#75, no time for fools
It’s not that the internet hasn’t had the time. Nor that I don’t find some pleasure or knowledge in such ironic efforts. As I have written in earlier work on fake documentary, it is true that satire and irony, tricks and ploys, can sometimes serve as distancing devices that produce telling affect, knowledge, and/or self-awareness about the sacred cows they try to topple, or at least attempt to allow us to see with more clarity or truth.
But my own daily practice—#75 objects and 41 days in—is another thing. Occurring in real time, and therefore necessarily intuitive, responsive, reactive, and under-pressure, I find that I have been decidedly serious, pronouncedly productive, sometimes evenembarrassingly sincere. First of all, I have been trying (self-awaredly stuck as I am in the very digital form and space that I critique) to focus my efforts on the links between #fakenews and #realviolence, between #socialmedia and #therealworld. The stakes seem very high.
But as critically, I find that my daily practice has produced, for me, in the experiencing of it, yet another set of linked #100hardtruths that make foolery less attractive for me as a personal mode for this online engagement (and to be clear, I am well aware of the verbaland visual puns that litter this effort), and instead lock me into a self-prescribed digital practice of ever darker self-criticism:
- Trump’s lies do not need to be exposed. He does most of this for us; the internet does the rest and more.
- #fakenews does not need me to expose it. A person could devote the rest of her life reading, watching, using, learning from its oceans of astute analysis and ready-to-use tools (only a sliver of which I’ve linked to here).
- through our linked, commodified, surveilled, digital activities of watching, reading, sharing, writing, and learning about #fakenews; through our communal digital practice of hiding-while-exposing, built daily by people, corporations, the media, our government, and others; through our every digital engagement; we read, write, like, share and become the #fakenews.
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- The images in this post were shared with me by the critical internet scholar, Geert Lovink. “I started to collect images. I could not resist. There are so many!”
- Lovink continues: “Maybe we can turn it into a collective collaborative project, just for the fun.”
- More Lovink: “Do you want to contribute and just pass it onto others? It is ideal for parties, to project on large walls, etc.”
- 75. im
