A Departure Into Noise by Lucas Tonks

A Departure Into Noise

hybrid essay by Lucas Tonks

17th October, 2022

In one month from now, you will be gone. I’m scared of losing you, your voice potentially irretrievable amongst the deafening call of sirens, or what those sirens warn us against. Please let it not be long until I hear your voice again.

To offset the anxiety of your absence, I attempted to write an article in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The leading question would have been what the theorisation/concept of the platform does in terms of reconceptualising the discursive agency of individuals. I embarked on a purposefully overly academic endeavour, one that would distance me from the actuality of our situation. But it seems academic language and logic become troubled in the face of what is occurring, and what I fear for you, of your loss.

Instead, what has turned out, is a theoretical rambling, a letter (?), a troubled attempt at sense-making and information-seeking. You will see me lose myself in lines of thought, connections will seem disjointed between subject matters, and certain points will contain excess amounts of information that I believed to be important but am no longer certain are. Of course, there is a fair share of contradictions too. I chose not to scrap or change this in any way. I long to preserve against erasure. What you read here is an attempt to make sense within a climate of misinformation and paranoia, and what occurs when one attempts to approach a logical void in the midst of its creation.

Informational warfare, a politics of disinformation. A form of warfare that has gained increasing significance and would not have as far-reaching consequences if it were not for digital platforms.

I am afloat upon an ocean of noise.

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63 Platform: A raised level surface on which people or things can stand

Origin; French, plateforme, meaning ‘ground plan’, literally ‘flat shape’.

We’re perched upon the crest of a perilous ledge, you and I. The wind pushes us back and forth, forcing us to brace ourselves against and sense the proximity of the void below, waiting to engulf our fragile bodies. It pulls us closer toward it, luring us in as we gaze downward, our vision and minds captivated by deathly possibilities. Simplification. Nullification. It would not take much for us to be pulled into its jaws, seemingly at the hand of our own will. I sense myself slipping. And then you call my name.

The revolution will not be televised, but the war will be platformised. In recent history, we witness a rapid change in the manner in which the general public experiences the politics of vision in relation to war. Most information concerning foreign conflicts prior to Vietnam was disseminated through radio broadcasts and newspaper articles. Vietnam was the first to be televised. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is the first war to be brought into the palms of our hands. Platforms serve to facilitate the streaming of spectacularised images of war into the minds of people across vast networks. Civilians across the globe are called upon through telegram channels to paralyse Russian networks and websites with a simple click, as they casually participate from the comfort of their own homes. Never before has a foreign war been brought into such close proximity to individuals who are not directly affected by the terror of conflict. War, brought to us through the visual, informational, and participatory mode of the platform brings with it new challenges concerning the narrativisation of the conflict.

In March 2021, one month after Russia declared its “special operation” in Ukraine, your friend was living with us, displaced as a consequence of the invasion. One morning, she rushed to the living room with tears in her eyes extending her phone out toward me,

“Is this real, do you think this is real? I just don’t know anymore”. On the screen was an image of Volodymyr Zelenskyy firmly shaking hands with a party official of

another government. After some close inspection, it appeared to me to be a craftily doctored image. But to someone bombarded with swathes of information regarding each development of the war, with the fatigue of it all collapsing in on her, the lines between information and noise were clearly beginning to blur. This was one of the first cases where (as far as I’m aware at least) that I encountered Russia’s informational warfare, or tactics of disinformation.

What ensued was an internal barrage of doubts and questions. But a slower process crept along, something else began to eat away at me. A displacement. A distrust. A disordering. I sensed myself entering a disquieted perspective. In a home that is not truly yours, how can you settle, gather your senses? From which reference point can you draw from anymore? At which point, your very sense of self becomes displaced, everything entering an agitated state of heightened precarity. You generate a new unsettled reference point, a new home. Where else to reside but within uncertainty? In German, the uncanny is instead the ‘unheimlich’. This phrase, in its literal translation, becomes the ‘unhomely’, or home, but not quite. The home, the body, the mind, transformed into spaces that are no longer beds of settlement, but those that regard you as an intruder, a stranger, one who no longer belongs. There is an unwelcome guest in my mind.

I began to question the idealism of the notion of the platform, the very thing that brought your friend and I that distorted reality. There are certain contradictions at play. The platforms, in their aesthetic guises, serve to flatten and democratise all information to users. I say guise, the democratic idealism of platforms is rarely true.

Information and discourse have always been presented to us in a flat manner, if we consider the material modes of informational presentation. Think for example, of newspapers, through their spatiality, rather than simply the discursive authority of the titles. Certain information is privileged over others, news deemed less significant or marketable is filtered toward the back of the paper, whilst eye-catching segments, images, and salient current events usually reside on the front page or at least tucked within the first few. In other words, newspapers in their mode of presentation do not suggest or create the ideal that they are equalising platforms of informational

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distribution. Despite being flat, they suggest to readers that not all information or discourse is created even. Although, of course, these biases and distributions can be problematic in their own right, they do tend to make themselves visible, there is a certain degree of transparency that grants readers a critical positionality toward the manner in which the information is being framed or treated, with relative ease.

People don’t read newspapers nowadays though, do they? On digital platforms, the production of singular identities (both on an individual opinion-based level, and that of the personality production of larger organisations on platform mediums) serves to disorder and enumerate source validity whilst distracting the senses. There is a balancing of the potential validity of alternative discourses and information presented to us. All stories are told within uniform windows, all comments and opinions appear underneath, neatly assembled and compacted into uniform comment boxes. Everything is flattened behind the screen. There is a troubled dissensus, a rabid democracy occurring, with consequences reaching much further than my strained eyes and scrambled mind. All information and discourse have lost value, as the hierarchies collapse.

But are they? Most of us know those informational pecking orders remain firmly in place. Yet there is an amplified opacity toward these hierarchies. If I am information literate, I can attempt to disregard some and have an effort of attention toward certain information, but I have little to no choice in what I am shown when inhabiting the platform. There is no way for me to distinguish how or why I am being shown a story, comment, or image over another. Information and possible disinformation seamlessly blend together as I scroll endlessly down my feed.

Uncertain as to what I seek, the resounding hum of noise returns. There is an unwelcome guest at the table.

Another unwelcome guest. Back on the platform. I’m watching an evening speech of Zelenskyy, I scroll through the comments, not really listening to the speech, so many at this point, most along the same lines. A comment sticks out to me, it’s short, simple, potent. My agitated thumb froze mid-scroll, twitching eagerly.

“Do you people really believe everything this guy says?” Another user replies,

“I can see the Russian bot farms are back up and running”. Who were these people? Were they people, bots, or somewhere in-between? How many users on this platform are not simply users, but politically backed individuals or bots that relentlessly regurgitated state rhetoric? Singular identities merged into a cacophonous multiplicity of voices and actors in my mind, a dissonant roar bombarding my senses. Whose voice was this really?

Journalist Lyudmilla Savchuk began her process of infiltrating the IRA as early as 2015. The Internet Research Agency, Glavset, based in St Petersburg, doesn’t conduct research. Many describe it as a ‘troll factory’, a producer of false information, discourse, and commentaries to be disseminated online. Viruses that grow beyond their hosts. Brexit, anti-Islamic hatred spewing out from the factory. Trump, a whole lot more disinformation and madness spewed and strewn across the platforms. 2014, the actual initial invasion of Ukraine, if anyone remembers that, commenting under posts and news articles, sowing seeds of doubt. A vast information campaign against Ukraine has been ongoing for years.

Whilst there, Lyudmilla noted how the farm was not inhabited by the usual suspects -secret service agents or public relation peddlers- but instead former journalists. Journalists. If you want to spin a story, a narrative, a warped recollection of reality, a sensationalist and affectively captivating retelling of events, you hire a journalist. Their insidious narrative tendrils sought their way into every aspect of her life. The fake reality, the dubious order established by the trolls was mirrored and regurgitated by her friends and relatives. In conversations with them, lines she had seen produced within the farm would weave their way into their conversations.

If I were to trace this comment back to its origin, would it find its home in St. Petersburg? So, I vow to stay away from comments, I’m tired, I don’t know what to believe anymore, who to trust. I just read an article, whilst avoiding comments, that told me over 60 websites mimicking that of popular news sources were proliferated on social media. I’m left wondering if I read or saw one of them. The void, the endless well of

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information is beckoning me toward it with its alluring hum, the echoes of discursive reproduction with origins unknown, seeping into the utterances of familiar trusted voices. All voices become flattened and devoured.

I am afloat upon an ocean of noise.

All it takes is one minor interception for a logical order to be toppled. Michell Serres describes my feeling well:

“When an infinite amount of information is scattered in the well, it is the same well as if it were totally bereft of information […] Chaos, noise, nausea are together […] We often drown in such small puddles of confusion”.

I am falling from a platform, a slow slide off an unbalanced surface, a trembling diving board perched above a blackened ocean threatening to swallow me. In these moments, your hand has always been there. But soon I shall not know what to grasp.

Noise is the unwelcome third guest present in all communication. The interrupter, the disturbance, the trembling, the destabiliser of order, sense, meaning. We are now, it seems, entering (or are we already in the midst?) of a period in which noise is very much a welcome guest. From a tool of the state to create dissensus among critics and sow seeds of doubt and confusion concerning our shared realities (Glavset and God knows what other states and all-consuming corporate monstrosities), to a means of distraction from the very task of meaning-making and truth-seeking within a society that awards quite the opposite. Noise, whether it be in the form of political chatbot discursive disorientation and dissemination, or the mindless background chatter of attention-span-depleting videos lined up on your platform feed, serves to unsettle our realities and presents us with the endless possibility of entering alternate frames of quasi-existence. Our attentions are distracted or numbed to our true existence, of events occurring around us. We are being driven mad within a stimulioverloaded world in which we lose any frame of reference as to the real – the real being

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our own mind and the material presence of the world that contains and forms that mind.

All our relations are in fact based upon this disruption, granting those who are ‘other’ or outside of the situation, the unwelcome guest, the noise which is always present and underlying, to enter and disrupt the logical ordering of the current situation, the current distribution of the sensible. The accepted forms of sense-making, being logos, order, understandable and interpretable sound, and that which is phonos, static, noise. As soon as the order is disrupted, a new order becomes established, granting us new understandings and means of sense-making. Yet, this new order is subject to the same destabilisation as the previous. All orders and logics are in a state of constant flux and disorder. Yet, the disorder is generative of order, there is reason to be found within the unreason, that you could grant me the ability of form through alterity.

There is a black box of communication. What secrets lay in the wreckage? All forms of communication occur in a black box, a non-representable entanglement of relations, discourses, an undefined and impenetrable space between input and output. Hello Glavset, are you residing in this black box? Are you the noisy parasite that rattles me so? Or is the platform the black box through which all communication is filtered?

What can we call a system that collapses at the most minor of noises? Who is the creator of this noise? A collective trembling, a static emanating from a black box. In all communication, there is noise, disruption, slippages and misinterpretation. These fluctuations, disordering, and noise are no longer enemies of reason. We are within a system, a societal palimpsest, that has inscribed upon it the deviations from the orderly, the collective trembling of disorder. Order is overwritten by disorder. A corrupted file no longer appears corrupted. Chaos and noise are the new understood form. We know the corrupted to be the uncorrupted. Am I being rewritten by this trembling? I’m beginning to sense the fragility of my own ordering. I am the system that collapses at the slightest tremble, the most minor of changes.

This one constant sound, almost deafening, produced a dull static blanket in which nothing could permeate. It was within these walls within which he could find

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peace, drowning in the static. No longer could he bear the voices of others, to him they now arose simply to screeches, unrelenting and tiring monologues about things he could not fathom to understand. Each voice attached to somebody, with their own prophetic vision, their own starved desires of mastery or submission, an unending desire to produce a world of their own order. Each served as a reminder of the unsettling truth underlying each utterance. For these words would never hover in the air, leaving a lingering image or scent, instead they dissipated, and those that produced them disappeared as quickly along with them. Each erased by the next.

Waves of sickness arose from his stomach thinking about them. For the time being, he would much rather reside within this warm static he created for himself, lacking in any coherence or sense, yet everlasting and omnipresent; order and disorder in the guise of one another. In this, he found cold comfort, distraction from erasure, from her absence.

I stumbled across this diagram in some book, and it swiftly became my obsession. Don’t let its simplistic flattened nature fool you. The names swap in and out, the multiplicity returns, each actant replaceable, vague, the disorder overruling the formulation of its own order.

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I can’t rest long enough. It’s not that I hear only noise, I also see some reason, but I’m tired, I’m paranoid. I haven’t settled long enough in one established order to gain my senses. Everything is flat and presentable on the platform, it’s all noise.

Am I experiencing hyperaesthesia? I’m smashing my head against an impenetrable block of information, of noise, of something. A violent wave of data collection and production crashes toward me. Facing the wave, I choose to let it swallow me. Its roar bombards my senses, there is no sensing what else surrounds me, all is fixated upon that wave. I’m drowning, submerged in the deep well of my own sensemaking. Information has become a weapon, a means of ensnaring those who seek to establish truth and order, and it seems I have succumbed to its trappings.

But I’m not overwhelmed, I’m just overly aware, right?

Back to the platforms, I’m fatigued but unable to stop, drone strikes in Kyiv, I’m worried about your family. Each strike produces such a wall of information that I don’t know what to do with. I used to ask you what information you were getting from the Ukrainian telegram channels (whose information is often more up-to-date and reliable than Western media channels), but as time goes on, I have begun to distrust even those. The realms of dissensus are tainted, contaminated. I’m stranded. I’m lost. I am afloat upon a sea of noise that I’m not even sure is noise anymore.

You could try to pin this down to hyperaesthesia, but it seems like there is something far more sinister going on. It’s not that there is too much information, it’s that I no longer know what information to trust. My logic becomes destabilised, but to the point at which I don’t even understand what the new logic is before it becomes destabilised once again.

As with all wars, a great void is left. A war of the senses, upon the senses, the sensible. A senseless war. A war based on false imperialist narratives spun throughout history. How can I make sense of this? It shall be many years until any clear narrative can be found within this war.

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I think I’ll be getting off the platforms now, away from the ceaseless chatter. I don’t think I’ll be checking the news today either. I’ll try not to be paranoid, to withdraw, to shut out the noise.

You go back home to Ukraine next month, for family and research. I guess I’ll be back on the platforms again then, attempting to find any sense in it all, to ease the worry if you cannot fill me in on your narrative. We all construct our own, but for a while now it seems our stories were one.

And I know I can’t stop you.

But please, my darling, take care of yourself, for you are one of the few things that still make sense to me.

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