----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- QANON ARG Remember Alternate Reality Games (ARG)? As some observers have pointed out [1], QAnon definitely feels and functions like one. It's got open and collective storytelling, multiplatform content, puppet masters, die hard players, hidden clues... a blurry boundary between fiction and reality. We make fun of conservatives because supposedly "The Right Can't Meme", but QAnon proves otherwise. It is the most addictive and ambitious media project of our times. A Brechtian double whammy, both hammer and mirror.
The aesthetics of the QAnon ARG herald a new (but old) political reality. In 1936, Walter Benjamin wrote "Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves... The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life" [2]. QAnon marks the (re)introduction of a particular aesthetic into political life: The Art of the Deal, reaching its apex in the ultimate ARG-cum-Flashmob: Jan 6, 2021 USA. PLAY IT BEFORE YOU LIVE IT I myself was engaged in exploring the pedagogical uses of Fake News. From 2009 to 2013, I ran a number of ARG's at my college. The games covered everything from budget cuts to public education, to racism on campus, Islamophobia, and US-Mexico relations. The idea was that in order to fix reality, we first had to break it. There's something very powerful about the idea that the breaking is the fixing, and I think we desperately need to reinvent ways of doing that. But everyone can play that game, so we become entangled in a competition to see who can create the best imagined communities [3]. FACEBOOK AND THE BUSINESS OF BULLSHIT Under this new aesthetic regime, reality is whatever receives the most Likes, Shares, and Re-Tweets. Taking a page from Harry Frankfurt [4], this looks a lot like bullshitting because it's not just about spreading lies, but about creating the social architectures and spaces where the lies are treated as the Real. Big Tech has found a way to monetize the psychometric targeting of this bullshit and is laughing all the way to the bank. But the problem is not just Facebook's shameless opportunism. It is the emergence of what Nick Coulrdy and I call "data relations" [5]: the configuration of social interactions to transform life processes into things (data) with value, so that ordinary social life becomes a direct factor of capitalist production. How do we break this gamification of reality? I agree with what everyone else has been saying this month: we need to break the very machinery of the Likes, Shares and Re-Tweets. A good place to start is to realize that while data colonialism is organizing itself along two global poles --the US and China-- the strategies being employed throughout the world are similar and repetitive: deregulation of the social quantification sector in a manner that gives more market power to favored corporations; collaboration between government and private sector to develop and implement technologies for extraction; increased state power to impose special measures of surveillance during increasingly permanent periods of emergency; and increased secrecy about what governments and corporations do with our data, all in the name of safety and progress. So yes, the bad news is that data colonialism is global. But the good news is that, while accounting for local nuances, strategies developed to resist data colonialism can also be global. NON-ALIGNMENT AS ALTERNATE REALITY In collaboration with others, particularly Juan Ortiz Freuler, I have been engaged in trying to launch a Non-Aligned Technologies Movement, or NATM [6]. It's very much a work in progress, and we don't have much to show for it yet. Our inspiration is the Non-Aligned Movement, a consortium of nations that during the Cold War attempted to forge a path beyond the equally unattractive choices of capitalism and communism. Today, we need options to navigate between the profit-motivated Scylla of Silicon Valley and the control-motivated Charybdis of the Chinese Communist Party. While the group hasn't agreed on specific goals, I am proposing that they can be framed in terms of the divestment and boycott strategies that have already been employed to resist older forms of colonialism. But those tactics need to be supplemented by initiatives in education, culture and solidarity. In short, this is not about opting out of GAFA and BATX (although it's great if you can!). This is about finding ways of engaging in public research, common knowledge campaigns, and decolonial thinking to articulate the dangers of extractivist tech, and how to resist them (Education). This is about finding ways to participate in a process of reimagining a world without extractivist technologies by creating a space that incorporates diverse voices and perspectives (Culture). And it's about linking to other people engaged in the same struggle, and using the power of collective action (Solidarity). Maybe we need an ARG for that! /Ulises ----- [1] One example: QAnon Is Like a Game—a Most Dangerous Game. https://www.wired.com/story/qanon-most-dangerous-multiplatform-game/ [2] Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. [3] Passing reference to Benedict Anderson. [4] Frankfurt, On Bullshit. [5] Couldry & Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. [6] Mejias, To fight data colonialism, we need a Non-Aligned Tech Movement. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/9/8/to-fight-data-colonialism-we-need-a-non-aligned-tech-movement _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
