cybersocialist notebook

Perhaps it has always been within us, injected from its future-perfect fully networked form. It is natural. But to leave Africa we must first return to it. To change nature, shapeshift. Steal back the crown from the clown demon. Put on a mask and start dancing.

...

When you are being attacked from all sides it is utterly futile to question, ruminate on, or select at what, at which angle, bearing and elevation, with what theoretical correctness, and with which method to attack -- why is anyone on the left wasting their breath at this question? Surely it is all a question of intensity. We are faced with a machine that possesses the capacity to metabolize, elicit, deflect, redirect and sink informational, mental and libidinal intensities. A machine that can, along with subliminally preformatting billions’ desires (and thus also politics), incorporate and adjust for left-wing critiques, hemorrhage a million responses, further fragment and schizophrenitize in dynamics and route its flows of resource-control around reforms. In so openly (and so cripplingly slowly) critiquing such a pervasive, monstrous, curious system the left has actively been helping Capital to increase in complexity and bridge the gap between human and machine.

The point is not to weigh theories in terms of their theoretical correctness and purity, at least not upfront -- the point is to actively inject every single possible theory/idea/critique on hand, the newer the better, into core capitalist machinery: if they are effective they are correct. Forget about white-faced epistemology: in raw informatics terms, the only way to analyze and effectively critique a dynamic, formless system is to constantly reformulate, at a pace which exceeds capital’s, or at the very least formulate a rough, cybernetic, modular and dynamic model of the system. A static, ink-has-dried critique is more than useless; such a theory is valuable only when Capital stops transmuting, i.e. when it is fucking dead.

“Legacy systems” I call them.

Advertising considers human attention to be an incredibly valuable resource: it is capitalized on. Digital technologies of communication are engineered (or rejiggered) to capture attention; to amuse and addict, and to provoke occasionally too, but usually instead to confirm. With no real social outlets, social media “chambers” echo: echo chambers. People get addicted, groups are separated and polarized.

Alienation occurs, on a vast scale, now also in the eerie nonphysical terrains that markets are colonizing having recently run out of physical space and time: human attention, human thought, free time, precarity, political stasis, passivity, atomization, subversive cultures and their t-shirt merchandise, simulation of human connection as substitutions, other simulacra… the list goes on. It occurs to an extent that is now inescapably apparent, both horrifying and benefitting many companies, fearing their harm will boomerang back as criticism and new political dynamics.

Some adapt quite well; many suffer. Cultures clash, refuse to reconcile; people are hurt. Runaway variables. "Unanticipated [(but not uncapitalized!)] special effects", you could say ;).

“There is no alternative.”

So it seems. But of course it is immensely useful, for certain groups, for the current stasis to be maintained. The last thing that markets need are subversive agents which are beyond their control. This is not a contradiction: there are many ways to concentrate wealth using antiproductive strategies.

Projections do not look good, I admit.