Mongrel's strategy
also consists of deploying devouring tactics to better expose the
underlying, racial, nationalist and diversity fearing biases rampant in
the info-sphere. In a vein similar to ®™ark's, they prey on the very discourses and power
structures in order to better neutralize the beast. This involves
appropriating the technologies of the beast by creating their own
software and network tools, of which the Natural Selection Search Engine
Search Engine is the most notorious. The aim behind Natural Selection,
as stated in their official company statement, is " to identify and edit
racist material stored on the Internet. Several power-user algorithms
then change it into randomised prejudice-packed drivel." Natural
Selection, in this sense, is a Cannibal On Line busy hybridising and
mongrelizing those forces it seeks to neutralize through randomised
absorption. Besides the software-based projects Mongrel also has a menu
of in your interface artistic projects. A current project which caught
my eye is entitled Save The Internet . If taken at face value, this
e-intervention looks like a cunning plan devised by Darwinian,
phrenology imbued, pure race(ists) to counter the hybridising, border
munching, national frontier and heritage erosion potential of the
Internet. The basic idea and 'bad science' behind this project is that
the Internet is causing an exponential decline in the quality and health
of national characteristics. "Save the Internet from the Relativism
Enforcer Engram" flashes an applet. In order to contribute to this noble
task you are asked to click on a spinning globe. This democratic action
will then result in a vote that will "reinforce the national
characteristics of the Internet." This exercise exposes the typical
anthropoemic bias of much Western thinking about race and diversity
through a sustained anthropophagic reversal and jumbling.
