I know. It’s crazy to apply this binary divide and assume technology is the encompassing power that has over our lives. …But that’s the truth. Without the internet, the current world governments will fall apart.

The only world that matters is the net world; its dependence is an inferior “meat” reality. This, though, is radical on its own because it denies humanity as nothing more than a phase called the “Anthropocene.” It assumes human domination and influence are a fad and that we as humans must get ready for a post-Anthropocene future where we will be replaced by robots or non-human (possibly extraterrestrial) life. This talk is popular among transhumanist and nihilist talking heads like Kohei Saito, Timothy Morton, and Eugene Thacker.

If we have to embrace this human annihilation, we have to accept that the internet is the only tool for our success as human creatives. Artificial Intelligence also challenges how we make “art” and what is ultimately considered “art” in the two worlds. We need AI because it will accomplish the minor tasks that we need to move on to the bigger and more sophisticated ones. This also means that we shouldn’t be putting huge effort into the little things that AI can already do in a minute. However, we should also have the mandatory skill sets and practical knowledge of application in case AI breaks down (and it will). We have to understand what exactly digital art is and what place it is in the world of the internet.

Art in the meat world is defined by the five senses; sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. An artistic discipline is created around one of these senses. The meaning of art is to be expressive in its selected medium. In the net world, being expressive is quite difficult. People can’t “touch,” “taste.” or “smell” something on the internet (not yet, anyway). We can, however, “see” and “hear” art and music on the internet! The internet is like a virtual reality video game that we get lost in, so we may have a fake simulation of those five senses.

John Berger pointed out in his 1972 documentary Ways of Seeing that art is becoming replicated and cloned, and no original “experience” can be enjoyed. Berger only recited Walter Benjamin’s 1935 commentary, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” giving it a twist for the Boomer generation. Benjamin’s “aestheticization of politics” was a focus found within his interest of Trotskyism and (possibly) Gramscism. The idea of a “culture war” was a new concept in the 1930s, and the focus that “the medium is the message” became a long-running fad up until the 1990s. Today, the global governments use the tool of mass media so they can “manufacture consent” to push political agendas, as noted by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman to further debunk any egalitarian notion of the happy “global village” that Marshall McLuhan parades about. It is a useless pursuit to uphold a “permanent revolution” in the 21st century.

We are coming to a conclusion about the political left and right divide and realize that we have entered a new stage of disinformation, where only individuals can “consent” to their influences and actions through their own curated and fringe media outlets. These outlets, however, all relate to the same message of the net world, in that liberal posting and sharing is the only thing that matters. Norberto Bobbio was right to assume the rise of consensual identity politics around the terms of left or right as a subculture, where one can say “I am left-wing” just like the other can say “I am right-wing.” However, this also concludes the divide, where both umbrella categories are becoming one subcultural consumer class.

Art cannot have an ideological basis. Expression, beauty, and logic lack the political. Ethics and narratives are one thing, but the aestheticization of these concepts is another. Religion and ideology provide a purpose to produce and a goal to achieve. Devaluing expression, beauty, and logic implies that art is not real. In the net world, we can protect these three concepts by understanding what it means to “post.”

In the early 2000s, YTMND allowed users to post a “YTMND,” or microsite, that included images, sound, and text. We can see, hear, and read a YTMND. Popular trends in the YTMND community are called “fads,” which would later become “memes” in the net world. The eventual creation of YouTube meant that users could upload entire videos and that YTMND became an obsolete medium. “Posting” ranges from whatever is uploaded on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter (now “X”), Instagram, Discord, Telegram, 4chan, or any obscure web forum or chat. Our options are no longer diverse, and all posting platforms have been compromised.

What we post is what matters. It could be a picture, a video, a comment, a cartoon, a radio show, a game, music, or anything that gets stored in the Internet Archive. The inflation setting that every possible human being on the internet implies that certain art is no long longer of value because there are too many channels of “content” creation and/or neglected spaces and channels of posting that people are unaware of. Imagine a Facebook user of 900 “friends” who posts his original memes made in Pixlr, and yet nobody “likes” his daily uploads. This is because everyone left Facebook for another platform (like Instagram being more picture-friendly), and there are too many users doing the same thing on the platform. Or it’s that this user is trapped in an echo chamber but producing for his therapeutic gratification. We have entered a new stage of producing without an audience, in that the posting that is of real value or is good art is being neglected because we are unaware of these private (yet public) isolated posters. I call this phenomenon “dark data” and explain it as “the urge to produce without meaning.”

On the internet, artistic intent is judged solely by the post. What is posted matters. This post may gain likes, “retweets,” and publicity from mainstream outlets. The algorithms lift up the dopamine hits that keep people addicted to the net world. Posting is judged on this hypothetical numbers game and mass “fake by democracy” consensus.

With that being said, digital art can only be conceived through a post. Digital art is judged on the basis if it’s a “shitpost” or not. Or, the user is going through a series of “Y-posting,” where “Y” represents any subject, slang, or activity. One could be “Jucheposting,” “Goonposting,” “Fedposting,” and so on. What exactly is posted is judged on this fleeting merit. If digital art is understood by what is posted, we start to question the entire ideology of the internet. Everyone has equal access and power to post anything they want and shall be judged on what is uploaded to the server.

Posting implies that the art is finished before it can exist. Digital art is not done in a live setting (as we can’t rely on live streams for everything). Art has to be made and finally digitized for the internet. And what can be art is another thing. Everything is up for grabs on the internet, even if it’s not intended as art. Collage is the constant medium of choice, and what samples and video clips we take is now ours to create original art from. As said once by Pablo Picasso, “Bad artists copy. Good artists steal!”

We are reminded what Paul Schuette wrote in his quick instruction manual, Demystifying Max/MSP. To Schuette,

“The larger issue here is that outright stealing is an accepted part of programming culture. Pieces of code are borrowed, share and ripped from other people, and this is what you are expected to do. The best programmers working right now never start with an entirely blank screen. The problem is that people who are new to writing computer code sometimes feel a tinge of morality running up their spine when they ‘borrow’ a piece of code for the first time.”

The realm of digital art is a cycle of inspiration, influence, and mimicry. What we see is up for grabs. What we take is now ours. And what we post from it is how we conceive new digital art. We could be under a parasocial “relationship,” a reality of solipsism, that what we scroll through on “social” platforms influences us directly as artists and intellects. It’s world without Chicago-style citation!

To find the origin of our favorite digital art, we follow the breadcrumb trail home and realize that, like the Big Bang, a random post conceived a new world. The origin of digital art came from posting, and to neglect that reality means we neglect the net world itself.

It’s not that we should think in terms of being in the Anthropocene or embrace a post-anthropocene future. We realize that we a knee deep into techno-singularity. And how we can understand our current reality is rather a reflection of the delusions of undeveloped transhumanism and the cartoon prisons we irrationally embrace.

We cannot discuss digital art unless we talk about the action of posting and how it influences art back into the meat world. Posting is what makes us valued in the art industry. The truth is that we can’t exist as artists without a net world, no matter how much we try to negate it.

The solution means posting without an audience. We don’t need isolated likes and algorithm boosting to be valued. Because there is no value within art, and to exist without purpose means we are truly free. To produce for the sake of it means we are no longer bound to the limits of what we have to produce for “society” and for profit. Artists are a type of malware that works against what the machine intended. No is a “failed artist,” as they love to assume one can either “win” or “lose” in a market of flashy TikTok pornography.

Every time we post, we take up space on the internet. And if we take up enough space, we own it. It’s not done by “culture war” or any persuasion of political powers. All we have to do is post for the sake of it, even if the post is shit.

That’s what it means to be a digital artist.

The post “Posting” and The Meaning Behind Digital Art appeared first on The Miskatonian.

Garbage disposal was always going to be a question. To be human is to use things. And it’s nearly impossible to use everything in its entirety—although the paleolithic man would have a thing or two to say against this presumption. Moreover, pretty much everything is accompanied by offcuts and byproducts. When the Industrial Revolution went to work on our conceptions of the world and of things in it, the question of waste ballooned. There was so much more of it. Dumpster trucks were, given this eventuality, a fairly sensible-seeming answer. And yet, this simple invention was less a solution to a problem than it was and remains the mother of several other problems. Here I borrow from Boromír: One does not merely invent anything; to invent a thing is to remake the world. 

The explicit goal of the invention of the garbage truck and its subsequent so-called improvements was, as will prove true for any new invention, not the only consequence. As soon as garbage trucks motored onto the world’s roads, systems needed to be created to manufacture them, supply chains needed to be arranged, skillsets needed to be combined to manage their manufacture, and so much more. As John Gall notes in his essential book Systemantics, a sort of rosetta stone book for so much accumulating nonsense in our time, “No matter what the ‘goal’ of the system, it immediately begins to exhibit system-behavior, that is, to act according to the general laws that govern the operation of all systems.”

Systems do not operate like machines. They operate like the world, as a more or less messy configuration of various kinds of order and disorder, roughly thrown together and fragile. Systems attempt order but tend to produce its other. Attempts to control things using technologies contribute significantly to robbing us of meaning. To introduce a new machine into the world is not to make the world more mechanical but to radically destabilize the equilibrium of the yinging-and-yanging of things. Because it is,, in essence,, artificial, this destabilization often tends towards inhuman proportions. 

And so it is with garbage removal. Once upon a time, there was a single problem, but with the invented answer and the subsequent system within which that answer would need to operate, many further problems were also produced. “In the case of Garbage Collections,” writes Gall, “the original problem could be stated briefly as ‘What do we do with all this garbage?’ After setting up a garbage-collection system, we find ourselves faced with a new Universe of Problems.” To further Gall’s logic, I would say the question now becomes: ‘What do we do with all this garbage removal?’ 

The new Universe of Problems includes “questions of collection, bargaining with the garbage collector’s union, rates and hours, collection on very cold or rainy days, purchase and maintenance of garbage trucks, millage and bond issues, voter apathy, regulations regarding separation of garbage from trash,” and, to quote Slavoj Žižek, “so on and so on. Sniff.” As civil engineers tell us, roads disintegrate more rapidly under the weight of trucks, too, which is to say that the effects of the technology supersede even the system itself. Nothing is a world unto itself. 

Now, and by now, I mean right now, we are not just trying to remove rubbish but trying to figure out what to do when employees are absent or how to reschedule late collections. We, and by we, I mean some nebulous collective that doesn’t include me except in the sense that it must deal with my own garbage, are trying to figure out better and worse ways to manufacture dumpsters. Inventions beget inventions and technologies must, as Friedrich Jünger noted so long ago, submit themselves to the logic of perfection and rationalization and the distribution of poverty.

No invention is without existential implications. Gall notes what anyone who works in a large system knows: “Large systems usually operate in failure mode.” We do not merely solve problems; we create misery. Thomas Sowell’s insight needs to be remembered: there are no solutions; there are only trade-offs. Before I get sidetracked into discussing systems theory, however, I want to anchor the essence of this discussion in the invention of the garbage truck itself, and so, by implication, deal with the nature of technological extensions in general. Certain principles around technology that we find in the world of garbage and garbage removal apply more widely. If we get what’s happening with dumpster trucks, we stand some chance of understanding our present technological moment, in which various novel technologies are becoming the talk of the town: new ways to make vaccines, new medical technologies, brain-computer interfacing through implants, AR goggles, new developments in AI, and more. Despite the hesitations and warnings of so many sci-fi authors, techno-utopians are busy building an abyss to stare into. They are building a monster to imitate.

Dempster was no doubt proud of what he had done. Without question, his invention was clever. But I doubt he was thinking about the possible troubles that would be connected to the garbage disposal industry in the future while he was considering how to get the engineering aspects of his invention right, even if he was building on a previous idea. Having no access to him or his thinking about this at the time, I may be doing terrible justice to the man himself. And yet, by simply observing people now, the very species that quite a few of my readers belong to, I think my speculation is at least somewhat justified.

Let’s consider, for one wild moment, some or other technoptimist—this is what I will call the person who sees only the upsides of technology and not its side-effects and downsides. Let’s think about some enthusiastic supporters of technological innovations. This character, we shall imagine, is crazy about what science can do. He has ‘Follow the Science’ tattooed in different equally kitsch fonts on several parts of his anatomy. He is unquestionably in favor of whatever medical-industrial product you might want to give him, even if it is a cure for a disease that doesn’t exist and even if it might be worse than any disease. He has all the latest tech, even if it’s not particularly useful. His phone is all apps. His mind is full of pings and notifications, current things, and distractions. He eats the bugs, he wears the AR goggles, and he’s on the Neuralink trial waiting list. “Just look at amazing these things!” he screams obscenely loudly at anyone who walks past his cubicle at work. His colleagues look at him askew when he does this. No one likes to be yelled at. Who is this guy?

He is, without a doubt, a moron. What makes him a moron is his unquestioning obeisance to the immediately obvious. He, my little fictional conceit, sees any given thing as if it exists apart from a world of meanings and consequences. He sees only the thing itself and so cannot even see the thing itself. Because, after all, nothing, in reality, can exist in such an unworlded state. Nothing can, in reality, be separated from its environment. 

And yet, the tragic stupidity of this technoptomist seems to me to be almost everywhere, albeit lurking in the secret machinations of normal people like you and me. Almost everyone is still likely, when asked what a garbage truck does, to respond that it removes garbage. The truck is the thing, not the vast, complex, and fragile system that came into being when it was put to work. And yes, this is true, but it is such a microscopic part of the truth that it may almost be said to be false. Schopenhauer was right about at least this one thing: the trouble we have is often less with imperfection than it is with distortions so dramatic that truth itself can start to appear to be false. 

My point is this. The dumpster truck doesn’t just remove garbage; it also, perhaps on a much greater scale, creates garbage. Garbage trucks in accidents. Garbage removers are injured on duty because of the trucks. Noise pollution gathers around homes when garbage trucks are around. And garbage itself becomes easier to produce and discard when we carry with us the assumption that there’s someone who cares enough to deal with the stuff we discard. The thing does a million things, not just one thing. It doesn’t just help but contributes significantly to making the world worse. Because—and here we are back at systems theory—what the thing does is what the thing is. Nothing is reducible to its intended function. Intention, if anything, becomes a sort of magic dust in our eyes, hiding the real truth of things from us. 

Concerning technologies and technological development, it is still normal to hear people speak about technology as a neutral thing—one with merely technical limits—that can be used in good or bad ways, depending on the user. What is missed is what Marshall McLuhan spent his entire career trying to convince people of. And here I am, fighting the same losing battle he was. McLuhan wanted people to know that we misunderstand things profoundly when we view them through whatever content they happen to relay. People review products in terms of their technical specifications but fail to see them as the effects and effectors of entire systems. New technologies aren’t just insertions into the world. They transform the world.

To explain the meaning of his phrase “the medium is the message,” McLuhan uses the example of a lightbulb. The lightbulb, he declares, can be thought of as a medium without a message. In the lightbulb, we are not dealing with any specific content, although perhaps neon lights shaped into letters may suggest otherwise. The thing itself does what it is. It emits light. McLuhan suggests that the message of this medium is total change. 

To know what this means, to know what this feels like, to walk into a dark room and, if you’re not stuck in a phase of rolling blackouts as I often am here in South Africa, flick that light switch. Day erupts inside a room, and night is chased into its various corners. The entire environment is altered. McLuhan adopts this as a metaphor for what any and every technology does. You don’t just get what the technology is intended for; you get a whole new world. It’s not that one thing changes, everything does. And in this new world in which we can convince our minds and bodies that being out of step with the rhythms of nature is possible, we suffer from so much sleep deprivation. Our moods are affected, and our sense of reality itself is warped. Just because what technology does escapes our conscious awareness doesn’t mean it’s not doing what escapes our conscious awareness. Even that ever-so-helpful electric light manufactures garbage. When everything is artificially illuminated, a brand-new kind of darkness descends. The mind itself is darkened. It is left to its own oblivion.

We all know this somewhat implicitly when any new invention shows up on the world’s stage. With Apple’s Vision Pro recently unleashed, conscientious objectors to the creeping simulacrum, people like me know that not embracing this tech is likely to change little. The mere presence of the new technology alters the way the world feels and operates; the mere introduction of the tech into the mimetic fray of crowdthink is sufficient to bring about some slippery slope. We’ve been here before, after all. We live in a world in which this has already happened again and again and again. Technological solutions are garbage producers. The novelty is nice for a moment before the aftermath needs to be dealt with. What is made is, in all likelihood, not just a neat little gadget but a new tool for manufacturing mental illness. And if we’re typing prompts into AI in a frenzy, we’re not just experiencing the IKEA effect; we’re in the process of willfully adopting a form of brain damage as we allow certain aspects of consciousness and neurological function to atrophy.

We already sense that everything is now bathed in that AR interface and the world is already becoming a glut of entirely average images, even if we’re not eating the bugs and living in the pod and wearing the goggles and typing the prompts. Consider the environmental effects of our electricity dependence, including the fact that, as the work of Steven Gonzalez Monserrate shows, the airline industry’s carbon footprint has been superseded by the Cloud. But beyond this, the psychic and social consequences of our technologies are immense. Techheads will spend hours and hours of their precious existence trying to figure out new uses for all the new tech, and so they will become even more beholden to it. Time will be spent. Lives will be wasted. Makers of the pixellated worlds will be unmade by the very pixellated world they are creating.

There’s no getting away from garbage. But now we have increasingly moved into a world that tries, tries, and tries again to get away from reality itself as if what it is doing is cleaning up the garbage. We live now in the world imagined in Pixar’s Wall-E, even if it doesn’t quite look as bad. The real is now hidden by all the products and byproducts we’ve produced and consumed. And there’s no sign that we’re slowing down. It’s as if we’re addicted to generating the circumstances within which life itself will become unlivable.

We have reasons already not to add yet another tweak to our psychological ecosystems. We know that the more artificial the world becomes, the more we work against ourselves, against what is human. And yet, we’re still beguiled by the content of our technologies. We think that what we’re conscious of is going to rule our fate. But as Carl Jung has wisely said, it is what they are unconscious of that seals the fates of people. They’ll live in the merry belief that they’re removing garbage. They’ll rejoice in their ingenuity as one new invention after another renders the world increasingly banal and soulless.

Just as people might go around believing they can have life without suffering, some think we can have the tech without its side effects. My argument here is slightly different. Technology is mostly its side effects. What it undoes outweighs what it does. The instrumental use of the tool—that is, its content—is perhaps even almost irrelevant when compared to its total impact on the world. Garbage trucks produce more garbage than they take away. And technology, far more often and in more ways than we tend to realize, takes away more than it gives.

The post The Detritus of this Technological Moment appeared first on The Miskatonian.