The Democrats were able to snatch the mantle of newness from the neo-cons by running a candidate that the Republicans simply couldn’t. Nothing could be more unique, more new, and therefore more suited to the End of History word view than a black man with a very global-sounding name.

You can get this as a life size cardboard cutout

Thanks to You Tube and hip celebrity initiative, Obama was not just a presidential candidate, we was part of Will.i.am’s posse, he was sang about by hot chicks on the internet, and we was the subject of a super cool/patriotic (but not the old fuddy duddy patriotic, the new fashionable patriotic) Shepard Fairey poster. Obey. Vote Obama. Never before has a politician’s mug been emblazoned on more baby tees, baby bibs, and urban-chic stickers. You could be radical, fight the system, and be part of the greatest wave of youthful idealism to break on the shores of the US since the hippies. Without having to really do that much. Ah, and this is the challenge for people who want change beyond just a new member of the two-party establishment every 8 years.

He's even on skateboards

Real change requires people to alter how they live, not just what buttons they wear, and what levers they pull twice a decade. How to make people swoon over local produce, bike to work, and become tax resistors is an entirely more difficult proposition. But one that’s infinitely more important than which candidate to Obey Giant.

The Brand Called Obama

Life in the Post Political Age

Moving to the Center of Elite Consensus

Obey Giant Vote for Change (embeddable videos of celebrity endorsements)

“If you’re trying to persuade people into do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think.” – David Ogilvy

via The Hidden Persuader

This is great speech by journalist John Pilger on the powers and dangers of corporate media. I think what’s most interesting about it is that he breaks from the Left/Right dialectic that plagues social change movements and takes liberalism to task for some of its crimes. The liberal Clinton administration increased the size of the prison-industrial complex and justified the Iraq sanctions and bombing campaign as a humane method of dealing with a dictator. The parents of the 500,000 children who died as a result of those sanctions (according to the UN) would disagree, I think.

Pilger’s point here is not simply to criticise the dominant ideology of the intelligentsia, but to stress that no action is inherently just or good by nature of the beliefs that support it. Again and again the liberal media has supported wars of empire, and liberal Democrats like Truman, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton have instigated and supported violent oppression around the world. The responsibility to prevent tyranny then falls to the public, and if I have any criticism for Pilger’s speech it’s that his conclusion suggests few solutions beyond vigilance and a citizen fifth estate to watch the watchers. Valid, sure, but the real issue is how do we inspire people to want to be the fifth estate?. Still, it’s an educational, sobering, thought provoking speech that’s definitely worth watching.

By Anne Landeman

Recently while browsing the Web I came across UrbanDictionary.com, which is sort of a wiki of contemporary slang. I found some of the newer words listed there amusing, like “hobosexual” (the opposite of metrosexual; someone who cares little about their looks), “consumerican,” (“a particularly American brand of consumerism”), and “wikidemia” (“an academic work passed off as scholarly yet researched entirely on Wikipedia”).

Then I came across a word that put me into a more thoughtful zone: “slacktivism.”

“Slacktivism” (alternative spelling “slactivism”) is a fusion of the words “slacker” and “activism,” and UrbanDicationary.com defines it as “the act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem.” It refers to ersatz acts that people perform that they have somehow come to believe are full of meaning, like slapping a magnetic ribbon on your car to “support the troops,” wearing a colored rubber wristband to “fight cancer,” or refusing to buy gasoline on a certain day to protest high gas prices, instead of, say, actually changing your lifestyle to use less gas.

According to UrbanDictionary.com’s definition, slacktivism pertains only to individual behavior, but shortly after I grasped the meaning of the word, I started to see that slacktivism is really much bigger than that. I started to see that corporations perpetrate large-scale, organized slacktivism as a public relations strategy to subtly derail social movements aimed at creating beneficial change.

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p>So what form does corporate-sponsored slacktivism take, and how can people recognize it? The best way to describe it is to give some examples.

Corporate-Sponsored Slacktivism Example #1: “Smoking or Non-smoking?”

By the late 1980s, more and more cities and towns had started banning smoking in restaurants, stores and other public places, and smoking was becoming less socially acceptable. Smoking bans encouraged people to smoke less, even quit, and this in turn threatened cigarette sales. To counter this spreading smoke-free movement, in 1987 a group of mid-level Philip Morris executives convened a secret meeting at Hilton Head, North Carolina, to find a way to undermine the public’s growing desire for clean indoor air and to preserve the social acceptability of smoking. Tobacco companies can’t fight smoking restrictions openly, since they would be seen as self-serving and would lose credibility, so PM had to come up with a more sophisticated way to slow the public’s movement towards smoking bans. The Hilton Head meeting led to PM’s Operation Downunder, a comprehensive, long-term, under-the-radar strategy in which PM switched from opposing smoking bans to advocating separation of people into smoking and non-smoking areas in restaurants and other public places. PM then engaged in a massive PR program to promote the establishment of separate smoking sections, while lobbying behind-the-scenes to enact state laws that mandated smoking sections. The laws PM pushed also contained provisions designed to prevent smaller political subdivisions, like cities, counties and towns, from making their own, stricter local smoking laws. PM called this its “Accomodation/Preemption Strategy.”

By and large, the public went along with PM’s “Accommodation Program;” many states unwittingly enacted PM’s proposed “solution” of “Accommodation/Preemption” laws, and people came to expect to hear the question “Smoking or non-smoking?” whenever they walked into a restaurant. The only problem was that smoke didn’t know it was supposed to stay in the smoking sections, and after a couple of decades nonsmokers realized that they still had to breathe secondhand smoke everywhere they went. PM’s “Accommodation/Preemption” strategy was an ingenious move for the tobacco industry: it assured that smokers could continue to smoke indoors practically everywhere and gave people a genuine feeling that something had been done to address the secondhand smoke problem, when in fact little had really changed. Most importantly, pushing smoking/non-smoking apartheid achieved a key strategic goal for PM: it delayed laws requiring 100% smoke-free places for decades.

PM’s “Accommodation Strategy” was an early example of tightly-engineered corporate-sponsored slacktivism: it advanced a fake policy or action that made people feel like progress was being made, while really preserving the status quo and protecting corporate profits.

Example #2: The American Chemistry Council and Plastic Bag Recycling Programs

Taking a leaf from the tobacco industry, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) and the Progressive Bag Affiliates (PBA), organizations that represent the plastics industry, are now using a similar strategy of corporate-sponsored slacktivism to derail efforts to reduce use of plastic bags.

Plastic bags exact a heavy toll on the environment: they clog waterways, kill marine life, bollix up sewer systems, get caught in trees, and are an eyesore when blowing around as litter. Their manufacture consumes millions of barrels of petroleum, and since most plastic bags are used only once and then tossed, they create a massive waste stream. Cities, towns — even entire countries — have started encouraging people to reduce their use of plastic bags by taxing the bags, putting deposits on them or banning them completely. Like the cigarette makers back in the 1980s who were threatened by smoking bans, the plastics industry believes a massive cultural shift to use of non-disposable grocery bags would devastate their industry. To fight truly effective policies like deposits, taxes and bag bans, the ACC and PBA have started implementing a clever new strategy: wherever plastic bag bans are proposed, they zoom in and push for a watered-down measure that only requires retailers to start voluntary in-store bag recycling programs.

If advocating for a law that mandates a voluntary program sounds ludicrous, it’s because it is. When used alone, voluntary recycling programs do little to change people’s behavior. Voluntary recycling programs depend on the altruism of a few dedicated souls to be effective, and when implemented as a sole measure, they have a dismal record at keeping plastic bags out of the environment. But forcing a voluntary program on businesses makes politicians feel like they’ve done something to deal with the plastic bag problem. It also largely preserves the current level of use of plastic bags, because people are given no real motivation to change their behavior.

Once again, that’s the whole idea: ACC and PBA are pushing a slacktivist policy that preserves the status quo while derailing serious measures that are truly effective at motivating beneficial change.

Example #3: Cause-Related Marketing

Look around, and you start seeing examples of corporate-advanced slacktivism everywhere. Another example is “Cause-Related Marketing.”

A relative of mine was eager to go to a department store on a specific day to buy cosmetics, because the store advertised that on that day it was going to donate a percentage of its cosmetic sale profits to fighting breast cancer. I went along for the ride, and while my relative was doing a good turn by shopping for cosmetics, I asked a saleswoman what percentage of profits the store was donating to fight cancer. She didn’t know. Three, four clerks later, no one knew. Finally, someone called a manager, came back and told me it was a fraction of a percent — a tiny drop in the bucket compared to what the store would make that day from the throngs of women pouring through the doors who believed that they were going to help cure a dreaded disease by buying lipstick and mascara. It probably dawned on few, if any, of them how much more good they could do if they donated just of bit of their money directly to a breast cancer research institute or charity.

The Moral of the Story Is…

…the word slacktivism should not be dismissed lightly.

Most slacktivist individuals are probably genuinely well-meaning people who just don’t take the time to think about the value, or lack thereof, of their actions. They’re looking for an easy way to feel like they’re making a difference, and let’s face it — how damaging is it anyway to wear a rubber wristband or slap a magnetic ribbon on your car? The same can’t be said for large-scale, industrial-perpetrated slacktivism, which is highly planned, professionally coordinated and intended to advance a self-serving industrial agenda. Corporate-sponsored slacktivism is, in short, implemented to stop social change that could, in the long run, be crucial to society’s long-term well-being.

The bottom line? Learn the signs of corporate-sponsored slacktivism, and don’t be deceived. If a group appears and suddenly proposes a policy, program or action in response to a serious problem, ask yourself if the proposal will actually address the problem in a serious way. Does it seem just a little too easy, a little too simple or honestly insufficient to make real progress? If so, it is probably a form of corporate-sponsored slacktivism and should be passed up in favor of a more effective, proven solution.

Billboards are a different story. For the most part, they are still a relic of old-world media, and the best guesses about viewership numbers come from foot traffic counts or highway reports, neither of which guarantees that the people passing by were really looking at the billboard, or that they were the ones sought out.

Now, some entrepreneurs have introduced technology to solve that problem. They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by — their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database. Behind the technology are small start-ups that say they are not storing actual images of the passers-by, so privacy should not be a concern. The cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon.

The goal, these companies say, is to tailor a digital display to the person standing in front of it — to show one advertisement to a middle-aged white woman, for example, and a different one to a teenage Asian boy.

“Everything we do is completely anonymous,” said Paolo Prandoni, the founder and chief scientific officer of Quividi, a two-year-old company based in Paris that is gearing up billboards in the United States and abroad. Quividi and its competitors use small digital billboards, which tend to play short videos as advertisements, to reach certain audiences.

Over Memorial Day weekend, a Quividi camera was installed on a billboard on Eighth Avenue near Columbus Circle in Manhattan that was playing a trailer for “The Andromeda Strain,” a mini-series on the cable channel A&E.

“I didn’t see that at all, to be honest,” said Sam Cocks, a 26-year-old lawyer, when the camera was pointed out to him by a reporter. “That’s disturbing. I would say it’s arguably an invasion of one’s privacy.”

Organized privacy groups agree, though so far the practice of monitoring billboards is too new and minimal to have drawn much opposition. But the placement of surreptitious cameras in public places has been a flashpoint in London, where cameras are used to look for terrorists, as well as in Lower Manhattan, where there is a similar initiative.

Although surveillance cameras have become commonplace in banks, stores and office buildings, their presence takes on a different meaning when they are meant to sell products rather than fight crime. So while the billboard technology may solve a problem for advertisers, it may also stumble over issues of public acceptance.

“I guess one would expect that if you go into a closed store, it’s very likely you’d be under surveillance, but out here on the street?” Mr. Cocks asked. At the least, he said, there should be a sign alerting people to the camera and its purpose.

Quividi’s technology has been used in Ikea stores in Europe and McDonald’s restaurants in Singapore, but it has just come to the United States. Another Quividi billboard is in a Philadelphia commuter station with an advertisement for the Philadelphia Soul, an indoor football team. The Philadelphia billboard was installed by Motomedia, a London-based company that converts retail and street space into advertisements. It installed the A&E billboard in association with Pearl Media, a Butler, N.J., company.

“I think a big part of why it’s accepted is that people don’t know about it,” said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group.

“You could make them conspicuous,” he said of video cameras. “But nobody really wants to do that because the more people know about it, the more it may freak them out or they may attempt to avoid it.”

And the issue gets thornier: the companies that make these systems, like Quividi and TruMedia Technologies, say that with a slight technological addition, they could easily store pictures of people who look at their cameras.

The companies say they do not plan to do this, but Mr. Tien said he thought their intentions were beside the point. The companies are not currently storing video images, but they could if compelled by something like a court order, he said.

For now, “there’s nothing you could go back to and look at,” said George E. Murphy, the chief executive of TruMedia who was previously a marketing executive at DaimlerChrysler. “All it needs to do is look at the audience, process what it sees and convert that to digital fields that we upload to our servers.”

TruMedia’s technology is an offshoot of surveillance work for the Israeli government. The company, whose slogan is “Every Face Counts,” is testing the cameras in about 30 locations nationwide. One TruMedia client is Adspace Networks, which runs a network of digital screens in shopping malls and is testing the system at malls in Chesterfield, Mo., Winston-Salem, N.C., and Monroeville, Pa. Adspace’s screens show a mix of content, like the top retail deals at the mall that day, and advertisements for DVDs, movies or consumer products.

Within advertising circles, these camera systems are seen as a welcome answer to the longstanding problem of how to measure the effectiveness of billboards, and how to figure out what audience is seeing them. On television, Nielsen ratings help marketers determine where and when commercials should run, for example. As for signs on highways, marketers tend to use traffic figures from the Transportation Department; for pedestrian billboards, they might hire someone to stand nearby and count people as they walk by.

The Internet, though, where publishers and media agencies can track people’s clicks for advertising purposes, has raised the bar on measurement. Now, it is prodding billboards into the 21st century.

“Digital has really changed the landscape in the sort of accuracy we can get in terms of who’s looking at our creative,” Guy Slattery, senior vice president for marketing for A&E, said of Internet advertising. With Quividi, Mr. Slattery said, he hoped to get similar information from what advertisers refer to as the out-of-home market.

“We’re always interested in getting accurate data on the audience we’re reaching,” he said, “and for out-of-home, this promises to give a level of accuracy we’re not used to seeing in this medium.”

Industry groups are scrambling to provide their own improved ways of measuring out-of-home advertising. An outdoor advertising association, the Traffic Audit Bureau, and a digital billboard and sign association, the Out-of-Home Video Advertising Association, are both devising more specific measurement standards that they plan to release by the fall.

Even without cameras, digital billboards encounter criticism. In cities like Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, outdoor advertising companies face opposition from groups that call their signs unsightly, distracting to drivers and a waste of energy.

There is a dispute over whether digital billboards play a role in highway accidents, and a national study on the subject is expected to be completed this fall by a unit of the Transportation Research Board. The board is part of a private nonprofit institution, the National Research Council.

Meanwhile, privacy concerns about cameras are growing. In Britain, which has an estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras — one for every 14 people — the matter has become a hot political issue, with some legislators proposing tight restrictions on the use and distribution of the footage.

Reactions to the A&E billboard in Manhattan were mixed. “I don’t want to be in the marketing,” said Antwann Thomas, 17, a high school junior, after being told about the camera. “I guess it’s kind of creepy. I wouldn’t feel safe looking at it.”

But other passers-by shrugged. “Someone down the street can watch you looking at it — why not a camera?” asked Nathan Lichon, 25, a Navy officer.

Walter Peters, 39, a truck driver for a dairy, said: “You could be recorded on the street, you could be recorded in a drugstore, whatever. It doesn’t matter to me. There’s cameras everywhere.”

via NY Times

Example 1 From Greenpeace:

The ranking criteria reflect the demands of the Toxic Tech campaign to the electronics companies. Our two demands are that companies should:

1) clean up their products by eliminating hazardous substances;

2) takeback and recycle their products responsibly once they become obsolete.