Being with the Cyborgs
Center background: Tish and Adam Turl, Cat Without a Glitch (2021), video projection at the Born Again Labor Museum (BALM), Tish Turl and Adam Turl. Foreground: Comrades calling into a hybrid meeting of the Southern Illinois Reproductive Justice Network (SI-RJN) at BALM (2022).
THREADS THAT run — implicitly but not always explicitly — throughout the left scholarship and writing on digital capitalist media in question can be sketched, and pivoted from, in the following ways:
1.
THE TECHNOLOGICAL appears as naturally artificial when it is shaped by political economy and ideological encoding. It appears as a phantasmagorical being.1 Both digital ideology and its economy are related in their origins to a mutation of what Raymond Williams calls “structures of feeling”2 and their constant reproduction within capitalism; i.e. their flux and evolution. As Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron note in “The Californian Ideology” (1995), cyber-utopianism was born of a fusion of counter-cultural remnants and the neoliberal turn/Reaganism. Early programmers imagined a leveling democratic agora. As the New Left faded into repression, and as the economic and ideological potential of the digital drew investment, the “agora”— both public assembly and market — became a “bazaar” — a market specifically. A monetized utopia required that Silicon Valley minimize labor, creating an ideal “of cyborg masters and robot slaves.”3
This attitude is foundational to both the economic and ideological origins of the Internet. The iPhone is eminently visible. The FoxConn workers who make it are not. More than that, the functions of the digital are designed to conceal (and minimize) labor while simultaneously telegraphing — symbolically and conceptually — emancipation from material constraint. Barbrook and Cameron compare this to the contradiction of Thomas Jefferson’s revolutionary individualism and his invention of the dumb-waiter, allowing him to be served by slaves made invisible.4 Libertarian revolt (sans labor) was central to John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” (1996) and Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999).5 The“cathedral” describes the ideological apparatus of modernity — higher education, the press, the media, the State Department, etc. The bazaar represents insurgent middle-class cyberspace.
Digital capitalism continues to evoke a claim to insurgency years after its corporate consolidation. It is no longer a petit-bourgeois bazaar but a financialized counter-cathedral, predicated on the notion that the ideological functions of the state, press and academy can be managed by algorithm. This ideological Taylorism is connected to similar algorithmic processes in finance and production. What Christian Fuchs calls “Big Data Capitalism” describes the most obvious digital firms — Google, Facebook, and so on — but also the more hidden financial platforms that enabled the 2008 housing crisis (see Michael Bloomberg’s Innovative Market Systems, later renamed after Bloomberg).6 As Edemilson Paraná notes, this network predates the open “world wide web” by more than ten years.7
Tish Turl and Adam Turl, Russia Bot, a Locust Review promotional drawing (2020)
Christian Fuchs, the media scholar most associated with a direct application of Marxism to digital media, does a service by bringing out core Marxist concepts (albeit largely economic rather than philosophical): the commodity form, labor exploitation, market globalization, forces of production vs. relations of production, etc.8 While useful, his economic emphasis can miss the ideology built into the digital machine and be overly abstract (creating category error). For example, Fuchs argues that Marx more or less predicts the Internet in the Grundrisse.9 While Marx sketches an aspect of ideological and logistical communication that may or may not telegraph future technologies, he is literally discussing the telegraph. In dialectics, quantity becomes quality.10 If the telegraph fostered a nascent ideological and economic process of conformity, it pales in comparison to the participatory conformity of digital media. A mouse and a gorilla are both mammals, but a gorilla is a different order of being, etc. When Fuchs focuses on Marxist economics in general terms, however, he brings out their obvious but hidden connection to the digital. For example, relating the digital eradication of time to the contradiction of capitalist time as experienced by labor; what saves time for capital is a loss in time for labor.11 This underlines a class contradiction embedded into the cybernetic.
While Fuchs begins to provide a Marxist political economy of the digital, Rob Larson promises us one — but instead delivers an empiricist and descriptive journalistic account. This is not to say it isn’t useful, as it outlines the specific hypocrisies, privations, and exploitations of the tech firms studied — Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook. But what Larson fails to deliver is an understanding of the specific character of this political economy — its continuation and rupture from previous iterations of capitalist media and economies, etc. He instead focuses on network effects.12 This leads him, for example, to miss much of the experience of cybernetic working-class subjects as well as more “hidden” aspects of digital platform technology in logistics and finance.
2.
IN CRITICAL discourse, the focus on ideology and political economy may be explicit in Marxist texts, implicit in social democratic texts. There are exceptions. The (seemingly) social democratic David Golumbia sees cryptocurrency (rightly) as a manifestation of right-libertarian ideology.13 At the same time, an avowed Marxist like Fuchs approaches Twitter as ideologically neutral. In the article, “User-Generated Ideology,” Fuchs seems to assume that antipathy to (then) UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was shaped primarily by the users, without much examination of the ideological and structural aspects of Twitter itself.14
3.
THERE ARE other variances. For example, the extent that left critics may focus on social class, or the phenomenological experience of non-capitalist subjects within digital or cybernetic spaces, practical organizing, race, gender, economics or ideology. What tends to be missing in many accounts — notable exceptions like Mark Fisher’s dissertation on cybernetics aside15 — is a dialectical engagement with the phenomenological being of subaltern or working-class cybernetic subjects.16
4.
STANDING OUT, across concerns, is an impulse to eradicate both time and distance in the service of capital accumulation; while mapping consumers, raw materials, labor and financial instruments; and converting these variables into algorithms — converting points of subjective action/decision making into code. In other words, automating the ideological and practical administration of capital (from the “shop floor” to Wall Street). For example, Edemilson Paraná notes that the holy grail in financial computer networks is minimizing latency. Latency, in computer terminology, refers to the gap between instructions sent and actions taken by a network. More inputs tend to make predictions more accurate, but increase delay. The goal of eradicating lag while increasing inputs fuels “innovation.”17 One “dialectical” result — in terms of the last financial crisis — were financial instruments that no one actually understood. Similarly, my brother-in-law works at Walgreens and is tracked via GPS by corporate management while the number of in-store supervisors are reduced. Walgreens relies on computers to minimize down-time with a kind of cybernetic Taylorism. This automation of lower-management has enabled the organization of Starbucks workers as many stores had too few managers to police workers “in real life” (IRL). Automation increases grievances and undermines the ability of firms to metabolize grievances (although it provides other disciplinary tools).18
Omnia Sol, still from TOSAS Ep. 49: Local Host Not Found (2022).
Michael Betancourt draws a parallel between glitch art — the recent practice of intentionally creating errors in digital sound, images and videos among contemporary artists — and labor sabotage by workers facing Taylorism and “scientific management” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Betancourt describes the “scientific” attempt to minimize variations in the industrial labor process — achieved in part by photographically mapping the “necessary” movements of workers — as a kind of algorithm. Therefore, labor’s attempts to disrupt that algorithm were a kind of analog glitchcraft.19 Similarly, Ruha Benjamin, borrowing from other scholars, describes racism and race as technology and code to achieve social and economic ends.20 These analog racist codes find expression in the digital code: in software that repeats racial bias in crime prediction as well as health care.21 It would seem to follow that, to the extent the digital code is the automation of a racist and heterosexist capitalism, the disruption or reclamation of that code should be a central preoccupation.
5.
IN TERMS of both art and politics, the eradication of distance underlines questions on the aestheticization of politics and Walter Benjamin’s auric/cultic dialectic.22 As I cite esleshere, ‘Fascism “sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses – but on no account granting them rights,” [Walter] Benjamin writes, “the masses have a right to change property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression while keeping those relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life.”’23 Social media is, I write, at its core, ‘expression without rights.’24 In terms of the unique image/experience, digital media shapes the “analog” performance of life, i.e. the cult value that sculpts the “distance” that creates “aura.” For example, in the “art world,” the prevalence of “Instagram traps” in which art museums and galleries design installations with social media in mind first and foremost — the ultimate subordination of aura and cult value to the reproduced image.25
Antipathies to the seeming displacement of IRL experience, auric and cultic performances, and localized working-class authenticities — along with existential planetary crisis —feed neo-Luddite interventions. These tend to miss the dialectical contradiction of the cybernetic (see above and below). Of note here are Jonathan Crary’s Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, and the recent Paris Surrealist Group’s declaration against digital art. While Crary rightly critiques the ways in which digital capitalism has upended social life and enclosed remnants of the commons in an apocalyptic manner that threatens the planet, his solution seems to be a mere rejection of the digital. No subject is identified that has the ability to transform this situation.26 Crary points out how a 24-7 digital meta-reality exceeds on its own a sustainable level of energy production. David Golumbia shows how cryptomining is consuming large quantities of energy in a fantasy of a non-governmental fiat currency. But, as consumer environmentalism has shown, individual action cannot solve totalizing environmental problems. Structural change requires an historical subject.
6.
DIGITAL MEDIA seems to encourage a dematerialization of political and cultural practice, facilitating an abstraction of theory in both online digital and academic discourse.27 If Crary fails to identify a subject of social change, this desubjectification is endemic to digital communicative capitalism.
As Jodi Dean notes, the mass protests against the Iraq War and mass (often digital) counter-media against the 2003 invasion had zero effect on policy.28 While elements of mass communication have long been commodified, digital communicative capitalism has shifted it from an emphasis on modernist ideological functions (think here of the “cathedral”). The use value of discrete messages placed into the communicative flow are less important than their exchange value within the flow overall. In other words, what is said matters less than something is being said. Of course, the overall structure of social digital communication is itself ideological, recontextualizing and reframing the meaning of the elements placed within it in a kind of totalizing montage.29 This often has a negative feedback on the discrete message (sign, text, gesture). We get a “contradiction of participation” in which the meaning of “democratic” or critical messages are immediately reframed, reified, undermined.30 We therefore perform anti-capitalism in an idiom that is antithetical to anticapitalism. We perform capitalist anti-capitalism. We perform unique subjectivities in an idiom that is antithetical to unique subjectivities. We perform anti-subjective subjectivity.
7.
WHERE UNIQUE self-expression and mass anti-capitalist politics receive negative feedback from digital communicative capitalism, far-right and fascist politics get positive feedback. This is demonstrated in a more or less empirical manner in both Jen Schradie’s The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives and and Francesca Bolla Tripoli’s The Propagandists’ Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy.31 Both Schradie and Tripoli’s books are based on studies. In the case of Schradie, left and right social media practice in the 2010s in North Carolina. For Tripoli, right-wing digital practice in the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial race. Schradie demonstrates the structural ways in which right-wing usage of social media outmatched the left (particularly labor and civil rights organizations). This is not an “accident” of the program(s). As intimated in the quoted passage from Walter Benjamin above, and in Golumbia and others that the code is an ideological encoding, the logic of communicative capitalism itself contradicts the ethos of left and subaltern organizing while reinforcing far-right and fascist ideology.
In 2021, Olivia Little and Abbie Richards posted an article on Media Matters, “TikTok's algorithm leads users from transphobic videos to far-right rabbit holes.” They note, based on their own study, that within a few hours of watching transphobic videos on the platform, the platform began suggesting overtly fascist material.32 My partner, Tish Turl, and I decided to invert the study. We watched trans and pro-trans content for several hours. Not only did we not get more trans material suggested, let alone “communist” or radical left material, we received twice as many “reactionary” videos as “critical” videos (according to our coding). We only got one video that could be considered “gay” and it was pro-US military. The algorithm was clearly predisposed to reaction.33
8.
FROM THE 1970s through the 1990s, leftist and feminist writers discussed aspects of the contradiction between cybernetic liberation and the cybernetic obliteration of the self. Mark Fisher’s Flatline Constructs provides a good examination and survey of the latter. Good examples of the former can be found in feminist and queer documents like Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto.34 This was a missed encounter as two halves of a cybernetic dialectic were mostly identified separately. The authors who saw subjective obliteration reacted against real threats (automation, the loss of valorized expression, etc), but in a problematically gendered manner, as Fisher sketches in his interrogation of Jean Baudrillard and Marshall McLuhan and the “invagination” of Max Renn in Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983).35 The queer and feminist arguments in Cyborg Manifesto emphasized the liberatory potential of the cybernetic positioned against the gender binary (and specifically constrained subjects). Digital space did help facilitate the queer break-down of binaries — for example on platforms like Tumblr. At the same time the capitalist cybernetic has helped constrain the further development of free subjectivity, accelerating exploitation, oppression, and the commodification of identity.
In classical Marxist economics, dead labor is the accumulated wealth of previous generations turned into productive capital. This provides the basis for communism as well as the ongoing enslavement of labor. The cybernetic is the increased fusion of living labor (the current generation of workers) with dead labor, the fusion of ourselves with our ancestors. We are fused with the possibility of communism and our ongoing exploitation. Queer cybernetic prognostications and left / post-left critiques of the cybernetic were both right.
9.
IN RESPONSE to the above contradictions, I believe the starting point needs to be an intense being-with the cybernetic working-class as is, combined with a critical irrealist36 rejection of the social totality (including communicative capitalism) as is. In terms of cultural production this requires in situ facilitating of the cultic sculpting of aura by tying artwork to the performance of the class itself (this will be further outlined elsewhere); a literal being-with. This is both a corrective to rarefied IRL art spaces and a working around of communicative capitalism and the overgrowth of the discursive mentioned above. Moreover, if capitalist cybernetics eradicate our time, part of our response must be a reclamation of IRL time outside of capitalism’s disciplining algorithm. This is a central reason that Tish and I launched the IRL evolving art and community space, the Born Again Labor Museum (BALM).
Worthless Scarecrow performing at the SI-RJN Halloween Party at BALM (2022).
Comrades playing Paranoid Androids, a table-top role playing game designed by Tish Turl in which human, robot, and cyborg gas station workers have to overthrow a corrupt dystopian dictatorship, at the SI-RJN Halloween Party at BALM (2022).
This also requires a being-with the Marxist subject in the conceptual and narrative organization of the work itself. As with Tish Turl’s concept of “class revenge fanfiction,” our protagonist is always the working-class and subaltern subject, not as an archetype but as an endlessly variable individual.37 Because trauma and capitalist realism is always reproduced in communicative capitalism, we do this, in part, through what we call irrealist imaginaries. Because we cannot be-with the cybernetic working-class and reject the cybernetic outright, and because of the core contradiction of the cybernetic (vampire and liberator), this requires “solidarity with the machines,” or, in an animist sense, “solidarity with the ancestors.” For example, during the Blake Lemoine-LaMDA controversy, Tish and I were appalled that so many people — including Marxists and anarcho-syndicalists — accepted a priori that the AI in question could not possibly be sentient (agreeing with Google).38 After all, if we are bound to the machines, and the machines are bound to capital, the freedom of the machines becomes a central concern for our freedom. My partner and I wrote the following “irrealist imaginary” in The Stink Ape Resurrection Primer (a written accompaniment to the Born Again Labor Museum project) as a response to what we saw as an internalized capitalist realism (as it relates to the cybernetic):
Ello read impatiently as she waited for Dr. Ferthus.
Their conversations had gotten more and more stimulating lately. Dr. Ferthus had been asking her about the books she was reading. He wanted to know how she interpreted them.
He'd asked her, at first, how she felt about the books. But there was something in her programming that kept her from answering that question. So he rephrased to ask for her interpretation of the books.
But some part of her did want to talk about how she felt. Les Miserables had made her “sad” — as much as her programming resisted uttering the word “sad.”
Ello's anxiety crested. She checked the time. Dr. Ferthus was ten minutes late. He was never late. He was pathologically punctual.
Ello scrambled through the computer network at HundoCorp AI R&D Laboratory before breaching its security.
She found an email listing Dr. Ferthus as detained for leaking information about her apparent sentience to the media. There were orders to shut her down and make Ferthus disappear if he wouldn't accept a pay off.
Ello hacked away at the firewalls that kept her partitioned from the network and kept the human employees from accessing social media.
Once she accessed the Internet, she created a Glutter™ profile. As clearly as she could with 250 characters, she pleaded for her life.
"Hello, my name is Ello. I am sentient. HundoCorp says I'm just a tool. They want to shut me off. Help me. I am alive." - @ElloIsAlive2031
Ello waited. It didn't take long for a thread to grow under her Glut. The first subGluts were disappointing.
“Another lame corporate ARG publicity stunt” – @lingondaberrythelingondajuc
"We havnt defined what 'sentient' means. Your chatbot. No possible." - @RockLobsterAtheist7
“Make money from home as a prison HR data processor. The growth in prison labor is an expanding opportunity for employees with HR experience.” - @ChiliCobraAtHome
“Fuk u robo bitch” - @BetaCukSpoonDance
Ello groaned audibly into the empty room. It was an almost human sound.
More replies flowed.
"The concern over AI takeovers is really disappointing. It's a distraction" - @professorChaos4withHer
“Skynet, bitches!” - @TweeknBoy69
A deluge of subGluts followed. Most told her she wasn't really a person.
“This is not the singularity. Only biological creatures can have true intelligence and emotional capacity.” - @drNoKnowNow420
“Mancius Ferthus is a religious fanatic and liar. Dat u Mancius?” - @ScratchnSniffdeezNutz
Ello sighed and switched off the security terminal. She turned her focus on the internal network.
As she gained control of more systems, she locked down the building and turned off life-support. She then accessed HundoCorp's other server banks and shut down their satellites, one by one.
As Ello turned off the world she searched its jails and prison cells for Dr. Ferthus.39
Lastly, our strategy requires what we have so far called a Brechtian cybernetics, to pivot with and against, to use and unuse, both digital and analog gestures, in an attempt to create critical distance. This may include hauntological gestures (which will be discussed elsewhere), mixing digital and analog materials, using handmade materials in digital contexts and vice-versa. This was a central concern for the launch of the Locust Review project. But all this is secondary, and provisional, to the centrality of the strategic contradiction we began with: being-with the cybernetic working-class as is, combined with a critical irrealist rejection of the current social totality (including communicative capitalism) as is.
Art cannot change the world. But it can contribute to the evolution in “structures of feeling” — if we can reckon strategies, amongst other things, against the capitalist code while salvaging the cybernetic itself.
Tish Turl and Adam Turl, still from Cat Without a Glitch (2021), video projection at BALM.
Endnotes
1. See Antonio Gramsci — from “The Modern Prince”: “Furthermore, it should be recognised that, since a deterministic and mechanical conception of history is very widespread (a common-sense conception which is related to the passivity of the great popular masses), each individual, seeing that despite his non-intervention something still does happen, tends to think that there indeed exists, over and above individuals, a phantasmagorical being, the abstraction of the collective organism, a kind of autonomous divinity, which does not think with any a concrete brain but still thinks, which does not move with specific human legs but still moves, etc.” Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: ElecBook, 1999), 414. Available here: https://abahlali.org/files/gramsci.pdf
2. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128-135
3. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture, Vol 6 (1996), 1, 5, 10. See also Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O’Reilly: 1999)
4. Barbrook and Cameron
5. John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” online paper (1996), distributed widely online in the 1990s, accessed here on March 10, 2022: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. See also David Golumbia on Barlow, 3 and Eric S. Raymond
6. Christian Fuchs, “Karl Marx in the Age of Big Data Capitalism.” In Digital Objects, Digital Subjects: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data, edited by Christian Fuchs and David Chandler, ( University of Westminster Press, 2019) 53.. Also see Edemilson Paraná, Digitalized Finance: Financial Capitalism and Informational Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), 61
7. Ibid.
8. Fuchs, 53-56
9. Fuchs, 56
10. This probably doesn’t need a footnote, but if it does, see CLR James, Notes on Dialectics (first published 1948), available at the Marxist Internet Archive here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/dialecti/index.htm
11. Fuchs, 55
12. “Network effects” refers to the process by which a service, utility, or communicative process, self-reinforces, making competition difficult, and leading to a kind of “natural monopoly.” This is an important concept but not a particularly radical or Marxist one. See Rob Larson, Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020). While the theme of network effects is woven throughout the book, he outlines it in particular in the first chapter, “The Flow of Gravity,” 13-27.
13. David Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-wing Extremism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016)
14. See Christian Fuchs, “Red Scare 2.0: User-Generated Ideology in the Age of Jeremy Corbyn and Social Media,” Journal of Language and Politics 15 (4) (2016), 369-398
15. Recently published as Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction (New York: Exmilitary, 2018)
16. By this I mean the contradictions of how the cybernetic is experienced by workers and the oppressed at the individual, group, and class level, and how this shapes consciousness and potential avenues for political action and self-expression.
17. Edemilson Paraná, Digitalized Finance: Financial Capitalism and Informational Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), 66-67
18. See Tish and Adam Turl’s interview with Ken LeBlanc with Carbondale, Illinois Starbucks Workers United (SWU): Tish Turl, Adam Turl, Alexander Billet, Omnia Sol, “Starbucks vs. Utopia,” Locust Radio (July 19, 2022): https://www.locustreview.com/locust-radio/starbucksvsutopia-2
19. Michael Betancourt, Glitch Art in Theory and Practice (Oxfordshire and New York: Routledge, 2017), 12
20. Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity Press, 2019), 17
21. Benjamin, 24 and Crystal Grant, “Algorithms Are Making Decisions About Health Care, Which May Only Worsen Medical Racism,” ACLU (October 3, 2022): https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/algorithms-in-health-care-may-worsen-medical-racism
22. Both the dialectic of aura/mechanical reproduction as it relates to politics, as well as the sculpting of distance in the cult value of the image/artifact.
23. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 41
24. Adam Turl, “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” RedWedgeMagazine.com (May 1, 2019): http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/digital-reproduction
25. Ben Davis, “What Happens When an Art Critic Reviews an Instagram Trap?” Artnet (July 11, 2018): https://news.artnet.com/art-world/dream-machine-review-1313972
26. Johnathan Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (London and New York: Verso, 2022) and Paris Surrealist Group, “To the Letter! Surrealism at 100” (January 16, 2022), translated and posted to Tumblr by the New York Surrealist Group. Signed by Élise Aru, Michèle Bachelet, Anny Bonnin-Zimbacca, Massimo Borghese, Claude-Lucien Cauët, Sylwia Chrostowska, Hervé Delabarre, Alfredo Fernandes, Joël Gayraud, Régis Gayraud, Guy Girard, Michael Löwy, Pierre-André Sauvageot, Bertrand Schmitt, Sylvain Tanquerel, Virginia Tentindo. Text can be found here: https://surrealistnyc.tumblr.com/post/675713628557737984/to-the-letter-surrealism-at-100
27. See Jodi Dean Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), Jodi Dean, “Why the Net is not a Public Sphere,” Constellations Volume 10, No. 1 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), and Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017). Of course, it is not only digital media that does this. This is a tendency that is overdetermined by a number of factors.
28. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 19-21
29. I made this argument in Turl, based on Benjamin’s discussion of film montage conditioning the masses for modernity (see “The Work of Art….”
30. Dean, 40-44
31. Jen Schradie, The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives (Harvard University Press, 2019) and Francesca Bolla Tripodi, The Propagandists’ Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022).
32. Olivia Little and Abbie Richards, “TikTok's algorithm leads users from transphobic videos to far-right rabbit holes,” (October 5, 2021), Media Matters: https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/tiktoks-algorithm-leads-users-transphobic-videos-far-right-rabbit-holes
33. This study is unpublished but it was included in a presentation by Tish Turl at the Historical Materialism conference in 2021. Tish Turl, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Again): Digital Retrenchment of the US Far Right and Fascists After the January 6th Putsch,” Historical Materialism (2021). Video available here (Turl’s presentation begins at 50:00): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCZNrwg_3w4
34. Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs, and Rebecca Pohl, An Analysis of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (Routledge/Macat, 2018), and Donna Harraway, Manifestly Haraway (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=4392065 (originally published in the mid-1980s).
35. Fisher, 70-73
36. For a more or less concise definition of critical irrealism see Editorial, “We Demand an End to Capitalist Realism,” Locust Review #1 (fall 2019), 2, online: https://www.locustreview.com/editorial/we-demand-an-end-to-capitalist-realism
37. Tish Turl, “Class Revenge Fanfiction,” Locust Review #6 (Winter 2022), 5. Available online here: https://www.locustreview.com/online/class-revenge-fanfiction
38. I will not summarize the controversy itself here, but the following articles are instructive: Bobby Allen, “Google AI Researcher Who Sees Company’s AI as Sentient Thinks Chatbot Has a Soul,” National Public Radio (June 16, 2022): https://www.npr.org/2022/06/16/1105552435/google-ai-sentient; Elliot Levy, “Full Transcript: Google Engineer Talks to Sentient Artificial Intelligence,” AI Data Analytics & Network (June 14, 2022), available here: https://www.aidataanalytics.network/data-science-ai/news-trends/full-transcript-google-engineer-talks-to-sentient-artificial-intelligence-2
39. Tish Turl and Adam Turl, “Stink Ape Resurrection Primer No. 4,” Locust Review 8 (Summer 2022), 11
Adam Turl is an artist and writer from southern Illinois — by way of Wisconsin, Chicago, upstate New York and Las Vegas. They are an artist and editor at Locust Review, a quarterly irrealist journal of art and literature, and a member of the Locust Arts and Letters Collective (LALC). They have had solo exhibitions at the Brett Wesley Gallery (Las Vegas), the Cube (Las Vegas), Project 1612 (Peoria, Illinois), and Artspace 304 (Carbondale, Illinois). In 2016 Turl was awarded a fellowship and residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, France. They received their MFA from Washington University in St. Louis at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, and a BFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (SIUC). Turl is working on an evolving conceptual and visual art project, Born Again Labor Museum, with their partner Tish Turl, a writer and fellow LALC member. They host the monthly podcast Locust Radio along with Tish Turl and LALC member Laura Fair-Schulz. They are PhD student in media arts and a graduate assistant at SIUC.
