Re: <nettime> Phillips/Beyer/Coleman: "false assumption that

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 04/21/2017 04:44 AM, David Garcia wrote:

> The question B) More interesting is the second question: Is there something 
> inherently alt-right in Anonymous?  Is also tackled in some depth by
> Coleman et al but conclude that the relationshp between alt-right 
> “trolling” to 4Chan and Anonymous as no more or less than a subset of a 
> faction of an ever-evolving, ever unstable, ever reactive anonyous online 
> collective…
> 
> Only one thing is clear to me in the fog of meme wars and ever more dubious 
> narratives around post-truth and alt.fact, is that the frequently despised
> discipline of -media literacy- needs to be urgently recuperated and updated.

Unlike Biella I have no sustantial research, only an opinion on this 
question.

On a horrible disgusting nazi website I read this horribly disgustingly 
thing:

"It was on 4chan’s /pol/ that most of the core concepts of what is now 
the Alt-Right were figured out. Many of the key “anons” (anonymous 
imageboard posters) from this group were people who had previously been 
involved in 4chan’s /b/, which is where modern internet trolling 
techniques originated.

"The anonymous nature of 4chan allowed for all different sorts of people 
to get together and discuss all sorts of ideas, without having those 
ideas attached to an identity of any kind (not even an internet 
pseudonym). Anti-Semitic and racist jokes had been a key feature of /b/, 
but on /pol/ the sentiments behind the jokes slowly became serious, as 
people realized they were based on fact. /pol/ became a haven for 
virulent anti-Semites and aggressive racists, and tone of the Alt-Right 
is drawn directly from these roots on 4chan.

"On 4chan, the Jewish problem was analyzed by news junkies and history 
buffs, feminism was deconstructred by sexually frustrated young men, and 
race was considered based on the actual data on the issue. The 
rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP largely took place on 4chan."

https://www.dailystormer.com/a-normies-guide-to-the-alt-right

OK, like Felix I HAVE done a lot of research to show that this is a 
systemic crisis, which means that the structure of the global political 
economy is at a breaking point. All the elements in the 
politics-culture-economy-nature relationship are therefore changing.

My opinion is that the Internet, including but not only social media, 
brings this process of change to immediate mass expression in such a way 
that for most participants, the whole process is MORE reactive, MORE 
unconscious, than ever before. People across the earth are being pounded 
by intimate outbursts of psychosocial passion twenty-four hours a day, 
seven days a week. Forces of systemic change - or you could say, 
geo-historical forces - are coursing through the nervous systems and 
keyboards of individuals tied into a vast resonating system with no 
rudder. It screeches, vibrates wildly and lurches with no chance, for 
most participants, to draw a breath, find a moment of quiet and 
formulate a response to any of the hundreds of things that may happen 
next.  Under these conditions, it's an understatement to say that media 
literacy is more important than ever. Literacy means you have an 
interpretive framework to make sense of a deluge of signs. Yet we do 
not. Even on this list we constantly see people's interpretive 
strategies breaking down, because they were not forged within the new 
paradigm.

The only way to regain any kind of political autonomy - by which I mean, 
the capacity to relate deliberately to the present - is to form groups 
that feel, think, discuss and act. The group needs dense ties allowing 
it to set up an internal resonance that can rival with the systemic 
noise. It needs times and spaces for members to formulate thoughts and 
submit them to a discussion that is not erased by next week's emergency. 
And it needs to act, both to achieve things and in order to experience 
the capacity to steer something in society. Finally, it needs to 
interrelate with other groups, not on the basis of the raw expression of 
the unconscious described in the horrible nazi rant above, but instead, 
on the basis of a sharable constructive aspiration. Only in this way can 
it take a further step, toward joining a larger systemic formation that 
can help resolve the crisis.

The social unconscious is a horrible disgusting thing, right now in the 
so-called Western societies anyway. But we are all inhabited by drives. 
Take care of your selves and your groups in the years ahead.

Brian

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