Re: <nettime> Towards a Non-facebook

[David Garcia <d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk>]

Thanks happy to join Pit’s initiative 

> Lets call it #non-facebook.
> https://www.facebook.com/groups/217513475509054/


I am interpreting Pit's challenge to the tactics of anti-Facebook 
movement as being based on a recognition that 
we live in a world where the digital and the social are so 
entangled that (as recent events have shown) not even 
Facebook is in control of Facebook. This combined with 
hard reality of the 'network effect’ makes it a bad moment to 
leave the internal FB territory un-contested.

Not a day passes without another strange event as a consequence of  
of the fact that digital platforms are no longer simply -facilitating - 
recording - analysing- the world but Increasingly INTERVENING. 
Furthermore as these interventions are overwhelmingly 
automated and therefore instaneous, we see a collapse in the 
tradional (deliberative) space between knowing and acting. 
The epistemic and existentialist consequences of the dissapearence of this 
space is as yet unknown. They are there to be both feared and explored.. 

This erasure is a likely factor behind what Michal Seemann calls 
"The Digital Tailspin" with his claim of an era of structural inteterminacy and the 
exponential rise in so called "black swan" events. 

There is no more need for Zukerberg’s edict for his employees 
"to move fast and break things”. Its the sytems (not only the sisters) that “are 
doing it for themselves”.   
 
Some artists and sociologists .. Constant Dullart (his army of FB bots), 
Erica Scourti (her ghosted biography based on her data-body) and Noortje Marres
in her many papers and book Digital Sociology that are treating these platforms not 
simply as instrumental space (where we have a fixed idea of what something is for) 
but as open-ended. 

As Marres wrote “not treating social relations and activity as a given and unchanging 
but as a set of activities, patterns and forms that may shift expand and are thus
transformable, digital technologies can be said to invite an experimental 
approach to sociality”. 

David Garcia


On 25 May 2018, at 03:38, Pit Schultz <pit@bootlab.org> wrote:


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