my sister went kony

I watched KONY 2012 last year, all 27 minutes or so of it, when I was procrastinating. It became clear around the moment that the sickeningly fresh-faced and fresh-voiced Jason Russell showed his son who the "bad guy" was that this was going to be something easy to hate. It also became clear that it was going to be compelling. I read reports of people booing it at screenings in Uganda, of how Joseph Kony was no longer relevant, this was the white man's burden of some secretly-bigoted Christian, all backwards. It was so easy, to feel the outrage not only at the content of the video but also at the attention, good and bad, that it was garnering. So much of it was good--had I been so warped by a liberal arts bubble to be immediately offended by the film? Was my moral code and sense of propriety so self-involved and politically correct that I'd become blind to the underlying issues? Was a PC reaction, a critique of presentation, a way of eliding the actual problem? Was the actual problem--Joseph Kony--actually, you know, a problem? Then they found Russell naked on the street and I stopped reading about the issue. He'd done himself in, I thought, and I could rinse my hands of it--not that they were ever particularly involved, of course.

So what amazed me was when my sister informed me that she was going to the Invisible Children rally in DC a few weeks ago. My sister is no activist. She spends a lot of time on Tumblr. She is not involved in charity work or particularly cognizant of global issues with dictators and militants. She is sixteen. I was confused. Then I learned about the ways that the rally had been promulgated. Invisible Children had hired the sort of star that appeals to the Myspace and post-Myspace genre of teen--Pete Wentz, some characters from Glee, that sort of thing--to document their "road trip" to the nation's capital to be part of the Invisible Children rally. Their photos were Instagram-filtered and fun. Tongues sticking out, mooning, drawing on people's faces when they fell asleep... Sort of like a music video or high school photo montage, but famous, and disseminated on an equalizing platform, Twitter, so that "regular teens" might try and approximate the sort of fun that their "peers" were having. This is, to me, the most interesting capacity of slactivism... not the fact that it doesn't take much to show up at a rally or sign an online petition but the degree to which aesthetics, a solid understanding of a targeted subculture, and logistical planning are crucial to making your cause appealing to "the young." It's not that I think "the young" aren't activists or are a generation of apathy--what a boring point. I'm just amazed that "charities," even the ones with decent financials and a relatively well-intentioned, if colonial and problematic, outlooks are so quickly and impressively approaching brand status. Invisible Children, the overdesgined triangular logo of KONY, it all has an aesthetic component that something like UNICEF never could. What are the ethics of such a tactical approach--are charities required to disregard cheap tricks like that, or is it just the name of the game? Why does it leave such an awful taste in my mouth?

Cruel Optimism Close to Home

In this last reading response I'm posting, I'm revisiting Cruel Optimism; it's a work I feel I know pretty intimately by now, having made it one of the cornerstones of both of my essays for this course, and yet I still feel as though complete understanding of the topic eludes me. Or perhaps, rather, something indistinct plays at the edges of my understanding; for I feel as though I understand cruel optimism, as a concept, pretty well by now: it is a situation in which the giving up of an object or desire is too painful to bear, and yet the possession of that object/desire/artifact/argument contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. Success will never come from it, and yet, one cannot let it go because it simply means too much.

So, I get it.

I keep coming back to the idea of labor, though, the concept of employment. It is not the theory itself that bothers me, I don't think; and it's not that the examples bother me, or rather, they don't bother me because I don't feel that they exemplify the theory itself; they do, that much is for certain.

Perhaps what disquiets me is the sad knowledge that I know, even as Berlant refrained from using empirical examples, electing to use poetry and films to make her point for her (and this is fair enough, as the idealized version of cruel optimism, as it is captured by the page or by film, is probably easier and less contentious to recognize than the realities of life under capitalism for so many), that these are true events.

I am reminded, offhandedly, of the film El Norte, one of the sadder movies I've seen recently (although many criticize it for its low production qualities, I'm a bit of a sucker, coming from a family of Hispanic immigrants myself). The struggles those main characters faced; the reality of their sacrifices coming to the United States, and the crushing poverty they faced in the United States, a poverty that was every bit as oppressive and deadly as the conflict the main characters fled in their native land …

With most theory, it is easy to separate the reality from the theory; to assume abstractions and create hypothetical people engaging in the activities theorized. But with cruel optimism (perhaps because of its cruel nature) … everything stings just a little bit closer to home.

Weak Ties, Phantom Ties

Mark Granovetter's piece on “The Strength of Weak Ties” occupies something of a special place in my heart, and not only because I had already read the piece before taking this course (although for a course that dealt primarily with economic globalization and thus, really had some trouble tying the reading back in with the course).

It's a very interesting piece, though, and not just because it validates all the shallow, mercenary, “I'm only talking to you because my parents told me networking was important” acquaintances anyone has ever made at university. Or rather, it is interesting precisely because of that, but that hasty wording makes it sound like a bad thing.

It's interesting to consider the idea of weak ties, though, in a purely digital setting. I did so already in my midterm paper on Brown culture on Facebook – but the argument itself was somewhat lacking and deserves a bit of expansion. These weak ties, I believe, have become even more important in the so-called “Information Age” simply because of the fact that they are so visible now.

Yes, in the factory there were a number of people who you knew you probably weren't as close to as you could be; and yes, their acquaintance status meant that their ideas were more likely to be completely different from those being fostered in your own group. These things were true. But Facebook allows for acquaintances from years ago – people you may have seen twice in your life are now part of your group of Facebook friends unless you are one of the sorts of people who ritually purges their Facebook friends lists (perhaps for this exact reason).

In my paper, I coined the phrase “phantom ties” without properly defining it. But here goes: weak ties are important because they introduce you to viewpoints from people who inhabit similar spaces from you but still, because of those they associate with, have radically different ideas. A phantom tie is like a weak tie from the past blipping momentarily into the future; a person who has developed in a completely different space from you, along completely different lines and for completely different reasons forced into your consciousness because of the vagaries of Facebook's news feed; a chance to see something you might have never known existed, for a brief moment, a shadow in time.

Denying Soft Control

Talking about soft control is fun because it's such a unique concept that, nevertheless, feels intuitively right; and there are, sadly, so few of those that when one comes around it is difficult to not seize upon it. It just makes sense that those who develop our tools, create our structures, decide what is and is not allowed on computers and the Internet (where more and more of us increasingly spend more and more of our time) alter our behavior in real, discernible ways; and yet, they are so invisible to us. When one learns how to use a new operating system or a new piece of software, when one starts thinking in terms of “Likes” and “retweets”, that changes one's behavior patterns, but rarely if ever does anyone sit down and think, “Man, using Facebook has really changed by behavior; thanks/screw you, Mark Zuckerberg”.

(At this point it is worth noting that some people do buck this sort of controlling behavior, by refusing to sign up for Facebook or canceling their accounts after the fact; needless to say, however, those that opt out of using Facebook after having already created an account are few and far between.)

Terranova's own look at this phenomenon is pretty interesting, however, from the way that soft control has permeated the real world – or perhaps more accurately, the way that our own understanding of soft control as a phenomenon has let us recognize it when it exists in the real world – in the layout of offices to encourage “interactivity, lack of hierarchy, modularity” (119). This is of course silly, because hierarchy does still exist in these corporations and no one would claim otherwise; except that by enforcing these themes in the everyday, could these themes ever be truly called “silly”? If they changed the way that workers did their work, could they ever be called irrelevant?

When someone claims that “the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it” (120) they are using clever technological wordplay to describe a “behavior” of the Internet; but even this is a euphemism. The truth of the matter is that the construction of peer-to-peer networks and open-source software (such as the program this post is being composed on currently, LibreOffice) were not intrinsic parts of the Internet or computer culture, but created by individuals with the ability to do so. The value of these constructs, for good or ill, is not at question here; but the way they are presented is. The Internet is not, after all, a “techno-utopian” culture; but the Internet does not have a “centralized government”, either. It is what it is because of the efforts of a few with the knowledge and willpower to make it such, and the shape it has taken is due to their own personal desires and goals for the project: it is not a lifelike organism that has evolved independently, but something that could be radically changed with a view shifts in ideology from those that support it.

The Futility/Creation of Identity

Although I had read excerpts from Benedict Anderson's “Imagined Communities” before, I had never focused so intently on the questions he poses in the book; his definition of nationalism as an “imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” serves well enough for discussions of national politics and the ethics surrounding those issues in other courses. But of course a course on Imagined Networks would take this piece more seriously; and with good reason.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to move away from concepts and conceits that we've carried with us for years, and so it was the discussion on patriotism and racism that interested me the most; I had, for instance, already read the (now commonly quoted) truth that dying “for one's country, which usually one does not choose, assumes a moral grandeur which dying for the Labour Party, the American Medical Association, or perhaps even Amnesty International cannot rival” (144), but it was rewarding to consider the problem anew.

For it is, most might agree, a problem; why should an involuntary association with a body, even one so powerful in the imagination as the nation, be seen as morally superior to an association with a body that one chose? Most might say that there is nothing more moral about being an American, say, or a Swede than there is about being an employee of Amnesty International or the Peace Corps; but dying for Sweden or America is constructed as so much more meaningful than dying in a civil war in Latin America.

Which leads nicely into the question of racism – because as proud as any person might be of their racial and ethnic heritage (and the majority of most people are), racial identity is hardly any more voluntary than national identity, being thrust upon oneself not just by the accident of birth but by the perceptions of other people (for that perception is important, and undergirds such occurrences as “white-passing privilege” and the endless questions of, “What race are you? I could have sworn you were [x]” that any mixed-race or questionable-heritage people might face).

One of the most interesting points that Anderson reaches at the end of his discussion on race is the fact that “Spanish-speaking mestizo Mexicans trace their ancestries, not to Castilian conquistadors, but to half-obliterated Aztecs, Mayans, Toltecs and Zapotecs” (154) – and they are not alone. Latinos up and down the Americas often emphasize their native roots when discussing their heritage. On the face of it, it might seem odd; both their native ancestors and their Castilian ancestors performed the same function in terms of producing the individual that stands here today. And yet occur it does, still, according to Anderson because of misplaced class sentiments; a conscious laying down of the claims to pseudo-aristocracy, remembering the ancestors one never chose but who suffered, lived and died under oppression to bring you here today. It is futile to deny one's ancestry; one's genetic makeup cannot be changed by fierce desire. And yet, the way that ancestry is interpreted, by others and by oneself, is so important.

Snow Crash and the Art of Making a Digital World

It's hard not to be excited by the world presented in Snow Crash – although perhaps that requires a bit more clarification.

It's hard not to be excited by the Metaverse, a digital world (literally) presented via the wonder that is the Internet. Now, although the Metaverse is something of a unique take on the concept of a virtual world/life-simulator (at least until one remembers Second Life, which, while not extant when Snow Crash was written, has the distinct advantage of existing now even as the Metaverse does not), the notion of a digital world that human beings can interact with, virtually, is not unique. From Neuromancer to Ghost in the Shell to the .hack// games, there is a very large body of work dedicated to exploring this concept.

Nevertheless, the way that Snow Crash goes about doing it is memorable because of the equal emphasis placed on the real world. Granted, a number of other works like this consider real-world consequences as well (the conceit of the .hack// series of games/books/tv shows is a virtual MMORPG in which the main characters are trapped; the new anime Sword Art Online discusses a world in which characters are trapped in a different MMORPG, but their death in-game would result in their death out-of-game, too).

But Snow Crash gives character to its world; the Metaverse is unlike anything you've ever seen, but so are the burbclaves and the CosaNostra Pizza, Inc., which couldn't even be called a “front” for the American mob. It is interesting to note the parallels between these two worlds. Both focus on real estate (prime real estate in the Metaverse means being an early adopter and getting in at the ground floor; in the real world, every suburb is its own sovereign state), and both emphasize a certain libertarian ethic: although the corporatization of America has been taken to an absurd extreme, inside the Metaverse money can still be used to establish one's status as someone who takes the Metaverse seriously; and if one is an extremely talented and skilled programmer, like Hiro, one can use those talents to increase one's status as well.

It is an interesting divide; the poor and the idealistic Hiro in the real world works as the lackey for Uncle Enzo, self-made man of influence, head of the mafia, essentially the “king of the world”. But in the Metaverse, he finds not an “escape” from that life; he becomes a king himself, and others are insignificant before his sword fighting skills, his intimate knowledge of the world and his own programs which help him, for instance, dispose of troublesome body parts left over from said sword fights.

As the lines between reality and the Metaverse blur (as a piece of code in-game has direct effects out-of-game) it asks us to think; what makes the Metaverse any less real, just because one can turn it off? Hiro's status symbols exist and have meaning to thousands when he is in the Metaverse; this is not just an identity he puts on and off at will, however. It is a fundamental part of who he is.

Postscript? On Visiting Mumu in New York

Writing and thinking about Slactivism; at the end of the semester---

I have decided, in posting this post that I missed, not to try and reorient myself back to that week, but to post a retrospective.  After writing my paper, I have become very interested in the idea of embedding the past and the future into the contemporary narrative.  Let's say trauma as past, desire as future.  Berlant, Ahmed, hat's off to you.

So this idea of embedding -- perhaps, conflation, or a reappropriated reconstruction.  This, as contrasted by an idea of juxtaposition.

The past event, the Slactivism lab, was (to be frank) slightly traumatic as it occurred in tandem with the opening of my Grandmother's hit Broadway musical.  I had to miss this opening. 

I will, however, (to look toward the future) be seeing the show in New York on Wednesday.  Now to analyze this in the context of desire:  why do I want to see this show so badly?  Perhaps some idea of feeling "cosmopolitan" ; the agency I have in travelling to New York City for a brief period of time, as an individual, apparently freely acting according to my wishes.  And this has to be combined in some manner with the idea that I should make my Grandmother happy and also proud.  I call this grandmother Mumu.  Visiting Mumu is always a performance of sorts, more so than another engagement as she often performs me.  I am her granddaughter, young and fresh, a senior at Brown University.  I offer some notion of potential which I like to play.  I want to play.  I hope that I will successfully play, successfully enact in an effort to promote its fruition.  I want to have had potential and to represent the manifestation of such -- some notion of a future success.

SO:  the current narrative; this blog post.  Slactivism.  Is Slacktivism ever a manifestation of success?  What is success, how will I one day feel morally sound, with a heart that is happy and full.  There was an article I remember a few years ago about the obsession with "happiness" in American culture.  Perhaps the American Dream has now been translated to some desire to be happy.  A state of being as the number one desire, one degree further from manifestations of fantasies of what might make one happy.  Is this progress, this distillation of meconaissance into emotion?

The lab itself was a success -- we caused patrons and employees of Brown's Rockafeller Library to question our actions in the context of revolt.  Is this success?  We had no intentions of actual revolt.  However, to spark thought and dialogue seems like it must be a success.

Here I find the success and failure of Kony all tied together.
Kony sparked dialogue.  Kony also incited action -- but perhaps not either a sustainable or even a useful form of action.  And yet, here I am writing about Slactivism and happiness and what I want for my future and I  think to reference Kony.  So, it provides an outlet, or better yet-- a base, from which to talk about  activism on the internet. 

Its an interesting time, again, to talk about success and failure in terms of the internet now that Egypt has AGAIN witnessed revolt.  And there was a shooting in Connecticut which made President Obama cry on national news.  There was this question about engagement in political thought in tandem with these shootings-- too early? too late?  What is respectful in terms of channelling a tragedy so quickly into motivation for political discourse...?  My thoughts run wild all over the place when thinking about such issues. 

And maybe that's okay... thoughts all over the place, all inhabiting this present space of what is now.  A spatio-temporal space that is infinitely deep, infinitely related, impossible to navigate but always necessarily reorienting itself inwardly to channel the myriad possibilities that may or may not manifest in full.