Evil Media 
(working title)

Proposal
Matthew Fuller, Goldsmiths			m.fuller@gold.ac.uk
Andrew Goffey, Middlesex University	a.goffey@mdx.ac.uk

Executive Summary
Taking the form of a handbook of stratagems, Evil Media updates Machiavelli's The Prince for the era of networked digital media and corporate governance. Addressing a range of objects, practices, techniques and knowledges traditionally excluded from the purview of media studies, it explores the sophistry that is quite literally embodied by the sophisticated technologies of the knowledge economy. 'Evil' explicitly references the antagonistic ethical and moral quality that an epoch gorging itself on progress has sought unsuccessfully to banish; and so Evil Media offers a provocative account of the ruses, subterfuges, deception, manipulation and trickery which media technics make possible.  By adopting a perspective which counters the idealistic, liberal, assumptions encoded within the notion of representation, it aims to resituate the study of media within a framework which includes forms of media that are 'below the radar' of most contemporary theory and actively occluded by the framework of representation.  Here, media do not so much tell us about things, but are themselves things that exhibit behaviours.

Aims and Rationale
Evil Media offers a playful and provocative challenge to media studies, to arts and humanities practitioners with an interest in media, to critical and cultural theory and more generally to anyone with either a benign or a covertly moral view of the media and its claims in and on our lives. Evil Media takes issue with two assumptions that have dogged the claim of media studies to provide adequate conceptual tools for understanding media. The first is the assumption that the media are - or should be - representational, in the cognitive sense of providing us with a picture of the world and in the political sense of accomplishing the liberal contract for a democratic institution. The second is the assumption that all the politically important work to be done on media should focus on the large scale mass media forms such as television, the press and radio (or the internet, as the amorphous figure replacing these), what we might think of as the media institutions that have historically been tasked with giving us 'information' about the world, or – in the critical optic - colonising the imaginary with ideological representations. Yet as McLuhan has argued, media are in fact considerably more pervasive than is suggested in the view proposed by critical commonsense, and the technologies that are encompassed by the broader view of media knot together some surprisingly disparate objects, practices, techniques and knowledges. Part of the underlying argument of Evil Media is that the presence of media in our lives and the abstract social relations of which they are the bearers is much more diffuse and much more extensive than we might imagine. Getting to grips with this 'osmotic' diffusion of media within the social is a vital task, and by proposing an exploration of a range of objects, techniques, knowledges, practices which do not fall within the traditional remit of media studies, Evil Media aims to explore this strange and disturbing new world, in a strange and disturbing way.

Evil Media is not alone in its concerns to provoke and incite, any more than it is alone in its endeavour to chart out new territories of media and mediation, or indeed to examine techniques and practices of manipulation and control. On the side of provocation, we would point to the recent work of McKenzie Wark, the Critical Art Ensemble or the well-known 'extrapolationist' writings of Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. For work which displays a concern with the spreading, tentacular operations of media and mediation, there is Jonathan Crary's work on the 'epistemo-technics' of attention, or the range of critical writings developing around hypnosis and technique in psychoanalysis (Isabelle Stengers, Mikkel Borch-Jakobsen and so on). Equally, for their development of a theoretically rigorous approach to the topic of media, we could mention the writings of Friedrich Kittler and his colleagues at Humboldt University in Berlin as well as to the range of writings associated with Science and Technology Studies - particularly actor-network theory - which offers a set of rich insights into processes of mediation and the social organisation of technologies that have not, hitherto, been exploited by the field of media studies. A growing body of work, associated with the (post) Autonomist current in Italy, which focuses on the centrality of communication and communication practices within the economy - the work of Paolo Virno, Franco Berardi (Bifo) and Christian Marazzi, to name but three - offers a challenging political context in which to situate our work. We should also mention Hardt and Negri, whose thesis regarding immaterial labour has been crucial in focusing attention on media and antagonism in recent years. Indeed, our work should also be considered in relation to a range of writers, critics and artists who have tried to develop this current of ideas in relation to artwork and aesthetic practices.  Points of reference here include writers such as Tiziana Terranova and Stewart Home, the fiction collective WuMing and others concerned with mythopoiesis and the generation of viral approaches to culture as well as artists such as Übermorgen, The YesMen or Thomas Hirschorn (with his work on philosophy).  In a sense, the book hopes to do for theoretical writing on media something of what the performative and provocative documentary film Supersize Me has done for reflection on diet and consumption.

The reference to art and to aesthetic practices is important for Evil Media as it informs our concern to develop an analysis with practical implications. More precisely it informs our conception of how the book should be structured and why: the provision of practical advice and guidance on the technologies of power within which and through which we increasingly define ourselves. Sharing the critical analysis of aesthetic judgement proposed by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his Man without Content, part of the aim of the book - reflected in its structure and its style - is to cancel the position of the spectator that implicitly or explicitly informs media studies (explicitly: audience studies and the more general emphasis on 'reading'; implicitly in its conception of politics as the field of reflective judgement). Instead, extending Agamben's take on art, we believe it is necessary to try to write from the 'producer's' point of view, thus expanding the field of implication of the user. In any case, at a time when communicating has become a crucial element of work as such and to consume is to 'provide content', the relevance of adopting the spectator's perspective is eminently questionable. The slight but significant twist that Evil Media seeks to give to the socio-economic imperative to communicate is that practical advice ought to bear on the ongoing production of media form as much as media content, a twist which gives our book an aesthetic inflection that we think is vital. Upping the ante on Toffler, the stratagems explored in Evil Media seek to provoke a disgust with and resistance to the new forms of enslavement being offered to the "prosumer" and the too-ready acceptance of aesthetics and technics of 'participation'.

Form and Structure of the Book
In a previous piece of work, out of which the Evil Media project develops, we experimented with a 'stratagematic' style of writing. We borrowed the idea of the stratagem from Arthur Schopenhauer, whose often ignored book The Art of Always Being Right itself offers a part-Machiavellian, part-Sophist guide to winning arguments regardless of how true or false they are. Our aim in this exploratory piece of work was to develop a type of writing that would allow us to provide a kind of focused form of practical advice about and intelligent analysis of media forms. The Evil Media project extends and adapts this approach by offering approximately 40 short texts, each between two and fives pages in length, modelled loosely on the kind of tacitly amoral and strategic thinking and writing adopted by both Schopenhauer and Machiavelli. We think that the form of the 'stratagem' is appropriate to a study of evil media for a number of reasons:

•	In terms of content, Schopenauer's own advice is the best indicator: "even when a man has truth on his side, he needs dialectic in order to defend and maintain it; he must know what the dishonest tricks are, in order to meet them. In fact he must often make use of them himself, so as to beat the enemy with his own weapons". 
•	The stratagem gives us a way of focusing, in a playful way, on typical forms of practical action that human and nonhuman agents accomplish – indeed, science studies refers to the kind of 'black box' media forms in which we are interested precisely as stratagems (Latour Science in Action 129). 
•	The exploration of proliferating practices, techniques, and technologies, in short, mediators, equally requires an approach which is adapted to the complex, multi-layered and reticular relations that they define. The 'non-linear' compositional structure that our stratagematic approach creates, encourages a view of media practices that underscores their shifting, recombinant, network-like qualities.          
•	It is in the nature of the kind of cunning practical wisdom that we wish to highlight to be forever adapting itself and mutating: in this respect it is impossible to provide a comprehensive mapping of evil media. A stratagematic approach gives us a way of opening up the field of study without risking the implications of an overarching theoretical explanation.    
•	Finally, extended across a range of practices, technologies, objects and knowledges, the stratagematic approach allows the reader to draw on those aspects of our discussion that are of most use to them in the development of a creative approach to working with and in media.

More practically, while the overarching tone of the book as a whole is playfully and provocatively amoral, and its intent that of providing an utterly serious account of myriad contemporary forms of mediator, each individual text aims at generating thinking across a number of registers, encompassing the affective, poetic, polemical, and analytic. We are seeking to open up a range of creative approaches to the study of media and think that this sort of 'formal' divergence from monographic convention better facilitates our aim.

In addition to being both informed by and engaging with some of the most interesting and challenging theoretical work on media, mediation and communication today, Evil Media draws on a range of other antecedents, actual and mythical: Balthasar Gracian's The Art of Worldly Wisdom, a 17th century lifestyle coach refreshingly free of the hypocrisy and cynicism that one discovers in today's management training and self-help books, De Quincey's Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts, the Ancient Greek conception of metis or cunning intelligence, testified to in trickster mythology and hacker practice, the pithy programmatic textual structures of the writings of Guy Debord, the 17th century Arabic Book of Ruses, Machiavelli's The Prince, of course and other writers, such as Voltaire or Swift, who weren't afraid of using a range of writing strategies in actualising an argument, not to mention the precision buffoonery of Alfred Jarry. 

The choice of these writers is, of course, deliberate: working in historical periods or cultural situations where writing had not been sanitised by the pseudo-scientificity of the human sciences and the "thinking in grooves" encouraged by the narrow specialisations of the academy, such writers are free to adopt incitatory and provocative practices that allow them to address hearts and minds, stimulating creative and often subversive thinking.  Such freedom is not simply one of a lack of discipline but also attained in periods of change or crisis, where people look to guides that are plain, reassuring, pragmatic or cunning enough to have the sensation of governing their actions with wisdom.  As such, one body of literature that Evil Media makes wise use of is that of management theory, where, like that for self-improvement, techniques, anxieties and solutions circulate in abundance.  The hunger for rules in such literature is something we will exploit.

The book covers a broad range of topics but each stratagem will focus specifically on some technique, practice and/or pragmatic effect of knowledge, discourse or media, addressing their place within broader networks or ecologies. The overall effect of the 40-odd stratagems will be that of a book that is a short but punchy read (in every sense).

Indicative List of Topics and Treatment
Expert systems: decision support 
The role of 'expert systems' in a range of working situations is indicative of the infiltration of productive activity by automated intermediaries. Largely organised around and appraised in terms of its methods of extrapolating patterns and applying theorems (the extensive debate within AI about induction and deduction, for example), the expert system gains its value from being more dogmatic than its human model. In highly formalised decision spaces where parameters are already numerically knowable - such as in autopilot systems or financial trading - expert systems are used for mundane or predictable tasks, releasing actual human brains to handle more complex problems.  Whilst some commentators have decried this as something approaching a 'proletarianisation' of the expert, the changing and unpredictable contexts in which these systems might be deployed, such as those of market crisis, make trained behaviours suddenly radical. The fervour with which an expert system sticks to its belief in the future has a decisive advantage over the vacillating neuroses or yearning to be creative of its human accomplices and deserves to be pushed to an extreme, its intelligence positively indistinguishable from its passion for ignorance.

Profiling and Recommendation Systems; Behavioural Economics/Marketing
The use of profiling systems within the porous boundaries of nation states sets up those compelled to use such systems, the police officer or border guard, as consumer of the automated suggestions of a complex algorithmic unconscious. When a suspect is recommended by the profiler, because s/he is similar to one they searched before, then the algorithmic logics that run across different kinds of social reality, mesh and homogenise.  This meshing and the effects it generates calls for a new kind of algorithmic street knowledge for cops, perps and customers. Equally, as behavioural economics increasingly studies actual rather than modelled or idealised behaviours, the means for shaping the measure of what is to be recognised and recorded has the opportunity to merge more tightly with behavioural marketing, advertising targeted at users according to keywords, sites visited and other triggers.

Workflow
According to the commentator Thomas Friedman, workflow software is one of the ten factors behind the flattening of the world in the new era of global capitalism. Workflow software - and workflow more generally - pervades corporate practice and the corporate mentality. Entering equally into the conceptual framework of self-organising, performative entrepreneurialism, it provides a remarkable example of the transference of routinised technological structures to the organisation of human machines dedicated to becoming high performance nodes in the high volume, high-velocity circulation of information capital. There are numerous examples of the use of workflow models within the workplace as a form of mediation of a range of different practices: allied with so-called supply chain management, they testify to a 'logistical' transformation of work, with disturbing implications. The question for us here is how, in what ways, can workflow concepts, practices and tools be re-engineered to transform other areas of life and equally, how can the kinds of work-arounds required in many companies and organisations to make it seem like workflow works gain a kind of artful thinking of their own?

Information Security Practices
Whilst learned studies show that cryptography has a long and distinguished history, the recent intensification of security mechanisation processes have become something of an end in themselves and have contributed to the escalation of stakes in both the securitisation and the infiltration of data flow. Overturning the conventional thinking that sees the sensitive status of information and communication processes as calling for their encryption and securitisation rather than the other way around, we regard information security practices as an attempt to preserve rarity and value in a world where data is abundant and information excessive. Viewed from this angle, and with an eye to debates about 'intellectual property', we explore a range of 'infosec' practices, and the related hackerly work of 'social engineering' with an eye on their strategic goals.

Neurolinguistic Programming
Easily dismissed as quackery by pseudo-scientists eager to establish their own credentials, the popularity of neuro-linguistic programming in business seminars, marketing literature and corporate self-help culture more generally testifies to the extensive reach that techniques of influence and suggestion now enjoy in the world of capitalised communication. Placed alongside the range of algorithmic recipes for improving one's sex life or one's standing in the stock exchange of prestige, neuro-linguistic programming fails to achieve its full potential because of its inability to admit to the inherent perversity of the domination and control it seeks to exercise. Dissolving its admittedly weak scruples allows the true stakes of NLP to become more evident and all the more effective for being practiced in full awareness of the desire that animates it.

Brainwashing
Excised from official histories of the 'psy' sciences, the advent of 'brainwashing' as a moral panic and actual practice of Cold War culture has often been occluded and marginalised as a factor in the thinking of media operations. A marked preference for 'autonomous' rationality and a more recent taste for admitting to the mistaken nature of some of the more lurid claims of 'psy' sciences in the post-war period (still forgetting e.g. the atrocious popularity of the lobotomy as a medical technique after 1945) precludes an understanding of the more disturbing ways in which 'mind control' (appropriately divested of its conspiratorial overtones) insists on the basic categories of information and communication practice. Emerging in an era where the crucial political stake consisted in gaining legitimacy for one's own side, it was always the other who did the brainwashing. With the end of the Cold War we are free from the tiresome need for legitimacy and can admire all the more openly the sophistication of the techniques we have been using ourselves, from the suave euphemisms of the MBA to the 'flexibly specialised' brain training of the neurophysiologist to the ideal of the pure acts of mediality set in play by electromagnetic frequency weapons.

PsyOps and Information Warfare
Always having had a close, but largely undisclosed, relation to marketing, PsyOps, the Psychological Operations engaged in by the military, is a deserving topic in any study of evil media. Unconstrained by the idea that the recipients of its attentions or targets of its operations always had to be won over into buying or believing, it could render them free of the soldierly encumbrance of morale or the citizen's twitchy look-out for hidden menace. It has had more than its share of double agents, such as the 1940s Marxists of the British Army who used their position in Army Information to ready the troops not for the front, but for their return to a Britain apparently ready to install socialism.  Occupying a node and deviating its traffic is a classic form of operation for information warfare as the increasing number of secret state cyberespionage and sabotage networks attest.  Finding a vocabulary and techniques that work across the technical and the imaginary has been crucial to both of these fields and it offers an exemplary gesture for contemporary informatics strategies.

Crowdsourcing/Wikinomics
Or: how Silicon Valley and neo-liberalism discovered the collective. Adopting the less than subtle rhetorical procedure of flattery and creating a relationship within technology identical to that pertaining within public speaking between the orator and the multitude, current debates about "crowdsourcing", "collective intelligence" and the like achieve the remarkable trick of recuperating the wisdom of the crowd and the work that it can perform as an unexpected source of profit for the wisely cunning entrepreneur. Crowdsourcing is a panacea in our credit crunch times, offering maximum returns at a minimum outlay and building community into the bargain, a kind of benevolent corporate social work. But the position of the "we-thinker" is of course anything but collective and in this testifies to the remarkable magic tricks of the New Economy. Prestidigital media entrepreneurship is as extendable as the pre-requisite of peer production - bite-sized chunks of work carried out in one's own time, on one's own dime - and appears arbitrarily extendable beyond the pieties of private accumulation. Opening up the structuring of the work relation in crowdsourcing beyond its limitation within flattery, we explore the value of some more unruly tropes. 

Other Topics
There are a range of other practices, technologies and knowledges that we propose to give a 'stratagematic' transformation to, many of which will be familiar to anyone with a passing interest in or experience of digital media and/or contemporary corporate practice. Topics that we plan to discuss include: focus groups, user acceptance testing, response tracking software (Morae, eyetracking etc), a range of algorithms actively employed within commercial applications (queuing, scheduling, sorting); project development and planning technologies (Gantt charts, Prince 2, Microsoft Project); software development methodologies (Agile Development, Scrum, Extreme Programming); plagiarism and translation software. We see these practices, technologies and knowledges as critical in the ongoing redefinition of work as communication and communication as work. In each case our analysis and 'strategising' approach to dealing with the issues that it raises will aim to make perceptible the antagonism that the smooth facades of the 'recoding' and 'black-boxing' of work through media technics usually renders opaque.

Competing Titles and Market
As mentioned earlier in the Aims and Rationale section of this document, Evil Media situates itself in relationship to a range of publications that specialise in the development of challenging approaches to thinking about contemporary media and culture. We have outlined what we feel are both the shared concerns and the divergences between our work and this broader market of publications. Evil Media seeks more generally to capitalise on both the ongoing academic and non-academic appetite for theory within the area of digital media, art practice and cultural study, as well as the more popular interest in books able to debunk and demystify the technoscientific proliferation of jargon. Best-selling publications such as H.G Frankfurt's On Bullshit and Francis Wheen's How Mumbo-Jumbo Took Over The World demonstrate, albeit in a rather different way to the present text, that cutting through the opacity of overly specialised discourses of knowledge resonates powerfully in the book-reading public. Popular science and cultural history books such as Dominic Streatfield's Mind-Control and Richard Wiseman's Quirkology equally indicate the continuing appetite for books which delve into ignored or actively occluded aspects of enlightened Western culture, as does the more academic work of the likes of Lisa Blackman (Mass Hysteria) or Vinciane Despret (Emotional Makeup) on the legacy of experimental psychology and Mark Andrejevic's iSpy on media. The continuing interest in and popularity of short, inventive 'theory' texts exemplifed by the Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents series is indicative of the value of a non-monographical format for the exploration of challenging ideas. Within the university sector we see our book as having a market in a range of courses dealing with digital media, the new economy, information society across a wide range of disciplinary sectors. Equally, the practical emphasis of the book, focusing as it does on guidelines to and rules for action, with a preference for aesthetic activity, strongly recommends it for students on practice-based courses, particularly those working in the growing areas of new media art, media design or information management.