p2p — a reader \\ on network culture
copyright Š 2015 marii nyrop (editor) and the five college digital humanities (publisher). all rights reserved. contact mnyrop@amherst.edu for permissions. be nice.
table of contents
p2p–introduction marii nyrop — 2 / loving networks: agonistic democracy and revolution siraj sindhu — 5 / p2p–virtues of anonymity pauline miller — 15 / the network of love and hate alex bisio — 25 / recovered excerpts from “overview of an accelerationist classroom” wouter schievink — 37 / free-to-be-free– networks as ritual liposuction marii nyrop — 49
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2 The following texts were produced by participants of a two-week intensive course on network culture and its discontents. The course was called “Peer2Peer” not because the class would be specifically about p2p models, but rather to highlight what is at stake when the apparatuses that connect peers to other peers in networks are occluded. What is the governance hiding between ‘p’ and ‘p’? What are the ethics? What constitutes labor and what constitutes love between networked peers? How are those peers subjectivized in the network? Who can really be considered ‘peers’ of each other anyway? Of the seven of us in the course, five have chosen to confront some of these questions through specific cultural analyses and alternate imaginings. Siraj Sindu considers the political economy of the network, and speculates as to whether a network based on agonistic democracy and processual love could replace one that presumes abstract consensus. Pauline Miller unpacks ‘the mask’ as a complex aesthetic and political paradigm, which has been used as a signifier of refusal, resistance, and anonymity, but cannot be fully rendered or reduced in any such category. Alex Bisio muses on some of the macro connections and conflations of networks—including the circulationism of capital, a concept of universal humanism, and the exhaustion of fandom. Wouter Schievink uses the “#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO” as source material for his fictional textbook on ‘accelerationist’ pedagogy after the fall of capitalism. And the last text offers a few playful notes on cybernetic affect.
p2p—introduction
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Thanks to the contributors of this text, Andy Hickman and Ethan Corey for their participation; Marisa Parham and the Five College Digital Humanities for their sponsorship of the course and this reader; John Bruner for welcoming our discussions in his space; and Christoph Cox and Adam Sitze for their support and suggestions for the course syllabus. All information, resources and readings from the course are open and available at p2p.5colldh.org or 5colldh.org/peer2peer.
loving networks: agonistic democracy and revolution / siraj sindhu
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siraj sindhu Representative democracy, typified by unidirectional channels of
information and conditioning, reproduces inequality in its technologies of control and power. Such modern media as television and the Internet provide users with a sense of control and agency while severely restricting and limiting the types of information and feedback channels available to the masses. An agonistic alternative, like the kind of democracy for which Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau argue1, might require new forms of media, or demand that media be used in new ways. But new forms of media, new kinds of networks, or even repurposed existing networks, will only be important insofar as they function as social spaces. Only if the political realm inhabits new media, can new media be politically relevant in any way. Because the public must participate in media in order to radicalize it, to transform networks from means of repression into means of emancipation, the experience of use and participation is critical. In this essay, I claim that a discussion of the revolutionary potential of networks must be conducted on the basis of a discussion of the affects of the users, particularly the affect of love. Users’ experiences in the physically constituted social spaces created by media are crucial factors in the application and use of media and networks. Though it may be claimed that network structure is most important in determining whether media has the revolutionary potential to construct agonistic politics of decentralized power, I regard affect as supremely indicative of revolutionary potential. Particularly in revolutionary networks, the affect of love is tremendously important because love provides the cohesive element that binds networks together, allowing them to transform systems of repression into systems of collective liberation.
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Affect emerges as critical even before media is used, insofar as new media, when produced, demand to be used in certain ways, to fulfill their scripted purposes. The masses then passively receive new technologies and apply them as they are given, without critique or subversion. What is perhaps most remarkable about pre-scripted technology is that when in use, it seems utterly unremarkable.2 Use of technology and participation in social media and networks are always already scripted: we see this in the language of comfort, user-friendliness, and natural ease used to promote and sell technology. Technology is structured to fit easily and organically into consumer life, to produce feelings of happiness, love, and comfort when used. Though technology seeks to produce feelings of love, use of technology and participation in networks seems to instead result in feelings of apathy and discomfort. This can be easily seen in the movements to flee Facebook, self-criticism for media overuse, and the deadened debates of the post-network era.3 This rising tide of dissatisfaction with the place of technology and social media in our lives signals the emerging consciousness of media’s hegemonic control. As users become increasingly conscious of their own enslavement, technology will of necessity either adapt to a new user base, or will be used in a manner contrary to its intent. The former possibility would fundamentally alter the social landscape, but is nearly unpredictable, and extends beyond the focus here: instead, we must seek to reveal how technology and media can be subverted, put to use for purposes contrary to their intent, and transformed into vehicles of Marxist media and agonistic politics.
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siraj sindhu Agonistic democracy seeks to position members of the public
as political adversaries of one another, resulting in the positioning of networks as spaces of battle or combat, rather than constructive spaces of dialogue or togetherness, which would seem to precipitate love. If we seek to inhabit agonistic networks, we must ask how we would experience such a network. To transform scripted networks into revolutionary, unpredictable, democratic, disordered networks, we must welcome the disorder that subversive use will inevitably entail. Disorder is unavoidable in any politics that seeks to enact real democracy, as the two act cooperatively to rupture the carefully planned marketing-useobsolescence progression through which technologies pass.4 In order to inject disorderly democracy into networks, we must reject the ethos of happiness and love that technology attempts to sell. This can be achieved by refusing to play the game of social media, by refusing to feed into a system that mobilizes user-generated data to construct consumer identities and better target advertisements and new products. By rejecting the one-way mode of caring and comfortable communication generated by technology and instead adopting what technology sees as discordant or unharmonious communication, we can transform technology into Marxist media of agonistic politics. Love in political networks occupies a curious space of duality and multiplicity, and must navigate that space in order to begin new forms of politics in terms of both the individual and the wider society. The work of French philosopher Alain Badiou is useful to engage here, for although his ideas on the intersection of love and politics suggest that love and the political realm are incompatible, the two also seem to be deeply intertwined in their engagement with difference. In
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decentralized networks, the affect of love is complicated by network structure: members may be anonymous to one another and avatars may come to precede actual content, which must be taken into account in the analysis of both politics and love. Political spaces are explicitly purposed as spaces in which to reckon and struggle with political questions, which are necessarily spaces of disagreement. Mouffe and Laclau suggest that this disagreement ought to be welcomed as an opportunity to build a politics of discord and agonism, the fuel of which is human uniqueness and difference. Love, on the other hand, is explicitly a means to seeing a different world, an experience that allows the lover to experience difference.5 To love, for Badiou, is to see the world through the double lens of self and loved one, to incorporate this fundamental duality and difference into one’s construction of the world. But the political is not, as Badiou claims, an entity that cannot be mixed up with love.6 Badiou mistakes love for a political law, conceiving of a politics of love only as a politics that commands each to love others. While a politics based purely on love might seem out of reach or impossible, networks allow us to confront the impossibility of a politics of love. The inscription of networks as political spaces pre-written as spaces of love forces users of networks to engage with a politics of love in order to dismantle the hegemony of love in such spaces. Politicized networks deaden the discordant drive, covering it instead with language of love; a redefinition of love is necessary in order to reveal the discordant politics underneath. Politicized networks— including, naturally, social networks—demand that users love, be happy, be comfortable, and enjoy all that is provided for them. But this
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language of satisfaction forgets the question it presupposes: namely, that an overwhelming sense of need catapulted the technology and media into existence. No network exists except that which is born of dissatisfaction and a sense of need, whether the need is conditioned or internal. Any revolutionary discordant politics must mobilize this primary sense of unhappiness or absence of love, and construct from it a politics that welcomes disagreement and disorder. But this welcoming of disorder need not abandon love entirely: Badiou’s world-beginning love—the love that begins a new way of seeing the world—is a love that functions primarily on the basis of difference. The world that love begins is a world predicated on a fundamental difference or duality: the difference between two lovers living separate and discrete lives, but sharing an identical world: a love of “identical difference.” Such a world is necessarily a political world, though, and not just a natural world of crags and sheep, as Badiou would have it.7 The political realm of love is predicated on difference, but it is an identical difference of love, rather than a purely oppositional difference of hate. Love is the affective basis for an agonistic democratic politics in the era of widespread networks. Only by reclaiming a political kind of world-beginning love can democracy reemerge. The objection will be raised that love in the political realm is impossible, or that love cannot be experienced between people who seek each other’s political demise. But universal or Christian love is not the love sought here: rather, the political love we must feel is only love enough to see a world of constitutive difference. One need not see the world on the basis of one’s difference with all others, but one must
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extricate oneself from one’s own ideals enough to see the ways in which agonistic politics are in every way as constraining as the universal, Christian love. In other words, political love must rupture atomistic thought, but mustn’t introduce universal thought into the particular— for universal thought is only the one-dimensional thought of the scripted, pre-written network. Among other affects, networks promise comfort and happiness, guaranteeing to ease the difficulty of our interpersonal interactions and thereby facilitate friendship and love. But these networks are onedimensional and hegemonic, and can only reproduce power imbalances in the social sphere; in order to subvert the hegemony of networks, we must first revolutionize the role of love in networks, transforming it from a teleological goal to a point of departure . Beginning with love, we must envision a world of identical difference: a world in which individual human uniqueness—and its requisite discordance—mirrors itself to birth new ways of thought, new ideas, and new worlds. Love as a point of departure in networks ruptures individualized politics, giving us a democratic conceptualization of new kinds of sociality while refusing the consumptive love characteristic of networks.
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Notes: 1. Geert Lovink, “Whose Democracy? NGOs, Information Societies and Non-Representative Democracy,” 52. 2. Cf. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 9. “We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilization: the rational characteristic of its irrationality.” 3. Claire Cain Miller, “How Social Media Silences Debate.” The New York Times. 4. Cf. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, 6. “Democracy stirs and disorder stirs with it.” 5. Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love, 26. “The fact is she and I are now incorporated into this unique Subject, the Subject of love that views the panorama of the world through the prism of our difference, so this world can be conceived, be born, and not simply represent what fills my own individual gaze.” 6. Ibid. 57. 7. Ibid. 25. 8. Cf. Brian Kuan Wood, “Is it Love?” Wood notes that when the Egyptian army drew hearts in the sky with smoke from fighter jets, Shahira Issa compared the image of the heart to fascism. Love as a teleological end goal of revolutionary networks risks devolving into a deeper and more pathological form of necessity and hate.
p2p – virtues of anonymity / pauline miller
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pauline miller
This essay will revolve around the ideas of masks that Hito Steyerl touches on in her essay about Freedom. I will explore both her analysis of the use of supermodels in the music video for Freedom! 90 by pop star George Michael, and her analysis of what “freedom” means in a surveillance through the reoccurring trend of masks in the work of multiple couture fashion designers. Because the nature of a surveillance state is to track (and potentially target) bodies, it is up to the individuals to develop and create their own form of mask. The mask will always be directly attached or related to the body, which is why they are so prevalent in the fashion industry. There have been a number of artists who have incorporated the evasion of facial recognition software into their work, but there has been a trend of of masks and other facial distortions in high fashion as well. Artist Jillian Meyer, writer Zach Blas, and projects such as C.V. Dazzle and the Queer Technology’s “facial weaponization suite” all tackle the issues of surveillance and the biopolitical in their work, but these lofty pieces tend to prescribe an abstracted reading to the issue of freedom in a surveillance state. The use of a mask is symptomatic of a larger issue, which is why it is has been put to use on both runway models and British pop stars. I hope to use these examples to explore and explain the impulse to mask oneself in the current climate of surveillance and the overwhelming trend of individuality. In her essay “Freedom from Everything: Freelancers and Mercenaries,” Hito Steyerl analyzes the use of masks in conjunction with struggles for freedom in both political movements and popular culture. She examines the music video and lyrics for George Michael’s song
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for his own image, through the same lens that she examines the use of masks by mercenaries and activists alike. Steyerl’s primary concern is to dissect what freedom entails in a post-Fordist, primarily digital age, but there is a hint of caution inherent in her writing; she is trying to warn her readers of the dangers of this new freedom. For this essay, I will be using Steyerl’s dissection of both the mask and the idea of freedom to examine the use of the mask in recent avant-garde fashion collections. Hito Steyerl looks at masks primarily as a tool for mercenaries and guerrillas, but Rei Kuwukabo and Martin Margiela, two notably reclusive designers, have co-opted the mask as a tool for the woman, allowing her to evade recognition and allowing for the focus of the presentation to fall on the work rather than on the girl - one who is so regularly utilized as a symbol or an object. For women, much like for Steyerls mercenaries, and perhaps even for George Michael, the mask acts not only as a means to blend in, but also as a means to protect oneself. The mask is an act of resistance, yes, we have seen this in fashion many times over. Rei Kuwakabo works to strengthen the woman, Yohji Yamamato famously spoke of arming the woman, making her violent while at the same time still accentuating the feminine. The use of the mask in the fashion industry is just as much of a resistance method as the use of masks by protestors and Pussy Riot. With the mask as an extension of the body, it alludes not to assimilation or inclusion, but rather as a form of invisibility. Kuwakabo and Margiela, much like the protestors Steyerl cites in her essay, use their masks as a means to protect the identity of their models, and ideally the identities of the consumers of their product.
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Above Left: Comme Des Garรงons Fall 2014 Ready-To-Wear Above Right: Comme Des Garรงons Fall 2014 Menswear
pauline miller
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Rei Kuwukabo is recognized as one of the most self-reflective and anti-fashion designers of the 20th century, and the masks allude to a growing awareness of the lack of freedom, especially for women, as she continues to navigate fashion in the 21st century. Her most current seasons have featured not only masks but also shelters that encase the body and the face, so as to make the models identity unreadable to the crowd. In her Spring 2015 collection, multiple outfits featured a tent shaped hood that covered the models face - suggesting full coverage from anyone attempting to detect a face, as well as alluding to a famous hooded fairy tale heroine. By covering up the faces of her models, she not only allows them protection, but also forces viewers to pay closer attention to the clothing. If Kuwukabo uses the mask to shift the focus away from the face and onto the overwhelming cages of fabric that she has draped her models in, then Margiela’s masks function in sharp contrast with his streamlined, minimalist designs. There has always been a trend in Margiela’s shows to cover the face, and shift attention to his designs (in fact, one of the house’s core tenants has always been anonymity, avoiding typical fashion practices such as keeping a prolific creative director at the forefront of the brand, a practice they were able to avoid for almost 20 years) but as of late it is these face masks that have taken the spotlight. This is not to say that they outweigh the power of his functional minimalism, but rather that something about Margiela has intensified. The mask is almost an extension of Margiela’s early anti-fashion work, but similar Kuwukabo, he has started to employ the masks as a portent. By covering up the sinister looking masks with jewels, flowers, lace and beads, he is alluding to the thin layer of protection that (barely) helps conceal the masks foundation. It is also worth noting that the masks,
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no matter how precious and gorgeous they get, function also as armor for the models, a means of protection. Margiela won’t let you be fooled by fashion’s smooth edges - he never has - but his face masks, which get creepier and more monstrous with each season, serve of a constant reminder that there is something that we should be hiding and protecting ourselves from. I wonder if it something akin to Steyerl’s understanding of freedom (“free-doom”) that the designers have in mind when creating these collections. One of Steyerl’s most prominent points is the way that freedom has devolved from being a useful and benign liberty to a means of manipulation that favors the institutional. She explains: ... current liberal ideals of freedom—namely the freedom of corporations from any form of regulation, as well as the freedom to relentlessly pursue ones own interest at the expense of everyone else’s—has become the only form of universal freedom that exists. This universal freedom is, as Steyerl describes, “rather like the freedom of free fall, experienced by many who are thrown into an uncertain and unpredictable future.” This uncertainty resembles the feeling of falling between the cracks of a network, which for many, may feel like a sort of impending doom. There is a horror inherent in the idea of losing oneself, or ones identity, in a world where identity and social capital are the primary means of generating worth. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a feeling of doom inherent in the most recent collections of Kuwukabo and Margiela. From darker color palates - bright red and grey blacks in the case of Kuwukabo—to shredded fabrics, to the referent of the ski mask that Margiela used for the
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base of their bejeweled face masks, there is something scary about the current collections being cranked out by these two designers. Perhaps it is the feeling of suffocation that comes with donning a mask or knotting an oversized sweater around your face. There is something scaring these designers, something that they are trying to hide themselves and their models from – and maybe something that they are trying to give us a fair warning about. Kuwukabo famously cited monsters as a key inspiration for her Fall 2014 collection. She left the specificities of those “monsters” up to the imagination of the critics and viewers, but there is something about this collection that suggests that it is not just a nightmare that is pursuing her, but one that they are trying to warn all of us about. Critics have taken note of it, calling Kuwukabo’s hair masks “scary” and acknowledging the growing feeling of “anti-fashion” in these two notably avant-grade houses. But it is not, I believe, just fashion that they are trying to rail against. Which brings me back to Steyerl and the network. Masks allow for code switching, for slipping through the cracks. George Michael is code switching in the video for Freedom! 90 when the all-star supermodel brigade of the early 90’s scream out “I wont let you down.” The use of the models exemplifies not only George Michael’s coming out tale – his switch into the world of the campy and glamorous, made up of striking beauties and “queens” like himself – but also act as a neutralizing plane. They are a safe space for George Michael, these faces that have been (and continue to be) used as canvases to convey the messages of artists. It is also worth noting that Michael was forcibly outed prior to the release of this song, a scandal that was met with public scrutiny and in some
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cases, condemnation. Similarly, in 2014, the formerly anonymous creative designer of Maison Martin Margiela had his identity revealed by a nosy fashion journalist. This desire for exposure, for transparency, is damaging to these artists, and, as they remind us through their work, may be similarly damaging for us as well. Models are tools of anonymity and protection for George Michael, just like the mask of the houses of Comme Des Garรงons and Maison Martin Margiela. The use of a mask allows for these artists to express themselves while not making everything about themselves. In a world where individuality is encouraged and emphasized, the negation of any form of identification through these designs is a radical move, but one with safety at the heart of it.
virtues of anonymity
Above Left: Maison Martin Margiela, Spring 2014 Couture Above Right: Maison Martin Margiela, Fall 2012 Couture
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the network of love + hate / alex bisio
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alex bisio To live is to be an individual capable of experiencing suffering
and satisfaction. The human life presents the possibility to redefine the architecture of suffering and satisfaction. The inhuman life attempts to either end suffering or extinguish satisfaction. It posits the freedom of the individual in the devotion of all of one’s energies to pleasing their self or working for someone/something else. But consumption and work do not make one free alone. They are necessary for the maintenance of life’s bare essentials, but their fetishization transforms them into Sisyphean task. So long as one works in order to consume, they will never be able to finish either. They will always find reason to believe in competition and scarcity. They accept their work and strive to make their personal life as comfortable as possible. Everybody must to push their own rock; your task is to make it enjoyable for yourself. Adapt! Affix your rock with screens blaring entertainment or see if you can trade it in for a smaller size. But remember: under inhuman conditions, human freedom only exists in resistance. The human life works in order to survive, consumes in order to survive, and survives in order to live, love, and hate. Survival, which by definition is terminal, the staving off an inevitable, is not a Sisyphean task, but it is often confused as such because it is transitory. The inhuman life perceives itself as a series of moments without end. There is some repetition, cyclical movements, but since most think every aspect of life is liable to improve or worsen, they strive for personal success. They believe subjects determine their individual fate with realistic dreams and hard work, failing to perceive anyone surviving for survival’s sake. They assume everyone, instead of hopelessly staving off death, is working towards a better life.
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Here, in the world perceived as linear, the finality of death is invisible. Mass attention is directed towards living “healthy” and the next miracle cure. We celebrate superlative bodies and universal victories. We honor winners and reward them with wealth and responsibility (to feed, to regulate, to inform, to manage). We focus on recent achievements as if every moment was leading up to this one. We tell ourselves the system couldn’t possibly be better because the best are already in charge. We know they’re the best because we made everyone compete, and, for whatever reason, those in/with power won. Then, whenever a winner dies, we use the occasion of closure as an opportunity to re-live all of their superlative moments: how amazing they were! How impossible! Rarely is a public death used to illuminate the hollowness of life. How much more they could have done if they hadn’t run into such stupidity, such banal bullshit. How much more love they could have given. How much better life could have been otherwise! The human life acknowledges that life consists of sequential moments but knows they add up. Moments, the substance of experience, are shared with others through relations of narrative as well as those of simultaneity. Each particular instance speaks to a larger, objective, social truth. Religion depicts this equation in the trial that follows an individual’s death in which the deceased’s entire life is judged against a moral scale. This scale is routinely corrupted, however, by the worldly power held by those who run institutions such as the state and corporations. They have the ability to prescribe a narrow vision of the “good life” with strict rules about what sort of thoughts, actions, and relationships are permissable. Where the inhuman life uses these rules to win or prove itself right, the human life always strives to illuminate the fullest scope of its existence, to love and hate in balance. It knows that those who obsess
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over fulfillment eventually lose or become too old to keep up with the game. They become a shell of the person they were at their peak; they live to manage the facade of fulfillment. We will never complete love or hate the way we may complete a constitution or process (by definition, love and hate are universal forces we can only channel in moments), but the combination of both makes it possible for us to complete ourselves, to live a truly human life. Through them we can see our selves as both real and potential, as the combination of the direct truth contained in experience and the possibility immanent in imagination. (It’s not where you’re from; it’s understanding where you’re at and where you’re going.) Thus, although the sum of one’s lived moments leading up to the present mostly illustrates a narrative determined by the inhuman life’s competitive modes of work/ consumption, it also contains alternate trajectories, both fulfilled and unfulfilled, where love and hate did or could have intervened as guiding forces. Again, the human life persists as resistance, but what does successful resistance look like? Reform models competitive interests, and violent revolution seems too old fashioned. Human freedom is best served by a human system, but how can love and hate be systematized without reduction into crude objectivities that defeat the imagination inherent in them: love in name only and hate based off of ignorance? To answer this question, we don’t need new representations of love and hate (of which we already have a plethora of historical examples, both successful and limited), but new functions interrelated through a network of symbols as convincing in its reality as that formed by capital is now. We need to work out of love and critique our failures with the hate they deserve. We must transform love and hate from personal
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romance, self-loathing, and antipathy into a fundamental protocol: love- and hate-motives instead of profit motives. The inhuman architecture in which so many of us feel trapped, which so many of us hate, must be restructured into a system of relation that assumes we are all loved and which productively channels our flares of hate into comprehensive understanding as well as the search for solutions. Before I address what a protocol of love and hate might look like, however, it’s necessary to define exactly what I mean to convey in those two words most commonly used in relation to personal sentiment. What does it mean for an institution to love its people and can it do so without reshaping love into a new face for old tyranny, the authoritarian leader who sincerely loves his people because he’s convinced that they love him. Such perversion of love and hate perpetually occurs in advertising where corporations attempt to put a new face on the same old product. As promoted in the Superbowl of 2015, McDonald’s offered select customers the opportunity to purchase their meals by saying sweet nothings to a loved one as if such expressions of love can compensate the workers who run each McDonald’s. Moreover, during that same Superbowl, Coca-Cola ran a doomed campaign to remove negativity from the internet with an automated twitter bot, named #makeithappy, that transplanted negative messages onto pictures of happy things. Such surface juxtaposition proved incapable of countering the negativity contained in Mein Kampf, which was continuously quoted by the twitter account MeinCoke in an effort to make it appear as if Coca-Cola was absurdly promoting Nazism, subsequently ending their attempts to free the internet of hate. How much easier it is to sell coke on the basis that it itself will fulfill you, make you happy. It doesn’t need to manage hate; just to be positive. In spite of whatever troubles you’re having, a sip of
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chilled coke will improve your experience. Neither love nor hate are based in fulfillment (of need or desire) although they can and do inspire it. They are polarities of understanding; they alternate, but they also co-exist. Nothing escapes them. Love is a response to absence as hate is to presence. Where love knows some absences can never be filled, only understood/negotiated, hate understands every presence is subject to change/disappear. This dichotomy expands upon Brian Kuan Wood’s “Is it Love?” in which he defines love as a fundamental human relationship “based in emptiness and lack – in mutual loss.”1 Love is the process of recognizing past failures, without necessarily singling out the particular parties who bare responsibility, then setting the ground for the solutions which heal all involved. Love is solidarity around universal ideas like egalitarianism and neutral manners (‘please’ and ‘thank you’ are a start). Hate is the process of recognizing present failures and determining the optimal resolution for all involved although a few may have to lose some of what they have. The embodied experience of hate is certainly more prone to violence and blindness than that of love, but not unlike suffering, hate is a fundamental part of the human experience, often felt in the forms of annoyance or self-disgust. Hate can easily be taken too far which is why it must always be tempered by love, the understanding that because everyone suffers, they also deserve satisfaction. In this sense, bigotry, racism, misogyny, and undue self-loathing are all counterproductive tendencies that can be managed through education and awareness. Still, hate must not be forgotten, for many suffer far more than need be, and a few others would do well to be humbled. I ask only that the smug be made to reign in their extensive egos. Fulfillment is insufficient in the
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face of universal hate and love. The human life loves in spite of and hates because. The inhuman life does the opposite. The power of both forces in respect to one’s determination of their personal actions is well-documented in literature and media, but it is often in conflict with other social constructions. Arguably the most pervasive human relation, Capitalism, which prizes competition and the fulfillment of a winner, castrates authentic hate with regulated processes, or protocols, that preserve the status quo. The state and corporations protect each other’s interests, suppressing valid complaints as a matter of routine. Further, capitalism reserves love for charity and its participant’s private lives. Public displays of love often flow between uneven, hierarchical levels, which disfigure its transaction such that it no longer functions as recognition. Love becomes the obsession and exhaustion of the fan in relation to their pop idols who, when in public settings, actively discourage recognition with disguises. Similarly, the true nature of devastation following a natural disaster is obscured by the organizations that assure the empathetic population, eager to do whatever they can, that their modest donation is all that’s needed. It’s made more important to give the impression of treating a problem than it is recognize what the real failure and attempt to comprehensively heal the lives of the effected. The moral consumer tries to purchase their way out of guilt. When there is no money to pay for treatment, as in economic crises, the government may ask its masses to heal under conditions of austerity. Wood describes common responses to such situations, means of survival including adults living with their parents and “neighborhood currencies,” as the melting of capital “into love,” implying capitalism is a deformed system of recognition that might be melted down into its fundamental element: debt.2
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alex bisio In a general sense, debt marks the process through which value is
created from labor and distributed through a population. It is immanent in capital’s processes, crudely reduced to the idiom “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” It is the logic of this for that underlying barter, and as such it is the grounds on which forgiveness can be realized. Mutual debt makes solidarity possible. It is one of the things taxes are supposed to create, but on this count they have failed in the recent past. The politics of capitalism have become that of the independent consumer, purchasing their favorite objects in order to fully express of their free will and power. This ideology is possible when capitalism quantifies debt and solely determines value according to market forces, obscuring the relations of power that underpin them: the reason this is worth so much more than that. Many believe no one’s pulling the strings; we’re all just players in the market, entitled to acquire as much as we can. And yet there are so many strings being pulled, cheaters, and mega-rich alongside so many more poor people whose lives could be significantly improved with so relatively little. As a mass, we have been too atomized to kick start any actual reorganization of interests. Everyone thinks they can come out on top with a little luck. Today we need new protocols of relation at every level, but most vitally at the level of economics. Capitalism has been repeating the same spectacles for decades, particularly in the United States where strip malls and brands dominate the landscape more than ever (both mental and physical). We need to intervene in the current infrastructure of debt and redefine the foundation of every transaction. I won’t bother to worry about the specifics of implementing such a shift except to mention that, I think, it requires mass dissemination of an alternative such that it can be imagined and eagerly awaited by the people who will populate it. People
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must love this alternative, recognizing how its strategic lacks reflect their own. It must elevate its transactions of debt to the foreground, no longer hidden behind the objects of fulfillment that justify the trouble we go through to acquire them. We need to recognize the debt we owe to society and hate the personal surplus adjacent to suffering: much better to be free to help and create than to consume and work (already necessities we pretend are free choices). The network of love and hate must convince the masses of its value on the merits of its protocol as compared to that of capital. In respect to politics, protocol functions as the architecture through which biopower, manifested today in the state’s directive “to foster life or disallow it to the point of death,”3 ensnares a population. Examples range from social security to the criminal justice system. Both constitute, as Alexander Galloway defines protocol in his book of the same name, “a universal description language for objects[, …] a structuring agent that appears as the result of a set of object dispositions.”4 Protocol defines the limits of what a given type of object can be as well as the structure through which types relate to each other. In capitalism, it reduces every object, including human activity, to a quantified value. Biopower hides behind Protocol, defining the ideology through which a population relates to their selves, under which they live. It is the state’s underlying policy. Galloway describes it as “the power to interpret material objects as information, to affect objects at the statistical or informational level, not at the level of individual content.”5 Qualities are reduced into categories; particular actions are excused as an aspect of routine or transformed into criminal behavior. Biopower lies in the importance of statistics; protocol lies in the specific determination of
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categories: what interests must be balanced, how things should be arranged. Under capitalism, everyone’s life is beholden to the language of contracts, capital’s brand of protocol. Thus, new modes of relation, a model beyond employer/employee for instance, would also reflect a change in the state’s underlying directive, constitute a new policy. There would still be statistics, but they would no longer be used to justify the status quo, as in the case of elections, but to interrogate it, make it more responsive. Here, new protocols require new ideologies, different functions of biopower, in order to be animated by their population. Capital encourages people to make their personal lives as fulfilling as possible. The network of love and hate would encourage people to survive by presenting them with guaranteed necessities, creating opportunities to discover oneself through creation/ collaboration as opposed to work/consumption. We must create new protocols and popularize their possibility. This task is one of imagination and distribution as opposed to invention and advertising. We don’t need new objects, but new methods of interrelating what we already have. I doubt a population of masses can transcend biopower and live purely qualitative lives but they can re-characterize it to manage the sphere of necessities instead of the total structure of society. People will still work out of necessity but that of fulfilling a societal lack instead of fulfilling themselves. They know their needs will be taken care of because, having transcended their submission to the invisible hand of the market, they willingly submit to a network of collective design, a solidarity consisting in love and hate. They will have plenty of free time outside of work to discover what fulfillment can mean for them.
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Notes: 1. Wood, Brian K. “Is It Love?” E-flux. March 1, 2014. Accessed February 13, 2015. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/is-it-love/. 2. Ibid. 3. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. London: Penguin, 1992. 138. 4. Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, 2004. 74-5. 5. Ibid. 69.
recovered excerpts from “overview of an accelerationist classroom� / wouter schievink
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The following are the only complete and coherent excerpts recovered from an accelerationist data storage unit and typed in the the early 2100’s. The footnotes will elaborate on terms and items specific to the accelerationist epoch. This epoch was provoked from a text released in mid 2013 (htp://tiny.cc/accelerationism). Given the great appeal to the wealthy people controlling and working in the empire of digital technologies, acclerationism quickly took off . In the next 100 years a number of organizations and companies who labeled themselves as accelerationists sprung up in the United States and eventually spread across the globe. At the time this recovered document was written, there were at least 10,000 accelerationist schools around the world. This document was the master copy issued to every accelerationist educator.
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From the section “An Introduction to Mass Education” Facilitating the cerebral growth of the next generation of emperoratrixes1 is a position not many feel comfortable being in. The world’s collective sanity does rest on your shoulders, but aside from that looming specter, your duties as educator will be few. It’s easy to envision your role as a teacher by closing your eyes and imagining yourself as a god who need only to alter the flow of a few rivers once in a while. A god who’s primary job is that of observance. In the same way the teacher need only to step in once and a while to make sure no child veers towards irrational destructive tendencies. To make the teacher’s job as simple as possible, most of the steering towards rationality will be taken care of by direction services.2 The rest of the education will rest on the children’s shoulders, as most children find rationality in their free-time.
From the section “Startup” Before class begins, make sure every child, even the ones with high CFUs, receives their daily TDCS3 treatment. This means more free time for the children as their learning will be expedited and more effective than usual. Affix the blue wire of the TDCS to the blue dot on the student’s forehead, and do the same with the green wire. Specific lesson plans may require you to shift these wires around or, on occasion, remove the wires entirely. That will be discussed in later sections. It is also of the greatest necessity to this nation’s health that the children have muscle stimulation elements firmly affixed to their leg and arm muscles during the teachings.4
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From section “Students with High or Warning-level CFUs”5 Accelerationist education does not tolerate the marginalization of peoples based on any phenotypic or personal traits. However, it is worth while to encourage public shaming and even social exiling of students who overuse there daily amount of water and carbon levels. Encouraging this behavior will eventually turn the students into environmentally conscious citizens who will self regulate each others environmental impact.6
From section “Screen7 Attachment” You will no doubt find some students developing an emotional, even sexual relationship with the screens they were awarded in the beginning of their education. Such sexual deviations have been present since the first iteration of screen technologies. This is fine only if it infringes on person to person interactions.8 For instance, sexual contact with or through a screen can serve to bridge the techno-human gap and help people gain an emotional and not a specifically technical relationship to digital technologies. However, dangerous behavior can arise when a student’s first sexual interaction is done with or through their screen. At one school a student had such a severe sexual attachment to their screen that, at the age of 15, the student could only achieve orgasm when using the screen as an intermediary. This can lead to a syndrome where the student feels overwhelming suicidal sadness when removed from their screen. This sadness can be so unquenchable that even direction services has not found a biochemical way to remedy it. Remind the child
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of how environmentally costly screens are and how an unhealthy attachment to them might result in the addition of CFUs to the student’s profile. For the most part attachment to ones screen is helpful, but, much like an unhealthy attachment to another human, screen attachment can lead to people having complete dependence on the screen.
From section “Imparting Values of Data” The strangest byproduct of teaching screen programming to children is the sameness of the independent projects they will unavoidably pursue. Most children, with only a bit of experience, will pour hours into creating impromptu renderings9 and programs to keep their eyelids open.10 Certain children have an obsessive tenancy to subvert already perfected by creating far inferior versions of those renderings. These devices have already been perfected and mass produced. These needless replicas mean more wasted resources which does next to nothing for techno-scientific progress. One way to stray from this behavior, while encouraging overall technoscientific growth, is to give the problem- student access to a piece of their biometric data11 and let them program whatever they want using it. See figure 24.b for a project one student created on their own. If the problem-student continues to create irrational and redundant things, remind them that there are two choices, fall back and get what the children with high CFUs get, or become an innovative leader. Comfort the child by reminding them that there really only is one choice when it comes to falling behind or progressing.
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wouter schievink Remind them that the only choice that is not techno-scientific progress is the choice where all humans are reduced to animals.12
Figure 2.48b: A student graphed the occurrences of the word “Love� in their screen communications over the course of their life. The student highlighted how the occurrences correspond to key relationships in their life. This was important for their understanding of why biometric data collection is necessary and how it can be used to gain an objective understanding of someone.
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From section “Global Consciousness” In accordance to the global consciousness initiative twice a week students will direct thier screens towards a random fellow from an international accelerationist school.13 During this time direction services will illicit a pleasurable experience for both your student and the international student, ensuring that both parties will feel positively about the ideals of connectedness.
From section “Student’s Free-time” Pupils will have ample time to explore and create. Although most exploration and creation serves a purpose, there are many paths which lead absolutely no where at all. In order to insure productive free-time, students will be fitted with various information gathering implements issued by the Bureau Towards Cybernetic Imaginings. This way we can insure that students will be concretely productive to some capacity even if they are pursuing leisurely activities. During this time (75% of their day) the students will be able to explore the gambit of humanness, they can explore the hydroforests,14 pursue artistic endeavors, socialize, sexualize, choose from an assortment of hallucinogenic drugs, and generally move about. Most of the children will spend there time in some sort of VR adventure, this is fine so long as it doesn’t exceed the daily CFU allowance and so long as they have the muscle stimulator’s attached to them. Inevitably, some students will prefer to engage in monotonous labor during their allotted free-time. A few students might try to spend their free-time doing tasks which could easily be accomplished by
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wouter schievink a rendering. Picking and placing objects, stacking books, building tables or combing their hair. These activities are altogether useless and impede upon progress in many ways. Another important time to use social ridicule and exiling to the classroom’s advantage. The free-time allocation will also be a time for you, the teacher, to serve as a role model for what can and should be accomplished in all this free-time. Children are much more likely to pursue fruitful activities if they see their teacher mastering a craft, building new things or learning a new skill during their free-time.
Any other recovered elements of the manual were corrupted to the point where adding them to this document would have only added a couple thousand unrelated or incomplete sentences. To access the whole document, direct inquires to the Accelerationist Archive.
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Notes: 1. Emperoratrixes are the highest ranking people in accelerationist politics. These people are elected based on a merit. This accelerationist system ranked people on their ability to preserve the environment using techno-scientific means. 2. Direction services was the euphemism for the strict cerebrospinal control system imposed on citizens from an early age to create positive bodily feedback loops whenever a citizen performed a task which lent itself to the accelerationist view of progress. 3. TCDS (trans-cranial direct current stimulator) was a widely used accelerationist device which was used to help students speed up memorization, and improve focus, meaning the learning time could be cut down. 4. Muscle simulators were forced upon much of the population. They ensured that even the citizens who hardly moved in their day to day were getting the equivalent to what the accelerationists deemed a healthy days worth of movement. 5. Carbon Footprint Units: One of the primary aspects used to place citizens into the accelerationist hierarchy. Citizens with very high CFUs would often have to perform the few mundane tasks which the accelerationists had not yet found a way to automate. Threatening a student with adding more CFUs to their profile was the harshest of punishments. 6. There is a cybernetic motive behind much of this education system which in multiple ways prepare students to create this self sustaining accelerationist feedback loops. That way once the students left the accelerationist education system they would still be imparting accelerationist values and ideals at all times in their day to day lives. 7. Unlike the capitalist epoch where digital technology was mostly controlled by companies and marketed to consumers in endless permutations of similar objects which had different names and logos, accelerationists focused all technological development onto one generic expandable device “The Screen.”
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Notes (continued): 8. Much like cellphones in the capitalist epoch, accelerationist screens became objects that citizens would have great attachment to. However because values of planned obsolescence and capital gain were no longer present during the accelerationist rule. Accelerationist screens would last a citizen their entire live and evolve alongside them depending on how the screen was treated. The screen, unlike the cellphone, became a direct object of emotional attachment, whereas the cellphone was the intermediary between emotional attachments. 9. A rendering is a screen modified to perform a specific task. 10. This epoch was marked with a compulsion against anything redundant. Multiple times in the manual there are suggested ways to steer children away from doing what has already been done and moving towards innovative advancement. 11. Widespread biometric data collection was another accelerationist obsession. Only those on the Biometric Data Board had access to this data, so being gifted with even a small amount of this data was seen as a great honor. Generally, citizens could request data which would usually be denied.. Occasionally the Board would send the products of biometric data analysis to the citizens telling them which aspects of their life are going well and which need to be altered. 12. Another aspect of the accelerationist epoch, perpetuated by the overwhelming climactic changes, was the reduction of most social and political options to two choices. Most usually one of the two would be the rational one and the other would appear ludicrous to the eyes of an accelerationist. 13. As communication devices screens also automatically translated and pacified all the messages which came through them. The pacification of sent and received messages furthered the goal of the Accerationist Nonverbal Institute to make needless argument and conflict impossible. 14. Artificially created forests were abundant at this time, completely sterilized environments where trees would be grown in water with a nutrient solution.
free-to-be-free– networks as ritual liposuction / marii nyröp
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one The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the invention of the Internet in 1990 dually mark a very specific moment—that is, the point at which the freedom to internalize and embody diverse moral and political ideologies was replaced by the freedom to externalize them in the abstraction of the global network. Put more simply: the liberal freedom to enact was exported as the neoliberal freedom to connect.1
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2
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3 But the Internet doesn’t really connect or free people at all. Rather, it frees information and qualities from the people who constitute them, allowing them to circulate, aggregate, and reassemble dynamically among global protocols. In other words: difference is exported as data, and data sees no difference.
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4 In computer programming, a global variable is a variable with global scope, meaning that it is visible (hence accessible) throughout the program, unless shadowed. The set of all global variables is known as the global environment or global state. —Wikipedia2
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5 The network is an affective architecture peripheral to that of “online space.� It is actually not a space at all, but an abstract logic against distinctive walls, against autonomous skins, against the opaque and the immovable. It thrives among modularity, striving to re-purpose the world as connective parts, exportable bits, extensible bodies, borderless territories for bloated currencies: a global state (kind of ).
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6
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7 It’s no longer a question of removing the subject from the traditional exterior bonds, as the liberal hypothesis had intended, but of reconstructing the social bonds by depriving the subject of all substance. Each person was to become a fleshless envelope, the best possible conductor of social communication, the locus of an infinite feedback loop which is made to have no nodes. The cyberneticization process thus completes the ‘process of civilization,’ to where bodies and their emotions are abstracted within the system of symbols. —Tiqqun3
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8
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9 Contrary to many current polemics surrounding ‘network culture,’ the problem is not that our lives have become hypermediated; it is that these medias which saturate many of our lives have become too responsive to each other while becoming less and less responsive to our public engagement. In the globally economized language of the network, dollars speak to servers, porn .gifs speak to military Twitter bots, and Instagram narcos mexicanos speak to Google analytics—but none of them are listening to us. Fractals vacuum mutual solidarities, shit them out as optimized, easy-to-read fictions.
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10 We shall not ratify the rise of the obscure and the fall of the transparent. But do not decry the reverse either. Simply withdraw from the decision to ask the question. Instead ask: what is this eternity? What is this black box – this black bloc – that fills the world with husks and hulls and camouflage and crime? Is it our enemy, or are we on the side of it? Is this just a new kind of nihilism? Not at all, it is the purest form of love. —Alexander Galloway4
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11 Is it true that we have no demands?
12 Can we—the fleshless envelopes, straddled with debt and salted with millennial shaming— offer civil war to our networks the way we offer flowers to our mothers in May?
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thirteen
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Notes: 1. Steyerl, Hito.Wretched of the Screen,“Freedom from Everything: Freelancers and Mercenaries,” 123. Steyerl writes: “We are accustomed to regarding freedom as primarily positive—the freedom to do or have something; thus there is the freedom of speech, the freedom to pursue happiness and opportunity, or the freedom of worship. But now the situation is shifting. Especially in the current economic and political crisis, the flipside of liberal ideas of freedom—namely, the freedom of corporations from any form of regulation, as well as the freedom to relentlessly pursue one’s own interest at the expense of everyone else’s—has become the only form of universal freedom that exists: the freedom from social bonds, freedom from solidarity, freedom from certainty or predictability, freedom from employment or labor, freedom from culture, public transport, education, or anything public at all.” 2. “Global Variable.” Wikipedia. Accessed March 14, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_variable. 3. Tiqqun. “The Cybernetic Hypothesis,” 18. 4. Galloway, Alexander. “Black Box, Black Bloc,” 249. In Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles, ed. Benjamin Noys.
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Images: 2. Screenshot from YouTube: David Hasselhoff serenading the fall of the Berlin Wall. 6. Screenshot from YouTube: Internet.org campaign for multinational wifi drones. 8. Found in a spam folder on my computer. No idea where it’s from. 13. Screenshot from YouTube: Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest (1981), dir. Frank Perry.