“When Scabs are a Danger to Public Health” I In These Times | 11.08.2021
“People Are Running Out of Patience with the Capitalist System”: Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez on Governing as a Socialist | In These Times | 9.29.2021
“To Fight Coronavirus, Organize Your Coworkers” | Jacobin | 3.20.2020
“YDSA Endorses the Public Housing Green New Deal Act" | The Activist | 11.14.2019 | with Bill R.
“A Force Stronger Than Gravity: NYC YDSA Supports the Chicago Educators Strike” | The Activist | 10.31.2019 | with Jake C. and Labiba C.
“Class (Struggle) In Session” | The Call | 2.26.2019
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for a writing class on pop culture criticism
“So much sensationalist bullshit has been written about Judee Sill (by people who never knew her) focusing on her days as a hooker and a junkie.” So begins Pat Thomas’s interview with Tommy Peltier, a longtime friend and collaborator of Sill’s, in the liner notes to the recently and lovingly compiled “Songs of Rapture and Redemption: Rarities & Live.” He’s not wrong; in nearly all of the writing on Sill, her music, an inimitable blend of gospel, folk and country at once bluesy and baroque, plays second fiddle to the stranger- and sadder-than-fiction story of her all-too-brief life. Her eponymous 1971 debut and 1973’s Heart Food were met with praise from critics and her fellow songwriters alike; in 1973 Steve Holden called Judee a “most gifted artist, one who continues to promise almost more than I dare hope for.” Unfortunately — for Sill and for those who loved her, and for those of us who love her music — much of that promise never came to pass. She died in obscurity in 1979, leaving behind an unfinished third record and quietly ascending to the pantheon of young, brilliant musicians who died too soon.
It’s hard to write about Sill without relying on sensationalist bullshit. I suppose in writing this at all I’m contributing to the problem, but like so many others, I have joined the ranks of Sill’s devoted disciples, compelled to tell and retell her story to rectify fate’s perceived cruel disservice to a great talent. What emerges is not always a faithful portrait of the complicated artist Sill was, but rather a shifting and sometimes contradictory fable that cements Sill’s status as a legend — not, as she might have hoped, as “an extremely famous or notorious person,” but rather as the subject of a “story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but unauthenticated.”
The story goes something like this: Judee Sill was born Judith Lynne Sill to an average, unhappy middle class household in Los Angeles in 1944. She fell in with a rough crowd, got married, committed a series of crimes, got addicted to various drugs, went to jail, got married again. Eventually she cleaned up her act, put the gospel licks she’d learned in reform school to good use, and became the first act signed to David Geffen’s Asylum label. She put out two albums of intricate songs that married earthly desire and longing for heavenly salvation, populated with lonely cowboy types and vigilantes that sometimes seemed strikingly similar to Jesus. For a few shining years it seemed like Sill had made it. It soon became clear (the story goes) that fame was not what fate had in store for her.
Until 2003, when Rhino issued Judee Sill and Heart Food on CDs for the first time as part of its Handmade series, Sill was “[u]nlamented and all but forgotten.” These are the words of Barney Hoskyns, who in a 2004 Guardian profile declared “[t]he tragic Judee Sill is well overdue for (re)discovery.” Since then, interest in Sill’s life and music has steadily increased thanks to a series of posthumous reissues and releases: 2005’s “Dreams Come True,” a two-disk set of unreleased recordings mixed by Jim O’Rourke (Sonic Youth, Wilco); Live in London: The BBC Recordings 1972-1973, released in 2007; and “Chariot of Astral Light,” an intimate collaboration with aforementioned Tommy Peltier recorded in the ‘70s and finally released in 2004.
In a review of the 2004 Intervention reissue of Judee Sill titled “The Judee Sill Cult Continues, This Time at 45RPM,” Michael Fremer of Analogplanet writes, “sometimes "legends" are created and nurtured simply by tragic circumstances. In Judee Sill's case add wasted talent and unfulfilled great promise that add up to a movie worthy story.” Sill’s life has yet to inspire a movie (although a seemingly-deserted IMDB page indicates at least one attempt at a documentary), but songwriter Laura Veirs’ “Song for Judee,” renders the Judee Sill legend in sparse yet cinematic detail. In it, Veirs’ voice echoes on top of warm, jangling guitars, the apparently upbeat melody betrayed by the sadness of the story it tells:
“You wrote “The Kiss” and it is beautiful
I can listen again and again
You never really got a break
From the car wrecks and the pain”
The crux of the Judee Sill legend is captured in these lines, which immediately identify Sill’s work with the tragic events of her life. Sill’s music is mentioned in Veir’s lyric but once, and only glancingly; it’s not even clear “The Kiss” is a song, or “Judee” a songwriter. Veirs’ appreciation for her music is given is as pretext for why the listener should care about Sill’s life, but it’s clear the main attraction here is tragedy. The rest of this atypical ode is not praise, but a retelling, addressed to Sill herself, of key moments in the legend of her life. What emerges is a tellingly concise fable that identifies Sill with the lonely phantom cowboys who populate her lyrical landscape.
Veirs appears to have lifted her narrative and several phrases from the BBC documentary. She mines in particular the commentary from Peltier, who says Sill was his best friend and shares the insights that would come to compose Veirs’ chorus: “You loved the Sons of the Pioneers and the Hollywood cowboy stars/you were just trying to put a hand to where we are.” She also borrows, nearly word-for-word, an introduction Judee gave during one of her London radio performances in 1972, describing her time “living in a ‘55 Cadillac, five people sleeping in shifts.” This almost creates an intimacy with Sill, whom Veirs had never met; however, there remains an insurmountable distance. Sill had been dead 35 years — as long as she was alive — by the time this ode was composed. While Veirs hints at Sill’s troubles in the first verse, only in the last verse does she make explicit what happened: “They found you with a needle in your arm, beloved books strewn ‘round at your feet”. The revelation gives the chorus retroactive prophetic relevance. The past tense, once wistful, is now crushing.
Her death, like her life, became part of the legend. There are general points of agreement: she had been in several car accidents, was using heroin again, and died of an overdose just after Thanksgiving 1979. Everything else is less clear. Though her death certificate reports she was found dead in her house in North Hollywood, a persistent rumor suggested she had disappeared to Mexico to live out her final days. Her death was reported as a suicide, but family members and friends maintain that the note found near her, a characteristic musing on death and redemption, was an idea for a song.
The title of a 2014 BBC Radio documentary by Ruth Barnes says it all: “The Lost Genius of Judee Sill.” Sill’s genius is preceded by its lostness. Sill herself comes last. Her music is mentioned too, of course. They quote Sill’s self-description of her work as “country-cult-baroque” and her professed influences, Bach and Pythagoras. (In some versions of the quote, Ray Charles is thrown in.) Yet every time, it seems, someone brings up that she wrote “Jesus Was a Crossmaker,” about JD Souther, that Graham Nash produced it. She was the inaugural artist on David Geffen’s Asylum, we’re told, .She opened for Crosby Stills and Nash, and Cat Stevens, and Gordon Lightfoot — and so on. These revelations are usually accompanied by astonishment at the fact that she failed to find the commercial success of her peers, despite her comparable — perhaps superior — talents.
Many have offered explanations about how this happened. There is a general consensus that her falling-out with Geffen played a role. It’s not exactly clear what happened. The word “faggot” was involved, but whether it was said live or on the radio, in reference to Geffen himself or a pair of his pink shoes, is up for debate. Whatever she said severed their relationship. Some contend that she may have been in love with him, and was hurt when he spurned her advances. Others point out that she was growing frustrated with what she saw as his lack of promotion for her music. By this point, she was already making no secret of her disdain for the “snotty rock bands” she had to open for, and I doubt this did her any favors.
The contradictions in people’s stories exacerbate the larger-than-life quality of her life and times, as do the many cliches used to tell her story. Headlines variously declare her “a star that fame forgot,” “L.A.’s doomed lady of the canyon who lost her genius to drugs,” a “mystic” who “walked among us.” The human Judee Sill is lost somewhere beneath this sensationalism. It is no wonder why her friends and family members, Tommy Peltier chief among them, feel so compelled to set the record straight by providing their version of events. In his remarks in “Songs of Rapture and Redemption,” Peltier is quick to discourage speculation about her drug use and past prostitution, declaring instead “She was just the most beautiful person.”
“Beautiful,” you may recall, was the only word Laura Veirs could come up with to describe “The Kiss.” When I first heard “The Kiss,” I was immediately struck by how inadequate the word was to describe what I was hearing. The song showcases the best of her efforts to induce mathematically precise intervals into intricate melodies that aren’t so much heard as felt. Her lyrics, confusing the sacred and profane, ride the thin ridge between love and logic, devotion and desperation. Over shifting and plaintive piano Sill sings a eulogy to stars bursting in the sky and begs a lover — god? — to come and hold her “while you show me how to fly.” I first heard “The Kiss” in a YouTube video, one of few that survives of her performing, whose introduction insists that she herself was determined to be a successful musician. Ironically, the video shows precisely why perhaps she couldn’t be: severe and guileless, Sill hunches over the piano as if it were all that exists, engrossed in the song’s intense and uncommercial emotional intensity.
Sill’s idiosyncrasies are on full display in “Songs of Rapture and Redemption”, a compilation whose greatest strength is its commitment to capturing the artist and all her contradictions in her own words. The sleeve features a candid photograph of a smiling Sill, alongside several of her paintings and drawings. The tracks included are a combination of live recordings, demos, and studio outtakes that lay bare the deceptive complexity of her compositions. In the Boston Music Hall performance that opens the record, Sill, armed only with an acoustic guitar, tells the audience “I’m going to sing you a few little songs before David [Crosby] and Graham [Nash] get here. I’d like to sing you this song called “The Vigilante”. It’s new, I hope I remember the words.” The self-effacing introduction notwithstanding, what follows is nothing short of revelatory.
An early highlight is “Enchanted Sky Machines,” a bluesy number about waiting for the end of the world where she trades her distinctive fingerpicking for pentecostal piano licks she picked up in reform school. There is an aching earnestness to the way she sings of swallowing her yearning, and it carries over into “The Archetypal Man,” which begins with Sill singing the song’s opening harpsichord solo. Before “Crayon Angels,” she describes how she would call up friends as she was writing the album and sing them instrumental solos, joking that it must have been hard for them to like her in those days. The crowd is in on it, and her self-deprecating humor belies a clear confidence in her talents and her musical vision that is justified by the virtuosic grace of her playing. Sill was a perfectionist who demanded and deserved creative control, a notoriously laborious songwriter who could be a tyrant in the studio, and these tendencies are on full display even in this humble solo set. When she introduces her second last song, “The Lamb Ran Away With the Crown,” she enunciates every word, then repeats it again — ”with. the. crown.” — determined to ensure the the audience walks away knowing exactly what she was saying.
The set ends with Judee’s signature song, “Jesus Was a Crossmaker,” which had only just been released to radio two days prior. She calmly reveals the song’s inspiration, an unhappy relationship with a “bandit and a heartbreaker,” and describes waking up one day with the conviction “that even that wretched bastard was not beyond redemption.” Her diction is clear, her tone less so. The audience, nonetheless moved, cheers and laughs. She goes on: “It’s true, I swear. It saved me, this song. It was writing this song or suicide. It’s called “Jesus is a Crossmaker” and I hope you like it.” Her voice seems monotonous for such an emotional confession, but that stops mattering as soon as the song begins.
Instantly her singing voice, freed from the perfectionism of her studio recordings, reveals itself as strikingly human. Precise, unadorned, free of vibrato, it is flat in places, sharp in others, yet cuts to the rhythmic core of each note. She struggles with a few of the intervals she has given herself to sing, but this only enhances the song, giving human voice to the mathematical precision of her compositions, linking the downtrodden with the divine. With her unpretentious voice and deceptively simple language, she strives to speak redemption into being. Her longing for it is audible.
Such longing is a key theme in much of sill’s work, and nowhere is it more pronounced than in “Crayon Angels”:
Crayon Angel songs are slightly out of tune
But I'm sure I'm not to blame
Nothing's happened, but I think it will soon
So I sit here waiting for God and a train to the Astral plane
Later in the song, she confesses “Guess reality is not as it seems so I sit here hoping for truth, and a ride to the other side”. Sill knows the truth she longs for is unattainable, at least in this lifetime — but she remains unflagging in her belief in something. It is this belief that motivates her music. To characterize Sill as a god-given genius laid low by fate undercuts her formidable musical ambition, and the sincerity with which she approached her craft. The work she created was not purely inspired by the divine, but instead strove for it, confronting the inevitable impossibility of reaching perfection with the all-too-human drive for beauty in the face of death. Still, one gets the sense that Sill herself, enthralled as she was with cowboy stories and cosmic secrets, might appreciate the mythic proportions her life story has taken. I like to think that she’s made it to the Astral plane, and that wherever she is, she’s smiling.
I don’t remember signing up for Quora. I know I must have, at some point, agreed to sign in with Facebook and hand over access to my inbox, because sure enough, I’ve gotten hundreds of emails from them, offering answers to questions I never asked — at least, not of Quora. Anything I’ve Googled, however, seems to be fair game. Apparently my friends are in on it too — nearly everyone I know with a Facebook has “followed me on Quora.” I’ve asked several friends if they knew what this Quora thing was. And time and again, I’ve heard back, “Oh, I get emails from them sometimes…”
According to its website, Quora “is a place to gain and share knowledge. It's a platform to ask questions and connect with people who contribute unique insights and quality answers.” Wikipedia is more revealing: Quora was co-founded by former Facebook employees Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever in June 2009. When asked why they chose the name, Cheever stated, "I associate it with 'quorum' or public congregation.” Quora continues the legacy of other public congregations such as Ask.com/AskJeeves, Yahoo Answers, and Answers.com, ask-and-answer sites that facilitate public sharing of both information and opinions on topics running the gamut from relationship advice to Russian Revolution trivia. Many of these sites allow for anonymous accounts and anonymous commenting. No expertise or authority is needed. The line between opinion and information ceases to exist, and anyone is able to sway the discourse without any authority or accountability.
Quora seems to do away with this problem, replacing pseudonymous online handles with a person’s real name and face. You can’t falsify credentials when the truth is a Google search away. Yet, crucially, on Quora, everyone can be an expert. The authority of authenticity is granted to anyone who has nothing to lose in being googled. Opinions are thus validated and reinscribed as knowledge. This may not be a problem, if we take Quora at its word: “Quora brings together people from different worlds to answer the same question, in the same place — and to learn from each other. We want Quora to be the place to voice your opinion because Quora is where the debate is happening. We want the Quora answer to be the definitive answer for everybody forever.”
Here Quora presents itself as little more than a neutral platform for the facilitation of public discussion and advancement of public knowledge. Quora has no ideology, no dog in the fight it facilitates. Its logo? A nondescript red serif Q against a white background. Its Twitter bio? “A place to share knowledge and better understand the world.” The only accounts it follows are those of its employees (and the actor Rainn Wilson, who “could literally spend all day reading @Quora” and whose web-content brand for the entrepreneurial brags “we make stuff that matters” — stuff that seemingly consists of bland, feel good YouTube videos). Its tweets are overwhelmingly links to highly-rated questions. Yet it is in these questions that one finds the chink in Quora’s armor of objectivity. Between questions like “Is rigor mortis reversible?” and “What happens when a hurricane hits an active volcano?” we start to get a sense of Quora’s base: the kind of people who care about “why @yishan resigned as @reddit's CEO?” and “How do successful entrepreneurs balance work and family life?”
The first response to the question “What is Quora? Why do I have an account?” (a question which in itself speaks volumes) confirms this suspicion. Quora user Sharon Newell (whose profile reveals no expertise beyond “Lived in Chile” and “Speaks French” and who nonetheless has answered questions on schizophrenia, astrophysics, and the meaning of the name Gyanender), who writes “Initially, it was mostly being used by people familiar with the Silicon Valley scene… Today, Quora is actually an awesome hangout. Anyone can ask a question and people answer.” Looking at its popular topics, however, it appears that the majority of active users remain white collar entrepreneurial and tech professionals. (A slightly deeper Google search reveals that this response comes verbatim from an article, geared toward entrepreneurs interested in maximizing their Search Engine Optimization, called “What is Quora and Why Should You Care?”)
The next answerer is blunter about this “awesome hangout”: “like all companies, it's for the owners to make money.” Not only is Quora populated by Silicon Valley techies and their ilk, but it is subtly part and parcel of the same competitive culture that makes the tech industry tick. Quora’s “Writing Sessions” — highly moderated live chats modelled after Reddit’s poplar “AMAs” — have been “bringing home the bacon by luring in...celebrities’ audiences. The average sessions get 2 to 4 million views. Feminist leader Gloria Steinem saw 5.5 million views. Venture capital genius Chamath Palihapitiya grabbed 7.5 million.” Anyone fluent in the culture of Quora would be far from shocked that Palihapitiya could draw such a crowd. The fact that Quora has such a culture is directly at odds with its mission statement, and begs the question: when a “public” discussion is comprised of middle class tech professionals, when all voices in the room subscribe to the same vague neoliberal libertarianism, what knowledge is being generated? Will access to information ever be democratic while the pursuit of knowledge is so closely tied to capitalist competition? With such deep roots in tech entrepreneurship and venture capitalism, how could the discourse generated by Quora ever do anything but legitimize the conditions that made it possible?
Legitimize it does. Quora may not yet have the mass appeal that it no doubt aspires to, but nonetheless remains an often-seen but little remarked-upon presence in the minds and mailboxes of millions. For many like myself, it is Facebook that opens these floodgates. Facebook, which for 1.47 billion people is a largely unquestioned part of daily life. Like Quora, Facebook has no stated ideology, yet is inextricably bound with the cult of the entrepreneur, embodied all-too-perfectly in its creator Mark Zuckerberg. He has no publicly identifiable political affiliation. His status as “entrepreneur,” as “businessman,” protects him from significant public scrutiny, and Facebook membership continues to rise despite the increasingly abundant evidence that something isn’t right, that Facebook might be more than just a neutral network. When 1/5th of the world is held in the thrall of constant content and commentary, “Quora” may be understood as the essence of the public commons in the digital age: tacit acceptance of the ideological apparatus of neoliberal capitalism codified as opinion, calcified as knowledge.
These existential concerns don’t seem to bother the vast majority of Quora users. A lone asker, however, seems disturbed: “What is Quora, and why do I want it? How do I get out of it and Quora out of my life?” Repeat questions are not allowed, so we don’t know how many might share their concerns. What we do know is that the answerers don’t seem to understand why the asker is upset. They offer solutions, instruct the asker how to deactivate their account, unaware that Quora is more than a question-and-answer site. One response has stuck with me: “It will be difficult to completely eliminate Quora from your life, because it will show up in many google search results. That is not a bad thing, though. Quora has answers.”
Scrolling Utopia: Internet Interaction Design and the Posthistorical Subject
Halsey Hazzard, fall 2018
for a class on German media theory
Writing just before the internet threatened to take over the world, philosopher and communicologist Vilem Flusser has often been called a prophet of the digital age, based on his concern with then-nascent internet technology and the applicability of his theories to the so-called digital age. Certainly he did dream of a utopian society in which communications technology would engender a more egalitarian global society, but his optimism was far from idealistic. Rather, Flusser’s work contains a demand that we understand the way technology shapes human consciousness so that we might develop and use it responsibly. A sense of urgency underlies Flusser’s calls for responsibility, and this call has grown only more crucial as the internet has grown more pervasive and social networks have ascended to global near-hegemony.
In many of his essays, Flusser argued that historical consciousness, engendered by linear writing, was giving way to a new, posthistorical consciousness as a result of changing technology. Now, nearly thirty years after his death, it would appear the new consciousness Flusser both dreamed and warned of has arrived, ushered in by the digital technology we call, not insignificantly, “social media.” In this paper I hope to deploy Flusser’s theory of humanization to understand one of social media’s most quietly pervasive design elements—infinite scrolling—and its relationship to the so-called posthistorical consciousness. Infinite scroll, I argue, is a key example of how technology shapes human consciousness and how its effects demand that we pay attention and take responsibility for the ways we are constructing ourselves as human subjects.
Throughout his work, Flusser articulates a definition of “human” that depends heavily on technology, and communication technology in particular. He is concerned with an apparent shift that took place with the appearance of apparatuses, which he defines in Toward a Philosophy of Photography as something that mimics a human capability and which merges with a human operator. The human is profoundly affected by its interaction with the apparatus, and because technology is constantly changing (being changed by humans), what is “human” is constantly in flux. What is constant, however, is communication. Humans distinguish ourselves from the “non-human” by our need to store and use “information,” defined as negative entropy. Flusser makes frequent reference to the second law of thermodynamics, arguing that humanization is thus the process of fighting against inevitable entropy through the creation of information technologies. He puts it succinctly in a 2003 interview with Patrik Tschudin: “a person becomes human to the extent to which he figures out which of one’s functions can be mechanized and then delegates those to machines. What remains, that which cannot be mechanized (for the moment, anyway), is that which becomes human” (“The Lens is to Blame”, 6). Taken together, these statements define humanity as a process of endless becoming, driven by the human drive to communicate and the responsibility to one another (and, as a result, agency) communication entails.
If humanization is a process of endless becoming, one should probably wonder what the human is becoming now. In “Humanizations,” Flusser illustrates the status of the human with reference to the “little brain man,” a model for how the brain perceives the body borrowed from neurology. In the linear era, the little brain man is a “tongue-thumb man,” but Flusser hypothesizes that in the telomatic future, “The fingertips, which will touch the keyboard, will doubtless be the most important organs, and it will become apparent that the purpose of the Brain Man’s entire body will be to support the fingertips” (“Humanizations” 190). While he is certainly right that technology has shifted the focus from the tongue, he was perhaps too quick to predict the shrinking of the thumbs.
In recent years, so-called “social media” has saturated Western culture, with Instagram in particular reaching one billion users worldwide (Carman). Much of this growth has occurred concurrently with the rise of smartphones, expected to be in 2.5 billion hands by 2019. While much attention has been given to the content on such platforms, this impending ubiquity demands an analysis of how the material apparati of apps like Instagram are shaping what it currently means to be human. In 2013, at the dawn of Vine, writer Chris Baraniuk situated the then-new (now defunct) video-sharing service in a long history of visual loops. Like the gif before it, the Vine video takes a moment—no more than six seconds long—and repeats it ad infinitum. Hypnotic and without a true beginning or end, digital loops are “uncanny” and “disturbing,” for, according to Baraniuk, ‘the complete absence of teleology and catharsis within the loop destroyers our sense of self, our idea of progress, our intention to accomplish anything.” (Baraniuk). The logic of the loop, he claims, is built into the very languages that make up the digital world. A similar “narrative dissonance” can be found in in “infinite scrolling,” a design element that, alongside the rise of digital visual loops, has quietly achieved near ubiquity as a feature of websites, in particular those considered to be “social media.” Infinite scrolling might at first appear to be the anti-loop. Where gifs only have one frozen moment to offer up for eternity, the infinite scroll seems to promise endless variety. Yet it shares with the visual loop a lack of teleology thanks to its lack of a clear beginning, middle, and end.
When one loads a page on a website that employs infinite scrolling, one is dropped into a seemingly-endless stream of modular pieces of content, known frequently as posts. These can be images, short texts, video clips, or a combination thereof. Scrolling is particularly popular in app design for smartphones which, with their small, vertical screens, replace the horizontal thrust of traditional text with a relentless vertical pull. The promise of new content just beyond the bottom of the screen draws the eyes down and the thumb up. Pagination, a holdover from the pre-internet days of bound paper books, presupposes a hierarchy of information, an order that requires a linear progression. Page one must come before page two, page four follows page three, and so on. Entries on sites like the search engine Google that still use this skeuomorphic setup, when not bound to a linear progression, are often algorithmically sorted by relevance. Posts on infinite scrolling sites, however, are typically arranged chronologically, which gives them all the same importance. Yet the constant updates endemic to social media mean the chronology of the infinite scroll is essentially an eternal present. It is impractical, if not impossible, to reach the end of the scroll, yet if even one were successful, one would have to find one’s way to the ever-extending beginning, and start the process all over again. The only way to read everything is in real-time. The infinite scroll thus begs to be constantly checked, foreclosing any possibility of action.
According to Baraniuk, this process--or, rather, lack of process--threatens our sense of self. He may be right, if what we mean by the self is the form of human consciousness that has for so long been constructed in and by linear writing: “historical consciousness”. In “The Future of Writing,” Flusser writes
“Writing is an important gesture, because it both articulates and produces that state of mind which is called “historical consciousness.” History began with the invention of writing, not for the banal reason often advanced that written texts permit us to reconstruct the past, but for the more pertinent reason that the world is not perceived as a process, “historically,” unless one signifies it by successive symbols, by writing” (Future 63)
For Flusser, writing is associated with logic and reason, with the sort of scientific thought that thinks of things in terms of cause and effect. History takes a narrative form, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The consciousness created by this kind of thinking is historical. The posthistorical consciousness, on the other hand, begins with the photograph. In contrast to the linear, logical thinking of alphabetic writing, images encourage formal thinking, and make it impossible to understand the world as “becoming.” Linear reading “has the sense of going somewhere, whereas, while reading pictures, we need to go nowhere” (Line 23). Images contain denser messages than linear writing, and demand to be thought of structurally rather than linearly. Images preceded writing, yet in their current iteration as photographs serve to explain written text, hence their post-historicity. This begs the question: if “[n]arratives make history” (On the End of History 143), does the narrative-less infinite scroll and its attendant digital consciousness make posthistory?
The infinite scroll, lacking finitude, has no historical sense of causality. In the scroll, things simply occur. The infinite scroll, then, with its lack of teleology, would seem to be a departure from linear, historical thought. Yet Flusser explains in “The Future of Writing” that in a world dominated by lines, “everything...follows from something, time flows irreversibly from the past toward the future, each instant is lost forever, and there is no repetition” (64). This sounds awfully like the endless streams of content on social media, signalling that the shift between history and post-history is not so cut-and-dried. In fact, the infinite scroll could perhaps best be compared to films, which, according to Flusser, “incorporate the temporality of the written line into the picture, by lifting the linear historical time of written lines onto the level of the surface” (Line 26). We still fail to grasp the posthistorical surface quality of films and TV programs, reading them as we would written lines. But Flusser suggests that “for those who think in films, it will mean the possibility of acting upon history from without” (25). This will become key, particularly if we understand the infinite scroll as a technology that allows us to step outside the procession of history.
Shortly after making this claim, Flusser calls attention to the distinction between immediate experience and the necessarily mediatized fictions of images and concepts, and further, the distinction between conceptual fiction (“line thought”) and imaginal fiction (“surface thought”). The relationship between these two forms of thought is at stake for our understanding of how media shape thought and thus impact humanization. Surface fictions, he claims, are not only advancing due to technological developments, but becoming more and more indistinguishable from reality, which linear fictions are becoming more and more abstract. Ultimately Flusser claims that “[t]he synthesis of linear and surface media may result in a new civilization” (31). The infinite scroll, by extending surfaces indefinitely so that lines may be followed forever, might perhaps be the very technological development that ushers in this new civilization.
This new civilization could ostensibly take two forms. The first, in which imaginal thinking fails to incorporate conceptual thinking, would lead to “the totalitarianism of the mass media” (34). If imaginal thinking does succeed, however, leading “to new types of communication in which man consciously assumes the structural position,” “a new sense of reality would articulate itself, within the existential climate of a new religiosity” (34). Flusser concedes that neither outcome is inevitable, and that the shape of the posthistorical future depends on choices made in the present. The infinite scroll could be a harbinger of either outcome. It is easy to see how the mass distraction and loss of teleology engendered by the technique could lead to totalitarianism.
On the other hand, the destruction of hierarchies it seems to encourage gestures toward a much more egalitarian future. Flusser, who often wrote urgently of the need for dialogue, might see this as a welcome step toward a classless, networked society.
The society Flusser has in mind is one where “dialogue and discourse balance each other out. If, as we see today, a discursive form dominates, which prevents dialogues from taking place, then society is dangerously close to decomposing into an amorphous crowd” (Stroehl, xvii). Media that encourages discourse imparts information from the top down, such as mass broadcast media like television or radio, whereas media like telephones encourage “[d]ialogue as a noncoercive relationship of mutual respect” (xviii). According to Andreas Stroehl, Flusser “believes that dialogue is the purpose of existence. The sense of responsibility inherent in the dialogic relationship between speaker and addressee offers the speaker an opportunity to give his or her own life meaning in the face of entropy and death” (xviii). To be human is to act on this responsibility to the other by communicating, and the technologies humans design to communicate impact the ways in which we become human.
Digital interfaces are no exception. Social media, by virtue of its “social” nature, can perhaps be seen as a step toward this telomatic networked society of mutual responsibility. Still, infinite scrolling is a key example of how it is not free from being determined by the political and economic contexts in which it was developed, contexts which impact the very interaction design of the internet. According to Chadwick Smith, for Flusser, “since objects impact the lives of others...and are a projection of some designer’s decisions, they are thus situated in a relational field, encompassing not just aesthetic and political dimensions but, given their infinitely intimate scale, ethical ones as well” (“The Butterfly and the Potato” 48). The infinite scroll, though a feature more than an object, is a prime example of this dynamic. In 2006, software engineer Aza Raskin developed infinite scroll as a way to maximize the time users spend on websites, eliminating the natural stopping points at the end of pages that inspired users to navigate away. This habit-forming tendency was conceived in the service of websites and advertisers that depend on keeping eyes on screens, indicating a motivation behind the design choice other than intersubjective goodwill. Even Raskin is critical of the scroll’s anti-human tendencies: “It's as if they're taking behavioral cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface. And that's the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back” (Hamilton). When we situate the scroll in the context of the rise of technocratic totalitarianism with which Flusser was concerned, it becomes part of the tradition whereby “The Enlightenment has overshot its mark,” causing extreme rationalism to turn irrational, thus barbaric.
If that is the case, what can we do to rescue humanity from this path? Flusser may give us, if not a plan, then at least a set of guiding principles. If being human is about communicating with each other to stave off impending entropy, and if humans have the agency to create technology to do so, then it is imperative that we take seriously our responsibility to each other in our efforts to design the future, especially considering the anti-human tendencies in what we’ve already built. As Smith writes, “Flusser’s concept of design is not about building a better world, but rather of eradicating from it everything that makes it worse” (“The Butterfly and the Potato” 53). That may not necessarily mean doing away with infinite scrolling, but taking seriously the dialogic potential within it when considering the effects it will have and is already having on collective human consciousness.
Luckily, if Flusser is to be believed, the posthistorical consciousness is giving humanity the means to step out of the stream of progress and look at structures, to critically assess our own history in order to fully take advantage of the opportunities the present presents. As long as technology like infinite scrolling threatens to pull us further into our future selves, we owe it to each other to know who those selves are, and who we will become.
Works Cited
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Carman, Ashley. “Instagram Now Has 1 Billion Users Worldwide.” The Verge, The Verge, 20 June 2018, www.theverge.com/2018/6/20/17484420/instagram-users-one-billion-count.
Flusser Vilém, and Ströhl Andreas. Vilém Flusser - Writings. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
Hamilton, Isobel Asher. “Silicon Valley Insiders Say Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter Are Using 'Behavioral Cocaine' to Turn People into Addicts.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 4 July 2018.
“Number of Smartphone Users Worldwide 2014-2020.” Statista, www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide/.
Smith, Chadwick T. ““The Butterfly and the Potato: Vilém Flusser and Design”. artUS. issue 26, 2009-1, 46-53.
Smith, Chadwick T. “The Lens is to Blame”: Three Remarks on Black Boxes, Digital Humanities, and The Necessities of Vilém Flusser’s “New Humanism” Flusser Studies, vol. 18, http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/smith-the-lens-is-to-blame.pdf . Accessed 18 December 2018
