Anthropocene Back Loop by Stephanie Wakefield: new from Open Humanities Press

We are delighted to announce the latest title in the Critical Climate Chaos, Irreversibility series: Stephanie Wakefield's very timely Anthropocene Back Loop: Experimentation in Unsafe Operating Space. 

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Anthropocene Back Loop is available for free: 

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/anthropocene-backloop/

In the face of climate chaos, post-truth politics, and growing tribalisms, it’s clear that liberalism’s old structures are unraveling. Drawing on resilience ecology, Stephanie Wakefield suggests we understand such phenomena to be indicators that we are entering the Anthropocene’s back loop, a time of release and collapse, confusion and reorientation, in which not only populations and climates are being upended but also physical and metaphysical grounds. Anthropocene Back Loop takes us on a journey though different responses and manifestations of the back loop, exploring urban resilience infrastructures, post-apocalyptic imaginaries in fiction and critical theory, and a range of everyday practices from survival skills and physical fitness to experimentation with one’s soul. Rather than returning to liberalism’s safe operating space, what is needed and what can be seen in many contemporary practices, Wakefield argues, are forms of experimentation geared toward charting autonomous modes of living within the back loop’s new unsafe operating spaces. Such efforts often let go of old frameworks, hubristically experiment with new uses, cultivate an allowance for the unknown, and embrace a confidence in exploring one’s own pathways. What these iterations suggest is that the back loop, long imagined in the singular, is spiraling out into myriad trajectories. After all, if we take seriously the idea that liberalism’s single world order is unraveling, we have the opportunity - one many have long fought for - to create our own new codes, if not new worlds. Being in the back loop means that we have already crossed various tipping points, and that in doing so, everything from social practices, technologies, and truth to plants, animals, and places have become shaken out of their normal frameworks. We are free to move on new planes.  

‘Announcing the apocalypse is easy. But doing something constructive with planetary catastrophe is rare and precious. Stephanie Wakefield’s repurposing of the ecological 'back loop’ for the badlands of the Anthropocene will not only fire your imagination, it will wind you up and send you out to slash, burn, pump, hammer, rivet and rewire a liveable world into existence.

- Nigel Clark – Chair of Social Sustainability, Lancaster University

Are we just survivors? Is our fate to endlessly – and aimlessly — govern the climate crisis? In this unexpected and inspiring book, Stephanie Wakefield reclaims the Anthropocene ‘back loop’ as a time for experimentation rather than fear, a time to probe possibilities rather than desperately cling to a ‘safe operating space’ that is safe only for a few. Anthropocene Back Loop returns to a key insight: Being is a question, not a blueprint. What other modes of life can we invent?

- Bruce Braun – Professor, University of Minnesota 

Author Bio

Stephanie Wakefield is an urban geographer and teacher. She is currently an Urban Studies Foundation International Postdoctoral Research Fellow based at Florida International University in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies and Institute of Environment. She writes frequently for popular, art, and academic journals.

How to Be An Anti-Bourgeois Theorist: Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics IV

In part III of Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics, I looked at some of the ways those of us who are on the left can employ communication technologies for purposes grounded in principles of social responsibility, solidarity and mutual care. In doing so I raised the question: might exploring new modes of authorship, ownership and reproduction have the potential to lead to ways of being and doing that are more consistent with the kind of progressive politics many of us advocate, but don't necessarily perform ourselves? To show that this might indeed be the case I included in my examples some of the bottom-up projects for the production and sharing of free resources, infrastructure and knowledge that my collaborators and I have been involved with over the years. 

Hopefully, the activities I have described go some way toward explaining how and why my collaborators and I are trying to operate differently to the individualistic, liberal humanist ways of working and acting traditionally associated with being a theorist in the fields of art and culture, especially of the ‘star’ variety. There are a number of further dimensions to this mode of practicing commons-oriented, anti-liberal, anti-neoliberal, anti-bourgeois theory (ABT) we’re experimenting with. I won’t have space to go into any of the related projects in depth. Besides, engaging with these ventures in their contextual site-specificity is actually the most interesting way to understand and experience them. But I would like to quickly sketch a few, albeit more in the spirit of an artist’s talk than a full-blown philosophical argument.

ABT Is Post-literary

In the era of YouTube, Instagram and Zoom, ‘Gutenbergian’ media technologies such as the written and printed text are no longer the natural or normative means by which knowledge is necessarily generated and research communicated. Accordingly, while my collaborators and I still publish conventional print books and journal articles, our theory might not necessarily take the form of a piece of writing at all. We are increasingly involved in opening knowledge and research up to being not just postdigital, but post-grammatological or post-literary too. 

We’re doing this by creating, publishing and sharing work in the form of films,  videos and virtual, augmented and immersive media environments. Take Oliver Lerone Schultz et al.’s collectively produced after.video. Published by OHP in 2016, this is a collection of annotated digital video essays that explore the future for theory after both books and video. It does so in two different instantiations: a freely available online version; and an offline version produced as a distinct physical object in its own right: namely, an assembly-on-demand video book stored on a Raspberry Pi computer and packaged in a VHS (Video Home System) case. after.video is therefore both an analogue and digital object manifested, in a scholarly gesture, as a ‘video book’.

after.video also points to another way in which my collaborators and I are endeavouring to open theory to being post-grammatological: this is through the reinvention of hardware, software and network infrastructures. Included in this reinvention are facilities concerned with the production and circulation of research on a radical open access basis: books and journals, for example, as with Open Humanities Press and COPIM. But we are involved in cultural/artistic projects that operate at a larger scale, too, such as museums, galleries and archives.  

Mandela27 DIY Exhibition

Let me provide an example of one such initiative that can be copied and reproduced relatively easily (unlike after.video perhaps, which requires a certain amount of technical know-how). Mandela27 is a website and digital platform created in 2014 by Jacqueline Cawston and her partners for the Robben Island Museum in South Africa. Included in the project is a hybrid physical/digital DIY Exhibition of the prison cell in which Mandela was held for the majority of his 27 years on the island. The exhibition consists of a few pieces of standard wood and plywood, arranged to form the exact dimensions of the space, together with a bucket, blanket, bench, plate and cup – the items the prisoners were allowed to have with them in their cells. The wood frame is also used to hold ten specially designed posters addressing topics such as colonialism and apartheid, along with a number of screens linked to the digital platform and its content. The latter features an interactive cultural map of Europe and South Africa, a 360-degree experience of the prison, images from the UWC Robben Island Museum Archives, video interviews with a former political prisoner and a prison guard, a crowd-sourced timeline and a digital game about life in Robben Island Prison. The original Mandela27 DIY Exhibition has toured South Africa, the U.K. and Europe and has been visited by over 170,000 people. However, Cawston and her colleagues also put together a kit containing details of how to construct the DIY Exhibition, and made it available on an open access basis, along with the contents of the digital platform and the ten posters. Because the physical materials are extremely low cost (all that’s needed really is some wood, a bucket and a blanket), this means any school or community can create their own pop-up version of the Mandela27 DIY Exhibition easily and cheaply – they don’t need to travel to a traditional bricks-and-mortar museum or art gallery to experience it. 

What after.video and the Mandela27 DIY Exhibition both show is that, as far as we are concerned, postdigital culture does not necessarily come after the digital in any simple temporal sense. Open access and the postdigital are not just to be associated with online communication technologies and the ‘digital commons’, for instance. It’s important that they are understood as being potentially physical, offline and analogue – as well as hybrid combinations therefore – too.  

ABT Is Low Key

Another dimension of our anti-bourgeois mode of theory is apparent from the way in which, although my collaborators and I may identify (or be identified) as radical theorists, we don’t always function as virtuoso individual authors. In a period when the self-organizing, leaderless mobilizations of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) and Hong Kong protesters have experimented with new forms of subjectivity and social relations, isn’t the cult of the highly individualistic ‘rock star’ theorist or philosopher coming to an end? Even if it isn’t, shouldn’t it be – especially after Covid-19 has made a shared sense of social responsibility, solidarity and collaboration within a common struggle not so much a matter of political persuasion but of survival for many people? In keeping with this notion, we often refuse to occupy centre stage, preferring to operate in a more low-key, at times anonymous manner as part of collectives and communities of thinking and doing, such as the Radical Open Access Collective and WeMake. The latter is a makerspace fablab in Milan, with whom our fellow members of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry, Valeria Graziano and Maddalena Fragnito, have been investigating the relationship between open technologies and healthcare. 

ABT Builds, Develops, Maintains and Repairs

In fact, our activities as theorists frequently don’t involve authoring at all. Along with affective labour such as supporting, encouraging and inspiring, they can on occasion involve operating in the background to build, develop, maintain and repair more than actually author – as with the work of another collaborator as system administrator for the file-sharing shadow libraries Aaaaarg and UbuWeb. This is because we see theory not just as a means of imagining our ways of being in the world differently. It is a means of enacting them differently too. (Staying in the shadows can of course also serve as a ‘defence mechanism’ that enables a given project to ‘thrive and prevents its destruction’, as the design collective Kaspar Hauser write of these and other digital libraries such as Monoskop and Library Genesis.)

ABT Is Performative and Pre-figurative

Many of our projects are similarly performative, in the sense they’re concerned not only with representing the world, but also with intra-acting with it in order to make things happen. Some have referred to this kind of approach as hacking the situation or context. However, our theory-performances can also be understood in terms of the pre-figurative practices Graziano has written about: of ‘being the change we want to see’. 

As I say, this often involves us in experimenting with the form of scholarly communications in the shape of books and journals, and also lectures, seminars, conferences, even the very gestures of reading and writing. When Clare Birchall, Joanna Zylinska and I wanted to explore the theory of books being liquid and living, for instance (rather than finished and frozen or dead), we didn’t just write about it. We actually made some liquid and living books that could be continually rewritten and republished: two series’ worth, in fact. Janneke Adema and I took a similar intra-active approach to editing ‘Disrupting the Humanities: Towards Posthumanities’, a 2016 issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP). What we wanted to do there was take on, as theorists, some of the implications of the idea that a presentation isn’t simply a re-presentation of the written, text-on-paper argument delivered by the author. It’s rather a relational and processual meshwork of presenter, event organizers, facilitators and audience, along with the associated cultural practices, technologies, institutions, buildings, materials, tools, infrastructure and so on, all of which contribute to the presentation in its becoming. So we produced an edition of JEP consisting of a selection of video-presentations/articles cum theory-performances. Heavily annotated using the InterLace open source software program developed by Robert Ochshorn, these were designed to break down the divisions between the research and presentation, as well as between the ‘real time’ and online or ‘virtual’ audience. 

Other projects we are engaged in concentrate on pre-figuratively reinventing the museum, gallery, archive, library or university in a postdigital context. Public Library: Memory of the World, for example, launched by Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak in 2012, is an ‘artist-run’ online shadow or pirate library that currently contains more than 150,000 titles that it makes sure remain widely accessible without charge and without any other restrictions, including those associated with copyright law. It consists of a network of private libraries that, although independent and maintained locally by a community of ‘amateur librarians’, are connected with the project’s server through the ‘let’s share books’ software developed by Mars. The software allows people to search all the collections in Memory of the World, discover a title they want and import it directly to their own virtual library that, like the others, is organized using a version of the Calibre open source software for managing digital books.

ABT Is Concerned with Infrastructure

Memory of the World, the Mandela27 DIY Exhibition and COPIM are all also examples of our development of radically open and inclusive knowledge infrastructures in support of commoning. Infrastructure is particularly important to us in this respect because, as Leslie Chan shows, it concerns the power (otherwise hidden) to: set agendas and decisions – which are never neutral but embedded with ideological assumptions and biases; mobilize and accumulate resources; set standards and norms; set boundaries of participation; discriminate – or not, hopefully; and control what gets built, what’s possible. 

Given the controversial and potentially transgressive nature of Memory of the World, it’s perhaps important to say a little more about why, as anti-bourgeois theorists, we’re interested in something like piracy (although Memory of the World can also be understood as a material enactment of the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto attributed to internet hacktivist Aaron Swartz). Quite simply it’s because one thing even the left finds it hard to question these days is the idea of private property. Yet it’s private property that helps to construct and shape our subjectivities as both possessive individuals and members of the bourgeoisie. Piracy thus provides my collaborators and I with one starting point from which to develop an affirmative critique of private property and bourgeois subjectivity that is designed to help us be more consistent with the kind of radical politics many theorists espouse (but don’t necessarily perform themselves) when writing about the commons. 

Having said that, Memory of the World, like a number of our other projects, does not, as Sollfrank points out, itself constitute a ‘commons in the strict sense of involving not only a non-market exchange of goods but also a community of commoners who negotiate the terms of use among themselves’ as equals in a voluntary, unforced, non-hierarchical fashion. That, in her words, ‘would require collective, formalized, and transparent types of organization’. It would also require governance, including the establishment of rules for resolving conflicts between individuals, the community and society at large, and the agreeing of sanctions for those commoners who do not comply. Moreover, most of the books that are made publicly accessible by Memory of the World are ‘privately owned and therefore cannot simply be transferred to become commons resources.’ As Sollfrank suggests, such projects are perhaps best understood instead as a ‘preliminary stage’ in which commoning is performed in an emergent, participative manner. They are moving us toward a horizon of ‘culture as a commons’, while at the same time providing us with the kind of ‘experimental zone needed to unlearn copyright and relearn new ways of cultural production and dissemination beyond the property regime.’

Certainly, one of the shared aims of our pre-figurative projects is to disarticulate the existing playing field and its manufactured common sense of what it means today to be a theorist, a philosopher, an academic, an artist or a political activist. They seek to foster instead a variety of antagonistic spaces both inside and outside of states and capital – spaces that contribute to the development of institutions and environments that are able to counter the hegemony of the traditional, liberal, public institutions such as the university on the one hand, and private, for-profit companies such as Elsevier, LinkedIn and Academia.edu on the other. This is the reason for our interest in the commons and commoning. Creating commons is one way we have chosen to describe our work producing, managing and maintaining such alternative, emergent spaces that are neither simply liberal nor neoliberal, public nor private. The fact of the matter is, ‘coming prior to adequate legislation, we currently lack even a vocabulary to talk about’ the commons in this sense, as the philosopher Roberto Esposito acknowledges. ‘It is something largely unknown, and even refractory, to our conceptual categories’. (And that includes communism, I would add.) Nevertheless, as Esposito insists, the struggle for an alternative ‘must start precisely by breaking the vise grip between public and private … by seeking instead to expand the space of the common’. 

The coronavirus event, with the huge systemic shock and suspension of business as usual it has delivered, provides us with a significant strategic opportunity to do just this, if only we can take it. After all, Covid-19 has made it clear that, as the climate emergency develops and we continue to face health crises and other disasters, neither (globalist nor libertarian) neoliberalism nor an highly individualistic liberal humanism is going to be fit for purpose. Now more than ever it is important to experiment with ways of working, acting and thinking that are different to both. For us, this is precisely what an (symbolic/functional) entity such as the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, or indeed a university, is for. One of the purposes of a university is to create a space where society’s common sense ideas can be examined and interrogated, and to act as a testing ground for the development of new knowledges, new subjectivities, new practices and new social relations of the kind we are going to need post-pandemic, but which are often hard – although not impossible – to explore elsewhere. 

‘F**k Business’ As Usual: Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics III

In 'Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics II', I argued that, whereas the nativist right have been successful in utilising communication technologies to transform the political landscape in recent years, the left has been conspicuously bad at turning its representations into actions that are compelling enough to make those in the mainstream of society want to constitute themselves as a group around issues such as community and the commons.  

How are those of us who are on the left to challenge the contemporary takeover by the populist authoritarian right? Can we employ communication technologies for more progressive purposes that are attuned to today’s rapidly changing political landscape? 

As we’ve seen, over the decades the left has found it difficult to devise collective forms of identification that are able to successfully counter the two main kinds of neoliberalism dominant in much of the West: the global neoliberalism of Barak Obama, David Cameron and Emmanuel Macron, which depends on a rule of law-based system of economic governance; and the libertarian neoliberalism (or authoritarian entrepreneurialism) associated with Donald Trump and Boris Johnson that wants to destroy this rules-based system, as embodied by the E.U., in order to generate new, disruptive business opportunities free from regulation.

'Fuck business' was an aside made by Boris Johnson at a 2018 private reception

‘Fuck business’ here means fuck the existing business. It's a disruption that is accompanied by assaults on institutions such as universities, the civil service and the BBC that, from a liberal perspective, are designed to serve as a check on political power precisely by remaining separate from it. As early as 2014, for example, the New Frontiers Foundation thinktank directed by Johnson’s senior advisor, Dominic Cummings, was calling for rightwing politicians to challenge the standing of the BBC. This was with a view to creating a U.K. equivalent to Fox News in the U.S. that would not be constrained by rules such as those concerning broadcasting impartiality.

Of late, however, there have been signs that a practical and relevant left alternative, capable of capitalising on the possibilities created by the fourth great transformation in media technologies to shift toward more direct forms of democracy, may (just may) be beginning to emerge. As reasons for optimism we can point to phenomena such as the grassroots upsurge against the political establishment associated with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the U.S. and her use of social media, the rise of the platform cooperativism movement, and calls for the monopolies of Google and Facebook to be broken up and for people and communities to control their own data. The latter idea is being explored in Barcelona by housing-activist-turned-city-major Ada Colau. Yet Barcelona is not the only city interested in engaging its population in mass participatory politics. Places as different as Porto Alegre in Brazil, Preston in the U.K. and Reykjavik in Iceland are experimenting with forms of municipal socialism, many aspects of which are made possible by online tools such as open consultation forums for citizens. More recently still, there have been the self-organised collective responses to the coronavirus epidemic. These include a hackerthon held in Germany in late March 2020 under the title #WirVsVirus (Us v. Virus). 42,869 participants collaborated remotely for 48 hours to come up with 800 different technological innovations for combating the virus. Popular themes included: ‘How can we organise neighbourhood assistance through helper platforms?’ (#58 projects); ‘How can food be provided to all citizens?’ (#50 projects); and ‘How can we support local businesses and protect them from insolvency?’ (#45 projects). 

It’s with this kind of emphasis on engaging with postdigital technologies for purposes grounded in principles of social responsibility, solidarity and mutual care coupled to the collective redistribution of knowledge and resources that my collaborators and I align ourselves.  And since a number of us are theorists, one of the issues we’re interested in as part of this is reimagining theory in the aftermath of the digital. In contrast to the worlds of music, film, TV and even politics, it seems to us that the transition from analogue to postdigital has really only just begun as far as many of the practices of the arts, humanities and social sciences are concerned. In this respect, one of the questions we’re raising with our work is: might exploring new modes of authorship, ownership and reproduction that are more in tune with this fourth great transformation in communications technology have the potential to lead to non-neoliberal – but (and this is extremely important) also non-liberal – ways of being and doing as theorists? Ways that are more consistent with the kind of progressive politics many theorists advocate, in their writings on community, collectivity and the commons especially, but don't necessarily perform themselves? 

Over the last twenty years we’ve been involved in a number of bottom-up projects for the production and sharing of free resources, infrastructure and knowledge (objects). To briefly take my own trajectory just as an example: in 1999 Dave Boothroyd and I launched Culture Machine, one of the first open access journals of critical and cultural theory. In an attempt to avoid limiting the geopolitics of our work to that of the global North, this journal has recently been relaunched out of Mexico, under the editorship of Gabriela Méndez Cota and Rafico Ruiz, complete with a redesign by the hackerspace El Rancho Electrónico. 

In 2008 Culture Machine became a founder-member of Open Humanities Press (OHP) Directed by myself and two colleagues based in Australia,  Sigi Jöttkandt and David Ottina, this initiative involves multiple semi-autonomous, self-organising groups around the world, all of them operating in a non-rivalrous fashion to make works of contemporary theory available on a non-profit, free/gratis open access basis using Creative Commons licenses. Open Humanities Press currently has twenty-one journals, forty plus books distributed across nine book series, as well as experimental, libre texts such as those in its Liquid Books and Living Books About Life series. 

OHP in turn became a founder member of the Radical Open Access Collective, an community of international presses, journals and other projects formed after the 2015 Radical Open Access conference. Now consisting of over sixty members, this collective seeks to build a progressive alternative ecosystem for publishing in the humanities and social sciences, based on experimenting with a diversity of non-profit, independent and scholar-led approaches. 

Meanwhile, in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) at Coventry University, we’re working on reinventing knowledge infastructures, especially those involved in the production and sharing of theory. Since its launch in 2018, the CPC has brought together many people involved in such ‘aesthetic’ practices. They include myself and Janneke Adema from OHP; Samuel Moore, who works with us as part of the Radical Open Access Collective; and Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak from Public Library: Memory of the World. 

The latest of these initiatives is the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, which emerged in 2019 out of a consortium of six open access presses called ScholarLed. An international partnership involving universities and libraries as well as infrastructure and technology providers, COPIM is designed to realign open access book publishing by moving it away from the surveillance capitalism model of competing commercial service providers. Its aim is to respond to the fact that companies such as Elsevier and Springer are increasingly looking to monetize not just academic content, but the ‘entire knowledge production workflow, from article submissions, to metrics to reputation management and global rankings’ and the related data extraction. COPIM represents an alternative, more horizontal and collaborative knowledge-sharing approach. Here the scholarly community collectively manages infrastructures and social systems for the common good in such a fashion as to enable a diversity of initiatives – including small, non-profit, independent and scholar-led presses – to become part of the publishing ecosystem. 

('Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics I: On the Commons and the Crisis of Representative Democracy' is available here)

If We Can Have Disaster Capitalism, Why Can’t We Have Emergency Marxism?: Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics II

In the first part of 'Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics', I argued that the anti-liberal right have been so successful in using the possibilities created by the new postdigital communication technologies to tap into those affective forces – those drives, desires, fantasies and resentments – that motivate people to become part of a group such as ‘the people’, that they have been able to completely transform the political landscape. 

Nasa maps show falling levels of nitrogen dioxide this year over China

Of course, the left has its own affective-emotional themes and tropes. (When it comes to theory you just have to say words like ‘commons’, ‘collaborative’, ‘Anthropocene’, ‘environment’, ‘material’ or even ‘affect’ at an arts event such as Transmediale to realise this.) Yet whereas the right has succeeded in using affect as a mobilizing political force, the left has been conspicuously bad at turning its representations into actions that are compelling enough to make different people, especially those in the mainstream of society, want to constitute themselves as a group – a ‘we’, an ‘us’ – around issues such as community and the commons. Sure, prior to the coronavirus outbreak a spate of large-scale youthful protests unfolded in places such as Hong Kong, Chile, Ecuador, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and Barcelona, orchestrated by ‘the children of the financial crisis of 2008’, as some are calling them. Little of this rebellious energy has fed into a mainstream political change of the kind the populist right have achieved, though. (Research shows that far right parties in Europe have tripled their share of the vote in the last three decades, with one in six choosing them at the polls.) Even the impact of the Extinction Rebellion (XR) protests, Greta Thunberg and the global wave of Friday school climate strikes have so far been mainly cultural. XR has yet to achieve its goals of getting the U.K. government to tell the truth about the climate emergency, commit to reaching zero net carbon emissions by 2025 and set up a citizens assembly. Nor have the school strikes translated into ‘real action’ from governments, according to Thunberg. In effect they have ‘achieved nothing’, she insists, greenhouse gas emissions having actually risen 4% in the four years since the 2015 Paris accord was signed. (Again, it’s going to be interesting to observe what if anything changes in this respect following Covid-19, given the reports that pollution levels have dropped dramatically in cities such as Bankok, Bejing and Bogotá, thanks to the lack of traffic and closing of industry and airports during lockdown.)

Don’t get me wrong: the left has its memes. Witness the one-time popularity of the ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ chant in the U.K., and the fact terms like ‘gammon’, ‘centrist dad’ and ‘bullshit jobs’ have now entered the language. The pink pussy hats, Handmaid’s Tale-style cloaks and Un Violador en Tu Camino (A Rapist in Your Path) performance piece adopted by various groups of feminist protestors around the world (see below) are also worth mentioning in this context. Still, there’s arguably been no really successful progressive equivalent of the kind of forceful play found on ‘White Boy Internet’ platforms such as 4chan, 8chan and Reddit. (It seems significant that the #MeToo movement has not led to considerable reforms of the law, for instance.) The democratic left has been conspicuously lacking in such politically effective ‘meme magic’.

Perhaps this is not surprising. Generally speaking, the left is less concerned about the kind of extremes of emotion that drive the reactionary right, and more about social justice, hospitality and mutual aid. Besides, societies are so diverse, pluralistic and fragmented these days it’s far easier to unite people around what they are not than around what they are. The protests in Hong Kong, for instance, after initially calling for the withdrawal of an extradition bill introduced by China, were widened to a demand for democratic reform. The demonstrations in Chile, however, started after an increase in metro fares and subsequently took in a broad range of demands for ‘better pensions, education, health, a minimum wage; but also water rights and action on environment degradation’. Meanwhile, those in Tunisia and Algeria were about price and tax rises, and those in Beirut about a tax on users of messaging apps such as WhatsApp. In Barcelona, the protests were different again: there they were about independence for Catalonia from Spain. The problem is, unless these different passions, and the heterogeneous demands and conflicts they give rise to, have a legitimate democratic means of expressing themselves – which is precisely what did not happen in the period of austerity, during which many social groups felt ignored and ‘left behind’ by the city-dwelling liberal elites – there is a danger that a ‘confrontation between essentialist forms of identification or non-negotiable moral values’ will take their place, with all the attendant negative consequences. The latter is what we have seen of late with the rise of populist right-wing political figures and parties in many countries: not just Trump in the U.S. and Johnson in the U.K., but Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen and the National Rally in France, Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement in Italy, along with Matteo Salvini, former deputy prime minister and leader of the far-right League there. Indeed, radical right politicians now lead three of the world’s four largest democracies: the U.S., Brazil and India. They are also at the head of two members of the European Union: Poland and Hungary. The third largest parties in a further two – Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany and Vox in Spain – are also far right. 

Each of these contexts is of course different and needs to be analysed in its specificity. Authoritarian nationalism is certainly combined with neoliberalism in some more than others. We also need to remain alert to the difficulty those of us who are European have with reading any political script other than the one with which we have traditionally translated the world. It’s a trait that often leaves us blind to the need for a new political language and ‘radical transformation of the regime of knowledge’ when it comes to understanding events outside of the ‘Global North’. (I’m placing this term in quotation marks as I’m aware it’s not without its problems.) Nevertheless, I want to take the risk of saying that something of a global trend does seem to be at play here. For these are all parties and politicians that by one means or another are placing liberal democracy under threat, along with its values of truth, civil rights and rule of law. Taken together, what this shows is that the election of Boris Johnson in the U.K. cannot be attributed simply to the shortcomings of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party (e.g. the supposed failure to deal with anti-Semitism, to unite both the left and centre of the party, or to a form a collation with the Lib Dems, Greens and SNP): the phenomenon is larger and more international than that. Could we even go so far as to suggest that those on the nativist right have been successful in utilising communication technologies to transform the political landscape in recent years, ironically, by acting as many on the progressive left say people should: that is by operating as cosmopolitan communities with the shared goal of collectively redistributing knowledge and ideas? While there is not just one form of populist authoritarian response to Covid-19 anymore than there is a just one form of populist authoritarianism, there was nevertheless a period in which Trump, Salvini, Farage and Steve Bannon all seemed to be working to deflect blame for the coronavirus pandemic onto the Chinese government. It’s certainly interesting that, almost in a reverse of the situation with New Labour under Blair and the Conservatives under Cameron, many of these governments are combining right-wing cultural polices with left-wing economic ideas such as nationalisation and welfarism. This is true of Poland’s Law and Justice party, and is increasingly the case with regard to the Johnson government in the U.K.. And that was before Sars-CoV-2 rendered uncontroversial the kind of state interventionism and general veneration of the public sector and welfare that would previously have been condemned as Marxist. 

Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics I: On the Commons and the Crisis of Representative Democracy

('Postdigital Politics in a Time of Pandemics II: If We Can Have Disaster Capitalism, Why Can’t We Have Emergency Marxism?', is available here.)

I'm going to begin with a proposition. In recent years a lot of work in the humanities and social sciences has been taken up with the commons. It’s a fascination that is only likely to increase following the coronavirus pandemic of 2019-2020. Over the next few years attention will understandably be paid to the manner in which communities all over the world spontaneously self-organised to fill the gaps left by the market and the state. They did so by collectively providing those in need with everything from information and accommodation, through hand sanitizer and medical supplies, to emergency childcare, financial aid packages, even company in periods of lockdown and quarantine, be it by telephone or video call.

Put simply, the commons can be understood as non-proprietary shared spaces and resources – both material and immaterial – along with the collective social processes that are necessary for commoners to produce, manage and maintain them and themselves as a community. My proposition, then, is this: if we want to actually create such commons, we need to act, work and think very differently to the ways in which most of us do now. And I include in this ‘us’ many of those who are well-known for writing about community, collectivity and the commons. Here I’m thinking here not just those who address the issue from within the liberal philosophical tradition of Garrett Hardin, Elinor Ostrom and Yochai Benkler. I also have in mind radical theorists such as Isabelle Stengers, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. 

How can we do this? How can we work and act differently from the way in which we do at present in order to help create such commons? It is this question that I am going to endeavour to answer in what follows, as it’s one that I together with a number of collaborators have been engaged with for some time.

Like the last group of writers on the commons I mentioned, a lot of those I collaborate with identify as radical theorists. However, we’re theorists who are also exploring ways of reimagining theory and what it means to be a theorist.  We’re doing this by challenging some of the taken-for-granted categories and frameworks concerning what critical theory is considered to be. Specifically, we’re endevouring to move away from the highly individualistic, liberal-humanist model that’s performed by most theorists today, regardless of whether they’re Marxists, post-Marxists, feminists, new materialists, posthumanists or accelerationists. Instead, we’re experimenting with the invention of what can be called – rather teasingly, I’ll admit – ‘anti-bourgeois theory’. This is theory that, in its ‘habits of being’, to borrow a phrase from bell hooks, is: 

1) consistent with the kind of progressive politics many of us in the arts and humanities espouse

It is important to be aware that neoliberalism is not directly opposed to liberalism. It is rather a version of it, as its name suggests, the wider historical tradition of liberalism having provided the discursive framework of modern capitalism. The singularized neoliberal homo oeconomicus is not necessarily always struggling against the liberal-humanist rights and values that the vast majority of theorists continue to adhere to in practice, then. Indeed, while most theorists position themselves as being politically on the left – writing books and articles about the importance of equality, cooperation, redistribution and so on – many end up operating as rampantly competitive, proprietorial individuals. Driven by a goal-fixated instrumentalism, what’s important to them are the number of books published, grants captured, keynote lectures given, followers acquired, or likes and retweets gained. (Elsewhere I’ve associated this behaviour with being a ‘micro-entrepreneur of the self’.)

2)  in tune with the changing political zeitgeist, especially the shift from representative to direct forms of democracy

In the U.K. this shift can be traced at least as far back as the horizontal groundswell against the ‘old politics’ of the liberal and neoliberal establishments that was such a prominent feature of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. Today, it can be seen in the decentralised manner in which the Extinction Rebellion movement operates: the refusal of hierarchal organisation in favour of bottom-up ‘affinity groups’.

2019 Extinction Rebellion ‘nurse in’ outside Google’s London HQ

It’s not just a progressive phenomenon, though. The move to more direct forms of democracy is also apparent in the U.K. Brexit party’s rapid rise to a position of political influence under the leadership of Nigel Farage prior to the 2019 general election. In large part this rise was achieved through the adoption of the digitally savvy electoral strategy of the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy, which entered government in 2018, having become the largest individual party in the Italian Parliament. It uses data gathered from the online activity of members to help shape M5S’s direction and policy. So successful was the Brexit party’s adaptation of this electoral strategy that in the run up to the election the ostensibly more mainstream, one-nation Conservative politician Boris Johnson found himself forced to take up many of its more radical right-wing ideas and forms of rhetoric (albeit  in detoxified form on occasion). And this in spite of the fact Farage himself has never won election to Parliament in the seven attempts he’s made over a span of two and a half decades. 

3) a more appropriate mode of engagement for today’s postdigital world than are printed and closed-access books and journal articles 

Arguably we find ourselves in the midst of a fourth great transformation in communications technology. Crudely put, if the first transformation involved the development of speech and language, the second writing, and the third print, the fourth entails the change from analogue to digital that is associated with the emergence of Facebook, Google and Twitter (not to forget Weibo, Baidu and WeChat in China). In fact, it can be said that we are already living in a postdigital era, if we take this term to name ‘a technical condition that… is constituted by the naturalization of pervasive and connected computing processes… in everyday life’, to the extent that ‘digitality is now inextractable from the way we live while its form, functions and effects are no longer necessarily perceptible.’ Historically, such transformations have often been followed by social and political upheaval and unrest, even war. The development of printing was at the heart of the Protestant Reformation in 16^th century Europe, for example, resulting in the breaking of the religious monopoly of the Catholic Church. A key figure was Martin Luther with his Ninety-five Theses. However, although many book historians regard print as having subsequently led to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the development of modern science and democracy, we need to remember that print has its dark side, too. Given the anti-Semitic attack at a synagogue in the East German town of Halle in October 2019, it’s worth recalling that shortly before his death in 1546 Luther published a pamphlet called ‘Warning Against the Jews’. Nor was this a one-off. ‘We are at fault for not slaying them’, Luther proclaimed in an earlier 65,000-word treatise titled ‘On the Jews and Their Lies’. The latter text was exhibited publicly in the 1930s during the Nuremberg Rallies. (So it’s not that the disruption brought about by print is good, while that inflicted by digital media is bad.)

We’re all probably going to be long gone before anyone knows if we’re currently living through a period of change as profound as the Reformation. (Although some have heralded the Sars-CoV-2 outbreak, to give the virus its proper name, as a sign that we are. This is because of the high degree of interconnectivity of global capitalism in terms of travel, trade, tourism, migration, the labour market and supply chains, all of which depend on postdigital information processing. Along with the associated destruction of biodiversity accelerated by the climate emergency and human population growth, such interconnectivity is held as having created the conditions for new, infectious, animal-borne zoonotic diseases such as Sars, bird-flu and Covid-19 to cross over from wildlife to humans as a result of their greater proximity to one another.) Nevertheless, it’s important to make an effort to come to terms with the shift from analog to postdigital – not least for political reasons, as the above examples drawn from German history suggest.

Of course it’s questionable to what extent the traditional political division between left and right (the origins of which can be traced as far back as 1789 and the revolutionary assembly in Paris, where the antiroyalists were physically located on the left side of the chamber) is still applicable. Today the situation is complicated by the fact this division has been overlaid, at the very least, by that between populist nativism and elitist cosmopolitanism. Both the U.K. Conservative party under David Cameron, and the Labour party under Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Miliband were socially liberal, for example. Indeed, Cameron has said that the passing of the law enabling same-sex marriage in 2013 by the Conservative-led coalition government was one of his most significant achievements in office. The main difference between the two parties was that the Conservatives were even more economically neoliberal than New Labour. This is why the rejection of significant elements of both in the 2016 European Union referendum as primarily representing the interests of the metropolitan liberal establishment came as such a shock to many commentators. It revealed that the electorate was no longer voting largely out of loyalty to either party on the basis of their class position, with the working-class (and large parts of the Midlands and north) traditionally voting Labour. Instead, people were voting on the basis of whether they were nativist or cosmopolitan too. Actually, what the 2019 general election made clear is that if you’re poor, working class and less educated in England you’re increasingly likely to vote Conservative. 

It’s going to be interesting to see if the public mood changes post-coronavirus. Will the backlash against the liberal establishment continue, or will it be replaced by a newfound respect for scientists and journalists and for institutions such as the NHS and BBC? Retaining the left/right political distinction for the time being, however, we can say that it’s been mainly those on the populist authoritarian right who, to date, have realised the possibilities created by the new communication technologies. It’s as if they’ve read their Gramsci and figured out that if you want to change politics, you need to begin by changing culture. So, to return to an international frame for a moment, the last few years have provided us with examples such as: Donald Trump, who’s been called a Twitter genius and the first meme president of the United States; Jair Bolsonaro, the first president of Brazil elected using the Internet, Google’s YouTube especially, as his main means of communication; and the U.K.’s Vote Leave campaign’s sophisticated exploitation of Facebook data to intervene in the 2016 E.U. Referendum, as revealed by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. What the actors behind these developments have done is create a new model of political communication by seizing on the opportunities created by the fourth great transformation in media technology to precipitate the cultural crisis in representative politics. 

Jair Bolsonaro, President of Brazil. He has accused large parts of the media of ‘tricking’ the people over the dangers of the coronavirus, which he has likened to a ‘little flu’

For populist politicians there are two distinct advantages to this new model. The first is that it enables those who don’t already have control of their state media (à la Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland and Viktor Orbán in Hungary) to sidestep the old, established forms of political communication that rely on the major newspapers and influential TV and radio programmes. They are thus able to avoid being held to account by journalists, even when they fabricate, lie, doctor videos and rebrand fake ‘fact-checking’ websites. Consider Boris Johnson’s keeping of his live interview appearances to a minimum during the 2019 U.K. election campaign; and, once in power, the attempt of his government to select which news outlets were allowed to cover it, and boycotting of leading BBC news vehicles such as Newsnight and the Today programme. Until the need to keep the population informed about Covid-19 made such a stance untenable, that is. 

The second advantage is that this new model nonetheless provides populists with a means of overcoming the apparent disconnect between professional politicians and ‘the people’ – the latter being constructed antagonistically as a self-identical and essentialised mass that is prevented from reaching its full potential by an establishment ‘elite’, also homogenised, which of course doesn’t include these populist politicians themselves. The nativist right are able to overcome this disconnect by using the repetition of slogans – most famously ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Take Back Control’ ‘– to link the grievances of a number of different sections of society. These grievances have arisen over a long period, stretching from the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ of 2015, through the 2008 financial crisis, at least as far back as the 9/11 attacks. They include a sense of abandonment and betrayal by elites, resentment against women, Muslims and immigrants, and the general lack of control over their lives felt by many of those living through late-stage capitalism, coupled to an anxiety about the future. By articulating such sentiments with a nationalist pride, populist politicians have been able to create chains of equivalence across those parts of the population that have been adversely affected by the results of neoliberal globalization. In this way the radical right have been able to tap into those affective forces – those drives, desires, fantasies and resentments – that motivate people to become part of a group (such as precisely ‘the people’) and form the basis of collective forms of identification, and so mainstream their ideas. 

Reactionary authoritarians have been aided and abetted in the creation of this new model of political communication by Silicon Valley companies. The latter are aware it’s not logical reasoning and verified evidence and information but extreme displays of emotion that keep audiences hooked, and so drive their profits by maximising attention. Not only have Twitter, Facebook and YouTube rendered indistinct the difference between making carefully thought-out comments on the current issues of the day, and hastily announcing one’s unconsidered feelings about them, they have actively amplified and rewarded expressions of anger, hatred, insecurity and shame. After all, contributions to these platforms don’t have to be true to get a reaction and go viral, just hugely captivating. Being controversial, intrusive, crude, vulgar, moralistic, narcissistic, sentimental, contradictory all works.

Similarly broadcast media often prefer adversarial debates. In the U.K. the BBC regularly invites speakers with explicitly opposing views to discuss a given topic. It does so partly out of an attempt to provide balance (although what it all too frequently ends up delivering is false equivalence, since just because someone is on the opposite side of an argument doesn’t make them qualified to speak about it). But the corporation also opposes contributors in this fashion because reputable professional journalism outlets and other high-quality mainstream sources such as Sky News and the Guardian constitute only a low percentage of where the public receives its information in the era of smartphones and social media. So the issue is not just fake news or Russian interference. It’s also that the mediascape is now highly diverse and disordered. What is needed therefore are combative debates that can cut through the chaos to be heard and get attention. (Piers Morgan’s entire career as a presenter on ITV’s Good Morning Britain has been built precisely on his ability to offer provocative opinions, be they about racism, gender fluidity, Meghan Markle or the response of the U.S. to Covid-19, in contrast to the more nuanced, easy going approach of his co-host, Suzanna Reid.)

All of which goes some way toward explaining the current situation, whereby small numbers of people are able to use communication technologies to move large numbers of others in the direction of nativist forms of populism characterised by an emphasis on authority, group insecurity and an exclusionary nationalist pride. Of course, in a situation of chaos and confusion there’s often a desire for a strong authoritarian leader who can gets things done regardless. Yet the media’s emphasis on hyper-emotionalism plays straight into the hands of the reactionary right, which defines itself negatively against those it considers ‘the other’. Hence the rise in sexism, racism and white supremacism we’ve experienced in recent times, both online and off, together with the presentation of the coronavirus as a ‘wartime’ (Johnson) or ‘invisible enemy’ (Trump), and description of it as the ‘Chinese disease’ (Trump again). (Even a pandemic is seen as national emergency from this perspective, not an international one.) Indeed, those on the anti-liberal right have been so successful in making their ideas acceptable – many produce brilliant viral videos and memes, often containing language and images that are full of humour, irony and ambiguity as well as ‘frightened bitterness’ – that they can be said to have completely transformed the political landscape. As a result, we find ourselves living in a ‘post-truth’ world of ‘alternative facts’, ‘deepfakes’, Holocaust deniers, climate-breakdown deniers, pandemic minimizers and people who are anti-immigration and anti-LGBT rights and (albeit indirectly perhaps) anti-diversity in terms of the biosphere too.