Clocking My Autochattering in Relation to it All

For some time, I've wrestled with what to write on this blog. I'm currently working on a rewrite of it — something that's become more of a worry stone, kudos to Ethan on the notion. The thing that's itching my mind is the rethinking I have of the Web as a valid extension of one's self and its explicit role in dehumanizing experiences for the corporate sake of quantifying what it seems to feels like to be a person online. This idea has spawn itself into my brain in this form since reading 24/7 and its mention of the concept of auto-chattering. Jonathon Crary writes (emphasis mine):

The forms of control accompanying the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s were more invasive in their subjective effects and in their devastation of shared and collectively supported relations. [The cycle of] 24/7 presents the delusion of a time without waiting, of an on-demand instantaneity, of having and getting insulated from the presence of others. The responsibility for other people that proximity entails can now easily be bypassed by the electronic management of one's daily routines and contacts. Perhaps more importantly, 24/7 has produced an atrophy of the individual patience and deference that are essential to any form of direct democracy: the patience to listen to others, to wait one's turn to speak. The phenomenon of blogging is one example - among many - of the triumph of a one-way model of auto-chattering in which the possibility of ever having to wait and listen to someone else has been eliminated. Blogging, no matter what its intentions, is thus one of the many announcements of the end of the politics. The waiting that one actually does now - in traffic jams or airport lines - acts to intensify resentment and competitiveness with those nearby. One of the superficial but piercing truisms about class society is that the rich never have to wait, and this feeds the desire to emulate wherever possible this particular privilege of the elite.

This specific section, in addition to the book as a whole, has silently fucked with my perspective of engaging the social Web. Folks who are staunch liberal advocates for it (public access to everything, privacy as a privilege and not a feature, etc) feed into the ideas of the above — requiring near-absolute access to anyone who participates in this system. It's the kind of socio-technical ecosystem that would help accelerate things like The Network State. The more folks submit to such a socio-technical system, the more that can be automated in judgment by said systems.

I don't want to discount the anthropological benefits of having folks transcribe parts, if not all, of their life online. As Dr Andre Brock Jr highlights with CTDA, this provides a deeper approach to understand digital subcultures and their echoes back into the meatspace. A brief explainer of it could be gleamed from the paper:

[Critical technocultural discourse analysis] reduces this formulation (the formulation of technology as a construct of technical artifacts) to a triad of artifact, practice, and belief, becoming essentially a hermeneutic empirical analysis inte- grating interface analysis (semiosis of the material and virtual aspects of the artifact) and critical discourse analysis (focusing on representations within and of technology) framed by rhetorics of information technology and critical race theory. In particular, CTDA is keenly interested in the technological artifact, here theorized as a “set of rules and resources built into the technology by designers during its development which are then appropriated by users as they interact with the technology”

A (dark) example of this is examining how misognyoir can be traced to its advocates by way of podcasts and video blogging and the parroting of points made there can be done in favor of a libidinal, while violent, ecosystem that cishetero men thrive in. But with all of this information, this analysis; the most that's done is the capture of this into books (sometimes into instructive but non-actionable film) that can't reach people who need to be moved by it the most: the folks who are swept up in these toxic economics of emotional exchange that then become advocates of folks who commit harm.

Tying back to the usefulness of the output of CTDA to a system driven by the doctrine of a networked state; it would be increasingly easy for those who are considered to be deviant to be pulled out and tracked by state-run tools since these services emit all of this information out of a "firehose". Making a joke about an elected official? With a networked state, one could see that being tied into policing technology; a not-so-nascent field that's hungry for new ways to "fight crime" by first manufacturing the idea of it and then "solving" it. You want to organize a Juneteenth event in a state whose governance is all but anti-Black in name? Expect to see police there with stingrays to scoop up any 3G or 4G non-LTE communications for interception. The tools of state warfare against the people who pay for it (either in taxes or tithes to Big Tech) has accelerated from the days of They Live or The Spook Who Sat By the Door; almost in response to heightened awareness of the such.

Jumping back to what Crary writes, this idea of "a time without waiting" is something that American tech companies have preached as the highest value of its ecocide-driven systems: the idea that it's best to rely on them to substitute the behaviors that we've come to understand as necessary to be amongst one another. Things from shopping in your local neighborhood, relying on librarians or local education centers or even taking the time to parse documentation or instructions are all part of the new product advertisements from Google and Microsoft. You're too valuable to wait for anything: your time is way too important. I've been wrestling with how to add to the conversation to the way generative AI is hijacking our collective ability to understand what it means to reason if the act of reasoning itself can be short-circuited and made more "redundant". It's troubling to see that, on the labor advocacy side, many folks looking at this as a way to weaken worker rights due to the general devaluing of work, and from the perspective of those within the professional managerial class (or adjacent to them) that these developments are not only inevitable but necessary to "transform work" as we know it. Some folks see it as a binary and I can understand how one can, whereas others see it as a more gray space, though I struggle to see how one can comfortably sit in the middle of such a situation without ceding some perspective away from folks either in a lower economic situation from them.

Auto-chattering is effectively what I'm doing now: writing with the intent of being read but not giving much space for hearing feedback as I do it. Microblogging platforms provide a way to introduce that discourse, indirectly with their size constraints (that can be curtailed by the use of imagery — another subjective form of communication) but that, in my experience, has led to folks becoming even less willing to hear anyone out. It can devolve into a shouting match or a reinforcement of the stances made. It's easy to blame the platforms for causing this — inanimate, non-corporeal entities like the profiles we engage online. But that's part of the dehumanizing aspect of the Web: that if there's a person behind it; we dramatically reduce our ability to understand by labelling them a bot (which they might be), deranged (which isn't improbable either) or a unexpected deviant of online discourse worthy of blocking (which is needed at times). The whole "social" part of social media becomes a bit of a neo-tribal attempt to not be excluded from the "good timeline", whichever one that might be.

It is very hard for me to come to this conclusion because of how much time I spent wrangling with different spaces and ideas, only to understand that I traded time that I should have optimized around deeper community building offline that would have paid (larger) dividends versus attempting to parse specifications for the sake of powering shitposting on the Internet. This brings me back to the genesis of frustration when it comes to writing things on this blog. Folks totally use their space however they choose. My intention is to try to highlight things I come across in my own development of understanding. I've toyed with the idea of media commentary but that touches too closely into the "content creation" world that I have friends in and I don't want to trespass that very blurry boundary. So, in the art of auto-chattering, a futile attempt at conversation in a networked space, I think I'll focus on making this worry stone of mine more throughout and consistent in its critique and perspective while reminding myself and readers that it is non-representative of me (it can't be). I'll have more patience for those who write out replies with equal effort. No longer does making a disconnected blog on a platforms that I'm routinely subject to misinterpretation work for me — I have to treat it as by its purpose — a data collection tool for general real-time sentiment analysis.