Media in the New World Order On leaving the twentieth century, the world has acquired a sixth continent that encompasses and dwarfs the previous five. Communication technologies have created an autonomous field which, though evident in all four corners of the globe, never touches the regional civilizations into which the world population is still organized. The relentless fascination with the media environment results from its ability to make familiar issues appear forever and totally alien. The pleasure of uncommitted sharing in someone else's joy and misery produces a state of euphoria that lasts as long as one is on line. No sooner do we turn our backs to the media than our awareness of local duties and diversions reemerges unaltered to detail. Just after having donated your savings to the victims of some Bangladeshi flood disaster, you may well blow your top over the neighbors' leaking washing machine. The global consciousness created in the media never leaves its medial surroundings. Awareness of the surrounding world occupies its own, separate level within the collective unconscious. Archetypes generated by the news somehow never find their way into the civilized mindset. Compassion for African victims of starvation is easily coupled with indifference concerning one's countrymen. Predictions of how the media would cause a shift in social attitudes have proved more than prophetic. Media teach us not to aim our actions at our immediate surroundings, but rather to subject them to the information at hand. The media's educational scheme aims only to initiate users in the rules of immateriality and show them an individual approach to global virtual reality. The contemporary potlatch of the game show proves how viewers may be abundantly rewarded for their concentrated participation - a pastime to instruct us in the casual attitude necessary to market one's own personality. The slick promotion of personal identity represents a code of behavior so far removed from workplace and bedroom bungling, it's simply amusing to watch. Whereas hi-tech is taking traditional progress to unheard-of extremes, local populations reorientate on civilizational models or cultural ideals quite immune to advancement. The current resentment of rebellion and extremism does not result from some reactionary scheme to implement bourgeois values; rather, it represents a victory by the emancipation and liberation movements. A normal existence is now viewed as a universal human right, no longer to be abruptly impeded by outside forces. The clearing of bigotry and prejudice concerning the social identity of labor and sex has led to the disarmament of social critics. Where gays embrace marriage, feminists advocate motherhood and the notion of "jack of all trades and master of none" denotes a flexible attitude towards employment, the beckoning option of uncertain expeditions into experimental modes of living has become unthinkable. Lifestyles that attempt to shed light on their intentions via the medial environment are merely providing meaningful contributions to democratic citizenship. Multicultural society proudly advocates its tolerance of distinct identities, no matter how odd. Bag ladies have the same existential right as do ethnic butchers or lesbian pornophiliacs. In this legible society, there no longer exists any beyond to tempt us. The other, for want of comprehensible proofs of identity, is persuaded it must either integrate or be banished. Finally, those who refuse their social emancipation or liberation can only be relegated to the posthistorical through military or colonial measures. Parliamentary democracy, the free market economy; they're not values advocated by the Free West, but conditions to be realized by the individual lest he falls under direct attack by the New World Order. They comprise a formalized model, open to covert rule by political/economic elites as long as they respect their own national borders and the rules laid out by the world economy. The nation-state is a prerequisite for full participation in the World Order. The rise in nationalist movements represents a misinterpretation of this fact, carried away by the remnants of local history; those who have thus missed out on the capture of economic markets easily take to the market of capture. The implosion of communist regimes and Third World dictatorships must take place in an orderly fashion, dictated by New World Order patterns ... for we are mere spectators. It's all right for the media to keep us posted on upheavals, but don't expect us to interfere. The greater the media attention on former Warsaw Pact countries or the Middle East, the deeper our stupefaction and the lesser chance of people here ever taking to the streets. High ratings during live registration of conflicts denote fascination with the power of modern communication technologies, not concern through the awareness that "we are all in the same fight together." In fact, all those liberation movements just threaten our own positions. Both refugees and cheap products endanger individual citizens' work and welfare. The one political factor to which bourgeois awareness remains sensitive is defensive by nature: preservation - of benefits packages, the virgin environment and multicultural society. All other themes for action are, by virtue of their unintended air of masochism, unfit for the calculating citizenry. No matter what radical discourse may be mounted, all lines of argumentation must end up in some Gulag or Auschwitz. The study of the two parallel worlds of media and classical reality teaches that anything taken from the local environment to the field of hi-tech is instantly incapacitated. On the other hand, it is clear that all positive action taken on the level of everyday life can only reinforce the desire to leave everything as it is. Tolerance and indifference both reflect the same urge, that is, to shut out the outside world from that level of consciousness where insights must be acted upon. Information no longer is a weapon, but an arsenal in which we permanently find ourselves. Those who refuse to accept this state of affairs can take three possible courses of action: inside, against, or outside the media. If, in the first instance, we enter media reality, our purpose would be to erode the media by charging them with an explosive topicality. The patronizing notion that bourgeois media need to be rectified by counterinformation has been abandoned. Mediumistic actions discard all well-intentioned content and lines of argumentation, employing semio-artillery discharging pure signs. Even if all the action's intentions are fleeced, distorted or omitted, it will generate images so powerful their significance cannot be devalued. To paraphrase a Dutch squatters' slogan, "You can tear down our ideas, but our images will always be ours." A guerrilla based on the presumption that the emancipated citizen has no faith in whatever the media churn out to begin with, privately chuckling away at the destructions on display. Negative images are still images. Disguised as issues, they force themselves on the media in order to gain maximum circulation. Their assault on the dogma of PR, which effectively blocks any true intervention in classical reality, turns the media on themselves, thus clearing the field for an autonomous abuse of media and the obstinate defiance of their reality potential. A radical version of this strategy is to be found in the workings of sovereign media. They no longer view the media as channels for the transmission of information about events, but as material to be freely adapted by all and sundry. The purpose of sovereign media is not to invade recent media, but rather to encapsulate them so they can subject them to their own homemade rules. The second option is the domain of the antimedial movement. Convinced that all information is disinformation, this democratic movement seeks to reinstate the twin categories of truth and falsehood. It aims at the radical short-circuiting of the parallel worlds so that the planet's unity may be restored, if only for a few moments. Through its antimedial acts of sabotage, it temporarily eliminates "media-related communications," thus giving way to time and space for direct encounters on the local level. These Temporary Autonomous Zones challenge events to unfold in the present, based on an awareness that democracy thrives on real conflicts - not stage-managed, but spontaneously erupting, under no one's direction. It remains to be seen whether the event will respond to these actions based on media critique. Demolishing the tentacles of the electricity grid; disrupting telephone communications, electronic banking, terminals, cameras and other tools of everyday repression; and sneaking viruses and worms into mainframes and networks were all part of an experimental stage in media renunciation. They were an expression of a will to reality, relic of a pre-Nietzschean, nineteenth-century paradigm. Romanticism from a tourist perspective. However, even in the case of unforeseen events and all-out rioting, the mob is still democratically obliged to inform the rest of the community concerning the upheaval's nature and development. This forces the antimedial to invent tactics for the wilful takeover of the media, in order to prevent distorted reports from causing confusion. The final dilemma of any antimedial strategy lies in the fact that it must maintain the media if it is to save democracy. The problem of the antimedial movement is how to employ the media without becoming a part of them. Perhaps the media never possessed either transmitters or receivers to begin with. It requires little effort to imagine a network that functions to perfection, unaided by operators or users, free of input or output. Images have no meaning whatsoever to start with - they merely exist. They do not require our concern; we do not have to charge them with our attention or disinterest. To them, it's all shit and onions. The antimedial gesture intends to establish contact with others; it is not aimed at the media and their existentiality, but at ourselves - the human remainder. Still, the continuing broadcast of signals remains a persistent source of annoyance and aggression. The antimedial movement is the media's ultimate issue. The media implode through their reports on the antimedial movement; it, in turn, disappears through its exposure to media. The third option, that of extramedial acts, is based on the presumption that all positive activist goals are ultimately defensive, and can only reinforce the conservative climate. Any medially discernable goals served by extramedial actions are utterly negative. Extramedial operations frustrate media attention by being simply indescribable. As soon as the media appear, they disappear. All that remains is fits of laughter, astonishment and terror. They claim no attention, but are satisfied to occupy their own worlds. Contrary to the antimedial movement, they do not wish to restore society. Most likely, they've been a part of it all along, though it's hard to tell. From our medial point of view, they are in a state of uncertainty, immeasurable, not open to comment. They are forever transmutating, in defiance of destiny; they may be the medium of the event. ??