I read Rita Raley and found myself thinking about Mark Zuckerberg. I worked as a reporter in Washington before coming to Chicago, and this past spring I had the unique misfortune of covering Zuckerberg’s protracted appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee. These hearings in their contemporary iteration are something of a farce — the advent of C-SPAN and subsequent placement of television cameras throughout Congress have given campaign communications teams an easy trove of advertisement B-roll, and members grandstand accordingly — and this event wasn’t an exception, despite or because of its alleged gravity.
But Cory Booker’s self-conscious jeremiads were not nearly as irksome as the general fallaciousness of the questions asked of Zuckerberg over those many redundant hours. I point specifically to the repeated demand that Zuckerberg/Facebook actively block political provocateurs: a “solution” tantamount, in my view, to placing a Band-Aid on a paper cut on a leprous finger. A localized, crudely cosmetic fix that fails to address the more salient (read: lethal) ambient disease.
To ground this crude metaphor: the issue is not Facebook’s lack of oversight during the 2016 election; the issue is Facebook itself, and Google, and Twitter, and the way in which these corporations have privatized — or more specifically oligarchized — a commons. The fact that we're looking unquestioningly at private actors as arbiters of public speech is disturbing. This is to posit: the internet is a public space, a plane on which we conduct our lives. If this was not true in the era of early cyberlibertarian utopianism, it has (perhaps paradoxically) been made true by capitalism. This potentially ambitious paradigm becomes more palatable if we choose to see the temporal realm as crucial as the physically spatial in our understanding of “space.” (Raley nods to this in her discussion of digital activist art: it seeks to captivate the temporal as much as the spatial.) Capitalism seems to be in on it, and capitalism still calls the shots. Earlier this year, the wealth management arm of Morgan Stanley pointed to the bullishness of the leisure market, incommensurate with the rest of the economy, and attributed it to the growing “importance of multiple leisure forms consumed at once” — e.g. the tendency to, say, scroll through Instagram on your phone while streaming The Handmaid’s Tale on your laptop. Time is money, and this trend, Morgan Stanley notes with an ominous implicit optimism, “break[s] the constraints of a 24-hour day.”
In short: our lives, and the systems of power in which they operate, have been digitized. The notion occasions some foreboding thought experiments. Does the 2016 election — and/or this political moment in the United States more broadly — suddenly appear more violent/dangerous if we choose to understand (e.g.) the vicious strains of anonymous bigotry on Twitter as the contemporary equivalent of a physical lynch mob? (There is some fascinating emerging scholarship on the trauma of online abuse that might resolve the seeming affective disparity in this comparison.)
Raley seems to think so. At the very least, she believes that the digital activist movement is onto something in its credo that “[its] shift in revolutionary investments corresponds with a shift in the nature of power, which has removed itself from the streets and become nomadic… Activism and dissent, in turn, must, and do, enter the network.” (1) Raley’s examination of this activism reinforces the suggestion that the digital realm is neoliberalism’s new kingdom, and that its authority relies on the subjugation of the temporal as much as — if not more than — the spatial. Her conception of this power is essentially Deleuzian: “Control is dispersive rather than concentrative; it works by communication rather than confinement,” she writes in her appreciative description of John Klima’s ironic subversion of government data. (21) She cites the Critical Art Ensemble’s doctrine that “authoritarian structure cannot be smashed; it can only be resisted” and its subsequent embrace of “little tactics rather than bold strategies” — gestures that specifically hijack the audience’s attention, often by subverting the expected.
These gestures plant seeds rather than posit solutions, and that, she says, could be the point: “the notion that revolutionary resistance no longer requires a single spatiality… means that power will not, cannot, reconstitute either on-site or in the hands of a limited few.” (24-25) I'm left to wonder what the future looks like.
“Multitasking Leisure” (Morgan Stanley Wealth Management Report), 2018
“Introduction” to Tactical Media, Rita Raley, 2009
“Postscript on Control Societies,” Gilles Deleuze, 1992
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