[…] Beyond Intervention

According to Henk Oosterling, in the information society, interpassivity rules. Browsing, watching, reading, waiting, thinking, deleting, chatting, skipping and surfing are the default conditions of online life. Total involvement implies insanity. Instead, we remain cool. What characterizes networks is a shared sense of a potentiality that does not have to be realized. Millions of replies from all to all would cause every network, no matter what its architecture, to implode. Within every network there are prolonged periods of interpassivity, interrupted by outbursts of interactivity. Networks foster and reproduce loose relationships – and it’s better to look this fact straight in the eye. They are hedonistic machines of promiscuous contacts. Networked multitudes create temporary and voluntary forms of collaboration that transcend but do not necessary disrupt the Age of Disengagement.

The concept of organized networks is useful to enlist for strategic purposes. After a decade of tactical media the time has come to scale up the operations of radical media practices and deal with the knotty issue of organization. We should all well and truly have emerged from the retrofantasy of the benevolent welfare state with its opulent funding for media, education, culture and the arts. Networks will never be rewarded and “embedded” in well-funded structures. Just as the modernist avant-garde saw itself punctuating the fringes of society, so have tactical media taken comfort in the idea of targeted micro-interventions. The fort/da game that the communication guerrilla is playing with the old media heavily depends on the ups and downs of social movements. Tactical media too often reproduce the curious spatio-temporal dynamic and structural logic of the modern state and industrial capital: difference and renewal from the peripheries. But there’s a paradox at work here. Disruptive as their actions may often be, tactical media corroborate the temporal mode of post-Fordist capital: shorttermism. In essence they do not break with the strategies of disappearance.

It is retrograde that tactical media in a post-Fordist era continue to operate in terms of ephemerality and the logic of “tactics”. Since the punctuated attack model is the dominant condition, tactical media have a fatal affinity with what they seek to oppose. This is why tactical media are treated with a kind of benign tolerance. There is a neurotic tendency to disappear. Anything that solidifies is lost in the system. The ideal is to be little more than a temporary glitch, a brief instance of noise or interference. Tactical media set themselves up for exploitation in the same manner that “modders” do in the game industry: both dispense their knowledge of loopholes in the system for free. They intervene, point out the problem, and then run away. Capital is delighted and thanks the tactical media outfit and the nerdmodder for the home improvement. The paradigm of neoliberalism is extensive throughout the apparatus of social life. And this situation is immanent to the operation of radical media cultures, regardless of whether they are willing to admit it. The alarm bells will only start ringing when tactical media crank up their operations. And when this happens, the organized network emerges as the modus operandi. Radical media projects will then escape the bemused paternalism of the state-as-corporation.

(excerpt from Geert Lovink, Zero Comments, pp. 229 – 231)