The aforementioned Tango Song was something I purchased on a whim. My physical Crowley collection is light, and I normally don't indulge in the ultra-obscure items. I have been a little intrigued of Crowley from a literary perspective—or at least his literary ambitions. After acquiring the Tango Song, and having read the short play and sheet music, I did a little research on it, which was when the algorithm delivered me the Marc Almond cover. The top link for this came from Dangerous Minds and was written by Jason Louv.

Jason was an intern and former employee of the Disinformation Company, which Richard Metzger co-founded. For those of you that have known me for a while, you'll recall that the "pre" and early Key 23 days were filled with cross-associations with Disinfo readers and employees. Jason—whom I visited in Brooklyn on two separate occasions—donated a few articles to us, and prior to establishing Key 23, I had interviewed Metzger for my Mad Ghoul site, and then later donated that interview to Key 23.

The home page to Dangerous Minds had been sparsely updated for a while with posts slowing to a crawl. At the time that I grabbed the link for the Marc Almond cover, Metzger had posted about the slowdown with a few paragraphs amounting to: everything on the Internet sucks.

The glory days of the internet are long over. It had a good run, but it’s done.

[…]

[…] When everyone got online in the mid-90s, it was fun and wild and fascinating. New and novel experiences awaited. Fast forward to today and the World Wide Web is sadly akin to a selfie and meme-filled version of WALL-E’s junkyard planet or an ocean full of plastic bottles and other human-created detritus. A friend of mine once described what we did at Dangerous Minds as “panning for Internet gold” but I told him I thought it was more like spelunking in a dank cave, standing in a river of shit wearing hip-high waders and a gas mask.

This, of course, is wonderfully high prose crafted as a lead-in to a new venture. Metzger just recently announced his "Magick Show" which seems to be a documentary that will finalize itself in the form of a Kickstarter, and involves the usual suspects of Disinfomation friends and fiends, including Douglas Rushkoff and Grant Morrison.

I like Metzger but…

Can you spot the real content vs. the advertising?

Not only that, but the original announcement linked over to everyone's favorite comic book news troll Rich Johnston.

How about this ad on Bleeding Cool?

If everything sucks on the Internet, the primary reason is the consistent push to monetize every single bit and byte. The very data spelunking, meme generating, influence peddling that Metzger rails about is a direct result of the monetizing of the Internet—especially through advertising and marketing. Seems very hypocritical to me to admonish the Internet as crap when the very design of your own pet project minimizes the font of the content in favor of freeing up more advertising space. But I get it, it's cool to trash the status quo, and you got to get out in front of the anti-modern Internet subculture to make them aware of your warez, and continue in the counterculture couture as a in-group figure.

Harnessing Kickstarter itself is an interesting choice since originally Kickstarter was meant for independent artists and creators to gain funding for their projects outside of the venture capital world. Many in the comic book industry started to complain when actual publishing houses like Top Cow started using Kickstarter as a way to pre-fund some comic book releases instead of relying on their own profits. Metzger touts himself as a successful publisher, but is using a platform meant for rising creators to subsidize risk. I just remember Nick Pell (before his alt-right turn) detailing a conversation he had with Metzger at a DisInfo event where Metzger talked about his six Paul Laffoley art pieces. At the time, these were valued at about $100,000 a piece.

I'm being overly hypercritical and I know. I like Metzger. He's always been on the right side of the evolving outsider culture, and I've no reason to assume purposeful hypocrisy. In fact—considering the founding and devolution of the Disinformation Company—Metgzer was likely the one genuine person in that management group. But I would be fooling myself not to point out that Disinfo launched by comparing itself to MTV but for technology (Metzger's own repeated story: "It'll be just like MTV, I kept saying"), before trying to be a counterculture Google search, before trying to be a counterculture Digg, before… well, I lost touch after that, but they eventually folded. Along the way there was a convention, a very short television series, a number of smaller talks, and a pretty solid book publishing business that focused significantly on anthologies for a while. Most of those twists and turns were following the trend at the time (other than the media portion, which was an expansion). They were a brand—a niche slowly relying too much on their audience to do the work.

This isn't to disparage DinInfo either. Without Disinfo I doubt I would have know about Paul Laffoley, and my introduction to Douglas Rushkoff would have been way late in the game. I can sit here and look at my Chicago Press art book of Laffoley's work and admire it. Laffoley himself was the keynote speaker of the first Esozone event in Portland back in the 2000's, which was a conference (and later an unconference) that spun out of Key 23.

Metzger was smart enough to get out early and started Dangerous Minds. Again, one of the few genuine people in my opinion. That's why I was disappointed to see the overemphasis on ad placement (and I get that the bills have to be paid), but even more so to read a post that lacked the self-awareness to see its own contributions to the very thing it was in arms about (I'm also not absolved from such contributions).

This is not unique, and it's actually somewhat of a catch-22 that rears its head at every counterculture, subgenre, or anti-establishment initiative. Post-punk industrial music history is filled with bands telling interviewers that they don't create music for an audience; They just create what they want to hear. This is fine, but eventually you have to eat food and pay the mortgage, so you certainly need to create something that sells.

You don't need my economic analysis (at least not in this post), but much of our current plight is a direct result of business leaders not actually reading Adam Smith (just the Cliff's Notes). Today's corporatist world lacks the balance of finance, land, and labor that capitalist economic theory originally emphasized. It's all finance now. Money people making money off of money—draining value instead of providing any… and these are our current economic leaders.

See. I'm just as much a curmudgeon as Metzger, so don't take my rants with any seriousness.

I'm complaining, but don't take that as a review. I do suggest you check out the "Magick Show" and back it when it launches on Kickstarter. I'll certainly back it. The world needs more against-the-grain thinking, and if Metzger is good at one thing, it's shaping the image of a scene into something that the youth see as niche, cool, and worthy of attention. If that isn't enough to convince you to follow the project, just take a gander at the DisInfo television series and the DisInfo.Con conference. Both are currently available on Night Flight Plus, which is a zero ad, low-cost streaming service that speaks to the heart of the counterculture, 80's children, and the weirdo in all of us.

I highly suggest you check out the Kickstarter for "Magick Show". You can watch the trailer below: