Re: <nettime> Nein, danke [was Re: Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy]

Unfortunately I don't have the time to fully respond to every claim of this larger analysis/investigation except to simply say that I think the projection of a white male subject onto a collectively written text (which has happened twice now) is a tired critique of militancy that isn't helpful in the sense that it actively erases the explicitly feminist movements which have adopted and practiced similar kinds of political thought. Of course it's fine to be critical of militant politics, and indeed we must be having these kinds of debates more often, but to do so on the grounds that there is something irrevocably masculine about militancy is to simply echo right wing talking points about gender.

Relatedly, a larger debate can be had about the role of transparency/publicity and obscurity/secrecy in political life in relation to accountability, security, difference, and intimacy (I would side with Glissant here), but that's also a debate for another time and place.

After having circulated various anarchist / communist / autonomist texts on nettime, of which I have varying degrees of affinity with as well as substantive critiques of, it's become rather obvious that nettime is not interested in these ideas and so I don't think it's worth anyone's time to post them any longer.

Following the debacle with AB, to be honest I'm not sure nettime is a productive place for meaningful political discussion at all, simply because the actual stakes, responsibilities, and investments are all so low as to be functionally nonexistent, leading the discussions nowhere except abstraction and generalization, and so I think I'll refrain from starting or participating in such political debates on nettime going forward as well.

Regardless of all of the above, I hope it's strikingly clear to everyone how incredibly urgent our political moment is, and as such how critically important the task of clarifying political strategies is with people who you can actually organize and take political action with. I sincerely hope to encounter some of you in these other times and spaces where such discussion is actually possible.

In solidarity,
~i

On Sat, Nov 10, 2018, 11:07 AM tbyfield <[email protected] wrote:

This thing didn't pass the initial smell test, and after spending some
time with it I can say: it stinks.

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/1241667

The 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 forest
source:
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-PD5c

That 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%22

And, 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/leftists

So, Ian Alan Paul, um...thanks for 'sharing' this piece of work on
nettime.

Cheers,
Ted

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