#caroline busta

[stargir1z]

Caroline Busta

[c01n02]

CAROLINE BUSTA | CLEARNET vs. DARK FOREST: NOTES ON THE NEW PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY OF ART

[diivdeep]

The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram

“To be truly countercultural in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform.”

[dentesguardados]

To be truly countercultural today, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform, which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self. (...) While climate change is a shared concern for many younger people, their responses might be more accurately understood as competitive-futurist than countercultural. As the greatly imaginative range of Political Compass positions illustrates, there is little consensus over who or what they are specifically opposing. This is wise in an era when the complexity of global crises makes it exceedingly difficult to effectively isolate responsible parties. How would one even begin to hold, say, Apple accountable for all of the externalities within the life of an iPhone? Who among us could easily give up our connectivity and still be economically and socially okay? It’s as if, having grown up on a fully networked Earth, Gen Z has bypassed counterculture, finding it futile in the face of a hegemonic system that more clearly resembles a Hydra than the monolithic forces that legacy counterculture was rebelling against. Intuiting that any activity directly opposing the system will only make the system stronger, the next generation is instead opting for radical hyperstition: constructing alternative futures that abandon our current infrastructure entirely (the emergence of blockchain-based currencies, for instance, or calls to not merely reform but fully abolish the police). (...) So what does today’s counter-hegemonic culture look like? It’s not particularly interested in being seen—at least not in person. It gets no thrill out of wearing leather and a mohawk and walking past main-street shops, which are empty now anyway. But it does demonstrate a hunger for freedom—freedom from the attention economy, from atomization, and the extractive logic of mainstream communication.

Caroline Busta, The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram

[grandhotelabyss]

A truth specific to our time is that dissent against one level of authority is now very often driven by a deeper hegemonic force.

Caroline Busta, “The Internet Didn’t Kill Counterculture—You Just Won’t Find It on Instagram”

(Is this a truth specific to our time? Anarcho-spectacular youth energy from Antigone to Akira—though my own favored example is good old Hamlet—breaks the static old order to clear ground for the new hegemony. As Adorno wrote in one of his most arrestingly bleak left-conservative sentences,

One realizes with horror that earlier, opposing one’s parents because they represented the world, one was often secretly the mouthpiece, against a bad world, of one even worse.

The article is correct that counterculture in its 20th-century forms is dead, that trying to offend John Lithgow in Footloose, a film that itself embodies the neoliberal hegemony now to be overthrown, is worse than pointless. The remainder of the article, despite its prevailing tech-determinist view that the digital rhizome has obsolesced the very idea of a counterculture, argues nevertheless that there is potency left in strategies of political shock:

The names of these e-deologies tend to be both fantastical and literal. A “post-civilizationist” might focus on what optimal human survival would look like were civilization no longer possible. A “voluntarist post-agrarianist,” meanwhile, might value anarcho-primitivism skills but see them as integral to realizing a civilization sustained through opt-in agrarian communes. Elsewhere on the compass, one finds the likes of “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism” (where a total embrace of technology delivers humanity from scarcity, ecological volatility, and the reactionary social ills of resource competition) and the defiantly neo-traditionalist “technocratic theocracy,” which puts its faith in a machine-governed future that upholds Christian virtues. E-deologies are further explored on message boards and social media via memes, TikTok posts, and livestreamed Twitch and YouTube debates, all of which can get pretty gnarly (calls for “eco-fash global genocide” and “secession of white ethnostates,” etc.) And maybe here, we do have an aesthetic counter to the wallflower non-style of Big Tech: a raging messy semiotic meltdown of radicalizing (if absurdist) meme culture where the only ideological no-go zone is the liberal center.

I hear people my age—roughly the far wrong side of 30—lament the absence of a youth counterculture, but why would it be happening in places we go? I suspect I know as much about whatever Zoomer counterculture there is as my mother knew about, say, Daniel Clowes comics or Gregg Araki movies in 1996. Which is fine with me—I’d rather be reading Adorno. It’s pathetic and not a little menacing to still be hanging around the proverbial high school when you’re approaching middle age. Then there’s the harder truth implied by the article: it is in the nature of counterculture to be counter, and not counter to whomever we thought was “the man” when we were 16, to some stereotyped Republican in a suit and bowtie, but counter to what presents itself as authority to the youth of today, which just might be something we take for granted, identify with, or even cherish highly—as I was saying. Luckily, it is also in the nature of counterculture to be neutralized by commodification in the long run; I have fondly heard the scandalous sex-and-suicide songs of my youth playing over the store speakers at two in the afternoon as I palpated the avocados in the produce aisle.)

[damianfurfuro]

Black Lives Matter Protestor Statue and the Art News of the Week 13 – 19 July

This week we want to remember and celebrate Andy Warhol's artwork. He was surely the best-known representative of pop art. Caroline Busta discusses the waning influence of the art world on the contemporary imagination and more.

This week we want to remember and celebrate Andy Warhol’s artwork. He was surely the best-known representative of pop art. Caroline Busta discusses the waning influence of the art world on the contemporary imagination. The Black Lives Matter Protestor Statue was unveiled this week in Bristol, England. The gallery Hauser & Wirthis presenting two simultaneous exhibitions of the famous American…

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[jessehlebo]

A piece I composed with Caroline Busta, Fay Victor, and Kid Millions is occurring next Tuesday the 28th at the Clocktower Gallery! You have to RSVP with 'Habit Towards Obedience' in the subject line to [email protected] in order to attend!