[-empyre-] Geert Lovink UNFINISHED

Fri Sep 6 21:07:19 AEST 2019

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.

Best,

Menno

Op 06-09-19 om 12:43 schreef Geert Lovink:
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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
>
>> On 5 Sep 2019, at 11:01 am, Josephine Berry <j.berry at gold.ac.uk 
>> <mailto:j.berry at gold.ac.uk>> wrote:
>>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Hello SL and Geert,
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> "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."
>> (Debord, 1967)
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> Ok, that's it for now - I need to get back to some gig-work and my 
>> mind is fragmenting.
>>
>> Josie
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> *From:* empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
>> <mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> 
>> <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
>> <mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>> on behalf of Shu 
>> Lea Cheang <shulea at earthlink.net <mailto:shulea at earthlink.net>>
>> *Sent:* 05 September 2019 07:52
>> *To:* empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
>> <mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> 
>> <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
>> <mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>>; Geert Lovink 
>> <geert at networkcultures.org <mailto:geert at networkcultures.org>>
>> *Subject:* Re: [-empyre-] Geert Lovink UNFINISHED
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