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

Kristoffer Gansing wrote:

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?

I'm in the same situation, and felt that same double perplexity at the end of the text. Seems to me we don't live in a Facebook society but one of state surveillance capitalism, epitomized by FB but irreducible to it. What I found great in Pit's text was the line, "Today you are told that somewhere else, with a different type of media, speech will be authentic and free again, just to stop you from waking up and stating the obvious." The obvious is that it's not all about speech or even freedom. It's about living in a particular kind of society whose norms and constraints have become suicidal, beneath a wierd veil of euphoria that again, is epitomized by FB....

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?

Look, Pit has a sharp tongue for sure (I'll never forget when he said a project of mine was like "early Grand Theft Auto") but the most important thing that comes out of it is, can you have a real internal critique of this ageing new media schtick, whatever it's called now, post-digital artistic activism? Because cultural creation thrives on self-critique, when it's the kind that shakes a person out of their usual thing. The "extimate existence" that you bring up further along sounds ecstatic for sure, but it also sounds like a very familiar micro-conversation among entitled sophisticates. In my view that's not what people need or even want these days. The networked social theories and subjectivist philosophies of the 90s/2000s had a lot to give, but it's time to use that stuff and not just spin out more variations.

You say 'no new universalism to avoid again committing severe violence,' and I understand what's behind that statement. But the severe violence is being committed right now and if the way people relate to politics does not change, it's going to be inexorable. Time was when, depending on country, you could emigrate to America or Canada or the EU in hopes of escaping your local nightmare - generations did it, including yours truly - but it looks like those times are over. There's an outside for sure, but it's not just extimate, it's evanescent, and like good drugs it has the best effects only once in a while.

I don't mean to diss, I want to get at the core of what you're saying. Current social movements are made up of weirdos and deviants and freaks of all kinds, including hyperintellectuals, whose exorbitant subjectivities are so threatened that they can resonate with people who just wanted to be ordinary, until they found out they were getting crushed by the ordinary state of things. You know that connection when you see it. The fancy language falls away and the sophistication is in the entanglement of radically different forms of resistance. How to bring art into that stuff?

Hey, maybe in media it looks like early Grand Theft Auto! Just kidding, but anyway, thanks for the compliment, Pit, and good debating with you, Kristoffer -