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The Meatrix.

This has been floating around for a long time but I only just got around to watching it today. If you haven't seen it, it's a bad Matrix spoof that teaches you about the ills of factory farming. There's a lot to it but the fundamental message is "factory farming bad, family farming good".

They give a lot of reasons and a lot of them make sense. Two of them did not make much sense to me at all. One is that factory farming produces more pollution than family farming. The second is that factory farming is destroying a way of life which is the family farm.

The way that factory farming produces more pollution is that they take an amount of land that would have housed, say, 20 pigs and put, say, 80 pigs there. We have 4 times as much pig waste and so 4 times as much pollution. Ergo: factory farms produce more pollution.

That's wrong. If we replaced all of the factory farms with family farms, then, assuming that we didn't reduce the demand for meat, it would mean that the same amount of pollution would be generated by the pigs, using 4 times as much land. So while factory farms might produce more pollution per acre they don't inherently produce more pollution than a family farm with a comparable number of pigs.

Family and organic farming is not inherently more sustainable than industrial farming. Organic farming didn't prevent the total collapse of Mesopotamian civilization due to fields being slowly poisoned from over-irrigation. This is something that drives me crazy at the super-market. I have no way of checking whether my food marked "organic" is actually more sustainable than the non-organic food. Especially, with no standards in place in Canada for the labelling of 'organic' products.

The second thing about the Meatrix is the bit where they talk about Factory Farms destroying a way of life. Again, there is nothing inherently good about spending your life working on a farm or having a system of family farms instead of larger commercial farms. In the 1930's, around 25% of the US population were farmers. Now, less than 2% of the population works on farms. People have been abandoning the farming way of life in DROVES. Is the argument seriously meant to be that we should send 23% of the population back to the farm? If not, what is the alternative? If smaller is better and more farms requires more farmers, who will do the farming?

I grew up in Nova Scotia, a place where another way of life, coal mining, is steadily disappearing. To do his or her job, a coal miner in Nova Scotia has to travel hundreds of kilometers underground, often out under the ocean floor. It's dark, cramped, dangerous, there are cave-ins and explosions and, if you make it through all of that, you are very, very likely to die of lung cancer. In short, it is not a good job.

It used to be a much worse job but years of fighting by a variety of unions slowly built up wages and benefits and rights for the workers. Now the unions have turned around and are fighting in the other direction. See, the Sydney coal field in Cape Breton peaked production in 1940's. Many of the companies than ran mines have left the region, leaving the Canadian Government to set up a Crown corporation to run the mines. The Government has been trying to phase out mining and find other employment sources in Cape Breton since 1967.

And every step of the way, the unions have been there, fighting to preserve the jobs of miners and preventing layoffs and demanding more assistance from the government in terms of bailing out the Crown corporation and generally doing everything in their power to ensure that we can continue to send people hundreds of kilometers under the ocean to continue to perform what must be one of the worst jobs in the world. Which, if you think about it, is INSANE.

What I'm saying is that sometimes it's for the best that a way of life fades away.

Part 1one is here.

The point that I am trying to make is that I've lost track of what the problem with television is, aside from my own personal inability to be in the same room as one without becoming a slave to its flickering love.

Television is an easy target. It's been bad for you since your grandmother told you that you shouldn't sit too close because you'll burn out your eyes.

Concerned parents hate it because it it making children bad at school. Concerned intellectuals hate it because banalifies the culture. Right-wingers hate it because it threatens family values. The Chinese government hates it because it threatens Chinese culture. Christians hate it for blasphemy. And counter-cultural activists hate it because it is controlled by mega-corporations and used to control the masses.

I think the fact of the almost pan-hatedness of television provides a useful clue about TV. It's just a medium. It can (and often does) contain such diverse content that just about everybody everywhere can find something to hate about it. This is a cripplingly obvious observation and in a lot of ways I'm puzzled that it's even worth mentioning. But I think that it is. My friend Alex wrote a press-release that makes the point better than I could.

Alex wrote the release in response to this year's TV turn-off week campaign. Unlike previous years, which have focused on asking people to turn off their own TVs, this year, the campaign focused on turning off other people's TVs.

I'm going to leave aside the very interesting phenomenon of a counter-cultural holiday driving sales of an otherwise useless gadget.

Can we talk for a moment about the idea of turning off other people's TVs at all? The first level is "Who the fuck do you think you are to fuck with other people's stuff?" The second level is "We're reclaiming public space and cleaning up our mental environment." The third level is "That's not public space, that's someone's Bar/Store/Mall and generally private property." The fourth level is "Corporations have taken over all of the public spaces. Commercial spaces have supplanted the public spaces, it's time for us to take them back." The fifth level, and here is where it gets complicated, is "Who the fuck do you think you are that you can 'take back' public spaces?"

Let's pretend that, instead of the store owner choosing the channel, the TV-B-Gone was a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire-style voting device. Everyone gets one, and you set it to broadcast a desire for a certain channel (or set of channel preferences, say) or for the TV to be turned off entirely. Using a complicated system of numbers and stats, the TVs around us respond, democratically, to the desires expressed by all of the devices in range. Raise your hand if you honestly think that the public TV landscape would change all that dramatically.

I submit that those of you with your hands up are wrong. I think that the overwhelming majority of people like the TV that they watch right now. This is troubling because I think that most of us can agree that a lot of the stuff on TV is terrible. We might not all agree on which show is terrible, and a lot of us probably have guilty pleasures of one kind or another, but the fundamental assumption that drives TV criticism coming from whatever direction is that it's bad and bad for you.

Why do people watch (and seem to like) it? There are four explanations for this, I think. 1) The people like bad things (bad taste). 2) The people have been duped into liking bad things (coerced taste). 3) The TV isn't so bad after all, it's us who are too picky (elitist taste). 4) The people like different things from us (diverse taste).

I think that by and large, right-wing moralists have concluded that #1 is true and that left-wing activists have concluded that #2 is true. For both teams, the conclusion is the same: the people need to be protected from the television and the bad thoughts. The moralists try to pass censorship laws and the activists buy TV-B-Gone.

What if it's OK to like what's on TV? What if people aren't really being duped into liking what's on? What if the Michael Jackson media circus is not the result of media manipulation of the public, but rather an arms-race-like result of the hunt for ratings via showing people what they want to see?

Not too long ago, the Chief of the LAPD and Mayor of LA asked TV stations to stop showing live car chases. They cited serious safety issues and suggested that the live airing of car chases has caused car chases to go up, both of which are terrible things. As I understand it, no one complied. If you are the only news station to voluntarily comply with the request then when the car chase comes on, no one is watching your channel.

Not everyone has to be an intellectual. If not everyone is an intellectual, then it follows that not everyone is going to want to seek intellectual entertainment. Let's be honest, if the people watching the bad shows were liberated from their TVs, they probably would not turn to reading Marx and Adam Smith. Let's be honest, the horsies are probably not any more intellectually fulfilling than ElimiDATE. Let's be honest, people used to go to freak shows, public hangings and gladitorial arenas.

Several years ago, I was driving home from an event with a group of friends and we got to talking about different models for a Just Society. A friend of mine (I wonder if he remembers this exchange) casually said something along the lines of "talking about politics serves the same role for men as talking about clothes does for women". At the time, I vehemently disagreed with him. I still disagree with the accidental sexism in the metaphor, but the more time passes, the more I wonder whether the comparison itself was apt.

We have digital cable in the new house. It is going to destroy me.

You need to understand that I have no resistance to television. When I was young, my family did not have cable. We used to have the plain four broadcast channels: CBC, CTV, CBC French and I forget the last one. It made conversations in the schoolyard very difficult.

I remember very distincly kids talking about some show they'd seen and me asking what channel it was and them telling me a number and me trying to explain to them that channel numbers are irrelevant and that I needed to know the NAME of the channel, which was different from the number, and no one believing me.

Even when we finally did get cable, TV was for watching. I think that a lot of people grew up in houses where the TV was always on, and you wandered in and out of the room and had conversations and dinner and so on. I think that this taught them to ignore television, when appropriate. I grew up in a house where TV was always on for a reason. Then you turned it off.

My theory is that this is the reason that I am almost entirely incapable of holding down a conversation if there is a screen somewhere in the room. No matter what's on, my attention strays to the flashing shinies and I'll trail off in mid sentence to stare at, I dunno, news footage or car races or wrestling or a Charmin ad. My roommates have learned to hit the power button if they want to talk to me. I have learned to pick bar seats that face away from the screens if at all possible. You could be the most interesting/beautiful person in the world and I've been trying to find some time with you for the past three months and TV will still defeat you. I'm sorry.

Since moving out of the Apartment of the Apes in 1998, none of the houses that I've lived in have had cable. There have been TVs, sure, but they were all used for movies and videogames. It's just that cable has never been a huge entertainment priority for me.

Most of the time, when someone writes a paragraph like that last one, you know that it's happening so that they can establish their counter-culture credentials. It's often followed with sentences like: "I don't own a car." (true of me) or "I don't even know how to drive a car." (also true of me) "I have read Naomi Klein's No Logo." (true). "I really enjoy Harper's and Utne Reader." (somewhat true) "I have read ALL of Naomi Klein's No Logo." (not true). I am telling you this so that you will understand the borderline culture shock that I felt upon first loading up the digital guide (televisions have loading screens now) and finding 999 channels.

NINE HUNDRED AND NINETY-NINE.

Even cutting out the pay-per-views, the sports feeds and the radio/music feeds, we are left with something between 300 and 500 channels. This means that if I surf and spend an average of 6 seconds on each channel, that I will take me a full half-hour just to do one cycle. By this point, the slot will have changed and there will be new shows on. You can see how the vicious cycle perpetuates. And that doesn't even begin to touch on our Rogers On Demand (ROD) programs, which are like pre-installed taped shows that you can watch whenever you like.

What's more, there's a whole lot of really interesting stuff on there. The other night, we watched a ROD SexTV documentary about these brothels that are opening that are five-star all-inclusive resort packages and by all inclusive, we also mean the girls. The show followed a bunch of clients and girls at two of these resorts over the course of a full 4-day vacation. It was titilating and sad and terribly thought-provoking. I wish we had TiVO, because there is a tonne of amazing stuff that's listed on the guide that I'd love to watch.

So I'm terrified of the digital cable. Because left to my own devices, I could easily lose an entire week, just consuming media.

I was surfing the BlackSpot Shoes website today. Do you know about the Blackspot shoes? The anti-brand of shoes that is a brand of shoes that Adbusters is selling.

From their website:
People were jaded by megacorporate control of so much of their lives, but couldn't see how they might take some power back. We decided to launch the counterattack. The result is the world's first global anti-brand: Blackspot Shoes. Made from organic, vegetarian, and recycled materials in a Portuguese union shop, everything about Blackspots, from their red toe tips and hand-drawn anti-logos to their renegade billboards and TV ads, is designed to do one thing: kick megacorporate ass. We're going to cut into Nike's market share, unswoosh their tired old swoosh and give birth to a new kind of cool in the sneaker industry.

Join us. Buy a pair and become a voting shareholder in The Blackspot Anticorporation. Your ongoing involvement is critical. Together, we'll revolutionize footwear, and then move on to "Blackspot" other industries — Big Music, fast food, coffee shops, clothing. Marrying a passion for social activism with grassroots antipreneurial zeal, we'll rearrange the ugly face of corporate capitalism.

ATTENTION KALLE LASN: Is your company incorporated? If so, you are a corporation and selling your shoes is corporate capitalism. Maybe it's ethical corporate capitalism, and maybe that's cool and exciting, and maybe the marketplace will buy into it and some workers in Portugal will have a better job. It's still not anti-capitalism. It's exactly capitalism. There's nothing wrong with this, mind. It just makes the self-congratulatory press releases seem kind of incoherent.

Just what the fuck is a "rebel billboard" anyway? In a world where Calvin Klein makes live billboards, where are you going to go? Guerilla Marketing is not a new idea.

Here's an interesting article that raises some more good questions. Namely: is the BlackSpot logo selling the shoe or is the shoe selling the BlackSpot logo? Nike's business model has long been that the swoosh sells the products to the point of them making ads that HAVE NO SHOES. The author of the article worries that Adbusters is more emphasizing the logo than the quality of the product being sold. This is exactly modern brand marketing. Consider the many shirts that are simple plain old t-shirts with someone specific's logo on it. How is the BlackSpot substantially different from that? On the site, they are very upfront about wanting to make a BlackSpot "empire". Imagine a chain of restaurants serving only locally-sourced food. Or an artist-controlled radio network. Instead of Nikes? Blackspot Sneakers. Instead of McDonald's, Warner Music and Microsoft? And of course, all of these will be umbrella'd under the BlackSpot (anti)brand.

So far, my favourite part of the site is the "anti-mercials" which (though sadly down at the moment) feature people wearing the BlackSpot shoes and doing some parkour (free running.

From the site:
As the creator of the antimercials notes, the sport ((parkour)) requires "no price of admission, no special gear, no lift ticket, no gates that close at night, no demand for resource extraction, conversion, or transportation." A small-footprint sport that requires no consumption? Sounds like a Blackspot idea in the making.

The irony that Nike has also run an ad based on parkour was not lost on me. Also not lost on me: the irony that the "we should buy certain shoes as an act of anti-consumerism" message was delivered totally straight-faced.

Can we have a conversation about Buy Nothing Day? I'm trying to remember what it's for again.

From the official Adbusters website:
For 24 hours, millions of people around the world did not participate -- in the doomsday economy, the marketing mind-games, and the frantic consumer-binge that's become our culture. We paused. We made a small choice not to shop. We shrank our footprint and gained some calm. Together we said to Exxon, Nike, Coke and the rest: enough is enough. And we helped build this movement to rethink our unsustainable course.

First off, that's wrong. The idea that we shrink our footprint is entirely incorrect. If you don't buy something on BND, one of two things happens. Either 1) You buy it the next day or the day before - no impact on your footprint or 2) You save the money in a bank or something, where they then lend it out to someone who buys shoes or a helicopter or whatever - no reduction in footprint.

Maybe is it like a religious holiday? Useless in terms of actual impact but useful in terms of getting people thinking? What are they meant to think about? What's the long term goal/change that we are aiming for, again? How does BND get us there?