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forms of ideological oppositions. In the end it became, and it is
this mockery that present day advertisers use as a jemmy, the
opposition of boring normality against the coolly different -
revolutionaries were the cool sect.

The mainstream media now grounds its operations in the
production of maximized untypicality; on any single evening it is
possible to find on TV celebratory reference to cannabis, sexual
fetishism, independent pop music, spiced and groovy foods,
stylized homes and gardens. It is assumed that normality is now
individualized, there is a background of millions of people going off
backpacking to faraway places, people are young, they are funky,
they want more than their parents had, more in the sense of
different. Very amusing and slightly embarrassing but nonetheless
not at all revolutionary. and so the pro-revolutionary, operating
with the Sixties legacy of IT, OZ, The SI and within the
cultural/ideological sphere, must push it further: pirate radio,
webcasts, clubnights (there are more leaflets given out at Reclaim
The Streets events for raves than political positions); the real
thing, that is, the subjective conditioning and autonomous
production of non-conformity must be even more cutting edge,
more knowing and more stylistically radical than the latest Ball and
Theakston product. Unfortunately, 'style', the production of
stylization, is dependent on who has the best video editing
technology; so the BBC, the not so stuffy any more BBC(the BBC
of The Love Parade Great Britain) can now produce images,
sequences, cultural products that outstrip the efforts of any pro-
revolutionary and his photocopier in radicality of form. Thus the
efforts of RTS to parody The London Evening Standard and
Monopoly seem rather tame and formally conservative.

Imagination is taking power used to be a slogan of the libertarian
left as it role-played a series of surface oppositions that portrayed
the establishment as inhibitive and itself as carnival harlequin; now
imagination is in power, it has be recruited through a
maximization of the role of the culture industry through lottery
funding, 24 hour broadcast media, the internet, and the
manufacture of celebrity as a product but nothing could be duller
than our bungee-jump society created out of the unholy union of
capital and radical imagination. The preference for extreme, to the
max entertainment has something Roman about it but it remains
spectacular, that is beyond critique or engagement.