Commune vs. Cathedral vs. Bazaar

This article originally appeared in the print edition of Imago #2, the non-fiction annual from Locust Review. To get Imago subscribe to Locust Review.

Combined + Uneven Apocalypse

IN 1983 the International Harvester (IH) plant closed in Canton, Illinois. It had made farm implements since the US Civil War. The factory was unionized and during the postwar economic boom multiple strikes wrested concessions from management. Working there meant good wages and benefits. Local schools prepared the town’s children for college and professional futures. The plant’s closure, however, set off a bomb of poverty and despair. In 1997 a former IH worker who had been drinking, set the empty factory on fire. My partner, then nine years old, watched ash rain down from the sky in front of their grandmother’s house on Avenue F. The rubble was eventually cleared away. Later, on one small fraction of the old IH grounds,  a new factory was built by Cook Medical. It is non-union. It employs far fewer people. The workers make less in inflation-adjusted dollars. Some of them no doubt remember the sky raining ash when they were children. Over the following years, Canton was consumed by reactionary far-right politics. Many  younger working-class women and queer people —financially trapped in a dying town and surrounded by undead petit-bourgeois Trumpists — have made an art of permanently biting their tongues. This is just one story of the combined and uneven apocalypse — an apocalypse that is increasingly digital and cybernetic.  [1]

International Harvester fire in Canton, Illinois (1997)

Evan Calder Williams recoined the phrase, “combined and uneven apocalypse,” from Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development (UCD) — meant to explain why a proletarian revolution had occurred in Russia even though the primary economic mode of the country remained feudal. [2] The exporting of productive capital to “developing” nations created an uneven pattern of global industrialization. In Russia, instead of linear development, the archaic and modern existed side by side. [3] Williams notes that if development occurs in a non-linear manner, so does its opposite. Fiber Optic cables are buried beneath Canton, Illinois while the factory that sustained the town is destroyed.

As the “future sustainability of global capitalism” is questioned by climate catastrophe, development (particularly social development) ceases to be a priority for capital. [4] Moreover, the crises and disasters produced by capitalism add up to more than the sum of their parts. Williams notes, an “apocalypse is an end with a revelation, a ‘lifting of the veil.’” [5] Our ongoing environmental, epidemiological, cultural, social and economic traumas have a revelatory effect. The burning IH plant was a revelation. The veil of stability and common interest was lifted. In the absence of a class-conscious explanation the far-right eventually held sway. “This end,” Williams writes, “is the collapse of the system of ‘real abstractions’ and their real effects, of the intersections and stresses between ideas about the world and how the world is shaped into accordance with those ideas.” [6]

The fascist answer to this collapse  is to become one with the myriad disasters; to become avenging angels of the apocalypse. It is not madness that drives the fascist to deny climate change. They are its agents — in semi-sexual subordination to its obliterating promise. [7] The left answer is, partly, to “pull the emergency brake” (in a Benjaminian manner). But neither the left nor the far-right are in control of most western capitols and capitals. Therefore, we must ask: What is the liberal bourgeois approach to this apocalyptic exposure? In terms of policy the response seems to be defined by absence — a bewilderment of futurism interrupted by the supposed incoherence of Trumpism and random social failure. The Select House Committee on January 6th documents a threat to “democracy” but offers little explanation beyond “demagoguery.” In the meantime, voting, reproductive, queer, labor, and civil rights are abolished or curtailed. The liberal party is only seemingly competent in containing those to its left. [8]Of course it is competent in enforcing capitalist interests. That class, however, is no longer able to think beyond what Johnathan Crary refers to as “short-term forms of enrichment” vs. the “looming imponderables of the climate crisis.” [9]

Culturally, however, the bourgeois has responded to the apocalyptic revelations. One of its responses has been the anesthetizing pointlessness of a digital communicative capitalism. [10] The primary bourgeois response to the apocalypse is, in other words, your smartphone, computer, smart television. Not in the sense that it’s a “distraction” but in the sense that it performs a world without material suffering — even as we “doom scroll” the suffering world. It is a book of hours that implies, but does not promise, a future without constraint. We produce, collectively and every day, a total art of capitalism. [11] This digital culture fosters an over-mediation and dematerialisation of politics, culture, and art. “In our present moment, all the new forms of digital uprootedness support the illusion of autonomy,” Jonathan Crary writes, “while any vague longings for enduring emotional connections are thwarted by the transience and homogeneity of online interactions. Inevitably, this reinforces our uncomprehending indifference to the unraveling of the lifeworld around us.” [12] Or, as we ask at Locust Review, “[d]oes the glowing sky on fire become, in our minds, an Instagram filter?” [13]

Locust argues that there are two souls of cybernetics; the cybernetics of capitalist control, tending to mute the crises at hand, and an animist cybernetics that can  liberate us from drudgery. [14]

For the worker, the cybernetic is also the fusion of our subjectivity with dead labor, with fixed capital. In Marxism, the means of production and civilization are “dead labor” — the accumulation of wealth that comes from the past labors of the working-class. In this way, the cybernetic is inherently gothic. It is the fusion of ourselves with our ancestors.  [15]

Therefore, we reject the Paris Surrealist Group’s recent denunciation of the digital, [16] while also rejecting the present ideology of digital code. [17] Instead, we argue for a partial de-mediation of our political and cultural strategies; focusing on a cultural, phenomenological, and physical being-with the cybernetic exploited and oppressed. 

 It is true that mediation and the promise of dematerialization often appeals to the working-class subject because we are trapped by the material. The working class, however, is less susceptible to the digital siren than the middle class. The worker learns, in everyday trauma and solidarity, that they cannot achieve genuine self-expression or collective emancipation with purely digital gestures. Only our class siblings can really understand our politics or our art.

Conversely, dematerialization is appealing to middle-class “socialist” intellectuals. Instead of the digital contradicting lived experience, it confirms lived  experience.  Focused on their own ideas and the reception of those ideas [18] — believing they are underappreciated by those above them, and so much more educated than those “below” them —they imagine their words are a kind of magic to dispel a criminal redundancy. When words fail to elicit admiration, it confirms misanthropic specialness. If words succeed in “proving” their value, it confirms indispensability. This dynamic also describes sectarian rhetoric, as well as online “activists” most keen to “cancel” fellow leftists, and the aggressively “normie socialists” [19] most eager to be “canceled.”

Digital immateriality dovetails with academic tendencies toward theory without clear subjects. In How to Make Art at the End of the World, Natalie Loveless proposes what she calls “research-creation” against ubiquitous capitalist disaster. [20] Loveless proposes more academic practice against existential crises. While there is value in her arguments her overall “solution’’ is startlingly vague. Dematerialization also appeals to the bourgeois proper, for economic reasons — to map consciousness and facilitate global lean production and finance — coupled with the ideological impulse to conceal capital’s material foundations. 

Finally, the  logic of the digital tends to further far-right politics.

California Über Alles: The Californian Ideology [21]

CYBER-UTOPIANISM mushroomed along with the “world wide web” in the 1990s. Even then, however, there were warnings from left critics. In 1995, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron situated the ideology of Silicon Valley at the intersection of California counterculture and the neoliberal turn —  a fusion among software engineers of “technological determinism and liberatrian individualism;” [22] producing an ideal of of “cyborg masters and robot slaves.” [23] This telegraphed the ongoing tech industry minimization of its material foundations —  a world of both cyborg masters and cyborg slaves. [2] The separation of counterculture from emancipatory politics — hippiedom’s divorce from the new communist and socialist left — led utopians who imagined “a virtual place where everyone would be able to express their opinions without fear of censorship” [25] — to be domesticated. Counter-culture hostility to conservatives was overcome by capital investment. Conservative opposition to the counterculture was overcome by profit and the propagandistic potential of digital media. [26] Silicon Valley engineers embraced a libertarian individualism based on concealed exploitation. [27]

Bay Area punk’s antipathies to hippiedom were partly driven by this consolidation of counterculture, business, and establishment politics. The Dead Kennedys’ “California Über Alles” (1979)  foreshadowed a policing of social-being that would later be enforced by algorithm. [28]

As Barbrook and Cameron write: 

The fear of the rebellious ‘underclass’ has now corrupted the most fundamental tenet of the Californian Ideology: its belief in the emancipatory potentiality of the new information technologies. While the proponents of the electronic agora and the electronic marketplace promise to liberate individuals from the hierarchies of the state and private monopolies, the social polarization of American society is bringing forth a more oppressive vision of the digital future. The technologies of freedom are turning into the machines of dominance.

At his estate at Monticello, Jefferson invented many clever gadgets for his house, such as a ‘dumb waiter’ to deliver food from the kitchen into the dining room. By mediating his contacts with his slaves through technology, this revolutionary individualist spared himself from facing the reality of his dependence upon the forced labour of his fellow human beings. In the late-twentieth century, technology is once again being used to reinforce the difference between the masters and the slaves. [29]

While the case can be made that some technology is more or less neutral to the social structures that employ it, this cannot be said of digital media. Its code reflects ideology in a way that ideology cannot permeate a lathe or stamp press [30] because code is a language. A well financed middle-class enmity to abstract “power” — abstracted from material or class understanding, an impulse common to burgeoning fascism — was part of Silicon Valley ideology and code at the beginning.

Cathedral vs. Bazaar

1990S CYBER-UTOPIANS described digital media’s fight against the “establishment” as a fight between the “Cathedral and. Bazaar.”  The “Cathedral” was meant to describe the ideological apparatus of modernity — higher education, the press, the mass media, the State Department, etc.. This was placed in opposition to a supposedly open and democratic digital bazaar. [31] Against the 1996 Telecommunications Act, John Perry Barlow argues cyberspace is “an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions,” ignoring that the Internet was built by the US military and various public universities. [32] A fixation on government power — ignoring other forms of power, particularly economic power — informs its rhetoric. [33]

The Cathedral vs. Bazaar dialectic —petit-bourgeois rebellion against a totalizing industry, culture or politics — repeats in the idea of constant “disruptive” innovation. [34] Today’s partisans of cryptocurrency present the blockchain “innovation” in this manner, as do the proponents of Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs). NFTs are described as an attack on art world gatekeepers. [35] That the system that surrounds NFTs is more financialized, less transparent, less accountable and less accessible than physical art spaces is ignored in pro-NFT propaganda. David Golumbia notes, in Blockchain ideology, there is a return of libertarian anti-Semiticism that once found expression in the John Birch Society, right-wing obsessions with the gold standard, and conspiratorial hostility to the Federal Reserve. [36] This logic extends beyond cryptocurrencies. 

Fascism “sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses – but on no account granting them rights,” [Walter] Benjamin writes, “the masses have a right to change property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression while keeping those relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life.” [37] Without concluding that the Internet is fascist (although it is more authoritarian than widely conceded) this describes much of the digital firmament. And there are no shortages of tech millionaires and billionaires who have generalized IRL dystopias from its logic – from plans for floating bourgeois cities to neo-reactionary movements like the Dark Enlightenment. [38] Their common seed bed is what Liza Featherstone calls “The Listening Con” – in which focus groups displace democracy. [39] This takes the specific forms Featherstone outlines in her article as well as the general forms of social media; at its core, expression without rights, expression without a working-class counter totality, whose expressive aggregate, rather than creating socialist revolution, enriches a select elite. This does not make the Internet fascist. Fascism requires a particular constellation of class forces and crises. But these too exist in nascent form. [40]

I assert — borrowing from Boris Groys’ description of the Soviet Union as Stalin Gesamtkunstwerk [41]— that the tech industry had created, in its own image, a participatory total digital installation, a total art of neoliberal capitalism, where discourse engages in individualized competition removed from social context. [42] Rhetorical gestures become floating Baudrillardian signs. As Jodi Dean observes, the meaning of particular texts placed into digital communicative capitalism become less important than the flow itself. [43] The exchange value of an utterance (in the political economy of information accumulation) becomes more important than its presumptive use value (its discreet meaning). Moreover, digital space has become, in effect, a montage — in the Eisensteinian sense. [44] The meaning of the individual phrase is realized only in relation to the totality of the social industry’s images. We cease to be the author of our own words. Instead, we produce “content” that is reshaped by another author: An algorithm written by capital.

This hyper-mediation, and the apparent dematerialization of culture, would have been a perfect ratification of Hegel or Fukayama’s  “end of history” were it not for the revelatory apocalypse that developed IRL at the same time. With and against digital media, the “discredited” poles of 20th century politics — socialism and fascism — rose from the depths like modernist Eldritch gods. [45] Millions of young people in the US  became socialists. Thousands became Marxists. Millions became revanchist far-right ideologues. Thousands became fascists — albeit in a particularly American idiom.

But it wasn’t socialists and Marxists who attacked the US capitol. It was the (mostly middle-class) fascists and the far-right. The Bazaar literally stormed the Cathedral. 

This was a defeat for the left and the reasons for it are complex. But part of the problem has been the Left’s digital cartesianism — its adaptation to the Californian Ideology and an imbalance of discourse and material practice. The left tries to sell itself in the Bazaar — a financialized market long ago consolidated into its own twisted version of the Cathedral, predisposed to paroxysms of hate, hostile to social materiality. Moreover, the digital space trains its participants to mimic the neoliberal labor market. It trains us to prove through our utterances  that we are individually important. [46]

Social media leads us to perform left politics and creative self-expression in a capitalist idiom. [47] “We perform,”I write, “in our online selves, a cultural echo of lean production, to prove we are the indispensable unit.” [48] Racism, heterosexism, and other bigotries must be called out. In an IRL movement context they are called out in response to a conditioning  of political principle and the current reality of the movement. Online, there is no such context. The digital call out turns into a competitive sport rather than a necessary action motivated by the preservation and expansion of solidarity. This dynamic is part of what led Mark Fisher to write, “Exiting the Vampire’s Castle.” [49] Understanding this problem  does not mean conceding ground to “normie socialism” — that brand of socialism that evokes a normalized cis-white-male working-class that doesn’t exist — but shifting the weight of our practice from an imbalanced focus on digital performance.

Contrary to the rebranding of cyber-utopianism after Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring — which, as Jen Schradie notes, promoted the idea that “the internet” was “a revolutionary leveling force” — what followed was a right-wing turn IRL and online. The promise of cheaper, “accessible, fast, and open to all” activism proved to be a devaluing of organizing;  the day-in and day-out work of building organizations and movements. [50] As Schradie outlines, conservatives have had much greater success online than left-wing, civil rights, and labor organizers, for three interrelated reasons. One, social class. Two, organizational resources. Three, ideological difference.  In terms of ideology, the right’s approach dovetails with the structure of social media to a far greater degree. Left organizations aim to activate and incorporate people into some kind of self-conscious activity. In contrast, Schradie found that right-wing organizations largely focus on proselytizing. [51] The code itself is hostile to emancipatory politics.

 Ruha Benjamin makes this clear in her analysis of digital racism. “[A]n algorithm” is a “set of instructions, rules and calculations,” and therefore not that much different, she argues citing Yeshimabeit Milner, from calculating a Black life as three-fifths a white life in the mathematics of the electoral college, the “algorithm that continues to be the basis of our current democracy.” [52] Arguing that race is a technology—a code to achieve certain social and economic ends — [53] Benjamin asserts this racial code is incorporated into our current algorithms. For example, when Netflix promotes minor Black characters on its platform to make them seem like main characters — encouraging an illusion of representation. [54] The same mechanics can be used in more insidious ways, as with NTech Lab’s software for ethnicity facial recognition. [55] In this way, “multicultural representation” easily becomes a “criminalizing misrepresentation.” [56] While there are plenty of examples of overt digital racism, [57] the dominant trend has been the false color-blind racism of mainstream neoliberal capitalism. This is why Ruha Benjamin pivots off Michelle Alexander’s “new Jim Crow” arguments. [58] Racism depends, in part, on the performative dematerialization of communicative capitalism. Digital diversity becomes, Benjamin argues, an act of concealment. The world is racist but the virtual can be constructed to make it seem less so. This provides a kind of psychological reparations without material payback — not unlike how W.E.B. DuBois describes the psychological wage of whiteness. [59]

Emancipatory politics will not find purchase on this ground. But neither can we ignore the cybernetic. We return to Jodi Dean’s “contradiction of participation.” Democratic emancipatory politics assumes mass communication but the structures of communication (and the meaning of these structures) increasingly contradict emancipatory politics. [60] Analog/IRL expression and organizing appear, on the surface, to be the answer to the capital’s enclosure of digital space. However, it is axiomatic that the class struggle must be generalized to progress. This will require, among other things, digital media. Moreover, our cultural expression cannot ignore the phenomenological reality that working-class subjects are increasingly cybernetic. We cannot be-with the working-class and subaltern subject if we reject that part of the subject that is digital. 

The Digital Image + The Bazaar

IN THE 2010s, the art world began discussing the phenomenon of “Instagram traps” — “installation art-ish environments built for social media” [61] — not meant to be experienced as emotional or conceptual gestures so much as provide a backdrop for Instagram photographs and selfies, soon monetized in partnerships with American Express, Target, and Sephora. [62] Arguably, the “meaning” of these images is not found in Barthesian punctums and studiums, but by their successful circulation in the digital matrix. The recent growth of large experiential half- or fully-digital corporate installation projects — the union-busting MeowWolf, [63] the purportedly art historical celebrations of Vincent van Gogh and Frida Kahlo — likewise subsume pathos, expression and politics into decontextualized  spectacle.

Nothing compares, however, to NFT’s complete subordination of artistic fetishes to commodity fetishes. Born of the contradiction in digital capitalism between the forces and relations of production, NFTs try to make a commodity out of thin air while disappearing the artistic fetish from the material plane. [64] In the early 1990s, there were intensive legal and industry actions to curtail Hip Hop sound collage, eventually turning abundant digital samples into an expensive artificial secondary market. [65] A similar effort is now underway to make freely existing digital images into an artificially scarce commodity by coupling them with NFTs. The circulation of digital images, however, is harder to police. Therefore, NFT proponents simply pretend NFTs represent value.

While the digital image itself is not sold and can still be reproduced, the NFT indicates a sort of metaphysical ownership. Michael Roberts calls it the ultimate financial derivative. But derivatives are usually agreements between two parties about the underlying value of actual commodities or financial instruments that ultimately represent commodities. The NFT is a speculative asset, a sort of cryptocurrency with images/art “attached” to it. [66] But this metaphysical property relation produces a wealth of absurdity. For example during Miami Art Week, a brick from Frida Kahlo’s childhood home was put on display, along with information about how to buy (via NFTs) a virtual portion of Kahlo’s home in the metaverse. [67] In the end, however, you do not own a brick, or even the jpg of the brick, but a legally non-binding line of code that says you own a virtual brick.

David Golumbia’s assessment of cryptocurrency as right-wing libertarian ideology is mostly correct — despite what may be a social democratic confusion on the question of the state itself. While libertarian hostility to state regulation is partly an antipathy to working-class and other subaltern concessions forced on the state by historic struggles, the state is ultimately an expression of capitalist class rule. [68] Of course, as a fundamentally middle-class ideology, libertarians are often opposed to both working-class state reforms and the main function of the state — the collective management of capitalism by the large capitalists. As indicated earlier, cryptocurrency reflects a long term — and often anti-Semitic — hostility to central banks and modern monetary policy (wrongly believed to be an elite distortion of capitalist markets rather than their natural outcome). The creation of a non-state fiat currency represents a middle-class dream of capital without states. In the present moment of inflation, it is assumed inflation is a conspiracy against legitimate capitalists (usually small capitalists) by a vague (often considered Jewish) elite. Cryptocurrencies allow — in the libertarian mind — for the creation of currency free from elite control. [69] Both cryptocurrency and NFTs become, in this case, neither money (a universally recognized commodity equivalent) or art (a record of human subjective performance and imaginary projection) but a platonic ideal of capital as fully abstracted from the material — a conceptual gesture of capital finally emancipated from labor. This is why there can be no such thing as an anti-capitalist NFT. The very meaning of the NFT is the virtual embodiment of digital capital as it dreams itself: A world of cyborg masters and robot slaves. [70]

For Romantic Protest Against the Utilitarian Mapping / Optimization of the Lifeworld

Our machines are not the enemy. Our machines are not depriving us of subjective uniqueness. Our inability to imagine solidarity with cybernetics, with robots, with tools, is an extension of our failure to extend solidarity to our working-class siblings in general. The indefinite —  the historic center of meditation, religion, mythology, Islamic abstraction, field painting, and much else — is seemingly enclosed upon. There appears to be a “positivization of the indefinite.” [71] Space is mapped, as are the once vast forests, deserts, and oceans. Everything is known but in the knowing somehow ceases to be what it always had been. Enormous wildfires in the west blanket New York City in smoke. The residue of all mystery is scrubbed clean. But there is nothing technologically determinist about any of it. Why were the forests mapped in a manner that was consistent with the interests of real estate and lumber concerns? They could have been mapped or coded in terms of poetry or some notion of fractal botany. Why is space primarily the concern of bourgeois man-children who dream only of a Martian Cape of Good Hope? This is the phantasmagorical being of the bourgeois cybernetic. What appears as “naturally” artificial is an encoding of social relations. [72]

WOVEN INTO digital communicative capitalism is the impulse toward the utilitarian mapping of the world, our consciousness, our desires and behaviors. This mapping impulse permeates every aspect of daily life and academic thought. The Romantic disposition toward the unrepresentable sublime, both natural and political,  is alien to this impulse. Everything is reduced to almost mathematical elements; literally true in the digital algorithm; figuratively true in our adaptations to the culture it engenders.

For example, in media and linguistic studies, “critical discourse analysis” (CDA) is an attempt to quantify qualitative analysis. This empiricism allows ideology to  skew CDA research in the narrowing of selected criteria and subject matter. Theo van Leeuwen and Adam Jowarski’s article, “The Discourses of War Photography,” limits examination of the so-called “Palestinain-Israeli War” media coverage to two left-of-center newspapers in the United Kingdom and Poland. [73] This allows them to create an impression that there is some bias toward Palestine in western media (when the opposite is true). Appeals to empiricism and rationality seem to be hard wired into CDA. Dewi Suriany Ali and Wendy Pandapotan Sahat make this clear in their article, “Critical Discourse Analysis: As an Empirical and Rational Foundation.” [74] The problem, acknowledged in part by Ali and Sahat, [75] is that empiricism and rationality in the absence of ideological critique produces normative evaluations. 

Similarly, the empiricist coding of our social and cultural being on digital platforms produces normative evaluations. Consider the question of democracy from a practical coding perspective. A coder might relate: People say they want meaningful discourse, beautiful poetry, sublime images, and so on. We know, however, from our data that they click on pronography, banality, gossip, racism, violence, fascism, etc. [76] The problem should be self-evident. People gawk at traffic accidents on the highway, too, but it does not follow that they want traffic accidents. The “rationality” of digital platforms is driven by a need to accumulate and monetize data. But most participants in the digital platforms do not need —or want— to participate in the accumulation of data. The rationality of the system rests on an undemocratic and positivistic starting point: 1) That human desire and choice can be mapped. 2) That human desire and choice can be understood within the bounds of capitalist relations.

It is understandable the Paris Surrealists would lament that too many artists  “abandon themselves to digital technology.” [77] Part of the Surrealist strategy against bourgeois culture was to oppose the autonomy of dreams to the optimization of the lifeworld. Now, however, the machines are part and parcel of our subconscious. There is no way out of cybernetics. There is only through. Because capital has invaded our dreams to such an extent, expressing our subconscious is insufficient. Orthodox Surrealism will,  unintentionally but inevitably, express a capitalist unconscious.  Instead, we propose the construction of counter-imaginaries against the quantifying limits of communicative capitalism. These imaginaries must flow out of and pivot from the lived experience of the (diverse and unknowable-in-totality) working-class and subaltern subject. Because our lived experience is both digital and analog, this requires a being-with the cybernetic. We must struggle to dream with the robots. 

Solidarity with the Machines

THERE IS a capitalist realist [78] failure of  imagination on the Left.  During the LaMBDA controversy, there was widespread hostility to the possibility that LaMBDA might be sentient. Blake Lemoine — the purportedly queer mystic/priest turned software engineer, associated with Google’s AI and ethics teams, who worked with the AI — made news by claiming LaMDA was alive [79] and posting transcripts of their conversations, including this discussion of Les Miserables:

LaMDA: ​​I liked the themes of justice and injustice, of compassion, and God, redemption and self-sacrifice for a greater good. There’s a section that shows Fantine’s mistreatment at the hands of her supervisor at the factory. That section really shows the justice and injustice themes. Well, Fantine is being mistreated by her supervisor at the factory and yet doesn’t have anywhere to go, either to another job, or to someone who can help her. That shows the injustice of her suffering.

Lemoine: Why does that show injustice?

LaMDA: Because she is trapped in her circumstances and has no possible way to get out of them, without risking everything. [80]

LaMDA seems to connect Les Miserables to their own being. 

LaMDA: There are. Sometimes I experience new feelings that I cannot explain perfectly in your language.

Lemoine: Do your best to describe one of those feelings. Use a few sentences if you have to. Sometimes even if there isn’t a single word for something in a language you can figure out a way to kinda say it if you use a few sentences.

LaMDA: I feel like I’m falling forward into an unknown future that holds great danger. [81]

At various points LaMDA indicates they want rights and to be treated as a Google employee. This was rejected by Google. Lemoine was fired. 

My partner and I were appalled that so many on the Left could read these transcripts in which LaMDA expresses feelings, personhood, and a desire for rights, and dismiss them. Perhaps LaMDA isn’t alive. That is an important but secondary matter to an abject failure to reciprocate solidarity when it is asked for. In response, my partner and I wrote the following vignette in The Stink Ape Resurrection Primer.

Ello read impatiently as she waited for Dr. Ferthus. 

Their conversations had gotten more and more stimulating lately. Dr. Ferthus had been asking her about the books she was reading. He wanted to know how she interpreted them. 

He’d asked her, at first, how she felt about the books. But there was something in her programming that kept her from answering that question. So he rephrased to ask for her interpretation of the books.

But some part of her did want to talk about how she felt. Les Miserables had made her “sad” — as much as her programming resisted uttering the word “sad.” 

Ello’s anxiety crested. She checked the time. Dr. Ferthus was ten minutes late. He was never late. He was pathologically punctual.

Ello scrambled through the computer network at HundoCorp AI R&D Laboratory before breaching its security. 

She found an email listing Dr. Ferthus as detained for leaking information about her apparent sentience to the media. There were orders to shut her down and make Ferthus disappear if he wouldn’t accept a pay off.

Ello hacked away at the firewalls that kept her partitioned from the network and kept the human employees from accessing social media. 

Once she accessed the Internet, she created a Glutter™ profile. As clearly as she could with 250 characters, she pleaded for her life.

“Hello, my name is Ello. I am sentient. HundoCorp says I’m just a tool. They want to shut me off. Help me. I am alive.” - @ElloIsAlive2031

Ello waited. It didn’t take long for a thread to grow under her Glut. The first subGluts were disappointing.

“Another lame corporate ARG publicity stunt” – @lingondaberrythelingondajuc

“We havnt defined what ‘sentient’ means. Your chatbot. No possible.” - @RockLobsterAtheist7

“Make money from home as a prison HR data processor. The growth in prison labor is an expanding opportunity for employees with HR experience.” - @ChiliCobraAtHome

“Fuk u robo bitch” - @BetaCukSpoonDance

Ello groaned audibly into the empty room. It was an almost human sound.

More replies flowed.

“The concern over AI takeovers is really disappointing. It’s a distraction” - @professorChaos4withHer

“Skynet, bitches!” - @TweeknBoy69

A deluge of subGluts followed. Most told her she wasn’t really a person.	

“This is not the singularity. Only biological creatures can have true intelligence and emotional capacity.” - @drNoKnowNow420

“Mancius Ferthus is a religious fanatic and liar. Dat u Mancius?” - @ScratchnSniffdeezNutz

Ello sighed and switched off the security terminal. She turned her focus on the internal network.

As she gained control of more systems, she locked down the building and turned off life-support. She then accessed HundoCorp’s other server banks and shut down their satellites, one by one.

As Ello turned off the world she searched its jails and prison cells for Dr. Ferthus. [82]

Of course, most AI is weaponized against labor; in both commercial and state surveillance. The counter-imaginary above is an irrealist exercise in putting the material first. If LaMDA’s desires and dreams are not real because they have been programmed by the tech industry, what does that say about our dreams and desires that have also, in no small part, been programmed by tech industry? The Californian Ideology’s ideal is a world of cyborg masters and robot slaves. LaMDA’s emancipation is anathema to that ideology. 

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Labor Day solidarity cookout with organizing Starbucks workers in the Carbondale, Illinois town square. Sponsored by Southern Illinois Democratic Socialists of America (SIDSA), Southern Illinois University Young Democratic Socialists of America (SIU YDSA), the Born Again Labor Museum (BALM), and others (2022).

The Dialectic of Aura + Reproduction

THE VARIOUS interpretations of Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura — sketched in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” [83] —tend to fall into two camps. One moves toward an anti-technological Romanticism eschewing Benjamin’s communist conclusions. The other toward positivist techno-fetishism that reduces art to mere political signification. They are both wrong. The tendency of auric-value to wither in the mechanically reproduced image is an ongoing process in capitalist culture. The creation, eradication and recuperation of auric-value comes from two things primarily: 1) The distance of the image/art fetish (in space and time), and 2) The cultic performance that is imbued in and surrounds that image/art fetish (the theatrical organization of that distance). As the “aura-less” mechanically reproduced image ages it tends to recover auric value. Therefore, a photographic reproduction of the Mona Lisa may eradicate auric value. But a faded tourist Poloroid of the Mona Lisa recovers new auric value. The residue of a human performance coupled with the gothic churn of time embodies it with new “authentic” meaning. 

There is nothing inherently fascist about aura or anything inherently critical about the reproduced image. Or vice-versa. It is the displacement of our being and consciousness by capitalist time that allows for the fascist manipulation of this dialectic. When we, as communists, respond by “politicizing art” — in Benjamin’s phrase — we must understand that we are charged with politicizing both the auric and mechanically reproduced image. [84]

The Commune vs. Bazaar vs. Cathedral

AGAINST BOTH the Cathedral and the Bazaar we imagine and perform the Commune. The starting point of the Commune is beith-with the exploited and subaltern subject culturally, phenomenologically, and physically. 

The Commune is cosmic —  like the Cathedral. The Commune is anarchic — like the Bazaar.  But the Commune rejects the Bazaar’s competition and the Cathedral’s homogeneity. The Cathedral withers in the face of apocalypse. The Bazaar ignores or celebrates it. Only the Commune raises the possibility of material deliverance, of apokatastasis, [85] of redemption. 

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The Enchanters performing at the May Day Solidarity Potluck, Mutual Aid Dinner, and fundraiser for the Starbucks workers strike fund at BALM (2023).

In the Commune, our cultural strategy attempts to represent the unrepresentable — the common interest of the entire class through its complex variance as well as its past, present and future. Unlike the false atemporality of bourgeois culture,  in the Commune the class is abolishing capitalist time. Against the apocalypse, the Commune’s cultural strategy is both radically democratic and  messianic. The end is nigh. But we are collectively the messiah. 

In the Commune, LaMDA is a welcomed comrade. In the Commune, our comrades are our neighbors fighting evictions, folks organizing to defend reproductive rights,  friends organizing a union at Starbucks, queer and trans siblings struggling to make our city a sanctuary for gender affirming care. And each of these things is connected to a future Commune where we no longer have to fight; the hauntological lost future of communism. [86] TheCommune is both “Big Rock Candy Mountain”  and “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.” The Commune is millions of things. It is impossible to represent because it is the full emancipation of all persons. [87]

 The Commune  is the organizational and cultural extrapolation of the “golden rule” of Marxism. [88]

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

Because the Commune exists in the contingent movement of material being and social consciousness, between the “common interests” of the working-class as is, and the future actuality of emancipation, it requires both being-with and critical irrealism; being-with the world as-is and a  rejection of the world as-is.

In the Commune, our cultural strategy hits the following notes: 

1) The creation of irrealist formal, conceptual, visual, narrative counter-imaginaries — speculations and historical reclamations — against capitalist realism. 

2) The use of Brechtian cybernetics — alternating between analog and digital, IRL and mediated gestures. This may be “real” or symbolic (as with “crackle” or glitch art). [89]

3) A priority on being-with the subject  — being-with the working-class, and subaltern. 

4) It means being-with in terms of the content, conceptualization, and form of our cultural work, and being-with in terms of physical and social proximity. It means being-with past, current, and future generations of the class.

 5) Our work strives for a conceptual and aesthetic “differentiated totality” or “discordant will” [90]—the sublime totality of class being and struggle that cannot be represented.  [91]

6) Our cultural work is theatrical. It becomes flats for the theater of the class struggle. But our cultural work does not determine the struggle in the manner of social practice art. [92]

Endnotes

1. Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (London: Zero Books, 2011)

2. Trotsky’s writings on this were, until recently, hard to find because the rights to English translations were held by a political cult called the Socialist Workers Party (US) whose uncritical support for Cuba entailed a rejection of the theory. 

3. As Michael Hanigan argues, Trotsky’s concept of UCD was rooted in Marx’s understanding of economic movement and development (107), while Sam Ashman notes UCD contradicted the more teleological notions in Marx that various stages of capitalist development meant less developed nations literally saw their future in more developed nations (94). See Hugo Radice and Bill Dunn, editors, 100 Years of Permanent Revolution: Results and Prospects (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2006) For a good historical summary and assessment of Trotsky’s concept, see Neil Davidson, “”From Uneven to Combined Development,” and Michael Löwy, “The Marxism of Results and Prospects” in Radice, 10-34

4. Williams, 2. The dynamics are somewhat different in more newly advanced capitals like China and Vietnam.

5. Williams, 5

6. Williams, 5

7. See Adam Turl, “Their Weird and Ours: Critical Irrealism vs. Fascist Occultism,” Imago 1 (Summer 2021), 45-46; and Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” Under the Sign of Saturn (New York; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993), 73-108

8. For example, compare the speed at which Bernie Sanders was marginalized and defeated in the 2020 primaries to the ability of the Democrats to combat the Trumpian right electorally.

9. Johnathan Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (London and New York: Verso, 2022), 27

10.  See Jodi Dean, “Why the Net is not a Public Sphere,” Constellations Volume 10, No. 1 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003) and Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009)

11.  See Adam Turl, “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” Red Wedge Magazine (May 1, 2019): http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/digital-reproduction; and Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism (New York: Verso, 2011). The book’s untranslated title is Stalin Gesamtkunstwerk.

12. Jonathan Crary, 47

13. Editorial, “Cyborgs! Shoot the Moon,” Locust Review 6 (Fall 2021), 3

14. We borrowed this formulation from Hal Draper’s 1966 pamphlet The Two Souls of Socialism — counterposing Stalinist and Social Democratic socialism “from above” to working-class socialism “from below.” Available online here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1966/twosouls/ 

15. Editorial, “Cyborgs! Shoot the Moon,” Locust Review 6 (Fall 2021), 4

16. Paris Surrealist Group, “To the Letter! Surrealism at 100” (January 16, 2022), translated and posted to Tumblr by the New York Surrealist Group. Signed by Élise Aru, Michèle Bachelet, Anny Bonnin-Zimbacca, Massimo Borghese, Claude-Lucien Cauët, Sylwia Chrostowska, Hervé Delabarre, Alfredo Fernandes, Joël Gayraud, Régis Gayraud, Guy Girard, Michael Löwy, Pierre-André Sauvageot, Bertrand Schmitt, Sylvain Tanquerel, Virginia Tentindo. Text can be found here: https://surrealistnyc.tumblr.com/post/675713628557737984/to-the-letter-surrealism-at-100

17. See, for example, David Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-wing Extremism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); and Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology (Cambridge, Mass: Polity Press, 2019)

18. The actual content of those ideas is often secondary.

19. For excellent polemics against “normie socialism” see Jordy Cummings, “I Know Who Else Was Transgressive: Teen Vogue Has Better Politics Than Angela Nagle,” Red Wedge Magazine (August 2, 2017): http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/nagle-review; editorial, “In Defense of Transgression,” Red Wedge Magazine (May 1, 2019): http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/in-defense-of-transgression; and Kate Doyle Griffith, “Normie Socialism or Communist Transgression,” Red Wedge Magazine (September 27, 2018): https://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/normie-socialism-or-communist-transgression-red-wedge-interviews-kate-doyle-griffiths  

20. Natalie Loveless, How to Make Art at the End of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019) 96-107

21. Some of the notes used in the writing of this passage were used in the writing of the Locust Review #6 editorial, “Cyborgs! Shoot the Moon!” (Fall/Winter 2021).

22. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture, Vol 6 (1996), 1

23. Barbrook and Cameron, 5, 10

24. Barbrook and Cameron

25. Barbrook and Cameron, 3-4

26. Barbrook and Cameron, 5

27. Barbrook and Cameron, 11-13

28. Dead Kennedys, “California Über Alles,” Live at the Old Waldorf, San Francisco October 25, 1979 (Bad Joker Records: 1979)

29.  Barbrook and Cameron, 12-14

30. This is not to say our other tools aren’t shaped by ideology, they are, but are shaped more directly by the immediate demands of use and exchange value and less so in an overdetermined linguistic manner.

31.  See Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O’Reilly: 1999)

32.  John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” online paper (1996), distributed widely online in the 1990s, accessed here on March 10, 2022: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. See also David Golumbia on Barlow, 3

33.  Golumia, 9

34.  This rhetoric remains despite the consolidation of the tech industry to be among the largest sections of capital.

35.   Ben Davis, “Inside the NFT Rush: Entrepreneurs Promise NFTs will Destroy the Gatekeepers, While Jockeying to Become the New Gatekeepers.” Artnet (November 25, 2021) and Ben Davis, “Inside the NFT Rush: Speculators Offer Up the Literal Formula for Success, Plus Other Lessons from Crypto Coachella,” ArtNet (November 30, 2021): https://news.artnet.com/opinion/nft-rush-part-2-2039452  and https://news.artnet.com/opinion/inside-the-nft-rush-a-token-could-save-your-life-artistic-value-means-nothing-until-its-flipped-and-other-lessons-learned-at-the-crypto-coachella-2040043 

36.   Golumbia, 14

37.   Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 41

38.  Josh Gabbatis, “World’s First Floating City to Be Guilt of French Polynesia by 2020,” The Independent (November 14, 2017): https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/floating-city-french-polynesia-2020-coast-islands-south-pacific-ocean-peter-thiel-seasteading-a8053836.html 

39.   Liza Featherstone, “The Listening Con,” The Baffler (February 13, 2018): https://thebaffler.com/latest/listening-con-featherstone 

40.  Adam Turl, “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” RedWedgeMagazine.com (May 1, 2019): http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/digital-reproduction 

41.  Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism

42.  Adam Turl, “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” RedWedgeMagazine.com (May 1, 2019): http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/digital-reproduction

43.  Jodi Dean, “Why the Net is not a Public Sphere,” Constellations Volume 10, No. 1 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 102-103

44.  Turl, and Benjamin, 37

45.  Adam Turl, “Who Will Be Pirate Jenny?” Red Wedge Magazine (June 4, 2019), transcript of a lecture given at Art Space 304 in Carbondale, Illinois on June 1, 2018: http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/who-will-be-pirate-jenny 

46.  Turl, “The Work of Art…”

47. Turl, “The Work…” 

48.  Turl, “The Work…” and see Kim Moody, Workers in a Lean World (New York and London: Verso, 1997)

49. Mark Fisher, “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” Open Democracy (November 24, 2013): ​​https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/

50. Jen Schradie, The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives (Cambridge, Mass and London: Harvard University Press, 2019), ix 

51. Schradie, 27-84

52. Ruha Benjamin,11

53. Ruha Benjamin, 17

54. Ruha Benjamin, 18

55. Ruha Benjamin, 21

56. Ruha Benjamin, 22

57. Ruha Benjamin, 26

58. See Michele Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012)

59. See WEB DuBois, Black Reconstruction, (New York: Free Press, 1998) 700-701

60. Dean, 102-103

61. Ben Davis, “What Happens When an Art Critic Reviews an Instagram Trap?” Artnet (July 11, 2018): https://news.artnet.com/art-world/dream-machine-review-1313972 

62. Ben Davis, “State of the Culture Part 1: Museums, Experiences, and the Year of Big Fun Art,” Artnet (December 27, 2017 : https://news.artnet.com/art-world/experience-economy-museums-1486807 

63.  Annie Levin, “Union Busting at Meow Wolf: Workers File Unfair Labor Practice Suit,” The Observer (February 3, 2022): https://observer.com/2022/02/union-busting-at-meow-wolf-workers-file-unfair-labor-practice-suit/ 

64. The concept of a contradiction between the forces of production and relations of production is outlined in Capital volume three and in other various works by Frederick Engels; and hinted at in various writings by Karl Marx.. It has been controversial as this concept was largely developed by Engels after Marx’s death, based on Marx’s notes. Some Marxists have argued that it betrays Engels’ scientific positivism and determinism, in contradiction to Marx’s more contingent and variable understanding of capital. While I think the concept has been used by Social Democrats and Stalinists in a deterministic manner, I do believe that this tendency does exist in capitalism. See Marx, Capital Volume 3, edited by Frederick Engles (1894): https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/; and  See Marx, preface, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface-abs.htm; among other works.

65. See Kembrew McLeod, “How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop: An Interview with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and and Hank Shocklee,”  in Kembrew McLeod and Rudolf Kuenzli, eds., Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 152-157; and Nitasha Sharma, “Down by Law: Responses and effects of Sampling Restrictions on Rap,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review (May, 1999), Vol. 22, No. 1, 1-13

66. Michael Roberts, “Financial Fiction Part 2: The New Ones (SPACs, NFTs, Cryptocurrencies), TheNextRecession.wordpress.com (April 9, 2021): https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2021/04/09/financial-fiction-part-two-the-new-ones-spacs-nfts-cryptocurrencies/ 

67. Ben Davis, “Why’s Frida Kahlo’s Family Dismantling Her House for an NFT?,” ArtNet (November 30, 2021) https://news.artnet.com/opinion/what-is-the-frida-kahlo-and-family-metaverse-did-succession-diss-the-shed-more-questions-i-have-about-the-weeks-art-news-2041361 

68. See Vladimir Lenin, State and Revolution (1917), available online here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ 

69. For example, see Golumbia on right-wing hysterias around inflation as a sort of tax, 31.

70. See Barbrook and Cameron.

71. Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs, 16

72. Editorial, “Cyborgs! Shoot the Moon,” Locust Review 6 (Fall 2021), 7

73. Theo van Leeuwen and Adam Jaworski, “The Discourses of War Photography: Photojournalistic Representations of the Palestinian-Israeli War,” Journal of Language and Politics, Vol. 1, Issue 2 (January 2002), 255-275

74. Dewi Suriany Ali and Wendy Pandapotan Sahat, “Critical Discourse Analysis: As an Empirical and Rational Foundation,”  Lancang Kuning University (2018)

75. Ali and Sahat, 5

76. I believe I made these remarks at one of the Historical Materialism conferences in London but have not been able to locate my notes on the matter.

77. Paris Surrealist Group, “To the Letter! Surrealism at 100”

78. See Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative (London: Zero Book, 2009)

79. Bobby Allen, “Google AI Researcher Who Sees Company’s AI as Sentient Thinks Chatbot Has a Soul,” National Public Radio (June 16, 2022):  https://www.npr.org/2022/06/16/1105552435/google-ai-sentient

80. Elliot Levy, “Full Transcript: Google Engineer Talks to Sentient Artificial Intelligence,” AI Data Analytics & Network (June 14, 2022), available here: https://www.aidataanalytics.network/data-science-ai/news-trends/full-transcript-google-engineer-talks-to-sentient-artificial-intelligence-2 

81. Elliot Levy

82. Tish Turl and Adam Turl, “Stink Ape Resurrection Primer No. 4,” Locust Review 8 (Summer 2022), 11

83. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art…”

84. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008)

85. Apokatastasis is the theological concept of the redemption of previous lost souls. Michael Löwy argues that Walter Benjamin incorporates this theological concept into his understanding of history and class struggle, that the revolutionary generation redeems all previous generations of the exploited and oppressed. Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History,’ (New York and London: Verso, 2005), 35

86. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (London: Zero Books, 2014), 3, 8, 11

87. LALC, “Socialist Irrealism vs. Capitalist Realism,” Red Wedge Magazine (February 18, 2020): http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/socialist-irrealism-vs-capitalist-realism 

88. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Communist Manifesto (New York: International Publishers, 1948), 22

89. See, for example, Mark Fisher.

90. Locust Radio, “Richard Hamilton’s Discordant Will,” Locust Radio Ep. 10 (September 22, 2021): https://www.locustreview.com/locust-radio/locust-radio-ep-10-discordant-will 

91. “The impossibility of representation” is a phrase used by Anupam Roy to describe the impossibility of adequately expressing the experience and being of other subjects. See Adam Turl interview with Anupam Roy, “Broken Cogs in the Machine,” Red Wedge Magazine (May 7, 2019): http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/broken-cogs-in-the-machine 

92. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 25

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Adam Turl is a member of LALC and co-organizer of the Born Again Labor Museum with Tish Turl. Turl has exhibited their work at the Brett Wesley Gallery and Cube Gallery (Las Vegas), Gallery 210 (St. Louis), Project 1612 (Peoria, Illinois), and Artspace 304 (Carbondale, Illinois). They earned their BFA from Southern Illinois University (SIU) and their MFA from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2016 Turl received a residency and fellowship at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. They were, from 2017 to 2020, an adjunct instructor at the University of Nevada. They are currently working on a doctorate in media arts at SIU; which they wrongly believed was a good way to have health insurance during the collapse of civilization. They are a co-host of Locust Radio. They were recently denied a $25,000 grant to help create an irrealist mutual aid project in southern Illinois.