Fake Activism?
Corporate stunts to promote mobile devices?
Feel good distraction dressed up as a popular struggle?
I’m highly disturbed by this new trend. The 60’s are long dead and buried, and this new video game pretend activism should give everyone pause. As far as I can discern Nokia the cell phone manufacturer created a fictional world to send young people on scavenger hunts around London. The cover story was a library to be built in Africa for the benefit of a particular tribe, but a fictional big mean oil company wanted to run a pipeline through the village. So, in excess of 900,000 people played along in this fictional “struggle” to defeat a non-existent mean oil company and save the African village and its proposed library.
Oh yeah, throw in a socially conscious singer to promote herself and her music in the service of this fictional “good” and what the hell is going on?
There are enough real problems for people to address without the need for slick corporate-sponsored fake social problems that come out of ad agencies and pr firms. Are these people kidding? It’s like the entire western culture has been shoveled into a gigantic douche bag, where it happily taps on its little devices on its way spiraling down the toilet.
How can 900,000 people get on board a fake social struggle like that in the midst of a world gone completely mad with war and tyranny and poverty and hunger, etc.?
Apparently when a corporation allows these people to care about something, they respond like Pavlov’s dogs. Absent the safe, clearly delineated corporate leadership, they won’t go outside the box even to have a little peek.
Am I too cynical? Are these people learning how to get active? Are they taking away lessons? Are they actually doing some good, as the game supposedly took in some donations to send south?
Well, I’m sure the Nokia position would be in the affirmative. How much charity actually went to the recipients vs. how much largesse went directly to the corporate manipulators who thought up this scheme?
If we’re talking money, there are cold hard numbers we could tally.
Fake activism — fuck you.
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