Thank you Patrice for attempting to blow softly on the faltering embers
of nettime. And thanks to the Guardian for rigorously detailing some of
the latest steps of the Trump regime's relentless probing of the blurry
threshold separating authoritarianism (control of behaviour) to
totalitarianism (control of thought).
Trump's attack on museums such as the Smithsonian as:
-"OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country
is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have
been – Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about
the Future.”-
Weirdly this could also be said of Trump's relationship to a core
ideology of 'disaster nationalism' that was fully on display from the
outset in his 2016 inaugural address *American Carnage*.
It has been said that one of the key indicators on whether the
totalitarian threshold has been crossed is that when you are awoken to a
knock on your front door in the dead of night, your first thought is NOT
that the police has not come to arrest you for something that you have
said or written. In this regard the unaccountable actions of ICE and the
free wheeling deployment of the National Guard suggest that this 'knock
on the door' threshold may at the very least be under pressure.
These direct threats of violence run in parallel with, and are
interconnected to, threats to individual jobs and livelihoods. And the
Guardian article does a good job of showing the pressure to preemptively
self censor on both senior individual gate keepers of museums but also
on more vulnerable less senior staff with fewer opportunities to find
new jobs. In short the pressure to remain silent and hope the storm will
pass remains intense.
Trumrpianism has at least reminded us of the extreme difficulty
accompanying claims of institutional impartiality. Anyone who has worked
in a university knows that this is an important ideal but often a
fiction. Trump has embraced the idea long acknowledged on the left that
the cultural domain is not a neutral but a contested space. Anyone of us
who witnessed the stifling of debate in the 2024 edition of
Transmedialle knows this is not just a US issue. There is a deafening
silence in the art world over Israel's war crimes in Gaza. The price for
many of taking a stand against the gravity defying rise of the far right
remains high and not just in the United States.
--
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