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February 03, 2007
Berdovsky and Stevens: radicals or posers?
Taking in the gallons of ink and hours of airtime devoted to this week's Boston's Aqua Teen debacle, I note that there was endless discussion of the cultural divide between paranoid straight people who saw a circuit board covered in lights and saw a terrorist device and hip po-mo 20-somethings who immediately recognized the signs as a clever bit of viral marketing, but very little discussion of a more subtle and interesting difference of opinion.
This debate is between those who think the ATHF signs are a great bit of sticking it to the Man, and the sub-sulture of REAL guerilla and illegal artists, who have been risking arrest for years and think the whole ATHF sign-placing prank is just another example of corporate advertising perpetrated by a couple of wanna-be posers.
Props to a couple of sites who have been looking into that side of things...
BoingBoing, who brought that up in their very first post about the signs.
Weekend America's(*) web producer Neille Ilel, who discusses the illegal art vs. poser debate on Weekend America's website.
(*)Full disclosure: I work for American Public Media, which makes Weekend America.
Posted by Chris Spurgeon at February 3, 2007 09:57 AM