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[...] The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealised. Fed by the market, its rapid growth is offset by bloat, and elegant innovation is surrendered to the buyer, whose stagnant world it decorates.
As the rate of profit continues to faceplant, capital responds to the declining organic composition of capital by seeking further, more elaborate efficiencies. As a result, we are now witnessing a technological development as rapid and runaway as accumulation itself, as packs of capitalists seek desperately to satiate themselves on any remaining puddles of profitability. A key component in the struggle over the conditions of our social relations is the wresting of those technologies to our needs. And what are struggles over healthcare provision, if not struggles over the terms of use for socially reproductive technologies? Successfully struggling on these fronts requires exorcising the pernicious ghost of a ‘natural’ human. Why? Because any evocation of an innate, untouched human invokes the idea that by having changed, we have lost humanity. This is not true: as Haraway says we are effectively cyborgs already [...]
Technology is us, and we change ourselves through changing the world around us, though not necessarily in a revolutionary way. Whilst reading glasses and a chip in the brain might have different effects, they are both ultimately about manipulating our bodies. And gender is contested – a tool, or perhaps machine, that is produced, dynamically, through history by active manipulations. Yet we always move within limits – by both historical accident and design we find ourselves with limited gender-shells in which to make sense of ourselves – even our rebellions are constrained. The Xenofeminists talk about ‘seiz[ing] alienation to create new worlds’: accelerationism perhaps, but on the terms of the oppressed, not despite them. Alienation is a two-faced thing: it hurts, and the freedom it gives is not on our terms, but there is also the germ of liberation – we are offered the chance to relinquish any investment in a self-destructive society. The pain felt from our alienation can’t be alleviated by a return to an ethereal state of nature, but has to be embraced, and retooled.
In an exploration of the role and meaning of digital labour, Jamie Woodcock encourages us to think about re-tooling emergent tech to ‘sketch out the ‘possible construction of a rationality opposed to capital … Instead of looking at the wasted opportunities of digital technology under capitalism.’ [...]
quote from the Xenofeminist Manifesto. i think the actual manifesto itself is a little outside my area of interest, but i do like this phrasing
this whole section is great tho
[...] the actualisation of desire and expansion of joy deserve a place in our futurity – what José Esteban Muñoz, in Cruising Utopia, sees as queer utopia. ‘Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.’ The ‘warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality’ is a purgative for assimilationist pragmatism; we don’t wait for ‘progress’ to work its magic; we take each moment of pleasure as a mere kernel of body communism.
There can and should be joy from our relationship with our bodies, in a way that is not reducible to our sexuality, but clearly encompasses it. The demand to end gender is only relevant when we recognise that its power comes from the way it is welded and wielded as a weapon. Like so many social relations, that way is in no way intrinsic – it is not the body that innately causes oppression – but something we choose.
this is pretty
When reality fails the model, the electorate refusing to do what they are told, the result is an epistemological crisis which throws up various and variously wild speculations. The Russians are said to have ‘hacked’ the election, and there is a useful elision in the verb between meaning literal IT interventions (such as the leak of John Podesta’s emails that so outraged Clinton’s supporters because it disclosed certain truths about their candidate, plausibly-enough blamed on hackers with Russian backing), and in a more vague and very urgent sense of tweaking any system towards a desired outcome in some way or other. On the latter, leaving aside the obvious hypocrisy of the outrage (given the US’s long and vigorous history of interference in foreign elections, from Italy in 1948 through the 1970s, Japan in 1951, Germany 1953, via the Philipines, Vietnam, Laos, the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Chile in 1964, and on and on – eighty-one times between 1946 and 2000, not counting coups, according to an estimate by political scientist Dov Levin), the paranoid nebulousness of the latter, broader allegation is striking.
Discussing CA’s signature technique of ‘psychographics’, one contributor warned urgently that the company was ‘using psychological techniques to change people’s thoughts and behaviour’. Of course, this could be read as a thoroughly banal description of everyday PR – or as crude apocalyptic warning of nefarious, Manchurian Candidate– or They Live-style total manipulation.
Certainly, there is no ‘free’ choice under capitalism, no preference not complexly shaped. The intricacies of agency, of choice and its constraints under neoliberalism and its ideologies demand nuanced analysis. That, visions of mind-control rays, of putting the ’fluence on the masses, ‘chang[ing] people’s thoughs’, are not.
’For some opponents of Brexit, the idea that the EU referendum was hijacked by alt-right hypnotists wielding high-tech psychological weaponry looks, perhaps, like a reasonable explanation,’ the report startlingly concludes, stretching the definition of ‘reasonable’ by some way. Almost ruefully the piece closes: ’But the known facts don’t, quite, support this theory.’
on Cambridge Analytica. nice rejoinder to liberal hysteria over that
If the failure of presidentialness is less the failure of the inaugurated persuader-in-chief to persuade than of the unpersuaded to be persuadable, presidentialness’s partisans can only pine to dissolve the people and elect another.
love this
[...] The term itself conveys loss but no responsibility for that loss.
Indeed, if salvage conjures Robinson Crusoe salvaging from the wreckage enough to survive, those socialists who came of age ‘in the wilderness’, watching the wreckage of the Old Left wash up on the beach, may see, if not a parallel, perhaps an analogy with our own ways of speaking about politics – and thus of shaping it.
poetic
Dare we speak, then, of salvage or even of hope? If we would struggle to keep alive – or resurrect – movements and traditions, revolutionary ways of parsing the world, the wisdom of our forebears and ancestors, in what language should we speak of such slippery things? And if our dialects and our minds, our very perceptions, have been colonised and standardised, making our own speech foreign to us? Twenty-first-century Marxists must be nimble if we are to revive our own idiolect: if its grammatical structure remains one shaped by class, its vocabulary must have enough breadth to encompass multiple and intersecting identities and realities, its nouns and pronouns unrestricted by binary gender. Can we lubricate our tongues with our own voices, our working- class dialects and interethnic inventions and personal pidgins, and create a living, intercultural lexicon to deploy against the forces of imperialism and the capitalist death drive? If Marxism is, as Walter Benjamin would have it, a conversation between the living and the dead, what does it mean when the dead outnumber the living? Can our old languages and our new ones speak us forward?
cool
The Left enthusiasts of Nick Land appear to come from tonier climes. They are often clustered within academia, the tech sector, venture capitalism, or the media. Sometimes calling themselves ‘Left Accelerationists’, they produce political tracts such as the ‘#AltWoke Manifesto’. Keen to harness the disruptive power of technology and global capital, they nonetheless try to superficially distance themselves from Land’s reactionary conclusions. They want to be futurists without being fascists.
Such enthusiasts are dazzled by the shiny new future that Land promises, ignoring the fundamentally ‘Randian’ conception of productivity implied by Futurist thought. Land’s anti-materialism severs productivity from the socially-necessary human labour which actually brings it about. Instead, production is equated with a frictionless ‘creativity’, conjuring up images of the Silicon Valley guru who independently create their miracles ex nihilo. That is why Land’s neo-confederate ideology is not as sanitised as presented to left audiences. For ‘white exit’ (comparable to Ayn Rand’s ‘capital strike’) purposefully ignores the actual human labour which will be required to keep these libertarian ‘utopias’ running. It will be a labour force with ‘no voice’, hardly distinguishable from slavery itself.
To be sure, Leftists may appreciate Dugin and Land for seemingly different reasons; cultural ‘authenticity’ in the former, and techno-futurism in the latter. What they fail to notice, however, is the deep commonality between Dugin and Land’s underlying positions. It is a commonality which precludes the application of their thought to any emancipatory program.
ha. wonder how the deepmind guy feels about this description
Burn! depicts two parallel trajectories: on the one hand, the moral abyss into which neocolonialism pushes its agents and, on the other, the progressive development of a political consciousness among the ruled people. When Walker meets Dolores, he believes in civilisation and progress, with the illusion that anticolonialism and British trade merge into a common cause. Ten years later - a period condensing the contradictions of a century [...] - he has lost his illusions and his Western culture is reduced to pure instrumental reason: he likes to do his work well and is interested exclusively in 'how', not in 'why', to do it. Dolores, on the contrary, knows he fights for liberation even if he still does not know 'how' to realise his goal. [...]
[...] Like Dionysus in Greek mythology, Lenin could reborn. This is not an announcement of victory; it is a socialist wager, based on the recognition that all has to be rebuilt.
damn. good section ending (if we ignore the missing "be" before "reborn"). worth thinking about more - the cyclical nature of things? destroying, rebuilding?