In THE INVISIBLE GENERATION first published in IT and in the Los Angeles Free Press in 1966 and reprinted in THE JOB, I consider the potential of thousands of people with recorders, portable and stationary, messages passed along like signal drums, a parody of the President's speech up and down the balconies, in and out open windows, through walls, over courtyards, taken up by barking dogs, muttering bums, music, traffic down windy streets, across parks and soccer fields. Illusion is a revolutionary weapon:

TO SPREAD RUMOURS Put ten operators with carefully prepared recordings out at rush hour and see how quick the words get around. People don't know where they heard it but they heard it.

TO DISCREDIT OPPONENTS Take a recorded Wallace speech, cut in stammering coughs sneezes hiccoughs snarls pain screams fear whimperings apoplectic sputterings slobbering drooling idiot noises sex and animal sound effects and play it back in the streets subway stations parks political rallies.

AS A FRONT LINE WEAPON TO PRODUCE AND ESCALATE RIOTS There is nothing mystical about this operation. Riot sound effects can produce an actual riot in a riot situation. RECORDED POLICE WHISTLES WILL DRAW COPS. RECORDED GUNSHOTS, AND THEIR GUNS ARE OUT.

"MY GOD, THEY'VE KILLING US." A guardsman said later: "I heard and saw my buddy go down, his face covered in blood (turned out he'd been hit by a stone from a sling shot) and I thought, well this is it." BLOODY WEDNESDAY. A DAZED AMERICA COUNTED 23 DEAD AND 32 WOUNDED, 6 CRITICALLY.

Here is a run of the mill, pre-riot situation. Protesters have been urged to demonstrate peacefully, police and guardsmen to exercise restraint. Ten tape recorders strapped under their coats, playback, and record controlled from lapel buttons. They have prerecorded riot sound effects from Chicago, Paris, Mexico City, Kent/Ohio. If they adjust sound levels of recordings to surrounding sound levels, they will not be detected. Police scuffle with the demonstrators. The operators converge. turn on Chicago record, play back, move on to the next scuffles, record playback, keep moving. Things are hotting up, a cop is down groaning. shrill chorus of recorded pig squeals and parody groans.

Could you cool a riot by recording the calmest cop and the most reasonable demonstrator? Maybe! However, it's a lot easier to start trouble that to stop it. Just pointing out that cut/ups on the tape recorder can be used as a weapon. You'll observe that the operators are making a cutup as they go. They are cutting in Chicago, Paris, Mexico City, Kent Ohio with the present sound effects at random and that is a cutup.

AS A LONG RANGE WEAPON TO SCRAMBLE AND NULLIFY ASSOCIATIONAL LINES PUT DOWN BY MASS MEDIA

The control of the mass media depends on laying down lines of association. When the lines are cut the associational connections are broken.

President Johnson burst into a swank apartment, held three girls at gunpoint, 26 miles north of Saigon yesterday.

you can cut the mutter line of the mass media and put the altered mutter line out in the streets with a tape recorder. Consider the mutter line of the daily press. It goes up with the morning papers, millions of people read the same words. In different ways, of course. A motion praising Mr. Callaghan's action in banning the South African Cricket Tour has spoiled the colonel's breakfast. All reacting one way or another to the paper world or unseen events which becomes an integral part of your reality. You will notice that this process is continually subject to random juxtapostation. Just what sign did you see in the Green Park station as you glanced up from the PEOPLE? Just who called as you were reading your letter in the TIMES? What were you reading when your wife broke a dish in the kitchen? An unreal paper world and yet completely real because it is actually happening. Mutter line of the EVENING NEWS, TV. Fix yourself on millions of people all watching Jesse James or the Virginian at the same time. International mutter line of the weekly news magazine always dated a week ahead. Have you noticed it's the kiss of death to be on the front cover of TIME. Madam Nhu was there when her husband was killed and her government fell. Verwoerd was on the front cover of TIME when a demon tapeworm gave the order for his death through a messenger of the same. Read the Bible, kept to himself, no bad habits, you know the type. Old reliable, read all about it.

So stir in news stories, TV plays, stock market quotations, adverts and put the altered mutter line out in the streets.

The underground press serves as the only effective counter to a growing power and more sophisticated technique used by establishment mass media to falsify, misrepresent, misquote, rule out of consideration as a PRIORI ridiculous or simply ignore and blot out of existence: data, books, discoveries that they consider prejudicial to establishment interest.

I suggest that the underground press could perform this function much more effectively by the use of cut/up techniques. For example, prepare cut/ups of the ugliest reactionary statements you can find and surround them with the ugliest pictures. Now give it the drool, slobber, animal noise treatment and put it out on the mutter line with recorders. Run a scramble page in every issue of a transcribed tape recorded cut/up of news, radio and TV. Put the recordings out on the mutter line before the paper hits the stand. It gives you a funny feeling to see a headline that's been going round and round inside your head. The underground press could add a mutter line to their adverts and provide a unique advertising service. Cut the product in with pop tunes, cut the product in with advertising slogans and jingles of other products and siphon off the sales. Anybody that doubts that these techniques work has only to put them to the test. The techniques here described are in use by the CIA and agents of other countries ...Ten years ago they were making systematic street recordings in every district of Paris. I recall the Voice of America man in Tangier and a room full of tape recorders and you could hear some strange sounds through the wall. Kept to himself, hello in the hall. Nobody was ever allowed in that room, not even a fatima. Of course, there are many technical elaborations like long-range directional mikes. When cutting the prayer call in with hog grunts it doesn't pay to be walking around the market place with a portable tape recorder.

An article in NEW SCIENTIST June 4, 1970, page 470, entitled ' Electronic Arts of Non communication ' by Richard C French gives the clue for more precise technical instructions.

In 1968, with the help of Ian Sommerville and Anthony Balch, I took a short passage of my recorded voice and cut it into intervals of one twenty - fourth of a second movie tape (movie tape is larger and easier to splice)- and rearranged the order of the 24th second intervals of recorded speech. The original words are quite unintelligible but new words emerge. The voice is still there and you can immediately recognise the speaker. Also the tone of the voice remains. If the tone is friendly, hostile, sexual, poetic, sarcastic lifeless, despairing, this will be apparent in the altered sequence.

I did not realise at the time that I was using a technique that has been in existence since 1881 ...I quote from Mr. French's article ... "designs for speech scramblers go back to 1881 and the desire to make telephone and radio communications unintelligible to third parties has been with us ever since"... The message is scrambled in transmission and then unscrambled at the other end.
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