Posts tagged: astroturfing

Back when I worked in other people’s offices, I used to refer to myself as technologically bisexual. I was equally comfortable on a MAC or a PC. I mean, most of my work was in Photoshop, PowerPoint, and PageMaker, with the occasional call for MicroSoft Word, Quark, or Illustrator. Once in the blue moon, I’d need to use some more esoteric software, but it was generally something available on both MAC and PC. And once I was inside the software, it was fundamentally the same thing on either platform. I could handle the amazingly wrenching switch from dealing with a doohickey key to a control key.

When I bought my own machinery, over the years, Blue Blood has been almost entirely PC. There has been the occasional person who already had a MAC that I bought MAC stuff for, such as a MAC cam or something like that, but, for the most part, Blue Blood has been entirely a PC-based company. I was not prejudiced against MACs. Certainly not at the beginning. I thought the machines were fundamentally the same, except a MAC had a nicer case, and a PC was more bang for the buck. This is not to say that a PC was in any way a technologically better machine. It wasn’t. It just cost a little more money to get the same thing in MAC format. Plus I could buy PC parts and really save by building my own power workstations.

But then Apple came out with their series of Think Different advertisements which made my teeth itch. First they bought all that footage of really cool dead people, like Apple had a fucking endorsement from Einstein or something. Then Apple pitched a fit when The Church of Satan web site, made by actual living person Peter Gilmore, …

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The biggest problem with the astroturfing style of marketing is that it makes everyone very skeptical of everything; it makes it very difficult to believe in anything. If a star willingly gets naked on camera, there will be some puritanical types who will think ill of them for it. Yet most people who enjoy being in the spotlight and being immortalized have a hankering to be in the spotlight and be immortalized even when they are, ya know, doing it. I have frequently run into famous people who want me and Forrest Black to shoot artistic nudes of them, but who do not want anyone to see the finished work. As an artist, it is important to me that people actually see what I create, so we have, to date, declined private commissions of this sort. A combination of following the various sex tape scandals, and my own personal conversations with people who wanted to get naked on camera without the social repercussions, has lead me to assume that most sex tapes are released with the knowledge and consent of the parties involved. That way, they can get the erotic attention and the victim sympathy.

The problem with this is that some people actually want their private lives to be, ya know, private. I have come to believe that actor Verne Troyer genuinely feels his privacy is being invaded with the current sex tape clip making the rounds and, at the request of his manager, I am having the honestly barely PG-rated clip removed from BlueBlood.net.

Late this evening, I received an email from someone named Ray Hughes who said that Verne Troyer was his client and who attached a PDF of what appear to be court documents pertaining to …

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I first came across Guns n’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction when I was a teenage metal DJ on the radio in Connecticut.

A little background explanation: I got into doing this gig partly because I’d gone to high school overseas and the American overseas high schools I attended were woefully behind the times when it came to music. Like really behind. I used AC/DC and Rush lyrics in my campaign posters when I ran for class president. (I won. I mean, of course I did; there were AC/DC and Rush lyrics in my campaign posters.) I was shocked when I found out that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, the big slow dance number where I went to ninth grade, came out more than a decade earlier than I would have guessed on a multiple choice test. So I arrived at college with more of an Aerosmith taste in music than the average student at a competitive, left-wing, East Coast school normally would have. Although I loved bands like Janes Addiction and The Dead Milkmen and The Cure and The Violent Femmes as soon as I was exposed to them, I held onto the hard rock thing because you never forget your first musical loves. Oddly, although my classmates identified as free-thinking liberal individuals, they seemed to hold the view that bands like Motley Crue and Dokken were for lower class stupid people. My annoyance at this classist hypocritical bigotry is probably the reason I became a metal DJ. I was frustrated that my classmates could be so close-minded about something like music. I enjoyed hard rock in my personal musical mix and I wasn’t about to fake like I didn’t just to impress people I went to school with. …

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Astroturfing is the word of the week. My brother just told me that one of his model/starfucker friends just called him up to chortle over the word astroturfing. This tells me that it is officially part of the internet lexicon and everybody needs to know the expression.

The term is, like the term spam, derived from an actual product. AstroTurf is the leading brand of fake grass ground covering. Developed in 1964, AstroTurf has been a particular boon for major sports arenas in areas where real grass is not easily grown or cared for. AstroTurf takes their products very seriously and promises to provide whatever is needed for every possible sport:

” The broad range of AstroTurf products ensures that there will be a synthetic turf system engineered to meet the demands of your team’s sport. Whether it’s a field hockey team that prefers the hydrophilic properties of AstroTurf 12™, or a soccer team that prefers the high-density fiber of AstroTurf PureGrass®.

Whatever sport your team plays, there’s an AstroTurf product ready to take the field.”

Grass roots support used to be what you called it when a band or political candidate had a lot of people who believed in them, whether or not the record labels or political machine did. Astroturfing is the act of faking grass roots support.

For example, if you see a point being made over and over again on MySpace or LiveJournal or in forums, and the point is usually made by people who nobody knows in real life, who tell you nothing plausible about themselves, and who do not have known online nicks, then you are probably looking at astroturfing. This means that, when you see certain points made over and over again, by potential sock puppets …

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