News from the Collective

Three days ago, with so much going on—and not going on—in my own country and around the world, a small anniversary slipped by: the one-year mark since Open Book Publishers issued my third book and first open-access title, Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels.

Two months ago, I wrote to OBP Marketing and Library Relations Officer Laura Rodriguez—whose enthusiasm for her titles is benignly contagious—that the book had ‘just blasted past 2,000’. As of this morning, online readership stands at 1,800 and free downloads at 883, for a total of just under 2,700. The three-thousand mark can’t be too far away.

Of course, the spike in ‘sales’ is partly based on tragedy. Tennyson scholars in the US, the UK, and around the world—like me and like millions of other scholars literary and otherwise, academic and independent—are holed up at home waiting for the current plague to pass, hoping it will spare them and their loved ones, hoping—and trying—to get on with their lives.

So the seven-hundred jump in readers of my book over the past two months is at least partly attributable to a lot of folks suddenly having, against their wishes and through no fault of their own, a lot of time on their hands.

Be that as it may, a reader is a reader, and is very welcome. It is heartening that so many scholars and students of literature are, like me, doing their best to put their captivity to good use, to read something new, learn something new, perhaps write something new. We may never become modern-day prisoners of Chillon, learning to love our chains. But our unexpected and unwelcome abundance of free time need not also be unproductive.

After publishing my Tennyson book last year, I turned to the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, found much of it (to be perfectly frank) forgettable, but fell in love with Aurora Leigh. A half-dozen readings of that verse-novel and related criticism later, I wrote an article-length study of the unidentified and misidentified textual parallels—allusions and echoes—it contains, submitted it to a leading literary journal which sent it out for review, and am now waiting to hear back. All that before the new coronavirus hit.

Since it hit, I’ve returned to the study of Emily Dickinson, who in the 1860s also fell in love with Aurora Leigh, and whose letters, I’ve been finding, are also filled with undocumented textual parallels. Her poetry as well? That remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

One of the miracles of modern technology is, I’ve discovered, how much literary research one can do at home. Without password and without charge, one can access virtually all of pre-twentieth century world literature and criticism, and much of more recent origin.

One can search for words, phrases, lines, and passages in the works of one or more poets, novelists, dramatists and others authors, as well as in scripture, that recognizably recur, for a variety of thematic and other valid reasons, in the works of other, later writers.

One can do meaningful scholarship without having already read everything there is to read and remembered verbatim everything one has read.

Open Book Publishers and other enterprises like it (if any such exist) are also miracles of modern technology, making peer-reviewed, well-edited, well-produced scholarly works widely and immediately available without charge to any and all would-be readers.

By helping scholars and students get through these difficult times and learn something of value along the way, they are performing a valuable public service, deserving and earning the gratitude of authors and readers alike.

R. H. Winnick is the author of Tennyson's Poems: New Textual Parallels. You can read & download this book for free or get your own hard copy here. You can also read Winnick's previous blog post Allusion/Echo and Plagiarism: Walking the Fine Line here and follow him at @rhwinnick.

By Ellyn Toscano

We are living through a moment  of profound disorientation,  dispossession, dislocation. How the pandemic will end – and it will – and how we return to social, political and commercial life is uncertain and almost too difficult to anticipate. With no direct experience on which to call for guidance, most of us find it hard to anticipate or plan our future.

Millions of people are sheltering in their homes, isolated from each other and incited by fear to suspect others of bringing this threat into their world. Those nationalist movements that have been slowly gaining adherents to the view that globalization represents an incursion on safe, secure and homogeneous cultures are triumphant in the work that the pandemic is doing to close borders, incite xenophobia and restrict liberty. With so many ill and vulnerable, the attention of the paralyzed public to the plight of migrants huddled perilously closely in detention centers or migrant camps or prisons is diverted.

Not everybody has a safe home into which to retreat and resources on which to rely when work is lost. What will happen to people already displaced by war, famine, globalized climate change and nationalist governments? The world’s 25.9 million refugees already are in situations of conflict, often with no or rudimentary health care. In the US, 37,000 people were detained, unsafely, in government facilities; 6,300 migrants  on its Mexico border were expelled using emergency powers to curb coronavirus spread. In one of Greece’s 30 migrant centers on the mainland, 23 migrants tested positive for coronavirus and residents, including 252 unaccompanied children, were  advised to remain in their rudimentary temporary dwellings. Migrant workers, who travel long distances for work, including across borders, already precarious and marginal, are losing jobs. With borders slamming shut, people can neither stay put, nor return to the places from which they have fled.

The numbers by which we define this pandemic are staggering and hard to comprehend. Hundreds of thousands of people are sick and dying from COVID-19. Millions have lost their livelihood. Billions of dollars are lost and billions are appropriated to save the economy.

As always, the numbers have unstable meaning and elide the lived experiences of people. It is not that the statistics are unimportant: they tell us one truth. But, as always, truth is ambiguous. And ambiguity is the space of artists.

The work in Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History reminds us of the beauty and complexity of the lived experience. Art holds a space for the human story. These essays are an historical offering, helping us to think about home and loss, family and belonging, isolation, borders and identity – issues salient both in experiences of migration and in the epochal times in which we find ourselves today.

Women and Migration contains stories of trauma and fear, to be sure, but also the strength, perseverance, hope and even joy of women surviving their own moments of disorientation and dislocation.

Ellyn Toscano is co-editor of Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History (2019). The book is Open Access (free to read and download).

Episode 1 with introduction: https://networkcultures.org/blog/2020/04/09/selfies-under-quarantine/

Episode 2: STORYTELLING OR ‘STORIES’?

In collaboration with Danielle, Shaina, Briana, Jackie, Marta, Gabriella, Sydney, Elena, Sophia and Natalia

This week’s readings:

Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’ and his short story The Handkerchief. Maisa Imamovic, ‘Aesthetics of Boredom in Times of Corona’. We watched Jenny Odell’s talk on ‘How to Do Nothing’.

I thought about Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’. Three quotes:

‘We wait. We are bored. No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste.’

‘The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.’

‘Tomorrow when I wake or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot?’

INSTA VS. BENJAMIN

As last week we approached ‘boredom’, this time I feel I need to talk about Walter Benjamin’ and his ‘storyteller’.

Let’s forget about Nikolai Leskov and reflect about storytelling and the art of Instagram stories instead, I propose.

Natalia thinks that ‘storytelling is about having something to say that is of intangible nature and value. The story of experience is intangible’. So, ‘can storytelling happen face-to-face? Yes. Can it happen online? I think no’, is her ultimate answer.

Gabriella is also skeptical about how the two things could eventually match. ‘Anyone can create Instagram stories… Storytelling used to be an art made by those who had a talent, now stories via Instagram are all inclusive and people with no talent at all can participate and create their own story’.

And yet there is something that gets irremediably lost with storytelling long before ‘Insta’ and the social media speed, Benjamin points out. Before our obsessive culture of the snap takes off, something happens already with the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. Printing deprives us of a certain pace, that of the epic, the familiar, the ‘told’, and replaces it with the novel, the fresh, the exceptional, the contemporary, the unfolding.

Briana writes: ‘No wonder why Benjamin opposes the “novel” to storytelling: the word novel, in fact, derives from the latin adjective “novus” which means “new”. The entry of the novel into modernity therefore seems to be following the increasing speed of life, and to satisfy our induced hunger for immediacy’.

The space of creation becomes a space of production, a functional space made by page numbers, bibliographies, printed copies, shelves to be filled, books to be sold. The space of creation turns into a space of solitary confinement, where the writer thinks in isolation and in function of, while no longer telling stories from experience, whether his own or others’.

This ‘social distancing’ ante litteram sells copies and creates reputations, yet it deprives from the gift of wisdom, empathy, connection.

Experience muted, collectivity erased, words eventually sink into the abyss of information, a mere collection of data that does not survive the ephemeral moment in which it was ‘new’.

Caption: newyorkercartoons A cartoon by @rozchast, from 2010

‘This whole issue’, Briana points out, ‘made me think about the structure of the ancient Greek square (the Agorà) versus the structure of what we think are our new squares, social media. What I found out is that the physical space of the Agorà, with its circular structure, conveyed and promoted inclusion (and therefore collectivity): the circle itself is a way to embrace and represent the democratic ideal of equality, supported by the circle’s definition being “a continuous curved line which points are always the same distance away from a fixed central point”. Social media’s structure, instead, is designed to place those who are more interconnected in the center and those who are less interconnected at the periphery, which Maisa Imamovic refers to when stating that “digital reality became knowledge competition […] for the sake of strengthening our online reputation in the eyes of the beholder”.

In fact, what we try to do on social media is to be more and more interconnected, trying to reach the center of the network, which we can visually picture by looking at this image:

The goal to enrich one’s online self is bigger than the goal to enrich any hypothetical discussion. People are not trying to build a community because in the first place they are not enabled by the structure; in the second place, because of the structure, the main goal is not to be all on the same level, but to get to the core of the network, enriching the online self by interacting as much as possible’.

Sophia’s words below echo Briana’s last point about capitalizing on the networks’ structure in order to create a brand, a social reputation, more followers. Even in times of crisis. Or, better said, especially in times of crisis.

‘I have noticed that YouTubers in general and other content creators have been publishing more than usual. Sure, it could be because of the excess amount of time they have on their hands, or it could be because they are trying to capitalize on all the clicks and views they can coax out of their followers during this time when everyone is on lockdown. It almost feels as though the content creators are preying on our boredom and giving us below standard content, whether it be video or blog posts, because they know we will click no matter what at this point’.

Shaina agrees that ‘social media influencers are really taking off during this time. A lot of people with a strong social media following who have a talent, a business, something worth value, that they can share with the world have seemed to really capitalize on these circumstances’.

Yet she does not think that this happens just because of the attention economy upon which social media influencers earn money and reputations. ‘I am honestly thankful for influencers like these because they have kept me busy and entertained during this time. I have hopped on the bandwagon for Chloe Ting’s 2 week summer shred, I keep up with Tasty for new, creative recipes that I cook with my family. It is people like this who are keeping me active during this period’, she concludes.

Danielle shows examples of ‘how a fitness influencer and a streaming service are continuing to advertise and grow business during this time’:

‘People capitalizing on the quarantine: the ads being pushed on Instagram have been interesting, a ton of workout and fitness supplement companies have been pushing content. Work on your summer body during this quarantine, you finally have the time.

I have also noticed a lot of streaming services have been pushing their services as you have the time to binge now.

I think this attitude of continuous productivity is detrimental to the empathy and processing that should be occurring during this time…Nurses are enduring 12 hour shifts day after day watching their patience die before them (video). I feel ashamed to be part of a culture that ignores the pain and trauma others are enduring’.

‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING’ IS THE NEW ‘HOW ARE YOU’

Maisa Imamovic: ‘By now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information’, Benjamin prophetically writes. You can picture him being ‘here’ with us, patting on the shoulder of someone like you experiencing severe FOMOI symptoms, the new syndrome of a crisis time, aka FEAR OF MISSING OUT ON THE INFORMATION….WFOR (whether fake or real).

Gabriella has experienced FOMOI: ‘especially this week I have been offline. I have stoped looking at Twitter that often, I have ignored social media a little and every night I feel I missed valuable information… Even if we go offline especially during this time I feel there is more anxiety of not knowing what is happening than while we are online’.

But is it really information that we are missing? And what’s the value of information that is injected in the data stream non-stop?

Natalia has a name for it: ‘the infrastructure of doing’. ‘Facebook never asks you ‘what are you thinking now.’ It is always about doing, performing an action, producing or consuming something, seeing or participating in the event that is unfolding in the never-ending loop of commodified entertainment. Boredom is no fun. Even if it were, it would be tricky to commodify on a mass scale. Boredom is no fun for our commercialized day-to-day reality because its essence is inherently individual and fluid, and it is tied to what it unsellable. Or one is tempted to say so. If on social media, we are constantly doing something, or at least we are partly occupied with performing an action that requires our attention, there is no place boredom to creep in’.

Gabriella adds: ‘These are examples of how the speed of media never ends. If there is boredom them social media make sure to deal with your boredom and find ways to entertain you, just like the TikTok links below. How can we get bored if circulation and speed are faster than ever?’

https://www.tiktok.com/@mtvuk/video/6810766824196672773

https://www.tiktok.com/@jamiefreestyle/video/6811146201950440710

And Danielle concludes: ‘don’t know if I am the only one, but I don’t feel bored. I feel the opposite. Overstimulated. Sounds weird huh? A time where you have nothing to do than sit around your house… how are you not bored? I have never been in this much contact in my life. My email is flooded with long winded explanations. I receive paragraphs on text daily. Phone calls everyday. I am hearing from people I haven’t spoken to in years. It’s almost overwhelming.

How can you not be entertained. We have every kind of technology. Between my family of 4, the internet, tv shows, card games, board games, working out, self-care, music, and work I feel like I am in overdrive. Constantly expected to be doing something, because “what are you doing” has become the new “how are you doing”.

Without structure, there is no separation between work and home. No lunch hour, no commuting times, just a constant flow of looming anxiety to be doing something’.

source: https://tapas.io/episode/1709280

EVERYTHING’S FINE, NO NEED TO PANIC

Space is collapsing. Benjamin’s novelist was writing in isolation and solitude. In quarantine, we no longer know the difference between where we live and where we work. The work space has invaded our living space, has eaten it up, leaving so little room to non-productivity. Everything should be made productive and functional. Everything should be given a name and ordered into a routine sequence of ‘to do’s, now more than ever.

We cannot afford the luxury of confusion and chaos inside, now that confusion and chaos reign outside. We are not allowed to panic.

source: https://tapas.io/episode/1687477

Natalia also talks about panicking in connection to what her home country, Poland, is implementing to fight Covid 19.

‘If I were to come to go back home tomorrow, I would become a subject to a self-Selfie-invigilation. As everyone who comes back from abroad, I would need to stay home for 14 days, and prove my self-isolation/quarantine by taking selfies whenever a special app tells me too. “People in quarantine have a choice: either receive unexpected visits from the police, or download this app,” said Karol Manys, Digital Ministry spokesman, as cited in cbsnews (yes, we do have “Digital Ministry.” How fancy isn’t it?). I would need to download an app, and then have 20 minutes to take a selfie each time after I receive an SMS/App notification to do so. Otherwise, police might come to check up if I am not breaking the rules of quarantine.

I wonder, why would they need my selfies if the app already has a geolocation system. The app itself is not groundbreaking. More advanced apps have been already launched in Singapore and South Korea, where they are able to track what people one is physically contacting and from what distance, and also making sure that people on quarantine don’t break the rules. In UAE, one has to fill in a permit to leave a house that is digitally glued to the user’s phone, checking the GPS location and duration of being outside. Why would I have to take selfies?

Because it’s also about fancy-sounding facial recognition technology, and that’s what sounds to me too much like Chinese social security plan.

The app gives the possibility to request medical aid or any kind of assistance, food delivery of psychological consultation etc., which is quite nice. What is not nice is that it is not clear how the app actually works, there is no source code accessible, its company apparently “does not sell the app to track consumer behaviors, as the app is only used to analyze the consumer environment and its basic focus is of interior usage in businesses and institutions.” The app also seems to be far from perfect, as hundreds of users reported errors in its GPS-location technology and the selfie-notifications. The app is active for 14 days, but the collected data (including the questionable amount of my selfies used for facial recognition) are kept for six years by several institutions and the company which created the app. Six years? Really? Like I wasn’t already objectified enough by having my representation scrambled and dismembered by all CCTV cameras, cookies, Facebook and Google and Amazon algorithms.

Maybe I am panicking too much, but there is something obnoxious about being ordered to take selfies.

Aren’t we all getting distracted from serious problems by weird apps, weirder news, new Instagram filters, new tik-tok videos, or by providing us with a media spectacle like super bowl (in the ‘past’ meaning before March 2020)?

Shouldn’t we all be really panicking?’.

BOREDOM IS LIKE YOUR MOTHER-IN-LAW 

We are not allowed to panic, and we are not allowed to be bored in these confusing times.

Elena reminds us of Benjamin’s quote: “If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”

She writes: ‘why do I hate boredom if it’s so beneficial? 1) Because complaining it’s the easiest thing to do; 2) Because the design of social media subconsciously (and mistakenly) taught me that I must avoid boredom; 3) Because I never considered the option of looking beyond the common consideration of boredom. I think that boredom is a tool only if we are aware of its potentiality, otherwise it’s just an empty, meaningless feeling. It’s the quality, not the quantity of events that makes boredom enjoyable. Boredom is a predominant aspect of our lives then we might as well learn to appreciate it. It is like your mother-in-law: if you get along with it/her your life is much easier. We can be “boredomphiles” or “boredomphobes”, it’s up to us.

From now on, I will embrace and exploit its benefits. To demonstrate my gratitude to Walter Benjamin for having opened my eyes…I wrote a boring poem born from boredom.

The ABC Of Boredom

Apparently, Boredom Creates Apathy. Be Cautious. All Blame, Complain About, Banish, Constantly Avoid Boredom. Change Attitude! Boredom Creates Abilities, Boosts Creativity ABottomless Chance. A Bonfire Can Awfully Burn Causing Agony, But Can Also Brighten, Creating Atmosphere. Boredom, Comparably, Ambiguous “Being”, Can Annoy But Can Also Be Celebrated. A Beneficial Calmness.

This writing style itself is a metaphor of boredom: although it feels limiting (as I had a limited choice of words) , it can be a tool for creativity’.

THE FINAL MATCH: INSTA VS BENJAMIN RELOADED

Here we come to the final match between Insta and Benjamin which has opened this week’s blog. Storytelling vs ‘stories’. Are the latter a modern version of Leskov? Or are they yet another dramatic evolutionary step -from the ‘novel’ to information down to the ‘story’- to finally dissolve storytelling into the ‘insta’ gratification of scrolling down, pretending to kill contemporary boredom while in the end generating more?

Shaina seems to agree that ‘Insta’ stories might be something of a different nature than ‘stories’.  She writes: ‘An Instagram story is usually not entertaining to me. I click through them quickly to clear the notification, I am not really paying attention to the details, I have no connection to the story, I am uninterested really’.

Marta adds: ‘Honestly, people don’t even pay attention to Insta stories, especially videos…. they just tap tap tap until there’s nothing else to look at….. I know this because I do it myself…. Overall, a story has a structure and a couple of rules, whereas Instagram stories can be used for instant and short term gratification and to keep you from feeling too bored. For me, when I watch people’s “stories,” I don’t expect to either learn something or to remember any of it. It’s simply for rapid entertainment and usually have no emotional connection. Insta stories are a way to pass time and to cope with boredom even when there are other ways to do so’.

And Jackie has her own story on ‘stories’: ‘My sister is the producer of her own show on Instagram called irrelevant-stories-taken-when-she-walks-through-the-front-door-and-proclaims-her-activities-to-the-world, or as you all call “Instagram Stories”. These “stories” are so weird to me because Benjamin is right: stories are not meant to be sheer information, stories are not “Roman is having an okay day and bought a Coke-Zero” (hyperlink or embed the video in the post) yet Instagram brands otherwise with their Snapchat-copy-cat function.

So Benjamin and I are here, sitting in the corner, very confused at this choice method of hers to spend her time. This is no novelization of life that is being shared in these fifteen second clips, and no artistry that works to weave the senses. It’s, well, whatever it is, and the only one who wishes to call these stories is Instagram themselves’.

So, an Insta story is not about telling others a story. Mainly, it is about telling others about US, isn’t it?

Elena confesses: ‘I share Instagram stories with the hope of making people feel something…not because I want them to feel something…it’s more because I want them to produce more notifications I can look at. With storytelling, we used to be better listeners, we were poliedric, productive, creative and empathic. Now, with social media, we exploit other’s feelings for stickiness (hyperlink https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/networked-affect) while social media exploit us for immaterial labour. We feel puppeteer but we are puppets’.

Marta has a point: ‘The last thing about Benjamin that I found very interesting is when he says that “storytelling without community cannot exist because it’s a collective experience.” That’s because, if you think about it a story isn’t a story if it involves just one element or one person’.

And Natalia adds: ‘I fully agree with Benjamin on how storytelling is about exchanging experiences. It is not about me or you per se. It is about something that happened and how it unfolds between us. There is no experience in the Instagram “story.”

Instagram design turns the concept of the story on its head in that:

1) There is a time limit for the story to unfold (Instagram breaks down longer stories into chunks of material).

2) There is a time limit for the story to last (24h), therefore, there is a deadline for it to be relevant (24h).

3) The story can be brought up as a memory after one year only to disappear again.

4) Consequently, Instagram provides a story with material objectification, which turns a ‘story’ into a digital object of no meaning or belonging in space in time. A ‘story’ is suddenly a ‘memory,’ yet one can only revisit it after one year on the day it was posted. Since when memories can be accessed only in limited intervals of time?

5) Users (or ‘viewers’) are allowed to skip and go back to different parts of the story destroying its narrative value.

6) By lacking the importance of narrative and chronology, any deeper meaning gets lost.

7) As stories are immediately played one after another, there is no time for the user to comprehend the story. Instead, the user is flooded with digital content.

8) There is no usefulness in the stories, no moral, practical, or proverb-like sense’.

As Natalia says, there is something about narrative and chronology, about the intertwinement of them. In ‘Little History of Photography’ Benjamin observes that the length of time the subject had to remain still determines the special character of early photography, ‘a more vivid and lasting impression on the beholder’. Because of the technical limitations at the time, obliging to a long duration of the exposure, the subject of a picture had to grow ‘into the picture’ and live its ‘way into’ it. This would pave the way to what he calls ‘the optical subconscious’, a sort of Vertovian kino-eye. The mechanical gaze, the way in which the technological apparatus sees us and catches the ‘tiny spark of contingency, the here and now’ of the picture which the human eye cannot immediately grasp.

We search within the picture to find the ‘inconspicuous place’ where, Benjamin says, ‘future nests still today – and so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it’.

It might be a gloomy future hidden in the past, as in Dauthendey’s photo that Benjamin shows us, picturing his fiancée who, many years later, will be found in their Moscow apartment with her veins slashed. ‘Her gazes passes him by, absorbed in an ominous distance’. The optical unconscious catches and fixes in the eternal moment of the picture what her gaze unveils to the mechanical eye only.

Where is the optical unconscious today? Does it still exist? Can we still learn about it through photography, looking into our past so to learn about our future? Is the culture of the snap able to produce something as mysteriously magical as the long exposure did?

The snaps, lenses, filters seem to look for “interesting juxtapositions” rather than digging in the depth on the picture.  And as the camera gets smaller and smaller, ‘ever readier to capture fleeting and secret images whose shock effect paralyzes the associative mechanisms in the beholder’, the ‘inscription must come into play, by means of which photography intervenes as the literarization of all the conditions of life, and without which all photographic construction must remain arrested in the approximate’.

As usual, Benjamin has an astonishing intuition, a flash-flash-forward that takes us directly into today’s culture of captions and hashtags, all those little signs contributing to a consolidation of the textual self. At the time, he called it ‘the literalization of all the conditions of life’. It’s pretty much what it’s happening now with Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.

All aspects of life (from eating to having sex), all conditions of life (feeling angry, bored, happy), have to be rendered into textual elements that are searchable, quantifiable, sellable. Everything has to be rendered into a text, no matter what text. Whatever text. The self has to be rendered into a text, whether a meme, an emoji, a hashtag, an Instagram story.

We no longer tell stories, then.

‘Insta’ stories tell us. They tell who we are, what we will be.

Recently, Sydney’s grandmother has tested positive to Corona virus. Since then, Sydney has been thinking about the fact that she might succumb to it. She shares her thoughts with us:

‘I already have an Instagram post planned for her, which makes me sick to my stomach to think about. But this is how it relates to my classes’ discussion for this week. I don’t know how I’d talk about my grandma’s death, so I’d follow in my peers’ footsteps: make an Instagram post.  I have the picture planned out. I have the caption roughly penner in my head. It would tell her story. How she almost became a nun, until she didn’t. How she was the only female-rifle shooter on her college campus. How she had 7 children, and lost one tragically. How she survived a stroke, dealing with it so well that doctors couldn’t even figure out what it was. How she can still sometimes remember who we are even with memory loss.

She’s asymptomatic, currently alive, and yet I have a ‘post’ planned out for her. It goes to show that social media is a collection of the largest events that occur in our lives; this would be the first major loss for me. It warrants an Instagram post rather than something placed on my stories. I don’t want it to disappear and be forgotten despite the possible pain that I will face in my future.

And that’s where my mind went when I found out my grandmother has COVID-19’.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF ‘NO ONE GIVES A SHIT’

As an ending note to this week’s blog, please ‘Welcome to the world of “No one gives a shit” by our Shaina.

Whenever I complain about something ridiculous my dad is always quick to humble me with, “Welcome to the world of no one gives a shit.” It is said out of love of course. What is meant by it is that life isn’t always fair and you will experience hardships but we are not entitled to anything, we should work hard to achieve what we want, appreciate what we have, and never expect anything from anybody else. This week in particular was filled with hardship and unfairness but nevertheless, we persevere. This is not written as a cry for sympathy but to give perspective, here is a breakdown of my week:

Monday April 6th: My mom is admitted to the ER for emergency surgery and diagnosed with cancer. The doctor broke the news to her but she didn’t remember because she was still heavily sedated from surgery. The doctor called my dad, who was home because he cannot be in the hospital beside my mom due to COVID-19 visitor restrictions, to share the news.

Tuesday April 7th: 3 years to date since my brother passed away, an already hard day for my family. My mom wakes up alone in the hospital and is made aware that she has cancer.

Wednesday April 8th: I had 4 classes today but my head was too cloudy to focus on school. I layed in bed and watched This Is Us all day.

Thursday April 9th: I ran errands since my mom is too weak to and my dad is so busy being her nurse. I decided it is no longer safe for my dad to be out running errands since he is by my moms side 24/7. We cannot risk her getting sick with COVID-19 right now. Everyone at the grocery store was wearing gloves and a mask. Sanitizing their cart before they touched it. And of course, staying 6 feet apart.

Friday April 10th: My boyfriend and I’s anniversary which we had planned to spend together and now, cannot. No visitors are allowed given my mom’s extreme condition.

Saturday April 11th: Spent all day cleaning, cooking, taking care of my dogs and little brother while trying to catch up on school work and study for my graduate school entrance exam. One of my friend’s dad passed away from COVID-19.

Sunday April 12th: Easter which usually entails 60 relatives running around my house, eating good food, laughing, drinking and having fun. Instead this year, my dad and brother watched superbowl reruns while I took care of my mom all day.

We can look at all the negative ways in which “no one gave a shit this week.” The hospital “didn’t give a shit” my mom had to be diagnosed with cancer alone. Cancer “didn’t give a shit” to hit hard on a different day that wasn’t already hard for my family. John Cabot University “didn’t give a shit” to cancel class on a day where I didn’t feel like attending. My point is, regardless of the week I had, it happened and life went on.

I didn’t write this piece to sound pathetic and be so negative though. That is in fact completely opposite of how I viewed this week. In a vulnerable time where one needs love and support from family and friends, “no one gave a shit” about not being able to come visit my family and I. “No one gave a shit” about all the social restrictions put in place. My family and friends have completely showered us in love and support at a distance this week. Every day a delivery of either flowers, food, cards, starbucks, bagels, something, is left on my doorstep. My phone is constantly ringing with texts, calls and Facetimes of people reaching out to check on how I am doing. Surprise visitors appear at my back door.

My anniversary plans resulted in eating dinner at the same time over facetime and calling it a dinner date. My family and friends did not let Coronavirus stop them from showing love and support during these trying times. They have found adaptive ways. Regardless of any hardship Corona is bringing us, we can still find ways to stay connected and be there for one another. We can spend our whole lives whining about how life isn’t fair or we can work our way around it. That is what my dad taught me when he started saying, “Welcome to the world of no one gives a shit” and that is what I saw this week from my family and friends. So I encourage everyone this week to stop giving a shit. Don’t let Coronavirus, or anything get in your way. Find ways to adapt so we can keep showing love and support to each other and achieve what we want out of life, regardless of the circumstances.

A dispatch from Salvatore Iaconesi, artist and technologist based in Rome

[This dispatch, that was originally published in Italian on the newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore is part of a series. Read the previous ones here.]

We are fragile. Of so many different frailties. The state of quarantine makes us touch the borders of these fragility: economic, psychological, social. They have impacts on our intimacy, relationships, in the ability to generate understandings about the world, on trust, hope, happiness. They concern everyone, starting with the weakest: the precarious workers, people exposed to domestic violence, the homeless, children, the elderly. It is a fragility of the possibility of generating meaning, of adapting to who knows what forms of normality will come “after”.

Not even who is writing is immune to this fragility, of course. In a peculiar twist of fate, during the pandemic, my brain cancer relapsed. This means being exposed to a double state of suspension: the lack of information, the risk of blockage of surgical interventions, the perceived insignificance while the entire national health service faces the emergency COVID-19 add to the quarantine.

Too little attention is being paid to these frailties. Yet when the emergency is over, everything will depend on them: what will hold; who will go into crisis and how; what will break, when and how.

In 2012, when I first had cancer and started La Cura to reposition in society the disease and the role of the patient (www.la-cura.it), data and computation played a revealing role about these frailties. And on how to deal with putting them in the midst of society, to unite instead of separating.

In 2020, if there is one thing that this pandemic reveals to us, it is that data and computation correspond to our survival, ability and to the possibility to exist.

They are an existential issue, and not just a technical one, at least from two points of view: the individual one and the ecosystemic one.

As individuals, our culture provides us with a rich set of devices to express and represent us: writing, images, voice, sound, gestures, the body. And now data and the computation, which can tell about movements, emotions, the chemistry of our body, gestures, our psychic states, our artistic expression and much more. A practically boundless wealth, data are also the largest extractive phenomenon on the planet, more than oil: extracted from our behavior and the environment, used to make decisions, sell products and services, predict pandemics and other events. Very important and useful things, but which describe a substantial inability of our society to create the rituals and practices that could enhance all this potential wealth in the circuits of sensitivity, desire, expression and representation.

From the point of view of the ecosystem, the only way to experience the global and ubiquitous complex phenomena that surround us are huge quantities and qualities of data, and their processing. Knowing that summer is warmer in my city tells me nothing about the planet’s climate change. Similar considerations are true for all complex phenomena: migration, finance, pandemic viruses.

In our hyperconnected society, our ability to know, understand, position ourselves and act towards the fundamental challenges of our environment depends on the access to huge quantities and quality of data and computation.

Our very survival, happiness and well-being depend on it, as we see in these days.

Huge quantities and quality of data and computation for which we are not in the least prepared: we do not have the intimate and social rituals to deal with them; we do not have the emotional dimensions, the sense of beauty, aesthetics and all those things that allow us not only to act / react with great efficiency, but also and above all to relate, to feel empathy, solidarity, friendship.

We have no rituals and opportunities (consciously built in society and in the intimate sphere) for self-representation and the relationship through data. Even if they are so powerful and expressive. Even if they mean our survival as individuals and in the ecosystem.

Data today is something that someone else extracts from us and our environment, and then prepares for us, transforming us into spectators and consumers.

There is no data-meditation, or computational asceticism. Data has no prayers and totems: only consumption.

In my profession, as an artist and researcher, I find myself instead imagining the implications of these kinds of scenarios.

With every passing minute, the world is showing us that data is much more than a resource to be used, extracted, consumed. On the contrary, data can become the new social and ritual objects around which to gather to create new practices, habits, aesthetics and traditions that help us to inhabit this planet: with dignity, solidarity and in the dimension of accessible complexity that is typical of friendship and generosity.

A dispatch from Lídia Pereira, Portuguese writer and designer based in Rotterdam

[This dispatch is part of a series: read the previous ones here.]

“I am thinking of all the things that I cannot think about because I cannot feel them because I cannot live them because I live here I am here and despite everything O wait let me check this message I am at home and have some savings but my friend might lose his job how many lost jobs I don’t deserve any breaks ping the outside needs to get in it is knocking bzzz ping let me in ‘outside gets inside through her skin’ I need to be alert now to prevent it from coming in like this in the future what future for whom we need to talk now organize now agitate now the Now that locks us into a constant present needs to be fought now the past is coming back but with a vengeance where will I move next maybe nowhere is relatively safe for longer than ten years at a time anymore was it ever if I have the ability to run away I shouldn’t complain equalizer my ass go peddle your liberal sap ping ping away from me bzzz ping Yes I saw the news oh here is a new link important link ping pong back and forth bzzz bzzz I just don’t want to be a prick anymore and everywhere everything intensely contradictory is a struggle but for some disproportionately so abhorrent asymmetric experience and we survive on private donations now and the cycle will continue, disruption through ping bzzz O I cannot talk at the moment try later, bondage yes that is the word I was looking for sadly I missed your last sentence the connection seems to be poor wait while I destroy another 5G tower for fear I might catch the virus but I will whatsapp you right back but can I really blame them the chaos the speed the flashing dazzling speed yet we fail to move along our designated failure navigating the tangled hairs of the politics of distraction wheezing past us trembling babbling mess and ping Yes we are all okay, but your uncle may not be able to pay his rent anymore does he get a subsidy no it doesn’t apply, why does nuance escape me now when I need it most No Mom I cannot help you install zoom at the moment ask Sister should I tell her about it no it’s complicated and otherwise what would be a good alternative when you lack digital literacy everyone around you does and there is money yes investment of course deals disruption through bondage yet we must resist and how and when just doesn’t matter we have to persist I am a nebulous cliché bzzz bzzz ping how many notifications should I choose to bzzz stay behind the guilt of taking distance vs the exposure to everywhere everything horrifying revolting I am just lucky while Adalgisa crosses the Vantaa, her gilded gondola sliding down a sore throat I don’t feel like breakfast how many now how many left? the limits keep on being exposed yet we are entertained lest we act on it accept what we wouldn’t otherwise because even if we are paying attention we are exhausted we are diminished follow the livestream like the bluebird follows the treasure at the end of my hot take.”

A dispatch from Alex Foti, writer and activist based in Milan

[This dispatch is part of a series: read the previous ones here.]

Nothing can never be the same. Nothing must never be the same. While the former is often repeated by pundits in these weeks of house arrest, the latter really is the assumption that is prodding radical movements on climate and precarity into action to flesh out a post-covid society. As with every plague, (surviving) labor commands higher market power and is harder to find than capital. The Pikettian imbalance of four decades of rising capital share over income is finally being reverted. The new SARS virus is doing what wars and depressions have done in the history of capitalism: reset the scales and counter the inegalitarian bias built into private accumulation.

While the zooming class adapts to a remote economy, the knowledge class is in fact largely irrelevant in the war against the pandemic, simply because they are not on the ground. As Branko Milanović notes, the health, logistics, food sections of the precariat are those indispensable for the survival of the Motherland, while non-vital manufacturing and services are taking the brunt of the self-induced economic coma. It’s the millions people laid off because of sharply reduced market demand that are feeling the pain and could be a major problem for political stability, just like the insurgent viral precariat that is manning the trenches and strikes not to be reduced to cannon fodder. White collars are irrelevant today, they are paid and acquiescent: it’s pink collars and blue collars that matter for our collective survival, just like virologists and epidemiologists, and unlike CEOs and industrialists.

In Milano and elsewhere, movement activists were the first putting sneakers on the ground in the huge surge of mutualism that is changing the way society looks at anarcho-autonomists and could be the embryo of a post-covid political society; certainly it is going to be form of permanent counterpower. Brigades of Volunteers for the Emergency (this their name) are in fact semi-public social workers that carry masks, food, medicaments to stranded old people and secluded single mothers. With 10,000 dead (and counting) in Lombardy alone, the pandemic here is a tangible reality, just like in Madrid, Paris, New York.

Wildcat strikes have hit Amazon and other chains both in the US and Italy and rest of Europe. Union-buster Jeff Bezos had to rise the wage (he had already gone to 15 bucks an hour before the crisis) to lure precarious workers into working for him as e-commerce has of course exploded. Couriers, riders, drivers, warehouse attendants are indispensable labor, more often than not scantily protected against infection by their employers. In fact, the Bergamo holocaust was partly due to the League’s reluctance to shut down its metalworking industry (same has happened in Brescia). The Milano wave has especially hit senior citizens in nursing homes, where often health workers where prohibited from wearing surgical masks “not to scare our guests”. Wherever Covid took hold due to arrogant stupidity, it was extermination for the eightysomethings in public care.

When we finally emerge from the lockdown in May, what will happen to social conflict? Higher wages for nurses and gig workers are inevitable, as well as the normalization of UBI to counteract Covid’s depressionary effects. As Trump put it: “We’re paying people to stay home; how’s that??”. However in movement’s radios and chats many are arguing that, in order for things not to ever be the same, there’s gotta be social and political revolution, because for the first time since 1917-1919 capitalism could really be overthrown, as it no longer commands the loyalty of most of the population. Increasingly, capital looks like a death cult. The climate crisis as well as FFF and XR mobilizations have made it clear that fossil capitalism is ecologically unsustainable. The Covid crisis has highlighted the basic fact that financial capitalism is hostile to human life. Are the brigades our workers’ councils? You bet  One thing is fairly clear, though. With the socialist illusion of Corbyn and Sanders gone (as we predicted in Theory of the Precariat), what’s left for the left is mutualism, syndicalism and, especially, dual power. The environment is recovering, now it’s time to recover collective agency and seize power.

Dispatch from Alina Lupu, Romanian Artist Based in Amsterdam

[This dispatch is part of a series: read the previous one here.]

As a generally resistant person, tending to be first and foremost critical of every situation as well as hard to engage in the first stage, I find it fascinating that this reorientation towards online education in the arts has been so far reaching and so quick. When I entered art school in NL, 7 or so odd years ago, bringing a computer into a fine art environment was considered blasphemy and prompted ridicule. I had one teacher that used to do net art. Yes, net art. In the ´90s. No, as fine artists we work with our hands, we experience the material, and the material tends to be wood, clay, paint, fabric etc. I had no choice in carrying a computer with me since I was videocalling with clients (US, Australia, UK) that needed to have their websites done via some Romanian outsourcing company or another. And here we go, now we´re all digital natives and don´t frown at it. Is this evolution or the death of critical thinking? Or maybe we´re just tired… I can´t quite say at this point.

A letter of dissent started being drafted by the students of the Sandberg Institute, the Master program tied to the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. In it, the students, supported by their teachers and by the student unions that popped up over the past couple of years, demanded accountability from the administration of the institution after the closing of the academy and the rushed move of many of their in-person meetings and classes to open source and proprietary online platforms (Zoom is overall popular in these cases). They asked for participation in the handling of the crisis, they asked for a postponement of the academic year and refused to see their graduation show moved online. They asked for refunds of tuition fees in light of lack of access to facilities if that lack of access extended well into the summer vacation. They asked for an empathetic understanding of their condition, affected as it is by the limitations the government of the Netherlands has put on education, public gatherings and various jobs – Horeca (Hotel/Restaurant/Café) is a field in which a large swath of students was employed in order to support themselves, and much of it has been suspended. They asked for understanding in the face of the international character of the academy and the fact that many students have had to leave to their countries of origin to be close to their families during these trying times, and for an understanding of the fact that focus is hard to come by in a crisis triggered by a pandemic. These are not normal working from home conditions. Education should not be rushingly transferred into online mode, pretending to forget what triggered the move and working on the premise of “business as usual”.

The letter was signed on March 30th, 2020. It reached my inbox by mistake. It slipped through the cracks of a stuffy newsletter, due most likely to the exhaustion of whoever put the newsletter together. It wasn’t meant for public consumption, but the mere fact that it existed signaled some form of solidarity in the face of hopelessness. The letter illustrated a bottom-up change of pace.

On March 31st, the Student Council of the Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Institute went one step further, this time publicly, and took responsibility for providing what was needed during the crisis. It issued a short guide with resources for international students, artists and art workers in the Netherlands. It surprisingly broke a taboo by acknowledging the type of support needed by students in a time of crisis, practical information such as: what is a freelancer? What is a zero-hour contract? What support does the government provide in times of crisis? What should one do if their contract is not being renewed? What is unemployment and how to apply for it? How to get legal assistance? And so on.

Because it´s perfectly well to offer solidarity in the abstract and draft encouraging video speeches, but people have been plunged into the land of terminated contracts, no income, and even homelessness and under these conditions knowledge is absolute power.

But then came April 1st (sly sense of humor maybe?). The timeline that I’m building is idiosyncratic, but it´s worth maybe asking if the administration of these schools had also kept an eye on the student initiatives that went counter to the need to adapt, keep one’s head up and keep up productivity. On April 1st the Sandberg, or rather its press office, sent out a newsletter towards all of its followers, I’m guessing students and teachers included, in which it announced its “Homemade Routines”.

“How do we clean, paint, administrate, chat, prototype, stretch, cook, read, watch and dream during a period of social distancing? A growing accumulation of activities by artists and designers, live-streamed for free on Wednesdays on Sandberg Instituut Instagram, echo a different pace and concentration for our homemade behaviors.” It covered:

• 08:00 – Cleaning
• 10:00 – Painting
• 11:00 – Administrating
• 13:00 – Chatting
• 15:00 – Prototyping
• 16:00 – Stretching
• 17:00 – Cooking
• 20:00 – Reading
• 21:00 – Watching
• 23:00 – Dreaming
• 24/7 production.

Despite the crisis, despite the confusion, despite resistance, despite solidarity, it seems the post-autonomous artist cannot catch a break, endlessly fucked as he or she or they are by the neoliberal need to be present, to be flexible, to adapt to precarity with a smile.

by Silvio Lorusso and Geert Lovink

During these long days, thinking is hard. Coronavirus updates come from every milieu: friends, family, work, governments, finance, the economy at large. None of them can be ignored. Remember, we used to complain about information overload. What about now? Now that we’re uninterruptedly tuned to different sources, from apps, radio, TV and newspapers, to Whatsapp chats with people in various countries and timezones. Now that our minds are busy processing the conditions and worries of our relatives and acquaintances, the selective scarcity of close-by supermarkets, the permutations of our shaky working schedules, the proliferation of software to set up. We put effort into changing our embodied automatisms, such as the urge to touch our face. In many ways, we are not ourselves.

This ain’t no time for speculation. “Instatheory” pops up and grows old in the span of a week. Are we locked, not only into our shared rooms, home-studios and apartments, but also into the present moment? Probably. And yet much of this present will be the material for the leading images and motives of the years to come. Trends are crystallizing, counter-trends are emerging. The March-April 2020 shock is a bifurcation moment, a time in which things can take completely different directions, among which there is a also cosmetic recrudescence of the ordinary. We see this in the news: what was yesterday’s “I’m shaking hands” is today’s “stay home”. What can we do then? Here, we attempt to chronicle the present: making sure that apparently minute aspects of this state of exception don’t pass unnoticed: a new habit, a novel social protocol, etc. Change is taking place at various scales, all interrelated. Subtle adjustments of everyday life accumulate. Suddenly, not recognizing this everyday life anymore, we may ask ourselves: how did we get here?

Before this happens we look at the time being to spot new behaviors that we are more or less consciously adopting, to identify social mutations that might be here to stay, to discern which ones should be encouraged or prevented.

First, some considerations. Before Coronavirus was the time of offline romanticism, time to log off, to take a break, to rediscover the fantasized authenticity of meatspace. Now, it is the time of online defaultism. Business as usual can continue thanks to smart work solutions; podcasts and live convos can broadcast conviviality; the tedium of quarantine can be overcome with a good dose of Nintendo Switch and Netflix. And yet, we feel the paucity of this networked double of social life. To be sure, the online is no less real than the offline. And yet, they are not mutually exclusive, they aren’t meant to fully replace one another. More importantly, the conversion from one to the other is not lossless. Following Franco Berardi, the conjunctive exceeds the connective.

Remote work is in many ways as concrete and corporeal than in situ work – if not more: video calls foreground the imperfections of the medium resulting in headaches and a loss of focus. Mediocre wifi disrupts the Skype-human cyborg. Remote work brings the intimacy of the family into the work scene. Remember the journalist whose live interview on BBC was disrupted by the cheerful bustle of his kids, with his wife running to catch ’em? Well, this is everyone with a family now, all the time. The messiness of life penetrates the aseptic virtuality of the digital office. We used to think of the home as a retreat from work, we now realize that work used to function as a refuge from domesticity. We speak from the position of people used to do video calls, to manipulate windows on screen, to cut and paste files, but what about the others? People who suddenly find themselves having to install software, timidly approaching a computer that is not their mobile phone, trying to orient themselves in complex spatial interfaces? Digital literacy acquires a new urgency, novel forms of digital divide emerge. Will we witness a renaissance of the desktop computer?

The lock-down comes with a software lock-in: organizations are leaning towards pre-packaged, centralized solutions. We witness the zoomification of work. Live streaming is taking over the small and busy yet simplistic interfaces of social media based on text, images and icons. Before the Coronavirus, a degree of technical informality survived. Video conferencing, notes, memos, chats… everyone could propose and use the tool or service best suited to their technical needs, ethical principles and personal idiosyncrasies. The state of exception banned this variety and with it the right to refuse certain insidious functions. “Emergency” Whatsapp groups active at every hour of the day, mandatory reports on Slack to keep the whole team updated (which few then actually read), video calls which allow to monitor the level of attention of participants.

All of these solutions have sprung up like mushrooms. It might have taken a few days to create the remote working conditions for the coming years, and they certainly don’t seem favorable. Same goes with our appearance on Zoom sessions. Apart from all the ‘selfie’ concerns of the correct face and posture, we now also have care about sound levels, background, animals and kids that come in to disturb. It is their environment, after all. Were we ever asked to comply with this intrusion of our private space? We’re not sound engineers and have no private TV studio at home. All the anxieties of the emerging Influencer Class have now, overnight, become general concerns. History has thrown us back in 2005 as our work now consists of watching ‘user-generated content’, this time produced by friends, family and fellow professionals that were not quite prepared to become ‘streaming stars’.

Covid-19 became the message so that the medium of pre-existing conditions could stay unchanged. We cried “this shouldn’t be business as usual” during the usual meetings, with the usual schedules, to the usual people. “Stop” was the forbidden word. Cultural organizations, which fundamental role is to perpetuate themselves, demanded resilience, which is to say that their atomized workforces had to implement ingenuity and flexibility. All the while, the same workforces were putting together useful lists of resources, penning open letters and signing petitions to voice their concerns. They were doing this informally, in their own spare time, to the benefit of organizations.

The organizational burden offloaded onto the workers was three-folded: organizing the very content of their work, organizing its remote form as demanded by the organizations, and finally organizing a reaction to this very form. Not even a week was lost. In schools and academies, lectures and classes continued to take place, even when it was farcically clear that a pause was due. Dutch universities lobbied to obtain the status of “vital profession”. Was this a matter of self-esteem, of dreading the idea of being irrelevant in a moment of crisis, after all the “what design can do” and “impact” kind of talk? Cultural workers whose activities weren’t postponed or “suspended” were able to stay alert, improvise, and organize work, but not to stop it. This word, “stop”, crossed the minds of many of them, a few even pronounced it out loud at the risk of appearing antagonistic or even lazy, when everyone else thought that a display of commitment was their civic duty. In this case the bifurcation was clear: stop or continue. We chose to continue.

As one could have expected, political organization in times of the Coronavirus is frantic – and yet on hold. The idea that people, once online, with spare time on their hand, would cause a revolution in cyberspace is still what it is: science-fiction. Why? Because, that very cyberspace is preventing the suspension needed to observe and analyze the situation, the interruption that we call thinking. On the contrary, we simply “adjust” to this alien situation, which means that we look at it through the rear-view mirror of the routine.

Where are the online swarms that block, hack, delete, take-over the virtual resources of the rich and powerful? Are the DDOS hordes just busy with the Italian Institute for Social Security? Is it the problem that they got sucked on Discord, or even on Slack, our rebels without a cause? What are we dreaming of here, anyway? Should we reclaim asynchronicity? Instead, we’re faced with various degrees of desperation and isolation, in which any form of wild and unexpected ‘computer-mediated communication’ is 100% not taking place. Instead, we’re trapped in the 24/7 virtual golden cages of the past, filter bubbles that rarely feel comforting.

Is it the real encounter we desire? How should we, European get there?

In solidarity, against sentimentalism.

Precarious, with worse to come.

By Donatella della Ratta

On March 5, 2020, the Italian government ordered a lockdown for all schools. A few days later, now a month ago (feels like ages ago), on March 9, all Italian cities, and all us human beings, were placed on a strict lockdown due to the coronavirus crisis. No more going out, no more walking, no more outdoor activities, except from shopping for ‘necessary’ reasons.

I’ve found myself having to adapt my professional and personal life to this unprecedented condition. One of the classes I teach at John Cabot University, an American liberal arts college in the heart of Rome, is called ‘Selfies and Beyond: Exploring Networked Identities’. Before the lockdown was issued, the students and I were using the method of auto-ethnography to explore our digital lives. Because of the obliged condition of ‘social distancing’, and since now many of them sit far away in their home towns in the US, on the other side of the Ocean, we came up with the idea of moving their pieces, which were once sent to me as private notes, to a public online platform where all can see, read, and comment on what my students are writing.

For the next weeks to come I will discuss here critical theory that reflects on the status of the networked self and emotional capitalism, from Benjamin, Baudrillard and  Zizek to Illouz. I have asked students to read the theory in light of the current situation, and look at it from the perspective of their networked quarantines and digital daily life.

This series of blog posting on the INC website puts together their reflections and my reflections, their anxieties and my anxiety, the occasional joy or maybe just temporary satisfaction that we encounter in sharing our thoughts and, every now and then, some digital laughter.

For this series I choose to work on a rough, irregular, broken style.

It’s a draft, it’s a rough-cut. It’s the aesthetics of the fragment.

At a time when everything is on hold, I cannot think about anything finished, anything with a polished and clear structure. Our lives are on hold, let our writing be in a permanent draft status.  We are holding our breath, let us then hold our thoughts, as well. Let us freeze permanence, certainty, and release drafts instead. Until the curtain is lifted, at least.

This is an aesthetics of the fragment. It is also an ethics of the fragment. Permanent judgment is suspended, definitive analyses are on hold. Things will flourish in the fragility of the fragment, in the uncertain style of the draft; randomly, just as the grass now growing in the city’s pavement cracks.

Episode 1: BOREDOM, SADNESS, NUMBNES

In collaboration with Danielle, Shaina, Briana, Jackie, Marta, Gabriella, Sydney, Elena and Sophia

This week’s reading: excerpts from Geert Lovink’s ‘Sad by Design’. Watching: Geert Lovink’s talk at John Cabot University. Looking at: Edward Manet’s painting ‘A Bar at the Folies-Bergere’.

We reflected on the following quotes:

“Emotion is a luxury, right? To be angry is a luxury. We don’t have that luxury right now. Let’s just deal with the facts, let’s just get through it.”  Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York

 

“There wasn’t any anger involved (I think). I mean, what was I supposed to be angry with? What I was feeling was a fundamental numbness. The numbness your heart automatically activates to lessen the awful pain when you want somebody desperately and they reject you. A kind of emotional morphine.”   Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore

 

“I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I’m here.”  Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

 

SOCIAL DISTANCING IS THE NEW BLACK

Is social media helping us overcoming the imposed ‘distancing’ of this crazy period; or is it yet another tool to dive us into a deeper sleep, trusting that in the end we will become used to ‘see’, ‘watch’ and, eventually, ‘feel’ the Other throughout the surfaces of our screens?

Marta writes: “Allegedly, this virus has robbed people of their social life due to social distancing, but did it, really? The truth is that social physical interaction was robbed by social media way before Coronavirus even existed. I believe that the lack of social interaction and the intensification of social media use is not a new phenomenon caused by a natural disaster, but a recurring one caused by human kind. The majority of us now use this calamity as an excuse for our excessive social media use. If you think Covid-19 is the reason why you can’t distance yourself from your phone, you are either lying to yourself or you’re in denial.  ‘The thing that scares me the most is the fact that we are adapting to social isolation. It will be harder to leave our phones and easier to stay home even when we are free to go out. Does adapting to social distancing lead us to numbness, or is it numbness related to excessive social media use?”

SYMPHONY FROM THE ACQUARIUM

The simulacra of interaction. Are we left looking at our lives from the acquarium, having to constantly feed and take care of the red fish we watch moving inside which, in the end, is us?

Natalia tells of a dream-like sequence: “After sleeping through the afternoon, I stood up with a slightly lesser headache and got to the other room. After a while, I grabbed my phone. I opened Instagram, only to notice – oh, the magic of happy accidents – that a friend of mine is live on Instagram Stories. Perhaps he’s been broadcasting his piano skills, I might have though yet the time spawn since I saw it until I cliched it was too short for me to think this sentence through in my mind. I clicked. And he was playing the piano. And I listened. He noticed that I joined, and so he played one of my favorite songs. And I listened. And I was happy.  But then it just disappeared. My friend came back to his life, and I was back in my room with a headache and a lack of will or power to act. Just as if our meeting a second ago has never existed, just as if it was a dream, something with no actual impact on reality. But after a dream one sometimes wakes up feeling better, feeling happy. I didn’t dream, neither I woke up, yet I felt sad.  It seems as if our interaction, our sociality, was an innocent delusion, a harmless hallucination.”

I AM NOW (LIKE) EVERYONE ELSE

Does a crisis situation give us validation as humans? Is a crisis a collective moment of unity, shared anxiety and common pain, or is it yet another occasion to shout out loud, ‘hiya world I’m here, I’m alive, look at me!”? And what’s the difference between a machine-generated feeling of boredom, boredom ‘by design’, and boredom IRL?  Do we scream outside the window to get attention IRL and finally find in validation our little escape from boredom?

Sydney admits: ‘There is no longer excitement in quarantine.  There was excitement in only having 3 days to evacuate from Italy, somehow.  It felt like a movie, unscripted, and gave me a purpose. And being home before everyone else had to quarantine also felt like an adventure.  I felt dangerous if I went outside. People constantly checked in one me, wondering how I was feeling. Now it is everyone’s normal schedule. There is no more excitement. The added danger and edge is gone now that my entire community is forced to be confined.  It feels nice every once and awhile to be told that we’re doing our part, but it has become normal. There is no excitement. It is boring. And now that my entire life can be filled with entertainment, it has become sad that I can not receive constant stimulation. I no longer feel like a special American soldier, fighting the coronavirus and escaping Italy. I am just another citizen, scrolling on my phone like everyone, watching the same show as everyone, complaining about the same thing.  Words that once sounded large and important as I was reporting from the ‘front lines of Italy’ on my social media are now muted by everyone else. My voice has gone mute. My body has gone numb’.”

Elena points out: “People post Instagram stories to show they are interesting people with interesting lives. I admit that I am one of those people who’s doing anything to keep my online identity interesting, even during these boring days. I post memes and TikTok videos, and I even tell funny stories of my past to entertain my followers. But, WHY? Who cares? Everyone knows I am bored even if I pretend I am not. Digital boredom is indeed very different from the “real” one: when I am bored IRL I don’t scream outside the window “look at me, I am interesting”.  We are ‘sad by design’ when we don’t receive many likes because we don’t feel appreciated. We are anxious by design when we see everyone on Instagram living a better life than ours and looking better than us. We are happy by design when we receive notifications because we feel desired and important. The design of the media platform decides how we feel, we are powerless.”

DESPERATELY LOOKING FOR THE ‘ANTI-EXPERIENCE’

Is there a moment in our desperate search for affective intensities that we just long for a flat line, that we just aspire to nothingness, that we just crave for an ‘non-event’?

Gabriella: “…. there is a point in our online experience in which we stop seeking the ‘happy accident’ and we find our selves needing an “anti-experience” that might come from the unfulfilled expectancies we encounter online.”

IS LASAGNA EXCITING?

Is boredom something more revolving around the lack of meaning rather than the lack of eventfulness? Are we trying to recreate meaning each time we go online to escape boredom?

Jackie writes: “I’ve especially found myself missing my wii despite the fact that I have a nice refurbished playstation in its place—why can’t I just be satisfied with this cool thing I already have? Why must we miss happiness from our past? I think this relates a lot to the question on the possibility of recreating meaning when being bored. Like rewatching a horrible show that excited me years ago, whenever we’re bored we often reminisce times we weren’t and think that maybe, just maybe, if we did the same thing we could precent all boredom.  A good example to this is my Monday in which I ignored all remote work and made a three-meat four-cheese lasagna. It was an all day affair and something I had always wanted to do, but all I could think about while doing it was getting it done, was being able to sit down away from the stove and do something mindless on my phone.

Instead of being stimulated or living in an exciting and delicious event, I was merely distracting myself from being bored by either homework or nothing at all. It reminds me of a quote from the first Guardians of the Galaxy that we’re always “in a big hurry to get from something stupid to nothing at all.” And for what? When Lovink talks about this sadness and the boredom it encourages, being “obsessed with waiting” felt like a real big callout, because even when many of us are doing things unrelated to the internet there’s this nagging in our heads that asks why can’t we be there now. Why do I have to be reading this when I could be reading something else? Why am I not satisfying my digital longing right here right now? While he talks a lot about the sadness created by constructs of the internet I thinks there’s incredible validity to discussing the sadness created by the lack of the internet. How elitist of me I guess.

Sophia continues: “I have found that recently in the past week I have become tired of the content which is available to me and have become quite frustrated with this, clicking off of movies and videos before the ending. I think Baudrillards thoughts concerning meaning and the constant flow of information could be applied in this situation as I have access to a vast amount of content, but at this point the amount which I have consumed has caused all of it to become “boring” to me and has lost its meaning’.

BAR AUX FOLIES-BERGERE AND THE WANDERING OF THE SOCIAL MEDIA USER

Here Natalia attempts at reading Manet in the time of our hegemonic social reality (and social frustration).

“Looking back at the female figure, one can proceed to draw conclusions that fit perfectly to the social media reality of today. Let’s take an individual social media user and compare him/her to the woman in Manet’s painting.  Both feel alienated from the social situation they found themselves in. Online, one feels alienated from the sociality of the digital encounter, an outcome of the online situation they entered.

The woman should act to be as entertained as others are, yet her boredom gives away her alimentation. She both chose and didn’t choose to be there. Could the online user choose not to enter this digital social situation? Was that really voluntary? How long can one escape the pressure to act entertained while being both sad and alienated?

It seems that while all the others are having a blast, they (the woman/the user) do not. But the others are the same: alienated, bored, coming to the same ‘place’ over and over again in a search of a trivial thrill of a happy accident, just as a ‘habit,’ or perhaps they do not have a choice?  The woman looks directly at the viewer, just as an individual social media user looks directly at the screen of a phone or computer. This reflection only deepens one’s sadness and alienation. Alienation is about the sense of narcissist individuality, especially in social media. She also feels her alienation and sadness, she lets boredom show on her face as a manifestation of her agency over her individuality. Though who really has agency here?

Look behind her, in the right corner. She is standing in front of the mirror, yet the reflection is twisted so that we can see her from an angle. Suddenly you notice a man. It is not “a man,” however, but a white, heterosexual, Western, healthy, relatively young, perhaps wealthy, man. Who, again, owns Facebook (and Instagram and WhatsApp), Amazon, Google, Twitter…? You guessed.

Just as the woman, a social media user produces exhibitionist labor for the users who are as alienated and sad and she/they are. But, in the end, those who benefit most are privileged white men who control them. The woman’s labor is not her own choice, based on the rules she set, as she is standing behind a bar, being a part of a greater enterprise, which uses and commercializes her body (and soul). Social media users are just like she is: producing labor for a greater enterprise (social media corporation) which sets the rules and commodifies feelings, socially, and physical life.  Instead of prostituting oneself, social media user is only keeping the content circulation flowing by producing, reposting, and reacting to content, and producing data. Though isn’t it prostitution itself?”

SOCIAL CORPSE AKA THE SOCIAL BODY

I wander in the city’s empty streets. Not because of boredom, because of desire.

Desire to reanimate the corpse that lies in front of me, in front of us all.

Formerly known as the ‘social body’, now turned into a social corpse.

Does our newly discovered freedom lie in this transparent structure, in this silent moving around like ghosts, in this not-touching not-sweating not-kissing,

… in this-NOT?

Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, emergency first aid to the social body

before it grows into a life without organs.

“When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.” Antonin Artaud (1947)

PROLOGUE. A LOVE LETTER TO FREEDOM

Life without freedom got me like:

We close this first episode with a long fragment, a love letter written by Elena:

“Freedom broke up with me almost a month ago. We were such a nice couple, we have been dating for about 20 years. I still didn’t get over her of course. I miss Freedom a lot, what a beautiful soul she has. I think about her everyday. Freedom was more than a girlfriend, she was my greatest source of happiness. We were in an open relationship with many other people but the way she looked at me…maybe I was jealous that she wasn’t just mine. What if she broke up with me because I was too jealous? No, I know why she did it: I didn’t deserve her. She gave me so much and I took her for granted. I don’t even feel the right to complain because Freedom broke up with a lot of people lately. Is it true that if something terrible happens to many people it hurts less? Is it true that misery loves company? I doubt it.

Fun fact about Freedom? She has two nicknames: those who love her like me called her “Libre”, those who were only attached to her materialistic beauty called her “Gratis”. Ungrateful freaks…Freedom is much more important than a capitalistic commodity but people confuse them. If only I could go back.

I’m stuck in an apparently endless cycle filled with numbness and uncertainties. When is this apathetic rollercoaster going to stop? When will Freedom come back to me? Will she ever come back or is she gone forever?…I don’t even want to think about that possibility. I think about those days when we were still dating and I could go to my friends’ house, to parties, to the cinema, to visit my grandma… good old days. I never thanked her. I used her like an object. Freedom, if you will ever read this…please forgive me. You are and will always be the greatest love of my life. I miss you. I love you like a prisoner loves the first breath of wind outside of jail. I don’t want to be numb anymore. Please come back.”