Remember Invisible Children?

Image Credit: Glenna Gordon.

Remember “Invisible Children” ? We don’t either. Yesterday they announced they’re winding up. Time to recall some highlights from the bullshit files. They were, frankly, full of it. To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, if you gave Invisible Children an enema, they’d be buried in a match-box.

* We didn’t enjoy the viral video. At all. This is what we wrote the day it dropped.

* If anything what Jason Russell, who has a background in musical theater, got out of the build up to Kony 2012, was a series of bizarre music videos:

* If you can remember, the mainstream media aided and abetted Invisible Children’s attention seeking. Like The Guardian, even after Invisible Children’s campaign was exposed for what it was.

* They called themselves the Invisible Children. We called them out as the Invisible Christians.

* They made instant Uganda experts out of everyone, including random musicians. Like Soulja Boy who raps over some terrible beat and audio of Jason Russell. Like we wrote at the time: “If you want to be tortured (go listen to it). This is not even a song. It’s like a monologue set to some vague drum beat. And he drops the word ‘swag’ a few times'”

* They also spawned Henry Morton Stanley fantasies.  A while after the author of the book The World’s Most Dangerous Places and rugged man’s man, Robert Pelton, who went on Kickstarter for an “Expedition Kony” like it was the mid 19th century.

* Among all the Invisible Children BS, there were also great steaming helpings of bat-shit to be had. For example, here’s Jason Russell’s review (?) of a Dr Seuss movie:

[We] went out to see a movie, The Lorax, a Dr Seuss film. And I thought it was talking directly to me. I thought it was all about me. The character is wearing a stripy top like the one [his son] Gavin is wearing in the film and I was like, ‘That’s so weird!’ And the character is trying to protect these trees, and I thought it was me, and the trees were Rwandans.

* Ugandans saw right through it. Here’s journalist Rosebell Kagumire or people affected by Ugandan state violence. And months before the video was posted on Youtube, they could have asked Ugandan journalists and opposition activists what they thought about Kony or why Life President Yoweri Museveni and the US government focused so much on him.

* The last word goes to Charlie Brooker (he’s not American) who made the most sense:

Further Reading

No one should be surprised we exist

The documentary film, ‘Rolé—Histórias dos Rolezinhos’ by Afro-Brazilian filmmaker Vladimir Seixas uses sharp commentary to expose social, political, and cultural inequalities within Brazilian society.

Kenya’s stalemate

A fundamental contest between two orders is taking place in Kenya. Will its progressives seize the moment to catalyze a vision for social, economic, and political change?

More than a building

The film ‘No Place But Here’ uses VR or 360 media to immerse a viewer inside a housing occupation in Cape Town. In the process, it wants to challenge gentrification and the capitalist logic of home ownership.