To say that I’ve been feeling uninspired lately is an understatement. Being uninspired is often described as your surroundings becoming dead. Nothing speaks to you anymore, nothing enticing you to come closer and inspect it, bringing you deeper into its rich world. I don’t feel that to be true. I find that disillusionment is something very much alive, so much so that I feel it consume me whole, literally, falling into its yawning jaw, pushing me into its digestive tract. Within its body, every line of thought seems to lead to the same place, someplace that is bleak and disappointing. Yet, I can’t help but sincerely believe it’ll be different the next time around, and when it’s not, I’m gradually more tired and less patient than I was before.
Normally, I don’t like to share anything while I’m in such a state, because frankly I don’t see the use of throwing out yet another set of polemic observations about technology. Simultaneously, I’m growing tired of waiting for this malaise to pass. Processing these thoughts seems like the only way I can come out on the other side — which brings me to where I am now, reporting from deep inside its belly.
We have somehow made it to the halfway point of this new decade. The reverberations of its predecessor, the long 2010s, can still be felt, that which Momtaza Mehri succinctly summarizes as “A theatre of dissonance”. She continues: “The cultural landscape was pummeled by wave after wave of surfacing shocks. Democratisation. Diversification. Devaluation. Decentralisation. Each swelling trend fed the other, jerkily reacting to market expansions and contractions..In a period marked by its incoherence and algorithm-choked horizons, it was accepted that a successful creative life had to entail a massive dose of self-deception”.
In the three years since I left my job as a software developer, a stint that demolished my ego and spirit, I’ve tried to say something useful about this thing called technology. I’ve rummaged in multiple disciplines, burying my bruised head in various ideas, theories, and histories. Admittedly, this journey has been more mystifying than illuminating.
If there is anything I have learned, it is that self-deception has become impossible. Tech critics cannot as easily believe they’re fighting the good fight when they’re merely playing whack-a-mole with the technocratic monster of the week. The absence of alternatives to go with this critique becomes too painfully obvious to ignore. This is nothing new; Evgeny Morozov described this very predicament a decade ago, predicting the uselessness of reactionary takes, the very kind that were everywhere during the techlash.
It may still be premature to periodize, but from my vantage point the 2020s seems to be a decade of exhaustion. Exhaustion, as defined by Asad Haider, is a historical condition between the end of an emancipatory political sequence and a new one that has yet to appear. It is characteristic of the “impossibility of politics”, where every attempt at emancipatory activity becomes effectively neutralized.
Drawing from Congolese philosopher Ernest Wamba-Dia-Wamba, Haider describes political sequences as something primarily driven by people. Contrary to the belief that the state and similar institutions are the only drivers of politics, Wamba posited that true politics is the result of people’s thoughts1. The ‘masses’ aren’t mere simple-minded sheep driven by a libidinal economy. As Gramsci famously noted, “All human beings are intellectuals”. But politics are not always taking place; they only appear in specific political sequences. When a sequence ends and another one is yet to appear is when we’ve settled into exhaustion.
In Wamba’s own words: “When people lose the consciousness of subjective break by ceasing to be involved in political processes, emancipative politics disappears. The completion of a sequence of progressive politics does not lead automatically to another. In the absence of emancipative politics, the state problematic or the imperialist influence prevails in the treatment of matters of politics.”
Within the ebb and flows of exhaustion, political curiosities become intellectual dead ends. Cheap epiphanies are traded in the attention economy, acting as weak antidotes to our sorry circumstances. We are inundated with takes but are none the wiser. No solace can be found in the pedestalized mechanic oracles either, despite how much water they gurgle to generate their soulless sentiments. Everything remains painfully confusing and opaque.
I’ve noticed a growing hostility towards traditional material analyses. The once reliable notion that our current technologies are directly tied to Capital has become so banal that it is mistaken for being contestable. Like toddlers who hate broccoli and bedtime, we roll our eyes at anyone who deigns to utter the word capitalism. It’s one thing to seek specifics in capitalist critique, but another to think that a lack of specifics, usually found in informal memes or clumsy formulations by leftist teens or twenty-somethings online, is indicative of the irrelevance of capital in current tech discourse. That’s exhaustion for you.
It's not just that it is passé to speak about capitalism; the disdain stems from the fact that such takes are perceived as too detached from what's tangible, what’s doable from an individual standpoint. This capitulation into personalization is one of the three kinds of pseudo-politics Haider posits are mobilized under periods of exhaustion. Personalization is the idea that individual behavior and choice constitutes a viable political programme that can lead to emancipation. Like good liberal subjects, it is on us to keep good digital hygiene. Tailoring social media feeds. Setting preferences in cookie forms. Speculating the inner workings of elusive algorithms for more effective navigation. Policing excessive phone use by setting timers that will be ignored and undone repeatedly. We may be long past seeing technology as value-neutral, but our everyday practices indicate otherwise.
Usually, there is some pragmatic argument that tries to say that there are positives to these new strides in technology; they simplify arduous tasks, make information accessible as well as offer new ways of communicating, or at the very minimum, are entertaining. This is perhaps the rebuttal that frustrates me the most. Of course there’s something valuable about them!
Any achievement Silicon Valley has made is off the backs of people. What these so-called inventors have successfully done is continue the tradition of rearranging pre-existing ingenuity and carefully placing them in new social orders that are exclusively beneficial to them. Technology does not precede our uneven social relations. Silicon valley, despite the myths it tries to perpetuate about itself, did not invent tools, abstraction, or mediation, nor the value that these things have in our lives. These are the aforementioned positives that are referred to; the fragments escaping the systematic muffling of value by the powers that be.
Under our current regime, we don’t get to decide what counts; what skills are valuable and most conducive for a good life; nor how to organize social life through collective problem solving, experimentation and discovery. We certainly don’t get to decide whether our technologies must necessitate human degradation and a recklessness towards nature. Technologies that have the potential to be collective good become monkey paws instead.
Haider ends his essay with no political prescription: “I am unable to conclude with a clarion call, to rally new energies to a resurgence of politics. But this is not because I view emancipation as illusory, inherently flawed, or doomed to failure. In reality, it has been exhausted, in a way that perhaps we are still unable to fully comprehend”.
I understand his apprehension. But I am growing restless in my exhausted state. With some hesitation, I wish to slowly cultivate a sense of clarity. In this little corner of the internet that I’m renting, I seek to banish surrogate premises inherited from our oppressors and their useless internalist disambiguation. I want to use my own metaphors. I am, after being digested by apathy, willing to drag my limp and slimy body to someplace I can begin to dream again.
I do not want to participate in the production of cheap clarity that has become a commodity in the attention economy. Rather, I seek the kind of clarity that is hard earned, durable, the kind that has historical context and ideological baggage. Above all, I want my work to honor the notion that it was always us first. As Wamba asserted, it is only we and our politics that can meaningfully break this oppressive social configuration. This goes a long way as existential balm.
«Luckily, there are limitless, new ways to engage our tender, and possible responsibilities, obligations that our actual continuing coexistence here..in our world require» —June Jordan
Haider elaborates on this:
Wamba emphasizes, drawing on Sylvain Lazarus, that “people think,” and that without this point of departure we inevitably end up in an elitist politics. Consequently there is a sense in which politics is thought—but thought is not, in some dualist framework, separate from reality. People’s thought is part of reality, and this is a materialist and egalitarian proposition. It rejects the idealist and elitist notions that “theory” is disconnected from people’s thought, and that only the party or the state can think. Emancipatory politics, then, based as it is on the “active prescriptive relationship with reality,” is not the expression of a social foundation. And because it starts from the premise of people’s equal capacity for thought, it is a mass politics—not a populist politics in the sense of “the people,” but simply generic “people.”