By (sic) opposition to postmodern pastiche, in which any sign can be juxtaposed with any other in a friction-free space, salvagepunk retains the specificity of cultural objects, even as it bolts them together into new assemblages. That’s precisely because salvagepunk is dealing with objects rather than signs
— Mark Fisher: Desecration Row, in The Wire 319, page 46

The Wire magazine, ear to the grounds of crit-think and artistic practice both, has astutely flagged salvagepunk as informing a breaking musical microtrend (works incorporating elements of Chris de Burgh’s Lady in Red are cited amongst the examples).

We predict that salvagepunk will break out of this music context, to become a key aesthetic for a new stage of post-postmodernism. The affordances of the internet will enable this to happen. That the first works informed by salvagepunk are musical is, we conject, due to music’s status as the popular art form access to the historical corpus of which has been most transformed by the internet. Other media, particularly time-based, will follow.

Here’s our thinking.

Kenny Goldsmith wrote of nude media — digitised content stripped of context. But: a denuded copy of a familiar song gives itself away by the patina of experience we individually and collectively attach to its content; still evokes time and place; is loaded with signs, a wingful of eyes.

For nude media to become amenable to salvage, there’s a harsher stripping-bare to be undertaken than that of which Goldsmith writes, subsequent to which salvage operations proper can begin — the calcination and burning off of, or turning-aside-from all signification, to locate the object as object, song as sound, form not even form, but shape.

Time can serve that function — the glories of the forgotten whitelabel in the dusty crate at Dalston Oxfam testify to that; but cultural Time is driven by the fidget wheels of Progress. There’s a gradient to cultural Time; the suck towards that compressive depth into which most of everything made, sinks, lost to salvage deep under the midden-heap of consumer culture disjecta.

The internet not only flattens that gradient, thus making findable nude media from everywhen; but often presents such already de-signified and in gorgeously ambiguous contextual conjunction.

If postmodernist aesthetics led to “everything the second time around, without the innocence“, salvagepunk perhaps points to the field of possibilities opened up to those who avail themselves of internet-mediated access to “everything around, still, forever, without the memories“. Not an overloaded gluing-together of the familiar, but a reconsideration of the utility for assemblages of everything — of a kind which can only be possible when everything is always to hand.

To our ears, cosmic disco god Daniele Baldelli’s 80s mixtapes are exemplars of proto-salvagepunk. Hunt them down online (not too hard a task), lean back and enjoy the sounds of his Opera Salvage.

The legendary information design theorist (and advisor to the Obama administration) is in London to promote his latest tome, Beautiful Evidence. We were lucky enough to get tickets for his talk at the Royal Geographical Society (along with apparently most of London’s geek population – talk about preaching to the converted).

Others have already transcribed his talk much better than we could have done, so we’ll stick to a few salient points. [Note: this is *very* hacked down for pertinence to this blog, hence the links to fuller notes and the full presentation at the bottom of the post].

Tufte on design …

The essential test of design is how well it assists the understanding of the content, not how stylish it is. You must understand the meaning of the content to design it. ‘Content indifference’ is the result of teaching that only design matters … Content matters! It’s a shame we live in a world where that counts as an insight.

On presenting and presentations …

There are two things you need to get across in a presentation – what the story is and why the audience should believe you.

On web design …

91 percent of pixels on the screen should be information.

On data visualisation …

It’s not a surface, it’s a depth.

At the end of the talk, we plucked up the courage to ask the great man a question. Asked what he thought about the current vogue for artists interpreting data with animations and so on, Tufte said, ‘I think they can do exactly what they please … one reason it’s alright is they’re not making other claims about the content, just using it as a found object. … I’ll stick with Matisse.’

Note: Lucy Spence’s brilliant sketch notes of the talk are on flickr whilst Intelligence Squared – who hosted the event – have a pay-per-view stream.

• 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.
• more than 8 in 10 online news consumers get or share links in emails.
• a third of cellphone users access news on their phones.

Pew’s analysis of this situation is that:

People’s experience of news, especially on the internet, is becoming a shared social experience as people swap links in emails, post news stories on their social networking site feeds, highlight news stories in their Tweets, and haggle over the meaning of events in discussion threads.

Locked down, pay-walled content is more or less shut out of this conversation — after all, how many ‘subscription required’ links have you forwarded to your mates or colleagues lately or posted to Facebook? Worse still, the research further reveals that only 17% of Americans read news in a national newspaper on a typical day. So, as physical newspaper reading wanes, many newspaper companies are actively shutting themselves out of the online ecosystem by pursuing a pay-per-view or subscription model. Smart.

There are lots of pieces which pass the kid test at this year’s Kinetica art fair at P3 in Marylebone. Special props go to Squidsoup‘s Ocean of Light, a startlingly beautiful ‘dynamic light sculpture’ that reacts to music. We can see all kinds of amazing artistic and commercial applications for this piece, not least in live performance. Bjork, get in touch! Cinimod Studio‘s Flutter which produces a rabble of virtual butterflies is also charming and effective — a real example of how digital art can be humanised. On the more Dorkbot-esque side of things, Monomatic’s P.E.A.L. replicates bell ringing with tubes of light, lasers and a iPhone remote (note, expect to see A LOT more iPhone remote controlled applications).

The fair also has some neat examples of first generation hacker art, such as Miss Rosa Bosom, a robot created by Bruce Lacey which won the Alternative Miss World in 1985 and SAM, a sound reactive cybernetic sculpture from 1968 by the late Edward Ihnatowicz. As an argument for the continued importance and relevance of digital and electronic art (are you listening, ICA?), Kinetica 2010 makes a pretty compelling case.

“I had a childhood fantasy of having a tea shop with mismatched cups” — Tony Hornecker

Click to play slideshow.

[Photos © 2009 Darrell Berry]

BST: What is the concept behind Fire & Knives?

TIM HAYWARD: Mainstream food media have become immensely ‘lifestyle’. I knew loads of food writers who just couldn’t get longer form, intelligently written pieces commissioned anymore. I also knew, through social media, hundreds of food lovers who couldn’t find anything interesting to read anymore.

Pulling it together — particularly using digital printing, a distributed ‘zine’-style production team and using social media to build audience — was pretty much a no-brainer. That’s as high a concept as I can give you.

How is Fire & Knives different from mainstream foodie fayre such as Observer Food Monthly?

The traditional food magazines rely entirely on advertising. They will increase (or at least try to maintain) revenue if they can expand their audience from a special interest group to those with a marginal interest or, indeed, those attracted to celebrities and their opinions on food.

The result is an unavoidable dumbing down and celebrity focus. It’s now too late for any of those mags to go to a subscription funded model. With no advertising, our subscriptions pay for the printing and production. We don’t have to worry about how wide our audience is or their demographics — it’s only advertising that requires that. The magazine is as big as the audience want it to be. So we’re really growing, building and attracting an audience rather than seeking one out and attempting to address it. It’s the opposite of ‘focus-group’ thinking and that has to be the first time that’s happened in years.

Why start a food magazine, particularly now when magazines are closing down?

I think the magazine world is in uproar because the model of a mag involves 20 staff, an office, advertising revenue to pay them and a marketing function to attract both advertisers and audience. There’s no other way — until you look at ‘zine world and realise there are kids putting together creditable magazines with pocket change. The way Big Mags are heading now they are inevitably leaving behind a valuable audience and talented writers.

Can you explain a bit about Fire & Knives’ distinctive design?

Rob Lowe. Rob worked on Sleaze Nation and combines design and illustration skills with years of magazine experience. Rob and Cathy Olmedillas form Present Joys who are responsible for the design. I gave him an odd brief — all my favourites for the last year from ffffound.com stuck into an apple-printed booklet — and asked him to make something of it. The result is superb. He hit it on the button first time. That logo would have looked great on a government information pamphlet in the 40′s, on a packet of cheap Canadian bacon in the ’70′s and it looks fantastic on a T–shirt today.

What are the criteria for contributors?

We’re looking for new writers who may not have been in print before, for established writers with a story they can’t sell elsewhere and for writers in other fields who might bring a new perspective to food. Most importantly we’re looking for the tonality of the true ‘amateur’ — in the sense of ‘one who loves’ food — rather than a connnoisseur or ‘one who knows’. I guess the other important thing is that we are interested in British food. We are getting in touch with our own food culture now and it’s time we stood by it. Finally… no recipes or celebrity stories — others do that better.

Are there plans beyond a printed magazine? Or is the intention to keep it simple and focused?

Print only. All the way. We can build fame online but we can only establish value for the written word and the photograph, in print. The brand might expand into other things but the mag stays in print forever.

As a blogger yourself, do you think that there is a revival in writing for passion rather than purely profit?

I’m certainly finding that writers now — both the the new writers who’ve come through new media, blogging and the like and the traditional writers who get what’s going on — are aware of the importance of their personal brand. It’s great getting paid to write but if unpaid media are the only place to show your potential then you need to balance both. I regard our writers as a key audience too. They need to know they are being showcased at their best. We make sure their stories look great and are circulated to a list of influential people with commissioning power.

Of what other trends do you think Fire & Knives is representative?

I guess a growing confidence in British food culture, a revival in specialist print publishing, media properties that grow online but monetise offline and a trend for creatives taking control of their medium and speaking directly to an audience they know.

We at BST are delighted to have contributed a photo story about legendary pop-up restaurant The Pale Blue Door for the first issue. Fire & Knives is available via subscription from fireandknives.com. Article pitches should be sent to submissions[at]fireandknives[dot]com

• Accessories
• Age Inappropriate
• Annoying Descriptions
• Art
• Baby
• Bad Poetry
• Bathroom
• Cats
• Clocks and Watches
• Clothing
• Copyright Infringements
• Dead Things
• Decor
• Decorative Pillows
• Dolls
• Edible
• Fairies
• Garbage
• Garden and Outdoor
• Glassware
• Hats
• Holidays
• Jewelry
• Jews
• Kitchen
• Mailbag
• Michael Jackson
• Needlework
• News
• Not Remotely Handmade
• Paper Goods
• Penises
• Pet Humiliation
• Regretsy Math
• Self-Gratification
• Soap
• Spelling Issues
• Toys
• Twilight
• Vaginas

Pictured: Kitten Head on Amputee painting. Yours for a mere $99,000 and — bizarrely — still available.

But sometimes, ideas are appropriated for campaigns without the consent of their creators. Consent can, at first glance, seem a particularly grey area for street art, say, or activist content. After all, if you’ve gifted an idea to the commons without a clearly-stated and enforceable license in place, what right have you to complain if that idea gets spotted by an agency and used to sell, say, soft drinks. Or indeed, sports shoes?

Consider, for example, Chalkbot — a robot which writes messages in chalk on the road as it bumps along behind another vehicle. You can send Chalkbot tweets, you can text it, you can probably email it. And whatever you send, ends up on the road, writ large in chalk. Chalkbot is cool. Geek cool. As we understand it, Chalkbot was developed by DeepLocal, and, via ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, is being used by Nike as part of its brand tie-up with the LIVESTRONG campaign of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, at the Tour de France (yes this can get confusing).

We first heard about Chalkbot on Twitter today. But actually, no — we didn’t first hear of it today. We first saw the technology demonstrated a few years back, at a Dorkbot event in London. The project was called StreetWriter, and its creators were a group of highly technical activists called the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA). Not just cool, StreetWriter was also political. Watch the video.

Chalkbot isn’t StreetWriter. Although based on IAA’s work, Chalkbot is far from political. It’s commercial. It’s also built, in part, by former IAA members. Nothing wrong with that in itself. DeepLocal present their version of its history on their website [thanks to Nathan at DeepLocal for providing us with that link in response to my earlier shoutout on Twitter].

Crucially, however, Nike and W+K’s press releases apparently make no mention of their robot’s activist ancestry.

Our problem with that? One word: Attribution — a key concern of us commons-loving content-creators. Play, mix, mash-up, create using what we’ve made, but give credit where credit’s due: show respect to those who came before, on whose ideas you build. This is simple: even leaving aside the politics, Nike should be putting some more love out. It seems the IAA shares our views on this. In the past hour or so, they’ve issued a press release which details their dissatisfaction with Nike’s appropriation of their work. Read it. Respond as you see fit.

This story is developing. We’ll keep you posted as and when Nike or its agencies make any public response.

The installation is the product of Hear Colours who worked with a number of different artists to produce the work. We spoke to one of them, avant garde artist Patrycja Grimm.

BST: How did your involvement in Face On come about?

PATRYCJA: I got involved in the project through a friend who recommended me as I was often in an audio visual environment and would wear colourful faces and costumes on a daily basis.

I use my face as an alternative surface on which to paint; I experiment with colors, shapes, decorative writing and tagging the skin. Through this I’m looking for a more graphical way of reflecting my own personal being away from the traditional use of beauty make up.

As I grew more experienced I found people’s response to my self-expressed exhibition very positive, and this soon lead me to be invited into professional collaborations like the Face On project with Nicola Romanini.

What are your ambitions for the project?

The aim was to create animation with expandin face-paintings and also capture facial expressions to use as samples for each of the sensors that the public will activate. With Nic’s agreement my proposal was to implement tribal designs from Kabuki, the Congo, Kathakali, and Papua New Guinea — as these are disappearing arts, along with more contemporary face-paints — such as clowns, pierrot, and some modifications with free-styling. It was a great opportunity to combine my need to paint with video art and interactive installation.

With these designs I wanted to reflect the subjects impression, aura, as well as their natural qualities and energies.

The project is visually stunning, but what — other than spectacle — do you hope people will take away from it?

From my personal point of view, I think Face On has good potential for interactivity which brings about a great joy of discovery.

As well as making people perform, The Mask brings a relaxed confidence about their own image which can now be used as a canvas for a visual game and hopefully reflection on our appearance in the era of absolute conformism.

Face On will be at the Glastonbury Festival 26-28th June and Glade Festival 16-19th July.

Duckie is every Saturday at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern.

[Photos ©2009 by Darrell Berry]

BST: Why are you holding AMW this year?

ANDREW LOGAN: Jes Benstock of Living Cinema shot the last event but didn’t have enough money to edit. So he then raised money with a new idea which was to take it right back to 1972 and to show how culturally it had influenced so many people and things. With me, I suppose, at the head of it. It is very much a family and friends thing. Very family-orientated but absolutely huge at the same time.

Can anyone enter?

Yes. I think we have 19 or 20 entrants this year.

What are the criteria for entry?

The contestants kind of find their way there. We don’t have auditions. It’s about transformation. Of course, it would be nice to have hundreds of people. But it’s quite tight and everyone takes 2 minutes on stage. And if you’ve got 20 people on stage that takes an hour. It kind of limits itself — finds its own level.

Can you confirm who the judges are this year?

We’ve got Ken Russell, Zandra Rhodes, Richard O’Brien, Tim Curry, Amy Lamé, and Betty — my housekeeper of many many years. And Tony Elliott. And then Philip Hughes who gave me a wonderful show up in Ruthin Craft Centre up in North Wales and he also published the book on my work. Altogether there are about twelve.

[The judges tend to be] the kind of people I’ve been involved with. And people that I admire. I’m not into names, names mean nothing to me. It’s just a bit of paper. That’s not the point of it.

You’ve described AMW as a family affair. Can you explain a bit more about that?

My brother Quentin has been in quite a few now. And my sister has been in every one. My mother judged it a number of times. My brother Peter used to the music and him and his wife — they both entered it. It was in 1973, when Derek [Jarman] shot it. Peter was doing the music so he had to get up — as the music was playing, walk up and down. It has always been a family thing.

Where do the similarities to Miss World start and end?

Contestants have a questionnaire which they fill in. Daywear-swimwear-eveningwear. Great isn’t it? It’s three outfits. It’s also fantastic to have an interview. It’s such a simple idea really — we just enlarged on that. In 1972 Miss World was huge in the UK, like it is in India is now. Every household watched it. Every household! No one escaped it.

Crufts Dog Show was the real inspiration. I’d been to Crufts Dog Show and we had one of the forms, for the dogs. Which kind of inspired the form for AMW.

There have been several films made already of the contest. Can you tell us a bit about the film that was made of the 1978 contest?

[The director Richard Gayor] was interested in disappearing tribes — so he chose us. He had been to 1975 so wanted to film 1978 and actually made a very beautiful movie. That’s the movie you should see. It’s about the event and the build up. It was the first time that 35mm handheld cameras had been used in this country and it was lit beautifully. Very sensitively done. I remember the credits — they said the AMW in mirror pieces. We laid it out on velvet and threw it up in the air and then reversed it. It produced a wonderful, magical movie and it’s timeless. You look at it and you wouldn’t really know it was 1978.

This year’s theme is The Elements. Can you tell us about how the themes work?

[The central theme of transformation] is timeless. There is a continuum between this generation of contestants and previous ones. Sometimes, I’m sitting there and someone comes out and I think — I’ve seen this before. Of course I don’t say that — I smile and applaud. Of course I’ve seen it before — there are only so many things you can do with the human body. Even though some of the transformations are absolutely fantastic.

There is always a theme. But I don’t know what the contestants are going to come as. I have the form, I read out the name and the description of the outfit and we do that all the way through the performance.

When you launched AMW the UK was in recession — and now we are again. It seems that AMW comes back whenever we need it most.

When I started the event and as it unfolded, I saw more and more that I wanted to continue with this event ‘til I dropped dead — brought in on a wheelchair. It’s fascinating that the format remains exactly the same and yet you get these things that happen. We had the war in ‘82- that was Miss Aldershot [who won]. There was punk in ‘75 — that was shot by Mike Ballard — the art editor for Interview, Andy Warhol’s magazine. The Alternative Miss World seems to indicate what is happening — or what is going to happen.

What’s the most surprised you’ve been by what someone came out wearing?

I think it might have been before someone came out. And it was my friend, the late, great Divine. I met him through Zandra and he came to the Alternative Tower of London. It was 1977 — it was the Queen’s Jubilee and we had a day-long party and he came to that. We became firm friends and he co-hosted the 1978 event.

I was getting ready in a caravan at the back because it was being held in a circus tent. I’d only ever seen him as a man — as Glenn. And a door opened and there… was Divine. He said, The look on your face, I’ll never forget it. I was a bit surprised.

Most of the others… Ok. When the donkey fell of the catwalk. That was a surprise to me. The donkey was the throne because it was in a circus. The donkey was fine because he fell on all these soft contestants in their outfits. I really wanted to have an elephant but it’s a good thing we didn’t because if that had fallen on the contestants it would have been most unfortunate. The whole thing is about surprises — you never know what will happen. All you can do is stand there and let the thing unfurl.

This year, a lot of health and safety seems to have crept in. however, it means that you have to use your imagination even more — so if you can’t use fire — what will I use? The postitive effect is that it stretches the imagination even more.

I remember the last contest drew some controversy because the then director of the Royal Academy – Sir Norman Rosenthal – took part.

Norman’s great fun. He got some artists to help him out, including Sarah Lucas. He didn’t win, by the way.

Do you see AMW as anti-establishment?

It’s what people make it. I just put it on — that’s it. I leave all the interpretation to others.

Other than the films, what other documentation do you have of previous contests?

Each contestant before they go on is photographed. So we have a documentation right back to the beginning. David Bailey came one year — he did 1973 — and took some pictures. That documentation is really important.

I want to do a book of these wonderful images. I have everything here. I’m just waiting for someone to come along and say they’d like to do an AMW book which I’d be very happy with.

You’ve mentioned Piers Atkinson whose work is currently part of the Stephen Jones hat exhibition at the V&A. Do you feel like AMW has nurtured talents like his?

Piers started here in 1995 for the Fire AMW. He’s actually here [in the studio] today. He’d just left college and came up and helped me work on the contestant numbers that they wear.

We have all these funny little customs and you need someone to help out with them. He worked with me for a number of years and then went on to work with Zandra. He did Daily Rubbish for Fashion Week and now he’s producing a souvenir programme for AMW.

Have you ever held AMW outside of London?

It’s very English but I’ve negotiated many times over the years to get it held someone else in the world. Places such as Japan, America — which was going to be a huge tour of all the big cities of America. Fantastic! Well, that didn’t happen.

And India but then a man set himself alight for Miss World. And we thought, well it might be a bit difficult — they might get a bit muddled up… I would love to take it somewhere else. We have many Russians coming this year if we can get their visas sorted out.

I think AMW is very English but it would transfer somewhere else but it’s never had the opportunity.

To conclude, can you tell me a bit about Andrew Logan?

I was trained as an architect. I think I am very different from any other artist anyhow. I think my work is unique. There’s no one else working like I do. I just happen to be based in London. But I am a great traveller. If I wasn’t an artist I think I would have been a traveller.

[Thanks to Andrew and his team for the interview and photo access. AMW 2009 - The Elements, is at the Roundhouse, 2 May 2009. Book tickets here. Jes Benstock's film, The British Guide To Showing Off, is due for release later this year]

But, eclectic music lovers, ignore — if you can — the tribes of wannabe Broadway Market coffee-shop hipsters, avert your gaze from the Friday-night mobs of Fulham-ite boys and trustafarian girls on Kingsland Road, and add ‘E8‘ right at the top of your list of ‘must-visit’ London postcodes. Cafe Oto is a Wire magazine-reader’s dream of a venue, legendary jazz bar The Vortex is now ensconced in Gillett Square; and over the past couple of years the fire-trap basements of Shacklewell have hosted, for those in the know, the best underground parties in town. The most famous night to emerge from that scene is Disco Bloodbath, justly fêted for great sound, below-any-radar vibes, a friendly, mixed crowd and (need we say it) disco, disco, disco.

Now the people behind DBB have teamed up with the creators of legendary Shoreditch club Trailer Trash (which has just celebrated its fifth birthday), to build a brand new café/bar/venue — Dalston Superstore — which officially opens this week, just north of the Rio Cinema.

We’re tipping the Superstore as a landmark new venue for East London clubland, and caught up with DBB’s Dan Beaumont to ask him a few questions about the venture:

BST: Who’s involved in the Superstore?

DAN BEAUMONT: This is a joint venture between me and the Trailer Trash boys. We’ve been looking to start our own venue for a few years now — it’s just taken a long time to find the perfect spot!

You’ve got a pretty eclectic mix of people involved, from both sides of the disco/electro divide. How did you all end up working together on this?

We’ve all known each other for quite a while. I’m not sure there’s really a ‘divide’ as such — there’s loads of cross-pollination between the various subcultures of East London. Disco and electro are really just two sides of the same coin.

Why Dalston? Why now?

When we started Disco Bloodbath in Dalston we realised how many people live around here with nowhere to go. Shoreditch has become so saturated with bridge and tunnel that loads of interesting, creative and socially adventurous people have ended up around here.

The Dalston scene has been very much about underground parties at secret venues. How does it feel to be building a ‘proper’ venue from scratch, that’s actually on the map!? Do you think this is the end of the Dalston Underground, or will you still be doing basement parties as well?

We’ll always aim to showcase varied and cutting edge music. That’s all we can really aim to do. In terms of what is or isn’t ‘underground’ that’s not really for us to judge. The only way we can move forward is to keep music at the forefront of our venue. We’re not really interested in chasing trends — if you start down that road you can never win!

Which parties will we see running nights at the Superstore? Who would you most love to have behind the decks for a one-off?

At the moment we’re taking it one week at a time! We’ll obviously be throwing Trailer Trash and Bloodbath flavoured parties but we’ll also be showcasing local heroes, established DJs and upcoming talent. We’ve already got a few of our favourites pencilled in… you’ll have to wait and see who they are!

We tipped up at Hot Boy Dancing Spot’s hardhat-and-hi-viz-themed pre-pre-pre-launch party at the Superstore at the weekend. Still a building site, the space worked brilliantly (though some aircon downstairs would be a blessing!). We’re looking forward to the finished product.

[Big thanks to Dan for this interview. Photo © Darrell Berry. And, yes, that's a picture of someone flaunting power tools on a dancefloor...]

Google ‘amazonfail’ for the developing story, or check this nice summary post from the National Post for background. Fittingly, we first heard of Amazon’s actions via author Hari Kunzru, on FaceBook (thanks for the tip!)

Amazon’s first statement claimed that the de-ranking was the result of a ‘policy decision’. However, as we go ‘to press’ (as making a fresh pot of coffee and curling back up in bed with the laptop is referred to, in blogging circles), the bookseller appears to have changed that position. Its updated statement is so tepid and vague (“There was a glitch with our sales rank feature that is in the process of being fixed…”), that we’re guessing the PR agency has taken Easter off, leaving Amazon to crisis-manage for itself. Ouch. Would love to eavesdrop on that conference call tomorrow morning….

Although this story has been picked up by the US-based culture blogs and mainstream press, we’ve seen no mention of it ‘above ground’ in the UK. Maybe UK media journalists are also having a long lie in today, rather than doing their jobs?

Regardless of Amazon’s final response (which needs to be significantly more credible than its efforts so far), plenty damage has been done to the brand, amongst communities which know how to organise, and that understand the strength of collective action. A glimpse of that strength came last night, when, within a few short hours, a word-of-mouth googlebombing campaign successfully dislodged Amazon’s own definition of its precious sales ranking system on Google. An Amazon-critical alternative definition of Amazon Rank now tops search rankings in the US and UK.

Online, the ‘hacklash’ continues: there’s an open call out for an amazonfail logo, to replace Amazon widgets and links removed by site-owners in solidarity with the ongoing protests. Expect more creative activism in the same vein, over the coming hours and weeks. Until, in fact, Amazon actually comes clean, credibly and openly, about what, exactly, just happened. The longer that communication is delayed, the more damage will be done to the brand. Through social media, communities organise and engage in real-time. Brand-owners must respond likewise.

Whoever it was, a few years back, who said we should stop belittling people’s power by calling them ‘consumers’ and start respecting them as ‘amplifiers’, got it so right. We’re going to hunt his book down. But not on Amazon.

[UPDATE 13 April, 15:15. As of this writing, this post is top-ranked on Google UK search for 'amazonfail'. If Amazon and its PR agency do care about social media engagement, we're easy for them to find, and would love to hear from them.]