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With the rise of nativist sentiment in Europe and America, I’ve seen a troubling change in the way people make the case for refugees. Even those on the left talk about how immigrants make America great. They point to photographs of happy refugees turned good citizens, listing their contributions, as if that is the price of existing in the same country, on the same earth. Friends often use me as an example. They say in posts or conversations: “Look at Dina. She lived as a refugee and look how much stuff she’s done.” As if that’s proof that letting in refugees has a good, healthy return on investment.
But isn’t glorifying the refugees who thrive according to western standards just another way to endorse this same gratitude politics? Isn’t it akin to holding up the most acquiescent as examples of what a refugee should be, instead of offering each person the same options that are granted to the native-born citizen? Is the life of the happy mediocrity a privilege reserved for those who never stray from home?
The refugee has to be less capable than the native, needier; he must stay in his place. That’s the only way gratitude will be accepted. Once he escapes control, he confirms his identity as the devil. All day I wondered, has this been true in my own experience? If so, then why all the reverence for the refugees who succeed against the odds, the heartwarming success stories? And that’s precisely it – one can go around in this circle forever, because it contains no internal logic. You’re not enough until you’re too much. You’re lazy until you’re a greedy interloper.
Still, I want to show those kids whose very limbs apologise for the space they occupy, and my own daughter, who has yet to feel any shame or remorse, that a grateful face isn’t the one they should assume at times like these. Instead they should tune their voices and polish their stories, because the world is duller without them – even more so if they arrived as refugees. Because a person’s life is never a bad investment, and so there are no creditors at the door, no debt to repay. Now there’s just the rest of life, the stories left to create, all the messy, greedy, ordinary days that are theirs to squander.
[...] Virtual Futures 96 was advertised as “an anti-disciplinary event” and “a conference in the post-humanities”. One session involved Nick Land “lying on the ground, croaking into a mic”, recalls Robin Mackay, while Mackay played jungle records in the background. “Some people were really appalled by it. They wanted a standard talk. One person in the audience stood up, and said, ‘Some of us are still Marxists, you know.’ And walked out.”
dying
“In Silicon Valley,” says Fred Turner, a leading historian of America’s digital industries, “accelerationism is part of a whole movement which is saying, we don’t need [conventional] politics any more, we can get rid of ‘left’ and ‘right’, if we just get technology right. Accelerationism also fits with how electronic devices are marketed – the promise that, finally, they will help us leave the material world, all the mess of the physical, far behind.”
Despite the protestations of obsessive fans and dismissive naysayers, for the site’s most successful content creators, simply switching on a camera and spouting whatever comes to mind is no longer the entire job description. A YouTuber is a small-screen entrepreneur who must oversee growth in a highly competitive and ever-expanding market, win merchandise deals, broker brand tie-ins and often manage support staff.
links nicely to that Wendy Brown quote mentioned in Jasmine Chorley's piece about the self being capital to invest in
[...] The current racial reality of China is informed by a 2000-year history of Chinese cultural imperialism and a more recent history of Han ethnocentric nationalism, as much as it has been moulded too by Western colonialism. It should be no surprise then, that Han Chinese people who have grown up in the West are often vastly different beings from those raised in a country where they are the normative citizen.
What does all this mean? On a personal level, I will never find representation in Chinese serial dramas; language aside, the only culture I really know is one that is entirely different, in which people like me are marginalised. Beyond this, British Asian, Asian-American, Asian-whatever Western diasporic identities are shaped by specific experiences of Eurocentric racial alienation as much as by any links we might have left to the homeland. This is the context that bounds our specific requests, and is not one that ‘real Asians’ share. We are not born racial subjects, but become so through our location in a racialised context. [...]
So don’t tell me that there’s something uniquely demanding about building yet another fucking startup that dwarfs the accomplishments of The Origin of Species or winning five championship rings. It’s bullshit. Extractive, counterproductive bullshit peddled by people who either need a narrative to explain their personal sacrifices and regrets or who are in a position to treat the lives and wellbeing of others like cannon fodder.
Many of the biggest social media platforms share this one thing in common, they were products designed to connect younger people to parties and facilitate sex. Maybe it is laudable that Jack and Zuckerberg have made an effort to reconceptualize the purpose of their products on such socially conscious terms, but I for one am suspicious of their self-narratives, I am suspicious that it isn’t really all about one thing for them: riding the hype-train into a golden sunset of unlimited wealth. The ambition, certainly, has always been there for the entrepreneur, but the justification of that ambition, the story, that comes after the fact; the story is something designed to conceal the emptiness of the ambition that drives the entrepreneur, the empty ambition of wealth, celebrity and success.
Rather than simply connect us to what our friends are doing, or helping college kids find a party to go to, social media platforms today have conceived of a much grander product to sell: existence. By means of their platforms we obtain existence in the new public sphere, we become observable. Facebook and Twitter don’t just allow us to share moments or memories, they allow us to become, they stream our data to the world so that we might suggest our social existence to others. This is the true dream of the Facebergian global community, a new social dimension into which we project and become, a phantom world of dream bodies peering through the brush of a jungle of data in order to observe one another as we engage in the intimate act of becoming.
We are all always engaged in some kind of self-narratization, not only do we use Zuckerberg’s platform to weave that tale of becoming, but our doing so is in turn predicated on our acceptance of the entrepreneurial bildungsroman of Faceberg and Dorsey, that they give us existence within the global community they benevolently foster. [...]