#socialmediaanxieties by Liz Kinnamon

Edited, Designed, and Curated by Liz Kinnamon (2014) Background Artwork for the Cover, Table of Contents, and Pages 6, 27, and 34 by Jennifer Mehigan Screenshot on Page 7 taken by Natalia Cecire

a zine on digital failure and attachment

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1

INTRODUCTION Liz Kinnamon

#WORK 4

Femininity as a Technology: Some Thoughts on Hyperemployment Robin James

#SUBJECTIVITY 9

Reparative Compulsions Rob Horning

QUANTIFIED/DAYS/AWAY Caleb Beckwith

#W(E)ARY BODIES 18

8==> Brian Droitcour

nokcupid (1) Lyle M. Suxe

Untitled Maxine Anderson

nokcupid (2 & 3) Lyle M. Suxe

#ATTACHMENT 29

Touch to Feel Joanne McNeil

Content Awareness Enrico Boccioletti

33 35

We are between Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not surprised: social media and the desire path Kimberly Alidio

Untitled Aisha Sasha John

Typotexture, Timm Ulrichs (1962)

Anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were at stake in the game from the outset.” —Jaques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play” (1967) “Doesn’t Freud describe form somewhere, all form, any form, each cultural structure, as having arisen in response to an anxiety. But if form (norm; ritual) is the human (latterly male) response to anxiety, then what are we to do with the anxiety provoked by form.”

— Ariana Reines, The Origin of the World (2014)

“Anxiety is the mood of ethicity, I think.” — Avital Ronnell (2008)

introduction Liz Kinnamon

“There are always screaming men and falling men: one does not much witness them, they live offscreen.” —Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism

When I first circulated the call for submissions for #socialmediaanxieties in August of 2013, I was propelled by awe at the becoming-calcified of certain online worlds. I wanted to zero in on the way in which the net generation in the US, or the group of people who have “grown up” with the internet (broadly conceived), have witnessed certain digital platforms take on their own “structures of feeling,” or “residues of common historical experience sensed but not spoken in a social formation, except as the heterogeneous but common practices of a historical moment would emanate them.”1 It is safe to say that the affectsphere of Facebook, for example, is emanated, but rarely spoken; wrestled with, but nearly always in private; and sensed, like an a priori fact with which we must reckon. Almost a year ago, the behavioral constraints of social media somehow supra-collectively agreed upon still felt arbitrary enough to estrange but since seem decidedly more fixed and blasé. We see less and less contestation over what the social medium’s space is for, as certain common-sense rules regarding tone, content, and propriety dictate the posts we make. Or, better yet, the infrastructure and algorithmic parameters of the sites—which is to say their inbuilt economic incentives— have shaped the way we post: Facebook is for watershed career moments, stock photo profile pictures, memes, marriage, and otherwise euphoric announcements of life success. No matter how much we love to Like frictionless success stories and to offer and receive nudges of co-celebration, the muscles for intersubjectively sitting with difficult content atrophy with the compulsion to please. Similarly, Twitter is for the rat race of trends, competitions of improvisatory wit, and contortion sports, but mostly always marketing. Instagram is more geared toward the minor but should never demand anyone’s time. And Tumblr is perhaps the most lawless, with no length limit (unlike Facebook and Twitter), less stringent norms for self-expression, and, of course, porn—courtesy of the millions of NSFW tumblrs who demanded that Yahoo! reinstate its visibility after the acquisition. Whiteness and capital pulse through social media climates, and not just in the liberal multicultural way that would have Silicon Valley expose its own lack of diversity. Google and most tech industry employees are caucasian men, but whiteness and male dominance are liquid and immaterial, flowing through and among bodies, tones, and status updates. The overarching understanding for all of the platforms above is that updates be likeable and quick, and since posting at all can feel like self-aggrandizement, users need to be confident with it or at least know how to go gonzo with their indifference. In this light, I have long thought Clarice Lispector would be best updated as such: “I scarcely ever [post] because I only know how to be intimate. I only know how to be intimate whatever the circumstances” (1969). With that said, given that many of us have come of age with these sites, we have witnessed something relatively rare: not only the invention of democratized online social spaces but the formation of their umwelten—we have both shaped and been subjected to these tiny infinite worlds, and perhaps even learned in an acute way that individual impact on collective structure is much less smooth than the kind of digital manipulation to which we have grown so accustomed on our screens (see Joanne McNeil’s “Touch to Feel”). You can “say whatever you want” on Facebook but somehow what you really want to say feels parrhesiastic, 1

full of risk—a risk rife with eternal decisionism and entirely on you; it becomes some kind of unprofitable, micro-version of disruptive technology teetering on the verge of “auto-disruption,”2 Jill Lapore’s word for start-ups that risk so hard they self-destruct. Individual deviation online can feel about as transformative or cathartic as recycling and as terrifying as public nudity. In Josh Clover’s words, “There is no entirely voluntary choice. That’s the point.” At the same time, regarding the decisionism, precarity, and constant sense of risk that pertains to one’s mode of participation online—in what is not a commons but arguably the closest thing to a commons we’ve got—its similarity to the MBA ethos of “disruption” begs another question. If, as Lapore writes, disruption is both founded on and breeds anxiety, what do we make of the fact that ethicity is and does, too? I am interested in the ways the tech industry inscrutably toes the line between liberatory and recuperative with ideas like “disruption,” “sharing,” and the shattered 9-5 workday. Silicon Valley’s ties to 1960s counterculture make for a kind of datamosh of anti-establishment presupposition and capitalist embrace, both ironic and earnest at the same time. This zine is the first-ever compilation of affective accounts on social media. The pieces collected here span desire, attachment, fundamental insecurity, privacy concerns, feminized subjectivities, intimacy, flatness, and paranoia. Robin James asks epochal questions about technological genderfuck and explores the ways in which we are our own mothers, wives, and marketing firms. Rob Horning incisively theorizes that attention on social media operates less as a currency for users, and more as an instrument—like money—for “sustained indeterminacy.” Caleb Beckwith offers a view into his singular, yet generalizable, futile attempt to quantify the self in a way that leaves both quantity and quality as enigmatic as ever. In his usual flippant style, Brian Droitcour performs what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (a la Spivak) characterize as “the first right”—or, “the right to refuse what has been refused to you”—by mocking the professionally pure LinkedIn body: “Lots of people feel good about their LinkedIn Bodies; lots of people are fine with Facebook. Lots of people out there hate Life.” Lyle M. Suxe and Maxine Anderson both capture the misrecognition, alienation, and flatness of millennial labor and OkCupid, two things which are not in any way separate. Joanne McNeil’s catalog essay for the TTTT exhibition at Jerwood Encounters is much more than an art review, focusing on the evacuation and resignification of touch. Enrico Boccioletti’s “Content Aware” resonates with the effect Natalia Cecire describes on pg. 7—what significance is any of us when we can be replaced ad infinitum? This concept of disposability and uselessness is somewhat taken up by Kimberly Alidio, as well, who proffers an index of online, academic, and/or radical life in the impasse, with attention to the perks and exhaustion of the interstice. Aisha Sasha John is delirious both aspirationally and factually, in the best possible way. And lastly, Jennifer Mehigan’s art provides historicity, texture, flatness throughout. While I still hold out hope that online spaces not find their genre, that we each might mischievously “block the becoming-object of the event,”3 my wish is that this zine help shift the conversation away from internet “addiction” toward questions about attachment. It might also be worth noting that this zine started as a joke, but that’s the very reason why it seems important that it actually exist. June 2014

1. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke UP, 2011), 65. 2. See Jill Lapore’s essay “The Disruption Machine” in the New Yorker, 23 June 2014. 3. Berlant, 64.

#work

Femininity as a Technology: Some Thoughts on Hyperemployment Robin James

Does digital technology, especially insofar as it is masculinized or seen as gender-neutral (which are generally the same thing: mankind, postman, etc.), resignify the gendered stigma conventionally attached to care work, affective work, and other sorts of feminized work that never quite count as “real” labor? This question comes out of a conversation I was having with some of my graduate students about Karen Gregory’s response to Ian Bogost’s Atlantic piece on hyperemployment. I don’t have an answer for this question, but I think it’s very important to consider. (Somebody’s probably already written a fabulous piece on it—and if they have, please point me to it!) So, in this piece I want to set up the question for further discussion. The gist of Bogost’s concept of hyperempoyment is this: if we are employed, we all work all the time. Digital technologies have made it easy for second, third, fourth (and so on ad infinitum) shifts to be built into every job (middle-class, managerial-style, non-retail or food-service job, presumably). He writes: It’s easy to see email as unwelcome obligations, but too rarely do we take that obligation to its logical if obvious conclusion: those obligations are increasingly akin to another job—or better, many other jobs. For those of us lucky enough to be employed, we’re really hyperemployed—committed to our usual jobs and many other jobs as well. It goes without saying that we’re not being paid for all these jobs, but pay is almost beside the point, because the real cost of hyperemployment is time. We are doing all those things others aren’t doing instead of all the things we are competent at doing. And if we fail to do them, whether through active resistance or simple overwhelm, we alone suffer for it: the schedules don’t get made, the paperwork doesn’t get mailed, the proposals don’t get printed, and on and on. Karen Gregory’s point—which I fully agree with—is that women and minorities have always had a second (and third, and fourth) shift. They’ve always been expected to do the things like make schedules, mail paperwork, and reproduce the conditions for productive labor generally. She writes: I am wondering if what Bogost is drawing attention to has less to do with “employment” than with the uneven redistribution and privatization of the labor of social reproduction, an antagonism that feminist theorists have been writing about for more than thirty years…This tacit agreement, however, extends beyond social media and e-mail and is really a form of housework and maintenance for our daily lives. For more than thirty years, Marxist feminists have been arguing that women’s unpaid labor—housework, reproduction, etc.—is a prerequisite for capitalist wage labor, surplus value extraction, and profit-making. Capital can extract surplus value from waged labor only because the wage laborer is supported by (and extracts surplus value from) unwaged labor, mainly in the form of the wife. Gregory’s argument is that what 4

Bogost is pointing to isn’t a new phenomenon so much as a reconfiguration of an ongoing practice: we are all our own wives and moms, so to speak. Indeed, as Bogost’s example suggests, our smartphones wake us up, not our moms, just as emails accomplish a lot of the relational work (scheduling, reminding, checking in, etc.) conventionally performed by women. Women are trained from a young age to perform this relational, caregiving, extra-shift work. Femininity—the gender ideal and norm—is the technology that helps women perform these tasks with ease and efficiency. Conforming to feminine ideals like cuteness, neatness, cleanliness, attention to (self)presentation, receptivity to others, and so on, trains you in the skills you need to accomplish feminized care/second+ shift work. Need to persuade people to do unpleasant things (like get out of bed)? It helps to be cute and/or nurturing! Need to create a clearly legible calendar or schedule that represents a family’s hectic and convoluted schedule? It helps to have neat handwriting, fine motor skills, and design sense (which girls of my generation definitely learned by, say, passing elaborately-decorated and folded notes between classes)! You get the idea. Now that “men” (by which I mean, masculinized or non-feminine subjects) are also expected to perform these sorts of tasks as part of their hyperemployment contracts, we rely on technologies other than femininity to assist us in accomplishing this work. Just think about the ways personal computers and smartphones regendered and re-classed secretarial labor. Typing isn’t feminized and classed in the way it once was (my mom’s boss’s wife still won’t type her own emails, because typing is for secretaries, not bourgeois housewives). Typing is universal, at least among the educated middle- and upper-classes. (At this point I want to go re-read Sadie Plant’s Zeroes and Ones, which is an old-ish but great book about technology, gender, femininity, and women.) So where does this leave femininity? I wonder if femininity functions as a way of disaggregating valuable “second shift” work (qua hyperemployment) from valueless but still socially and economically necessary second shift work? There are definitely feminized ways of using these technologies that enable hyperemployment: texting sometimes gets derided as teen girl excess, Pinterest seems to be heavily feminized. How do contemporary ideals of femininity train girls’ bodies to relate to technology in specifically feminized ways, ways that are tied to class, race, ability, etc.? (e.g., “good girls use technology wisely in their STEM careers, but bad girls use it excessively in their texting/shopping/selfies/etc.”) How might thinking about the feminization of digital technologies/platforms help us think about Gregory’s question: “I am wondering what solidarities can be drawn among bodies, selves, and data (and other nonhuman actors)—solidarities that might really take care of all of us”?

“This is why the B theme, addressed to the lover, makes so much sense. Beyoncé sings “Take all of me; I just wanna be the girl you like, the kind of girl you like” across shots of her almost hilariously spectacularized body, first just writhing in some sort of beaded wig, but quickly multiplied as what Siegfried Kracauer called the “mass ornament.” Multiplied in avant-gardist seriality, the spectacle of Beyoncé’s body is rendered generic and, at the same time, sublime in its sheer repeatability. The boundary between “the girl you like” and “the kind of girl you like” is as permeable as a limo partition (with the “chauffeur listening in eavesdropping, trying not to crash”), which is why the already commodified Beyoncé and Beyoncé-bits multiply until the video winds up full of professional exotic dancers from the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris (Wikipedia: ‘The dancers are deliberately chosen to be indistinguishable on stage in height and in breast size and shape’) and a...I’m going to go with chaise-not-very-longue?...that is allegedly ‘famous.’”

—Natalia Cecire, “Beyonce’s Second Skin” (Works Cited 2014)

#subjectivity

Reparative Compulsions Rob Horning

Are social-media sites just slot machines? Anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll’s book Addiction by Design, suggests how machine gambling, which is engineered to prompt compulsive use, can serve as an analogue for social media. Like video slots, which incite extended periods of “time-on-machine” to assure “continuous gaming productivity” (i.e. money extraction from players), social-media sites are designed to maximize time-on-site (as Alexis Madrigal, a senior editor for the Atlantic, suggested) to make their users more valuable to advertisers and to ratchet up user productivity in the form of data sharing and processing — liking and tagging posts, making connections among other users that enrich the network map and form the basis of ad hoc marketing demographics — that social-media sites reserve the rights to. Both video gaming machines and social media facilitate an escapism through engagement, an immersion in immediate risk-taking routines that obscures users’ anxiety. Both function as masochistic practices that offload the burden of self. The idea that one can “lose oneself” through gambling machines seems readily plausible: They narrow subjective experience to immediate and arbitrary reward seeking. But it’s a more paradoxical thing to claim social media use obliterates the self, given that social-media sites ostensibly serve to build up, circulate, and store the self (or at least the carefully curated tokens of identity). The archive generated through social media use, however, is less for the users than it is for the platforms. Users derive pleasure and relief from using social media not because they can construct an accurate picture of themselves but because they can garner the rewards of social recognition. But it is the nature of these rewards to diminish. In investigating machine gambling, Schüll wants “to track how shared social conditions and normative behavioral ideals contribute to shaping gambling addicts’ seemingly aberrant ‘machine lives,’ and to discern in those lives a kind of immanent critique of broader discontents.” That is, she argues that machine gamblers — many of whom routinely spend unbroken stretches of days at machines — pursue an extreme “nonrational” coping behavior as a response to economic and social instability. Under neoliberal economic conditions and ubiquitous surveillance, no one is free from such precarity. As social safety nets are systematically disabled by austerity governments and job security is replaced by demands for flexibility, individuals become more and more acclimated to a life of constant risk. And as more and more of one’s life is recorded, quantified, ranked, and credited to one’s human-capital quotient, virtually every gesture one makes becomes a gamble, with potential ramifications for one’s economic value as a “free agent” or “personal brand.” Everyday life is inseparable from brand-building labor, and labor is increasingly inseparable from leisure and consumption: It all demands a rational approach with a view toward enhancing the perceptions of one’s usefulness, or one’s centrality in the network of flows of valuable commercial information — knowing the right people, knowing what is cool, being in the loop, and so on. But these gambles confront us in chaotic fashion, with unpredictable or obscure stakes and outcomes. Given the real subsumption of subjectivity to capital — no ontological security without routing your thoughts and feelings through communicative capitalism’s circuits — self-construction has become an endless series of unpredictable risks. Inescapable surveillance makes simply being someone risky. The push to capitalize on every moment of conscious life overwhelms the individual subject — critics like Franco Berardi point to the rise of depression in capitalist societies, linking it to the acceleration of “prosumerist” imperatives to always be conceiving and circulating novel forms of consumer desire and lifestyle attenuations. And not only is

one’s “human capital” always at stake in life’s endless little gambles, but one is also subject to the threats inherent in visibility: Over- and underexposure both carry potential harm. The tension between these simultaneous threats leaves us craving a way of re-establishing control. What organized gambling does is rationalize the presentation and resolution of risk, converting it into the experience of what gamblers talk about as “action” — taking risk becomes pleasurable in and of itself, regardless of outcome, as the routines of gambling establish a sense of mastery over risk itself. Erving Goffman, in the essay “Where the Action Is,” theorizes “seeking action” as an individual’s effort to call forth otherwise inaccessible dimensions of ”character” and prove poise and “composure,” a term of art for Goffman that amounts to keeping one’s cool and earning a reputation for it — the ability to act natural. “Action” sets up a contrived situation that lets us show our “natural” character — or at least lets us think others think it is natural. According to Goffman, “excitement and character display, the by-products of practical gambles, … become in the case of action the tacit purpose of the whole show.” When we play, we don’t necessarily want to win; or rather, winning is not what it seems, not a matter of placing the right bet and having fortune turn our way. Winning is instead a matter of expressing a mastery of risk, of experiencing that expression as a feeling and loitering in it. Goffman suggests that we are fundamentally “ambivalent about safe and momentless living,” so we feel a pull away from the comforts of everyday life to the fringes to seek “serious action.” At the same time, choosing “action” makes us believe we can assert control over the way our lives are contingent and at the mercy of fate. Through seeking action, we seem to choose the momentous occasions for ourselves. Gambling addicts carry this logic to its endpoint, attempting to contain the continual recalibration and flexible adjustment demanded by neoliberalism within the total environmental offering by a gambling apparatus. Machine gambling folds the capitalist demand for efficiency and maximization back into this coping strategy, ramping up the orderly presentation of risk and resolution and acclimating users to ever faster cycles. This is what converts “action seeking” into the “machine zone” — the point at which “you are the machine,” as one of the gamblers Schüll interviewed describes it. Schüll argues that machine-gambling addicts become hooked on the “zone” that machines can take them to, in which the contingencies and inconveniences of human contact are eliminated, the pressure of being rational and entrepreneurial in one’s life is suspended, and money’s value is inverted. In short, it is a temporary antidote to the pressures of neoliberal subjectivity — the calculating, rational self who must constantly hustle and perform affective labor and prosume. Machine gambling is a procedure for converting those pressures into their opposite by indulging their logic completely. Something similar happens with social-media use, which converts the pressures of social exposure — the economic need for attention and the loss of privacy — into something that feels managed and managable. Both the compulsions of machine gambling and the compulsions of social-media checking, afford users a specific and limited sense of control over a very precise set of choices and then simplifying the possible outcomes. In Schüll’s words, these platforms let “individuals use technology to manufacture ‘certainties.’ ” Certainties is in quotes because this type of technology use doesn’t allow us to determine outcomes, only to choose the occasions when we seek rewards. Schüll quotes a 1902 essay on gambling by Clemens France: “So strong is the passion for the conviction of certainty that one is impelled again and again to enter upon the uncertain in order to put one’s safety to the test … Thus, paradoxical as it may sound, gambling is a struggle for the certain and sure, i.e. the feeling of certainty.” Schüll notes the asymmetry in the time horizons of gamblers and casino operators: casino operators take the long view and use the mass of data they collect to manage long-run profit. Gamblers, in seeking the “zone” of satisfactory play, pursue a “perpetual present tense” whose horizon extends only to the possibility of immediate gratification. In this sense, the gambling transaction is a mechanism for trading the long-term view, over which it is hard to sustain positive

mood, for the short-term, in which mood is irrelevant and there is only reactive sensation. As Schüll puts it, machine gamblers operate by “affective adaptation rather than analytic leverage.” They are looking to hack their brain’s reward mechanisms, not pursue a Weberian rationality that might lead to steady gains. Another way to put that is that casinos, as corporate subjects, don’t experience depression the way individual gamblers do, so casinos don’t need the compensations of the zone but can instead sell it to those who do. Hence the companies responsible for machine gambling and social media make this hack possible as a monetary exchange — you can buy out of capitalist subjectivity through an even more capitalist bargain in which experiential time itself becomes a fungible and commoditized. But these companies have no incentive to help anyone resolve depression, only to make it “productive” — that is, a guarantor of a predictable profit stream for the casino. So casinos collect data and develop technologies and environments to cultivate and nurture depression in such a guise that the depressed subject can’t recognize their depression for what it is. This is how escapism-driven, “experience economy”–driven capitalism works. This market in turn becomes a precondition for a self to have “experiences.” Social media works similarly, aiming to ensconce users in a total environment that ministers to their anxieties by stimulating them in a routinized fashion. The continuity social media supplies to users relies not on sensory nullification, as with gaming machines (or opiates) but on making connectivity ubiquitous, of being always on and responsive to our flashes of social curiosity and anxiety. Is anyone thinking of me? What are people doing? Do I belong? Am I connected? These continuous processes allow us to digest our memories, experiences and fears and excrete commercially useful information. The design techniques for ushering users into the machine zone involve resolving the ambiguity, contingency, and complexity of action in everyday life, crystallizing ambient risk and dread into heightened moments that users can trigger and seem to control, whether it’s by spinning the reels or checking for likes or at-replies. Schüll writes: Intensive machine gambling … manages to suspend key elements of contemporary life — market-based exchange, monetary value, and conventional time — along with the social expectation for self-maximizing, risk-managing behavior that accompanies them. The activity achieves this suspension not by transcending or canceling out these elements and expected modes of conduct, but by isolating and intensifying them — or “distilling” them … to the point where they turn into something else. Later, she clarifies what she means by machine gambling’s distillation effect: The activity distills these aspects of life into their elementary forms (namely, risk-based interaction, actuarial economic thinking, and compressed, elastic time) and applies them to a course of action formatted in such a way that they cease to serve as tools for self-enterprise and instead serve as the means to continue play. This same analysis can be applied to social media pretty readily. Social-media use can distill anxiety-inducing aspects of social surveillance, status competition, the economic mobilization of personality, and the fear of missing out into their “elementary forms” (overt self-promotion, explicit networking, stalking, establishing connectivity for its own sake) and format them into a manageable interface. The trappings of entrepreneurial selfhood in social media fall away, and the platforms become a means of escape, with distraction just a push-notification jackpot away. Given that video-gambling machines offer, in Schüll’s view, a pure escape from the pressures of sociality, it may seem strange to liken them to social media. “The immersive zone of machine play,” Schüll writes, “offers a reprieve from the nebulous and risky calculative matrix of social interaction, shielding her from the monitoring gaze of others and relieving her of the need to monitor them in return.” Nothing could seem further from the realities of social-media use, which is built on mutual monitoring, lateral surveillance, calculated acts of sharing to build a personal brand, and so on.

But that is precisely what makes social media a powerful way of mastering the contingencies of such surveillance: On social media, privacy fears are ”distilled” into their quintessence — I am always exposed — and concentrated in a realm where they can be amplified, where we can toy with them rather than be ruled by them. It takes the logic of gaming machines a step further. You can interact with a machine, alone, on your own terms, not to escape being social but as a way of being social. Thanks to social media, we can believe that we control the time and place where we confront our social risks, our status uncertainties, our fears of exposure. (In fact, it may just make us less prepared to address those risks when they arise outside the social-media platforms.) If machine gambling is about mastering and escaping the feelings brought on by economic precarity, social-media use is about mastering feelings of privacy risk, social exclusion, coinciding fears of over- and underexposure. We don’t want to be “unwilling avatars,” yet we also don’t want to be excluded from the social realm as it is reconstituted in fluid, intertwined, networked platforms. If we are truly trapped in an attention economy, then compulsive social-media use represents an attempt to devalue the attention currency, the way gambling devalues money, makes it useless for its customary purposes. Schüll writes: it is possible for a sense of monetary value to become suspended in machine gambling not because money is absent, but because the activity mobilizes it in such a way that it no longer works as it typically does. Money becomes the bridge away from everyone and everything, leading to a zone beyond value, with no social or economic significance. In the zone, instead of serving as a tool for self-determination, money becomes an instrument for “sustained indeterminacy.” Attention in social media continues to serve the same economic function it always has for marketers and ad brokers, but for users it works differently, leading to “a zone beyond value” where it no longer gratifies or terrifies in the conventional ways. On social media, attention becomes an “instrument for sustained indeterminancy.” It propels users through the closed feedback loops that social media create, extending “time-on-site,” ultimately for its own sake. It allows us to perpetually defer the irreconcilable contradictions of being a subject in the world. We both want attention and to be free of attention’s control over our lives, free of the insecurity it provokes. (Just like people want to belong while asserting their individuality.) So it’s not sufficient to say that social-media addicts are driven by a hunger for crypto-fame. Attention in social media may at first trigger and trade on such fantasies, just as gambling initially triggers fantasies of striking it rich, but then both settle into moment-to-moment compulsion. In social media, this allows them to addresses the psychic damage inflicted by precarious sociality — the result of social recognition and support having been depredated by its absorption into the service economy. Or more plainly: attention on social media both compensates for and is the logical endpoint of commoditized care work. Getting into the “zone” and staying there is a form of productive labor that workers essentially become willing to pay to perform (like an internship in a glamour industry). Prosumerism at its purest. People can zone out into rituals of checking for signs of having been noticed, which, by Schüll’s logic, helps cultivate our ultimate indifference to it. The rituals of checking become more important, more soothing, than whatever is being checked for. You go from seeking a message to seeking the zone of perpetual seeking — aimless scrolling through the stream of tweets, for instance. When gambling addicts win jackpots, they often resent the way they have disrupted the flow of their play. Likewise, the notifications of social media are best when they are ephemeral and require no response from us that precludes further checking or scrolling through. The “zone” of social media is a paradoxical hybrid of the asocial, desubjectified zoning out brought on by fusing with a gaming machine and the action-seeking hypersociality of exhibitionists. Intersubjectivity is negated by the social-media platform, which gamifies social interaction and makes it something that one plays alone on a smartphone. Social risk and the scary contingencies of personal interaction are mastered by the platform’s transformation of other people’s unpredictable attention-granting behavior into the social-media game’s “reward schedule.” The rewards remain addictively intermittent, only they are provided by capricious peers, not a random number generator. Here, validation or social recognition functions as a discharge as much as a confirmation of the self.

Thus social media addresses the anxieties inherent in constructing a self in part by making attention dismantle the self, dissolve us into flow, even as our social-media use lets us passively build our identity up as a data profile. The data profile becomes rich but hollow, uninhabited phenomenologically by a subject. One is not “there” in the content of one’s self, which is in an archive; instead one experiences only the rhythm of checking and responding, and the one-dimensional rewards the rituals offer. Ongoing use of social media yields desubjectification through interaction with the standard formats elicited by the platforms: Your data is individualized, while your behavior is homogenized. A 1988 paper by psychologist Roy Baumeister, “Masochism as Escape From Self,” argues that the pressures of having a unique self — the “high-level self-awareness” and high-pressure decisionmaking involved — can become aversive, and lead to an intensification of the desire to escape from self. “The requirements of making decisions under pressure or uncertainty, of taking responsibility for actions that may disappoint or harm others, of maintaining a favorable public and private image of self despite all threats and challenges, and of asserting control over a recalcitrant social environment can become oppressive and stressful and can foster desires to escape. This burden of selfhood can be used to explain and predict the selective appeal of masochism.” It seems plausible that the intense self-consciousness of ongoing social-media use (certainly a “recalcitrant social environment,” despite its responsiveness) could likewise trigger an intense need to escape from self. The pretense of self-construction online becomes an alibi for authorizing self-forgetting, escape. When we are seeking the self, we may be seeking how to get rid of it. According to Baumeister, masochism allows people to escape the self by orienting them on the immediacy of physical experience and by allowing them to dissociate through the creation and inhabitation of a “fantasized identity.” Intensive sharing on social media can mirror this process and cease to work as a building up of a self, instead instigating its dissolution — not merely in the sense that archived information on social media is harder to assemble into a coherent identity, but also in the way engaging with social media narrows focus: akin to the masochistic myopia that Baumeister notes in the literature on masochism as well as to the depersonalization of gambling’s machine zone. The constricted choices and checking opportunities social media constantly provides function as ego depletion, draining the will to continue to think about the self strategically, leaving us happy to make choices about self-presentation with the least friction as possible. Choices in social media invoke the self en route to dissipating it along with all resistance. Knowing we should share, but too tired to think about it, we start to share according to the defaults. And this release from self-consciousness is a sort of zone its own. Much is made of using social media for personal branding, but the personal brand is something we wan to deny as much as create, a stigma we bear. Self-expression in social media can function as a self-purging, a way of processing life experience at a remove that reduces the uncertainty of its implications to straightforward traffic metrics (number of likes, etc.). Self-documentation becomes a way of conquering the paralysis of self-consciousness, of having too much self on one’s mind. Instantaneous and continual sharing shrinks the time frame over which our narratives of identity need to span in our imagination. The idea that we must posit a long-term identity disappears and is supplanted by the rhythms of updating and checking. That long-term identity persists, but as an archive, and making a narrative out of it ceases to be our persistent worry. The material in the archive is available for whatever narrative one wants to make, when they want to make it. Your archive can confront you as the work of a delightfully mysterious stranger.

QUANTIFIED/DAYS/AWAY Caleb Beckwith

HEY,

QUANTIFIED

DAYS

AWAY.

QUANTIFED/DAYS/AWAY is a product of the Quantified Self movement, an internet-based social phenomenon springing from the California-based Quantified Self Labs (quantifedself.com). Behind Quantified Self is a belief that by mining the body’s vast stores of data (such as heart rate, bpm and mood patterns), one might gain a greater sense of mastery over his/her general state of being. This art-piece utilizes the Quantified Self iphone app “How Are You.” The app produces personal data by promoting users to grade ten potential affects and emotions by intensity, which is scored on a scale of 1-10. These include, but are not limited to: attentiveness, nervousness, shame and hostility. These answers are then: 1) graded on a positive/negative scale (ie: BOTH a zero in hostility AND a five in attentiveness would yield ten points, this because hostility is presumably bad and attentiveness good) and 2) combined to form a number ranging from one to one hundred, effectively scoring one’s mood on an A-F academic scale. In this specific piece, the author tracked his mood(s) for roughly one month, from September to October 26, his 26th birthday.

#w(e)ary bodies

8==>

Brian Droitcour I don’t have a LinkedIn page but if I did it would be filled with dick jokes. When you get a LinkedIn page you get a LinkedIn Body—it’s you, reconstituted as a linear aggregate of achievement. A LinkedIn Body is made of the ways in which you’ve made money. A LinkedIn Body makes you into money—the contacts and connections are the lubricants of your professional mobility, and you, as a LinkedIn Body and a product on a networked market, are easily exchangeable, measurable in value. LinkedIn contacts aren’t people; people on LinkedIn are contacts. The LinkedIn Body doesn’t sweat or piss but it does shoot out bots—via email—to invite more contacts. The LinkedIn Body is a vessel that incubates new connections in the big collective networked body of LinkedIn. The LinkedIn Body is promiscuous, and its promiscuity is purely professional—professionally pure. The LinkedIn Body is clear and flowing, transparent, flat, eager to link in to networking opportunities, to register presence in the mobile zones of white-collar labor. The LinkedIn Body is shaped like a slender strip of netting—the more connections it has, the longer and stronger it gets. Its health is measured by its number of contacts. Its orifices are hermetically sealed but its fingers branch out, offering a slim handshake in all directions. Its arms flex the clout of its connections. Its mouth is impenetrable; it shows a tight mesh of white teeth that circles the whole head, its gleam pinging back the query—Are we connecting? I don’t want to have a LinkedIn Body and this is why I don’t have a page on LinkedIn. This is why, if I did have a page, it would be filled with dick jokes—to poke holes in the fabric of the LinkedIn Body, to peek through its undone flies, to be reminders of the real, pissing body beyond bloodless LinkedIn one: 8==> HI !! The LinkedIn Body’s look persuades follow professionals that it never has funny thoughts about dicks. Or if it does it keeps them hidden, just as—on the streets or in the office—it conceals its dick in khakis. The LinkedIn Body’s dick fucks its wife and doesn’t try anything funny. The LinkedIn dick—encased in pleated khakis—only shares its funny dick thoughts in an AFK location like a men’s room where the only ones who can hear them are a couple other LinkedIn dicks who can be trusted not to perforate the condom of integrity encasing their LinkedIn dick buddy. What does Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, have to say about this? “You have one identity,” says Zuckerberg. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” What Zuckerberg is saying here is that he thinks we should all have LinkedIn Bodies. No—he thinks the LinkedIn Body should be the only body we have. Co-workers—no, “work friends”—might as well be the only people you know. LinkedIn makes everyone a “contact”; Facebook treats people the same way but makes them “friends.” Friends are friends, kin are friends—you can identify husbands, wives, siblings, cousins on your profile to single a few people out as more than friends but they still count toward your total number of friends. And Facebook connects you to hundreds of friends. Facebook dresses up the strangeness of

LinkedIn Bodies in the gooey warmth of friendship. But in spite of that it still shapes bodies as flat, grasping, eager—monstrous. What does Chris Poole, founder of 4Chan, have to say about this? “Google and Facebook would have you believe that you’re a mirror,” says Poole. “But in fact, we’re more like diamonds.” He means we have a body that’s not a LinkedIn Body—but we have to hide parts of it at times. We’re like diamonds, he says, but Poole’s diamonds oddly reflect light from only one facet at a time: a facet for Facebook, a facet for 4Chan, more facets for other places. “Anonymity is authenticity,” says Poole. “It allows you to share in an unvarnished, unfiltered, raw and real way.” The truest facet is the hidden one—the dark side of the moon. 4Chan is a community of affinities of what the LinkedIn Body holds in privacy—a water cooler in the dark. 4Chan lives in symbiosis with the LinkedIn Body. It is the private parts of social media, or a glory hole for them. On 4Chan the dicks aren’t in the khakis. They’re out there! It’s the faces that are clad—in Guy Fawkes-type masks. Both Zuckerberg and Poole are interested in preserving the social status quo through online communities. If one of them is radical it’s Zuckerberg, who wants to eradicate privacy and make public life—professional life—the whole life. Zuckerberg’s “integrity” and Poole’s raw and real authenticity are spatial conceptions of selfhood derived from the liberal ideal of the subject—an autonomous agent within a bounding line, acting consciously and consistently as the embodiment of principles. Mirrors or diamonds, the pictures of the self that Zuckerberg and Poole like have hard, definite edges—inorganic and discrete. A LinkedIn identity—Zuckerberg’s integrity—accommodates growth and change but only along a linear path. The change allowed is change in the sense of professional development, or the stepwise movement down the drop-down menu’s options from “single” to “in a relationship” to “engaged” to “married”—it’s better not to muck around in the grab bag below! Facebook’s Timeline tracks life as a chronicle where, when viewed retrospectively, one thing led to another with the inevitability of linear progression. It disposes with the narrative possibilities of biography that can be open to contingencies and the past possibility of other stories, other paths. The Timeline, like the pruned achievements of the LinkedIn page, is a bounding line, delineating people as agents within a nicely rounded public sphere. But the remarkable thing about social media is its potential to undermine old conceptions of selfhood, by making space for a record of utterances and images of the body that are immediately public and visible, revealing change and the contingency of selfhood is an unvarnished, unfiltered way, as Poole might say. Social media turns the public sphere inside out, collapses and deflates it—the private mingles with the public in the leftover mess. Zuckerburg would clean up that mess by vacuuming the private parts—my dick jokes!—and discarding them; Poole would like to sift the public from the private and glue them to facets of diamonds to keep them apart. But what’s wrong with being real and raw without anonymity? What’s wrong with the real and raw abject dreck of bodies (selves) being with and changing with one another? “You have one identity,” Zuckerberg says, and he’s right—what he’s wrong about is the shape of it; what he misses is its shapelessness.

You only live once. You have one self, one body—and the contact of your self with the world is bound the position of its body in space in time. But singularity shouldn’t be mistaken for stability or solidity. Positions in space and time are always changing, and the self and the body—though one—are always changing with them, always changing with others. Authenticity is bound up in ideals of stability and consistency, but real and raw authenticity is the truth of change, the reality of multiplicity within singularity, the contingency of life. Life is what happens around LinkedIn but LinkedIn makes it look like the bit of life it records is the one that matters. Facebook adds a film of friendliness to make it feel like LinkedIn living is all there is to life. Lots of people feel good about their LinkedIn Bodies; lots of people are fine with Facebook. Lots of people out there hate Life. *** APPENDIX: Sample CV 1984: Made applesauce in pre-school; teacher said not to put plastic knife in mouth; put plastic knife in mouth to eat a tiny bit of apple; cried, not because cut self but because disobeyed. Skills utilized: Yielding to temptation, crying 1994: Viewed mother’s emaciated corpse. Skills acquired: Skepticism toward medical knowledge, indifference regarding death 1997: Saw therapist weekly; therapist said I only had to talk to him if I wanted to; sat through all sessions in silence; therapist said I didn’t have to keep coming. Skills utilized: Skepticism toward medical knowledge 2000: Did not have sex in twentieth century. Skills acquired: None 2005: Slept with friend’s ex; made people angry. Skills acquired: Rudimentary understanding of emotions associated with romantic relationships 2006: Invited friends over for a small gathering; three guests arrived early and proceeded to have threesome in my bed; tried to get them to stop but could not until other guests rang the buzzer; one of the sex guys ran into bathroom naked and vomited in tub. Skills utilized: None (someone else cleaned the tub for me) 2007: Black eye obtained when beaten by Miami Beach police officer. Skills acquired: Don’t spit at cops even when repeatedly asked: “Do you have AIDS?” 2012–present: Took many selfies. Skills utilized: Social media optimization

Lyle M. Suxe

Untitled

Maxine Anderson

You make nine dollars an hour. The managers only make eleven. This would encourage solidarity in the ideal world you spend meager breaks browsing, a world of labor journalists’ tweets and optimistic emails from small magazines, but in this world, the world of your job, the labor journalists’ parents still pay their rent and subsidize their tickets to the magazines’ hundreddollar benefit galas. In this world every industry feels like a dying one. At your job, solidarity has thus far failed to materialize. You tried to get the union to organize your store. They can’t. When this location opened, they cut a deal with the owners, they say; they are powerless, they say; you emit vague statements of disgust, you give up. At work, everyone spends meaningless hours browsing for shoes and cutoff shorts and crop tops instead of helping customers. You join in. Nobody ever buys anything because most of the gratification is in looking and, anyway, your meager paychecks are consumed all too quickly by whiskey gingers and whiskey rocks and whiskey neat. Two months in, this loses its appeal. Everyone’s budget is in a permanent state of austerity. Everyone is cripplingly anxious and cripplingly lonely. Instead of shopping for clothes, everyone eventually confesses that they date, you know, online. You move on from clothes to the online husks of people. All of your coworkers are identically white and brunette and androgynous and you all hover around the computer, now shopping for women and men in the same detached haze in which you once shopped for shoes. You write your own ad copy and judge everyone immediately for their own. It’s worse than freelance work: your only hope of reimbursement is cheap whiskey, cheap beer, cheap sex. You date an anarchist even though you know you will regret it. After five minutes you realize this is not going well. He spends half an hour interrogating you about computer programming. He texts you on May Day. You ignore him. You send more messages. You wait for more messages. Your profile is more carefully curated than your resume because if you are going nowhere, you may as well enjoy it. Nobody seems to find you funny. You wait for more messages. You are bored. You look at people who a soulless algorithm has determined to be 100% your enemy. They are all from Texas and in the army. You feel like a soulless algorithm yourself. You wait for more messages. You are so avant-garde, they say. I want to smash the patriarchy with you. Did you go to Oberlin? How far left is “radical left”? You meet someone who says he is a feminist. You plan to start a magazine. He says Be the Sacco to my Vanzetti. You talk about of Montreal and Bataille. You write each other letters by hand. You never become Facebook friends. You think you have escaped a curse. He asks you to join a commune with him. He asks you to move to Mexico City with him. He fucks your boss. You keep the job anyway. You leave him and

sleep with friends. It feels dangerous; you feel numb. They don’t. You think about quitting your job. You ask for your six-month raise, tentatively, and it is never given to you. Your parents stop buying your subway tickets. You are afraid of what would happen if you quit. You have gotten very good at filtering your messages. For some reason you agree to meet someone solely because you like his eyebrows. Before you go out, you Google him. Someone has written an entire essay on his work around student debt. Someone else has written an entire essay on how he needs to check his privilege. On the first date, he gives you the business card of a union organizer. He tells you he got fired from his last job because he tried to organize it. He spends his days writing a young adult novel, drinking wine and smoking weed like you haven’t seen someone smoke since high school, and he is living on money fromsomewhere mysterious. You want to tell him to check his privilege, but somehow despite all this he is kind. You drift apart. He flees the country. You message a punk with a round face and a torn-up jacket. You go to a show. He lives in a squat. He makes you feel bourgeois because you don’t. You get fucked up on a subway platform together but don’t go home with him. Seeing him again would be too exhausting, but later you bump into each other at a party that Verso has organized, and you talk about how much the rent on their loft must be. At least they pay their interns, you say. You are there with a friend. Why don’t you meet someone here? he says. There are lots of people here. You think of how things used to be. In the South the strange algorithm had less material to work with and it only showed you people you knew, people who messaged you and pressured you to respond by their silent and constant presence at house parties and protests and discussion groups. People who had already dated your friends. People who did not consume the flesh, ovum, or lactate of animals. People who went out with you while their primary partner was sick in bed, people who refused to fuck you because you didn’t advocate armed revolution against the government. You relive old fears in the cavernous loft filled with labor journalists. You take your leave. When you were in the South you hoped that OKCupid would provide some kind of alternative -- something radically different from the incestuous, bitter dating and breaking up of the left. Instead you met the same people over and over again like a fever dream, I heard he has a big dick but he’s kind of a misogynist. You were disgusted by your propensity to gossip. You did it anyway. You dredged old Facebook photos and old threads and old message boards, tracing out the web of broken things to years before you were even radicalized. You watched things fall apart. You deleted your profile, but then you reopened it, revised it, resubmitted a new version of yourself to the barely-attentive gaze of a million strangers. In this cold lonely industrial city, in your dead-end job where your only freedom is choosing the music you’ll play, twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift, you look for a different alternative. You are looking for meaningful human connection and cannot find it. You look for meaningful political connections and cannot find them. The sum total of your organizing for the past year has been one unbearable meeting, one ineffective march, and endless dates with endless leftists. It snows. You cry. You change your profile. All your friends move west. You change your profile. You are really not looking for company anymore, just someone with some spark of life.

You meet someone who looks like a young Art Garfunkel with an Ivy League education. He is drowning in debt. He is unbearable. Later you find him on OKCupid and realize that his carefully curated online presence is shockingly benign. It leaves a bad taste in your mouth. It makes you paranoid. You think about deleting your profile. You tell your friends, I am addicted to the Internet. You tell a customer at work, I am not living a political life. I am addicted to the Internet. You blog about it. You think about deleting your profile. Why do you want to deleteyour profile? OKCupid asks you. It provides a tidy list of reasons. You donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to check any of the boxes. If there were a box that said OKCupid reproduces the particular despair of your situation, ad nauseam you would check that box. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not there. You go to work. You go home. You go back to work. You think about deleting your profile. You wait for more messages. You rail against OKCupid. You rail against late capitalism. You rail against the patriarchy. You wait for more messages. You wait for more messages. You wait for more messages. You wait.

Lyle M. Suxe

#attachment

Touch to Feel

Catalog Essay for TTTT, Curated by Sarah Williams at Jerwood Encounters in London Joanne McNeil A smartphone just launched called “Pyongyang Touch.” It looks like a common Samsung or Apple model but it is available only in North Korea. Hardly anyone in the country will ever see one of these devices, let alone “touch” one, but those few will be initiated into customs and rituals unique to our time. These gestures are instinctive — swipe to scroll, pinch to minimize. It is the way we played with make believe books and microscopes as children. Hands customize what is on the screen. Touch until the screen reflects what you wish to see. “Pyongyang Touch” doesn’t connect to the internet. That is forbidden. But it gives users the power to manipulate a screen environment like clay. After experiencing it, the physical world no longer seems like something static. Touch screen gestures are so natural that it is not unusual to watch toddlers swipe a television or shake a book to update the image. We are no longer divided by these gestures. Somewhere a kid in North Korea might be patting at a TV now saying, “this screen is broken!” The origin of an object in the exhibition TTTT is also, improbably, Pyongyang. Oliver Laric’s Mansudae Overseas Project is a copy of a bronze sculpture the artist ordered from a commercial art manufacturing studio in the city — its website operated by an Italian liaison. The network activity (visiting the website, contacting its administrator) that led to the construction of this object is as invisible in physical space as the policy that made it complicated (postal service sanctions and other logistics.) Border control and internet censorship divide us from North Korea. We might be standing on the same sedimentary rocks but no one meets us in the digital overlay. Physical miles seem like years away. Nicole Morris’ Your Love Will Fade begins with shadows and shadow puppets. No one casts a shadow on the internet, and you can’t touch either. A woman’s flesh, bound in a strappy dress, is shown in contrast with rough textures, sounds, and surfaces which indicate friction. The idea for every piece she makes begins with clay. Viewers squeeze in to see the projection of the film behind hanging fabric. Nicholas Brooks and Heather Phillipson also construct physical barriers to see their work, with screens and ladders, respectively. Cécile B. Evans is exhibiting an installation including 3D printed items that she selected from a study of the top 100 most familiar objects — a comb, scissors, and a screwdriver. The familiarity comes not just from the look of these objects but also our expectation of what each weights, the surface texture, and way we handle the objects; the qualities we register by touch. Benedict Drew and Johann Arens further interrogate the contrast between navigating the physical world with your eyes and navigating a screen surface with your fingers. Artists in the exhibition TTTT are inviting us to consider textures that are only experienced offscreen. Digital and physical worlds might appear interconnected, but for now, to touch, to feel something other than flat glass, means to put the gadgets away. In time, we will move away from the screen, and the internet will pump through everyday objects. Interfaces of the future could feel like grass, snakeskin, denim, or rubber. We will mime fingerpainting in the air soon enough. The physical world will be as malleable as what we see now boxed in bezels. Until then, we live in anxious crosshatches: the space between the world we create with our fingers and the world we sense from touch. 29

Common words took on new meanings after the internet. Now to “search” for something, is less about yearning, than research. Used outside an onscreen context, “search” becomes a metaphor for the algorithmic function to find something specific, but it is a word as old as language. There is no synonym — quest, pursue, examine — that quite fits the shape of the desire we described before we went online. The word “touch” is likewise recalibrated, with a focus on the motion of touching rather than sensing the texture of something. The uniformly smooth surface of a “touch interface” has no friction. Touch is never the point of a digital experience, not the way that code is written for us to hear or see. We touch surfaces that do not tug back or prick our fingers. We touch to alter images, to turn the volume down. We touch to engage other senses. No wonder a phone is frequent bedside companion. The last thing to touch before sleeping. Wake up and touch. Handling that object all day long with delicate fingertip gestures creates an unusual intimacy. Touch to feel in control of the screen world, to orientate your way through space. It changes your postures and body. When my phone is in my bag or my pocket, sometimes I catch myself holding my right hand clenched still like a claw. I have spent so much time holding a flat rectangle my muscles contort in this resting pose, an empty space where my phone is otherwise.

The word “touch” is likewise recalibrated, with a focus on the motion of touching rather than sensing the texture of something. The uniformly smooth suface of a “touch interface” has no friction.

An elite few in North Korea wake up and touch their phones first thing in the morning. In a satellite image, the country is a black patch between networked glittering garland weaves of light in neighboring South Korea and China. It is as dark as the Sea of Japan, with just one bright spot at the capital city, Pyongyang. That’s where the smartphones are sold. The smartphones without internet. Mapped there is a tyranny beyond our imagination, and to privilege online representation above physical encounters, or weigh each the same, is to allow us to forget it.

A screen only represents texture. It offers just a shadow of an approximation of what it is like to experience tactility. There is emancipatory imaginative power in the capacity to move digital objects with fingers. However, to register the substance and feel of things, as the exhibition TTTT reveals, means to hold your hands out to touch. 30

Content Awareness, 2012 Enrico Boccioletti

“Content Aware (2011) takes its name from a function introduced in 2010 in the latest version of Photoshop, the well known photo editing software programme: an “intelligent” algorithm enables the user to remove an element, automatically replacing it with new content which is generated by the programme in accordance with the background. This is how the Photoshop site presents the function: “Remove any image detail or object and watch as Content-Aware Fill magically fills in the space left behind. This breakthrough technology matches lighting, tone, and noise so it looks as if the removed content never existed.” In other words the tool automatises a very complex process, putting it within the reach of any amateur. Boccioletti makes a fairly banal alternative use of this tool. He appropriates fashion photographs found on the net, selects the area corresponding to the figure or various parts of its anatomy and asks the software to fill in these areas at will. He makes no further modifications. Yet the large size of the selected area and its importance compared to the background creates some problems for the software, which is designed to deal with much smaller areas, causing it to make approximations and mistakes that Boccioletti accepts as surprising random side effects. In the best case scenario, what is left behind is a light trace, a ghost of the deleted figure, while in the most extreme cases the software generates monsters: bodies without arms or faces, replicated anatomical parts, clothes dressing an empty space, Cubist interiors, eyes staring at us out of wallpaper. Each of these identities annihilated or absorbed into the surrounding setting, yet still present in some way, is given a name, a credible and precise identity by Boccioletti, using a Fake Name Generator found on the internet. Yet again, extremely simple formal strategies are deployed to generate extremely sophisticated results. Boccioletti’s images are created for the web, for mass, rapid consumption, the same type of consumption that is the destiny of the fashion photographs he uses as his starting point. By introducing anomalies, the artist in some way rescues them from this brand of consumption, demanding greater attention be devoted to them. His artistic culture also comes into play, drawing bizarre parallels with Western visual art: Impressionist painting, geometric abstraction, hyperrealism, surrealism. He makes them meaningful once more. He forces us to think about their aberrant nature as entities that are part consumer image, part work of art. He adds content.” —Domenico Quaranta Fabio Paris Art Gallery, Brescia, Italy (2012)

We are between genre, in the ether world of over-ambition, we author no books, win no grants, get cast in no roles, adjudicate no awards, receive no fellowships, finish no degrees, start no theater companies, teach no classes, make no touring dates, speak at no panels, read at no readings, get no jobs, speak for no one, not even ourselves, we want it queer, we want an instigation, we want out, we want in to be maximal, so until then we wait, Admire our effervescence, our rephrasing, our branding, our public vulnerability, while we warrant no feedback, attain no mentors, advance no further, we listen in on social media to shop talk and in-house blogging, mixing the cadences of slam poetry with the cadences of intersectional praxis, right?, we have this down, anticipating catharsis so we press against others, to get it, right?, Righteousness facilitates self, awards for being the new guard go to a happy Facebook feed, PR manages depression, our prose grates on everyone, admire how we figure it all out, making bank like a prophet, holding space in perpetuity in a place declared as dying, the internet freeing us from compulsory reading, our civic work is conference livetweeting, pounding one aphorism after another, we are so material, so resource-rich, so networked, so bank; queer = + weird open-ended amoral art-making + so many loans + a random landing (ten years of â&#x20AC;&#x153;temporaryâ&#x20AC;?) + laziness + searing self-criticism + reverence + microaggressions + old patterns of crisis management + aborted career + love for difficult language + love for difficult movement practices + stalking anyone marked by racialized queered (social) death + fighting tooth and nail for down time allotted for rehearsals and unpaid overtime and re-allocated for exhaustion, writing, and moderate ambition = no genre of body of work, rather our body is ephemera, a keepsake valued as junk, maybe worth more as ashes, so until then we wait, sick from the wrong things, mad at the wrong things, using the wrong platform for manifestos, attaching mostly through grievance, abusing your trademarked phrase, apt to composting on contact, doing you so wrong just â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;cause we want you 33

Kimberly Alidio

I’m (not) surprised: social media and the desire path Kimberly Alidio

—Erykah Badu on Twitter

Fuck this world. I’m out. — A friend’s Facebook status update

I use social media to space out, to self-medicate, to meditate, to be alone while in public. The thinking and feeling happening online can represent for me an interruptive break from the labored project of “life-building.”

The morning after Trayvon Martin’s killer is acquitted I seek the break of online life in grief. Of the four opening “epigraphs,” the first three are a series of Twitter posts (tweets) by singer-artist Erykah Badu. The fourth is my friend’s characteristically honest response to injustice. Note the beautiful hemistich line made by the strong pause. The quiet drama made by the broken back. Where’s that break from the grieving world?

I’ve been holding a one-way conversation with the writer Teju Cole for a while now. So it goes today on Twitter.

Does such a public event as Zimmerman’s acquittal prompt a personal re-commitment to one’s practice and to a path of justice? The broader conversation unfolding online is whether one is surprised by Zimmerman’s acquittal. In a post from a protected Twitter account:

My friend comes down on the anti-surprise side of things while documenting the political reasons for maintaining a capacity to be taken aback by legal injustice. One shouldn’t anticipate that the court system anticipates young black men’s “inevitable” shortened lives and (social) deaths, but one should anticipate being taken aback each and every time history repeats itself. I get momentarily distracted by the ghazal-like power of the ending word. Have you also noticed the resonant usage online of “this”? Sometimes it stands in somewhat for amen. In the case above, the word acts as it often does online to point to something and bring it into closer position. This injustice. I don’t attend the Austin rally for Trayvon Martin at the Texas Capitol that day but I do have one in-person conversation, one telephone conversation, and one text message conversation. In addition, I’m plugged into 157 websites on RSS feed, and posts and re-posts by 191 Twitter users, 336 Tumblr users, and 8 Facebook connections. The overall collective feeling includes rage, devastation, and, yes, grief — but somehow all these are mobilized against surprise. Several people make the case against surprise by invoking history, as in: we’re afraid the legal system validates racist vigilantes but history has already done so. A crowd-sourced historical memory forms around the names of dead folks killed by guns, often by law enforcement, whose killers were let off scot free. Twice killed. Also: “Remember, a criminal conviction is not justice” (Kathleen via Silky’s Twitter) The reminder of transformative justice: a conviction may be what Berlant call a “placeholder” for what we really want. So: choose hopeful reengagement with the promise of civil rights prompting one to take action, sign a petition, carry the sign, block the freeway? Or choose detachment born of deep antagonism with the 36

modern world system — say, afropessimist commemoration —, which can also animate action, but in a more unruly way? Which kind of knowing better is easier to bear in this moment? Which is easier to declare to one’s public? How might we use public language to represent any shifts among positions, the non-cognitive shifting as we try to manage and often fail to do so? I do admire Cole’s public statement that we don’t live in public, at least all the time. To take to the tweets (groan, pun) to proclaim that one’s sphere of influence is limited indicates to me that this tweet defiantly fails at legibility. Just looking at the replies, and skipping over the many affirmative echoes (“this” “this”), one must exercise the will to not engage with trolls. Social media seems to give rise to hope that we can always escape the local and immediate.

Social justice responses demand one’s exit from the private. Somehow, we should all be pundits. Cole does elegant, little things with the Twitter short form, adapting it to the tradition of faits divers in his project, “Small Fates.” I cannot fully express the love and respect I have for something so quiet and still. We are so reducible by large-scale public drama. * Let’s write our collective autobiography of “social media.” Let’s write a collective biography of social media. I’ve documented the shit out of everything so social media loves me. Social media and I are both obsessed with archives. Should I ever come to my senses, I’d budget enough money every month to pay for Dropbox and Evernote premium accounts, and then buy more memory for every computer I own. Cleaning up my hard drives last month, I unearthed a file of family emails from the 1990s that I then sent to my brother. He compares me to the NSA. There was a time on Blogger and Wordpress when academic bloggers were semi-anonymous. I adopted 37

coding while I do not, and deploy millennial glitter style better than me. (And not get skeeved out by the occasional selfie. I’m prettier with you than when alone.) But who cares. I’ve managed to make Tumblr friendships that jumped the tracks into real life meet-ups and then back again. The format’s OK with my lack of mastery and my indifference to being the best. Social media is happy with the short form. The day after Zimmerman’s acquittal, I embark on a small project of flooding my Tumblr with reblogged posts for one or two days. Departing from my prim custom of queuing posts so they go out only once a day, I decide to pass along every message, image, documented artwork and quotation suffused with grief and wondering. I usually find torrents of posts unbearable, so I wanted to become unbearable, just for a while. Not in an art/life way but in a more delimited way. I choose the Tumblr account (I have four) with 49 followers, rather than the one with 1751, and the one associated with my name. Excerpts in list form:

Three items by poets pass by:

* I’m (not) surprised. * The problem with academic writing, with the long project of Colonial Cosmopolitanism, is that it somehow presses on me at times when I’m not writing. I experience an urgent pressure in my head. My life with ideas slated for academic publication pivots on the central question: how can I wrench away the necessary function of thinking through a problem (a function as vital as peeing and drinking water and peeing and drinking water) from the sad trap of making a closed argument? Bonnie McElhinny has a great literature review called “Audacity of Affect” that organizes a huge rave of thinkers under one tent and each one brings a gift of a highlighted case study but some seem to hold the gift back by interpreting their “data” as a one-note thing. As if the thinking process is this: “I’m going to push my argument that the weaving song 39

means (pick one) the oppressive neo-liberal self-policing of the migrant household OR the ambivalent effect of liberatory discourse OR…” Pick one and repeat, pushing it through all the data and out. Brand yourself and the data with one interpretation. Never two at the same time. Never one valence at one point and another at another point. Never a mere portrayal of something fascinating and interesting that breathes on its own without the life-support system of academic signification. My yoga teacher friend chatted with someone while I spaced out before class last week. She quoted Machado’s “Traveller, there is no path. The path is made by walking.” The poem includes this: By walking the path is made And when you look back You’ll see a road Never to be trodden again Since I’m loosey-goosey with grammatical structure, I consider how the path is made not just by walking it and but also by looking back at just how you’ve arrived. A “desire path” is made by repeated foot traffic made over time by growing consensus about how to connect two points together. Also called “activity concentration,” and giving rise to “trampling studies,” according to Wikipedia. The poet Matthew Zapruder annotates his own poems on Poetry Genius, an off-shoot of Rap Genius.

In contrast to other poets on the website, such as Tao Lin and Megan Burns, Zapruder tends not to include direct popular culture references in his poems. But Zapruder seems game to make light of Serious Poetry.

Yeah, exactly. Put another way: how to avoid arriving at the end of wondering. At the end of wandering.

Tumblr early enough to take on the word curate as a blog name and watch that word take on its own life. There are tons of people on Tumblr (TM Yahoo!) who write better copy than I do, care to understand HTML

Aisha Sasha John, Untitled

Jennifer Mehigan (1988) from Cork, Ireland, is currently studying Fine Arts with a focus on computer-generated images at LASALLE College of Art, Singapore. She received graphic design qualifications at CATC Design School in Sydney in 2010 where she taught upon graduating. She has exhibited in the US, UK, Belgium, and Australia, including a two person show at Paradise Hills in Melbourne, and recent group shows include Wayward Gallery in London, as well as cloaque.org’s online exhibition and their recent showing at Untitled Art Fair, Miami. Recent publications include Flaunt Magazine (2014) and online at OFLUXO. http://www.jennifermehigan.com Robin James (@doctaj) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte, and faculty affiliate of the UC Santa Cruz Digital And New Media program. Her theoretical work addresses the interaction between music, sound, and systems of political organization (like gender or race). She is currently working on two manuscripts: one is about pop music, biopolitics, and goth; the other is about the role of sound in neoliberal epistemology and aesthetics. Her work in digital sound art creatively examines the issues in feminist/queer/critical race/disability studies, continental philosophy, and music studies that she explores in her theoretical writing. Robin has published articles in The New Inquiry, Hypatia, Contemporary Aesthetics, and The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and a book titled The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music. For info about her current projects, and links to un-paywalled copies of her published research, visit her blog, http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com. Rob Horning is an editor of The New Inquiry. http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/marginal-utility/ Caleb Beckwith is a poet and editor living in Philadelphia, PA, where he studies poetics at Temple University. He is a Senior Editor at the Conversant and organizes The Volta’s 365 Reviews project, which tries—and fails—to review a book a day for the entire 2014 calendar year. His writing can be found at The St. Claire, The Volta, and in the Journal of Modern Literature. Brian Droitcour is a writer, translator, and curator in New York. He is an editor for The New Inquiry and has written about art for Artforum, Rhizome, and Yelp. Currently a comparative literature Ph.D. at NYU. http://tcour.com Lyle M. Suxe lives in Brooklyn; her online ephemera are collected at pussy-strut.tumblr.com. She is a master’s student in Performance Studies at NYU and once wrote a thing for Mask Magazine. She also has a poetry zine, lmao. Maxine Anderson is studying Francophone post/colonial literature at the CUNY Graduate Center while chronically underemployed in New York. Several of her one-act plays have been staged in Atlanta. She also writes critically about literature, labor, and politics & enjoys surreptitiously reading theory at work.

Joanne McNeil is a writer and researcher interested in the ways technology is shaping art, politics, and society. She writes about things like broken iPhones, virtual assistants in airports, the Chelsea Manning trial, and the future of novels. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Modern Painters, Domus, Wired UK, Frieze, LA Times, Paris Review Daily, The Boston Globe, n+1, Jacobin, Dissent, and other web and print publications. She was a 2012 USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism fellow. She is a contributor to Art and the Internet (Black Dog Publishing, 2014) and has written a wide range of catalog essays. Formerly the editor of Rhizome.org, she developed all content published on Rhizome News and the Rhizome blog. (2011, 2012 roundups.) Through Rhizome and with FACT, she co-curated online programming for the 2012 Liverpool Biennial. Earlier, she founded and edited the blog The Tomorrow Museum. An essay of hers was listed in The Verge’s “Best Writing of 2013.” She has lectured internationally including at Lighthouse (Brighton, UK), Centro in Mexico City, and Digital October in Moscow. She studied economics at George Mason University, where she was a University Scholar. She met the Philip K. Dick android before it lost its head. She is currently writing a book on privacy and internet culture. Enrico Boccioletti is an artist and musician based in Milan—active under multiple names (Death in Plains, 4SICSX, spcnvdr and Enrico B)—in the fields of post-conceptual, new vernacular, performance and sound. In his work he explores relations and value in networked communities; perception of the self and expectation, performance anxiety under conditions of over-exposure to information; space/time compression in the over-excited lifestyles of an accelerated culture; and reality as mediated through the screen. Exhibitions and performances include, among others: Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Roma; 319 Scholes, New York; Istituto Svizzero di Roma, Milano; Live Arts Week/MAMbo, Bologna. He also works for Mousse Magazine and Vdrome. http://www.spcnvdr.org Kimberly Alidio is originally from Baltimore, Maryland and currently lives in Austin, TX. She is the author of Solitude Being Alien, a poetry chapbook published by Dancing Girl Press. Her critical essays appear in the Center for Art and Thought Artist-in-Residence blog, Social Text, and American Quarterly. She has published poems in several anthologies, the Center for Art and Thought, Drunken Boat, Spiral Orb, ESQUE, Bone Bouquet, Fact-Simile, Lantern Review, and Make/shift. She holds a Ph.D from the University of Michigan, and fellowships from the University of Illinois Asian American Studies Program, the National Academy of Education/ Spencer Foundation, the Naropa University Summer Writing Program, VONA/Voices of Our Nation, and the Kundiman Asian American Poetry Retreat. http://kimberlyalidio.tumblr.com Aisha Sasha John is a dance improviser and author of THOU (BookThug 2014) and The Shining Material (BookThug 2011). She lives in Toronto. http://aishasashajohn.tumblr.com Liz Kinnamon is a PhD student in Gender & Women’s Studies at the Unviersity of Arizona and currently works as online editor for Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory and managing editor for Feminist Formations.