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The Internet is atwitter over the National Reconnaissance Office's logo for their newest spy satellite, NROL-39 (as tweeted by the Office for the Director of National Intelligence).
Given all the coverage in the increasingly paranoid mainstream media, my posting about this feels superfluous at this point, but also expected, since it's both a GPM and ties into my current theme of menacing cephalopods. So for the few of my readers who haven't seen it, there it is.
I originally posted about the NRO's attempts at propaganda mascottery way back in GPM #2 when they had a small menagerie of poorly conceived characters. At some point their kids' site, NROJr.gov, was redesigned and the roster was pared down to just an anthropomorphic satellite named Ollie, who doesn't really appear much except as something to click on in an intro screen before being dumped into a library of dreadfully boring skeuomorphic books built in Flash. The pages turn just like in real life! Kids like that, right?
This new octopus mascot isn't part of the same Clinton-era every-agency-must-have-a-for-kids-site directive, but rather the older tradition of aerospace mission-patch logos. Wikipedia has a list of NRO launches with their patches, some of which reveal too much with obvious New World Order imagery:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
As many have already pointed out, the NROL-39 logo bares an uncanny resemblance to a common propaganda trope used to negatively portray the subject as a creeping threat to life and freedom, personified as a world-gripping octopus (see Vulgar Army for numerous historical examples). Why would a government agency intentionally present themselves as the enemy? Are they just taunting us? Are we so powerless to stop them they can openly announce their villainy? Or is it proof that the Internet is still a threat enough to their power to need manipulating?
Whereas when the trope originated over a century ago the octopus was viewed as a sinister "devil-fish" to be feared and disgusted by, today citizens of the Internet have adopted the octopus as loveable friend whose global embrace would be welcomed -- nay, demanded! Thus the NRO's blatant referencing of this now-neutered trope is a way to subvert it, making the Internet react to the creeping threat to global privacy with a collective "Dawwwww! Octopus can haz world!"
