| tbyfield on Sat, 10 Nov 2018 17:06:38 +0100 (CET) |
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| <nettime> Nein, danke [was Re: Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy] |
tl;dr: It's provocateur agitprop made by Americans for Americans, and it's crafted to blur distinctions between left and right — more specifically, to lure progressive/leftists into a rightist fantasy world, with — I think — the intention of normalizing and fostering consideration and discussion of violence. In part, it's a visual exposition of the "but Nazis were SOCIALISTS" nonsense that's going around in rightist circles; but unlike that pseudo-factual claim, this site is intended to be obliquely persuasive. There are signs that it's tied to murky efforts to identify leftist college students. Whoever developed it has put some serious time into studying Nazi aesthetics and, more than that, has a subtle sense of how to evoke them without being obvious about it. The fact that it comes in three languages, English, Spanish, and French is mostly pseudo-'internationalist' window-dressing. There are signs of a layered, deliberate editorial development process that, I think, was based on psychological modeling. This isn't a one-off project made by a band of nutters: it's planned and executed with subtlety and sophistication, with *very* high production values. We'll see more efforts that look and sound like it.
Here's why I think so:It was inevitable that we'd start to see manifestoes/etc whose philosophy and production values are inversely proportional: as the text becomes hsallower, the visuals become deeper. They'll require two kinds of 'reading,' textual and (for lack of a better word) visual. As the philosophy falls way the value of close readings diminishes, and as the visuals become more sophisticated the value of 'close looking' increases. So let's take a close look at the website Ian pulled this text from: https[colon]//inhabit[dot]global/ — URL mangled because I don't want anymore links to it in the nettime archive.
The text casts future history as a 'choose your own adventure' exercise. It uses red-pill/blue-pill rhetoric ("there are two paths") to dress up a binary choice — which, tellingly, explicitly uses the language of A/B testing. Not very interesting, imo, except maybe as some sort of obligatory web-analytics gesture.
Much more interesting is the visual style, which is self-consciously modeled in several ways on print.
First image: an eagle flying above it all, against threatening clouds — but they're too close and detailed to be storm clouds, so maybe it's smoke? Hard to tell, in an almost perfect way.
The color palate, which is *very* unusual in terms current trends, mimics faded print — and not just any print but the kind you might expect from, say, 1930s Germany. The solid color fields, in particular, are reminiscent of propaganda from the period — close enough to hint at it, but not so close as to be too obvious.
The display type ("Lydia-BoldCondensed," if you chase down the CSS) is the typographic equivalent of alt.right rhetoric: it evokes Walter Höhnisch's National and Schaftstiefelgrotesk (literally, "Jackboot Grotesk") without quite going there, as they say.
https://www.colophon-foundry.org/typefaces/lydia/ http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-24194.html http://de.academic.ru/dic.nsf/dewiki/1241667The photographs are all black-and-white, which places them in an obvious historical register — pre-color photography. But, more than that, they're processed to mimic paper tinted with age: again, almost *but not quite* like the discoloration you get from early mass-produced paper from the '30s, a time when the production of cheap new kinds of paper skyrocketed but the chemistry hadn't been worked out.
Odd detail: there's enough diversity in how the images were processed — cropping, blurring, and adding color gradients (in the first and last images) — to suggest that the art director knew what he (pretty sure of the gender there) has real experience.
And then there's the substance of the photographs... This part gets geeky, but bear with me because it's very telling. These images have been deliberately curated to
* balance racial/ethnic and gender * appeal to indigenous struggles (Latin America, Dakota Access) * make reference to internationalist militance * make reference to survivalist training I'm pretty sure the ~curator was a white guy. Below is a list of the photos in order. Here's the legend: * '+' means a pictures with an identifiable person* '-' means a pictures with with faces obscured by cropping or photoshop
* '[+]' means the photo is widely available * '[ ]' means the photo does NOT turn up in reverse images searches.— that last category is interesting, because it narrows the scope of where the images come from.
* [#] means there's some interesting detail (below the list) about its origin
The photos, in order: - [+] Boston Dynamics robot dogs running+ [+] woman wearing a keffiyeh with an assault rifle in the back of a pickup truck - [+] gender-balanced, faceless people in a crowd — maybe a demo, maybe a concert, probably in Europe - [ ] Instagrammy composite photo of a skinny woman's arms, four hands flipping the viewer off
- [ ] people eating, maybe communally, faces blurred in photoshop - [+] stock photo of an athletic woman running on a race track+ [+] composite photo ("harveryaftermath") of blacks and whites working to save kids in a flood zone + [ ] poor Latin American kids, maybe in school, with a boy hiding his face behind paper, bandana-style
- [ ] a punching bag hanging in some sort of crude training camp- [1] composite photo of two white men crouching behind a mound, one with a rifle, one with binoculars - [+] two helmeted motorcyclists pulled off by he side of a remote road, maybe coordinating - [ ] arbitrary 3D-rendered thing (a "network" I guess, but quite unusual — interesting detail) + [ ] outdoorsy white woman, long hair flowing, resolutely digging a trench
- [ ] hippyish white man (probably), framing a house - [ ] someone welding+ [ ] infrastucture-ish composite: white guy working on a tower scaffold, container ships - [2] ambiguous photo of someone burning branches, distant crowd visible through the smoke
- [+] composite: car burning, small group of people in a burning forestsource: https://tineye.com/search/5db3c04fd14bd706fae384a44674a21bdcb9d457/
- [+] misc boats in a flood zone (also Hurricane Harvey, in Houston) More details:[1] The two men crouching behind a mound is cropped from an image that appears in several articles about westerners who joined ~local forces to fight ISIS
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3049019/Peshmerga-s-foreign-legion-fighting-alongside-defeat-ISIS-workers-ex-soldiers-brave-men-world-teaming-Kurdish-forces.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-normal-guys-from-the-uk-and-us-who-have-given-up-their-day-jobs-to-fight-isis-in-syria-10195105.html https://beta.al-akhbar.com/Arab/19873/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC%D9%8A%D8%B4-%D9%8A%D8%AD%D8%B1%D8%B1-3-%D9%82%D8%B1%D9%89-%D8%A8%D9%8A%D9%86-%D8%AE%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B5%D8%B1-%D9%88%D9%85%D8%B7%D8%A7%D8%B1-%D8%A3%D8%A8%D9%88-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B8%D9%87%D9%88[2] the photo of someone burning branches comes from an image ("dakota2.jpg) that appears widely on college essay–selling websites to illustrate a webpage called "law-enforcement-essays.html", with a bias toward "racial profiling essays" and "essay on police corruption"
https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=1-nmW9WJIu3isAeVr6KYDg&q=%22law-enforcement-essays.html+%22&oq=%22law-enforcement-essays.html+%22&gs_l=psy-ab.3...628.3317.0.3913.5.4.0.0.0.0.116.320.3j1.4.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..1.0.0.0...0.LHWyEv-PD5cThat last bit is interesting, because it suggests something that had never occurred to me: essays-for-sale websites being used to identify specific students' political leanings. Maybe some enterprising journalist can take that one on — by using reserve image searches to identify where ~stock photography is used on anonymous, cloned essay-selling sites.
Other possible follow-ups that could shed light on where this site comes from:
- language analysis, to see where else the phrasing is popping up - identifying faces (for example, the woman digging a trench)One really interesting find: Reverse image searches turn up one more photo that didn't make it into the final production, called "hangingrose.203ee432.png," which was to appear in a section called "Let Them Hang ..." It's a homebrew photo (not available elsewhere) of a bouquet of flowers, hanging upside-down on a wall, above a US-style electrical socket. That seems like a pretty sophisticated proposition: a sentimental appeal phrased in the passive voice but strongly suggestive of political violence as a tragic, forlorn necessity. I have screengrabs. Who "they" are who'll be hanging is left to the reader's fantasy. The phrase "let them hang" comes from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (1.3), but it's attained a slightly meme-like status in a variety of music circles:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22let+them+hang%22And, for the sake of boring completeness, the site is pretty new: no earlier versions on archive.org, the SSL Cert was issued on 29 Aug, and the HTML was last modified on 25 Oct.
Again, I think we'll see more stuff like this — by which I mean very deliberate efforts to:
- resuscitate various aspects of fascist aesthetics- muddy distinctions between left and right in order to bamboozle progressives/lefitsts
- encourage discussions of violence among progressives/leftistsSo, Ian Alan Paul, um...thanks for 'sharing' this piece of work on nettime.
Cheers, Ted # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected] # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: