#100hardtruthsMain MenuPledges and lists written over the first 100 daysA path through the primer focusing on the several pledges and lists of hardtruths I wrote during the first 100 days of the Trump administration24 #100hardtruths authored by invited contributorsA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths written by scholars, artists, activists, and friendsArt Answers to Phony QuestionsA path through the primer focusing on speaking hardtruths about and through poetic, abstract, formally reflexive, non-indexical Art FormsVirality is VirilityA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths that connect a macho growing of digital stature to real world violenceFake News R UsA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths that reveal our complicitySome #100hardtruths on Digital Media LiteracyA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths about reading, writing, participating and understanding Digital Media LiteracySome #100hardtruths on RacismA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths about ethnicity, nationality, zenophobia, immigration and racismSome #100hardtruths on SexismA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths about gender, sexuality, sexism, and misogynySome #100hardtruths on ImagesA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths about photography, visibiity, and the power of imagesSome #100hardtruths on the LawA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths about legislation, (il)legality, public institutions, and the power of the LawSome #100hardtruths on AdvertisingA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths about corporate greed, getting eyeballs to content, the monetization of the Internet and AdsSome #100hardtruths of the InternetA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths that attempt to reveal the structure, logic, uses and power of the InternetSome #100hardtruths on Freedom of ExpressionA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths about journalism, freedom of speech, and the power of ExpressionSome #100hardtruths on and through Film and VideoA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths about or spoken through film and video35 #100hardtruths highlighting the work of othersA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths produced by journalists, scholars, artists, activists found onlineCreditsAbout the makers of this Scalar book.Old home page that links to WordpressSome #100hardtruths in poetryPoems that were produced as a result of radical digital media literacy workshopsSome hardtruth poem responses and readingsAlexandra Juhaszf60e7beb550e75bc077d6722b27684bbbb62d0deXiomara Liana Rodrigueze692622823dfcb5652df57e66962e293d1913569Craig Dietrich2d66800a3e5a1eaee3a9ca2f91f391c8a6893490
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!”
12017-10-23T18:54:19-07:00#75, no time for fools3April 1, 2017plain2019-07-25T15:35:56-07:00I write and post this #100hardtruths on April Fool’s Day, 2017. Given this effort’s focus on deception, fakery, falsity, the untrue, the almost true, trickery, slander, and shams of all sorts, it would seem a near imperative for me to today engage in some mild mockery or corny contrivance. However, one of the things that I’ve noted about my own daily practice—particularly at today’s other milestone as I round the final bend into my fourth quartile—is that across this effort I haven’t had much time or heart for fools (except for, perhaps, myself). 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.