Hi Mauricio,
I like Mumford’s metaphor of a megamachine, but I suspect that carrying it to its conclusion is unlikely to result in mass culture and mass control—the Orwellian nightmare. Rather, it is like a Jean Tinguely self destructive machine that has at it’s end the pile of rejected rubbish and chaos from which it arose.
Holding chaos and misunderstanding at bay, to make life a little more bearable for ordinary people, is a task I can cope with. But visions of total power and control seem ultimately absurd and unattainable, even for North K.
None of these visions take account of human resistance and our capacity for parody, irony and satire. Lacking any sense of humour, these visions miss the most obvious areas of dissent and resistance.
A little story: Once upon a time there was an old fashioned colonial outpost mutual insurance organisation called City Mutual. The workers in that organisation loved the organisation they worked for because of the way it shared risk among its members and policy owners. But it’s managers decided to demutualise it, buy out the members and turn it into a modern financial services organisation.
The workers were not happy and instead of it’s grand name ‘City Mutual’ they started calling it 'Shitty Mutual’. Not to be undermined by such a negative image, management searched for and found a design firm of branding magicians to change the companies image. The branding experts—juju men in silver bird from across the water—came and performed their magic and the sad old dusty organisation, which had lost its way in the financial jungle, was transformed, like superman out a phone booth from City Mutual to Capita. Power and Control was reestablished.
To celebrate the birth and obvious power of Capita, management commissioned a new building to house the head office. On the day of the grand opening, office and building workers gathered in the impressive foyer to welcome the dignitaries of the city who came to admire the new Power in town. To celebrate the occasion they were all given white T shirts with the word CAPITA emblazoned in the dark red chosen for the corporate colours by the juju men, to wear for the special occasion. A nice touch.
But all was not going well in the new powerful regime. The building workers on the site were in dispute with management. To demonstrate their anger and dissent the building workers wearing the T Shirts, showed their skills in information design by using a felt tip and adding a correction—a caret mark—between the C and A in CAPITA and neatly placing the letter ‘R’ above the caret. Thus the innovative and disruptive transition was complete—changing from Shitty Mutual to CRAPITA. Just a little story.
David
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blog: http://communication.org.au/blo <http://communication.org.au/blo>g/
web: http://communication.org.au <http://communication.org.au/>
Professor David Sless BA MSc FRSA
CEO • Communication Research Institute •
• helping people communicate with people •
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Phone: +61 (03) 9005 5903
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60 Park Street • Fitzroy North • Melbourne • Australia • 3068
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