…okay, done? Penny may well be smarter than me. (Not flattery, just a low bar.) But I’ve a perspective they don’t. I am part of “the last generation of that demographic to reach adulthood before social media”, the age where I’ve experienced the world without and then with the net. And from that perspective this is my way of telling the story…
First, we should always make clear that if more people are getting to say stuff, the problem for the Right isn’t what they say but that they get to say it. The only things they should be permitted to say are applications to join the in-group, professions of loyalty to our great nation, to the Royal family and so on. (Well, you know, the white Royals.) With the caveat that acceptance of such professions can only be provisional, the test reapplicable at any time. Difference alone is not seen as an inherent problem, provided there is social hierarchy to manage it. It’s threats to their hierarchy which antagonises them.
By comparison, in the segregated Southern states, no-on ever questioned black people’s right to vote. That was constitutionally guaranteed. It was just a matter of denying black people’s ability to vote, that was all. And the appearance of fairness without the messy real-world ramifications, surely that was best. But then some bolshy troublemakers tried to give those theoretical rights real-world consequences, boorish oafs with the effrontery to make us say the quiet part out loud.
Hence the common conceit that “freedom of speech” is when they speak, and “cancel culture” is when we imagine we then get a turn. It’s no good pointing this out to them and expecting them to change. It’s not a twist of logic they’ve concocted to serve their ends. It’s what they honestly think, and they genuinely don’t see why it should be a problem. This is what makes them our enemies.
Circling closer to the point, people can over-estimate the importance of the net. (It’s slightly unclear how much Penny’s piece is personal recollections, and how much intended as analysis of general trends.) Everything new and unfamiliar can get loaded onto it, the way my parents’ generation fretted over that funny pop music. The rise of social media came about with as many push factors (the decline of the high street, of the local pub etc.) as there were pull.
But the elephant in the room is neoliberalism. With organised labour defeated, society was reduced to an agglomeration of individuals, where everyone’s just in it for themselves. The atomised world of social media, with it’s endless formalised and fruitless debates, came to provide a handy form to match this content. But it’s not causal, things would have gone this way without it.
The drift from Right to Far Right is of course largely down to the paranoid feeling among the privileged that their privilege may be under threat. Privilege so hard-wired into their world-view they perceive any questioning of it as oppression.
But it’s also due to a fantasy of belonging. In a way, they have won too much, even for them. They sense at some level that their victory has come at a cost, so in a world they own almost outright they become nostalgic for before. We can all be alike again, just like it all used to be, once we get the unlike back in their place, just like it all used to be. So, not for the first time, they blame the consequences of their actions on us.
There’s an argument which, these days, seems to constantly need making. If anti-fascists fight back against fascists, yes both may well be fighting, but that doesn’t make them equivalent. The anti-fascists are still anti-fascists, that’s why they’re opposing the fascists, and that does make a bit of a difference really. To understand something, you need to recognise it has a content as well as a form.
Yet it’s equally true, and at times just as necessary, to say things have a form as well as a content. And products of technology are a classic example. There’s the absurd, reactionary and widespread notion that technology is politically neutral, that it comes off some conveyor belt called ‘progress’ in a linear fashion. So responses to it can only be binary, an all-embracing yes to product upgrades one and all, or a desire to go off and live in a teepee.
To take an obvious example, a society powered by renewable energy could work from a decentralised network. It doesn’t absolutely have to, of course, but it could do. Whereas a nuclear-powered society definitely could not. And strangely enough, nuclear power is given far greater funding, is subject to far less regulatory control, than renewable energy. If I say I prefer the path of renewable energy, I am not being ‘anti-technology’, I’m favouring one type of technology above another.
But the notion that technology is politically neutral at the point of innovation, that it starts to have political effects only when its put in place, is scarcely any less reactionary. Technology is always scoped out, invested in. There’s no automatic correlation between investment and result, but only investment can lead to result.
And there’s a history in radical thought of assuming one mode of production will simply supplant another, reshape the society it comes into contact with and capitalism will go the way of Windows 95. In 1935 the great radical thinker Walter Benjamin wrote the classic ‘The Work Of Art In the Era Of Mechanical Reproduction’, in which he argued…
“The film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing. This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed.”
In short, the argument is that the mass medium of film leads inherently to more contemplative, and hence more critical audiences. And this will be true across the arts. And I’m going to suggest it didn’t work out that way.
The angle’s seductive partly because it offers victory. Though it isn’t and can never be part of our thinking that some kind of cavalry will ride in to our rescue, we either liberate ourselves or we are not liberated. But also, and more saliently for here, because at first sight it seems materialist. We don’t need to wait for people to just change their minds one day, according to arbitrary and subjective processes. Our minds are after all shaped by real-world encounters, so different encounters will re-shape them.
There’s an argument which, these days, seems to constantly need making. If anti-fascists fight back against fascists, yes both may well be fighting, but that doesn’t make them equivalent. The anti-fascists are still anti-fascists, that’s why they’re opposing the fascists, and that does make a bit of a difference really. To understand something, you need to recognise it has a content as well as a form.
Yet it’s equally true, and at times just as necessary, to say things have a form as well as a content. And products of technology are a classic example. There’s the absurd, reactionary and widespread notion that technology is politically neutral, that it comes off some conveyor belt called ‘progress’ in a linear fashion. So responses to it can only be binary, an all-embracing yes to product upgrades one and all, or a desire to go off and live in a teepee.
To take an obvious example, a society powered by renewable energy could work from a decentralised network. It doesn’t absolutely have to, of course, but it could do. Whereas a nuclear-powered society definitely could not. And strangely enough, nuclear power is given far greater funding, is subject to far less regulatory control, than renewable energy. If I say I prefer the path of renewable energy, I am not being ‘anti-technology’, I’m favouring one type of technology above another.
But the notion that technology is politically neutral at the point of innovation, that it starts to have political effects only when its put in place, is scarcely any less reactionary. Technology is always scoped out, invested in. There’s no automatic correlation between investment and result, but only investment can lead to result.
And there’s a history in radical thought of assuming one mode of production will simply supplant another, reshape the society it comes into contact with and capitalism will go the way of Windows 95. In 1935 the great radical thinker Walter Benjamin wrote the classic ‘The Work Of Art In the Era Of Mechanical Reproduction’, in which he argued…
“The film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing. This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed.”
In short, the argument is that the mass medium of film leads inherently to more contemplative, and hence more critical audiences. And this will be true across the arts. And I’m going to suggest it didn’t work out that way.
The angle’s seductive partly because it offers victory. Though it isn’t and can never be part of our thinking that some kind of cavalry will ride in to our rescue, we either liberate ourselves or we are not liberated. But also, and more saliently for here, because at first sight it seems materialist. We don’t need to wait for people to just change their minds one day, according to arbitrary and subjective processes. Our minds are after all shaped by real-world encounters, so different encounters will re-shape them.
But this is at best a vulgar materialism, as mechanistic as the film projector. Marx criticised it from the start…
“The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating.”
“The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating.”
Or, at another point, “If man is formed by circumstances, then we must humanise the circumstances.”
And the net gives us a particular twist on this. It sprang, more or less, from academia and initially followed those principles. It wasn’t set up with the idea that we’d learn what it felt like to be autistic or gender-fluid or convey any other subjective form of experience. But it was set up to spread the free flow of information, so we could learn when the fall of Rome had been, and at the press of a button. At the time academia was generally thought of as something higher-minded than the tawdry world of commerce, something to benefit society not just stimulate the economy.
I can remember that era, where people would exult over the ‘digital Wild West’. And me pointing out that it was the Wild West which became modern corporate America. And them telling me I didn’t understand how the next worked. Which perhaps I didn’t. But I did, on the other hand, understand how capitalism worked.
The net was set up to be decentralised, so information could be spread rather than corralled. But in it’s early days capitalism enclosed the commons, evicting those who lived on them, sometimes burning out those who didn’t leave quickly enough. It changed the principles the commons were run by, by a combination of money and force. (Inasmuch as they’re different things.)
Similarly, the digital commons of the internet have now been divided up into a series of enclosures, with Musk, Zuckerberg et al as the landlords. They may be willing to de-padlock and grant you admittance but on their terms, and demanding registration if not remuneration. Banning, or digital exile, has become by fiat of digital landlords. In some ways it’s a benefit that Musk is such a gormless blowhard, because he fails so badly at disguising this. And this was precisely the case with enclosed land back then, it was only ever the undesirables they wanted to keep out.
There was no perfect past, of course. Back in 2005 Brighton’s (since defunct) radical info news-sheet ’Rough Music’ had their website under threat. Some antagonist was persistently going to their ISP to claim they broke it’s terms of service. Which, rather than spend time and money investigating, would normally just close them down. But they could, and did, respond by going to a new ISP, in a continuing game of cat and mouth.
Whereas more recently, the radical news site It’s Going Down was banned from Twitter by Musk. (At the same time he brought back Trump, and other far right nuts. This is of course what “free speech absolutism” normally means.) They had already been banned from Facebook, in 2020. True, they still have their own website. But with the way the modern internet works, that’s like being allowed to open a shop provided its not on the high street.
And significantly this enclosing of the digital commons has come hand-in-hand with a new enclosing of the physical commons. Here in Brighton the main shopping centre, Churchill Square, is officially private property. You can be ordered out of it at any time, with no reason given, and no right of redress.
Meanwhile… I have no direct contact with academia, but I’m told from those that do that it has also become run by the principles of neoliberalism, with tenure a bygone word, where journals are profit-gouging, where targets for publishing research are set, where it’s understood research should be benefiting “the market” in some way.
We have freedom of speech, officially sanctified. But the ground we stand on, as soon as they stop liking what we say, they’ll try to take from under us.
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