Abstract

 
From the printing press, photography and phonograph to cinematography, new culture technologies of replication have strongly altered how we conceive and structure reality. Mimetic machines create a wilderness of mirrors in a labyrinth of copies. The subtle distortion of reality and the corruption of ideas that is introduced through the skillful subterfuge of the fake have been compared to the danger of undetected aliens living amid us. Technologies are not only used to make the dead stand up and walk, but to silence the living, buried alive by systems of symbolic domination. Evil eyes of surveillance scan the tombs of intellectual property and social categorization. Beneath the ways of everyday life, free spirits trace hidden paths responding to the enigma of the Zombies: What is the difference between the dead and the living?

Meanwhile the unholy nuptial of the security complex and the entertainment industry amounts to a fusion of simulation and factual, of the virtual and the real. With it comes the disappearance of the borders between fantasy and reality, Information Dominance extends into the psycho-cybernetic coordinates of individual reality. In a world of information feudalism, theaters of possession are the battleground for control of object and subject. Selectively exposed to subsets of data, in “Truth Projection”, we are victimized by a so called “reality” of restricted actuality and the terror of a bland virtual normalization. “We do not trade with images but with reality” says Harold Burson, founder of the Burson-Marsteller PR corporation and business intelligence firm. Deep Infopolitics is not founded on a projection of “omnipotence of thought”, but on pragmatic action in a world where thought and reality are not radically distinguished. It is indispensable to make a strategic claim to reality and reclaim lost utopias in an enforced global colonization of the imagination.

 
Konrad Becker Biography

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