Re: <nettime> In God We Tryst

re: this post and Brian's last post (albeit coming from a media angle rather than legal/institutional), I've been working on a text on the Capitol storming and Parler's relationship to it. Might be interesting to some on the list. Feedback welcome of course.

More than a Mob: Parler as Preparatory Media for the Capitol Storming

On January 6 2021, a violent mob attacked the United States Capitol. Yet while mob suggests a chaotic and fragmented crowd, networked media had already been working to provide it with "just enough" cohesion, transforming it into a more dangerous political body. This article conceptualizes this preparatory media by examining the "free speech" social media network Parler, drawing on a corpus of ~350,000 posts from the days leading up to and including the attack. This material empirically demonstrates how media worked to forge connections between disparate camps, to incite participants toward violent activity, and to legitimate this attack as moral or even spiritual. Preparatory media frames events, establishes targets, and sets agendas, providing a degree of order and working against disaggregation online. This temporary stabilization contributes to a more mobilized and organized public body. Rather than prosocial or emancipatory, the Capitol storming demonstrates the far darker potential of this work. Understanding this role of media and intervening within these logics provides one component for preventing future attacks.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348608060_More_than_a_Mob_Parler_as_Preparatory_Media_for_the_Capitol_Storming

cheers,

Luke

On Tue, 26 Jan 2021 at 07:51, McCorkle T. Diamond <terence.diamond@gmail.com> wrote:

This idea has been on my mind for a while and is serious. The U.S. equivalent of de-Nazifying white supramacists needs to be done. When - immediately. How, is the question.

McCorkle Terence Diamond
www.terencediamond.com
646-876-1700

The sage does not hoard
The more he helps others, the more he benefits himself.
The more he gives to others, the more he gets for himself.
The way of heaven always does one good and never does one harm.
The way of the sage is to act but do not compete.
- Lao Tze

On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 1:19 PM Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sunday [fittingly - BH], Jan 24, 2021 at 1:32 PM Joseph Rabie <joe@overmydeadbody.org> wrote:

Perhaps, in terms of fascism, fundamentalist religion is what is being substituted for the state.

Contradiction doesn't bother these people. They are anti-state nationalists. Traditional fascism gets folded in as part of nationalism. For them, being against the state means getting rid of those aspects of government that don't fit their world picture. Ideally, a Christian state would solve all their problems, but in the meantime, the White nation is good enough. If you try to find coherency here, there is none.

Fundamentalist religion already requires the rejection of reality in favor of myths and miracles. The pathological narcissism of social media works perfectly for them: it provides a frame of reference for their communalist imaginary. They look for secret knowledge (gnosis) and find it in the palm of their hand. They commune with God through their cell phone, while fulfilling some politician's plan.

After the war, the Allies set about de-Nazifying Germany. To do this they had to consider the Germans, not only as entirely deluded, but also as a kind of social material that could be reworked, reshaped like putty in their hands. To be sure - and this is crucially important - their goal was not to produce robots or ideologized slaves. Their goal was to restore, or perhaps create, the kind of individual autonomy and the kind of citizenship that prevails in capitalist democracies.

No one will say it explicitly, but it is now urgent to "de-Nazify" the USA. As in post-WWII Germany this must be done with new laws, new institutions, and also with new cultural contents (words, images, figures). But there is obviously a big difference. This time our own capitalist democracy has been at the origin of the problem. What do the ideal citizens of the twenty-first century look like? How can they be produced? By whom?

The question is serious, and answering it demands a new philosophical account of what a human is and can be, along with new forms of society-shaping agency. We should not be ashamed of trying these new accounts out in public debate. After all, Twitter and Facebook have already built out a new account of what a human is and can be, and they have done so at global scale. Surely we can find a better way.

Brian
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