since 1994 unamerican.com has held the torch of free speech aloft across the world. this is one of the very first e-commerce projects EVER, and it stands as a beacon testifying to the basic radicalism of the early Internet. i was living in the bay area from '89-'93 and the mesh of my own interests and experiences with the Bay Area's heritage of social and cultural experimentation triggered a libertarianish philosophy of creation. my sociological mind and my punk rock heart led me to create a zany sticker company with some of the ideas I had been collecting as a songwriter and 'zinester.
so by throwing this site up there so long ago i believe this project influenced the world in very oblique ways since then. i am so grateful that i was able to play a part in the thinking of the generation of hackers both technical and cultural during that critical time in the 1990's with the set of amazing influences and motivations and great software i could use after work at my job as a desktop publisher on the swing shift at the menlo park CA kinko's.
think about it this way: a truly robust society such as ours MUST be intellectually challenged and culturally stimulated in order to grow properly. those who are able to think about where we should go - those of DIRECTION and PURPOSE - often feel underrepresented in a world that is so completely dominated by the voice of capital. we take shortcuts in our understanding because the media makes it so compelling to do so. unamerican.com is here as a voice in the wilderness, joyously proclaiming that no matter what kinds of psychological tactics capital may manage to innovate, the flames of american iconoclasm will burn relentlessly with the sound of heartfelt truth.
back in 1993 i wanted to share my ideas with other people without getting all up in their faces and just yammering on about things we'd forget anyway. i didn't want to just do another 'zine and so i was like, "stickers!" that's how it began, selling stickers at the rear of gilman street during green day shows, barely making the rent but independent and free to build my utopia - a shrine to my own whims, perhaps, but a way for me to simulate actually mattering in a society that seemed lethargic and, well, you remember 1993...
words and images form the fabric of culture, but it's people just like you and me who manufacture these words and images. Information interacts with our minds; information that is "containerized" stays static forever (or until altered). copies of ideas spread, occasionally mutating, like a giant game of telephone. ideas that are designed to travel from mind to mind until they're socially understood by the culturally literate. these ideas have been termed "memes" by communications theorists, and I've got some ideas about them.
a meme is a contagious idea that is passed on from mind to mind through mimicry. memes function the same way genes do, propagating through communication networks and face-to-face contact between people. memes exist in symbiosis with human minds and often affect the behavior of their hosts. they are created by advertising agencies and songwriters, and reproduced by photocopiers and radio stations. certain memes, like the behavior of cigarette smoking can be toxic to their hosts; other memes, like fascism, can be toxic to an entire society and can bring it to the brink of war or collapse. other memes are therapeutic and help people live more positive, aware lives.
for the last fourteen years I've created a very unique brand experience centered around, essentially, iconoclasm in all of its forms. this brand has had significance for thousands of people through this website and I can tell you that I've had a blast. unamerican has given me some insight about how corporations and political parties build their brands. The entire structure is built on words and images and our conditioned responses to them. stimulus -> response -> stimulus, for ever and ever. if you're willing to take the time to think and ponder and then learn how to engineer memes of your own you can be among those who manufacture these stimuli, and the behavioral responses to these stimuli could look a lot like revolution, at least on a cultural/media plane.
just like a computer, memes can help an operator get from intention to actualization. if your intention is to sell more potato chips, you can use memes to do this. if you want to protest something, make a meme, put it on a stick and go to city hall, or a stack of stickers and go to a party. we all know that a government or a political/economic entity can use memes to sell a war or introduce a new product.
if your intention is to make sure NOTHING EVER CHANGES, you can create a "memeplex": school=education, bosses=management, money=wealth, work=productivity, consumption=fun, mcdonalds=food, TV=leisure, NFL=athletics, CNN=knowledge about the world, etc. etc. etc.
these false (or incomplete) equations are the psychological tools with which "they" govern our lives. the way squares relate is a "buy-in" process - they buy into one after another of these ideas and ultimately they become predictable.
The left side of the equation is easier to achieve than the right, so obviously instead of really informing yourself, you say "i watch CNN"; rather than making reading books a part of your life it's easier to say "i went to college, of course i'm educated". no need to defend your positions - you've got a Harvard degree, of COURSE you're smarter than everyone else in the room! swathed in memes created by the System as indicators of status, congregating in the pseudotribes that are marketed as "communities" while your family erodes and your friendships remain removed from actual creativity, you become dependent on the easy answer, which is to say addicted to that component of the System.
unamerican.com was created as an antidote to this dependence. these stickers - like other great bits of culture - make sure you stay out of the trap.
