Sad by Design Digital Barricades: Interventions in Digital Culture and Politics
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Sad by Design Digital Barricades: Interventions in Digital Culture and Politics Series editors: Professor Jodi Dean, Hobart and William Smith Colleges Dr Joss Hands, Newcastle University Professor Tim Jordan, University of Sussex Also available: Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria Donatella Della Ratta Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex Nick Dyer-Witheford The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy Paolo Gerbaudo Gadget Consciousness: Collective Thought, Will and Action in the Age of Social Media Joss Hands Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society Tim Jordan Unreal Objects: Digital Materialities, Technoscientific Projects and Political Realities Kate O’Riordan Sad by Design On Platform Nihilism Geert Lovink First published 2019 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Geert Lovink 2019 The right of Geert Lovink to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7453 3935 1 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 3934 4 Paperback ISBN 978 1 7868 0451 8 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 7868 0453 2 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 7868 0452 5 EPUB eBook This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America Contents Series Preface vi Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Society of the Social 1 1. Overcoming the Disillusioned Internet 13 2. Social Media as Ideology 23 3. Distraction and its Discontents 33 4. Sad by Design 45 5. Media Network Platform: Three Architectures 61 6. From Registration to Extermination: On Technological Violence 77 7. Narcissus Confirmed: Technologies of the Minimal Selfie 98 8. Mask Design: Aesthetics of the Faceless 108 9. Memes as Strategy: European Origins and Debates 119 10. Before Building the Avant-Garde of the Commons 138 Notes 151 Bibliography 171 Series Preface Crisis and conflict open up opportunities for liberation. In the early twenty-first century, these moments are marked by struggles enacted over and across the boundaries of the virtual, the digital, the actual, and the real. Digital cultures and politics connect people even as they simultaneously place them under surveillance and allow their lives to be mined for advertising. This series aims to intervene in such cultural and political conjunctures. It features critical explorations of the new terrains and practices of resistance, producing critical and informed explorations of the possibilities for revolt and liberation. Emerging research on digital cultures and politics investigates the effects of the widespread digitization of increasing numbers of cultural objects, the new channels of communication swirling around us and the changing means of producing, remixing and distributing digital objects. This research tends to oscillate between agendas of hope, that make remarkable claims for increased participation, and agendas of fear, that assume expanded repression and commodification. To avoid the opposites of hope and fear, the books in this series aggregate around the idea of the barricade. As sources of enclosure as well as defenses for liberated space, barricades are erected where struggles are fierce and the stakes are high. They are necessarily partisan divides, different politici- zations and deployments of a common surface. In this sense, new media objects, their networked circuits and settings, as well as their material, informational, and biological carriers all act as digital barricades. Jodi Dean, Joss Hands and Tim Jordan Acknowledgements Three years have passed since I handed in the manuscript of Social Media Abyss. Looking back, this period has been defined by Brexit, Trump, Cambridge Analytica and related Facebook scandals. Absent were the equivalents of Wikileaks, Anonymous and Snowden (perhaps with the exception of Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Chris Wylie). There was a lot of ideological regression and “multi-polar” stagnation, acceler- ated by a booming stock market, real estate excesses, an ongoing war in Syria and real existing climate change. While the “social media debate” hit the mainstream, resistance and alternatives were all but absent—with the exception of the alt-right. As the public discourse around “behavior modification” and “per- vasive surveillance” intensified, I shifted away from the preferred panorama format used in my previous books. Dutch cultural funding for new projects at our Institute of Network Cultures had dried up (mainly due to new Dutch apartheid walls erected between education/research and the cultural sector). This forced us to go into survival mode and work for third parties, which is the main reason I’m not reporting about the activities of our networks here (even though MoneyLab stills runs and various digital publishing experiments continue, despite the closure of the PublishingLab in 2018). Thanks to David Castle at Pluto Press and the editors of the Digital Barricades series for taking this book project on board and for their valuable comments. Working together with copy editor Luke Munn (Auckland) was an amazingly smooth and most pleasurable experience. My Berlin dialogues over the years with Pit Schultz, Michael Seemann, Volker Grassmuck, Andreas Kallfelz, Stefan Heidenreich and Alexander Karschnia have proven vital for my intellectual wellbeing. Gratitude goes to Steven Shapiro, Ana Peraica, Marc Tuters, Mieke Gerritzen, Franco Berardi, Letizia Chiappini, Daniel de Zeeuw, Ellen Rutten, Alex Foti, Isabel de Maurissens, Morris Kolman, Marie Lechner, Florian Cramer, Katharina Teichgräber, Michael Dieter, Tripta Chandola, Tatjana Seitz viii . sad by design and Donatella della Ratta for their inspiring comments on different chapters. At the Institute of Network Cultures I would like to thank in particular Miriam Rasch, Inte Gloerich and Patricia de Vries for their detailed responses and support. Thanks also to Silvio Lorusso, Leonieke van Dipten, Margreet Riphagen, and to Barbara Dubbeldam and Kelly Mostert, who recently joined us. The entire team has been pivotal in running such an inspiring, critical research center. Special thanks go to Ned Rossiter for his friendship and dedicated feedback over the years—and to Linda and Riddim DJ “System of Chaos” Kazimir for their amazing support, to whom I dedicate this book. Amsterdam, October 2018 Geert Lovink Introduction: Society of the Social “There are 87,146 thought leaders on LinkedIn.”—“Real painters do not paint things as they are…They paint them as they themselves feel them to be.” Vincent van Gogh on fake art—Unload that Truck of Dislikes! (alt-left slogan)—“Web: We noticed you’re using an Ad blocker. Me: I noticed you’re using 32 tracking services.” Matt Weagle—“New Security Comes With New Vulnerability.” Lulzsec—“Truth is for suckers, Johnny Boy.” Being John Malkovich—Our focus is the cosmo-technics challenge that brings us in direct contact with our slaves (tribute to Yuk Hui)—“I always knew I was a good writer but I thought I’d do poetry or fiction, not the emails I ended up doing.” OH—“Das Handy und die Zuhanden- heit des Virtuellen” (German essay)—“One of my favorite self-harm techniques is googling airfares to Bali.” Addie Wagenknecht—“It’s not size, it’s scale that counts.” Barnett Newman—“Warning: People might not like you after this.”—“Smart is the new smoking.” Johanna Sjerp- stra—“Please like our DNS poisoning attack here”—“I HAVE THE HOUSE TO MYSELF TONIGHT! *stares at phone*”—“The Internet is like the Wild West. We thought we were the cowboys, but it turns out we’re the buffalos.” AnthroPunk. Welcome to the New Normal. Social media is reformatting our interior lives. As platform and individual become inseparable, social networking becomes identical with the “social” itself. No longer curious about what “the next web” will bring, we chat about the information we’re allowed to graze on during meager days. Forward-looking confidence has been shattered—the seasonality of hype reduced to a flatline future. Instead, a new realism has set in, as Evgeny Morozov tweeted: “1990s tech utopianism posited that networks weaken or replace hierarchies. In reality, networks amplify hierarchies and make them less visible.”1 How can one write a proper phenomenology of asynchronous connections and their cultural effects, formulate a ruthless critique of everything hardwired into the social body of the network, while not looking at what’s going on inside? Rather than a stance of superiority, a judgment from on high, could we take an amoral approach toward today’s intense 2 . sad by design social media usage, delving into the shallow time of lost souls like us? Let’s embark on a journey into this third space called the techno-social. Our beloved internet may be portrayed as an “inverse hydra with a hundred assholes”2 but we love it anyway: it’s our brain-junk. While social media controversies have hit mainstream media, the fallout has been zero. We barely register the online frenzy that surrounds us; we can’t even pretend to care about the cynical advertisement logic.3 Social media scandals appear to us, as Franz Kafka once wrote, “like a path in autumn: no sooner is it cleared than it is once again littered with leaves.” From behavioral manipulation to fake news, all we read about is the bankrupt credibility of Silicon Valley. However, very few have suffered any serious consequences. Evidence is apparently not enough. Muck gets raked, data gets leaked, and whistles get blown—yet nothing changes. None of the outstanding issues get resolved. There’s no “internexit” referendum ahead. No matter how many hacks and privacy violations occur, no matter how many awareness campaigns and public debates are organized, overwhelming indiffer- ence prevails.