Stupid like a new-media-savvy fox.

The release went out last Tuesday. By Thursday, a blurb was up at FEED. On Friday, "the weekly high-tech sarcastic update for the UK," NTK Now, featured a generous paragraph on the stunt; meanwhile, Wired News was giving it the full-blown story treatment, and the Village Voice is next in line.

Surely, reporting on a homemade collection of Beck remixes is the Web's equivalent of rushing a camera crew down to the local zoo to capture footage of a newborn hippopotamus. In its diligent pursuit of way-new journalistic integrity (and to gaily append itself to the daisy chain) Netly has lined up the authors joy riding down this latest cul de sac of infotainment to explain how this cut-and-paste operation became a likely story.

First, briefly, for those who haven't stumbled over the scoops, 10 artists have contributed 13 tracks to the "Deconstructing Beck" CD using the pop icon's own sound collages. As Philo T. Farnsworth explained to yet another reporter for an Australian student paper, he was "conceptually attracted to the fact that Beck uses samples and that we would be sampling his sampling."

The results are, appropriately, mixed, ranging from the definitely danceable to the audio replication of a swarm of household appliances on the attack. The resampled samples were funded by RTMARK, another collective behind genuinely amusing pranks such as the Barbie Liberation Organization's tampering with Barbie and GI Joe's voice boxes so that the dolls would say the darnedest things, and the hack of SimCopter that replaced the game's usual buxom babes with a few good (gay) men.

One difference between "Deconstructing Beck" and those jobs, however, is that the CD is for sale, marked up "only 100%," as the press release puts it, "instead of the industry-standard 800%." On the face of it, these profits may seem a dubious attack on corporate culture, but the money is to be plowed into further RTMARK projects, including financial rewards for workers who sabotage the signifiers of their employers' power. What's more, RTMARK has now appropriated the ceaseless spin of the new media news cycle to feed its deconstruction machine.

The cause may be decent enough, but stories like this one invite the question, Are we too easy? "Deconstructing Beck" smacked of counterculture packaged for mass consumption -- and it worked. "RTMARK is one curious Hole in the Wall Gang of monied agent provocateurs," says Austin Bunn, who passed the Detritus.net link onto FEED and will devote his column in the Village Voice to the pomo bandits. "They've got an incredibly media-savvy sensibility (which helps), and a fierce ideological bent which convinced me it wasn't a hoax (which I was sincerely afraid of). I mean, hell, do I care about the new upgrade/release/plug-in/turn-key solution? Nope. I'd write about groups like RTMARK any day over a conference." Obviously, he's not alone.

"Granted, there have been more eloquent attacks on cookie-cutter culture, more deserving targets than Beck, more thought-provoking challenges to intellectual property restrictions on audio recordings," says Steve Silberman, who broke the SimCopter story for Wired News. "But it was, I thought, a piquant little item for a Wired News Friday. I had written much more weighty stories early in the week; every day can't be the apocalypse."

Danny O'Brien explains what attracted NTK Now to the story. "I'd say that it's got three elements of appeal," he says, and like Monty Python's mathematically challenged Spanish Inquisition, he names four. "One, it's about intellectual property rights. IP, almost per se, is intriguing. To hazard a guess as to why that's so, I'd say that most geeks, deep in their hearts, know that there's something profoundly fucked with current thinking on IP in a digital age, and are either keen to come up with useful alternatives or enjoy sitting back and watching the carnage as the whole thing unravels."

Secondly, it's about DIY (Do It Yourself) culture, central to the hacker ethic. "Three, it's liable to be covered in an entirely different way, if at all, by mainstream media. 'BAN THESE INSANE BECK RIP-OFF MERCHANTS'." After all, mainstream media depend on copyright just as much as record companies do.

Finally, "it's funny. This is often the chief determinant for inclusion in NTK." But O'Brien stresses that this may be the most important reason of the bunch. "Sometimes self-conscious copyright artists are almost as insufferably pompous as 'The Man' they battle. If, for instance, RTMARK's compadres start moaning about how they're being sued to the hilt by Beck's publishers (like Negativland did over U2), we'll probably moan right back. Like, what did Negativland expect?"

Dave Green, who composed the NTK take, adds, "the other schemes on their site were rib-ticklingly entertaining, indicating they weren't just some po-faced humorless situationist art collective."

A spokesperson for RTMARK concurs, and is counting on Beck to show himself to be neither po-faced nor humorless. "We're hoping Beck himself hears about this and reacts to it with pleasure. That would be best for his image, best for us, best period."

And so, with this metastory, the deconstruction of the deconstruction is mercifully complete, the spin spun, ready to go another round on April 6, the RTMARK-sponsored "Phone In Sick Day." Countercultural media spin doctors will be ready and mainstream PR folk will, no doubt, be taking notes.

-- DAVID HUDSON