My own small part...

Local media gets the job done. There's nothing quite like that trusted and friendly local anchorman/anchorwoman to lay down the local truth. DailyKos has been reporting on the embedded video that captured on film the presence of High Explosives that were reported missing by IAEE. The focus in the blogsphere seems to be on the SCLM. The CNN's and USA Today's get hammered with emails to follow the story. This election will come down to a small handful of counties in a smaller handful of states.

It seems to me that the real import here is to hit, and hit hard, the local media outlets; those less likely to be able to handle a radical influx of email and contact on one subject. Volume alone to places like the Columbus Dispatch, WBNS 10 TV (Columbus, OH), the Delaware Gazette (Delaware, OH) should at the least get noticed and tie up some media outlets. At best, this will raise coverage and awareness in local media markets of isues that are taking days to filter down. The problem is, the local media breaking news consumption process barely works for the amount of time it takes big news to hit. It is not a distillation where the news grows more potent but more like a coffee-drip; if you need it now, go soemwhere else. This allows local media to create a second-guess spin in local papers, editorial columns and television stations. The below email I have used to canvass the media in central ohio.

My new mantra is think globally, act locally (or in your nearest swing state).

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"Videotape made by a television crew with American troops when they opened bunkers at a sprawling Iraqi munitions complex south of Baghdad shows a huge supply of explosives still there nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein, apparently including some sealed earlier by the International Atomic Energy Agency.


The tape, broadcast on Wednesday night by the ABC affiliate in Minneapolis, appeared to confirm a warning given earlier this month to the agency by Iraqi officials, who said that hundreds of tons of high-grade explosives, powerful enough to bring down buildings or detonate nuclear weapons, had vanished from the site after the invasion of Iraq." per the NYTIMES ONLINE

This story demands top billing. It can also be more fully researched at the following news sources.


http://www.kstp.com/article/stories/S3723.html?cat=1/
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/NotedNow/story?id=156246
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=206847
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/10/28/174412/70

Untitled Collage - Mixed Media on Carboard - June, 2004

The Cosmogony of Limitless Capitalism

In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx discusses, amongst other things, the antagonistic relationship between humanity and their environment. Marx includes the relationship of man to his environment as one of the defining modalities of capitalist estrangement and alienation. Marx stresses not just the alienation of man via the antagonism of product versus producer, but also alienation in the environment via the opposition between nature's physiological support of the "physical subject" and its constituitive affects of "making" the worker (i.e. supplying the worker with resources to produce, permeating the worker in the production process). In his words "in this double respect the worker becomes a slave of his object, first, in that he receives an object of labour, etc. in that he receives work; and secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence. Therefore, it enables him to exist, first, as a worker; and, second, as a physical subject. The extremity of this bondage is that it is only as a worker that he continues to maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker."

In the contemporary world, electronics and computers (means of production, as well as, products themselves) have fully permeated the "environment". Further, the individual in the contemporary world is constantly connected to and in contact with, the means of production: wearing communications devices on their person, carrying computers and decision-making business tools anywhere, a computer with a VPN client in every home, in every room even. I question whether there is any physical subject anymore outside of the means of production. The worker is no longer the slave to his object, he is the object. Or rather, there is no time that he is anything other than a slave of his object. There is no dialectic; his being is completely tied to his being as worker not as an economic or a psychological antagonism, as an experience. In the age of information and connection, there is a fundamental change in the ontological and existential relations of the individual. There is no longer any space(metaphorical or geographical) without the means of production of the modern society. There is no openning for a dialectic of social production and social living. No longer is environment what provides nourishment (for the individual qua worker) and resources for production, environment is now completely immersed in the means of production! The modern environment is so saturated by capital and the modern mode of production that it has quite literally become the means of production. The rise of the computer and information technology has completely immersed all spaces into the environment of production.

These hegemony of objects in defining man, his environment and his activity is not unique to modern times. Mircae Eliade throughout his anthropological work details a historical theory of humanity based on man's incessant productive faculties. The product that most intrigues this thinker is the production of the ancient sacred pole or totem. For Eliade, man insists on socially producing a sacred pole, an object that supposedly creates the real and present world and connects it to the divine. This is a product of duality; man's labor and man's uderstanding. Within the ancient mode of production, Eliade posits, the creation of this symbol of connection to the heavans, to a transcendent ground of being, is a tenuous border upon which the economic and semiotic activities of man merge. This claim mirrors Marx's own when he demands that man's metaphysical claims are derivative of material conditions and relations.

If the ancient created a world (and universe) based upon the material and symbol of the sacred pole, in reply, what has the modern created?

Unlike the ancients, the contemporary totem that is carried is not a connection to a root of cosmic being, a divine benevolent power. Also, the communal charecter of the sacred pole has dissolved; there is no single object that communities create and move by which they define themselves and their space. Instead, for us modern nomads, there is only a connection to a greater economic and ontic self-estrangement. The connection to heaven (and likewise their own purpose and root of being) that grounded the ancients, has been transformed into the total alienation within contemporary man. The cosmogony of the information age is the birth of a limitless capitalism, a virulent mode of production that supplants all social, biological, and existential connections in favor of a means of production so present, so ingrained that there is truly no exit.