<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-size: 13px;color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><div>but if Hong Kong's street movements, applying all social media. mobile media, mesh network, P2P network, bluetooth limited area transmission is not the SPECTACLE, where we are at?</div><div>sl<br></div><br><blockquote style="padding-left: 5px; margin-left: 0px; border-left: #0000ff 2px solid; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; font-size: 10pt; font-family: arial,sans-serif; color: black;">-----Original Message-----
<br>From: Menno Grootveld <rabotnik@xs4all.nl>
<br>Sent: Sep 6, 2019 1:07 PM
<br>To: empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
<br>Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Geert Lovink UNFINISHED
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<p>Hi all! I would say that the spectacle is manifesting itself in
all media, not just social media. The spectacle consists of
politicians and their corporate allies throwing up lots of dust,
trying to blind us for what is actually going on in the world. And
yes, eventually social media play a role here too, by blowing up
some of these tales by endlessly repeating them or by enticing
people to engage with them (even from a negative perspective). The
situation is much more complex than a simple dichotomy between old
'broadcast' media and (not so) new 'narrowcast' media, it is both
at the same time.</p>
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<p>Best,</p>
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<p>Menno</p>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Op 06-09-19 om 12:43 schreef Geert
Lovink:<br>
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Thanks, Josie! I really like it that you bring in and say about
Debord. I still wonder if there is something like a social media
spectacle. Can we still talk about a spectacle when the audience
is that much dispersed, fragmented, individualized, personalized,
isolated, insulated, jailed in their own filter bubbles? Maybe we
can. Perhaps this individual reading of information processing is
just a dream. It is unreal, no doubt. Is is also something that we
passively consume? I struggle with that idea. Centralized… for
sure. Are social media turning into a television 2.0 experience?
What does this mean for current mobilisations? Best, Geert
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<div class="">On 5 Sep 2019, at 11:01 am, Josephine Berry
<<a target="_blank" href="mailto:j.berry@gold.ac.uk" class="" moz-do-not-send="true">j.berry@gold.ac.uk</a>> wrote:</div>
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Hello SL and Geert,</div>
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I've been dipping into our old friend Guy Debord and
his still invaluable Society of the Spectacle while
this discussion is running and I think that much of
his analysis still bites in regards to our questions
about media, social organisation and politics. I like
his way of discussing the contradictory consistency of
the spectacle that, while producing a realm of
communication split from 'the former unity of life'
and social production, and used to enforce a feeling
of pseudo-reality, separation and helplessness, is not
only a product of that self-same unified life and
production, but one that distills its character and
mode of organisation. The distortion and the reality
circle through each other.</div>
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"Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the
outcome and the goal of the dominant mode of
production. It is not something added to the real
world - not a decorative element, so to speak. On the
contrary, it is the very heart of society's real
unreality. [...] It is the omnipresent celebration of
a choice already made in the sphere of production, and
the consummate result of that choice. In form as in
content the spectacle serves as total justification
for the conditions and aims of the existing system. It
further ensures the permanent presence of that
justification, for it governs almost all time spent
outside the production process itself." </div>
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(Debord, 1967)</div>
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I am interested in thinking about the consistency of
social production and the way it has changed since the
90s, and the way the spectacle reflects, distorts and
impels this reality. Ok, maybe the obvious point is
that the mailinglists of yore were somehow expressive
of a mere potential, as yet virginal and unexplored.
of a globally integrated 24/7 communications
capability, one that we filled with all our critical
passions and utopian schemes - and again, to stay
close to Debord, these were not mere fantasies either,
but reflective of a genuine social possibility that
was hoving into view at that time as the Communist
Bloc crumbled, Fordism fell apart, the West needed to
reinvent itself, and less and less labour was required
to produce the goods and commodities needed by the
planet's population to survive. </div>
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Since then, the infrastructure has been centralised
and monopolised as a lever and reflection of an
asymmetrical tendency towards wealth monopolisation
and political control that goes 'all the way down'.
This, as we have discussed endlessly, is one that
neoliberalisation conjoined with financialisation has
accelerated beyond all imagining. The tendency, it
seems, is one that requires humans to supplement the
highly efficient technological production that has
extended planet wide, fixing the algo-fuckups,
injecting creativity, and more than anything doing
low-value work that the capitalist apparatus 'sucks
up', due to the same technological efficiency, into
the hands of fewer and fewer. </div>
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How then does our 'attraction' to the spectacle of
social media and streaming reflect this transformation
of social production, and how should we respond?
Undboutedly, passivity is important. We only need to
chip-in and combine fragmentary thoughts across social
media. We don't need to go to the agora or the cinema,
but as Flusser says, are driven into separate corners
to receive information. This creates a more powerful
sense of being together, like chatting round a table,
while the reality is we are less and less together,
and increasingly phobic of each other. This also looks
a bit like the gig economy - contract work without
regularity, without the workplace community that
creates consistency of identity, activity and
relationships. And as we know, the fragmentary quality
of these environments which we also all enjoy (maybe a
big part of this is their combo of low engagement
expectations and lots of pictures), help to further
fragment the social body as we are seeing with all the
extremist and turbulent politics of our times. The
consistency then is that social relation is being
mined as the resource of economic profit, like
fracking or the end-of-the-line process of oil and gas
extraction, and leaving behind it a kind of mangled
and exhausted social field. </div>
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I'm interested in how we can think about the
unfinished project of radical media and alternative
communications within this situation - one for which
alienation is a double-sided experience of isolation
and reality of the means of our relation. Should we be
at the crux of this, in the most fleeting (e.g. the
blue-tooth meshes people are talking about), or take
distance? I guess this is the old question of
critique, and what its possibilities are.</div>
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Ok, that's it for now - I need to get back to some
gig-work and my mind is fragmenting.</div>
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Josie </div>
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<div id="divRplyFwdMsg" dir="ltr" class=""><font style="font-size:11pt" class="" face="Calibri,
sans-serif"><b class="">From:</b> <a href="mailto:empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" class="" moz-do-not-send="true">empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a>
<<a href="mailto:empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" class="" moz-do-not-send="true">empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a>>
on behalf of Shu Lea Cheang <<a href="mailto:shulea@earthlink.net" class="" moz-do-not-send="true">shulea@earthlink.net</a>><br class="">
<b class="">Sent:</b> 05 September 2019 07:52<br class="">
<b class="">To:</b> <a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" class="" moz-do-not-send="true">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a>
<<a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" class="" moz-do-not-send="true">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a>>;
Geert Lovink <<a href="mailto:geert@networkcultures.org" class="" moz-do-not-send="true">geert@networkcultures.org</a>><br class="">
<b class="">Subject:</b> Re: [-empyre-] Geert
Lovink UNFINISHED</font>
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