A new year is upon us, and many things have happened that are worth reflecting on. Everyone in the “content game” does the same sort of end-of-year reflection piece or video; and I believe last year I did a video. So I may as well do something similar, because certainly a few things have changed in my life this year, and there have been ups and downs along the way. So perhaps I will start off with a more personal reflection, and go into the state of the world a bit more afterwards. It wouldn't be me writing something if I did not start off with some maudlin reflection on my own personal foibles that spins into a giant theorycel tome.
Because it seems that there is a sort of inscrutable maxim or cosmic harmony that each new decade is not collectively “sensed” until a new year has passed by it. So 2022, like 1992, or 2002 or even 1962, etc. are years in which the decade's “intuitive feeling” or “vibe” starts to cement. And lord knows the past 3 years have all been awash in discourse about the “vibe shift”.
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2022 was a mixed bag in terms of facing various challenges, some of them private and family-related. Some the consequences of trying to be more active and radically changing my approach to eating and health. But more importantly in various ways, at the dawn of turning 30 years old, 2022 forced my hand in terms of making decisions as to where I am heading in life.
As many of you may know, for the past 2 years, almost all throughout the Covidian era, I frequented the Break the Rules podcast. Now that some time has passed since my albeit inevitable and somewhat dramatic departure, I can view the whole experience through clearer eyes. It is not any shame to admit that I just sort of fell into it unconsciously and went along for the ride. Because a persistent pattern in my life has been this sort of “fall into” a strong identification with something, or someone, and then being taken along a bumpy road till the journey meets a graceless end. Either out of my own sense of procrastination with cementing my own place, and/or inadequacy with building something of my own, that people would find tolerable, let alone enjoyable.
I should have listened to friends and my better judgment, to only have these suspicions confirmed. But there is no need to go over the petty insults, and quiet desperation, or lack of compensation or recognition. Those little annoyances then led to one final humiliation that I needed to bare in order for me to realize things needed to change, and I must take responsibility for myself and what I put out there. Lord knows anyone could have saw it coming from a mile away.
Instead it is best to highlight the fact that doing a regular show with different people for two years really did expand my horizons. I made valued connections, and cemented my place among “this thing of ours” in the online world. It afforded me content opportunities that I did not otherwise have. So for that I am grateful. And what I am more grateful for is that final push, to finally do what I always wanted to do since I started art-posting, writing. podcasting. To go at it on my own, make decisions for myself, finally make something that isn't determined by the vision of another, and for that I received immense support and love.
However, still I feel unfulfilled in many things as I turn 30 because I am a flawed person, and it is my hope that people do not misconstrue what it is that I am doing. I'm not trying to proclaim expertise in anything, or that I am a voice of authority on how to fix your life, or how to think about many things; I am not some guru, or life-teacher that posses some unique insight that transcends time. I am merely someone who views what I do as being compelled by something else.
The only explanation I have is what the godfather of modernist painting Wassily Kandinsky called an “Inner Necessity”1. I will save you dear reader, a long explanation of his whole theory of the work of non-representational abstract art. What is important to know is that Inner Necessity is the coming together of elements within the work of art that expresses a harmonious whole. And if the feelings certain shapes and colours produce match the whole arrangement of the piece in general, like the way music arrangements and notes come together which produces certain affects; for Kandinsky, painting should share these same elements, even if, like music, the arrangement of painted elements escapes explanation.
Like music, painting is all about the “vibes” for Kandinsky, and as an artist, I like to think this ethos carries on into everything I do, with varying degrees of success. Firstly, that the podcast or the written article takes on this vibes-orientated composition. There should be rises and runs, the conversation or lecture should flow naturally, while also evoking a variety of emotions from harsh, to humorous, to reflective. Even to evoking angst and anger, but this should have a purpose in my opinion.
Too much of the internet Dissident Right is essentially anger-bait porn. Secondly, everything is experimentation, so “success” is measured in the degrees of emotion and thought that is evoked. But you should not be too hung up on this, because most of what is produced is subjective. Everything from your beliefs, life-experiences and emotional/attitudinal disposition will go into how you think and feel about certain ideas and topics. And especially these things influence how they are presented to you. I often love how some people, like my online friend Barrett, approaches podcasting as a union of thoughts, music, images/art and long passages which combine all of them (check out his Contain podcast2, it is quite good).
Possibly another way I understand the term Inner Necessity is the way in which a muse operates on the creative type. You are driven to produce something, even if other aspects of your life suffer, because something inside you compels that. Perhaps this is a sort of Neo monasticism the online world is producing. The numinous is that grand ocean of data that is the digital world and all of us who feed the seas of that data by producing the almighty content, we are swallowed whole by it. We are monks in our digital prayer cells, our worship is the content we so love to throw everything at, seemingly without reason (because being an edgy podcaster or scribbler doesn't exactly provide a whole heaping lot of material wealth).
However I have come to realize what I do is a bit of a lonely path, or many of my most cherished friendships are with people around the world, while I am here, in my study, and my studio, creating things I feel compelled to create, day in and day out. Unstructured time can be an absolute bane to most people, and should be handled with care. The day can slip by with nothing accomplished. When I relied on others to schedule things, it was easy. You fall into a trap and are lulled into a sense of security. But then one day this can change, and you are forced with the responsibility of being invested in what you put out there. The sacrifice for creative freedom is not living a “normal life” by the definitions of that fuzzy picture most people have of normalcy (“normal” is a boomer truth regime tautology). This often goes seldom talked about among online circles, the actual experience of daily life in a sort of meagre acetic existence. All “creative types” feel this eventually.
A huge part of my life is spent on these screens, peering into a vast world while sitting down in the same room. It is quite an odd experience humanity has found itself exploring. Perhaps this was the “Dreamtime” our ancestors talked about. Albeit a technics produced pantomime of a sort of waking Dreamtime. Screen life is now eating into “Meatspace”, and years ago I did not imagine myself primarily living through this transition to full digitality. Perhaps there were makers and signs in my life before that could have predicted that I was heading for the terminally online internet dweller archetype. But this is just romanticizing an unhealthy attachment. I tend to catch myself, on stream and in writing and even in art, slipping into a sort of half-baked poetics about the internet and life as a “poster”.
What the digital world presents to the artist, the thinker, the schizo, and a whole assortment of underground Bohemians and misfits, is the opportunity for true psychic-goring and exploration of the depths on a mass scale. But this comes at a cost, and most of what we consider “normies” are ill-equipped for the ocean that is pure dataism manifesting into our “Meatspace” reality.
What do I mean by this? If you look at what Jung says, of course reiterating Nietzsche, about the role of the artist and myth-maker, one could easily compare this to Net-based activity. In particular, we know this term that is thrown around quite a bit, that comes from Nick Land and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU). To quote Land himself:
“Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions – by their very existence as ideas – function causally to bring about their own reality. Capitalist economics is extremely sensitive to hyperstition, where confidence acts as an effective tonic, and inversely. The (fictional) idea of Cyberspace contributed to the influx of investment that rapidly converted it into a technosocial reality”3.
Essentially memes and “meme magic” works as such, a generative process occurs in where an aspect of culture, an idea, anything, is birthed in a collective self-referential matrix. Say, in a group chat, memes that are organically created, then cross-mutated with other ideas and references. Culture as a whole takes these ideas up, and with enough dissemination, auto-generates a reality to them. Late Capital is a breeding ground for them because of the weaponization and marketization of information, entertainment, beliefs, etc. Also there are vast cultural blind spots that these hyperstitions exploit using communicative technics. 2016 would not have happened if it were not for dissident forces to provide a sort of internet-based insurgent force that ripped open these contradictions within mainstream (controlled) culture and politics.
But Jung reminds us that for Nietzsche, the work of art is all about this exploration of the depths, those hidden monsters and ineffable feelings, sometimes exposing us to a hidden meaninglessness that threatens existential and psychical stability. To “burst asunder our human standards of value and aesthetic form”4. The work of art “paints a primordial picture” and is ultimately contained, and gives us only a glimpse into the “unfathomable abyss”. To which the artist is tasked as a role of gatekeeper or groundskeeper, or sin eater, paying the price of direct access to such an abyss to then mediate it within the work of art, where it is safe for viewing, reading, listening and consumption.
But let us examine this picture a bit more, and connect it to these net-based hyperstitions. It is it true then the internet is a generator of these depths. It reveals to the poster what their true inner sensibilities are after awhile (at least from my anecdotal observation as a bit of an old hat). And it opens forth a ruptured geyser to the absolute edges of human experience and thinking. It took actual effort for schizos and artists to reveal themselves to a larger audience before the internet. But this isn't necessarily a good thing.
It can potentially damage the psyches of untold numbers of people. Because unlike the space of the work of art, there are no book covers and canvas frames here. There is but a constant and never-ending pipeline of the depths. And this year, like the year 2003 when the internet kicked off its mass democratization in terms of PC affordability and social media (MySpace was founded in 2003 after all), seemed to have opened up these channels, to the point of influencing a series of chaotic world events that has shaken up the already frayed and precarious order of things.
The reason I speak of such things here at the end of 2022 is because it feels like this was the year where things started to pull in a more acceleration direction. All of us being subject to a radical shake up in the “order of things” as it were, and as crazy as what I'm about to say sounds, and perhaps this is too dramatic and far out there, even for terminally online schizos and netocrats. 2022 marked the year that we were truly submerged in a switch from traditional to “internet time”.
Global Internet Dreamtime.
To dive right into the events of the past year, 2022 saw a major lifting and dismantling of the Covidian era that dominated public consciousness for over 2 years previously. In order to explain what I mean by sensing a radical shift in time, we must look at the development of “life on the internet” and the Covidian era itself as a form of social technology.
If you examine the writings of people who were terminally online, before it was even a thing, such as people like the first “internet philosopher” Alexander Bard (another pleasure I had on BTR was getting to talk to him, albeit I wish that in the near future, I have a more extensive talk with him on Content Minded one on one), and Bloggers like “Humdog” who wrote the seminal 1994 essay “Pandora's Vox”5 on internet life and commodification through the writings of Baudrillard. Or the writer Peter Ludlow, whom wrote a eulogy for Humdog when she unfortunately took her own life in 2008, being a pioneer-as-victim of the discovery they tried to warn others about6 (both of which I highly recommend reading). They pretty much predicted the course of what an advanced net-based communicative society was going to develop into.
Essentially life on the internet would undergo a process of what I call “digital liquefaction” but more on that later... life would take on a sort of consistent decoupling from routine and the confines of a much older model of regulatory “bio power” when it comes to the regimentation of routine-orientated conditioning of time itself. Regimenting and segmenting time was a big part of bourgeois life in the 20th century. You don't have to be totally well versed in the works of Michel Foucault to understand that our notion of time influences the very management of life on a socioeconomic and biological level.
In that the regulation of life, from cradle to grave, school to prison to family life to even the last years of life itself, was marked by regulations of time and a slavish devotion to clock-oriented time sequences which divided public-private spheres of living itself. But I would not characterize this as necessarily something positive, or something under the umbrella of “social liberation”, rather the few seem to manage this quite well, and the many falter in an endless spiral of burn out and waste. This is what Byung-Chul Han meant in The Scent of Time by time itself losing its “scent” or its feeling, its pungency-signifer attached to a powerful signified. Acceleration of time means there is no longer a “mythic time” or even a bio-political time from which regimentation and the changing of seasons are guided by. As the social is eaten away by endless streams and geysers of information, time itself is atomized7. Time losses its meaning and is “left without gravitation”.
Another observation is the distinct feeling of accelerated sequences of events themselves. Time is at a feverish pitch, nothing is truly absorbed as “experience”. Rather, there is an endless series of happenings and bits of information, the colours of such events and information never fading, buy only bleeding out. There is no finality to things, no narrative from which a terminus is reached8. But an endless series of feedback loops and chains of events put into motion, in other words, pure accumulation of time and events. No moment of reflection is given at an ease, and to be a web poster is in a lot of ways, sinking into these series of happenings. 2022 was the year of happenings, one after another, from the Convoy protests, to the War in Ukraine. It was in a sense, the year of Dreamtime, the emergence of large swathes of people choosing to stay in the world of the terminally online.
This is what 2022 has unleashed upon the world, from which events transpired that have the potentiality of disruption and precarity for decades to come. But from the perspective of the poster, the sojourn on the digital seas, this vastness and complex infinity of information provides opportunities, or at the very least, a never-ending series of intrigues. To go back to the theory of an “Inner Necessity”, Kandinsky was the first to create the idea of an artist-mystic, operating within an Avant-Garde that is “unique today, but tomorrow's common knowledge”. What he was doing was crafting a visual language to express this, through shape, colour and composition. Such as Composition VII, his most complex work which he claimed denoted a sort of apocalypticism and rebirth. Always sticking close to the themes of water and fluidity. Like music, Kandinsky found an expression of pure colour and shape that ebbs and flows, melting colour washes on stark shapes and lines.
What Kandinsky did was take the representational art of painting and bleed it into a motion and rhythm of movement that is similar to music. But this is meant to, as he claimed, be expressed in terms that are unique to the contemporary condition. Where the image itself is distorted because it is endless, fluidity of motion, constant meshing of everything into everything else, energy, ocean-like information exchange, urgency, anxiety, speed, etc. In this sense Kandinsky was a visionary, because he depicted the modern (and now Hyper-modern) condition in the most abstract and fluid of terms.
But what to say of this condition, and of the Netocrat Posters who inhabit these spaces? It is interesting to say that the internet is filled with “spaces” when it is virtual, horizonal, and lacking focal points apart from nodes of larger activity and personalities. Perhaps it is the case in navigating abstract space, posting, gaining a presence in the online world, however evanescent and fluid it is; splaying yourself across platforms, accounts, anonymous alts, etc. This is an aesthetic navigation of space as much as it can be a discursive one.
Just as Kandinsky painted abstract symbolic representations and wave forms in paint to denote something beyond representation, the Poster navigates the see of data and limitless dream time to form what a approximates a “singularity” of identity (qua Hardt and Negri). A bricolage network from which data generated by the Poster culminates into a single point. Rather than the solidity of events, the lack of “gravitation” of time and events forces us to see expression on the internet as a conglomeration, or accumulation of insights, images, memes, words, and feelings. Time that lacks solidity will inevitably mean that our sense of self as personalities, lurkers, posters, “content creators”, in short, Netocrats, will always lack a solidity.
Byung-Chul Han denotes that our current age is marked by Profound Boredom,commenting on Heidegger's notion of “attunement”. The constant search for meaning in an age of time lacking its gravitational weight, duration periods of marked points of progression and then repetition. All of this gives way to a sort of emptiness caused by that very massification of events and data, and time's elasticity rendered it into a sort of meaninglessness. We are not able to engage with others and with the world in the same way, not collectively anyways, so boredom is produced from a sort of impotency with the lack of action or “via activa” from the (hyper)modern subject9.
BCH points to Heidegger's theory of “the Calling”. That the authentic mode of being for Dasein is to resist everyday life's inauthenticity by the rulership of “the They”. The internet has maximized the they, it is ever-present, the non-stop chatter of discourse, the endless sea of information and events, an awareness of the they without end. Heidegger then posits that real authentic being is given by the “call of conscience”, which is a silent call made by the self to the self. By making “a call to myself from myself”, and being compelled to do so by “care” (our inherent throwness into the world leading to a demand for caring about events of the world and the lives of the others around us. In other words, care=engagement) we arrive at authentic being, taking responsibility for Dasein10. This calling or telling is disrupted however, by the alienation one feels from the other and from events of the world. Leading to boredom as a sign of “a total inability to think and act” for Heidegger. Profound boredom is a result of this widening gap between the self (Dasein) and the world, and can only be broken by resolute action and this calling of the self to the self11.
Notice how the Covidian era, which has by most public health measures lessening, and the indifference of most people towards it now, revealed this paradox. One that never truly ended, even after COVID itself became a marginal public concern, thus negating 2022 being a year of rejuvenation and people “touching grass” on a mass scale. The summer of love 2.0 never arrived because of the fundamental paradox that shook up our notions of time, action and mass events. The event where people would finally live care-free and without fear of the breath of the other. Where we would log off on mass and re-discover public places as sources of identification, rather than bio-hygienic hazard zone non-places.
During the Covidian era we experience this mass plugging in of the online, similar to the second “Eternal September” of 2002-2003 with the birth of social media. Events seemed to become never-ending and without constraint, because people felt online Dreamtime in its full effect by having no choice but to be within its presence. Swimming in the waters with seasoned internet-dwellers; Of course, the mix of lock downs, remote work, the barring of public rituals, and the need to know every bit of new information around COIVD led to the average person having a taste of the terminally online life for the first time in a many cases. Time was meaningless in such an environment, but when it came to these events, like COVID itself, and the summer of 2021's racially motivated riots, these “current thing” happenings, their speed and voracity accelerates. Social conditions and mass-enforced public beliefs change course on the turn of a dime. Yet people feel more powerless and impotent than ever.
We are rendered into mass observers, lurkers of public happenings. People during the lock downs experienced the unique anxiety of being aware of the rapid shifts in information, events, happenings, etc. yet feeling totally isolated and without the ability to act. Heidegger in his analysis of boredom, which is produced by this loss of being “surrounded” by others and the world, returns to dwelling. Dwelling in one's place, in our home, lifts up from boredom, because it is the place that precedes us as acting subjects. Boredom robs us of this place, the dwelling, that which unites the self with our immediate world of relations12. Joy, pleasure, situatedness, and so forth, come from dwelling, and the ability to engage with one's surroundings. But the Covidian and now post-Covidian era, through the very throwness into internet dream time, robs us again of this. Only now it is within the most intimate of spaces that we lack dwelling, interiority which services life that is unique to us as individual beings.
The current age of infocracy13 allows no space for escaping. Time is unbounded by the ever-present infoscape. Even “logging off” does little when more aspects of everyday life are consumed by it. Infinite time, endless information, even within our traditional spaces of dwelling, the outside invaded the inside. In a sense, all information and communication technologies bring about a greater awareness of the “they”, and is to a large extend participatory. But for the last 3 years or so, the pull of it was acutely invasive. Its accelerative process enabled the total submersion of all dwelling places into this greater network. This is what Michel Houellebecq meant at the beginning of the Pandemic14 by it simply accelerating processes that were already logically taking shape in mass society anyways. A weird mix of atomization met with a constant need to be “informed”. Full digital living, welcoming the infocracy influencing our very thoughts and most private dreams. Dwellings oddly became non-places because most of life was now fully determined by the mass and infinite non-place and non-time of the digital world.
An artist that I have come back to repeatedly during the Pandemic was the post Young British Artist painter Justin Mortimer, whom I have written about elsewhere15. Predating COVID, those paintings of Ebola response workers dotting surreal landscapes, collages with items and juxtapositions that seem nonsensical at first. One painting in particular features those yellow masked pandemic figures inside a typical council flat backyard. A visual metaphor of bio power spreading to a place of intimacy and dwelling. The public state of bio-medical exception has quite literally crept form the outside in. Information serves a similar function to this on a digital-virtual plane.
But now that we have examined our relation to time, happenings and our own inner sense of self, and how 2022 seemingly was the watershed year of cementing our full immersion into Infocractic governance and life, what is this process that took place? And how can we negotiate a place, perhaps not outside of it, but within it. To navigate a space of authenticity among the digital noise.
Digital Liquefaction.
Liquefaction is a process in which sandy soil sitting atop a water table is filled with air pockets, being less densely packed and a heavier particle. When this sedimentary layer is disrupted, water leeches upwards to the surface, say in an earthquake most commonly. The resulting effect is similar to quick-sand, where whole buildings are destroyed by sinking into the ground16.
Now forgive me for using a somewhat strained metaphor, but imagine the “real” or “meatspace” as the building. The space of dwelling, the soil it sits on. As my good online friend and author Zero-HP Lovecraft said “The internet is an ocean that we invent as we explore it. The deeper we dive, the more we become cryptozoologists, or crypto-ichthyologists, or even crypto-theologists”17. The waters of the online once disturbed, say by a mass event which forces a swell in its body, seeps up to the surface, consuming more and more of “meatspace” like quicksand.
Notice how this process isn't easily turned off as soon as it has begun, because being online is a necessity in an advanced post-industrial society which relies on info technics for even the most basic of functions. 2022 seems to be the realization of this process, and the previous Covidian era the earthquake. It is a common and somewhat cliched observation now, that since the pandemic, public “happenings” seem to be multiplying and receding and an accelerated rate. What goes almost without question is that in a lot, if not most of what has happened in the last 10 years, especially the various events of the previous few years, has been shaped and determined by this flooding of the online space. Public policies determined by Facebook posts, battle field strategies fought over the perceptions of the online hordes, “memeing things into reality”, and more.
Imagine the people caught in such instances where the ground from underneath you starts to give way, liquefying into an abysmal slurry pit. Perhaps one can think of the whole populations of the earth being enveloped into a seemingly alien intelligence or hive mind not as a form of global “liberation” or “connectivity”, but something far darker than the lurid and muddle-headed techno-optimist fantasies of 90s silicon valley nerds. Instead this is the average befuddled, goes-with-the-flow individual engaging with something far vaster and more influencial on the self than a simple communications apparatus. Perhaps old Papa Land was right when he wrote in Fanged Noumena that “Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control”.
Desiring-machines have no object or subject, and desire itself is a productive force. Machine desire acts as a sort of circuit breaker at random intervals and chains of other flows of social, cultural, passionate desiring chains. They are in a sense unbounded by time as well. This is the ripping up of the equilibrium of the organism and the surrounding biosphere. The “everything solid melting into air” Papa Land is describing. Because one cannot distinguish what is true unconscious ID-driven desire and what is a product of this desiring-machine process from the outside itself18. The online world itself is this intersection of the dissolution of time and the space of channels and flows of desiring-machines. Ripping up and contorting everything in sight, liquefying the real into a process that mimics the logic and emptied boundlessness of time that is the hyper-online. In fact the Infocracy demands that the logic of the internet supplants the logic of all other relations, as “big data”19consumes the very metric of what constitutes fact, truth, and worth in our advanced telecommunications-driven society20 .
Yet there seems to be a paradox at the heart of being terminally online from the position of someone who has driven a lot of meaning and identification out of being as such. The “old hats” tend to say that the internet is closing in on itself. As more users log on, the spaces of the online world grow tighter and tighter (which of course is the result of social media platform centralization). One grows into a familiarity with other posters, treading in the same spaces. That is something that Humdog even observed back in 94, that despite the never ending chatter and ceaseless activity, there is an odd silence to online life:
“cyberspace is a mostly a silent place. in its silence it shows itself to be an expression of the mass. one might question the idea of silence in a place where millions of user-ids parade around like angels of light, looking to see whom they might, so to speak, consume. the silence is nonetheless present and it is most present, paradoxically at the moment that the user-id speaks. when the user-id posts to a board, it does so while dwelling within an illusion that no one is present. language in cyberspace is a frozen landscape”21.
To post is a silent endeavour, because most of the newly minted terminally online amount to this silent flood. Speaking into the void. But perhaps this is an older reality for messages boards and forum culture. On social media, on Twitter especially (the Heavensite) there is always the suspicion and fear of being found out by the mass. Some greet it, others hate it, especially under the previous years of ruinous censorship and total jannie derangement, anything could get you banned. But the amount of posting, its sheer volume and repetition, might as well take on a form of white noise-as-silence. Projecting the same, near bot-like posting into the digital Aether. And groups of every political, cultural, religious, and E-tribal persuasion are subject to this NPC mode of thinking and reacting to the latest discourse bauble.
Humdog was commenting originally on the realities of the online world being rendered into a series of commodities to be bought and sold through big data. The poster generates content for web admins to sell as data to corporations. In this sense, no one is truly posting into nothingness, there are always a Shiva's manifold face of a thousand eyes gazing into that boundless void. And yet people post, even during their most vulnerable of moments, as if no one is watching, reading or listening. Even as we become “educated” to this fact, internet Dreamtime has a way of peeling off our defences, melting our armour, because we have to keep posting, slipping in and out of a character, till there is no difference between “you” and that tulpa that wears a version of you online.
Perhaps the only solution is not “out” but “through” because as I have said, you cannot just expect to turn these processes off once they have kicked into gear. The question is not an ethical, but an aesthetic one. It is not the ethics of living online in an equilibrium, or even taking right/moral action with the responsibility of turning away from the most vicious excesses of the “They” (not even Heidegger would go head-long into such an individualist route). But it is the aesthetic expression in the online world which provides a sort of ruthlessness and passionate approach that combines seriousness with laughter, irony and sincerity. To dance on the wires with the spirit of a holy fool, or the fool-wanderer “Taigu” in Zen Buddhism, what BHC proposed at the end of Psychopolitics as “Idiotism”. This approach is perhaps more creative as it is practical, because we have to think of these things I have outlined as a process, rather than an act of human or group agency. Even if there are corporations and governmental (or extra-governmental) entities vying for control of the surface web, this goes way beyond their greasy and sallow hands.
Think to the concept of Inner Necessity, there must be a navigational map from the inner emotive state of the artist to the audience, mediated through a metaphysical process. Kandinsky outlined this as an abstract symbolic language that represents what is by its nature, evanescent, in motion, horizonal, like music22. The digital presents the poster with ever-shifting conditions. To sift through data and information in such a way as to rearrange the conditions around one's self and reflect a state of authentic expression, this is what I mean by approaching the online through aesthetic rather than moral or even political categories. The moral and the political will invariably flow from the aesthetic, because despite the sea of language and word and sound, the image becomes the primary mode of communication in the online. Language itself is expressed in the image. Discourse and text even painted pictures on the earliest of Usenet boards and forums.
The poster is able to take the endless and timeless flow of data, happenings, memeplexes, and feedback loops, then re-arrange them in unique ways. Under the realities of evading censorship, anonymity and negotiating complex, porous relations between other groups and posters. This is what BHC means by Idiotism, because he recognizes the impossibility of halting the digital liquefaction of all life at this point:
“the idiot savant has access to knowledge of a different order. He raises himself above the Horizontal plane-above merely being informed and networked”23
“intelligence means choosing-between (Inter-Legere). It is not entirely free in so far as it is caught in between, which depends on the system in operation. Intelligence has no access to outside, because it makes a choice between options in a system. Therefore, intelligence does not really exercise free choice; it can only select among the offerings the system affords. Intelligence follow the logic of a system. It is system-immanent...intelligence does not have access to what is wholly other. In contrast, the idiot has contact with the vertical dimension inasmuch he takes leave of the prevailing system- that is, abandon intelligence. The inside of the idiot is delicate and transparent, like a dragonfly's wing. It glistens with the intelligence that has been overcome”24.
The poster takes on an artistic role of disengagement from the current arrangement of what is largely a fabricated presentation of events by various “interests”. Operating within the realm of internet Dreamtime, finding hidden connections between things. Think of a horizontal network, a channel or random breaker which connects various wires together and limits certain connections to feed energy to others, or a spike in a certain wave form which effects the proceeding waves.
The poster becomes transparent to the ocean of data, never fully consuming what is around them, but reflecting pieces of everything in different ways. The poster realizes fundamentally that the information, discourse and images presented to us in the online do not really reflect the same “matters of fact” realities as they once did. Hyper-reality means that even “meatspace” operates in such ambiguities. So an artistic engagement with the real is called for, even out of necessity. To “make life a work of art” by making posting a work of art. The poster being a half-sea fairer, half plein-air artist of the real, chasing the light that illuminates the world/landscape and seeing something only they see within the arrangements of light and shadow, colour temperature, shapes and composition. The poster is fundamentally a digital impressionist.
2022 was the year zero for the terminally online poster because it set these conditions in stone for a large swath of the population. The poster evades conditions of narrative capture, having the real reflect the commonly held speculations of postures on a delayed Gradian scale. Picture the nature of “truth” being a sort of scaled aesthetic experimentation in this ocean of data that is the internet. A poster or cobble of posters speculates as to the nature of something being presented as not really the “real” situation. Like the War in Ukraine, like most information that was forced down everyone's throats during COVID. Information takes on a sort of artistry, that requires audience engagement. Ergo truth becomes relational. You paint a picture of a world through posting, and this picture then becomes a sliding scale towards it hitting enough “consensus reality” when the “normie” is allowed to openly question it.
We know that art in the internet age has fundamentally changed, and most of it becomes a sort of performance requiring an audience, and often relying on collage and repetition/remixing of source material. In the age of digital reproduction, everything becomes horizonal, no longer in a liner progression. Even the “truth” of events that happened relatively recently are questioned, and “truth” can only be approximated or gestured at. “The obliteration of time and space, has consumed the past as well as the present” one article reviewing art in the internet age states. Everything being accessible leads ironically enough to more enigmas and paradoxes in relation to what is the “real reality”. Because everything is fundamentally speculative. Art is not art unless it is observed now on the internet25.
The poster generates a spectacle that becomes an Egregore without enough power that it cannot be ignored. Partly because those responsible for maintaining “official public information channels” like media hacks and the “expert” class are so mindbogglingly irresponsible, ideologically mind-poisoned and midwitted, that this is relatively easy. Most “experts” in the medical field soiled themselves and their reputations, and now military experts plucked by the liberal media are doing the same. The real damage done by them cannot be ignored for every long. Even something as simple as taking Vitamin-D during the pandemic was at once shrilly denounced as giving people “dangerous false hope misinformation” that would prevent taking the bio-medical sacrament. Now the positive effects of Vitamin-D during COVID are widely talked about and explored by medical experts26. Something posters got onto a mere months into the pandemic and were denounced for.
Posters also speculated that most of these terminally online “expert” doctors who sucked up the first shred of clout and attention they have ever received in their lives were stretching the numbers and even making them up as they go along. I heard chatter like this even in 2020 on the Chans and on the burner accounts of various posters, clipped by the old Twitter regime for “spreading disinformation”. Lo and behold that this was the case as it was recently reported in San Francisco27. The fact that a cabal of Trans medical authorities were inflating numbers of sock accounts and “expert opinion” manipulation around things like Lock downs and masking has other implications that would be too long and besides the point to go into here.
This is not to say that posters are always right, because there were many things that they got wrong in 2022, as the regime is more capable of diffusing and even subverting the strength of alternative online discourse. But this is just a demonstration of the current order of things as they stand today. Information and truth becomes a form of Avant-Garde aestheticism in the internet age. The poster takes on the role of a picture maker insurgent, a synthesizer and collage arranger of words, images and images. This is what BCH also means by “making use of the useless”, not just to disrupt the process of commodification by embracing those less easily grasped aspects of life. But also making use of that which is neglected. The internet in its more brilliant aspects does this job, of finding what is hidden and ignored and breathing new life into them. Even the poster does this with information. Shitposting as a work of art, jamming up those officiated chains of information and data collection through weaponized memetic nonsense. The Shitposter too is a surrealist at heart.
when i went into cyberspace i went into it thinking that it was a place like any other place and that it would be a human interaction like any other human interaction. i was wrong when i thought that. it was a terrible mistake.
the very first understanding that i had that it was not a place like any place and that the interaction would be different was when people began to talk to me as though i were a man. when they wrote about me in the third person, they would say “he.” it interested me to have people think i was “he” instead of “she” and so at first i did not say anything. i grinned and let them think i was “he.” this went on for a little while and it was fun but after a while i was uncomfortable. finally i said unto them that i, humdog, was a woman and not a man. this surprised them. at that moment i realized that the dissolution of gender-category was something that was happening everywhere, and perhaps it was only just very obvious on the net. this is the extent of my homage to Gender On The Net.
i suspect that cyberspace exists because it is the purest manifestation of the mass (masse) as Jean Beaudrilliard described it. it is a black hole; it absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as spectacle. people tend to express their vision of the mass as a kind of imaginary parade of blue-collar workers, their muscle-bound arms raised in defiant salute. sometimes in this vision they are holding wrenches in their hands. anyway, this image has its origins in Marx and it is as Romantic as a dozen long-stemmed red roses. the mass is more like one of those faceless dolls you find in nostalgia-craft shops: limp, cute, and silent. when i say “cute” i am including its macabre and sinister aspects within my definition.
it is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some kind of island of the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their Individuality. some people write about cyberspace as though it were a 60′s utopia. in reality, this is not true. major online services, like compuserv and america online, regular guide and censor discourse. even some allegedly free-wheeling (albeit politically correct) boards like the WELL censor discourse. the difference is only a matter of the method and degree. what interests me about this, however, is that to the mass, the debate about freedom of expression exists only in terms of whether or not you can say fuck or look at sexually explicit pictures. i have a quaint view that makes me think that discussing the ability to write “fuck” or worrying about the ability to look at pictures of sexual acts constitutes The Least Of Our Problems surrounding freedom of expression.
western society has a problem with appearance and reality. it keeps wanting to split them off from each other, make one more real than the other, invest one with more meaning than it does the other. there are two people who have something to say about this: Nietzsche and Beaudrilliard. i invoke their names in case somebody thinks i made this up. Nietzsche thinks that the conflict over these ideas cannot be resolved. Beaudrilliard thinks that it was resolved and that this is how come some people think that communities can be virtual: we prefer simulation (simulacra) to reality. image and simulacra exert tremendous power upon culture. and it is this tension, that informs all the debates about Real and Not-Real that infect cyberspace with regards to identity, relationship, gender, discourse, and community. almost every discussion in cyberspace, about cyberspace, boils down to some sort of debate about Truth-In-Packaging.
cyberspace is a mostly a silent place. in its silence it shows itself to be an expression of the mass. one might question the idea of silence in a place where millions of user-ids parade around like angels of light, looking to see whom they might, so to speak, consume. the silence is nonetheless present and it is most present, paradoxically at the moment that the user-id speaks. when the user-id posts to a board, it does so while dwelling within an illusion that no one is present. language in cyberspace is a frozen landscape.
i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management.
as if this were not enough, all of my words were made immortal by means of tape backups. furthermore, i was paying two bucks an hour for the privilege of commodifying and exposing myself. worse still, i was subjecting myself to the possibility of scrutiny by such friendly folks as the FBI: they can, and have, downloaded pretty much whatever they damn well please. the rhetoric in cyberspace is liberation-speak. the reality is that cyberspace is an increasingly efficient tool of surveillance with which people have a voluntary relationship.
proponents of so-called cyber-communities rarely emphasize the economic, business-mind nature of the community: many cyber-communities are businesses that rely upon the commodification of human interaction. they market their businesses by appeal to hysterical identification and fetishism no more or less than the corporations that brought us the two hundred dollar athletic shoe. proponents of cyber- community do not often mention that these conferencing systems are rarely culturally or ethnically diverse, although they are quick to embrace the idea of cultural and ethnic diversity. they rarely address the whitebread demographics of cyberspace except when these demographics conflict with the upward-mobility concerns of white, middle class females under the rubric of orthodox academic Feminism.
the ideology of electronic community appears to contain three elements. first, the idea of the social; second, eco-greenness; and lastly, the assumption that technology equals progress in a kind of nineteenth century sense. all of these ideas break down under analysis into forms of banality.
as beaudrilliard has said, socialization is measured according to the amount of exposure to information, specifically, exposure to media. the social itself is a dinosaur: people are withdrawing into activities that are more about consumption than anything else. even the Evil Newt says that. ( i watched his class.) so-called electronic communities encourage participation in fragmented, mostly silent, microgroups who are primarily engaged in dialogues of self-congratulation. in other words, most people lurk; and the ones who post, are pleased with themselves.
eco-green is a social concept that is about making people feel good. what they feel good about is that they are getting a handle on what amounts to the trashing of planet earth by industrialists of the second industrial revolution. it is a good and desirable feeling, especially during a time where semioticists are trying to figure out how they are going to explain radiation- waste dumps to people thirty thousand years in the future. eco-green is also a way to re-package calvinistic values under a more palatable sign. americans are calvinists, i am sorry to say. they can’t help it: it arrived on the mayflower.
i also think that the idea of electronic community is a manifestation of the triumph of sign-value over worth-value. there is nothing that goes on in electronic community that is not infested with sign- value. if electronic community were anything other than exercise in sign-value, identity hacking, which is entirely about surface-sign, would be much more difficult. signs proclaiming electronic technology as green abound in cyberspace: the attitude of political correctness; the “green” computer, the “paperless” office and the illusion that identity in cyberspace can be manipulated to obscure gender, ethnicity, and other emblems of cultural diversity; the latter of course being both the most persistent and most ridiculous. both of these concepts, the social and the eco-green, are directly nourished by an idea of progress that would not have appeared unfamiliar to an industrialist in the nineteenth century.
i give you an example: the WELL, a conferencing system based in Sausalito, California, is often touted as an example of a “social cluster” in cyberspace. originally part of the Point Foundation, which is also associated with the Whole Earth Review and the Whole Earth Catalogues, the WELL occupies an interesting niche in the electronic-community marketplace. it markets itself as a conferencing system for the literate, bookish and creative individual. it markets itself as an agent for social change, and it is, in reality, calvinist and more than a little green. the WELL is also afflicted with an old fashioned hippie aura that lead to some remarkably touching ideas about society and culture. no one, by the way, should kid themselves that the WELL is any different than bigger services like America OnLine or Prodigy–all of these outfits are businesses and all of these services are owned by large corporations. the WELL is just, by reason of clunky interface, a little bit less obvious about it.
in july of 1993, in a case that received national media coverage, a man’s reputation was destroyed on the WELL, by WELLpeople, because he had dared to have a relationship with more than one woman at the same time, and because he did not conform to WELL social protocol. i will not say that he did not conform to ethical standards, because i believe that the ethic of truthfulness in cyberspace is sometimes such as to render the word ethics meaningless. in cyberspace, for example, identity can be an art-form. but the issues held within the topic, called News 1290,(now archived) were very complex and spoke to the heart of the problem of cyberspace: the desire to invest the simulacrum with the weight of reality.
the women involved in 1290 accepted the attention of the man simultaneously on several levels: most importantly, they believed in the reality of his sign and invested it with meaning. they made love to his sign and there is no doubt that the relationship affected them and that they felt pain and distress when it ended badly. at the same time it appears that the man involved did not invest their signs with the same meaning that they had his, and it is also clear that all parties did not discuss their perceptions of one another. consequently the miscommunication that occurred was ascribed to the man’s exploitation of the women he was involved with, and a conclusion was made that he had used them as sexual objects. the women, for their parts, were comfortable in the role of victim and so the games began. of the hundreds of voices heard in this topic, only a very few were astute enough to express the idea that the events had been in actuality caused more by the medium than by the persons who suffered the consequences of the events. persons of that view addressed the ideas of “missing cues” like body language, tone of voice, and physical appearance. none of this, they said, is present in cyberspace, and so people create unrealistic images of the Other. these opinions were in the minority, though. most people made suggestions that would have shocked the organizers of the Reign of Terror. even the words “thought criminal” were used and suggestions about lynching were made.
hysterical identification is a mental device that enables one person to take on the sufferings of a group of persons. it is something that until the 1880′s was considered a problem of females. in our society, many decisions about who a person is, are made through the device of hysterical identification. in many cases, this is brought about by the miracle of commercial advertising which invests products with magical qualities, making them into fetishes. buy the fetish, and the identification promised by the advertisement is yours. it is tidy, easy, and requires no investment other than money.
in october of 1994, couples topic 163 was opened. in this topic, user Z came on to discuss her marital problems, which involved a daughter who was emotionally disturbed. it began in a very ordinary way for this type of thing, with the woman asking for and receiving advice about what to do. in just a few days, though, the situation escalated, and the woman put another voice on the wire, who was alleged to be her daughter, X. the alleged daughter exposed her problems and expressed her feelings about them, and the problems appeared to be life-threatening. this seemed to set something off within the conference, and a real orgy began as voices began to appear to express their identification with the mysterious and troubled daughter X. the nature of the identifications and the tone of the posts became stranger and stranger and finally user Z set the frightening crown upon the whole situation by posting a twistedly lyrical monologue of maternal comfort and consolation directed at the virtual Inner Children who had appeared to take refuge within her soft, enveloping arms. the more that the Inner Children wept, the more that the Virtual Mommy lyricized and comforted. this spectacle, which horrified more than one trained mental health professional who read it on the WELL, went on and on for several days and was discussed privately in several places in disbelieving tones. when the topic imploded, the Virtual Mommy withdrew reluctantly insisting that only a barbarian would believe that she would commodify her own tragedy.
one of the interesting things about both of these incidents, to me, is that they were expunged from the record. News1290 exists in archive. that means that it is stored in an electronic cabinet, sort of like what the Vatican did with the transcripts of the trial of Galileo. it’s there, but you have to look for it, and mention of 1290 makes WELLpeople nervous. Couples 163 was killed. that means it was destroyed, and does not exist at all anymore, except on back- up tape or in the hard disks of those persons (like me) who downloaded it for their own reasons. what i am getting at here is that electronic community is a commercial enterprise that dovetails nicely with the increasing trend towards dehumanization in our society: it wants to commodify human interaction, enjoy the spectacle regardless of the human cost. if and when the spectacle proves incovenient or alarming, it engages in creative history like, like any good banana republic.
this, however, should not surprise anybody. aesthetically, electronic community of the kind likely to be extolled in the gentle, new-age press, contains both elements of the modernist resistance to depth and appeal to surface combined with the postmodern aesthetic of fragment. the electronic community leaves a permanent record which is open to scrutiny while maintaining an illusion of transience. in doing this, it somehow manages to satisfy the needs of the orwellian and the psycho-archeologist.
people can talk about cyberspace as a Utopian community only because it is literature, and therefore subject to editorial revision. these two events plus another where a woman’s death was choreographed as spectacle online, made me think about what electronic community was, and how it probably really did not exist, except like i said, as a kind of market for the consumption of sign-value.
increasingly, consumption is micro-managed, as the great marxists alvin and heidi toffler suggest when they talk about “de-massing.” so-called electronic community may be seen as a kind of micro-marketing of the social to a self-selected elite. this denies the possibility of human relationship, from which all authentic community proceeds. if one exists merely as sign-value, as a series of white letters, as a subset, then of course it is perfectly fine and we can talk about a community of signs, nicely boxed, categorized and inventoried, ready for consumption.
many times in cyberspace, i felt it necessary to say that i was human. once, i was told that i existed primarily as a voice in somebody’s head. lots of times, i need to see handwriting on paper or a photograph or a phone conversation to confirm the humanity of the voice, but that is the way that i am. i resist being boxed and inventoried and i guess i take william gibson seriously when he writes about machine intelligence and constructs. i do not like it. i suspect that my words have been extracted and that when this essay shows up, they will be extracted some more. when i left cyberspace, i left early one morning and forgot to take out the trash. two friends called me on the phone afterwards and said, hummie your directory is still there. and i said OH. and they knew and i knew, that it was possible that people had been entertaining themselves with the contents of my directories. the amusement never ends, as peter gabriel wrote. maybe sometime i will rant again if something interesting comes up. in the meantime, give my love to the FBI.
Well...happy new year Gio. Here's to hoping its a better one! You'll probably be missed on BTR far more than you know, my friend.
Thing about time: I haven't read Scent of Time (My only BCH books are Burnout Society and Psychopolitics), but it sounds like McLuhan has something similar to say in Understanding Media. According to him, it is precisely by dividing time into segments and aliquots that has created the impression of it "passing", and passing faster all the time. Accord to M McL, the premoderns saw time as intrinsic to objects and to seasons/events. Everything had its own, intrinsic time. In modernity, time is merely a framework in which things occur. It's always interesting to see how our view of time affects its "passing".
Looking forward to reading your book when you put it out.
You actually got me into Byung-Chul Han, who I've really loved ever since. Thanks!
Well...happy new year Gio. Here's to hoping its a better one! You'll probably be missed on BTR far more than you know, my friend.
Thing about time: I haven't read Scent of Time (My only BCH books are Burnout Society and Psychopolitics), but it sounds like McLuhan has something similar to say in Understanding Media. According to him, it is precisely by dividing time into segments and aliquots that has created the impression of it "passing", and passing faster all the time. Accord to M McL, the premoderns saw time as intrinsic to objects and to seasons/events. Everything had its own, intrinsic time. In modernity, time is merely a framework in which things occur. It's always interesting to see how our view of time affects its "passing".
Best wishes for the new year!