Hi friends,
Today I have a bunch of disparate thoughts orbiting the same general themes, so I’m just gonna let them all stand alone and not try too hard to tie them all together neatly. I’m sure you’ll see where I’m going with this, anyway. Here we go:
I’ve been thinking a lot about this piece that writer Elvia Wilk wrote for The Towner in 2016 in the wake of the Trump election.
It’s a great essay, and still very relevant. One particular line stands out to me now: ‘History has shown that free travel and communication are as precarious as they are precious. Even the internet is no sacred institution—there is no reason to assume that Twitter internationalism will infinitely prevail over manic nationalism. In fact, they are probably flip-sides of the same coin that will eventually meld into one.’ Four years later: yes, they are and yes, they most certainly have. We’ve all seen how manic nationalism has run rampant on the internet these past years—the upside-down information ecosystems of hatred within the cavernous expanses of social media. The turn of phrase ‘Twitter internationalism’ also feels odd and quaint here. Remember when, like an Animorph in progress, Twitter hadn’t yet fully assumed its position as a cesspool of bad takes? And Jack Dorsey hadn’t waited half a decade to deign to come down from his ashram and crack down on hate speech and fake news? And we barely knew what 4chan was, let alone Parler? Oh, how times have—extremely predictably, with writing on the wall in neon block print the entire time—changed.
Relatedly, in this week’s edition of her newsletter The Bluestocking, Helen Lewis notes that ‘reading the accounts of those involved in social media optimisation in the late 00s and early 10s is increasingly like reading the memoirs of scientists on the Manhattan Project: the awakening realisation that you wield terrible power’. Lol, now what though?
As Emily Alford points out for Jezebel,
The US media is off the mark by continuing to lean on the trope of rural white poor people who have been left behind and just don't know any better/have no choice. It’s not just that this is reductive, which it is, but moreover it’s a total red herring. One week post-Capitol insurrection, we know now that the calls were coming from inside the House (see what I did there?). Behind every laughable photo of an uncouth insurrectionist who looks like they crawled out of their mother’s basement with Mountain Dew and vape pen in hand, there’s a spate of rich, Ivy-educated hard-right congressmen who incited them and are using these absurd antics as a convenient, distracting cover for more sinister agendas. ‘News articles from the past five years depicting the plight of the down-and-out Southerner with no recourse but Trump are bullshit,’ Alford writes. ‘They’re enjoying this. It’s the day they’ve been waiting for.’
Alford observes that she grew up with people like the ones she saw in photos from the Capitol: frat-boy sons of oil barons, driving expensive pickup trucks and wearing expensive camouflage attire, costuming themselves in the trappings of the working classes even as they profited off their indigence and labour. (The man who put his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, Alford notes, was wearing box-fresh, expensive-looking work boots. And then of course there’s the lady who took a private jet to Washington…)
There is this pervasive idea in the media that racism stems from the bitterness of a people left behind by progress and resources. But in fact, racism has always walked hand in hand with power and wealth in the United States. It therefore stands to reason that many racists are, indeed, very rich and very powerful. The mainstream news media ought to get a handle on their approach with this—if for no reason other than because it must be getting tiring for Soledad O’Brien to be the only one calling it out all the time.
Has everyone heard about the CIA’s new branding?
What a world. The absolute funniest part of this New York Times article on it is this bit: ‘On social media, people noted the website’s visual similarity to electronic music festival fliers and streaming platforms like Boiler Room. Others compared it to the look of The Intercept, an online publication known for its reporting on the C.I.A., as well as marketing materials for brands like Urban Outfitters.’
Like honestly, did the CIA hire a a twenty-three year old in Doc Martens to spearhead this rebrand? I guess the real question is what every techno club in Kreuzberg is gonna do now that their branding has jumped the shark…
Illustrator Colleen Tighe, in an excellent essay for SSENSE about those ubiquitous social media infographic posts (you know the kind…) writes:
‘Part of me wants to be visually set apart from the corporate hacks, to proudly declare I Am Not Like Them. This is understandable, but somewhat childish and egocentric. I am succumbing to the advertising world’s belief that aesthetic symbols define who I am, rather than what I do. Our critical thinking must require flexibility and understanding that sending ideas out on corporate platforms in a world dominated by colonialism, racism, and capitalism will always contain contradictory elements and eventually be co-opted. It is impossible to create a specific anti-capitalist aesthetic. Instead, as I meditate on the efficacy and purpose of these slides, I start to see all this DIY design and education as a visible fight between the application design of Instagram and a wing of radical users. The web of today refuses user input and customization in favor of user experience.’
The flattening of experience design into a framework of consumption rather than of action is dangerous, and depressing. And design can often be hierarchical, gate-kept. It’s a fallacy to think that there’s a visual rubric for radical design—the CIA logo is a prime example of the way that the radical or new can be co-opted by institutions. Design, in one sense, peddles a false sense of security in that we ascribe intent to its tenets—but that intent is in fact not intrinsic and can be appropriated, justifiably or not, by others. Tighe writes that her first instinct is always to give herself a pat on the back for noticing when this sort of branded co-opting occurs. Ultimately, though, she concludes that things aren’t so black-and-white: ‘Judgement based solely on aesthetics is a trick by those in power. It distracts us from structures of domination and how to effectively weaponise tools of mass communication. Stuart Hall clarified the questions we should ask ourselves: “Is the novel a bourgeois form? The answer can only be historically provisional: When? Which novels? For whom? Under what conditions?” Toronto-based group Design Justice Collective simplify their questions to: “Who benefits? Who is harmed? Who participates?’
The answers, Tighe writes, change constantly. Thus is the nature of aesthetics. These candy-coloured Instagram infographics barely scratch the surface of direct action, but Tighe sees them as a valid, if complicated, contribution to movement work and radical organising. ‘We lack the resources of the truly powerful, so we must attack with a tiny thousand cuts,’ she writes. ‘Dismantling the mythos of capitalist design is one cut. Combating propaganda in every form with our own is another. When I see young people and organizers galvanized by this movement creating a message of their own design, I see a tiny blade, in sync with many others.’
That’s all for today! See you next week,
Maddy