Re: <nettime> Towards a Non-facebook (Pit Schultz)

[Kristoffer Gansing <kg@transmediale.de>]

Pit wrote:
> Towards a Non-facebook
> a pretext
> 
> 
> The current facebook debate is a chance to get your act together and
> get organized - just a little.

Thanks for this call to action Pit, much needed in these times of
inflated and often misinformed social media critique. As someone who
never joined facebook in the first place, I can’t help wondering what
then to do. Is a facebook user strike strictly for users, since we have
frequently been told you cannot really be outside facebook whether you
are indeed active on it or not. In other words, does suspending your
account for a week really amount to a strike?

Your article touches upon many of the blind spots and deficiencies of
the current drive to create a more “ethical” and/or “transparent”
digital society, i.e. the points about interoperability leading to great
arguments about the need to change education and the referral to a
possible deindividualization of the social media model. What I can’t
help find both fascinating and slightly discomforting however is that
you, as a long-time local radio activist and co-founder of this list,
start out by so vehemently dismissing those who are engaged in imagining
and sometimes designing the outside. Don’t get me wrong, I think one of
the cornerstones of nettime and critical net culture has always been its
resistance to the naive dreams of the cyberlibertarians and I think your
suggestion here that critical art practice might operate a similar
reality diversion pretty healthy, especially when regarded in the
context of a larger “industry of critique” that starts to get absurd
when you see it in connection with the rise of explicit cultural
mechanisms (in organisations and at events) of disarming everything
negative (techlash notwithstanding). But, the larger question I would
like to ask here is if your critique then does not indeed dismiss
artistic and much post-digital activist practice per se? If we have to
give up imagining the outside altogether, why then also still have what
you call “collective agencies of real resistance: running archives,
sharing strange interests and hobbies, collecting and filtering what has
been easily neglected or forgotten.” Would any of that even exist in a
world which ceased imagining an outside to facebook or any other
dominant mode of social interaction? To escape totalitarian thinking,
one should not boil it down to two movements, one fighting against and
one from within. Both and many more struggles have to be allowed to
co-exist and continue to contradict each other from a truly “radical
democratic point of view” (if we by that also mean agonistic). Posing a
new universalism is catchy and seems attractive, but hampered by a
nostalgia for a world that’s not possible to simplify like that any
longer, without (again) committing severe violence, and we should
probably rather look into what Povinelli has called “extimate existence”
, considering entanglements and differences in order to create
interoperability from there.

So, please reformulate and help me strike against facebook also if I’m
not already part of it.

/Kristoffer
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