post-nihilism blogging about blogging

The Chaser’s ‘Life at the Top’ skits were my favourite part of the most recent series. They featured a group of Aboriginal Australians, probably in middle age or elderly, sitting around in a bush setting discussing issues pertinent to the (then upcoming) 2010 Australian election. Watch the first video and then I’ll explain why I loved it so much.

The video opens with the peppy jingle that opens and closes each skit, building a cheery picture of ‘Life at the Top’ (referring to the ‘Top End’ of the continent). An image of a single tree with yellow sun behind, red ground below appears, conjuring up a digitally re-mastered version of the Aboriginal flag, itself a symbol with great meaning for indigenous Australians. The tree brings to mind ‘the subaltern’ who, unconcerned with issues like work and productivity that much of western civilization slavishly obsesses over (think the protestant work ethic), instead has an altogether different set of priorities – perhaps gathering and socialising under a tree.

An establishing shot shows us the bush the gathered indigenous Australians are within and that they are sitting in a circle. Subtitles are added for the benefit of viewers not familiar with the language they are speaking in, and the first words, “Did you see the Great Debate?” are a juxtaposition that confounds out expectations. The Aboriginal language is made comprehensible, and is demystified. Any expectations or prejudices are blasted away instantly by the banality and normalcy of their conversation.

“Yeah, all those irrelevant questions about refugees and the economy.”

“They should let online Journos ask about the real issues… like Lindsay Lohan.”

“Or MasterChef.”

“Or Paul the Octopus.”

“Surely people aren’t sick of hearing about the octopus yet.”

The banal continues, and the Aboriginal elders are treated lovingly and respectfully just like everyone else; a too often rare occurrence on Australian television, where they often fall into stereotypes.

“I didn’t see the debate. Did they ask about indigenous affairs?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It was a serious debate.”

The punch line sends a wry smile spreading across the face of everyone who acknowledges the great debt we owe to the first Australians – The Chaser are pointing out the travesty in the situation. The state of indigenous affairs in Australia really is beyond shameful. I have no new or special insights into the issue, but the facts speak for themselves. Here’s some choice quotes from the Wikipedia summary page for contemporary issues facing indigenous Australians:

“According to the United Nations, the quality of life of Aboriginal people is the second worst of the planet.”

“[Indigenous] Students as a group leave school earlier, and live with a lower standard of education, compared with their peers.”

“Indigenous Australians as a group generally experience high unemployment compared to the national average.”

“Due to lack of access to medical facilities, Indigenous Australians were twice as likely to report their health as fair/poor and one-and-a-half times more likely to have a disability or long-term health condition…”

“Indigenous Australians are jailed five times more often than black males in South Africa under apartheid.”

“Many Indigenous communities suffer from a range of health, social and legal problems associated with substance abuse of both legal and illegal drugs.”

As a result of colonialism and white settlement, Indigenous Australians have historically been treated poorly, been subject to the worst kinds of racism and in some cases were outright massacred, having been considered little better than animals. It is a stain that is all too often hidden from what Australian’s themselves usually like to think of as their otherwise immaculate nation.

The temptation for those of us who neither wish to ignore, nor to trivialise the plight of Australia’s first inhabitants, is to consider them helpless victims of circumstance – but this is almost as bad the institutionalised racism that sees their concerns brushed aside on a national scale.

Which is why, in the above skit, when one asks whether indigenous affairs were considered by the two prospective leaders of Australia, they are quickly brushed off. It’s a complex bit of comedy and the writing is extremely well done. The quality continues in the second episode in the series. In it, the deal the Government has made with Telstra (the national semi-privatized telco) to deliver fibre-optic broadband to 93% of Australia is greeted with plaudits.

“Faster internet speeds should be the nation’s top priority.”

The line reminds viewers that, far from being helpless victims, Aboriginal Australians probably hold, and are just as entitled to, a view about the nation’s future and direction as any other citizen. Whether faster internet is actually a concern for these inhabitants of the Top End is not the point, but rather that inhabitants of the bush are not to be forgotten or ignored merely for their distance from a capital city.

As an aside, I actually think internet speed could well be an important issue for them – internet in rural Australia is often impossible to get, and creakingly slow when available. See Hungry Beast’s humorous Carrier Pigeon vs. Car vs. rural Internet Speed test in which the carrier pigeon and the car both prove a faster method of transferring 700mb of data than the internet. Yes, really.

“White people should be able to watch Hitler ‘Downfall’ parodies without having to wait. It’s a basic human right.”

We may laugh, but a certain standard of internet access (often set at 1Mbps – faster than many connections still) has been enshrined as a human right a number of European nations. The mentioning of internet access as a human right, however, brings to mind the fact that so many other, more integral human rights of indigenous Australian’s are so easily brushed aside. The former Howard Government’s “Northern Territory Intervention” in which indigenous Australian’s relying on state welfare are treated like children – having everything from their finances to their food shopping managed for them – would not be tolerated if it were foisted upon a community of whitefella’s for the simple fact that it impinges on basic human rights and freedoms. And that’s not to mention the dignity that is stripped from them by having giant warning signs at the entry to their communities warning that “alcohol and pornography” are banned. What must it do to a person to have to live with that outside their home?

[Edit: Nick S. writes in to say "It’s a little-known fact but “income management” has recently been imposed on the Northern Territory’s “whitefellas”, with plans by both ALP and Coalition to extend it to “disadvantaged” communities nationwide. See e.g.'Major Welfare Reforms Support Vulnerable Australians' and 'Abbott backs ALP welfare management bill'.]

“Thank God the government has finally got it’s priorities in order.”

The delicious irony here is almost self-evident, but when it comes to indigenous affairs, suffice to say it’s nowhere near a top-priority issue for either of the major political parties in Australia. Nor is it on the national agenda of the mainstream media. The Chaser, broadcasting to an audience 1.41 million Australians in their first week, have probably done more to raise awareness than any news outlet.

Each episode is bookended with the peppy “Life at the Top” musical jingle. Let’s watch Episode 3 of “Life at the Top” before continuing. This episode continues the theme of travesty (for more on the distinction between travesty and straight satire, see Ian Bogost’s blog), and while all episodes are cleverly and carefully played for laughs, this one cuts more directly at the issues.

“I think there should be more funding for the arts in this country.”

“Absolutely. Our culture is our identity.”

“We need a healthy film industry to tell important Australian stories like ‘The Wog Boy 2; The Kings of Mykonos’.”

“It is vital that the full ‘Wog Boy’ story is preserved and passed down to future generations of Australians.”

The conversation again exposes triviality and lack of depth in Australian political and cultural priorities, this time using the Australian film industry to make their point. The original ‘Wog Boy’ film was a rather shallow, up-beat affair about the common European immigrant experience (in this case in particular, a Greek ‘Wog Boy’), and the skit leaves vast tracts of room open to suggest that the Australian film industry could look at the wealth of Australian Aboriginal storytelling. Frankly, it has barely even begun to do so.

“Nick Giannopoulos speaks for us all.”

For a people group so often left with no one to speak for them in national politics, this line stands out in particular as “travesty” and elicits laughs of recognition.

The final episode of the season, episode 4, is below, and deals most explicitly with Aboriginal Affairs and the issues facing our first Australians.

“I hear the Labor Party might still win the election.”

“Really? Are Labor good?”

“Very good. They have an excellent track record on indigenous affairs.”

“What have they done?”

“They said ‘sorry’ to us once.”

“When?”

“Three years ago.”

“And what about since then?”

“Lots of things. Every week they remind us that they once said ‘sorry’ to us three years ago.”

“If Labor hadn’t apologised we wouldn’t have the standard of living that we all enjoy today.”

“Yeah, we can only hope Labor gets back in.”

The national apology to the Stolen Generation in early 2008 was indeed a high water mark and, many hoped, the first step toward better social outcomes for Indigenous Australians. In this clip, the Chaser team, through the mouths of these Aboriginal Elders, remind us that there is so much still to be done, and that still none of the parties are mightily concerned with them (The Liberal Party fails to rate a mention – it’s former leader was the one who instigated the horrible “intervention” after all).

Aboriginal Affairs are not exactly high on the national agenda right now (are they ever???), and for various reasons. But I feel The Chaser, known for being provocative to the point of offense on occasion, have done loads for the cause with these skits, all while avoiding being either patronising or racist. Indigenous Australian’s are still Australian through-and-through and should be afforded all the same consideration they would be if they were white skinned, urban dwelling voters in a marginal electorate.

Australia is currently in a situation that remains extremely charged with political potential. Is it too much to hope Aboriginal Australians get a bit more consideration afterwards? If any of the pollies have been watching Yes We Canberra, there may be a better chance of that now than before.

It is supremely appropriate for Far Cry 2 that a dead king’s son – for whom it should be noted you have just committed an act of regicide – chooses to repay you with a gift that is completely and utterly disposable. A four wheel drive, even one with gold rims, is functionally no different to any other of the same type and is guaranteed to become a hindrance at some point, at which it will be unceremoniously left at the side of the road. The same type can be found scattered around several places and despite its tank-like appearance acts nothing like. Much more likely is that it endows you with a false sense of security and gets you killed.

And this one mission is just another little detail to contribute to the overall theme of disposability – disposability of life, vehicles, weapons, health. Nothing lasts, everything decays; No one gets out alive. The things that are indispensible to you are only those that were here before you arrived – the safe houses; the land itself – and the occasional things your buddies add to them.

Guns, while not biodegradable as pointed out so poignantly by The Jackal in one of his many tapes, are in fact the ultimate height of disposability. You aren’t even presented with the choice of keeping them – they rust, get jammed, and eventually self-destruct like a Mission Impossible style mission. “This gun will self-destruct after three more jams.” Life-safing syrettes of drugs are one shot, and never re-filled; they’re simply flung away to be replaced by a new handful later.

Disposability is built into the human aspects of the world.

This is a series of 5 “downloadable” blog posts that form what I’m calling “Words I-V” because each individual post is either Words 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5. Seems straightforward enough.

The point of them at the time of writing each one was slightly different for each, but they are loosely united by the desire to be as unconscious in my writing as possible; just let is all hang out for all to see; as little self censorship and self guidance as possible. Whether they succeed or they fail as anything else, they each stand on their own. You can read them in order, in reverse order, or no particular order. Not reading them also constitutes some level of engagement with them, since I take it that you are reading this post about them right now and your decision will be to either read or not read them. Unless you decide to read them and then don’t carry through on that decision because you put them on your desktop and never get around to them which is what I have a tendency of doing.

They are things, they exist. Here’s a download link.

If you like them, or even if you hate them, would you please tell me so?

I walked through the cool, dripping heart of a mountain today. It contained an inspiring number of caves filled with stunning white stalactites and stalagmites. A giant cathedral of a space easily 50m high, a room filled with an organ-like series of brilliant white columns, and numerous other chambers along the path were lit by delicate white lights from angles and hidden locations that helped set the spaces in the most majestic and beautiful way possible. A glittering wall of flowing limestone shimmered as one moved, looking so much like a wall of diamond-studded ice. A reflecting pool lit from below revealed the water’s pearlescent aqua colour. Another chamber twenty metres below disappeared into the black earth as the only light cast from the lamps faded into the gloom.

There were a few locations along the path set aside to better view particularly beautiful and sublime formations. At one of these, highlighting a particularly imagination stirring formation was a sign that explained the cave system had been named first been surveyed by a fellow by the name of Oliver Trickett. The sign reads,

He recorded and assigned names to many of the formations. The large orange formation he called “The Judges Wig”; nearby are the “Lambs Fleece” and the “Wedding Cake”. Today we prefer not to use fanciful names for such formations, but to present them for what they are.

Can you feel the exasperated nuisance the writer feels at having to tell the plebs about the irrelevant names given to these beautiful and wondrous formations? Why even tell us what the formation is called if today’s standards prefer to “present it for what it is”, as if one can simply present what A Thing is with one terse piece of scientific rational description. With what authority does the writer of the sign appeal to reality?

Truly, it is a cold and boring “reality” that seeks to replace the descriptive, the subjective, even the fanciful with… I don’t even know! They never say what it supposedly is, except to go on to say that “The orange tints are…due to iron.”

Have you been floored by the persuasive and rhetorical power of this rational description? Iron makes the formation look orange. I am simply in awe of nature.

The totality of the thing labelled The Judges Wig cannot be explained away in simple description by attributes, nor can it rightly be summed up in the “fanciful” name given it by Trickett. But it goes a lot further than any bland, textbook description ever could – it does look considerably like a Judge’s Wig, with a curved central back and columns flowing down the sides from it. I imagine that just knowing it is called “The Judges Wig” conjures more images (and perhaps more interest) in the thing than an attributive description.

You might ask, why pick on the poor National Parks and Wildlife Service sign writer? It’s because I believe that how we describe the world is important and non-trivial, and also because appeals to “reality” as if whatever reality actually is were something self-evident, itself smacks of arrogance, smugness and a lack of imagination. As someone who cares about the natural environment, with an interest in seeing it preserved and human impact upon it mitigated to the greatest possible extent (there’s a larger discussion about the place of humanity within nature that I’m deliberately not addressing here). I want people to be rhetorically persuaded of the importance and value of things like The Judges Wig. Just consider this – it has sat underground for millennia. It has probably gone unobserved for longer than there have been people to observe it. If the scale of that is not humbling, I don’t know what is.

Written on 20th of July while holidaying in the alpine town of Talbingo. Visit the thermal pools.

There’s a young man living in Brisbane who wears a sweet hat, talks really fast and with his weekly videos critiquing and criticising videogames draws multiple millions of views from around the world. His name is Yahtzee, he’s a British-born Australian, and he’s the king of videogame critics.

My thesis is about online videogame critics like Yahtzee and the communities that have grown up around them over the past number of years. Videogame criticism is still a pretty new deal – as recently as 2006 Chuck Klosterman noted in Esquire magazine that “There is no Lester Bangs of videogames”. Bangs being a bit of a rock star music critic of the 60’s and 70’s. Today there are literally hundreds of amateur and semi-professional videogame critics writing for hundreds of blogs and websites, and since 2007 when I first included myself in their number, I have seen the community explode with activity. My research will look into the particular community I’ve been involved with, document its emergence and characteristics, and use it as the focal point to examine three broad themes.

The first is inspired by an increasing wealth of literature that spells out the co-dependent relationship the human mind has with technology. It is becoming evident that far from simply shaping technology as in the great enlightenment narrative, rather human cognition is to an equal or greater extent shaped by the technology it engages with. How we evaluate the beneficial, detrimental, or ambivalent nature of those changes is an area still in development.

The technology central to my research, and the second broad area of investigation, is the internet. The globalised space of the internet would at first seem to repel or diminish expressions of nationality, but mounting evidence and my own observations suggests that the actuality runs counter to this. For a nation of a mere 20 million, there certainly seem to be a heck of a lot of Australian videogame critics operating on the internet – and Yahtzee, who I mentioned earlier, is just one of them. Why and to what extent the online community of critics attracts or encourages expressions of nationality will be investigated.

Thirdly and finally, I will attempt a reading of the critical videogame community on the internet as a place of resistance to neoliberal principles of capital. I will attempt to argue that internet communities, and the critical videogame community in particular, presents itself as an expression of disillusionment with and resistance to, “the right of capital to exercise its sovereign power wherever and over whomever it chooses” to quote Terry Eagleton. Nine times out of ten these critics do their work and give it away for free, and I think that’s significant.

In conclusion, the arrival of these communities of like-minded authors and critics, working together to develop ideas and expand a field of criticism, expressing cultures and identities that are both global and locally based, has been enabled by one of the most revolutionary technologies of the past hundred years. The Internet and the videogame critic, that’s the subject of my research.

I came across this picture/quote at the Archive Fire blog in a post entitled “nationalism is fascism“.

Until quite recently I would have unquestionably agreed with the title and sentiment of the post– nationalism is so close as to be identical to fascism in most cases, and it is quite often the case here in Australia. I’ve argued with people that there is no logical basis for patriotism, as all it consists of is an a priori assumption that your nation is better than another.

Blog author Michael suggests in the comment thread an alternative to nationalism that also resists the hegemonic term ‘globalism’ and it’s capitalist overtones, suggesting that,

…rich, diverse planetary ways of being and knowing open up possibilities that could compel us to be better with and for each other.

Which is all well and true, but as John Ralston Saul pointed out in his talk at the Sydney Writers festival recently, apart from a few global elites who spend their lives jetting around the world Ryan Bingham style, most of us are and will spend out lives as citizens largely of one place. For the majority of the earth’s population, we exist in a more or less single location.

Perhaps more to the point, what makes any one place in the world any more or less a part of the global thinking than any other? Why privilege the unknown/other place in your planetary/global thinking?

There seems in fact no other level to engage with “planetary ways of being and knowing” except the very local and immediate vicinity. It’s a cliché, but I think there’s truth to the oft denigrated slogan “think global, act local” and while it does ring with a sense of falseness and defeatism, I think that’s a result of a lack of momentum or the ‘critical mass’ necessary to make it work. If enough of us actually did think globally – or if capitalism were to be suddenly replaced with a system that included thinking globally – it would only make sense to act locally. Where else do we act other than where our own bodies and lives touch the earth?

Yes, let’s promote thinking and knowing on a planetary scale, as Jeremy Rifkin has suggested will be necessary if we are to stave off complete planetary entropic disaster. But we also aught not practice the mental writing-off of everywhere outside our own patches of turf until that critical mass is achieved, for that smacks of selfish short-sighted libertarianism.

In light of all this, I’m thinking again about nationalism and a piece I’m writing at the moment for the Killscreen Magazine. I’m writing about the issue of Australian nationalism and identity and while I won’t go into too many details, I would like to float the idea of a not entirely repulsive Australian nationalism based around an appreciation of the unique landscape that is outside our own back door.

Here’s an extract that I think speaks to the issue,

…the 1930s and 40s saw a resurgent interest in an Australian nationalism in connection with the land, and according to Bill Ashcroft and John Salter, saw the ‘establishment of a legitimate link between the people and the Australian landscape.’ In a three-part essay from 1935 on ‘The Foundations of Culture in Australia’ PR Stevenson, considering the case for an Australian identity, advocates for one informed by the environment itself. He suggests that ‘as the culture of every nation is an intellectual and emotional expression of the genius loci, our Australian culture will diverge from the purely local colour of the British Islands to the precise extent that our environment differs from that of Britain. A hemisphere separates us from “home”—we are Antipodeans; a gumtree is not a branch of an oak; our Australian culture will evolve distinctively.’

It probably helps that PR Stevenson was a beautiful raging communist in the years before he came home to Australia, turned into a nationalist, and began writing about how our twigs and grasses and venomous animals add to the national character. At least his brand of nationalism is an inward looking one, and not one facing an ominous, encroaching outsider.

So I’m going to say that the kind of ‘localism’ that involves a strong sense of connection to place, along with a nationalism approaching a communal acceptance of such, goes a long way towards planetary level empathy. I’m going to resist naively saying that it’s the solution, but perhaps it’s at least one solution.

You scoff at the thought of a videogame scaring you.

Then Penumbra: Overture tells you to “turn out the lights” and adjust your gamma settings until you can barely make out the image. It takes itself so seriously you start to doubt your own bravura – and you don’t entirely follow their instructions. You keep the lights on, a shadow of trepidation forms somewhere in the back of your mind.

The screen fills up, worrying you with its surprisingly easy immersive quality. No HUD, complex inventory system, fiddly physics to move objects. Things have real weight and heft; drawers slide out slowly as if it takes a great effort.

You’re now walking through a cave or a mine and the sound is sparse, hollow wind movements and you mistake hearing your own footsteps for someone else. You stop and whip around, scanning the darkness. But it was only your own footsteps. You begin to feel the paranoiac sensation of being followed even though no one is there.

You enter a room. A metal trapdoor slams back and forth suddenly, as though a terrible inhuman force is being applied to it in an attempt to Get To You. You jump a few centimetres out of your chair in surprise and cry out in half delight – instant reaction. You’re acting purely on instinct now, your body short-cutting your rational brain. In the wake of the scare the brutality of silence rushes out at you like a fist in pitch darkness and thumps you in the chest. The silence is worse than the noise – at least you knew where It was when It was making a sound.

A small gap between bars in the hatch permits some line of sight to what is on the other side. You don’t even want to see what’s on the other side. But you peer through. Nothing. It’s the only place you can go. You don’t want to go. As the seconds pass and the violence clamour stays away you build up your courage.

Over the next few minutes you take some time to hit [ESC] and sit on the menu screen, listening to the (by comparison) comforting sound of wailing wind. You alt+tab out and mention to friends the Sheer Irrational Terror gripping you. You haven’t even seen what it is that’s making you afraid.

And it’s exacerbating your growing sense of dread…

Capitalist Realism is the name of a rather new book by Mark Fisher, author of the K-Punk blog. Between the book’s quite stylish covers and in a relatively small number of pages Fisher outlines the pervasive, totalising power of capitalist realism, a political economy that says “Capitalism may not be the best, but there’s nothing better”. Built into the system is an inherent anti-capitalism that on-the-ground, that is, where it affects real people, makes the acknowledgment that “yeah, capitalism causes lots of problems but there’s nothing we can do about it”. Accordingly, that has become a realistic fact-of-life and no one is to blame since, after all, “Who really is it that actually wants poverty?”

Capitalist realism’s decentered existence (there is no-one to blame when it fucks up) deflects the issue from one of systemic failures and onto issues of personal responsibility; onto “What we can practically do”. It’s only suggestion is that if we bought the right products, like Bono’s product Red brand, then we could solve the world’s problems. It’s not capitalism’s fault that we’re so selfish!

In his final two chapters, Fisher points out that the political left needs to undertake a massive re-imagining or reinvention of a “collective will” to replace the methodological individualism that is a cornerstone of Capital with a big C. One of capitalist realism’s great successes has been in making the “alternatives” (note the deliberate use of scare quotes) appear untenable and unworkable, rather than replacing capitalism with a system that actually works, the end result being the current situation where we have a system that doesn’t work but we all have to pretend that it does.

Cynicism and pragmatism are the abiding dispositions of capitalist realism because it has embedded itself in our imaginations as the new natural order – as just the way things have to be done now. Fisher points to Lacanian psychoanalysis’s principal of “The Real” which “is not synonymous with reality” for our first warning that this is not the case. When we protest the failures and excesses of capitalism, we acknowledge the real-existing-reality and it’s incongruity with the vision of The Real as presented by capitalist realism. But for ‘the system’ to work, someone (or something) has to believe in its convenient fiction, and this is what Fischer describes as the big Other (another Lacanian term).

About a third to half-way into reading Mark Fishers incredibly thought provoking and quite punchy little book, I felt myself getting more and more depressed by capitalist realism’s pervasive irresistibility and it’s accepted position as natural or inevitable. The inability to resist capitalist realism’s seduction is a further amplifying affect, and I began to spiral into a kind of despair that will be familiar to anyone who has ever seriously faced the impossibility of the end of their own existence. To escape the spiral of despair, I got to thinking about alternatives, of which Fisher seems to only hint at in his final two chapters.

A lot of the books I’ve been reading lately about culture and technological change talk about artists and artisans pioneering ideas before philosophers come in to neatly colonise the ground they’ve ploughed with their tools (and that’s not meant as a criticism of philosophers). As a bit of a self-styled artist, working primarily in the medium of words, I thought I’d employ a little bit of bricolage as an attempt at a new strategy to figure out the name for an alternative to replace/supersede/expose capitalist realism before actually nailing out what it will actually do. So here are a few quick ideas and notes on them:

- Capitalist Absurdism
In this absurd political economy we would value (perhaps value is not the right terms here for it carries connotations of money) the most outrageous, the most provocative and the most absurd. This could even be a part-time political economy where we occasionally throw everything up in the air and go “to hell with it all”. While there is no doubt this political economy contains the potential for catastrophe, so does capitalism so we’re about even.

- Equality-nomics
Perhaps in this economy we could banish the profit motive and instil a rigid commitment to equality of income. No one earns any profit from their work above and beyond an arbitrarily decided amount which everyone everywhere receives equally. Neoliberal economists would most shrilly decry; “But no one would have any motivation to do anything!” to which we reply, “You don’t even believe your own axioms about the relationship between money and motivation, so why should we?”

This political economy has the added benefit of disestablishing the protestant work ethic which has proven so exceptionally and comprehensively destructive to individuals, families and communities for at least the past hundred years or so. If Art for Arts sake was the slogan of Modernity, Work for Works sake is certainly capitalist realisms. The social stigmatization of the unemployed and fetishisation of the figure of the “dole bludger” in Australian society is proof enough of this. While the unemployed get railed against for being freeloaders, not once do the railer’s themselves stop to consider whether the unemployed should participate in an economy that by all accounts is environmentally unsustainable (let alone whether they could – I would have thought that the dream of employment for all should have been recognised as such long, long ago).

- Dada Capitalism

Political economy for its own sake. Despite the fact that I called out ‘Work for Works sake’ earlier, this is perhaps the one I’d be most interested and perhaps the one with the most potential for implementation (not least of all by artists). Self-organising communities of artists could resolve to act (purchase?) based on Dadist ideals of being “anti-war… anti-bourgeois and anarchistic in nature.” If you’re noticing a trend in that these are all starting to look a bit the same, you’re right, and that perhaps speaks to my lack of imagination. Dada capitalism may also look quite similar to the next political economy called…

- Capitalist Nihilism
Think Fight Club and destroying or undermining all the capital you can possibly get your hands on – think also of The KLF burning £1m in the 1980’s, itself perhaps the most grand send off for the pre-neoliberal era imaginable.

- Capitalist Denialism
Think refusing to acknowledge the existence of money and living as such. Granted, capitalist realists will say “you won’t get far living like that!” but that close-minded inability to even consider alternatives to capitalism, that acknowledgment that it’s “the only game in town” is precisely what I’m trying to transcend. In actual fact, there is a man in the UK who has lived most excellently for a year without having anything to do with money.

And before you go thinking (and I know you’re thinking it, because I am too – it’s symptomatic of our conditioning to capitalist realism that we self censor like this) “none of this is realistic” or “we couldn’t all live like that” or any number of other thoughts about the relative plausibility of these or other political economic alternatives – just stop and realise that you’ve probably become complicit in capitalist realism.

We can un-think these kinds of thoughts, we can transcend the tendency to put so much stock in them that we fear to even consider the possibility of alternatives to capitalism. We just need to have a little bit of faith and imagination.

This was the first thing I saw when I woke up this morning. Totally made my day.

I joined Formspring to examine the practices and implications of a particular social technology, as it falls generally inside the area of study I am focussing on with my PhD. Formspring seemed like a good opportunity to practice analysing the socio-technical structures of a budding social network.

I tried to come to Formspring with as few prejudices as possible, or at least being as aware of the ones I possessed as much as could be. I initially considered Formspring a “fad” and my assessment of it has almost gone full circle. At least having tried it out I feel rather more justified about making the following assessment. As things stand, I find that as a piece of social technology it’s remarkably asocial, though not quite anti-social, and at least fails to promote social connections to the extent other social media has.

The first effect or change I noticed Formspring engendering in me was probably reasonably predictable, but the strength of it surprised me. Immediately after finishing up answering a bunch of the first questions I was posed by anonymous questioners I tabbed back to Facebook and noticed a status update about a friend stranded in a car-park in Penrith with a flat tyre.

The “answer questions” mindset stuck with me outside of the Formspring page, and I began to “answer” the non-question that was this friend’s status. My instant reaction short-circuited rational thinking, causing me to volunteer actual assistance which I would not have been so forthcoming with otherwise since I didn’t know this person exceptionally well. Lets just say that venturing out into the cold night stretches only so far for even my best friends… somehow I was still in “proffer information” mode and it was persisting beyond the Formspring site.

After typing my super-helpful comment where I offered to come help this (rather recently acquired friend) in his predicament, I checked myself. Did I really want to go help this person? It was cold and late. Realistically… no, probably not. Being in the Formspring mode made me at least temporarily more inclined to offer something. The first question raised by this is one of motive – if I was on autopilot was I even motivated by a selfless desire? (Whether that really makes a difference is an ontological debate we’re skip for now)

Certainly some have accused the motivation behind setting up a Formspring account to be one of ego. Simon Ferrari tweeted recently, “So yeah I know I always said I wouldn’t do Twitter, then caved. But I’m never gonna make a fucking Formspring. Seriously.” In a similar vein Michel McBride added comment, saying first “I always just saw it as an ego thing, like people with Twitter accounts who never respond to replies” and then clarifying by adding, “I mean formspring is ABOUT responding to people, but creating one in the first place is pure ego. Sometimes deserved, sometimes not”.

When people say that Formspring is ‘narcissistic’, I presume they’re often expressing doubt at the worth of having a service that allows people to ask you questions – surely if you have a burning desire to ask a question, you just ask someone. There’s nothing inherently narcissistic about being asked or answering a question. A bit of a stigma is attached to Formspring however (as demonstrate above) because using it requires the creation of an account, which seems to say something about the user when they join. That their opinion of themselves includes either, a) thinking that people might want to ask them questions and b) that their answers are worth reading or caring about.

One aspect of the service the importance of which often gets minimised, however, is the ability to ask anonymous questions. This feature needs to be underscored because of the impact it has on both the questioner and the answerer. Allowing for anonymous questions seems to have the main benefit of eliminating the sign-up barrier that would turn a lot of people away from asking a question. Anyone on the internet who knows the users account name can ask an anonymous question, provided that the user has agreed to allow for this.

For the person receiving the questions this adds a lot of confusion in question and answering. Interestingly, of all the questions I was asked on the first evening, only one was by a fellow Formspring user (and even she remained anonymous at first!), the rest were all anonymous (or other Formspring users asking anonymously).

Anonymity means the user has no way of knowing ‘who was who’ in current and previous questions. My natural tendency however, was to guess or infer who was behind each question and it influenced my answers each time. Furthermore, the anonymity fragments any conversation that may happen, and the lack of an ability to “comment” or reply to specific answers felt like a shortcoming. Somewhat interestingly, some of the other users (and I myself on one occasion) found ways around this inability – either through referring back to earlier questions in their answers, or by turning the act of asking a user a question into a comment on a previous answer. But unless a user is signed into their account and poses a question visibly then conversations get fragmented fast. Users answering questions may as well treat every question as though it were from a completely different person, but this goes against our natural instincts to guess who the anonymous person is.

The ability to ask anonymously makes the John Gabriel Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory only completely applicable to Formspring. The percentage of people receiving (and answering!!) rude and downright abusive questions was very close to 100. I asked a few inappropriate questions anonymously myself, just because I could. The seductive nature of anonymity is indeed a near irresistable force.

And lastly, the most importantly thing for anyone interested in the composition and make-up of Formspring to realise is that it rolls out a decidedly Socratic (or rhetorical) method of persuasion. The aforementioned inability to comment on an answer, which would turn it into a threaded discussion, means that a question is posed and the user is charged with answering it in a decidedly rhetorical manner while a near-silent audience looks on. The Socratic method has it’s pro’s and con’s, but it’s hardly the manner that I want to employ on a social network. As an aside, this exercise has actually been extremely valuable as it has led me to discover that I greatly prefer a dialectical method, involving a back and forth between parties in an attempt to reconcile differences of position and opinion.

It’s important to note that this Socratic method I’ve identified here is being employed by Formspring as a conscious and deliberate choice. Formspring as a piece of technology was designed and that design did not just fall from the heavens. It behoves us to examine and question both the implications and the validity of this approach. For me, and in light of Formpsring’s perceived role as a piece of social software, it meant an unwillingness to continue using the service, and I have since deactivated my account in response. As I said on twitter, I may not have been the first on the bandwagon, but I can still be one of the first off it.