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Cyclonograph I

Beyond the horizon of collapse—Posts by Vincent Garton 2016–17

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A CONCEPTUAL PRELIMINARY TO UNDERSTANDING MEME WARFARE

Vincent Garton Cyclonograph January 22, 2017 5 Minutes

The subject of the Internet’s effects on politics has provoked a good deal of
nonsense, often attracting the expansive and tedious commentary of people who
have little experience at the core of online politics and much less
understanding of it. Many of these analyses—though not all—have missed the
genuine novelty emerging in the interaction between politics and the Internet,
attempting pathologically to subsume it into previous modes of political
thought. This retrograde form of analysis is, to be sure, successful to the
extent that the Internet is often politically operationalised in a very
conventional manner. But there are, substantially, two forms of interaction
between politics and the Internet: one which is easily comprehensible, and
another which is far less so but increasingly the more important. As a
preliminary analysis, it is worth understanding the distinction between the two.


INSTRUMENTAL-REGULATORY DIGITAL POLITICS

The instrumentalist approach to the Internet represents an intuitive humanist
mode of engagement. It begins with a matrix of objectives constituted without
reference to the Internet, and attempts self-consciously to bring the Internet
to bear on their realisation. Inherent to this is a distinction between humans
as social actors and the Internet as an instrument that transparently mediates
their interactions.  This mode of engagement encompasses coordinated political
mobilisation as much as conventional advertising and broadcasting, in effect
positioning the Internet as merely a more democratised form of the familiar
twentieth-century mass media, enabling essentially conventional hierarchical as
well as peer-to-peer means of transmitting messages with particular determinate
goals.

Within and alongside this instrumentalism we may also distinguish a regulatory
approach to the Internet that conceives of it as the object of external
intervention, subsumed as one particular component of a calculus of power. This
is the Internet from the perspective of the post–Cold War state, a tool and also
a problem that demands external intervention and regulation—if not because of
any direct threat from its weaponization through instrumentally digital
politics, then because of the mere fact of its existence as a largely
unregulated sphere of social technology.



We may immediately note that this regulatory approach is doomed, in its most
vulgar form, to failure, not because of any idealistic inevitability in the free
flow of information but because it is technically anachronistic. As a means of
communicating ideas, the Internet is extraordinarily, unprecedentedly powerful.
Just as ARPANET was originally conceived—at least in myth—as a means of
operating a computer network that would withstand a nuclear attack on any number
of its nodes, the Internet is functionally insusceptible to control merely by
the targeted juridical or securocratic regulation of its particular users.

Other forms of regulation, to be sure, are proving more successful, notably the
Russian. But these lie substantially outside the dominant worldview, not
consisting of mere external action through and upon the Internet as a docile
object; they bear witness to a dialectical interaction with cyberpolitics that
puts them beyond the idea of external intervention.

These more mundane instrumentalist and regulatory approaches share fundamentally
an identical conception of the Internet, but emphasise respectively its role as
an instrument of resistance and an object of security. They are the same view
from different vantage points. This instrumental-regulatory perspective, which
reached its climax at the start of the 2010s and sees the Internet as an organ
subject to external direction one way or another, can no longer accommodate the
ways in which the Internet is now affecting and generating new modes of
political and social communicativity in its own right—not as ‘mere’ instrument,
but as a transhuman subjectivity of its own.


CYBERPOLITICS

At this point we enter a realm beyond the recognisably modern, in which
conceptual categories are only dimly identifiable and a radical state of flux
prevails.

We may hazard the following definition. Cyberian politics or cyberpolitics is a
politics that flows out of the machinic subjectivities proper to the Internet
itself. This is not, as its opponents may hope, simply a different way of
understanding politics as it is mediated on social media networks. On the
contrary, it is a radically different form of politics as such, an escalating
viral insurgency that corrupts/disrupts and struggles to supersede the
instrumental-regulatory approach described above.

Marx claimed that the core of the revolution of capitalism consisted in the
transformation of the circuit C–M–C’, where money mediates the accumulation of
commodities, into the circuit M–C–M’, where commodities are merely a means for
the accumulation of money itself. Cyberpolitics similarly represents the
transformation of a circuit in which messages, or, properly, memes, are mediated
between users, into a circuit in which users mediate the recursive generation of
memes. Just as the distinctions between commodities collapse in the eyes of
capital, in the realm of hypercommunicativity the distinctions between human
users collapse in the perspective of memetic accumulation.

This comparison should not, perhaps, be taken too seriously. Though it is in the
ascendant, the mode of machinic subjectivity that undergirds this transformation
is still in a very preliminary phase of instantiation. If 2016 was the dawn of
cyberpolitics, it is strictly because of Trump, whose victory represented
perhaps the first self-conscious loss by the constellated forces of global
liberalism to a memetic artefact. From this perspective, Trump’s victory was
highly ambivalent. Trump himself is by no means conscious, let alone supportive,
of this cyberian futurism in his policy objectives. His campaign drew on
cyberpolitics only as much as it depended necessarily on numerous other more
retrograde forms of political organisation. The quantitative units of his
victory were not 4chan and Facebook and Reddit, but Wisconsin, Pennsylvania,
Florida…



But neither focus of analysis is precisely wrong. The Trump campaign
participated in and learned its tactics from the Internet with an attentiveness
that allowed it to explode beyond the expectations of its opponents. This, in
the end, is its historic significance. President Trump is both the culmination
and a mockery of the politics of the liberal-securocratic world order, both
subject and unwitting object, drawing on the ressentiment and revisionist
aspirations of the very worldly malcontents of liberal globalisation while also
representing the triumphant humiliation of the planetary order by an alien
subjectivity far beyond conventional moral-political economy.

To the extent that the Internet remains simultaneously a network of
self-conscious individuals, cyberpolitics can only, inevitably, constitute
itself parasitically at the edges and the cracks of traditional politics. We may
expect this inconvenience to be discarded in the future. For now, cyberpolitics
remains in a state of necessary indeterminacy, flickering spasmodically as it
phases in and out of the instrumentalism it seeks to overthrow. Politics cannot,
for now, start out as cyberpolitics. Only in the singularities of intensity
created by the Internet’s relentlessly compressive communication engine—at the
edges of madness—does a subjectivity emerge that can devour the reaction mass of
real-world political disintegration to phase-shift to the properly cyberian.

‘In 647 BCE, the Elamite empire was devastated and their capital Susa was sacked
by the Assyrians on the pretext that an unnameable abomination was surfacing
there, and that everything that came into contact with that benighted entity had
to be eradicated.’ (Negarestani)

A dawning realisation of the emergence of cyberpolitics has produced concern,
hysteria, and regulatory counterattack. ‘Post-truth politics’, ‘fake news’ all
operate (originally) to designate the explosive shockwaves of its birth. They
are being absorbed and repurposed by it.

All this is just more reaction mass.

‘The truth is we haven’t seen anything yet.’





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RELATED

The truth is irrelevantDecember 10, 2016In "Cyclonograph"

2016: The accession of the InternetDecember 31, 2016In "Cyclonograph"

The end of (your) humanity: Cybernetics casually definedMarch 5, 2017In
"Cyclonograph"




PUBLISHED BY VINCENT GARTON

View all posts by Vincent Garton

Published January 22, 2017


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Next Post Catastrophe and time


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