"You're welcome." Screencap from MoveOn.org's Message From the Future.
The same technology that will, in the future, allow malign corporate conglomerates to project personalized mind-control messages onto your eyelids while you sleep — all because you clicked that ALLOW button on Facebook — is now being used by MoveOn.org to deliver the most innovative use of personalized content I’ve seen yet.
MoveOn’s “Message From the Future” is a short video distributed via Facebook and MoveOn’s website; it uses individual information from Facebook profiles to integrate photos, names and other information into a stark sci-fi warning of what the future will look like if you — personally! — don’t vote today.
Even better, this Rock the Vote message with a hell of a sense of humor. It creates a paranoid portrait of an ultrapersonalized-depersonalized Republican Corporatist future that only reminds me how unbelievably milktoast most progressive voices are in this country. Instead of preaching “bipartisan cooperation” and “meaningful dialogue,” MoveOn lays down a worst case scenario that’s as bizarre and overstated as it is uproariously funny.
But apart from its innovative use of personalized profile content, what makes MoveOn’s Message From the Future interesting is its focus on the very marketing-focused corporate culture that makes videos like this possible.
In the video’s worldview, the Corporatist takeover is the force that eliminates individual power. This fear of corporations taking on their own Fascistic personalities is a hallmark of 1980s cyberpunk works, which were created when the sort of personalized content offered by social networking was nothing more than a pipe dream.
How fascinating to see the tools of the future’s oppressor turned into a tongue-in-cheek apocalypse.
Obviously, the video’s message only applies directly to voters in the U.S. elections held today, but citizens of other nations (and those stripped of voting rights for whatever reason) may find it just as amusing.