videoegg.com is demoing their add overlays for user created media. The sample clip they have created for their campaign is highly suspect.



It features a person of color being slapped, poked and flicked by white people while being overlayed with advertisements for bugger king and other white owned corporations famous for their "urban" cool re-appropriations. (a dated excerpt on white vs black ownership)

The metaphor videoegg is self promoting is that these overlays are "nicer" and more effective than the dulled down slap in the face that the consumer is used to. But I can't help but see a different set of "overlays" at work. The shoveling of corporate messages down the throat of a passive apathetic racialized consumer. I see the building transnational corporate power, through psychological warfare against a nation of "consumers". The aesthetics of physical abuse of a black man being sold back to himself. Labor is no longer the only thing to beaten out of people, rather consumer messages have to be beaten into them. We are entering an age where any piece of cultural production that gains significant mind share is can be instantly appropriated algorithmically into the brands of the online context providers. This is essential for the corprate propagandists as the bounding of debate of traditional media deteriorates in the open publishing environment of online communication. These corporate overlays help cloud meaningfully communication with cynicisms and distrust.

When public enemy spits some rap criticizing the bling bling, we will have an add ontop promoting the very thing the creator is trying to communicate is wrong. Or "related video" links that debase the proposed conversation. Videos documenting walmart human rights abuses could be overlaid with a "get the facts" walmart sponsored link and so on and so forth. This transfers the power of popular visual meaning production away from the creators and places it back into the hand of the propagandist for consumer society.

But given network neutrality at least in the online context we need not be the apathetic abused racialized consumers that the propagandists thinks we are. We can build our own content distribution networks because the same techno-social-economic conditions that allow for corporations to cheaply host and appropriate popular visual medium production enables collectives with alternative motives host it (relatively) cheaply as well.

Take wikipedia for example a collective/NGO that has committed to an advertisement free knowledge repository, forgoing hundreds of millions of dollars in advertisement revenue in favor of community support. This model is able to function on a transnational scale surpassing corporations that invest many orders of magnitude more resources into their services that end up attracting many orders of magnitude less participants. This enabled by conscience choice by participants to participate in free systems rather then contributing to proprietary systems where your contribution is subverted with commercial messages in the margins and private control over the byproduct of our collective labor.