Slouching towards Xanadu

This blog has gone pretty quiet lately — it’s in one of those dormant stages that strike me every so often. Really I need to upgrade the website generation (how cool would it be to have readers’ comments on the posts? Probably not very — most of the comments on these kinds of tiny sites are spam and ’bots), but I haven’t really been motivated to do it. I’ve just been tired. Or rather, I’ve been trying to take care of myself.

I’m over the hump in the moving process: there’s probably a few big pushes left, but the end is very nearly in sight for me. I donated a bunch of stuff to a local thrift store, which helped clear space for yet more stuff (yay!). I got some extra storage-type furniture, so that helps give things homes. I even got out the radios and fans, though for now they’re huddled together on whatever free surfaces I could find for them. Xerxes is delighted with the new place, but unimpressed with all the boxes and clutter. So far, though, he hasn’t broken anything. I’ll count that as a small victory.

I started this blog to share my travelling, but now travelling is (temporarily) done. I began to share my thoughts, opinions, and even arguments. I began to think that somebody was actually reading this (who reads blogs anymore, anyway? That’s what I need to set up: RSS and Atom). This blog is ultimately the informatic version of the diary I began to keep during COVID. It’s a slightly different thing, since I revise and edit the posts before releasing them, and I release them (at least in theory) to the public. I’m inspired by the essays of Charles Lamb and Joseph Addison; Mark Fisher’s blog was the main predecessor to this one, though there are others.

I suppose that this post can be considered a sort of “season finale”; it’s not good-bye for good, but it’s good-bye for now (unless I find a second wind and a sudden urge to write). There’s a certain “I can’t do it”-iveness (how’s that for derivational morphology!) that sabotages me. Maybe I’m not the only one; I don’t know. But I tend to think: I won’t try because I’ll fail, and failure is not an option. Maybe it’s the “curse of the gifted child”; it was always the assumption that if it doesn’t come easily, it won’t come at all. And my tendency is to give up once it stops coming easily, which it invariably does (at least for me, because I’m not as good at things as other people are).

This post is all over the place, but so am I. Fuck it.

I struggle with academic writing because I’m terrible at making an “argument.” Not terrible. I just don’t know what my claim is. I guess the problem is that I have nothing to contribute to the so-far accumulated sum of human knowledge: I’m just trying to catch up with what’s going on. I hope, should I have any impact, that it were to inspire doing. Nothing would be worse than the fate of all those leftists consigned to the academy (how many revolutions did Adorno inspire? Or Žižek? Maybe I’m being too critical…).

I suppose my argument is this: “do the thing while they aren’t stopping you.” Whatever the thing is, do it. You aren’t going to destroy them, but for now, they don’t see you as a threat. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth: I know that you think of yourself as some radical revolutionary character, but your discontent is comfortably within the limits of acceptable, if eccentric, opinion. God save the Liberal order.

And that’s an enormously powerful position to be in, because it’s non-threatening. The FSF might have the right idea: make something that’s useful to them, and they’ll leave you alone; the flying city isn’t ever going to take off, anyway (at least, that’s what they think…). So hey, there’s no hope of victory in our time. There’s no hope of salvaging the defeat: the Net, as it was, is no more (for most people).

But rather than destroy the Net-as-it-was (I recently read Code by Lawrence Lessig, so this is all very influenced by him), they made the tactical mistake of confronting it socially, and ideologically. In other words, rather than dismantling the basis of Utopia (a non-Euclidean one, in Ursula Le Guin’s sense), they convinced people to abandon it. Indeed, they need it: ultimately, the master’s house was built using the slaves’ tools (I’m so sorry Audre Lord, whose work I must read); the spooky-verse was built of bricks of freedom (some nice William Blake for you); the technical basis for the construction of the panopticon was and remains the same as the technical basis for Xanadu (“Xanadu” taken more broadly than Ted Nelson intends it); the Net-as-it-was isn’t gone, it’s just buried in the foundations of the Net-as-it-is.

More to the point (have you noticed I have a tendency to speak circuitously? Get in line, buster), the Net-as-it-was (the fermenting “cyberspace”, as it was once known) is still out there; in the desolate reaches beyond the walled gardens there are homesteads (Eric S. Raymond). In short: your web browser can go to websites besides facebook.com and google.com, amazing as that may seem (though I’ve known people to use exclusively the google search engine program on their mobile devices rather than access the thing through an ordinary web browser, so I’m not sure how long it’ll last). For now, it’s still possible to go to all those fun corners of the Net using the very tools they provide to use their things. Indeed, those tools rely upon the same techniques that everyone does. The “web standards are open”, which has become a weird rallying call for certain megacorps: it’s not even the “commons” that’s at stake (that’s already gone, insofar as the vast majority of people never leave the enclosures) so much as the techniques: they’re building a prison out of bricks from the public kiln, or some such (it’s very difficult to make a material example, since the point here is that the “methods of production” are themselves available to any and all; it’s the “means of enclosure” that are limited; computer programs are castles built in air (RIP Fred Brooks), and the plans to the castle are everyone’s).

This is why I don’t get into it: I can’t explain it clearly. I think it’s not that I don’t understand it clearly, it’s that I communicate in riddles. I can’t help it — that honestly is the most direct and clear way I can think of to say exactly what I mean (what was that Humpty Dumpty said about paying the words extra?). The point of all this is: they’re building their empire, but the territory of the computer (“cyberspace”) is not zero sum; they don’t enclose the commons, because the commons aren’t “rivalrous”: they build an enclosure and encourage people to abandon the commons, which fall into disrepute and disrepair; but it isn’t possible to enclose the commons directly (still in cyberspace here), since the means by which the enclosures are constructed are the same means by which the commons are built. If you don’t believe me, read some RFCs: the internet works the same way for everyone, regardless of whether you’re a megacorp or a nobody; it’s in the megacorps’ interest to keep it that way, since they get to build their enclosures for free.

Their victory is ideological, not real: people think that the commons is enclosed, that the Net-as-it-should-be is no longer possible, but this is a vicious lie. And because it’s such a successful lie, they themselves believe it. The trap of “there is no alternative” (and so we return to Mark Fisher) catches those who promulgate it: for the inevitability of victory blinds them to the as yet un-destroyed remnant that they, concealing it from ourselves, keep alive for their own purposes.

And if anybody has anything to say about it, I invite them to send the cops to knock down my door and drag me away for “seditious thoughts” — I’ll go calmly, if they take me in the name of the megacorps, rather than of the state. The state isn’t my enemy, unless they ally themselves to my enemy. Even my enemy isn’t my enemy: ideological perversions such as mine are not punished; they are contained and muted. But the great brilliance of the (neo)liberal model was to allow dissent in order to disable its effectiveness. This was a catastrophic and irredeemable blunder on their part. Because they don’t care about what wacky stuff you’re up to, so long as you keep it quiet: there’s nothing more irritating to simmering discontent than a martyr.

So build it while they aren’t stopping you: now that the secret’s out, they may not let you do it much longer. Be smarter than them, and hide directly under their wing. Do I believe that we will lead a great exodus from the enclosures to freedom? No, I don’t. The people don’t want to leave: they’re comfortable. And “freedom”, in this sense, is a very confused and inapt idea. It’s precisely the “freedom” they afford us that I’m arguing you exercise. I still haven’t been able to really explain why we must do what we must do, and why the panopticon is what it is. Perhaps I will end up discovering that their enclosure is the most free. Perhaps they are doing it all in an honest effort to improve our lives. It doesn’t seem as though that’s what’s happening, but it’s possible.

But theory follows in the footsteps of practice (Gustavo Gutiérrez), and understanding freedom is not necessary to fight for it. I know it when I see it, and we are all enabled to build it for ourselves. So do it.