Caroline Busta

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.

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. We can imagine collectively held physical spaces reclaimed from empty retail or abandoned venues hosting esoteric local scenes, a proliferation of digital gangs in dark forests who hold secrets dear, and a new desire for scarcity in cultural objects—deeper and closer connections made between people even while rejecting the platform’s compulsion to “like and share.” In the internet era, true counterculture is difficult to see, and even harder to find—but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Subjectivation is not a flowering of autonomy and freedom; it's the end product of procedures that train an individual in compliance and docility. One accepts structuring codes in exchange for an internal psychic coherence. Becoming yourself is not a growth process but a surrender of possibilities that we learn to regard as egregious, unbecoming. "Being yourself" is inherently limiting.

the social order is protected not by preventing "self-expression" and identity formation but encouraging it as a way of forcing people to limit and discipline themselves — to take responsibility for building and cleaning their own cage.

Thus, the dissemination of social-media platforms becomes a flexible tool for social control. The more that individuals express through these codified, networked, formatted means to construct a "personal brand" identity, the more they self-assimilate, adopting the incentive structures of capitalist social order as their own.

madlib

Social media doesn't appeal to me, at all. I ain't into posting beats or showing off, none of that bullshit. I'm all about keeping it a mystery, basically. For me, it's all about the music. I haven't slept in two days, I've just been working. Making music is like therapy. I hope I take my last breath while making a beat. Yes sir, I'll probably make a hit and then die! I cut off all my friends, threw my phone away, and that's because I live strictly for the music.

Jennifer S. Light

The private ownership of online services means that these agora function only in their commercial sense; the sense of the market space as site for civic life is subject to strict controls.

Hanif Abdurraqib

I've run out of language to explain the avalanche of anguish I feel when faced with this world, and so if I can't make sense of this planet, I'm better off imagining another.

Friends, I come to you very plainly afraid that I am losing faith in the idea that grief can become anything but grief. The way old neighborhoods are torn to the ground and new ones sprout from that same ground, it feels, most days, like my grief is simply being rebuilt and restructured along my own interior landscape. There is not enough distance between tragedies for my sadness to mature into anything else but another new monument obscuring the last new monument.

Catherine Price

The key is to keep asking yourself the same question, again and again and again: this is your life - what do you want to pay attention to?

from How to Break Up with Your Phone

Terry Nguyễn

Under capitalism, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin believed that citizens were lulled into a collective dream state. He called this condition the “phantasmagoria,” which arose out of 19th century mass culture. It was a theory born out of Benjamin’s fascination with the shopping arcades in Paris, where shoppers come to be surrounded by advertisements and an endless array of buyable things. He saw Paris’s arcades as the physical manifestation of French society’s obsession with consumption and commodity. Yet, Benjamin held the oddly optimistic view that people were capable of awakening themselves from the “phantasmagoria.” They were not doomed to sleep forever. Today, the symbol of mass consumption has shifted from the shopping mall to the social internet — and so has this dream state. In May, I wrote about how users are induced in a state of ambient shopping on social media. Users function as both consumer and commodity; they are virtual commodities (or “influencers”) in the data, advertising, and monetized interactions they provide, and consumers of the commodities touted by the targeted ads, influencers, and brands that float across their feeds. There is a passive helplessness associated to our consumer condition, this “phantasmagoria.”

Laura Jaramillo

The big lie perpetuated by the 60s was that the lifestyle you choose is more important than what you do as a political actor. The big lie of now is that what identity position you're born into or choose to identify with is more important than what you do as a political actor.

Both profoundly individuating ideologies that have had us in a chokehold for decades.

Gotta break out and act collectively. I don't think the millionaires think we're as different from each other as sometimes we seem to think we are. Doesn't mean differences aren't important but we're basically all just basically expendable population to millionaires.

Audre Lorde

there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean (feel like) on Sunday morning at 7 AM, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth; while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while tasting our new possibilities and strengths - from Poetry is Not a Luxury

Geert Lovink

We can read as many facts as we like, but if we try to add them up, they refuse to become a system. We struggle to keep track of all the information that approaches us, making it hard for most info bits to be properly digested. This is the passive indifference that Jean Baudrillard celebrated during his lifetime, and which has now become the cultural norm. The result is "epistemic closure." When we are constantly exposed to real-time interactive media, we develop attention fatigue and a poor sense of time. (Johnson says that his overconsumption of information impaired his short-term memory.)

every time I go on my phone it is one of the worst experiences of my life

tiqqun

The Young-Girl would thus be the being that no longer has any intimacy with herself except as value, and whose every activity, in every detail, is directed to self-valorization. At each moment, she affirms herself as the sovereign subject of her own reification. The unquestionable character of her power, all of the crushing assurance of this flattened being, woven exclusively by the conventions, codes, and representations fleetingly in effect, all the authority that the least of her gestures incarnates, all of this is immediately indexed to her absolute transparency to 'society.'

John Muir

I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.

• big data causes 'social cooling'
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• Marxist Internet Archive