> This was not the only slum I visited in my travels.
> I've also been to the slums of Siem Reap, Bangkok,
> Maputo, Santiago and Mexico City. In all those places
> I saw signs of social structure and order amids the
> squalor. It is only pampered arm-chair philosophers
> and campus radicals bored with their middle class
> existence and trying to escape their petit bourgeois
> ennui by looking for the exotic that see a "boiling
> revoltionary mass" or similar bullshit. I see people
> trying to build normal lives and maintain order and
> dignity, even amidst squarlor.
Well, that's because the boiling is highly... mediated. One of the really stunning features of the post-American or multinational mass media is that the social movements of the semi-periphery and true periphery are slowly but surely infiltrating the most advanced, high-tech media of them all -- video, web and videogame culture. It's all there, in the middle of Kojima's magnificent games or Squaresoft's Final Fantasy games. I didn't expect to find this, but then again, I didn't think the US Empire would fall apart as quickly as it has.
-- DRR