Alternative Media

People are ready to hear the truth. At the very least, they are willing to consider more varied perspectives in order to overcome the Six Blind Men and the Elephant problem. User generated content thus far has exploded the capabilities of political dissidents than just about any other methodology up to this time.

 

 

The alternative media sprang up as a reaction towards the dying dinosaur corporate whore mainstream media (MSM). Corporatist reporters began complaining about the stories that bloggers began to break. Open-source intelligence gathering and dissemination was the exact kind of workaround that dissidents, and even those of the mainline public, could use to discover, evaluate, and act on information that they otherwise would never have heard from CNN, Fox, MSNBC and the rest of the mass media cartel.

As I mentioned in my last documentary Jamming Culture: Creating Guerrilla Media (which is now only available through sneakernet), there are four communications mediums; written, audio, video, and in-person (or live). The first three are different from the last one since they are all “dead” types of open-source intelligence sharing, in that you cannot converse with your intel source. Bloggers write posts, podcasters record broadcasts, and videographers shoot footage (vloggers, by contrast, just sit in front of their web cams and rant because they were too lazy to write anything or acquire their own RSS feed). While it may be possible to record something live (such as a speech), if you weren’t there and you clap or boo the speaker, it won’t make it into the recording simply due to the fact that you weren’t there (duh). It would behoove every single political dissident to be familiar with each medium and eventually decide to specialize in one of them.

The technological advances made have given true power to the multitude of alternative media outlets. Video press releases are now common, especially over at YouTube and Vimeo. Some blogs allow podcasts to be hosted on the same RSS feed as the posts are. BlogTalkRadio has provided the ability for live streams to take callers over both normal phone lines and VoIP, and then those streams are rendered into free downloadable podcasts. Videoconferencing has exploded to the point where entire interviews are now possible for public viewing on video sharing websites. Simulcasting is now a household term. CGI graphics of the quality that the MSM cable “news” channels use are available to the consumer at affordable prices, or sometimes as shareware or even freeware.

The quality content available through various alternative media sources blows the MSM out of the water. When there are disagreements, they tend to be fundamentally serious when the individuals involved posses truly contrasting political orientations. Accuracy in reporting breaking news has begun to revitalize the discipline of journalism. James Corbett, Matt Drudge, Wayne Madsen, and other truly investigative reporters are bringing to the table those pertinent subjects that have been deliberately ignored or even censored by the corporatist media.

That being said, the alternative media is experiencing some serious growing pains. While there are several news aggregators, there is no reliable way of verifying each and every claim that comes down the pike; distinguishing between what is reliable open-source intelligence and what is simply rumour is so sloppily done that unfortunately a deluge of data simply falls through the cracks, all of which is assumed to true and correct. It is not at all uncommon for emotions to run so high that rationality goes out the door when the contending parties prefer to bicker endlessly with each other (utilizing trial by press instead of trial by jury), thereby causing internal balkanization. “Patriot” Rockstars and Messianic Figureheads abound, forming dedicated fan bases of the easily swayed without difficulty. Faketriots and Patriotards are some of common terms of derision used to describe controlled opposition and useful idiots, respectively. Despite these serious internal problems, if they can be overcome, then victory against the Establishment becomes realistically possible; otherwise, the alternative media would be filled with nothing but hobbyists who spend their leisure time pretending to be “revolutionaries,” much like Dungeons & Dragons role-players (that is, having a video game mentality).

If you ever happen to pay attention, you would notice that most of the alternative media is currently ineffective because all they do is act as watchdogs (necessarily entailing a function I’ve called “news & analysis”) and neglect to brainstorm like think-tank analysts (what I’ve referred to as the “problem-solving stuff”). Most of the alternative media prefers to whine and bitch all day about the 20,000,000^th awful thing the Establishment did this week, but when it comes to actually trying to solve it (or at least use a temporary expedient), they spend all of five minutes on methods that have historically proven themselves to never work. Everyone else who still clings to reason and evidence are either vilified or ignored out of existence, and then the alternative media figureheads wonder why nothing they’ve pushed thus far moves the case for Liberty forward.

The potential of what the alternative media can be and do is so amazing that people who get bogged down in the Carnival of Distractions is really nothing short of heartbreaking. Watching all that skill and talent just being wasted on either the same old redundant shit, or worse, focused on something that necessarily requires an ineffective method to work, is quite beyond frustrating. What needs to happen is for people to cross that line where they understand that there is no way to work within the system; you cannot negotiate with dedicated psychopathic control freaks. By empirically demonstrating that certain methods simply do not work (such as voting, petitioning, writing congressmen letters, and so on), perhaps it is possible to cut the learning curve a hell of a lot shorter, thereby saving dissidents the time, effort, and anguish in eventually determining that you cannot make a square wheel roll.

What I greatly fear is the alternative media degenerating into an Internet version of the mainstream media. The alternative media began during the ‘80s and ‘90s through newsletters, fax distribution networks, and eventually the Internet. I’ll be damned if the enemy propagandists and their behavioral eugenicist mad scientists are going to corrupt our personnel, in addition to trying to control and regulate the Web. Besides needing a backup and/or alternative Internet, what we also really need right now is some sort of truly private (non-corporate) third party arbitrator who can resolve disputes between those who utilize communications mediums over the Internet, so as to finally put an end to this internal slander, defamation, and libel once and for all.

It is time to separate the wheat from the chaff, and ostracize those who seek to harm our own people. It is time we take back our alternative media from the shit stirring infiltrators who have instigated discord within our ranks. It is time to finally use the Internet to truly revive the discipline of journalism, and to use that to its maximum utility as a part of the overall effort in securing our Liberties.