Culturegeist

Out of Darkness cometh Life.

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<title>The Medium is the [Error] Message (and/or?) All Glitched Out </title?>[draft]

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The Glitch and the Eel

The highly quotable media theorist Marshall McLuhan in his book Counterblast (1969), a work which in a typographically rich manner addresses issues surrounding media and the human condition, stated that: “Today we live invested with an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to a fish”(1)

This statement seems to be no less pertinent today than when it was first coined back in the late 60s, in fact for many, in an age of near-blanket internet coverage, it could seem to be not only more meaningful, but perhaps to an extreme even prophetic in summing up our everyday relationship with the digital.(2)

Later in 1977 on Australia’s ABC Network, on a TV program called Monday Conference, McLuhan replied in response to a question about media education that: “The hidden aspects of the media are the things that should be taught, because they have an irresistible force when invisible. When these factors remain ignored and invisible, they have an absolute power over the user”

These two quotes brought together help to initially demonstrate in a palpably efficient manner what I believe to be the core theoretical impetus behind the contemporary use of the glitch aesthetic today when used to its maximum artistic potential. Rather than simply being an interesting look, Glitch Art, when employed beyond mere visual pleasure, aims to reveal the water to the fish; like an electric-eel it thrashes about the data-streams, disrupting the flow to create perceivable ripples in the smooth flow of the normative operational condition of our digitized information technologies. Whereas we once actively surfed the web as a unique act, we no longer find it a necessity to highlight the activity as being distinct, as today rather than simply skimming the surface and riding the waves we are now fully submerged in a data drenched environment.

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Towards a Definition of Glitch

Before continuing further we need to first establish what is meant by the term Glitch. Its origin is not a simple one, the 1989 Oxford English Dictionary does not, perhaps characteristically of the term, provide a straight-forward answer, for it states that the term’s etymological background is unknown. One attempt at applying a history to the term was attempted by the American journalist and lexicographer William Safire in his New York Times Column, ‘On Language’ , in which he put forth the suggestion that the term glitch: “probably originated in the German and Yiddish glitschen, meaning ‘slip,’ and by extension, 'error”.<…>

Despite this, the commonly (whether correct or not) first attributed use of the term glitch, as we know it today, is attributed to astronaut John Glenn in his 1962 book Into Orbit in which he describes a glitch as: “a spike or change in voltage in an electrical current”.<…> What links this ‘original’ usage of the word glitch then, and today’s understanding of the term, is the notion of a sudden unplanned state change within an electrical system.

Today on hearing the word glitch, as we will explore further, we commonly interpret the term as referring to a sudden humanly unexplainable break or disruption in a computer system. More specifically, according to artist and theorist Iman Moradi, a glitch is an observable “…artifact resulting from error. It is neither the cause, nor the error itself, it is simply the product of an error and more specifically its visual manifestation. It is a significant slip that marks a departure from our expected result.”<…>

This explanation of glitch provides us with an interesting account of the term as it acutely notes that a glitch is only a glitch when it is visibly recognized as such. In other words the glitch operates at the level of the age-old metaphysical conundrum of ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’. What distinctly then makes a glitch a glitch is when we as end users interpret there to be an error present. Computer systems do not ‘think’ like us, they execute code as a start/finish process; any mistakes are a result of our ghosts operating within the machines, within the code we implanted within and choose to execute. A glitch then does not so much reside in technology per se but within human interpretation of technological outputs. As Curt Cloninger & Nick Britz put in the ‘Sabotage! glitch politix Man[ual/ifesto]:

“Because the machine has no cause/effect expectations. It simply does what it does. A glitch is experienced when a human mis-expects one thing and winds up with something else. Without hope, anticipation, and expectation, without a sense of rightness and the way things are supposed to be, there is no glitch. There are merely events in the world. When humans filter out the glitch as so much noise interfering with their status quo signal, when humans refuse to engage with and be thrilled and terrified by the nuances of the glitch event, they are making a [con/pre]servative political decision.”

Leaving the larger context of the above comment to one side for the moment, the concept of noise in relation to glitch is important and as of yet has not been noted in our search for a clear definition (which itself has been a somewhat noisy affair). The power of glitch as artistic affect is derived via the foregrounding of noise in mediums for which it has been the aim for successive technologies, particularly communication technologies, to minimize and ultimately overcome. Each new technology sells itself as being of higher fidelity than the last (even if in-fact, as with the mp3, data is actually ripped out rather than improved). Take for example the move from what is now retroactively called Standard Definition TV, to High-Definition TV, and slowly but surely the move into 4k TV. The history of our communication technologies show that we continually attempt to move closer and closer to a platonically perfect signal/system. The ultimate techno-utopian dream here resides in a literal realization of Baudrillard’s hyperreal, the development of the ability to create fully immersive virtual realities. In order for the fantasy to materialize into a seamlessly pure fiction the coders and engineers must do battle with noise in order to minimize, if not attempt to try and entirely eradicate, any erroneous disruption in their hypnotic reality emulations. The glitch artist as a reactionary force position themselves by contrast as agents of techno-reality distortion, they aim to insert noise in order to reveal and probe the artifice inherent within the tyranny of images that our communication technologies conjure, they attempt to break the illusion they hold over us. As Rosa Menkman puts it in her Glitch Studies Manifesto from the book The Glitch Moment(um):

“The dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel has been - and will always be - no more than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma. Acknowledge that although the constant search for complete transparency brings newer, ‘better’ media, every one of these improved techniques will always possess their own inherent fingerprints of imperfection”

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Glitch as Noise

This concept of having to overcome erroneous noise in order to perfect communication systems has its initial origins within the cybernetically informed communication model developed by Shannon and Weaver at Bell Laboratories in 1948. The model provides us with a basic mechanical understanding of communication that views information as being non-context specific, in other words it views communication as a simple matter of getting a desired a signal from one place to another. As such the model is entirely based on the process of data transmission between machines, in doing so it views noise on an entirely mathematical level, it puts aside humanistic considerations such as linguistics, culture and other context based factors in order to ultimately improve the clarity of an intended signal.

                (Visualization of the Shannon-Weaver model of communication, 1948)

The model consists of five basic steps. Firstly we have an information source that produces a message, the transmitter converts said message into a signal or code that is, for the medium being considered, suitable for transmission. This signal is then directed through a channel, be that for example an FM transmission or via internet protocols. This signal is, all being well, then received by the target and translated back into a message that can then be forwarded onto its intended final destination. (Source -> Encoder -> Channel -> Decoder -> Destination.) This could be described as the absolute basic core idealized process that all communication technology models itself upon even today. 

However, in the model is the added external factor labelled as noise. Noise describes interference with the perfect transmission; it disrupts the signal flow and can be interpreted by the human at the destination source as a random error (a glitch). Noise shows up in communication as unexplained variation between what was sent and what was eventually received. In analogue communication technologies this noise can be clearly felt and understood as an interference in the transmission from source to destination, for example static hiss and the blending of sounds on long-wave radio.

In our digital era however the conceptual understanding of noise-error is less easily apparent as our working understand of the technology becomes ever more obfuscated. Media theorist Friedrich Kittler highlighted this issue with digital technology back in 1994 when he explained that on a superficial level the graphic user interface hides the operation of the computer from the user. The point here is that the interfaces of our digital technologies are purposefully designed, initially with the best of intentions in mind, to make their operation seamless, to hide noise, but in doing so they limit the end-users fundamental understanding of how the systems that they use actually work. For all intents and purposes our devices take on the appearance of working like magic(3), the fundamental reason why they actually work becomes veiled to the average user, we just know that they function as long as we input our required spells correctly.

The key difference here between the analogue and digital is that with digital systems a signal is either received as a whole or not at all, there is no clear interstitial state as there is with analogue. This ultimately results in a lot less natively noticeable interference with digital technologies; this does not mean however that error cannot occur, but the manner is not an everyday occurrence as it was with our pre-digital communication devices. Whereas the noise in an analogue system could be clearly understood for what it was in theory, a disruption in signal strength, in a digital system the noise is not so clearly recognized as noise. As far as digital systems are concerned a glitched image that can be opened is being displayed correctly, according to the code at hand, because if the system interpreted their to be excessive noise present, i.e. if the file were corrupted, it would fail to open the image at all. The interpretation of error then, lies ultimately with the analogous end-user. We find that the glitch as a result of this, rather than being a digital or technological phenomenon, is in fact a distinctly human one for it the failure of our worldly expectations to materialize which brings the glitch into being.

Taking a step-back for moment then, we should remember that the Shannon-Weaver model, as noted, does not take into consideration the human, it is an entirely systems-based communications model. The difference between noise in an analogue and digital system is that theoretically there cannot in fact be noise, as we know it in the analogue sense because in digital communication systems, as noted, bits of the signal in a either arrive or they don’t. One should therefore get either a pure signal or an entirely broken signal, there is no technical ether state, no communicational limbo, as there often would be with analogue.

Yet, we know in our everyday lives that this isn’t the phenomenological truth of the matter. Glitches occur all the time in the operation of our devices. Audio can distort, images can in their rendering temporarily look off-kilter, peripherals can become unstable. While our systems appear to getting closer and closer to an idealized noiseless state, these glitchy ripples serve as a reminder that entropy can never truly be mastered.

In the glitch art world, these naturally occurring glitches are known as ‘Wild Glitches’ (or ‘pure glitch’). When they are captured, often via a screen grab, the glitch is no longer actually there, what remains is an artifact of a glitch that once happened. The grab is a trace of a process that took place and appeared incorrect to the human user, this is because a wild glitch is an affective event that happens in real time.

                                                            (a ‘wild glitch’ caught by Curt Cloninger[4])

The crux of the matter here then is that a glitch is only a glitch when observed by the human end-user as such. Crucially what this serves to highlight is that the analogue has not been entirely removed from communications systems, and as such the ability to interpret error in an analogue mode is still in existence. This is because the initial input into computer systems is derived from an analogous world, humans have to initially program the computer systems, which could create unwanted noise. This can come particularly troublesome when one bares in mind that not only are systems becoming more and more complex but more often than not they are being built upon a babble of other computer languages be they contemporary or legacy. On top of this, when the data reaches the required destination, there is a human on the other end which requires analogue representations of the digital sphere in order to be able to understand the languages of data. Our physical senses in other words are not directly compatible with the digital world, they cannot yet be patched in directly, and this is why we require our devices to convert the digital into analogue forms, be that via our digital displays, audio output and in the future potentially haptic interfaces. The glitch fundamentally then serves to highlight that we haven’t yet transcended our bodies, and furthermore, as we will explore, they remind us what it is that our computers actually do, they are translators of data; they act as the village shaman once did, they are intermediaries between us and another magical world that is not natively accessible to the human (despite our hand in its creation). So powerful the act of translation, so seamless and instantaneous, we can often forget that it’s going on at all; the act of glitch serves to reminds us of this fact. To quote H, Manon and D, Tempkin’s Notes on Glitch:

“We tend to think of glitch as a purely digital phenomenon, but nothing could be further from the truth. Glitch is an intersection of analog and digital modes of (re)production. Reveling in the blocky, layered, decomposed underside of digital transcoding, glitch art is an anamorphosis in which digital has been poked by its analog other;; it is “digital gone wild” when grazed by an analog fingertip.”

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Can Glitch Still Disrupt?

Glitch art, when at its absolute best, is utilized by the artist to highlight the biases and errors inherent in any translation, they demonstrate just how much faith and devotion we pay to our digital communications. The glitch artist wishes to reveal the political implications inherent in this, to show how our lack of fundamental understanding could potentially be exploited. Ultimately the purpose of glitch is to highlight that noise and entropy haven’t disappeared, the world is not seamless and we must not simply pay fealty to the technology gods who reside in their manifest clouds. In the more grounded language of Sabotage! Glitch politix Man[ual/festo]:

“a glitch reveals itself as political when it reminds us that technologies are not neutral tools, but rather are symptoms of our worldview and cultural norms: when encryption breaks, leaking user credentials—how have we come to view privacy when facebook fields feedback into themselves—how have we come to view identity when emails garble and voice/video over IP slip/drop—how have we come to view relationships.”

The issue with glitch art today resides in how effective it is in achieving this aim. While it no doubt highlights various issues as noted, does it have the power to maintain its critique of contemporary technology culture? The political power of glitch resides in the very moment when the human engaging with glitch feels implicitly entangled and enthralled by the very systems that gave materiality to the glitch in question. To be effective glitch art has to go beyond a simple revelatory uncanny moment and move towards a subsequent self-analysis of one’s own interaction and relationship with digital technologies. The act of filtering out noise in order to return to the fantasy of a platonically pure/noiseless signal is an attempt to maintain a myth of pure transcendence. The problem for glitch art today however is that the noise it wishes to highlight is itself becoming a mere aesthetic, something which now finds itself doubling-back and cloaking that which it wishes to rip-open.

Glitch as a style has found itself becoming a recognized and codified aesthetic, in doing so it has been integrated and normalized. As it becomes more widely used in everyday popular culture the glitch loses it element of surprise, its uncanniness, the noise of glitch becomes noiseless; when the use of glitch becomes a means unto itself it is no longer noise but the intended signal. In one sense this case could be argued against intentionally produced glitch art from the outset, but the key difference here is that the glitch artist is specifically utilizing the style, and more specifically in their case the method of glitch, to provoke questions. The glitch style when used in popular culture is primarily used as mere aesthetic, a cool style, a signifier of authenticity. The effect of this cultural broadening is that when one now encounters glitch art we automatically begin to filter out the political content inherent in the message. Its normalization serves to neutralize the intent, in the same way in which the punk movement, once brimming with fecundity, is now sterile, sold back to us intermittently as a style hinting at an authenticity which is no longer there, with all the radical questioning content is stripped bare. Glitch art then could be facing a similar fate, as Manon and Temkin state:

“When glitched images appear in mainstream motion pictures—for instance the Joker’s videos in The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008), or the camcorder footage in Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008)—they are always deployed in the name of authenticity, and never in order to call into question the illusion of (digital) cinema itself. Rare is the feature film in which a glitch goes unexcused by the premise of a film-within-a-film. In mainstream popular culture, glitch is deployed not as a marker of artifice, but as a signifier of raw authenticity”

             (Glitch as mere effect - from Post-Glitch by Jon Cates <http://nooart.org/post/81334324619/cates-postglitch>)

                   (Animated Gif from the Adventure Time episode ‘A Glitch is a Glitch)

The core result of this is that the glitch has now seemingly doubled-back upon itself, rather than revealing to us the noise inherent in any communication, instead of provoking us to consider the politics of our communication systems, glitch is used paradoxically to hide away the underside of our technologies. As a normalized aesthetic the glitch just becomes yet another background to either ignore or take notice of only on the most superficial of levels. The issue here filters problematically into news coverage of technology. We frequently find that the term glitch is used simply to brush over discussion of the problems with, and the politics of, digital technology; the term gets used to focus discussion towards the effect of a glitch in a system, but rarely the inherent cause. Companies and Governments alike throw out the term glitch in press releases and interviews to avoid having to explore why an error occurred, as long as it is fixed and the effect of the problem is effectively managed that’s all that seems to matter.

In previous news reporting of computer system error, before the popularization of the the term glitch, the commonly used go-to word was bug. The difference between these two words is of considerable note. The computer bug conjures images of a process gone awry, gone native, something that has to be caught and controlled. While of course still a myth in itself, it nevertheless demonstrates the active element of having to find and eradicate an erroneous error, it demonstrates more actively how wild and unstable computer systems can be. In popular imagination today we tend to see our systems as being seamless, smooth and always entirely efficient. This in itself isn’t entirely baseless, our technologies have naturally improved on these fronts, but as glitch art has demonstrated this appearance can often simply be an environmental illusion, a slight of hand. The substitution of the word bug for glitch in technology reporting only plays into this, for as noted in our search for a definition a glitch, if its origin is indeed as suggested by William Safire derived from the German and Yiddish term ‘glitschen’, meaning slip, the whole conceptual notion of error, when the term is used in this context, is altered. When major errors in systems, such as the recent NYSE outage, are labelled as a glitch meaning mere slippage, we brush away the seriousness as just a blip. If it were again described as bug we may view it very different, as something out of control, and as such we would seemingly take the issue more seriously, in perhaps the same manner that a hack, an attack from outside, is seen as more important than a ‘simple’ glitch.

The term of glitch then, when used in this context and in an environment where glitch is normalized, while admitting to error, is used to paper over the cracks in our digital technology systems, a glitch sounds harmless, a minor slippage that is soon corrected, seamless reality restored. Glitch when used in this context loses its power to interrogate the world. Glitch only works when it is viewed by the end-user as an uncanny disruption, leading to self-reflection; the banalization of the term limits and blocks out this uncanniness from emerging. The term glitch is frequently being used then to paradoxically filter out noise rather than exploring it. The problem with this, as Cloninger points out is that: “…filtering noise is never "politically” neutral; it always involves an initial and sweeping value assessment which then excuses us from having to make subsequent, case-by-case value assessments based on specific individual positions.”

If glitch art is to remain in effective in challenging our assumptions of the digital world it needs to stifle this neutralization of its core motif. Is this still possible? I would say it could just about be salvaged as the glitch-mode currently used in popular culture is only a small segment of the plethora of different methods and styles that reside within glitch art as a whole. Where the battle rests then is in the reclamation of the term, to make it political once-more rather than simply a tool used by the black mages of the PR world to cloak real-world issues of which the public should conversely be encouraged to engage with and question.

To end as we begun, by evoking Marshall McLuhan, it is telling that he states that: “The role of the artist is to create an anti-environment as a means of perception and adjustment”. What is meant by this is that the role of the artist is to create a dialogue, to create other worlds in which we can reflect about our own. If the fish are to see the water they need another environment in which to see there own. Glitch did this, but then the alternative environment got dragged deep-down into the water and failed to make the same ripples in reality, to be effective again it needs to create new paradigms of thought, new anti-environments. This I believe is possible for glitch as it is inherently effective at showing us the ghosts that haunt our machines, this is of great us because as McLuhan states: “propaganda is environmental and invisible.The total life of any culture tends to be “propaganda”… It blankets perception and suppresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom”

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(1) - David Foster Wallace also uses a similar metaphor in his 2005 commencement speech to Kenyon College titled This Is Water: “There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

(2) - It is from this that the digital-duality debate emerges, primarily as a conceptual misunderstanding between digital natives and other groups. The argument, put crudely, that the divide between online and offline is a false dichotomy is neither true nor false, like the fish in the water the recognition of the medium (being online) does not efface the fact that the fish is surrounded by water.

(3) - Indeed Apple famously in 2010 utilized the phrase “it’s magic” to describe the iPad. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlgiWO8_BiQ> In more recent times Google, in a blog post discussing their logo change, stated that: “Today we’re introducing a new logo and identity family that reflects this reality and shows you when the Google magic is working for you” <http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/google-update.html> and in the UK Virgin Media state that the reason their broadband is faster than competitors is due to the “…magic in our cables” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq9YYISEJzs>. There are of course many other examples out there.

(4) - For more of Curt’s captured wild glitches view his killing jar here: <http://lab404.com/glitch/>

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56k Modems and the Digital Duality Debate

In both an act of nostalgia, and ‘research’ for an art project to do with religiosity and the web, I’ve recently found myself searching through YouTube listening to multiple captures of the jaggedly dulcet tones that are produced by the 56k modem handshake.

None of them sounded quite like my old modem, the pitch never quite as high, the electronic squeal never quite the same. So why the hunt for a personally derived technological haecceity scrap which may or may not exist in the manner in which I remember?

The original search was not initiated with this personal element in mind, but it soon, perhaps inevitably, descended into it. In some small way the fact that what I intended as a quick look-up soon turned into a nostalgia hunt only seemed to confirm my conception of the possible significance of a transcendental affect poetically embedded within 56k handshake sonics.

The idea that instigated my search was the conception that the tones which the 56k modem whined out act very much like Gregorian chanting, or perhaps more meaningfully, like the ‘Om’ mantra emitted during certain meditation practice; the point being that the ritualistic like process of connecting enmeshed with the sounds in a way that perhaps instigated in the individual a mental mechanism allowing for a conceptual switch into another mode of existence. These tones, in some manner, and with hindsight, literally prepared users to adjust to a different level of consciousness. This libidinal association between the 56k noise and the world it subsequently opened up no doubt resulted, for me at least, in a personal attachment to the signal.

It is perhaps from this initial experience of web connection that for many people the digital dualism meme first implanted into their minds. The audio generated by the modem would demarcate clearly both the difference between and transportation from, the material world into a seemingly immaterial one. Like the effect of chanting or meditation, one was forced to think about a change in state, the traversal from one mode of consciousness to another. Yet today, with seemingly instant and ubiquitous connections, from wi-fi to mobile data, this dualism, this personal and deep transcendental reflection about the nature between the physical and digital, which was once built into the connection medium, is dramatically lessened if not altogether lost.

To initially caricaturize Cyborgology’s Nathan Jurgenson et al’s position on this, good riddance to such thinking, the binary opposition of online/offline is now (and always was)  false. The duality was in essence always incorrect despite how the 56k experience created a palpably ontological schism between online/offline. To demonstrate how our experience of the web has since changed Nathan quite rightly points out:

“…what research as well as those who actually use social media tell us is that social media has everything to do with the physical world and our offline lives are increasingly influenced by social media, even when logged off. We need to shed the digital dualist bias because our Facebook pages are indeed “real life” and our offline existence is increasingly virtual“

While this clearly articulates how many people today experience the web and makes a good contribution to dismantling the dualist myth, I nevertheless think that attempting to get rid of a dualist analysis is not entirely useful. Rather, by retaining, in certain instances, the ontological framework of digital duality, we can explore a variety of issues around our interactions with the internet; That is to say, digital dualism can be a theoretically useful fiction. It analytically separates the digital from the physical, pushing us to examine and notice how each influences the other and maintains distinct qualities. Without this useful fiction, it is perhaps all too easy to fall into the strong augmented perspective in which distinctions between digital and physical are erased entirely.

The augmented position is today the commonly experienced perspective, due to the relatively seamless manner in which access to the network is phenomenologically felt. For many we are, in our day to day existence seemingly always already connected. For example, at home, I, via numerous devices, find myself connected to wi-fi, when I leave to go to work my phone switches onto mobile data, when I get to work it switches back onto wi-fi automatically. This all happens seamlessly, ‘like magic’, the duality of online/offline phenomenologically and quite literally under these circumstances, no longer makes sense as we in the West are always already connected.This is not to say that digital dualism was more valid in the 56k era, but that its dismantling maps more logically onto the experiential ways people connect to the Internet today.

However, the ontological fit between an augmented perspective and seamless digital mediation seemingly reduces the useful fiction of digital duality; it affords an easy forgetting of the ways in which digital media pervade, affect, and shape social life.

Today, it is only through breaks and cracks in communication systems that the average user is thrust into reflection about their relationship with technology and technologies’ independent effects. If the dualist framework were to be flattened out of existence entirely we could potentially be left with one-dimensional thought as these breaks can be occluded within the strong augmented perspective.

While using a 56k modem did not particularly require strong technical understanding of how the technology worked or how it interacted with the greater communications infrastructure it nevertheless foregrounded that a technical process was taking place, that a connection was being established where there wasn’t one before. While one didn’t need to know specifically what was happening, we knew that something was, there was a clear distance which provoked reflection. Connections today are silent; , there is a disappearing experiential  divide between digital and physical, and while this reflects a truer sense of how networked technologies are not isolated from our physical world what can and does get occluded as a result is a degree of everyday critical distance.

As such it is increasingly only via system failures, which are becoming less frequent, that one is plunged back into a more palpable dualist relationship with the network, albeit momentarily.

What I should make clear is that I’m not arguing that digital dualism is the only effective means of a critical relationship with digital technology.; However, as an everyday framework, reflection is embedded into the dualist standpoint, making it a useful tool..

While it is right to highlight that the online/offline binary is a false one, that does not mean that the split itself is not a useful one to occasionally have. The everyday erosion of the dualism and the theoretical flattening of online/offline creates a structure which actively encourages a lack of everyday critical thought; it is in part because of this that the Snowden revelations came as such a shock to many who did not consider the socio-political implications of technology and it is equally this same very reason that they soon quickly disappeared as an area of concern as soon as the media circus switched focus. It is my view that a quantum hinterland between the two nuanced camps which both are and are not epistemologically valid is perhaps, in light of all this, the best position to take.

As our commonly-held understanding of the nature of online/offline in someways rightly becomes more spectral and ephemeral as to better reflect our Schrödinger like experience with the medium, we could then find in an extreme situation that people’s everyday fundamental understanding and philosophical pondering over the political and ontological implications of the network could evaporate in turn. While it is right to highlight that the online/offline binary is a false one, that does not mean that the split itself is not a useful one to occasionally have.  

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(Originally posted on In Media Res for Black Mirror Week: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2015/05/07/ghost-black-mirror-technology-spectrality-and-magic)

Our modern communication technologies are magical and spectral but their ubiquity has rendered them, along with the world they inhabit, increasingly banal. It’s only when there’s a crack in their seamless operation that we awake to curse that our black mirrors won’t cast our spells.

This utilisation of occult terminology isn’t simply flippant, as Jeffery Sconce documents in Haunted Media, communication technology has since its inception been linked with the spectral; be that a literal belief that they could communicate with an empirically provable ghost-world; to the postmodern condition in which technologically mediated spectres play with our ability to maintain a ‘reality’ distinction from the technological ethereal.

Arthur C Clark’s famous  3rd dictum states: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”; this shouldn’t be seen to simply apply to science-fiction as it also informs our everyday understanding of communication technology whose language is magical; from installer wizards that setup an interface with the digital ether to tech-gurus that assist us when our digital magic goes awry.

Charlie Brooker  literally cracks the surface of a Black Mirror at the start of each episode, in doing so he summons forth the digital ghosts that surround us. Brooker’s catoptromanic divination haunts us by reflecting back uncanny futures from behind the shattered screen. These tales, as with all good science-fiction, are not so much concerned with an actual forthcoming future, for what is presented is a ghost future, a summoning of a present which has not truly existed but has the potential to cross over.

As we look into our black mirrors what we see is a ghostly image of ourselves and our world which is all too uncanny. This thread cracks through the Black Mirror series. What’s most uncomfortable about the show is that it demonstrates how little control we actually have over our technologies, but more than this, who are the real ghosts? Is it those behind the screen, our doubles? Or is it our corporeal selves living in a present age which formally disavows the spectral despite carrying with us everywhere a magic mirror which connects us to a cyber-ether? Is it not perhaps the case that our technologies have in fact always rendered us spectral and that what we find most disturbing about Black Mirror is that it dare show us how entangled and powerless we’ve become in technology’s enchanting web of spells?

[culturegeist]

Social Networking and Work (Part 1) Frozen

I’m often asked why I don’t have a Facebook profile. The fact of the matter is I don’t really have a complete answer I can fall back on. If provoked further I’ll often cite a privacy argument and go on to roughly explain how Facebook uses tracking cookies to surveil journeys across the web. This is of course not unique to Facebook but they remain one of the biggest beneficiaries of our online surveillance consensus. Many of the people I use this line of reasoning with are surprisingly naive, they are often unaware that this open tracking is taking place and upon hearing about it most remain unconcerned; in fact it can often be the case that the “what have you got to hide” line gets flung my way upon hearing about it. The only simplistic answer I can give in response to this really is that it’s the principle that’s the issue. However, to the average millennial this is an empty argument to make, principles are quaint, an Instagram aesthetic as solid as air.

A recent press release for a not at all bias ‘report’ from PwC about the Future of Work promotes this nonchalant attitude towards our data. It opens by stating that: “The type of data profiling used by retailers and advertisers could soon become commonplace in the workplace”

It goes on to say that: “Our research reveals that employees are more open to sharing their personal data than previously thought. The millennial generation of workers are particularly happy to share their data meaning this kind of data monitoring by organisations could become routine in the years to come”

The press release clearly is very enthusiastic about this integrated data-driven future in which our online social capital would determine our success in the working world. And of course why wouldn’t it be? If HR departments can convince us to share our data with them in the search for work it brings down their costs. We would no longer need to go through the stress of an interview, an algorithm could instantly assess our suitability for a job role based in part on our online behaviours. But from this a permanent level of underlying anxiety would arise. Yes we wouldn’t have that nerve-wracking day, but in exchange we would have to be always policing ourselves online, we would have to make sure we never transgressed ever. With cookies and other mechanisms tracking our every step, one false move could lead to disaster. Who knows what the employment algorithm would consider to be negative, viewing sites deemed even marginally too transgressive could easily land us with a negative flag on our profile, locking us out of decent employment for years. This scenario is naturally excellent for those in positions of power who want to maintain our neoliberal status-quo. This privacy invasion, this further blurring between work and life would freeze the present still, we would be unable to advocate provocative new ideas out of fear it would ruin us economically, the powerful would become unchallengable.

Perhaps all is not lost however, this potential future, despite already in some limited sense operating, does not have to progress. The press release which pushes the positive boon this set of circumstances could have for HR departments attempts to brush over one of its own statistics. It is stated very early on that: “The research reveals that the younger generation are more open to sharing their personal data with their employees, with 36% of Generation Y workers saying they would be happy to do so.”

This sentence here is carefully constructed, it leads the reader to mis-interpret the data ahead. Reverse the figure and we can see that almost two thirds of millennials are against their data being used in this way, a sizeable majority. To prevent this from happening we millennials need to stop falling into the trap of slacktivism and take active steps to opt-out of such a system, we need to stop being so carefree about our data and begin actively controlling it. For me, one step in that direction is not having a Facebook profile, but this action alone is of course not enough to trigger what will be a much needed thaw in the frozen future ahead.

(First posted at: dotdashscribble.tumblr.com by @unluckydip)

[culturegeist]

I am a feminist!

There are a lot of positives when it comes to Twitter: you interact with interesting people, it’s a realm of free speech (in theory anyway) and it’s a fantastic platform to keep up to date with recent headlines and events.

There is, however, one disastrous drawback. Caitlin Moran.

It’s true that Twitter does encourage a self-righteous mindset, and often you can find your wit and sarcasm becoming lost in textual translation and the subject of abuse despite honest intentions. In Moran’s case, it is entirely plausible that this process has occurred. I don’t doubt her reasons and fundamental beliefs. She recurrently attempts to establish herself as a pioneer for women’s rights and the ‘lost voice’ of the female.

How she goes about it is what pisses me off. She’s the classic case of someone who has completely misunderstood what constitutes feminism, instead choosing to borrow and shabbily rehash the “solidarity, baby!” tagline that has seen the subdiscipline mocked and generalised by the mainstream.

Worse of all: she’s earning fame off of the back of this.

My opinions aren’t without evidence to back them up. Anyone who writes a book on How to be a Woman - one that I have sadly read, by the way – deserves to severely mutilated and have their insides fed to the local village dogs. It’s egotistical, unsubstantiated drivel. If ever there was a text to encapsulate and promote the stereotypical, hairy armpit ladette feminist, this is almost certainly it.

Her continual references to Sex and the City and Bridget Jones’ Diary throughout said text further detracts from its feminist credentials. How can a group of women – or a single woman – whose sole purpose is to find a man and get married be considered feminist? If Caitlin Moran truly wants to ‘smash patriarchy’ – which she seems to think getting some ludicrous tattoo at the age of 15 will do – then she should perhaps contemplate identifying better female characters within popular culture.

Worst of all: she’s from Wolverhampton but it ashamed to confess this, or have anything to do with her hometown. No matter how many times my workplace offer her the chance to air her opinions to a live audience (you'd think she’d love that, right?), or my University offer her a Honorary Degree, she’s just not interested. How can someone so proud of their sex be so ashamed of where they come from?

At least she creates offensive, derogatory television series’ based on her heritage. What a shame they’re based in Manchester.

Back to the feminism. By far the most contradictory, frustrating chapter of How to be a Woman is “I Am A Feminist!”. She initially urges the reader to stand on the nearest piece of furniture and scream this sentence from the top of their lungs. Something she did at 15 years old apparently. This perhaps goes some way to why she has such a skewed perception of the subdiscipline, actually. Her credentials for being a feminist are simple:

Do you have a vagina? Do you want to be in charge of it?

Did you answer yes to both? Congratulations – you’re a feminist! That means – sorry blokes – but you can’t be feminists. No matter how much you may pioneer for women’s rights, or treat all women like Queens, you can’t be a feminist until you magically grow a vagina. Or, well, get a very expensive and complicated operation.

Feminism needs to be ‘reclaimed’ apparently. Most women don’t consider themselves feminists.

Who can fucking blame them? I certainly wouldn’t want to be Caitlin Moran’s idea of a feminist. According to her, I’m a feminist simply because I wear jeans everyday. Go figure. Perhaps my next step is to let my armpit hair grow out of control.

Don’t get me wrong, I support feminism as an idea of equal rights for women. What I don’t support are the mouthpieces who succeed only in tarnishing the hard work of others to overturn the stereotype.

She wants to reclaim the use of ‘”strident feminism”, an underused and reviled term – which makes it hot, apparently. She even compares it to reviving the top hat as a fashion icon, claiming that ‘once people see how hot you look in it they’re all going to want to get one.’ Sorry Caitlin, I forgot feminism was just a trendy commodity. A compulsory accessory for women in modern society.

Moran even has the nerve to compare her reclaiming of feminism to Martin Luther King’s campaign for civil rights for ethnic minorities. Do me a fucking favour.

What comes next, however, is the most hilarious of all:

‘But then, I do understand why women started to reject the word feminism. It ended up being invoked in so many baffingly inappropriate contexts that – if you weren’t aware of the core aims of feminism, and were trying to work it out simply from the surrounding conversation – you’d presume it was some spectacularly unappealing combination of misandry, misery and hypocrisy, which stood for ugly clothes, constant anger and, let’s face it, no fucking.’

You see the hypocrisy, right? I’m glad it’s not just me. Her context of feminism is as baffingly inappropriate as her contemporaries: rehashing old arguments like women being the subject of sexism in music videos. No fucking shit, Sherlock.

What is feminism to Moran? Women being equal to men, but that does exclude all men who support this notion – they don’t have a vagina after all. Sorry guys.

She wants to reclaim feminism in the same vein as black people have reclaimed the ‘N word’. No, Caitlin, I’m pretty sure some people would still consider that quite racist. And, whilst you and other shouty mouthpieces are around, I don’t want to be your idea of feminism. That must mean I don’t support women’s rights. Never fucking mind, ay?

The sooner women rally against fame-seeking mouthpieces who pioneer feminism as victimisation as opposed to liberation, the better.

(Posted by Wolvensam)

[culturegeist]

Reversals and revelations

I’m rapidly reaching the realisation that fan fiction is as much of a critique of real life – and damning of the social issues that we all face – as it is an escape from it.

I vividly remember one text I encountered within the first year of my undergraduate degree that, to this day, continues to resonate with me. The issues it questioned throughout such a short and sweet narrative was nothing short of astonishing. I have to credit it as one of a plethora of starting points for what – I’m hoping – is an interesting, and relatively original, dissertation topic.

The text itself is Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy: a critique of stereotypical gender roles, behaviours and – more importantly – perceptions. The beauty of the novel is that it never reveals whether the narrator is male or female as s/he possesses the traits of both. It’s impossible to not have your eyes opened to the suffocating gender stereotypes imposed by society after reading such a compelling piece of literature.

The stomach-churning website uniformdating.com is the perfect example of just where we are at with ‘gender equality’ in the twenty-first century. A male nurse? A female fire fighter? Don’t be so stupid and revolutionary, folks!

By the same token, pornography is a stereotypically male endeavour. It is made for the man, by the man and with the man as the dominating sexual figure throughout. Forgive me, male readers, but there is no sentiment in pornography. The focal point is penetration – where, when and how – and the ultimate goal is the ejaculation; both for the man on the screen and for yourselves (well, I assume so anyway…)

Feminist critic Joanna Russ discusses throughout her essay “Pornography by Women, for Women, with Love” how slash fiction – sexy fan fiction to you and me – is the female equivalent. It offers an insight into female sexual fantasy and formulates an autonomous medium that contains elements of the sexual experience that pornography purposefully excludes. For example: the lover’s interest in each other’s minds, not solely one another’s bodies, the tenderness, and the refusal to rush into a relationship with one another.

Of course, slash fiction contains narratives of the sexual acts – I doubt it would be half as popular as it is if it didn’t – but the emphasis throughout these acts is placed on the emotional quality of the sex, as opposed to the physical satisfaction felt by both parties. Unlike porn, sex throughout slash fiction doesn’t strip away the humanity of the characters, rather it constitutestheir humanity. Slash fiction recurrently represents sex as a commonplace act within a committed relationship as part of a meaningful exchange between equals, not anonymous or depersonalised

Don’t get confused, however: slash fiction writers (and readers alike) do not express any desire to become male; they merely succeed in formulating a unique discourse which aids in subverting the dominant cultural tropes attributed to both genders. In slash, both characters can be equally as strong or vulnerable as the other, equally dominant and subservient without either quality being deemed as a result of their sexuality or their gender.

Some would say that slash fiction writers merely tease out the subtext of much-loved television series’ and films. Take Captain Kirk and Spock for example: they both resist the restrictive marriages to women in episodes and films alike, allowing them the freedom to prove their loyalty to one another. Kirk loves many a woman throughout the course of the series, but none so dearly as he loves Spock. Kirk recurrently renounces emotional and romantic ties that may interfere with his professional duties, despite persistently disobeying orders and putting his job at risk to protect his “friend”.

As a fan – or slash – fiction writer, it must be difficult to ignore such a glaring subtext.

Whereas the authors of the primary texts can only allude to the homosexual subtext of Kirk and Spock’s relationship, fan fiction is a medium separated from the discourse we see dominating popular culture and, as mentioned previously, society on the whole. Slash fiction has successfully distanced itself from the constraints of heterosexual society and established itself as a liberated form of expression for readers and writers alike.

Culture has altered: that cannot be denied. But has it altered as much as we, the readers, would like? Probably not. Concerns of the 1980s and 1990s may seem quaint and outdated, yet the focal points of those arguments still ring scarily true. As a population, we are certainly more accepting of homosexual relations: yet you’d struggle to not hear a gasp in a cinema when two men kiss on screen, or hear a mother scorning her young boy for wanting a pink bracelet as opposed to a blue one.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though: I do think we’re getting there, and the internet has played much of a part as any other contemporary medium. . Fans are no longer restricted to learning about slash face-to-face with their fellow fans at conventions, with hard-copy slash zines sold under the table. Gay, lesbian, bi, trans and queer fans are all now vocal and visible. It would be foolish to brandish slash fiction as the aegis of the middle-class straight white woman.

Indeed, slash could once be fairly easily defined as homoerotic relationships between male characters which did not happen on screen but might, given differing circumstances, have done. Yet men would still object that the slash fiction ideal of sex just does not match their ideal – whether this ideal is constructed by them or society is the underlying question – but this is all part of the point. A slashed hero has more to do with what writers wish men were like than what they know men to be like. It also has an awful lot to do with what women are like.

Above all else, slash fiction is a rebellion against the canonical text it is borrowing from and a middle finger to the canon itself. text. It is a medium through which its writers can scavenge for textual crumbs that become the raw materials for creative reworking. As is the case with the aforementioned Kirk/Spock slash fiction pairing, gender is removed as a governing and determining discourse within the relationship. The lovers may still have a vast array of problems to confront, but one problem common to women within contemporary culture never arises: one partner’s inferior rank in a sexist society.

But it’s time to stop. My utopian ramblings are definitely not going to cause shockwaves. Nor encourage sexist bile such as uniformdating.com to shut down. Nonetheless, it’s comforting to know that there are some revolutionary thinkers – whether in the public eye or not – who are attempting to make a difference. Even if they are few and far between.

(First posted at: wolvensam.com by @wolvensam)

[culturegeist]

"Our Nonchalance was the USP"

The front-man of indie band Peace is quoted as stating, in a recent publicity grabbing piece in the NME, that the concept of 'selling out' is "..an old concept that doesn't exist anymore. All the new cool bands are sponsored by shoe brands anyway..." The article where this is quoted is titled, in click-bate fashion, as "Peace question Arctic Monkey's indie status". Their criticism centres around wether the Arctic Monkeys new album, titled 'AM', possess an authentic indie sound, with Peace stating that it sounds "somewhere between Black Sabbath and Dr Dre". I believe going down this route of analysing audible qualities to assess wether the Arctic Monkeys, or any other bands/artists, can be categorised as 'indie' is erroneous.

Stripping the concept of indie back to its origins we can see that term was used simply to describe music made independently from major record labels, meaning that the term indie does not relate to any audible quality within music but instead to the production and distribution of music, it relates to the economics of the music industry. Going off just this as a definition, the Arctic Monkeys are indie, but, self-described indie-rockers Peace are not as they are signed to Columbia records. It is clear from this then that Peace's challenging of the indie credentials of the Arctic Monkeys is rooted in something else, another conception of what 'indie' represents.

Indie today is a complex term in the sense that it has become rather vague and muddy. What underpins the concept of indie as we cloudily know it today can still be picked out of the ruins of the original definition however. Independent labels were an alternative to the mainstream; this concept of being other, of being different from the crowd is alluring, particularly in an individualist world. As such this element stuck, to be indie is simply to be alternative. But, the problem with this is that aren't we all alternative? Aren't we all encouraged to be unique individuals? With this being the case what are we, or more importantly here, what is indie alternative to? As Peace said in the opening, if 'selling out' is considered an old concept in the indie scene it certainly can't be considered an alternative to mainstream neoliberal ideology. Going the independent route to get started in the music business is in fact not an alternative at all but the norm now. Rather than being simply a way of circumventing the gate-keepers that were the bigger labels, going independent today is to become an entrepreneur. Going this route you can prove to the bigger labels that there is a market for your music, then hopefully you can be signed, or bought-out, further down the road. Take for example Adele, not possessing the typical skinny-girl pop-star image, she had to prove there was a market for her banal music before she could get signed up, this she did very successfully. She was so successful in fact that the Huffington Post recently ran a story with the headline "Why Adele Proves That Being Indie is the way Forward", an article which exalts indie as being the best business strategy in today's economic environment. 

So this begs the question, does indie exist beyond a business model today? Is there an indie ethos? And the answer is yes, there is still an indie ethos, being alternative, but question that needs to be answered is what is the core nature of this alternativeness?

The advertising guru Bill Bernbach came up with a radically new idea in the 50's that shook-up the advertising world and would help foster the consumerist environment in which we live today. His central idea was, rather than simply trying to satisfy the needs of the consumer, it would be better to encourage us all to be 'different' in order to drive sales. However, to be different one needs to keep running away from those who we want to be different from. It could be argued that it is this continual search to be superficially different that has led to today's world feeling static. Adam Curtis states that: "If consumerism continually scours the margins of society for rebellious or contrary notions and then immediately turns them into stuff to sell - it ironically becomes very difficult for new ideas to change society. Instead they tend to end up reinforcing it." This, I believe, touches on the core problem with indie today, the whole indie drive to be alternative is not alternative, it is the driving force of our consumerism, so, rather than being an alternative to the status quo, indie is very much symptomatic of it, the indie bands of today buy into already produced and sanitised versions of rebelliousness. In Capitalist Realism Mark Fisher sums up how this is at play today when he writes: 

"What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled 'alternative' or 'independent' cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. 'Alternative' and 'independent' don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream"

With this in mind, it should be no surprise that the Arctic Monkeys can maintain their alternative status and yet demonstrate values in-keeping with our neoliberal present; they can 'play' at being alternative by adopting the accepted look and sound of an imagined alternative because it has been already incorporated, commodfied, and made safe by capitalism. The Arctic Monkeys are probably very much (pre)conscious of this. Unlike Kurt Kobain who was troubled by the futile struggle against being incorporated, the Arctic Monkeys like many Gen Y's just accept, along with austerity, that this is simply the way things are now. Their debut album titled "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not" could perhaps be read as an admission to all this, they know that despite being called alternative they aren't in fact alternative to anything at all. Their first single from this album, "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor", highlighted from the off that they were not going to be alternative in the sense of opposing anything in their present, but that they were a band simply putting on the now commodified clothes of what was once alternative; both the song and the video look and sound superficially as if it could have genuinely have came from the early 80's rather than the 21st century. This plays into the hands of the status-quo, much better we look at a commodified safe past than try and challenge the present or future.

Further evidence of the band reinforcing the status-quo can be evidenced in front-man Alex Turner demonstrating their entrepreneurial underpinnings when he recently admitted that "Our nonchalance was the USP". To be 'indie' is to know your market. Alex Turner gave his market exactly what he knew they wanted when he, along with the rest of the Arctic Monkeys, accepted the Brit award for Best Album 2014. He gave the audience a rambling acceptance speech in which, just as his music, he invoked the ghosts of rock from which his band is not simply indebted but knowingly possessed. In the speech he talks about the cyclical nature of the world, and how Rock 'n' Roll is always already destined to come back, accepting the idea that in our postmodern world all we have to look forward to is the past repeating itself. He ends by dropping his microphone on the floor and walking away with a swagger, an empty spectacle of rebelliousness that both traditional and social media went mental for, as if something so outrageous had never been done before, everyone secretly knowing it almost definitely had, and with much more affect. Key to this incident is that, just before he dropped the mic he prefaced his action with the line "Invoice me for the microphone if you need to", in doing so he demonstrated that he couldn't even momentarily escape the Capital Realist world that his band is not alternative or independent from, but very much a part of.

As such, it came as little surprise when it emerged recently that the Arctic Monkeys, along with various other celebrities, were reportedly avoiding 1.1million in tax by investing in Liberty, a tax avoidance scheme. Perhaps then, Peace hit the nail on the head when they said that the notion of selling out was an old concept. So far the reaction to this tax story regarding the celebrated band has been rather muted. This kind of money-focussed action is, it would seem, to be expected, even from an 'alternative' band. It would appear then that their USP extends from marketing and into their actual ethics and politics.

Once again we have to return to, what are they 'independent' or 'alternative' from? These words, these notions, they're nothing but commodified styles now, detached from meaning, empty signifiers pointing to other empty signifiers. So much so that even Adele could at one point be described as being indie. But, it would seem, she has maintained her modern indie roots, as Mark Fisher said earlier, indie is the dominant style, so when she was recently stated the following, it would seem she also inadvertently summed up the stagnant ideology underpinning indie today:

"I'm mortified to have to pay 50%! [While] I use the NHS, I can't use public transport ! any more. Trains are always late, most state schools are shit, and I've gotta give ! you, like, four million quid – are you having a laugh? When I got my tax bill in from ! [the album] 19, I was ready to go and buy a gun and randomly open fire."

(First posted at: dotdashscribble.tumblr.com by @unluckydip)

[culturegeist]

Jodi Dean - The Limits of the Web in an Age of Communicative Capitalism

(This is a great debunking of cyber-utopian thinking that we can all find ourselves easily getting sucked into with it being one of the dominant discourses of our age. Goes someway to explaining why it is that culture today feels so stagnant and static) [posted by @unluckydip]

[cabofcuriosity]

The modern age was a time when human beings, alone or together, could sculpt the marble of history with the hammer of will. Today, both the marble of history and the hammer of will seem to have vanished from sight.

From Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s introduction to The Last Night: Anti-Work, Atheism, Adventure. by Federico Campagna (via cabofcuriosity) [posted by @unluckydip]