Re: <nettime> made for TV, made for social media

Dear Felix, Brian, Seb, et al,

I would not say that it was a great thing that happened, but it certainly was an 'ok' thing to have happened, especially if you believe in representational democracy.

Conditions that prompted Trump to take advantage of his "base" back in 2016 -- poverty, lack of education, lack of digital infrastructure, unemployment, farm problems - and which have raised the spectre of depleted rural populations (see tons of press across the States including the NYTimes on this subject) still hold true. For one, Trump, despite his "love" for them, has done '0' to help them. No vaccines rushed in when rural states became the most beleaguered, for instance. His gameplaying with them and manipulation of them is not to their advantage, but fuels some other need - the need for a leader to speak to them - the need for a father figure whatever...not to mention that right-wing authoritarian, mostly white male, but not only...and far right fascist groups have long existed in their own wierd fashion. These people have a voice and they need to be able to feel that government buildings which their (probably increased) taxes paid to build, belong to them in some way. Obviously they had support - from the 100 Repubs inside - whose lives are far more bizarre and contradictory than the poor saps believing in Trump and Trumps presidency (they will probably not benefit too much from wilderness drilling - this is getting into semiotic landscapes). Their lives have been won on the premise that elections could be won. Now we know, and we know more than we ever did, that Republicans shout voter fraud while gerry mandering and suppressing the vote. We know now that they are willing to take that already fraudulent set of declarations all the way to the top of the democratic ladder - in order to besmirch not only the election processes "held dear" but the incoming Biden presidency. (Solnit states it right)

And by calling the 2020 election unfair, and by extension then, all elections as they now stand as possibly fraudulent, they are sending us backwards ad infinitum.

The "insurrection" was televised and looked bad from all sides. Chants of "we will be back and we will be armed" only speak to the NRA and so forth fueling gun power. (again Solnit nails it)

If you believe in democracy as being representative of all the people, then you need to allow people to express themselves, even if they are delusional. "These liberties come from our Creator...no where else".
I'm glad the cops weren't more violent than they were. That would have made everything worse because this mob likes to be victim.
I'm glad they got to "revolt."
I'm glad their faces were unmasked on TV (not because of Covid, but because we could see them) and that they are in the news as ruffians and anti-democratic. They look and act worse than ever. They do not look heroic or even righteous.

And, once Trump is out, many of the worst will crawl back into their lairs and breed little swastikas. (I looked but did not see any swastikas in the crowd). They will do what they have been doing for years in places like Idaho, Texas, Montana, Michigan - planning the great insurrection of powerless white men who want power.

What remains to be seen is - will rural states gain economic relief, Covid relief, educational relief. Will these same people be given numerical evidence of how much Trump ripped them off and can they be turned to the Left, such that their rage against "the government" is directed in a more productive way?

Molly

molly hankwitz - she/her

http://bivoulab.org

On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 11:29 AM seb olma <sebolma@xs4all.nl> wrote:

Brian at his best, thank you so much for this!

Best,

Seb

On 7 Jan 2021, at 19:25, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 2:32 AM Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com> wrote:
I followed, like many others I presume, yesterday's events in Washington
on TV (cnn) and on social media at the same time. And it seems pretty
clear that this event was made on, through and for social media....
[...lots of other very cogent observations here...]
I'm far away, maybe miss-reading this entire thing.

It's too early to tell. However there is an opposite interpretation.

In my view, far from being a harbinger of possibly worse threats to come, yesterday's events were the most positive thing that could have happened. I had hoped - dreamed - that we would see something exactly like this.

The reason why is that through these events, we as a country left the world of "harbingers" and "possible threats" behind. Simultaneously, we left behind the pretense that populist Republicans are "merely" engaged in political theater. The day began with the usual push-the-limits posturing from Senator Ted Cruz and his allies: yet another page from the rhetorical playbook developed by Newt Gingrinch in the early 1990s. But then the play-acting devolved into an ugly insurrection carried out by crude, stupid and very obviously manipulated people. They were directly incited by the highest powers, via social media for sure, and television, and radio, and print journalism, and above all by the hottest channel of all: live rallies. The theater had consequences. The possible became real. And so a choice between conflicting realities could finally occur.

Amazingly, no bomb exploded, no automatic weapons came out at dusk, there was no massacre. The pretense of "political theater" that fomented the uprising also took the place of, and disallowed, any serious planning for collective violence. Instead the entire country got a close look at an inchoate, yet very dangerous mob whose worldview is paranoid and delusional. Sure, we had seen these folks already, many times. Yet this time there was no equivocation as to who was leading. When Pence and McConnell took their last-minute stand in favor of the Constitution, Trump sent his thugs to oppose them. And with their actions, Trump's people - the real, unequivocal "deplorables" - finally lanced the boil of Trumpism.

When the Western forests burned and smoke hung for weeks over Seattle and San Francisco, it became obvious to a majority of Americans that climate change was real. Similarly, when the windows were shattered at the Capitol, it became obvious that a politics based on staged and calculated insurrectionary rhetoric leads to real violence and institutional breakdown.

Rather than subjecting it to a media-theoretic analysis, I think it would be realistic to see yesterday's electoral count event as a "total social fact." The phrase by Marcel Mauss refers to moments of collective ritual in which the pragmatic administration of functions coincides with the charismatic or magical _expression_ of values. For Mauss this is a dynamic ritual with all the density, complexity and precarity of lived experience. It is a real force because it tests out the validity of social fictions. It is a total fact because it upholds, but to some extent also transforms, a society's core affective and cognitive assumptions about what the world is and how it works.

The pragmatic function of yesterday's certification ritual was to confirm the peaceful transferral of state power. Yet what it became, dynamically, was a challenge to and subsequent re-affirmation of all the procedures, values and aspirations attached to the society-wide practice of democracy. This was not a monolithic, mythical, predetermined ceremony, even though that was what everyone was fearfully hoping it would be. Instead it was dynamic, open-ended, touch and go, extremely vulnerable. And look at what it actually did.

It reconfirmed, in the evening, the about-face of political power that had occured in the morning, when the results from Georgia came through. In this way, it opened up the possibility for a Democratic administration to actually legislate: to move transformative laws through both the House and the Senate. Not just Trump, but three decades of Republican mendacity and opportunism were pushed aside. And that event did not merely happen over social media, or on talk radio, or on the Hannity show. It was not just another piece of calculated political theater. It was a society-wide event: a total social fact.

Not only that, but from the media-theoretic viewpoint, something extremely interesting did occur: Twitter censored Trump and blocked his communications for 12 hours. The anarcho-capitalist media took one giant step towards accepting their integration in the overall political process.

So we dodged a bullet yesterday, for sure. And something a lot more important may potentially have happened.

There comes a point where you have to be counter-factual, you have to engage in what Mauss calls "magical thinking." You have to take a role in a theater that really does have consequences. That tipping-point is now. I will participate in the collective actions of a society that starts to reverse the tremendous harms it has been committing for decades and centuries. I will help to transform the pragmatic administration of social functions.

all the best, Brian

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