The Perfect Disguise/Jolly Green Giant

The discussion about the potential risks of academic engagement with/on YouTube got me thinking about hoaxes, viral marketing and astroturfing. Maybe the most radical threat that YouTube poses isn't the way it degrades certain forms of discourse, but rather how it enmeshes all communications -- genuine or not -- within a populist Everyman vernacular, the perfect disguise for the praxis of sales...(YouTube: Juhasz Final Video)

It's fun and more than a little depressing to imagine a future wherein astroturfing (as a sub-sub-discipline of marketing, branding, propoganda, sales--) has become so sophisticated that it is indistinguishable from the ordinary madness of the ambient "grassroots" media wash. It's even more depressing to think about how we're probably living in that future already. I'm thinking here of heartfelt (but ultimately fake and paid-for) rallying cries around particular causes, products, services or brands; bloody political and ethnic murders perpetrated by gangs of the misguided and disinformed; the gutting of government, the destruction of the environment, and the final collapse of the Authentic (though of course that probably happened a long time ago).

There have been plenty of villains throughout human history, but none have had quite as attractive a logo as YouTube. And by "villain," I mean the standard definition of the word, not the meta-/infra- genre usage that one might suspect I would be using in a forum such as this. No, I am deadly-red-orange serious.

YouTube is to sales what a fresh plate of peas is to the Jolly Green Giant.

So, Jack goes up the Beanstalk and the Green Giant is there, and the Green Giant says, "Jack, it's always been this way, the stakes are just different now. You want power, you need the crowd -- or, at least, a crowd. Someone to take out your laundry. Someone to pass on your story and amp it up. You got goals? Better get a team. Got a team? Get a support network. Expand your team. Expand your goals. Repeat. That's the core procedure of power."

Man has never invented a better tool for this procedure. How long it will last as a brand name is anybody's guess. But the affordances it posesses, both in terms of those accessible to the Public and those of which Power can avail itself, are here to stay.

On the other hand, these two videos really made my day today...