video phones has established a networked mega-camera, a super-light panopticon, an horizontal Big Brother. In this net the White House happened to be trapped. It is no more the weak thought of postmodernism ˆ the world as an illusion of simulacra. We live in an interconnected universe where videopoiesis can link the farthest points and breaks out fatal short circuits. ... Abu Ghraib pictures and Nick Berg's video (fiction or not doesn't matter) forged a new narrative genre for the collective imagery. For the first time they projected a snuff movie on the screen of the global imagery and liberate internet subcultures used to feed on that kind of images: rotten.com reaches the masses. What is going on worldwide media is not the elaboration of a shock, but of the political, cultural, social, aesthetic consequences of a new genre of Image that forces us to upgrade our immunising system.