Wings Over the Pyre

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Various Artists - Pokemon: 2B A Master - 2B A Master (Squid's Redoubt)

As many of you know, I’ve been experimenting with Producing a second show during the week on Thursdays, B-Tards on Patrol, Thursday nights at 9p, with __oni_no_kaze__ doing a fine job of holding down the primary Host role. Unlike the Sunday show, Operation BSU, B-Tards pretty much keys on me not doing much planning for the show before-hand. I do production for any interstitials we use, like the Fox11 report on Anonymous, taking the audio straight out of the video, then chopping it up into recombinable phrases to use during future shows. I maybe do a little song selection for tracks to spin while we really work out the next segment on the fly behind the scenes. Other than that, I concentrate on being a solid second voice and real-time show-runner, keeping the feeds connected and managing the muting/unmuting of callers.

Overall, it’s paying off quite well. The number of live listeners is plateauing for the moment, but the number of downloads is on a steady increase. I’m expecting another climb in live listeners next week from the sheer number of downloads we had this week; some of those’ll plan to be there live, and that’s all kinds of good. As long as the numbers trend as I expect them to it means I have some kind of grasp on the underlying demographic we’re servicing, and that’s almost unbelievable. Sure, I have a diploma from Atlanta Broadcast Institute and they touched on demographics, but not much on analysis. Everything I know, I’m largely reconstructing from what I recall of sociology and a bit of intuition. I’m glad it’s working. Believe it or not, I have concerns about my capabilities in that context from time to time.

The truly odd thing about B-Tards is that the number of notes, the scaffold of planning, seems to be creeping upwards despite my initial intent to just sort of wing it. __oni_no_kaze__ is starting to bring more notes and bits to the show on his laptop, which lets us keep things rolling live, even when things go off the narrative rail. There’s always some thing to drop on in and jump on to when the talk starts to flag.

I knew I’d be leveraging that sort of thing with BSU, but not with B-Tards. I never intended to, and it’s interesting to watch as the skeleton of the latter begins firming up, begins becoming more structured but simultaneously less brittle, it becomes a better show. It’s another moment where my intuition seems to be coming through for no good reason I can determine — but I’m glad of it.

If you’ve never listened to B-Tards (and, honestly, I haven’t exactly been touting it to the heavens), this is the new show description:

Anonymous! /b/! The ‘chans! Glorifying the Internet Hate Machine, illuminating and enlightening the curious! Trying to keep ourselves and our listeners entertained at the same damn time! The Excel Saga of Internet Radio shows!

If you don’t get the references, don’t feel bad, they’re all culled from the /b/, or Random, boards of several inter-related websites: 4chan, 420chan, 7chan and so on. Essentially, the inhabitants are members of a self-defined micro-society/enclave/phyle that styles each member as Anonymous. The core mechanism are a set of boards on which the default (and preferred) mode of presentation is to post anonymously as Anonymous. Anonymous thus becomes a meta-cypher representative of the masses, That’s nothing new; a lot of self-identified groups have taken up that mantle since there was a DARPAnet to infest. The key difference and iconography of this instance is the members of Anonymous have no problem acknowledging and embracing the darker aspects of the mass-Self at all. You can see the most hideous and horrifying things on the ‘chans, from sexualized depictions of vivisections to outright and blatant admiration of racism, at a purely casual level. The sheer casualness of the experience is one of the things that seems to convince outside observers that the things going on under the hood are as horrifying as they seem.

Except, of course, they aren’t.

Lots of things happen when the mask is a complete abdication of the Ego. The sheer capacity for cruelty and suffering is magnified, since without a Self there’s no core to feel empathy. Of course, once you discard the concept of Self, you can achieve a kind of satori in a social sense. You can joke about racism with a straight face, you can share pictures of impaled children, you can harass and torment members of communities considered sacrosanct by “cultured society” because you’re Anonymous, faceless, the mass-undermind given voice and hands. The bulk of mainstream society considers doing these things “bad,” but everything considered bad is not bad. Once you can joke about racism, it has no power over you. Once you can look on the faces of death and pain without being transfixed by emotion, you learn how to deal with it’s ongoing presence. Once you can challenge the sacred, you can question why it should be sacred, or if it should, or if it’s good that the sacred exists.

At heart, it’s funny. B-Tards is about a lot of people leveraging the sheath of anonymity to explore extreme positions all throughout the media of human experience. They also make crude jokes, offensive comments, and other aspects of the Id let loose. Eventually, and you can see it if you watch the ebbs and flows of Anonymous long enough, you can see the converse: the untrammeled Superego. Authoritarian, strict, architectural, even hierarchial. And it’s the direct and unmediated conflict between Anonymous’ Id and Superegos which seems to drive the immense meme-factory which are the ‘chans.

You can almost bet that every meme on the Internet whipped out of the seething mass that are the Anonymous ‘chans, with the few exceptions having come from the teeming pools ofthe Something Awful fora (itself the birthing place of 4chan and thus the rest of the ‘chans in a sort of memetic incest). Lolcats are just the latest in a long, long stream of memes. The ‘chans have an extremely active biotic broth of memes which can be thought of in energetic orbits, either being sucked back down as no one uses them or gaining energy and higher orbits as they catch on, until they gather enough energy (egoboo?) to slingshot out into the wider Internet. There’s a shimmering semi-stable core set of memes which serve Anonymous as a common set of symbols for recognizing members of the group which, as point5b has mentioned, seem to use English as a carrier wave for their alien language (“I leik mudkips!” “Nigra stole my bike!” “Longcat is loooooooong.”).

Needless to say, running this show has been an interesting experience. I’m ending up learning more about Internet culture than I expected to. Being able to give this particular phyle a new way to talk to itself is interesting, in the sense that I get a seat on the front row of a high-speed, blood-fast evolutionary system.

I like it.

Remember the Code of Anonymous:

Anonymous is legion. Anonymous does not forgive. Anonymous does not forget.

Anonymous is devoid of humanity, morality, pity and mercy.

Anonymous works as one, because no member of Anonymous is as cruel as all of Anonymous.

Anonymous cannot be harmed, no matter how many Anonymous may fall in battle.

Anonymous takes all attempts to harm Anonymous seriously.

Anonymous is an enemy of those who are not Anonymous.

Anonymous is not subject to law.

Anonymous only undertakes Serious Business.

Anonymous is everywhere.

Anonymous cannot be out-numbered.

Anonymous reinforces its ranks exponentially at need.

Anonymous has no weakness or flaw.

Anonymous exploits all weaknesses and flaws.

Anonymous holds nothing sacred.

Anonymous is not your friend.

Anonymous is not your personal army.

Anonymous is in control at all times.

Anonymous does not accept failure, Anonymous delivers.

Anonymous has no identity.

Anonymous cannot be betrayed.

Anonymous are created as equals.

Anonymous is a choice.

Anonymous obeys the Code.

Anonymous likes it AT FULL FORCE IN HER VAGINA, MOUTH AND ASS

Anonymous is neither holy nor evil.

Anonymous is neither moral nor nihilistic.

Anonymous is Balance.