Shamans in ancient societies traded their powers for social prestige. Amerika the "techno-shaman" does the same, knowing that commodification as a celebrity is the form that such prestige takes in the world today. All the cool new aesthetic strategies of the postmodern world–appropriation, remixing, unlimited digital reproduction, synaesthetic convergence, and so on–are revolutionary tools for the production of new modes of consciousness. But it’s precisely because of this fact--and not in spite of it--that these strategies are also the means for creeping commercialization. After all, if the techno-shaman’s methods weren’t so powerful, we wouldn’t have to worry about multinational corporations scheming to control them.
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