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06.01.2017

I was pretty excited to read Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art (2016) by Virginia Heffernan, as my Wikipedia search of the woman told me that she was basically a more wholesome and successful version of everything I aspire to be, but hey, the book sucks!! This is one of the two key texts for the class––the other, naturally, being Kenneth Goldsmith’s ‘Wasting Time On The Internet’ (2016). Both books were published in 2016 (so like thematic relevance and current case studies would have been nice.) 

She writes in the preface:

the Internet is a massive and collaborative work of realist art [...] Digital forms are best illuminated by cultural criticism, which uses the tools of art and literary theory to make sense of the Internet’s glorious illusion: that the Internet is life. 

Because of course the Internet is not life. In fact it is a highly artificial regime, with tight rules and rituals that organize its text, music, and images. That’s why the Internet becomes more deeply meaningful when “read” as an aesthetic object rather than lived or reported on as firsthand human experience. 

I have so many issues with this blanket aestheticization of Internet practices by people over the age of thirty who so clearly gives no fucks about the lived fabric of Internet communities and the Real, incredible people making Real Lived Experience a much kinder/warmer/more fascinating/understanding place for their URL friends. I get that the forefathers of (sub)cultural theory (see Hebdige 1979) may have premised subculture and community on physical proximity, which may have led them to see online communities as simply an aesthetic abstraction, or an inferior, digitized ‘copy’ of the more ‘real’ IRL communities they represent. 

When early cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote that the "content of any medium is always another medium,” he was referring to the written word as speech, film as a collection of pictures, recorded music as a collection of notes written on paper, but was he talking about people? Of course not, and understandably––things like selfies, hyperreality, social media ‘presence’ were barely a spec on the horizon. The lines between self, medium, and reality were distinct (in the academy, at least). 

To frame the Internet and social media as an abstraction (in 2016 FFS) and ignore the porous, fluid relationship between what goes on URL/IRL is outdated and out of touch. I wanna be like “hey Virginia have you heard of ‘weird facebook’ and all the amazingly honest, fucked up, socially conscious, generous people who live on there and say challenging things that every day make me rethink the way I carry myself in real life? Have you ever met up IRL with someone you met online and just like hung out and made cool art and then gone back to URL friendship and it all just feels like a continuation of the same thing? Have you ever relied on your online friends for emotional support and advice to help you get through really stupid, self-destructive periods when your ‘real’ friends and family were physically present but emotionally on another planet?” 

So yeah. This whole ‘the Internet is a mysterious and artificial place that speaks no volumes on how we are as real people’ is bullshit. I was talking with a fb friend yesterday evening and he put it really nicely:

Oh God i can't do that internet shit like idk how ppl act like this shit exists within a vacuum like they didn't IRL acquire a crippling porn addiction almost ironically

N yea ppl def think I'm bugging for what I do but if they aren't tryna step up what I'm doing isn't for them

!!! Off rip like yo a good 2/3rds of the memes are self deprecating cries for help and no1 helps they laugh n be like same bro :)

Like I really be jumping in ppls messages tryna talk to them cause some shit u can't scroll past n just be chill

Like Idk so many super self destructive things got normalized in some of the most creative pockets of the internet and with so much going on ppl are just numbing themselves

The class itself is taking turns, this message I sent my former professor/mentor yesterday is all that really needs to be said:

...

RIP x

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04.01.2017

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04.01.2017

A couple of friends have asked me about this class I’m taking in January called ‘Wasting Time on the Internet’, why I would take a class with the much-lauded and intensely problematic ‘conceptual’ ‘poet’ Kenneth Goldsmith, and what the hell this seeming bullshit entails. From the look of things, there is no syllabus, no schedule, and no assignments, so for the sake of posterity I’ve decided to detail the events of this month in a blog. 

Still to early to pass judgement, so here are some things he said during our first time meeting as a class today:

“It’s just like shit hanging off a grid.” (the internet)

“Pollock-esque”

“You don’t know Jackson Pollock? That’s amazing.”

“Does anyone remember that woman who unleashed a bunch of insects on the New York subway?”

“I dream of this. I wanna be here.” (the Windows XP default wallpaper)

“Dirty Sprite 2. Bookmark it.”

“Wasting time on the internet can feel really solitary and depressing, but there’s this beautiful thing that happens when we do it together.”

“I want this class to be easy, i want it to be the easiest class you’ve ever taken. But ease if difficult, and some might say a radical act in and of itself.”

“Hypothetically, could we watch porn in a mall out here?”

“I have no idea what i’m doing here, i just walked in and was like ‘what is this terrible desktop’.” (proceeds to spend two hours analysing the desktop image of our TA, a Cypriot engineer who doesn’t speak very good English but plays along. Our homework for the day is to set our desktop image to the same one.)

“I would like you to start using the terms we use in here, like ‘doge’, ‘affect theory’. Keep using them until they become familiar to you.” 

“I want this class to be easy, i want it to be the easiest class you’ve ever taken. but ease is difficult, and a radical act in itself.”

Disclaimer, I have a fairly strong agenda when it comes to theorisations of internet practice, so to be fair on Goldsmith here’s a brief rundown on where I stand:

Rewind to last year, 2015-16 was the period in which I began to focus more seriously and autobiographically on current web culture, censorship, identity politics and corporate $$$. The paper that I ended up writing (currently redrafting for publication later on this year––Sisyphus feels), focused on ways that white masculinities, through their online practices and performances, have appropriated the language and forms of both black masculinities and white femininities (amongst other marginalized groups) to reinscribe white-male privilege and, simultaneously, underscore its presence as a largely uncontested form of racial and gendered social domination URL as much as IRL. 

The move beyond existing new media theory’s naive conception of morality is, I believe essential, to the larger dialogue happening within the art world right now as it seeks to engage with the multiple ways commercially driven, online platforms (inc. Facebook, SoundCloud, xvideos, 4chan) and the way these are shaping and reshaping both public and private cultures of violence and desire in the grander scheme of critical theory. (TW for links: drug use, sexual violence) I focused especially on the music and online identities of rapper Drrty Pharms and the Beta Boys collective as an entry point into a discussion of school shootings, rape culture, and the rise of the alt-right. 

Aside from my fascination for his confronting and freakishly self-aware experiments in appropriation, desire, structural and domestic violence, the interview and research process was both intellectually and personally cathartic, as it forced me to confront the norms and structures that had long kept me safe as a researcher and a woman writing about violence.

Part of the beauty (and often unwelcome self-reflexivity) of internet research is your ability to slip, without even realising, from the safety of the ivory tower into much more murky personal, agent-based territory where the lines between researcher and subject are blurred. I remember the moment I realized that this paper would be as much about my own issues as it would be about Drrty’s:

While I am cautious of over-intellectualizing [his] depictions of sexual violence and injecting meaning where there is none, these conversations with Barrett inspired me to reconsider my blanket rejection of misogyny in music––even if this approach would not fit comfortably within my earlier vision of feminism. I began to re-examine the violence of Drrty Pharms’ lyrics with a new ear, searching for instances that corroborated or broke with the more normalized, implicit forms of gender violence that proliferate in our cultural constructions of masculinity.

The Drrty Pharms persona provided such a belligerent counter-narrative to the swathes of casually sexist songs, films and advertisements that I had grown up with and come to accept as normal, if somewhat problematic; his lyrics so absurd, his persona such a caricature of hypermasculinity, that I simply couldn’t accept this monstrous, pathetic character at face value. At the very least, the responses that his work provoked in me––and in the friends to whom I rushed to share his work––were too complex to put down to pure shock value. Deep down, and perhaps a little naively, my hope was that by honing on his character, I might find some rationale, some context, for the male violence and aggression that had peppered my life as a young woman, and that of virtually every woman I had loved or admired. In his song “Zero”, I remembered the words of Gail Dines, “The feminine hence becomes feared––and that which we fear, we also learn to despise.”

The advancement of gender and race theory through honest, autobiographical writing, and critical approaches to online identity-play is basically where I’m at write now in my research interests. 

I’ll keep this blog updated on developments and lack thereof. 

RIP x