Production of Ignorance and Confusion

This Is a Generic Brand Video is a generic brand video of "This Is a Generic Brand Video," written by Kendra Eash for McSweeney's Internet Tendency. No surprise, it's made entirely with stock footage. All video clips used are from dissolve.com. See and license them here: http://www.dissolve.com/generic The original piece is published on McSweeney's: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/this-is-a-generic-brand-video Narrated by Dallas McClain.

Blind we are, if creation of corporate ignorance we could not see. Not if anything to say about it I have.

Cultural Production of Ignorance

Michael Hiltzik, writing for the L.A. Times:

“Robert Proctor doesn’t think ignorance is bliss. He thinks that what you don’t know can hurt you. And that there’s more ignorance around than there used to be, and that its purveyors have gotten much better at filling our heads with nonsense.

Proctor, a professor of the history of science at Stanford, is one of the world’s leading experts in agnotology, a neologism signifying the study of the cultural production of ignorance. It’s a rich field, especially today when whole industries devote themselves to sowing public misinformation and doubt about their products and activities.

The tobacco industry was a pioneer at this. Its goal was to erode public acceptance of the scientifically proven links between smoking and disease: In the words of an internal 1969 memo legal opponents extracted from Brown & Williamson’s files, “Doubt is our product.” Big Tobacco’s method should not be to debunk the evidence, the memo’s author wrote, but to establish a “controversy.””

Others are now using the old tobacco playbook. The powerful then exploit our ignorance. The dark side clouds everything. Impossible to see the future is.