Burroughs' methods

Burroughs was writing at a time when mass media was, without exception, inaccessible to the fringe without mainstream approval. The tactics by which he would intervene in reality, namely the recording and modified playback of audio from subjects whose operation he wanted to disrupt, seem both ridiculous and somehow spot on brilliant.

To unpack my perspective of his writing a little: I see his underlying method as modification of information about the past or the remote. This springs from the observation that we have a small sphere of perception as finite physically rooted organisms and that the expansion of that sphere requires technology. Burroughs knew that most people never saw presidential candidates speak, never saw another continent, never heard the news, without it being digested, transmitted, and excreted at a distance by a media monster. The channel of absorption in which he chose to intervene was that of audio and video, and he believed that by changing the networks of reference between subjects he could alter the way reality really Was.

Today we have the internet, which ought to have changed everything. No longer is our information mediated by corporations, but rather by our equals, our neighbors. Governments and corporations have, in fact, run into trouble because of emergent phenomena beyond their control growing on the internet. So why does Burroughs' message still ring true? Why, upon reading about his methods, does one still see a space -- a constructed reality in need of a revamp -- in which they could be deployed?

I believe that the internet has made the modification of reality through media intervention impossible. While things took a little re-equilibrating after the advent of the internet, the essential state of human perception-at-a-distance has not changed. For example: to know what was happening during the presidential debates I did not read liveblogged accounts of them posted by audience members; I watched CNN and read the New York Times analysis simultaneously. Tomorrow I will not read about the financial crisis on an individual's blog; at best I might read the Huffington Post. For poll results I will visit Intrade, 538, and RealClearPolitics. None of these are run by individuals, and each of these has a brand which could be recognizably parodied, imitated, or otherwise intervened in in the manner Burroughs suggests. But in order to see anything on the internet, you have to want to see it.

And the difficulty with people only seeing what they want to see is that it makes changing preexisting notions of reality even harder than it was for the ideological revolutionary, the advertiser, the dadaist, the missionary, the convicted innocent. Burroughs believed that simply exposing reality to an alternative narrative, however disconnected from it, would affect a change in it. But today, the internet acts as a resonator for the aggregate perception which constructs reality.

So the old media remains strong. Tomorrow thousands of thousands of thousands will read what writers for the New York Times believe to be true. Burroughs with his tape recorders will be lost in the noise of people yelling their beliefs back to themselves. And above it all, unchanged, billions will turn on their television sets and watch anchormen construct state-sanctioned credibility and liveness and the people will believe the commercials and take their new beliefs back to their computers, where they will confirm themselves, where the network of them will confirm them.

The internet made social change seem easy. But cutting through the noise still requires subversion, just of a new kind.