I took part in yesterday’s Yes Men fake New York Post heist (an entire special edition full of real facts about climate change).

More images here, The Yes Men Fix the World movie information here, and you can play their Fix The World Challenge game now.

This is culture jamming, but relevant to the culturemodding thoughts here (and participating helped me think more about how culturemodders are and aren’t agents).

via kenyatta:

Overall, Jacobs argued that the very concept of “ideology” is fundamentally flawed and detrimental to both individuals and societies, no matter what side of the political spectrum an ideology comes from. By relying on ideals, she claimed people become unable to think and evaluate problems and solutions by themselves, but simply fall back on their beliefs for “pre-fabricated answers” to any problem they encounter.

As a poignant example, she cited the Chicago Heat Wave, which killed hundreds of mostly elderly Chicagoans in 1995. The “official” reason, according to the United States Department of Health (following a multi-million dollar study), was that the victims simply did not take precautions such as maintaining a steady water supply, finding air conditioning, or circulating air in their buildings.

Jacobs argued that the study, in addition to spending millions of dollars to state the obvious, was flawed because of its inherent ideology, which was individualism. She noted that a sociology graduate student, Eric Klinenberg, wrote his thesis on the disaster, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, which proved much more enlightening.

By examining the social atmosphere of different Chicago neighborhoods, Klinenberg discovered that many deaths were not dependent on individual factors, such as wealth, but rather on the cohesiveness of the neighborhood. Within tightly-knit and older neighborhoods, he found, elderly people at risk of heat stroke were more likely to be checked on by neighbors, less afraid to leave their homes to get help, and more likely to find sympathetic people and businesses that would allow them to relax in an air-conditioned environment (for example, dropping into a neighborhood grocery or barbershop, and having a proprietor willing to simply let them sit). In contrast, within neighborhoods where neighbors rarely socialized, the elderly were isolated and unable to get help.

Jacobs, citing the two studies, argued that the federal study was unconsciously biased by the prevailing political and economic ideology (that is, neoliberalism), which promoted individualism to the point of becoming completely oblivious to community and social factors, even though, as Klinenberg found, these were the factors that ultimately caused the deaths.

Using this and other examples, Jacobs argued that modern political and economic ideologies were in effect no different than those dominant in Western civilization’s past Dark Ages, such as Middle Age Roman Catholicism. In both cases, she claimed, the dominant ideology prevented and discouraged people from finding rational and scientifically-verifiable explanations and solutions.

This is culturemodding.

What’s so interesting about Park(ing) Day is the use of sod that is rolled out in parking spots and parking lots, grass seemingly a necessary component of parks.

The crew in Soho also had a ball pit, and I like this image from Eugene (Oregon) of them set up on a busy street.

This is not culturemodding.

“Instead of actual meteorological events, it will track these genetic fringes, these dark topographies shrouded in secrecy by Big Agro, Big Pharma and their patent lawyers, for any signs of quarantine breaches.”

- “Transgenic Storms,” on Pruned, September 10, 2009.

[Great piece on the intentional impossibility of mapping genetically-modified food test areas in the U.S. that keep company with non-genetically-modified food areas. “Genomic dark spots” and other frightening trends…]

a surreal set out of a really modular franchise furniture location. Not a new idea if you remember the children’s book Corduroy, but fascinating as an ensemble production and a timestamped cultural product.

via perpetua:

Ikea Heights is a melodrama shot entirely in the Burbank California Ikea Store without the store knowing.

The music cues are especially clever and droll. It’s so much better that they focus on parodying the aesthetics of contemporary melodrama rather than older versions of the same thing.

Detroit Cheers might be my favorite name for a local currency. I have to wonder about the tender parlance - looks like it’s one “Cheers” = one dollar, so three “Cheers” = three dollars in the image above?

via slavin:

“A Detroit trio of small-business owners are reviving the idea, following an emerging national trend. The businesses are creating a currency called Detroit Cheers, and more than a dozen city merchants have already agreed to accept it as real money. “The world is just now reeling from economic chaos; in Detroit, that’s how we always roll,” said Jerry Belanger, 49, a backer of the currency, as he watched the initial run of Cheers bills roll off the presses last week….

Detroit Cheers joins an estimated 75 local currency systems that have sprung up recently in the U.S., said Michael Shuman, author of “The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition.”

(via Local Currencies: Communities Printing Own Money To Keep Cash Flowing)

I think I’m going to use these to illustrate layering of interactions in online food communities at Ars Electronica next weekend—

iwanttogothere:

i don’t remember who did this but i like it

A check box for a bike-sharing program that you can lobby to bring to your city:

“Check here to tell my mayor I want B-cycle.”

And so government interactions become incremental transactions—