Duffco

Rafał Olbiński

THE FOLLOWING IMAGES ARE MISINFORMATION AND HAVE BEEN CANCELLED

BANNED BY INSTAGRAM!

Anatomy of a #cancelled image

This image was removed from Instagram, twice, within minutes of its posting. The image came about by accident, an unintended photo collage materializing in the virtual space of bogus procedures like “copy” and “paste.”

The image startled me. I don’t know what it means. Two months ago, the Ukrainian flag would have been unrecognizable. Now, paired with a wholesome advertisement for the militaristic American toy market, it serves as a denominator to the psychotic numerator of capitalism’s selling of war.

What do establishment minds like Zuckerberg find so disturbing about this graphic? The toy tank perfectly embodies mainstream American values: hyper-masculinity and jingoistic belligerence. Two red-blooded boys in a $400 Walmart tank. Against a flag of a country we couldn’t locate on a map, but now dearly love. A flag that serves as a gang sign, a brand logo for low information liberals and moralistic war enthusiasts.

The image may suggest that the real America is a merchandizer of murder to its children and practices a dubious selectiveness in its sympathies to foreign cultures.

The censor seeks to prevent cognitive dissonance in the public by banning ideas contrary to the narrative of American greatness. Images hinting at other motives for US actions contribute to anxiety and may lead to un-American thoughts.

We now have a Ministry of Truth, the federal “Disinformation Governance Board.” It is a sign of desperation in the field of perception management.

I don’t know what the tots-in-the-tank image says specifically to warrant Instagram’s banishment. The online liberal may be embarrassed to see the moral shabbiness of pimping war to kids. Or that nothing should obscure the innate holiness of Ukraine’s victimhood.

At a time when authority’s grip on legitimacy is loosening, even obtuse memes and hoary digital sight gags can be labeled misinformation and summarily disappeared.

SLIPJIG plays Irish music at the
MALT HOUSE on the fourth Tuesday of the month

Summer of 2021

FORGE
an art exhibit in the
Madison Brass Works Building

Makeshift at Olbrich Park

MUNICIPAL
an exhibit in the Municipal Building

Visit the Madison Underground

The F-35 fighter jet comes to Madison

a modest proposal

“We want Google to be the third half of your brain.”

― Sergey Brin

Illustrations for the Baffler magazine

Posters from Onadare's Malt House gigs

“Beginning in the 1980s and continuing since, the events of the 1960s and their participants have been ferociously converted into hollow caricatures, into objects of ridicule, demonization, and trivialization. But the extensiveness and malevolence of the historical falsifications are an index of the danger levels the culture of the 1960s posed, even in its afterlife.”

—Jonathan Crary

DEEP STATE

“The deep state is in fact not a conspiracy theory at all, but simply a concept used in political analysis for discussing the undeniable fact that unelected power structures exist in America, and that they tend to form alliances and work together in some sense. There is no denying the fact that plutocrats, intelligence agencies, defense agencies and the mass media are both powerful and unelected, and there is no denying the fact that there are many convoluted and often conflicting alliances between them. All that can be debated is the manner and extent to which this is happening.”

- Caitlin Johnstone

DEEP STATE

“a hybrid association of elements of government and top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process.”

- Mike Lofgren, a former Republican U.S. congressional aide