From a “deep state” to “diagonalist” movements, our political-spatial mindset is changing through virtual technologies
The postmodern, globalized world of the 1990s has been described as incredibly resistant to mapping through theorists such as Fredric Jameson. He crafted his call through courageous “readings” of buildings like the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles: “Hanging banners. . . Virtual networks permeate this empty area in such a way that, in a formulaic and intentional way, they divert attention from the form it is intended to have, while constant activity gives the impression that the void here is surely filled. As Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues, the virtual networks were full. The internet even promised a new paradigm for interpreting the global and moving beyond the left/right binary formula that “third way” politicians like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were willing to paint as inherently obsolete.
In articulating their dreams of a networked political future, the cyber-utopians of the 1990s drew on an idealized past. Online, everyone would have access to a global public square where they could debate the key political issues of the day. This confidence underpinned acts of political theater such as Clinton’s “City Hall” webcast in 1999. Titled “The Politics of the Third Way in the Age of Inshapeation,” the occasion depicted the Internet as the Athenian agora of the 21st century. And like the Athenian agora—which served as a marketplace and forum for civic debate—the Clinton administration sought to have the Internet (which it had recently privatized) serve as an advertising area as well. Anti-hierarchical, decentralized, designed for smooth and instant exchanges. communication, virtual networks intrinsically compatible with this new form of end-of-history politics. It was clear that the expansion of the Internet would consolidate the ultimate victory of neoliberal capitalist democracy over all other ideologies.
Two years after Clinton’s webcast, political journalist Wayne Brittenden’s Political Compass online page featured it as another expression of his dissatisfaction with the left/right binary. After asking visitors 62 questions, the site placed them on a graph with 4 color-coded quadrants. The graph kept the left-right spectrum as the X-axis, but complemented it with a vertical axis that goes from libertarian to authoritarian. From the anarcho-capitalists on the lower right to the Maoists in the upper left corner, other ideological factions have been assigned their own coordinates in 2D space.
U. S. President Bill Clinton believed that new technologies could bring a strong economy to life. In the late 1990s, it was addressed to schoolchildren as part of NetDay (main image), which aimed to encourage access to computers and the Internet. As younger generations become increasingly disillusioned with political elites, they are designing their own “e-deologies. “These complex ideological labels “serve as a playful form of identity play and niche non-public branding,” says Joshua Citarella, who has created physical flags for them, adding Anarcho-Pacifist Selfishness, China’s New Federal State, Young Americans for Freedom, Traditional Slavonic. Agrarian, anarcho-transhumanist solarpunk and Austro-libertarian distributism.
Although the site remains popular, artist Joshua Citarella says it is wasting his ability to speak to a generation coming of political age in an era of intensifying crises. Citarella’s 2020 ebook, 20 Interviews, which combines conversations with Gen Z social media users active in radical political communities, features a dizzying array of remixes, revisions, and memetic expansions of the Compass. Some climb new dimensions; others replace what the X and Y axes follow; others further subdivide the four zones of the compass into a minutely granular mesh of difficult-to-understand nanoideologies with names like “Insurrectional Paleoaccelerationism” or “Chinese-Style Cryptodeleuzoid Anarchic-Transhumanism. ” As Citarella acknowledges, many of these photographs serve more as bullshit posts than as serious attempts at political theorizing. For him, however, they also reflect a real preference on the part of young people to find (or shape) ideologies to believe in. More than that, they recommend the impact of virtual media on how we perceive politics today. Citarella detects a notable influence of gamer culture in the way zoomers configure their political identity, as if specifying avatars for a role-playing game. He also recommends that his preference for carefully expressed ideological categories is not unexpected given that they grew up with platforms designed to classify and profile us, platforms where users are constantly begged to “identify” Array.
Citarella isn’t alone in arguing that social media platforms have fundamentally replaced the way politics is conducted. Nor is he alone in concluding that, far from being fundamentally welcoming to liberalism, such platforms may simply encourage its demise. For Alan Finlayson and Rob Topinka, my co-hosts of the Reactionary Digital Politics podcast, the wonderful political history of the last decade is the rise of a new generation of right-wing “ideological entrepreneurs” who have used virtual platforms to achieve mass goals. Public. For these influential reactionaries, the kind of deliberations and debates that liberals consider essential to the practice of politics are unnecessary, because politics as we know it is only a farce, a mere façade. If the symbol of the geopolitical Cold War setting were the “Iron Curtain” separating East and West, it might sound like some other theatrical metaphor: an affirmation that truth is represented in the scenes. But it is the virtual screen, not the stage, that provides the true metaphorical basis here.
“It was evident that the expansion of the Internet would consolidate the definitive victory of neoliberal capitalist democracy over all other ideologies. »
As users of virtual devices, we know that when we look at our laptops or phones, there is an invisible layer of programming underlying what we see. While the interface can give us some degree of control, we find that to really make a difference we want to interfere at the code level. This is the promise that reactionary influencers make: to take their subscribers beyond the interface. This promise is summed up in the symbol of the red pill, a metaphor taken from the Matrix. Justas Neo will have to be fit to see through the simulated truth that surrounds him before he can put on his leather trench coat and lose humanity, so they implore their audience to wake up to the ghost of liberal democracy. In 2016, those claims discovered an architectural correlate in the form of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria. According to a conspiracy theory spread on the platforms 4chan and As conspiracy theorists claimed, the traffickers operated from the basement of the building; In fact, the building had no basement. The hidden depths that were complex simply did not exist.
And yet, the concept that genuine fact lies somewhere beyond or below the political interface remains appealing. Moreover, it turns out to be mobilizing ever broader and more varied coalitions. The post-pandemic era has seen a marked increase in what Quinn Slobodian and William Callison have called “diagonalist” movements. These movements have blurred the familiar left/right polarity, attracting adherents ranging from New Age hippies to far-right extremists. What unites these comrades is their shared trust in the machinations of a “deep state. “manipulate the political game for their own nefarious ends. This is an alarming development, a sign that the rhetoric and concepts rooted in the far right are making their way into subcultures and communities generally considered liberal or progressive.
Clusterduck’s Meme Manifesto seeks to document “the new memetic landscape” and jointly investigate “the hidden sides of the internet. “It takes the form of a website, a series of workshops and a physical installation, “Detective Wall”, recently exhibited. together with the flags of Citarella, in the exhibition Poetics of Encryption at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the web has also proven to be a valuable tool for connecting people. As part of an assignment to document the Black Lives Matter protests, Sara Dilliplane drew a picture of the online vigil she attended on June 5, 2020. to honor one hundred victims of police violence.
So is there any good news? In a recent verbal exchange on the Politics Theory Other podcast, Naomi Klein discussed one of the ultimate visual manifestations of pandemic-era diagonalism: the convoy of truckers that occupied the Canadian capital of Ottawa in early 2022. Klein had eyes clear on the points. That made the occasion so unsettling, adding the presence of a contingent of avowed Nazis among disgruntled small business owners and vaccine-skeptic mystics. At the same time, he noted that the convoy revealed serious cracks in the edifice of networked global capitalism, demonstrating that it is still imaginable to build alliances across demographic divides and exercise a politics of genuine tension by disrupting the movement of physical intelligence to through physical space. Array Klein also noted the pride with which “truckers took journalists around their camp, you know, like ‘this is our organization’s kitchen, this is the daycare. ‘” Although its reasons varied from mistake to active poisoning, Klein admits that the convoy presented a “glimpse of a genuine choice” in which the urban area is laid out along very different lines, suggesting a widespread preference for having more interaction. deep with what comes next. the whole basic task of politics: that of inventing tactics of coexistence.
Addressing the elusive mandate of an architectural exhibition, Sto Werkstatt was. . .
The popular myth of an immaterial Internet our peoples to. . .
Using Asset Libraries to Create Videos raises questions of. . .
The proliferation of knowledge centers, essential for technological progress, has destructive consequences. . .
A technological layer is already superimposed on museum spaces, and a layer of technology is expanded. . .
The tactics of seeing produced through open-world video games owe a lot to colonialism. . .
51N4E | Jaspers-Eyers Architects | CUA | Healthcare Professional | Happel, Cornelisse, Verhoeven. . .
Democratic processes are inherently spatial, yet the buildings and environments that space them. . .
Join the line