Yeah, well, if you're going to do incisive, politically-charged theater and you find the standard Marxist fare tiresome, take advantage of the Information Age and the horrors it's about to bring.

Besides, I can't think of a better tip of the hat to TMBG for inspiration than to shamelessly steal the title of the last track on Mink Car.

Political Motivation

Perhaps I've been watching too much of The Prisoner lately. Correction: I have been watching too much of The Prisoner lately. Still, with the Attorney General calling everyone that walks upright a traitor, the RIAA and MPAA suing anything that moves and trying to legislate the computer into a Playstation, people being jailed for exposing corporate incompetence under the rubric of the DMCA, salesmen attempting every invasive marketing scheme but unsolicited anal probing, Larry Ellison trying to foist a national ID card on the populace so he can sell more copies of Oracle, spyware, drug tests, zero-tolerance school shakedowns, people getting sued for posts on message boards and usenet, the latest shenanigans of the Church of Scientology, spam, passenger profiling and the idiocy of shoe searches on airlines, and the inability to purchase anything at Radio Shack without giving them a mountain of demographic information, can paranoia really be considered a mental disorder?

I'm not a big fan of the Theater of Transformation school of thought. I think people should satisfy themsleves by doing good original work they are proud of, pushing the limits of a form, their skill, and the tolerance of their audience. Doing that may change the world. Setting out to change the world is a losing proposition, partly because it's a saturated market, and partly because most that tread that path are idealists of dubious talent.

I'm motivated by fear. I am deathly afraid of waking up tomorrow to find myself legislated into becoming a voiceless read-only media consumer, or worse, under some Kafkaesque non-arrest for criticizing the Justice Department without appropriate corporate sponsorship. I think we're in the tail end of the transition into what DEVO called the corporate-feudal state. People accept the surveillance, the cube farms, soul-killing bureaucratic shite, the ignorance and illiteracy of the elect, and the pervasive assault on dignity and privacy, everything McGoohan railed against in The Prisoner. I'd like to think that things are better than they were in 1967, but it's hard to tell.

Okay, Maybe Things Aren't All Bad...

Actually, a number of things are better. The environment, race, age, and gender issues. Access to media creation tools (though distribution-for-pay is still locked up by the vested interests.) People with bell-bottoms and feathered hair still look retarded.

What's So Damned Funny?

All of it, actually. Somewhere in this cesspit of bad law and ill manners, there's a bumper crop of material, some caustic, some political, some poignant, some irreverent, some just plain funny.

Lets use identity theft as an example. What kind of setups can we get from this?

There are a lot of societal issues yet to be worked out caused by the explosive technological advances of the last decade. If you can use reductio ad absurdum to prove your point, why not go the other direction, show something absurd and maybe isolate some important problems with society's use and perception of technology.

I mean, what if you could read all your grandparents' usenet posts from when they were 15? What if you find out your great-grandfather was a spammer? How would you react if your workplace could instantly monitor your sweat, urine, and stool and restrict your cafeteria access if it thought you weren't eating healthy enough to satisfy the company's health insurance carrier? March of the Nanotech Corporate Donut Detectors! Spamming and telemarketing people to expose them to poetry.

There's much more, especially if you want to take some big risks and take a chance of offending or being inaccessible.

Now what?

Dunno. Turn this into a themed Harold or Lab Show.