“Debate is Idiot Distraction”:
Accelerationism and the Politics of
the Internet
By Eugene Brennan.
Robert McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet
Against Democracy (http://thenewpress.com/index.php?
option=com_title&task=view_title&metaproductid=1878), The New Press, 2013
The myths of libertarian competition and innovation espoused by defenders
of neo-liberalism are the same myths which ‘celebrants’ of the internet have
fallen prey to. In the nineties these ‘celebrants’ outweighed those Robert
McChesney refers to as ‘skeptics’. Theoretical and journalistic writing,
intoxicated by the advances of the net, was by no means limited to the
starry-eyed optimism of the likes of Wired magazine in California. The
Internet and new technological changes were also a source of fascination
from the very different perspective of the nihilistic libidinal economy of the
Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at Warwick University.
Sickened by the moralising tendencies of a Left content with identity
politics, their controversial leader Nick Land searched for a theoretical
praxis based on a negation of identity, a post-human ‘machinic praxis’. This
led him to embrace the de-subjectiying qualities of neo-liberalism,
envisioning capitalist speed as a generator of post-human technological
revolution. The CCRU’s fusion of disparate elements included texts by
Deleuze and Guattari , cyberpunk and science fiction references, films such
as Blade Runner and Apocalypse Now, and jungle and rave music. The
texts are saturated with a discourse on immersion and imminence, always
oriented towards an experience of the Outside and a celebration of posthuman possibilities. If for Land and the CCRU, imminent human
extinction was accessible on the dance floor, network theory and the
development of the internet also pointed to exhilarating trajectories towards
the Outside.
Fast-forward to web 2.0 and the landscape of the internet is not one of an
exciting labyrinth of networks but is characterised by the exact opposite of
what attracted the CCRU: the constant maintenance of personal identity
through social media, monopolization of the internet by corporate interests
and government surveillance. The net’s development can be illustratively
read in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s characterisation of capitalism as
deterritorializing on the one hand what it reterritorilizes with the other.
(The most illuminating example of these contradictions at work might be
Thatcherism: There is a ‘nothing is sacred’ advocacy of the marketization of
public services while at the same time espousing sentimental nationalism
and traditional family values.) Anarchy and patriarchy apparently go hand in
hand.
The development of the internet in tandem with neoliberalism has played
out in terms of these ultimately stifling contradictions. Robert McChesney’s
Digital Disconnect makes for essential reading because it gives a wellresearched account of the internet grounded in political economy, which
undermines lazy narratives that oppose an innovative private economy and
a stifling public (state) sphere. McChesney’s narrative on the internet
undermines any remaining conceptions of neo-liberalism as anti-state and
pro-market. Rather, neo-liberalism is more akin to supervision of the state
by the market (with a sometimes complex reversal of roles). Government
and corporate interests have increasingly worked together for antidemocratic ends. One unsettling example is the introduction of the Cyber
Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) in the U.S. House of
Representatives in April 2012. Edward Snowden’s recent revelations have
halted the bill for the moment but it offers an interesting example of how
Internet giants work with government. CISPA would allow companies and
government to legally bypass privacy protections to search through personal
e-mails, private correspondence and contacts, with only the vaguest
justifications. The internet giants all support it according to McChesney
because it would them legal cover for what they are already surreptitiously
doing with the government. It also opens up potentially lucrative deals and
possibility of more secure government protection.
Snowden’s revelations have since issued a sharp wake-up call to anyone still
labouring under the illusion that the net is an inherently democratic space:
For a firm like Google, there is an immense amount of money to
be made providing security tools to governments and corporations
and not as much of a market for supporting dissidents, especially
those who have the misfortune of living in countries with
governments that have close relations with the U.S. government
When the NSA started an illegal warrantless wiretapping programme on US
citizens in 2001 it received the unconditional support of all major telecom
companies except Qwest, who were threatened with loss of lucrative
government contracts if they did not comply with the Bush administration
and the NSA. The monopoly domination and emerging cloud structure of
the internet works in the governments favour in such cases as there are
fewer companies to negotiate with. Another glimpse of the potential
efficacy of this consolidation of monopolies came in the U.S. response to a
wave of WikiLeaks revelations in 2010. Amazon removed WikiLeaks from
its servers and the site instantly crashed as there was nowhere else to go.
Apple pulled a WikiLeaks app from its store and Paypal, MasterCard, Visa
and Bank of America all severed ties to WikiLeaks.
Throughout the book McChesney is attentive to the problematic views of
both ‘skeptics’ and ‘celebrants’. Debates on the development of the internet
have been structured around these opposing positions. The misguided view
of both positions is to suppose that there are qualitative judgements to be
made about the internet as inherently positive or negative. McChesney
makes the welcome argument that it is a space that does not have magically
democratic powers of resistance to monopolies of power and capital.
Against the sometimes luddite skeptics he argues that it is a field of
contestation. There is nothing inevitable about its development, as its long
anti-commercial origins attest. There are obviously many positive facets to
the internet, and he stresses that it could be developed towards much more
democratic ends:
The Internet and the broader digital revolution are not inexorably
determined by technology; they are shaped by how society elects
to develop them.
The most interesting aspect of the book is its focus on the internet’s impact
on news media, an area which celebrants have been particularly emphatic
about apparently innovative and more democratic changes taking place.
The research suggests otherwise. Studies have shown that the proliferation
of media in recent years has led to less and less original reporting.
McChesney points to a 2010 Pew Centre for the People and the Press study
which examined how news stories were generated and received among the
public, focusing on the Baltimore area. Eight out of ten stories regurgitated
already published information while more than ninety-five per cent of
original news stories were still generated by old media, particularly the
Baltimore Sun. However the Sun’s production of original news stories was
down more than thirty per cent from ten years ago and seventy-three per
cent from twenty years ago.
The decline of journalism was underway before the internet but it has
nevertheless accelerated the crisis. No more than six companies control
more than eighty per cent of the American news. Fewer journalists are
attempting to cover more and more areas with the inevitable consequence
that the vast majority of news stories originate from official sources and
press releases rather than independent investigation. The feeling that we
are increasingly inundated with ‘news’ disguises a decline in actual
investigative journalism.
The pressure to keep journalistic content free online means increasingly
commercialized sources of funding have to be found with the result that
content is increasingly dictated by advertising. The senior editors of the
Washington Post, for example, “have embraced the view that studying
[Internet user] traffic patterns can be a useful way to determine where to
focus the paper’s resources”. Their unambiguous aim is to “find the content
that will appeal to desired consumers and to the advertisers who wish to
reach affluent consumers. In this relationship, advertisers hold all the trump
cards, and the news media have little leverage. In the emerging era of ‘smart’
advertising, this means shaping the content to meet the Internet profiles of
desired users, even personalizing news stories alongside personalized ads.”
When AOL purchased the Huffington Post in 2011 an internal memo from
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong summed up the editorial/commercial logic: he
ordered all editors to evaluate future stories on the basis of “traffic potential,
revenue potential, edit quality and turnaround time. All stories, he said are
to be evaluated according to the ‘profitability consideration’.” Such
downward economic pressure on journalists again leaves it increasingly
likely for news stories to offer little more than rewrites of PR press releases.
The corporate corruption of mainstream media is well known and has led to
enthusiastic embraces of alternatives such as Wikileaks. However, the
relative weakness of WikiLeaks’ impact on public opinion in proportion to
the shocking details of the released documents is a striking and unsettling
testament to right-wing hegemony in the media, and the power of
institutional channels of popular communication in framing narratives and
opinion. Following the release of secret documents to the public, Heather
Booke described how “documents languished online and only came to the
public’s attention when they were written up by professional journalists.
Raw material alone wasn’t enough”. McChesney then highlights the
complete lack of independent journalism to respond to the U.S.
government’s successful PR and media blitz to discredit WikiLeaks:
How revealing that a news media that almost never does
investigative work on the national security state or its relations
with large corporations does not come to the defense of those who
have the courage to make such information public!
Citizen journalism, blogging and alternative media provide some necessary
alternatives to vacuous mainstream reporting. Valorizing such media can,
however, lead to a sense of insular segregation from the popular sphere: the
already-converted preach to each other within micro-communities. It can
be sometimes easy to forget the disparity of opinion between your twitter
feed and the majority of the electorate. Amidst the celebratory rhetoric
about its democratizing nature, we need to be reminded of the limitations
and shortcomings of alternative media. McChesney’s research on the
limitations of apparently ‘democratic’ and participatory media finds a more
militant reinforcement in the theoretical work of Jodi Dean. Her work on
communicative capitalism
(http://commonconf.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/proofs-of-tech-fetish.pdf)
identifies a technological fethishism among many media theorists, bloggers,
leftists, and conscientious web participants, which covers over a lack on the
part of the subject. The fetish appeases guilt and sustains a somewhat
deluded faith that we are well-informed, politically engaged citizens.
The technological fetish condenses and simplifies political complexities such
as organisation, struggle, sustaining strategic modes of resistance over a
period of time, and representation, into one problem to be solved:
information. The problem is simply that we need to be better informed.
Persistently framing the debate in terms of information, as WikiLeaksenthusiasts and advocates of participatory media regularly do, does not pay
adequate attention to media hegemony and the way in which narratives are
deeply embedded in the social psyche, despite an abundance of information
that contradicts those narratives.
As Dean also emphasises, valorising micro-political activity and online
debates through social media “displaces political energy from the hard work
of organisation and struggle.” We are persistently invited to ‘join the
debate’, share an article, and express our opinion in a variety of ways. We
feel like we are politically engaged when really, as Nick Land put it, “debate
is idiot distraction”. The persistent exhortations to indulge in debates where
apparently YOUR opinion counts contributes to and fosters an
(un)critically relativist culture. Everything, we are often led to believe, is
subjective, and thus it becomes more and more difficult to assert
authoritative criticism.
The technology fetish encourages immediacy over sustained reflection and
engagement. Filesharing is political. A website is political. Everything is
political.
Theoretically endowing banal quotidian action with a ‘political’ status was
prominent in much neo-anarchist theory before web 2.0 but it has, again,
been even more problematically exacerbated in online activity. The
‘everything is political’ mantra is a dangerous one because, while true in
itself, its discursive use can encourage a paradoxical depoliticization and
retreat from politics into individual ethics, which actually plays into the
hands of power and capital.
An interesting example of this kind of techno-political optimism is
McKenzie Wark’s updating of the Situationist International in which he
makes such claims as: “every kid with a BitTorrent client is an unconscious
Situationist.”
Again, this sense of immediacy and insistence that peer-to-peer file-sharing
is political operates as an unthreatening form of micro-politics and
horizontalism.
McChesney’s book also hints at these misguided approaches to technology
and politics in his criticism of the arrogance of hackers who, he says, often
persist in the naïve faith that the “the revolutionary nature of the
technology could trump the monopolizing force of the market”.
The valorization of such horizontal politics frequently encourages a
complacency and sense of self-satisfaction with one’s own apparent
radicalism, which leaves little hope of ever having an impact on the public
at large. Zones of spontaneous autonomy, whether on the street or online,
pose little threat to prevailing ideology and often only come into popular
consciousness in the form of a carnivalesque sideshow to actual political
struggle. Faced with repeated insistences that ‘everything is political’, it
begins to feel like nothing is political.
McChesney’s research on the development of the internet and inadequacies
of online journalism, Dean’s theory of communicative capitalism, and the
insufficient responses of advocates of neo-anarchist micro-politics on the left
all attest to a persistent lowering of the horizon of ambition which neoliberalism imposes on political and cultural activity. Don’t worry if rightwing hegemony poisons public opinion and creates horrible social divisions:
you can find a quick release for your rage on an obscure ‘lefty’ blog that a
few of your mates might read. These impotent responses are symptomatic of
the engulfing power of neoliberalism, not condemnations of individual
actors. The fact that intellectually discredited neoliberalism continues in
zombie-like form seems to have actually strengthened the stronghold of
capitalist realism, as described by Mark Fisher, in leftist responses as well as
the popular imagination.
The resurgence of accelerationist theory in recent years points towards
strategies of engagement with technology, politics and media which
audaciously attempt to seriously raise the horizon of ambition.
Accelerationism was coined as a term of critique by Benjamin Noys
(http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/apocalypse-tendency-crisis) in
his compelling theoretical work The Persistence of the Negative. Noys used
the term to identify and critique a strange trend in the wake of May 68
among French thinkers, most notably Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard and
Baudrillard. The common thread was a nihilist embrace of forces of
disenchantment as the means for achieving a “strange kind of liberation
through absolute immersion in the flows and fluxes of a libidinised
capitalism”. Leftist politics often entails slowing things down, putting on the
emergency brake. On the contrary, this thought embraces speeding things
up, embracing the flows of the market. Nick Land took up this trajectory
with the CCRU in the nineties embracing a deterritorialization free of the
caution which Deleuze and Guattari advised. Land attempted to uproot the
association of the market with capitalism arguing that the latter is stagnating
while the former can be used to deterritorialize and accelerate towards a
post-human post-capitalist society.
Where Land’s writing was an anti-political celebration of the irrelevance of
human agency, the emergence of a left accelerationism in recent years offers
a more enlightened politicized theory. Land’s misconception of capital as a
sole and primary accelerator of innovation is even more glaringly obvious
in its divorce from reality today. As Alex Williams has written
(http://www.e-flux.com/journal/escape-velocities/):
Technological progress, rather than erasing the personal, has
become almost entirely Oedipalized, ever more focused on
supporting the liberal individual subject. The very agent which
Land identified as the engine of untold innovation has run dry.
This is alienation of an all-too familiar, ennui-inducing kind,
rather than a coldly thrilling succession of future-shocks. All of this
opens up a space for the political again: if we desire a radically
innovative social formation, capital alone will not deliver.
The CCRU embraced technology and the internet for the potential of
acceleration and immersive intensity. On the level of consumption
however, our experience of technology is not especially immersive.
The relentless circulation of information, and mere accumulation of
gadgetery and apps, among other less than exhilarating developments, has
led to a dispersal of attention and something akin to a state of permanent
distraction. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi has written (in Precarious Rhapsody and
other works) on how time and stimuli are being accelerated while
experience is being decelerated. The hyper-abundance of information
available, the sense of permanent distraction and increasingly precarious
nature of labour for a cognitive workforce means that anxiety prevails over
intensity. Late Capitalism’s hijacking of our time to feel or experience takes
the ultimate form of disconnection, for Berardi, in online pornography.
There is no time for the slow immersive intensity of erotic experiences,
replaced instead by the quick-fix neuro-short-circuiting of pornography.
While Berardi has written on the decelerative nature of consumption and
experience in online and everyday activity, Mark Fisher and Simon
Reynolds have written on deceleration in cultural production. As Fisher put
it recently (http://www.e-flux.com/journal/%E2%80%9Ca-social-andpsychic-revolution-of-almost-inconceivable-magnitude%E2%80%9Dpopular-culture%E2%80%99s-interrupted-accelerationist-dreams/),
reinforcing Reynolds’s argument in Retromania:
We live in a moment of profound cultural deceleration. The first
two decades of the current century have so far been marked by an
extraordinary sense of inertia, repetition, and retrospection,
uncannily in keeping with the prophetic analyses of postmodern
culture that Fredric Jameson began to develop in the 1980s. Tune
the radio to the station playing the most contemporary music, and
you will not encounter anything that you couldn’t have heard in
the 1990s.
A sense of cultural deceleration has repeatedly manifest itself in nostalgia,
whimsicality, and retreat and regression from politics. This has been equally
characteristic of many cultural attitudes towards the internet. While the
advance of the net has had its major disappointments, the logical conclusion
should not be to disconnect. When middle-class bestselling writers like
Jonathan Franzen
(http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/07/jonathan-franzen-callstwitter-irresponsible) berate virtually everything about the internet and
implores writers to ‘disconnect’ , it not only betrays a completely clueless
understanding of the realities of cultural and cognitive production for the
twenty first century anxiety-ridden precarious worker, it also feebly and
misguidedly responds to technological advances with an injunction to
disengage and switch off. Rhetoric which encourages us to ‘disconnect’
comes across as a literary equivalent of folk troubadours such as Bon Iver,
who leave the frantic pace of gentrified city life to go and find themselves
anew in a cabin in the woods, armed with nothing but an acoustic guitar
and a broken heart. Responses to disappointments with contemporary
culture and technology do not have to result in self-indulgent retreat.
Accelerationist aesthetics refuses such vain quests for a ‘lost identity’ and
searches instead to rediscover ‘future-shock’, to awaken us from a sense of
ahistorical slumber in a perpetual now.
As a political proposition, accelerationism has not been entirely convincing,
as strong critiques
(http://www.academia.edu/2197499/Cybernetic_Phuturism_The_Politics_of_Accelerat
by Benjamin Noys in particular attest. However it opens up a space of
debate and a desire to engage with political thought on an ambitious
macro-level, which I suggested has been lacking in much leftist writing on
the internet. In relation to the media in particular, it offers challenging
provocations. It critiques neo-anarchist thought and activism for too often
abandoning the struggle for hegemony and for not giving sufficient
consideration of how to effectively communicate radical ideas on a
genuinely popular level. While not giving up on the democratising
potential of new media, the Accelerationist Manifesto
(http://syntheticedifice.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/accelerate.pdf) rightly
insists that traditional media are still crucial in the framing of popular
narratives and thus these institutions need to be fought for and brought as
close as possible to popular control through wide-scale media reform.
The manifesto offers a provocative challenge to micro-politics. The rhetoric
has a somewhat unsavoury macho tone which warrants critical rebukes.
However its particular raising of political thought to a macro- level of
complexity that simultaneously engages with the popular is enticing:
“We believe the most important division in today’s left is between those that
hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism,
and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at
ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology.
The former remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of
non-capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in
facing foes which are intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep in
our everyday infrastructure. The failure of such politics has been built-in
from the very beginning. By contrast, an accelerationist politics seeks to
preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value
system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow.”
Technology is thus embraced but the manifesto is careful to distance itself
from ‘techno-utopianism’. It is not given inherent qualitative judgements
but considered in relation to a socio-political dialectic. Technology is a tool
to be used in aiding radical communication and accelerating towards a postcapitalist society. It can also be a source of exhilaration, but one always
influenced by socio-political factors shaping it. It is thus, as Robert
McChesney’s research demonstrates, not to be valorized in itself.
While accelerationism is the subject of warranted criticism for possible
political complicity with neoliberalism and a problematically macho tone,
accelerationist writing is also criticised
(http://blog.voyou.org/2013/07/20/communism-equals-soviet-power-plusamazon-com/) for self-conscious seriousness . The tone of seriousness,
however, actually carries a compelling implicit argument: in an era saturated
by nostalgia and regressive whimsicality in culture and politics, and a dearth
of ambition, we would do well to approach collective experience with a
sense of seriousness. Accelerationist theory carries the implicit demand that
we raise the standards of what passes for culture, and reinvest cultural
production with a sense of authority (as well as cultural criticism for that
matter), while explicitly arguing for a maximal politics of collective selfmastery, that issues a necessary challenge to the limitations of micropolitical ‘direct action’.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eugene Brennan is a writer/researcher currently working on a PhD on
Georges Bataille with the University of London Institute in Paris. He
teaches English with Universit é Paris 13.
August 12, 2013(https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/2013/08/12/)
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