Our present-day realm of state terror operates through abductions, murders, and content farms. ICE workers raise their cameras as often as they raise their guns, decked out in military gear like a kid trying on mom’s heels, camo stark against the snow, while their bosses confuse retweets for votes, likes for being liked. Don Moynihan dubs this a “clicktatorship,” a cursed word if there ever was one, no less for being accurate. André Gorz, writing more than half a century earlier, terms this “pseudo-culture,” a counterfeit culture that does not arise out of ways of living but seeks to impose itself upon it.
Mass pseudo-culture, while producing passive and stupefying entertainments, amusements, and pastimes, does not and cannot satisfy the needs arising out of dispersion, solitude, and boredom. This pseudo-culture is less a consequence than a cause of the passivity and the impotence of the individual in a mass society. It is a device invented by monopoly capital to facilitate dictatorship over a mystified, docile, debased humanity, whose impulse of real violence must be redirected into imaginary channels.
Gorz, A Strategy for Labor, page 94
That is, the tractable audience does not give rise to the clictatorshop so much as the reverse; The Apprentice precedes the presidency. The programming creates a subject whose anger at billionaires who dominate and oppress is redirected towards immigrants who do neither. Fantastical stories are projected onto real bodies as they are dragged out of their homes. The placated, brainrotted viewer is expected to see only the projection, to imagine themselves into the role of kevlar-swaddled goon, even as they flop onto the couch in cheap sweats, furiously tapping buttons, the only muscles getting exercised the ones in their thumbs.
Mass culture, a byproduct of commercial propaganda, has as implicit content a mass ethic: playing on, maintaining, and flattering ignorance, it encourages the ignorant to resent those who “know,” persuades them that the latter despises them, and encourages or provokes their contempt. This abject demagogy, one of whose elements—contempt for “intellectuals,” (a term which has become an insult not only in the US) and for culture—can be found in all fascist movements, professes no respect for exceptional individuals except insofar as their superiority can be accounted for by what they are, not by what they do: athletes, beauty queens, princely personages. This is because the superiority of being, physical or hereditary, can be taken as a product of the nature—of the soil, the race, the people, the nation—from which all individuals derive, and can thus reflect to them a natural bond of community with the hero, their own vicarious aristocracy, their original identity, reproclaimed in chauvinism.
Gorz, A Strategy for Labor, page 118
Into this model is planted the vacuous chatbot, which both further denigrates knowing (why bother knowing anything when it can know things for you) and pumps out nonsense on the regular and at such a scale that both knowledge and the skill of knowing are drowned out. What’s left are the signals of superiority, cast in both skin and hip, recast with fillers and leg-lengthening surgeries, because nature can’t be trusted either (she’s a woman, after all). All in service to chauvinism, a word whose original meaning was an absurd devotion to a fallen leader.
The observers who bravely record a different perspective, not only a different camera angle, but a different intention and context, show us that there are other ways of seeing, other ways of being. They dash through the fourth wall, make plain that we are not merely audience but actor, as much able to take up space on stage as the masked extras parading before them. It’s not their cameras that do this work, although those are useful, but their minds, their spirits, their fierce hearts. Their belief that they can see and know what is before them, that they don’t need to be told what is happening but—when they lift their gaze away from their screens—can trust their own eyes.
All industries and disciplines, over time, direct people into greater and greater specialization. Those who have been working on the web since the beginning have been able to see this trend first hand, as the practices and systems grew ever more complicated and it became impossible for one person to hold it all in their head. We sometimes talk of this level of increasing complexity and specialization as inevitable or natural, when it’s neither. Moreover, like many things involving work, specialization benefits some people and immiserates others.
[There is an] extreme human and cultural misery to which not only the industry of advanced capitalism but above all its institutions, its education and its culture, have reduced the technical worker. This education, in its efforts to adapt the worker to his task in the shortest possible time, has given him the capacity for a minimum of independent activity. Out of fear of creating men [sic] who by virtue of the too “rich” development of their abilities would refuse to submit to the discipline of a too narrow task and to the industrial hierarchy, the effort has been made to stunt them from the beginning: they were designed to be competent but limited, active but docile, intelligent but ignorant outside of anything but their function, incapable of having a horizon beyond that of their task. In short, they were designed to be specialists.
Gorz, A Strategy for Labor, page 106
Impossible not to think here of the rise of labor unions in the tech industry and the subsequent rapid (and surely coincidental) deployment of so-called AI which—unlike nearly every prior technological development in software—arrived with mandates for its use and threats of punishment for the noncompliant. Elsewhere, Gorz talks of the trend of workers being reduced to “supervisors” of automated systems that are doing the work for them. But simply watching work happen, without any of the creative, autonomous activity that would occur if they were doing the work themselves, gives rise to a degree of boredom and stupefaction that can be physically painful and spiritually debilitating. Anyone who has experienced the pleasure of creative work is likely to greatly resist that reduction; better to create workers who have never known such things.
There’s some use in distinguishing here between the worker who, having learned the skills of writing software over many years, now turns to so-called AI to assist her in that task; and the worker who will follow her some years hence and may never learn those skills, but will know only the work of supervision. The former, elder worker may find some interest or curiosity in applying her knowledge to this new technology, especially as the modes and methods for doing so are still being developed. But what of the worker who begins their work a decade from now, who has been specialized to do nothing more than ask for something? What will she know beyond that menial, dispiriting little task? What kind of people are we designing now?
We are, once again and inexplicably, seeing a conversation unfold about reforming the military force in our streets, with body cameras and training standing in for a moral reckoning about the kind of world we want to live in, the kind of world that is livable for more than the wealthy few. We know what such “reforms” accomplish, because we’ve seen this many times before: an armed, unaccountable force with body cameras is no less deadly or immoral than an armed, unaccountable force without. A trained secret police is still the secret police.
A short walk from where I write this is the old Walnut Street Jail, the first penitentiary built in the US, a precursor to the more infamous Eastern State Penitentiary, which was designed and operated by the Quakers. The Quakers advocated for reforms to the old prison systems, in which deprivation and corporal punishment were the norm, arguing that solitude, cleanliness, and discipline were better methods for rehabilitation. More than 200 years after those “reforms,” our prisons remain locations of intense deprivation, physical violence, coerced labor, and, frequently, inhumane solitary confinement—the “penitence” the Quakers were after still in short supply. Reports from the detention centers built today to house people pulled from the streets without due process shows that even those minimal standards are anything but: inedible food, overcrowding, lights on twenty-four hours a day, refusal of medical care, rape, and murder are all regular occurrences in these new prisons.
This is the process that reform takes: the system is modified around the edges, often in ways that seem to cushion or obscure its real purpose, but the underlying conditions that maintain it remain unchanged. The old ways resurface, eventually.
But if not reform, then what? What else can we do? André Gorz proposes a concept of “non-reformist reforms,” reforms which
bring the future into the present…[that] make power tangible now by means of actions which demonstrate to the workers their positive strength.
Gorz, A Strategy for Labor, page 11
For Gorz, a reform is non-reformist if it both exercises the power and agency of workers acting together and foreshadows the future world in the present. That is, a non-reformist reform requires both concrete, bottoms-up action and the reflection of a different world within that action, the way a small fractal prefigures the large. Body cameras promise increased surveillance with no attendant increase in accountability, while training maintains the distribution of money and resources away from care and towards cops and prisons; both reforms represent business as usual, not a remade world. Only abolitionist demands—to defund militarized police forces in all their many forms, to invest instead in schools, libraries, homes, healthcare, childcare, and more—can both exercise that power and foreshadow a world where care overcomes criminalization.
To put this another way: a reform maintains the old world, often under cover. While a non-reformist reform demands that we build a new world, one in which all humans and the more-than-human world can thrive.
We must take small steps towards the future we want; there is no other way. But each step must point the way toward that future, a drop of water that heralds the wave.
