I joined the Social Text Editorial Collective this Spring, and one of the first visible results is this interview with Matthew Frye Jacobson. Tavia Nyong’o and I interviewed Matthew about his interdisciplinary Historian’s Eye project.

Jacobson: And then I’ve been traveling around–I’ve been to something like 28 or 30 different states at this point– shooting pictures that I think capture something important about what’s going on. So now it’s a project not just about Obama, but it’s about the backlash against Obama, it’s about the Tea Party, it’s about the economic collapse, it’s about the oil spill, the wars, the anti-Muslim agitation. It still feels like a unique moment to me, historically speaking. It feels like a moment in which the country is about to deliver–at any second we could deliver up our very best or our very worst. It feels like that kind of tense moment of hope and danger. The archive is meant to build materials that capture that aspect of this moment. But then it’s also meant to be a pedagogical tool, to help teachers help their students to think historically about the present, really. To think about history as what the present is made of. To think about the present as having a deep history of its own, but also being history in the making.

The full interview is online at Social Text.

Terracycle upcycles consumer waste into new salable goods. They primarily harvest their raw material from schoolchildren as part of charity drives, though they are now placing recycling stations at certain Walmart stores. At the Walmart centers they pay 3 cents per piece, but only for a narrow range of product packaging; the website supports a wider range of recyclables.

The spirit of the project is wonderful, but the problem is that it creates zombie advertising and branding for these undead consumer objects. Which is actually not all that surprising, as the Walmart program is sponsored by the very brands whose packaging are featured in the upcycled goods.

Now you can send your children to school with Capri Sun drinks, Lunchables, and Oreos in their Capri Sun lunchbox, and feel really good about returning the packages to Walmart, where you can buy more of the same processed food to send your child to school with. Capri Sun, Lunchables, Oreos, et al certainly feel really good about the branding opportunity, as do the big box retailers who are are partnered in the program as well.

Despite my cynicism about sponsorship and branding, the program is pretty incredible in the interpersonal organization that it has created, and the logistical barriers that it has overcome. The mechanism that it has put in place can hopefully be used to produce tools or goods whose central purpose is not advertising and branding. It seems that some of the products they are making either come from unbranded raw materials like film strips and bike chains, or they are using the plain inside surface of the packaging. These are more like Freitag bags. Not only are this last group of upcycled goods unbranded, they are actually much nicer looking and much more likely to be actually used.

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1. Corporate Giving, Social Networking, and the Devil
2. Obsessive Stephen Colbert Disorder

This is 16 minutes long animated film of logos and and advertising characters produced by a serious 3D house in France, and nominated for an Oscar, but yet in dire threat of lawsuits for use of corporate logos. At least this is according to the blogs, which, are… well… contradictory. But it is a hell of a great 13 minutes. Great villains, chase scenes, and a surreal vision of contemporary corporate life. It helps if you know Los Angeles.

Great fun. Sad truths. Fantastical visions.

Related posts:

1. Corporate Giving, Social Networking, and the Devil

A site called Vintage Ad Browser has over 100,000 categorized advertisements from today all the way back to the 1840s. Categorized by type and date. A great resource for research. (tx @twhid)

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1. What advertisers pay to catch your wandering eye
2. There Are 12 Kinds of Ads in the World
3. Boston Boots Musicians for Marketing Messages?

Is there a word for the irrational and/or rational fear of becoming the target of direct marketers?

Advertisaphobia? Adverphobia? Adphobia? Ad-phobia?

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1. Official Foundation for Freedom Press Release
2. Advertising Age: “We Hate Ourselves”

Canal and Broadway. All you Chisel-tippers and KRINKers go after it.

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1. Virgin America goes “street” – why?
2. Advertising Scofflaw Assaults NYT Reporter

I’ve noticed a new NYC microtrend of people wearing billowy checkered cotton scarfs around their necks. They remind me distinctly of Yasser Arafat’s Keffiyeh. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keffiyeh). Fashion can be pretty fascinating in its ability to absorb and appropriate otherness. So while we are at war with much of the Arab world, and Arab-Americans are feeling threatened and misunderstood enough that they have had to launch an advertising campaign in the subway, NYC consumerist fashionistas have appropriated the Keffiyeh. I wonder whether the wearers know what they are wearing, and whether they see it is some kind of statement, or just “cool.”

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1. Murky(ting) Water

After a recent conversation with an author that signed a contract and then realized she should have negotiated a Creative Commons license for it, I realized I should revive the HOWTO CC post as an instructable. Same content, new form. New community.

Original all-text-no-pictures version here

One: who owns the street sign posts

This morning I rode my bike to a not-so-close subway stop because I had to run into Manhattan for a meeting and make another meeting in Brooklyn right after that one. And I was late. I get to the station, find a street sign to lock up to, and the guy hawking the Daily News comes up to me yelling. He tells me that is his sign, and that he is going to lock up his newspaper rack AND stool to it, and I have to go find somewhere else. I tell him he doesn’t own the street sign and start locking up, and he says that if I do that he will simply lock his rack up around my bike and I will not be able to get it out. And I’m running late.

As I scuffled off around the corner to find another street sign on the next block my head was full of expletives, but now, sitting on the ferry to Staten Island I am a bit more calm about it, but I have nagging questions: who owns the space. Who has the right to lock what to signs. Are the rights of individuals different than those of corporations. What about corporations acting via pseudo-independent citizens like the Daily News guy. And what is the answer in principle, what is the law’s answer, and how wide is the gap?

Two: obeying the law like an obedient dog.

I ride the Staten Island ferry three times a week to teach at the College of Staten Island. Sometimes I am on bicycle (not as often this semester as I would like) and usually I have a backpack full of books, student papers and my daily rations for my excursion into the crypto-suburbs. Almost every time I pass through the threshold of security I am eyed by the man with the bomb dog. About half of the time he asks me to take my bag off and let his dog inspect it. But every time one of the bomb-dog-men tells me to take off my bag for inspection he says it as if I should already know that I was supposed to take it off for him.

Today I’m running late (its the theme for today) and I am trotting towards the door to the downstairs bikes-only segregated waiting area in my bike shoes (which means I can’t go very fast), and the man yells out “Hey! You!” and points at me. He is jogging over to me. He simply points to the ground. I’ve done this enough times that I have internalized this procedure. I remove my bag and put it on the floor. Take two steps back. You always have to step back from the bag — as if it is a bomb… The dog sniffs it for 10 seconds. Walks back to his master, and the master walks away.

It is amazing that I have been interpolated into the bomb-dog-man’s vocabulary of power. He calls out short commands, I stop, and respond. He points to the ground. I know what the command means, and do as commanded. I am an obedient, well disciplined dog in the dog master’s control society.

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1. How Valuable Is Our Public Space?
2. James Howard Kunstler on Public Space
3. Public Ad Campaign’s Recent Five

I guess there is a reason they call it Mafia Wars. Business Insider has broken a story about insurance company shills paying Facebook users into sending emails to their Congressional Representatives opposing health care reform.

This is interesting in the context of the Health Care debate (see the attempt to push Komen for the Cure to dump Leiberman’s lobbyist wife) but is more significant as a marker of the way that advertising and advocacy are creeping into places and forms where the information consumer does not expect them.

This is one more place to be on guard. And being on guard changes the place. I’m having nostalgic memories of surfing the web on Mosaic, circa 1994… but I know it is just nostalgia.

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1. Is the Ad Porn more Ad Creep?
2. Ad Creep Hits the Bike Lanes
3. New Site