Yesterday Eve posted a query about these strange, metallic-shiny door hangers that have recently been appearing around the Mission, all bearing the Miranda Rights warning, "Anything you say can and will be used against you." She wondered aloud if this was a teaser for some kind of viral marketing campaign, and I wondered if it was something creepier, or ominous. And thanks to the power of the internet, today we received the answer: It's art.
Local artist Brian Singer, a.k.a. SomeGuy, says that he's the culprit, and that the door hanger project "is part of a larger exploration around privacy, and how technology has changed our relationship with strangers." He's calling it a "social" art project, and it's certainly having the effect of people feeling creeped out and/or invaded on their front steps but the point he's making has more to do with social media, as he explains.
Our society used to burn witches and hang people because of the color of their skin. Now, we channel our anger and fear through entirely new means.
A woman tweets something while traveling, boards a plane, and by the time the plane lands she has been publicly humiliated and fired from her job. A man tells his friend a joke at a conference, a woman overhears it and tweets about it. The man loses his job. In the backlash that ensued, she was also fired.
We habitually take things out of context and jump to conclusions without the full story. We revel in the tearing down of others, and serve up mob justice for imaginary crimes. We shout, and rarely listen. Most important of all, we’re doing it to ourselves.
So he hates Twitter too! Singer references the same NYT Magazine piece I pointed back to in explaining my fatigue with Twitter, talking about the case of publicist Justine Sacco and her poorly conceived, tasteless joke about AIDS in Africa, which quickly got her fired and vilified across the internet.
What do you think? Have you gotten one of these door hangers? Does the explanation make it more interesting?
A couple more examples are below.
Photo: SomeGuy
