Fats, Vitamins and Minerals

Or was it hopeless but not helpless?

Whatever an old news report on the crisis in Germany actually stated (as far as Trevor could remember), those were reflective of my own sentiments as I deleted the entire Korakora Proyekto website and - a few weeks later - resurrected it. Thus, the new Korakora Proyekto.

Some two months earlier, Indi asked if she could include Proyekto in a study “of the practice of civil society media by artists and technology experts as citizens and media activists.”

To me, it was initially an encouragement to keep Proyekto going. Later, it became a challenge to shut the whole thing down and re-think.

Indi mentioned James Hamilton’s proposal for possibilities for alternative media to move away from mainstream media’s patterns of consumption:

• strive for an everyday, spontaneous, non corporate mode of organization that requires little if any capital outlay;

• should be part of other realms of life instead of divorced from them;

• should erase the division between producers and consumers and become popular means of cultural organization and exploration instead of individualised media products to consume. (Hamilton 2000: pp 370-371)

Recently, I realized that these are similar to what corporate and mainstream media networks have been doing since the “Web 2.0″ propaganda, and the 1999 Clue Train Manifesto that gave the old corporate firewalls new ropes for turning even the most resistant or isolated of people into (hyperlinked) markets. What happened was that civil society (and similar) tactics got hi-jacked by the very elements that civil society itself was trying to critique, oppose or open alternatives to.

Again, this reminds me of the old Chinese adage, if the wrong man uses the right means, the right means turn out the wrong way.

The reincarnated Proyekto is not a media activists tool anymore nor does it operate in the context of advocating communications and media democracy. With “peoples of the earth” now migrated to markets and consumers, communications and media democracy merely hyperlink them. What I need is a medium (a language) to protect myself from this global anathema - an antidote to distortions of the mind: if it is true that language deceives us then maybe at least language-making may allow us to lay the land to see where deceptions and distortions lie.

Helpless but not hopeless? Will see …

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