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Internet Realism: “Is there No Alternative?”

Zach Blas’ Tweets (image via DisMagazine).

 

Talking about his book, Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher explains “Put at its simplest, capitalist realism is the widespread idea that capitalism is the only ‘realistic’ political economic system”.

Following on Margaret Tatcher’s famous slogan that “there is no alternative” to the free market, Fisher argues that this idea has long served as an ideological legitimation of capitalism. “We’ve now got a generation of young adults who have known nothing but global capitalism and who are accustomed to culture being pastiche and recapitulation” (Wilson 2017).

Similarly, the artist and writer Zach Blas has argued that in the last two decades the Internet has become “a totalized sociocultural condition. Like capitalism, the internet has come to exist as a totality, with no outside, no alternative, no ending” (Blas 2016). It has merged into the materiality of the physical world (the Internet of Things) and has grown into “a mode of subjectivation, a set of feelings, a sense of longing, a human condition, a metanarrative” (Ibidem). Is there still a world outside the Internet?

The idea that every aspect of reality is rendered into its digital counterpart (the data) is central to what Shoshana Zuboff has called “Surveillance Capitalism”, this new “ubiquitous networked institutional regime that records, modifies, and commodifies everyday experience from toasters to bodies, communication to thought, all with a view to establishing new pathways to monetization and profit” (Zuboff 2015: 81). The network, recalling Blas’ concerns, serves as a tool for control, management and commodification of every human experience.

What happens when even intimate experiences are monetized? Are there any sites left for resistance or even political struggle becomes another profitable opportunity? These are some of the questions posed by Goldsmiths researchers Beverley Skeggs and Simon Yuill.

They developed a custom-built software to detect Facebook tracking, targeting and advertising activity, inside and outside the platform (e.g. the interaction with sponsored companies), and found out that Facebook pays more attention to and monetized more effectively users who are “high net worth individual(s). […] The more coherent and predictable we can be, the easier it is to fragment and disaggregate our data in order to trade it” (Skeggs, Yuill 2016: 391). Paradoxically, the more political integrity we perform online, the more profitable we become.

The need for a clearer understanding of such opaque mechanisms is undeniable, as well as the ability to imagine something outside the Internet. Zach Blas’ concept (and artistic project) Contra-Internet stems from this necessity. Building on Paul Preciado’s Contra-Sexual Manifesto, Contra-Internet is “the refusal of naturalizations, hegemonies, and normalizations of the Internet that have contributed to its transformation into a locus of policing and control” (Browne, Blas 2017). It is the attempt to fragment the totality of the network and to conceive an alternative such as, for instance, “mesh-networking”, a non-hierarchal, independent, local network that doesn’t rely on the Internet.

We need to include such alternative in the common narrative of the digital. In doing so, perhaps, as the soundtrack plays throughout Blas’ artistic performance, we could hear a new world.

***

References

Browne, Simone, and Zach Blas, 2017, “Beyond the Internet and All Control Diagrams”, The New Inquiry, January 24(2017).

Fisher, Mark, 2009, Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? John Hunt Publishing.

Skeggs, Beverley, and Simon Yuill, 2016, “Capital experimentation with person/a formation: how Facebook’s monetization refigures the relationship between property, personhood and protest”, Information, Communication & Society, 19.3: 380-396.

Wilson, Rowan, “They Can Be Different in the Future Too: Mark Fisher interviewed”, Verso, January 16, 2017 (available online at https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3051-they-can-be-different-in-the-future-too-mark-fisher-interviewed).

Zuboff, Shoshana, 2015, “Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization”, Journal of Information Technology, 30.1, 75-89.

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