Re: <nettime> So what's the use of art, theory, activism?

[Sean Cubitt via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

dire and dark times. Polling suggests even more support for authoritarian / dictatorship models; the vulnerability of ‘opinion’ to massive interventions by well-funded state and commercial interests makes them untrustworty, but that was always the case with democracy, the worst system. possible apart from all the others. Its cardinal sin is that to get elected, a party has to become an alliance between factions, and one way or another Labour, Liberal, Democrat and other loosely progressive alliances fall prey to their most conservative members. Rolling back from pledges to deal with war, climate and poverty is commonplace. A other of us end up voting strategically on the principle that Greens and otherprogressive-socialist  blocs that might make a difference are unelectable. 

Cyborg capital depends on waste to secure growth, which it needs like a shark needs to swim: simply to survive. War as waste, environment as externality to be exploited and dumped into; people as waste, especially now the spurt of growth formed by subsuming consumer data under capital is becomig exhausted in the AI industries.  Despair is a symptom of waste humanity. It has the extra benefit of deflating resistance. Totalitarianism is the pretense of totality: in reality, it is never complete, universal or coherent enough to survive. 

Consideration - to be considerate and to consider consequences -- and imagination – counter-factual, multiple – are the prerequisites for the act that is despair’s only remedy: making. 
This may take some time: 

Die Kriifte waren gering. Das Ziel
Lag in groBer Ferne
Es war deutlich sichtbar, wenn auch fiür mich
Kaum zu erreichen.

Our forces were slight. Our goal
Lay far in the distance
It was clearly visible, though I myself
Was unlikely to reach it.

Seán Cubitt

I acknowledge the Boonwurrong and Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin nation on whose unceded lands I live and work

> On 24 Jan 2025, at 10:00 pm, nettime-l-request@lists.nettime.org wrote:
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>   1. Re: So what's the use of art, theory, activism?
>      (d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk)
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> Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2025 02:26:18 -0700
> From: d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk
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> 	collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets"
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> Subject: Re: <nettime> So what's the use of art, theory, activism?
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> Trumpism and other autocratic strongmen of the new era of ?the deal? 
> routinely claim to be an insurgency displacing elites. But so far the 
> most impactful voice I have heard challenging this narrative has been 
> Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, speaking in the post inauguration service. 
> She quietly but defiantly forced Trump and his acolytes to endure a 
> sermon asking for compassion and mercy for those individuals and 
> communities that are being targeted and living in fear. And she did so 
> in a manner that highlighted the key way in which Trumpism for all its 
> cheap religiosity contradicts the core of the Christian message, which 
> contains the weird and radical claim that it is better to endure 
> suffering than to be the cause of suffering. In simple language it 
> exploded all of Trump?s expedient and hubristic claims of being an 
> instrument of divine intervention. Maybe it opens up surprising avenues 
> of resistance that escape pocket book politics and the usual sterile 
> liberal pieties.
> 
> David Garcia
> 
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