The New Inquiry Vol.

30 | July 2014
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Editor in Chief
Ayesha Siddiqi
Publisher
Rachel Rosenfelt
Creative Director
Imp Kerr
Executive Editor
Rob Horning
Senior Editor
Max Fox
Managing Editor
Joseph Barkeley
Editors
Atossa Abrahamian
Aaron Bady
Adrian Chen
Emily Cooke
Brian Droitcour
Malcolm Harris
Maryam Monalisa Gharavi
Willie Osterweil
Alix Rule
Contributing Editors
Alexander Benaim
Hannah Black
Nathan Jurgenson
Sarah Leonard
Sarah Nicole Prickett
Special Projects
Will Canine
Angela Chen
Samantha Garcia
Natasha Lennard
John McElwee
Editors at Large
Tim Barker
Jesse Darling
Elizabeth Greenwood
Erwin Montgomery
Laurie Penny
Founding Editors
Rachel Rosenfelt, Jennifer Bernstein, Mary Borkowski
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ESSAYS
6 THE LOVES OF OTHERS BY HANNAH BLACK
1 0 VERNACULAR CRI TI CI SM BY BRI AN DROI TCOUR
1 6 THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW I T BY WI LLI E OSTERWEI L
22 FACT- CHECK! BY ATOSSA ARAXI A ABRAHAMI AN
REVI EWS
27 LI TTLE ORPHAN NELLI E BY LAURI E PENNY
A REVI EW OF NELLI E BLY, AROUND THE WORLD I N SEVENTY-TWO DAYS AND OTHER WRI TI NGS
31 TURN DOWN FOR WHAT BY MALCOLM HARRI S
A REVI EW OF ROBI N MACKAY, ED. #ACCELERATE: THE ACCELERATI ONI ST READER
38 NO LI FE STORI ES BY ROB HORNI NG
A REVI EW OF MARK ANDREJEVI C, I NFOGLUT
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FIVE years ago, we started the New Inquiry to
try to work through the general problem of fnding forms
of expression adequate to our experience of the present.
Since our inception, we have tried to fnd ways to foster
and promote writing that didnt simply reproduce the
modes of either mainstream commercial publishing or
academia, the two dominant institutions for legitimating
critical thought about the world. Te moment when their
hegemony began to crack was the moment we began.
This issue is a departure for us. We have a new ed-
itor in chief, and so also a new singularly focused pub-
lisher. Weve welcomed new editors to the team. And so
as we move into a new iteration of the New Inquiry, we
wanted to mark this moment of change and reflect on
who we still are.
For the past 29 volumes, our issues were loosely
organized around a single themeprecarity was frst,
then youth, and so on. Anchoring the issues this way, we
thought, would allow us to present a more complex view
on a subject than any single essay could ofer. Tis issue,
however, has no theme; its a just a collection of essays by
writers listed on our masthead.
While planning for this issue during the long winter,
we joked that July would be the Swimsuit Edition, unsure
of what that would mean. Nobody actually wanted to do a
photo shoot or analyze the nexus of misogyny and sports
journalism or atempt something like a beach read, so we
lef the name behind. But as the issue came together, it be-
came clear there was a sense in which it would have been
apt, in that we chose to showcase TNI editors and each
produced an essay that serves as a revealing portrait of their
larger body of work.
Read together, the essays in this volume address the
cardinal problems the New Inquiry atempts to grapple
with: gendered writing and the women who challenge it,
technosocial acceleration and its discontents, reactionary
messaging in mass culture, the art and publishing world
and their rituals, love as a problem, surveillance and afect,
apps and neoliberalism. Essentially: how can we express
ourselves, despite what controls expression?
Without a theme, its harder to indulge in the ap-
pearance of definitive answers. This month, were put-
ting forward the open question of what could unify
our disparate sensibilities. We ll go back to our regu-
larly scheduled programming in the upcoming months.
(Sneak preview: Augusts magazine theme is death.)
But for now, we hope you enjoy the unadorned
Volume30.
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6 THE LOVES OF OTHERS
HOW to talk about that thing or experience or
lifestyle or belief known as the couple?
Here is one way. In its heyday at the time of the de-
velopment of the amenity-laden one-family home, the
coupleas encountered in the metropolitan west and its
cultural exportsalso privatizes daily needs into a single
unit. Emotional, erotic, and practical requirements are
condensed to a bare minimum, as efcient as a domestic
Te Loves of Others
By HANNAH BLACK
You dont have to be a couple to participate in the couple form.
In fact there is nothing else to do.
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HANNAH BLACK 7
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kitchen. It is the most reductive, exclusionary, and precari-
ous imaginable method of meeting the probably universal
need to feel close to and recognized by others.
Nevertheless the couple dominates the imaginary
realm of love, so much so that people who are not in cou-
ples are described negatively in relation to it (single, di-
vorced, etc.). In its heterosexual form, its a patriarchal
horror movie: Women are more likely to be atacked or
killed by a partner than a stranger, and many are fnancially
dependent on the same men who statistically, if not actu-
ally, threaten their lives, and even more so if they have chil-
dren. Despite the limited achievements of feminist strug-
gles, the structure of straight coupledom still represents an
appropriation of the physical and psychic energy of wom-
en to beneft men. And insofar as gay people re-create the
straight couple, this structure of violence, domination, and
emotional paucity is what they are re-creating. Whatever
Beyonc says about not making a big deal out of the lit-
tle things, marriage is no more the logical full extension of
sexual desire than prison is the utmost expression of shel-
tering from a rainstorm.
How should I talk about the couple? Here is another
way. I fell reciprocally in love when I was 24 and we stayed
together for just over a year. When we met I thought he
was weird looking; then I thought he was funny and smart;
then I thought he was the funniest, smartest, most beauti-
ful person in the world. We said, interchangeably, things
like, I want to marry you, and I could look at you for-
ever. Tis was the expression of a feeling between us; like
summer aches with the premonition of winter, romantic
love aches stupidly with thwarted infnity. Tere is one
particular day we spent together, having sex and swim-
ming in the sun, that years later is still my shining image
of eternity: I could live happily inside that day forever. I
moved to a new country and into his apartment. Unfor-
tunately it turned out I had no concept of love outside of
what I could physically feel. So the logic of sex extended
to encompass the whole relationship, by which I mean the
confusion of pronouns and body parts, of whats mine and
yours (yours because its part of you/yours because its
part of me but belongs to you, etc.). At one point I was
so deeply invested in our physical connection that I reg-
istered it as a faint disturbance when we ate diferent food
from each other. I fused myself into that couple as fast as
I could, because it seemed like the most radiant form of
life, because I thought that by being a couple I could get a
break from being myself.
(Its kind of gross to talk about this relationship in
this way, to stuf it into these gluey sentences. My ex is a
stranger to me now, and he lives with his girlfriend and his
kid. It feels bad that I still invoke his reality to make myself
seem more real to myself, but my excuse is that the couple
is an abstraction and fatens whatever is found inside it.
His account of our time together would be diferent from
mine, of course, and I dont think he would have any rea-
son to write it.)
When I was a couple, I would say things like, If
only there were someone else in this relationship, every-
thing would be fne. I thought this imaginary third per-
son would be beter able to bear the demand to be consis-
tent, present, alive to yourself and to the other. I thought
they would distract us from how inept I was at receiving
love, like a hapless cartoon character with eyes swiveling:
Who, me? I could not believe anyone had been stupid
enough to fall in love with me; I was full of grateful con-
tempt and contemptuous gratitude. In the end the idea of
the couple, the praxis of the couple, was too big, and we
were too small, and also the other way round. We broke
up and I moved back to London, disoriented by grief. Te
food I had not wanted to eat alone stuck in my throat, and
for months I had to force myself to eat, mechanically, in
the cold glow of what felt at that point like the purely bio-
logical will not to die. Pared back to the mode of survival,
I realized I had become a couple beter than I thought: I
had become a couple so successfully that I had forgoten
how to be a person. And ever since then I have been care-
8 THE LOVES OF OTHERS
ful enough not to get what I wish for. Never since have
I shared a digestive system from mouth to asshole; only
rarely since have I said, without thinking, something like,
I want my dick in your mouth.
Both rejections and afrmations of the couple are
skewered on this doubleness: It is the fullest expression of
love and proximity available to us, and it bears all the insuf-
fciencies of present social relations. Monogamous roman-
tic commitment, like infallible lifelong atraction to only
men or only women, is surely a minority tendency expe-
diently elevated to a general social principle. But knowing
that isnt enough to undo the power of either. Te couple
represents an unforgivable privatization of love, but refus-
ing it doesnt necessarily make love any more freely avail-
able. Despite the eforts of radical groups and the bravery
of marginalized communities, it mostly remains the case
that in turning away from couple-form love, we are turning
toward nothing. Te hope or mirage of kindness among
strangers, of love among friends, is at war with the inten-
sive familiarity of romantic love.
How to talk about couples? But I am always talking
about them. In the park sprawled in the sun we signal
intimacy by picking over the details of our love afairs. I
like for people to tell me how they met their partners. Tey
were at a party. Tey sat next to each other in class. Tey
were at a bar. Although romantic comedy perceives every
twist of daily life as a potential meet-cute, how-we-met sto-
ries are prety repetitive. Tey are adorable (or annoying,
if you feel that way) because the emotional signifcance of
the encounter so far exceeds its detail. Tey are enlivened
by mild peril: What if they hadnt gone to that party or bar
or college or city? At the same time theres nothing really
at stake at all. Any of these couples might easily not have
met, and had they not met each other, each would have
met someone else, and that would have been a love story
too. How-we-met stories teach us two things: (1) Your life
could have been completely diferent, and (2) in which
case, it would have been in many ways exactly the same.
Anything could happen, but less than everything does.
Falling in love is meant to be unexpected and trans-
formative. I just fell in love is, especially the way men
wield it, an unparalleled excuse for all sorts of shity be-
havior. But love as random event is not really compati-
ble with love as duration. Te couple domesticates the
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HANNAH BLACK 9
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happenstance of love into the everyday; love in the form
of the couple turns its face against accident, and lives by
this refusal. As Germaine Greer famously notes in Te
Female Eunuch, Security is when everything is setled,
when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial
of life. But for many people, especially women, especially
impoverished women, denying life is the only way to have
one. Overall, the couple seems to endure mainly negative-
ly: breakups are painful, being alone means youve failed,
good sex is hard to come by, the world is a scary place,
etc. Tose couples whose love survives on the gentle basis
of shared afection and interests might be inspiring exam-
ples of emotional health, but on the other hand their ad-
vantages over people with, say, a close circle of friends, are
mainly legislative.
Te frst couple I encountered were my parents, who
were together for 10 years. Tey were beautiful, troubled
and emotionally irresponsible. Tey were twentysome-
things with small kidshow had that happened? One of
them was a black man and the other was the child of a Ho-
locaust survivor, so they treated the family as a provisional
arrangement, or a drag performance, or a historical irony.
In the evenings one of them would smoke weed and listen
to records and the other would paint her toenails and talk
on the phone. Sometimes she thought he was going to kill
her, and I guess he could have, but the fact is he did not.
Te seismic register of their arguments and reconciliations
and the inaccessible mystery of the desire between them
regulated my early childhood. I sheltered in the intricate
imaginary world I shared with my brother. Perhaps we
were a kind of couple, too. All the men I have loved remind
me of him in some way; one even shared his birthday.
I failed at being a couple, but you dont have to be a
couple to participate in the couple form. You can watch
movies about couples, you can listen to songs about them,
you can watch them fuck on the Internet. In fact there is
nothing else to do. Tere must be a secret sympathy or
secret correspondence between people that mimics or ex-
ceeds or subtends the global correspondences set up by
commodity production. Or maybe just because we mostly
emerge from families, we carry the family inside us, vesti-
gially, as the fascination of the couple. Otherwise I dont
know how it is that romantic love endures as an image,
even as it fails as a practice.
Broken-hearted and sick with jealousy last summer,
I obsessively imagined the person I loved then having
sex with his new partner. I was delirious with the impen-
etrable truth and the total obscurity (to me) of the sex
between them, sometimes almost high on it, sometimes
nauseated. Lying in bed in the haze of these thoughts, I
tried to contract my heightened powers of imagination to
include more mundanely not my ex-lover in a distant city
but the driver of a passing car, whose hands on the wheel
seemed just as mysterious as the hands of the person I
loved touching someone else. All these things seemed to
shine from inside the twin mystery of separateness and
sympathyhow we are something to each other, and not
nothing; something to each other, but not everything. In
the news at that time a video was circulating, of Mos Def
atempting to endure the tube feeding inficted on pris-
oners at Guantnamo, and I experienced a pointless but
sincere sympathetic pain in my sinuses. Te principle of
the couplelove as privacystands in opposition to the
logic of this faint pain, which belongs to a swamp in which
sensations are transmited across lives. In my craziness I
saw this swamp clearly, the inverse of the couple, but I
couldnt live there either.
What remains of a couple when its gone? A small
collection of souvenirs: phrases, images, sensations. Tese
fragments persist long aferward, as vivid as they are com-
pletely and radiantly meaningless, as if they were signs that
will one day reveal their secrets. Sometimes the fragments
include a child or two, and sometimes those children grow
up and have to be what they are. But although the couple
is the primary image of love, the couple is not all that love
is, and so these fragments are not signs.
10 VERNACULAR CRITICISM
BOYFRIEND says that its
a litle silly to review a museum like PS1 because it has
so many rotating pieces/exhibitions, writes Yelp user
SaskiaS. in her fve-star review of MoMA PS1, a contempo-
rary art center in Queens. Boyfriend voices the status quo:
Reviews of museums should refect their rotating oferings,
which means that the appearance of reviews should be
metered by periodicalsthe daily newspaper, the month-
ly magazinewhereas a Yelp review sits in online stasis,
which is a litle silly. Another subtext, which Boyfriend is
perhaps too polite to say aloud, is that the high refnement
of what museums do is best addressed by the profession-
al critics who write for those periodicals, rather than Yelp
users such as Saskia S.
Te accumulation of Yelp reviews over time is meant
to establish the reputation of a local business that Yelps
users wouldnt otherwise know about or know what to
think of. Te reputation of a museum, on the other hand,
Vernacular Criticism
By BRIAN DROITCOUR
Te most interesting place to read about museums is Yelp
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BRIAN DROITCOUR 11
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is established a priori, by the fact of its status as a museum.
Museums are landmarks. When Im on Manhatans Upper
East Side I dont open Yelp to fnd a good local museum to
check outI open it to fnd a place to get lunch afer going
to a museum there, which is the only reason I ever go to the
Upper East Side.
And yet Yelp reviews of museums can be insightful,
colorful, or strange (or, in Yelps own nomenclature, funny,
useful, or cool):
However, it seems that the artwork seem to curated
neither chronologically nor harmonically with other work,
May Y. writes in a three-star review of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art that bristles at its encyclopedic miscellany.
I felt like as if I were in a large feld with diferent patches
of fowers around me.
Being asian w/ tote bag n art student id at the Whit-
ney during a Yayoi Kusama show felt like a fag with more
than 2 photo tags on patrickmcmullan.com wearing all
black harem pants n rick owens. Valeriana S. writes in their
three-star review of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Aniwai, Im sort of on a diet of processed food n faminist
art, so the majority of my interest was spent on spoting
fashion students (who will use Yayas art as inpiration for
their next assignment designing a collection) n counting #
of art lovers wearing dots.
I never really thought much of Christinas World (by
Andrew Wyeth), writes Gretchen P. in her fve-star review
of the Museum of Modern Art. Ten I saw it live and in
person and it hit me. In a city where so many people move
from the country to make it, where the emaciated ribs of
the 1930s still show in spots, here is Christina. Her world
is polio and the ground in rural 1940s (although it might
as well be 1930s) America. What strikes me is that this is
what I contemplate as Im riding an elevator. Its just a weird
place for an important piece of art. [] Ten again, thats
also why I now like it. No pomp, no circumstance. It just
exists and next to an elevator is where it does so.
Even reviews that dont detail responses to art ofer
frank facts about the bodily experience of being in a muse-
um that professional criticism tends to omit. Once youre
inside I would either use the elevator or the stairs to get all
the way up to the top level. Start your visit at the top and
then walk down, writes Nicole P. in a three-star review of
the Guggenheim Museuma practical piece of advice that
appears in many of the Guggenheims reviews.
Carrie Mae Weems installations saved my whole
visit! However, I didnt understand why they chose to put
her video pieces in a narrow hallway with high volume traf-
fc, writes Honore F. in another three-star review for the
Guggenheim. Also if they are gonna run for longer than 10
minutes I do think there should be a bench for the elderly
and those with physical limitations.
Exhibits are hidden in rooms and there are no signs
to direct visitors. I was informed that signs are aesthetical-
ly ugly and I should write a leter to express my opinion,
writes Iris S. in a three-star review of MoMA. One fnal
observation. Womens bathrooms dont have tampon ma-
chines. I was told that its because it looks ugly!
Yelp reviews like these are a reminder that museums
tend to subjugate concerns of the viewers body to things
like sight lines, the production of meaning through juxta-
position, the interaction among isolated works of art. To
museums and their curators, the social space produced
by the peoples encounter with artworks, or the needs of
a body in between its encounters with art, are secondary.
In this way, many Yelp reviews confront the engi-
neered homogeneity of the museum experience, the stan-
dardized conditions that Brian ODoherty, an artist and
critic, wrote about in Inside the White Cube. In these essays,
writen in the 1970s, ODoherty describes the origins of
ubiquitous gallery architecture and ofers a critique of the
white cubes transformation of the viewer into a phantom,
a spectral organ of cognition designed for the bodiless ap-
preciation of art.
Te abruptly intimate accounts of subjective expe-
rience in a museum found on Yelp defy the white cubes
12 VERNACULAR CRITICISM
bloodlessnesseven if all they do is address mundane
concerns about a bodys movement in space.
Im not a big museum fan but I do enjoy work of art,
writes Ricca R.
I have to admit something, begins Nadia Z. in her
fve-star review of MoMA. I been postponing museum re-
views for some time now. Te grandiosity of NYC art mu-
seums intimidate me. How you review something that not
only the league on its own, but ever-changing with bigger-
than-time-itself exhibits as well? But alas, I am going to try
and learn to fy here.
Yelp does a lot of things, including a number things
that make people hate it. But one thing it does is provide
a platform for vernacular art criticism, a diferent kind of
writing about art and the public spaces where it is seen.
Vernacular criticism can reject the guidelines set by cul-
tivated artistic tastes, or it can guilelessly speak in igno-
rance of them, or in its naive fascination with them can
inadvertently expose their falseness. Vernacular criticism
is an expression of taste that has not been fully calibrat-
ed to the tastes cultivated in and by museums. Vernacular
criticism inscribes bodies in public spaces that would oth-
erwise erase them.
I yelp. Ive writen over 100 reviews on Yelp, almost all
of them about museums and galleries. Other Yelp users
have found my reviews useful (305 votes), funny (209
votes), and cool (198 votes). I know what its like to open
the window on Yelps page to compose a new review, to
have Yelp ask me to quantify my experience of a place by
choosing a number of starseach with its corresponding
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BRIAN DROITCOUR 13
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interjections. One star is eek! Two is meh. Tree is A-
OK! Four is Yay! Five is Woohoo!
A friend gave me a T-shirt she found in a thrif store
that says I [Yelp logo] Yelp modeled on the I [Heart]
NY design. Instead of a heart it has Yelps logo, which
might be described as a sunburst or a blooming fower.
Im not exactly sure how to identify it, but its suggestion
of an outward explosion through a neat and stylized form
seems to approximate Yelps quantitative rationalization of
the burst of feeling that moves me to write a review there.
I wouldnt say that I love Yelp. But I might say that I [logo]
it. I [logo] Yelp says less about how I feel about Yelp than
what I do for itI spill my guts, I blurt my tastes, I let them
by counted, branded, averaged, muted, processed into a
crowdsourced stamp of (dis)approval.
I write about art on Yelp. I also write about art on oth-
er websites or in magazines in exchange for money, and Ive
been doing that since 2005. Im not an art historian. Ive
never studied art history, which from a distance looks like a
bleakly stufy feld, concerned with questions of infuence
and provenance that stake out an autonomous purity for
art and its mediums, that disengages them from social or
cultural history. Criticism, as opposed to history, appeals
to me as a practice of inscribing art in life. Im an art critic,
and some people have said Im the frst art critic on Yelp.
Tats not true, of course. If other people hadnt writen art
criticism on Yelp before me, it never would have occurred
to me that it was even possible.
Like most people, I had been using Yelp mainly to
fnd out about restaurants, but in January 2012, when I was
searching for information on Ai Weiweis exhibition of mil-
lions of porcelain sunfower seeds at Mary Boone Gallery,
the top result on Google was a four-star review on Yelp, by
Lisa Jane C. During my visit, many people were mesmer-
ized by the seeds, which are beautiful, she wrote. Each
one is unique, just like people.
I dont think that last line especially struck me the
frst time I saw it, but when I read it again now I realize it
contains the seed of a theory of aesthetics whose practice is
easier to imagine thanks to Yelpone that begins with the
heterogeneity of taste, a totality of dissensus expressed in
subjective accounts of a bodys experience at a unique point
in space and time. Somehow I recognized Yelp as a detour
from the homogeneity of voice and style that I struggled
with in writing for professional publications: the aloof pos-
ture of academic expertise applied to paraphrase the artists
statement or gallery press release in a more authoritative
way, all within the limited word count available for reviews.
And so I started to yelp.
In some ways, being a yelper isnt all that diferent
from being an art critic.
Te art critic gets paid so litle he may as well be writ-
ing for free, like the yelper does.
An art critic who gives Jef Koons a negative review
is like a yelper who gives one star to the Olive Garden. Te
market has already made up its mind and institutional poli-
cy follows. Te art critic confronts this consensus and tries
to express an independent, individual opinion in spite of
ita thankless task. Te art critic doesnt change the art
worlds systems of power; he simply gives them publicity
by reminding readers that they exist. So it is with the yelper
who accumulates language around a storefront or a brand.
Most art criticsthe ones writing for specialized art
journals, where most art criticism today is founddo lit-
tle more than mimic the academic discourses of art history
and art theory, ofen poorly, as they apply them to specifc
instances of art making. So it is with the yelper, who does
litle more than mimic, ofen poorly, the vocabulary and
style of marketing and journalism.
Te more the art critic writes the more people pay
atention to their name, to their opinion, even though
these opinions have no efect on the landscape of the art
world, the mechanisms of the market. If the art critic writes
enough reviews, they will be invited to gallery dinners
where critics are served free food and drinks, and so it is
with Yelpif you yelp enough, your account is designated
14 VERNACULAR CRITICISM
Elite, your reviews are elevated to the top of a business
page, and youre invited to atend Elite events where yelpers
are served free food and drinks.
Te Yelp Elite are people who write lengthy, chaty,
mostly positive reviews, and for my frst year and half of
yelping I held the Elite in scornthese users were tools,
instrumentalized by Yelps promotion of its brand identi-
ty. I didnt think I wanted to be Elite or that I would even
have a chance, with only a few dozen reviews under my belt
compared with the hundreds on the profles that boasted
the Elite badge. But last October, afer posting a particular-
ly ecstatic fve-star review of Friedrich Petzel Gallery, a Yelp
community manager invited me to join Yelps Elite Squad.
So I did, and I started to atend Elite events. By this
point, my account had received some institutional and
media recognition, and so I was curious to test reactions
to my account from people outside the art world. Would
they think it was funny, or novel, or stupid and annoying,
like people in the art world did? When I talked about it
to Amaryllis S., from Astoria, Queens, she said she didnt
think my account was all that diferent from hers, which
has hardly any reviews of restaurants, focusing instead on
service-oriented businesses, like salons. Jando S., Yelps
community manager for Queens, told me about a guy in
Miami who reviewed only strip clubs, and they were all
thorough reviews, regardless of whether the strippers were
men or women, which Jando took as a sign of true commit-
ment. Te strip-club expert had resisted Elite status when
it was frst ofered, because he thought his activity on Yelp
was too narrow, but he eventually came to terms with his
own eliteness. In short, my focus on museums and galleries
difered litle, in the eyes of the Yelp Elite, from other re-
viewers atention to salons or strip clubs.
Teir opinion would probably be endorsed by Pierre
Bourdieu, who in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judg-
ment of Taste uses sociological data to argue that the theory
of aesthetic judgment proposed by Kant in the 18th cen-
tury as a description of a universal human condition is, in
fact, particular to the class interests of the bourgeoisie. Like
my fellow members of the Yelp Elite, Bourdieu chose not
to grant art special status, to recognize its distinction from
other pursuits. Te dispositions which govern choices be-
tween the goods of legitimate culture cannot be fully un-
derstood unless culture, in the restricted, normative
sense of ordinary usage, is reinserted into culture in the
broad, anthropological sense, and the elaborated taste for
the most refned objects is brought back into relation with
the elementary taste for the favors of food. Taste is an em-
bodied, sensory experienceone that originates in the gut
and touches the world with the tongue. But it is also subject
to a number of social abstractions that manage it, rational-
ize it, and build what Bourdieu calls a magical barrier, dis-
tinguishing legitimate culture through the skilled labor
of identifcation and decoding, distinctions reproduced in
education and cultivated over time.
Te museum lives behind such a magical barrier. Te
power structures of Yelpthe hierarchy of service provid-
er and users, algorithms of usefulness, advertisinghave
nothing to do with the museums power, and so Yelp can
smash its magical barrier. Yelp puts museums into pages la-
beled with their names and addresses where anything can
be said about them, the same as any other business.
THE museum is a technology of public life, and
like the public sphere, it began to acquire the forms familiar
to us now in the 18th century.
Both museum and public sphere were born of bour-
geois revolutionthe museum quite literally; the frst
modern museum, the Louvre, was converted from a palace
into a public collection of art by decree nine days afer the
French monarchy fell.
Both acquired signifcance as vehicles of bourgeois
ideology, a worldview that did not displace aristocratic
tastes and values so much as it worked to make them avail-
able, to present them as a way of life that anyone could
BRIAN DROITCOUR 15
aspire to approximate, imagined as so universally appealing
and good that no one wouldnt want it.
Both served as vessels for the bourgeois utopian ide-
al of meritocracythe most rational and reasonable ideas
will win the approval of an informed society through their
dissemination in the public sphere; the best works of art
will edify the public in the museum.
Social media is another, newer technology of public
life, one so young that its hard yet to say what purpose it
serves. But its easy enough to see that it doesnt coincide
with the purpose of those older technologies of public life,
because the results of its contact with them are so ofen
funny, strange, or unnervingthe kooky comments on
newspaper websites, reviews of museums on Yelp.
Social media is not a degradation or improvement
on the public sphere. Tough owners of mass media have
atempted to transpose the logic and power of the pub-
lic sphere to social media, it never comes out quite right.
Social media is further from the public sphere than it is
from the old world of leters, diaries, albums, conversa-
tions with friendsthe private sphere laid bare in public
life, without subordination to the social abstractions that
govern the dissemination of ideas in the public sphere
(except, of course, for the ones that users have already
learned and internalized).
Tere has been a lot of speculation about whether
or not social media can measure artistic meritor any
meritthrough likes, favorites, reblogs, retweets and
so on. But the conversation tends to be limited to the
potential of these metrics to measure quality, without
acknowledging that such a process of measuring con-
stitutes an atempt to merely democratize the meri-
tocracy. Tis totally misses the potential of social media
to account for the plurality of tastes found in the world.
And so the counting of social-media atention is always
unsatisfyingthese metrics give a unifed count of ev-
erything whose sums mean nothing.
Yelpas well as Amazon and other review sites
shoehorn taste into metered ratings, but they also demand
a frst-person expression of taste. Tey ask the user to be a
critic without demanding the past labor of cultivation or
the other social abstractions imposed by the public sphere.
Meanwhile, the public sphere regularly produces ed-
itorials bemoaning the death of expertiseits own slow
death. Food and movie critics are catching up with art
critics, who have been talking about the crisis of their pro-
fession for about a half century. Te crisis of art criticism,
however, did not originally come from the encroaching
massesthe hostile arcana of the avant-garde held them
of long enoughbut rather because of a hypertrophied
art market, whose monetary consensus renders criticism
moot, and the professionalization of the art world, the MFA
programs that teach artists to develop critical appraisals of
their work for marketing purposes, so that it appears in
public with an already determined historical signifcance.
Tat seems like sufcient indication that criticisms prob-
lems stem from its own professionalization.
Te early art critic retained something of the ama-
teur, writes Jrgen Habermas in Te Social Transformation
of the Public Sphere. Lay judgment was organized in it with-
out becoming, by way of specialization, anything else than
the judgment of one private person among all others who
ultimately were not to be obligated by any judgment except
their own.
Yelp is not the answer to criticisms problems. On its
own it cant transform criticism, or museums, for the beter.
Te reviews of museums there may eschew the academic
jargon of art writing and bourgeois biases of taste, but they
tend to replace them with the clichs of marketing and ad-
vertisingthe register of a commercialized public sphere
found in Yelp reviews of restaurants, strip clubs, or salons.
And yet Yelp could help reset the terms of art criti-
cism, as an environment where the judgment of one among
others not obligated by any judgment except their own is
newly fresh, and where this judgment is honestly subjective
and contingent, as tasted by unobligated bodies.
16 THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT
WHEN we think apocalypse, we tend to
think of the future. Accordingly, the apocalypse seems to
show up on flm only in the realm of sci-f or, occasional-
ly horror. But while every single hair on the roting scalp
of zombie cinema has been analyzed under bloodstained
micro scopes, a new subgenre has been emerging that
wields the potent thought of the end of the world to even
more reactionary ends. It uses the trope of apocalypse to
project current power into the future by situating catastro-
phe and its overcoming in the past. Tese movies give
voice to the blind hatred of the disgruntled agents of col-
lapsing empire.
Tese flms span a number of generic registers, from
animated kids movie to big-budget summer production.
Te End of the World as We Know It
By WILLIE OSTERWEIL
Ancient Apocalypse flms use the past to project
a reactionary present into the future
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WILLIE OSTERWEIL 17
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Youve probably seen one: 300, Noah, Gladiator, Te
Croods, Centurion, etc. Tese are the Ancient Apocalypse
flms, and they have opened up whole cinematic territories
for a far-right theory of terminal crisis to play in.
Tese flms difer from the historical epic or the
sword-and-sandal flm primarily by their total disinterest
in telling a true story from history. Even when the source
material is biblical, the flms dont stay close to their texts.
Instead they are set in various ancient pasts mostly for
the fact of their ancientness, their distance from the cur-
rent moment. Tat ancientness allows these flms to en-
ter the space of the mythological rather than the purely
fantastic or the historical. Tis mythological space makes
a world-ending event appear like it was based on a true
story without geting caught up in questions of chrono-
logical soundness or cultural or political specifcity.
Te story of the Ancient Apocalypse (with slight
variations), is as follows: Tere is a subnational social
group: a tribe, city-state or family, living, if not happily, at
least in stability and relative peace. Tat group receives a
prophecy of a coming apocalypse. Te prophecy proves
true almost immediately, though it refers to the end of the
world only insofar as it is the end of the group as currently
constituted, the end of the groups forms of life, the groups
world. Tis end is violent, sudden, and comes from the
outside, in the form of natural disaster, foreign hordes, or
rival groups with beter technologyalthough its efects
are exacerbated by internal decadence, corruption, weak-
ness, willful ignorance, and/or betrayal.
Te flms duration is then mostly taken up with pre-
paring for and passing through a series of physical and emo-
tional trials precipitated by this apocalypse. Other groups
must be confronted and overcome, and the protagonists
group will be thinned. Ultimately, the willed group iden-
titywhich draws from the groups primary unity but is
sharpened and intensifed by the experience of some com-
bination of loyalty, shared physical struggle, heterosexual
love, mutual hatred for or disgust with an enemy group or
the shared experience of betrayalallows (whats lef of )
the group to pull through and either defeat their enemy or
survive their trial. Victory and survival, however, can
mean the death of all the groups individuals. As long as the
group is projected forward into history via myth, deed, or
physical monument, survival is assured.
If this sounds it this would make for a terrible mov-
ie plot, well, youre right. Te vast majority of Ancient
Apocalypse flms are, afer 15 to 45 minutes of setup, just
long boring strings of action sequences. Long strings of ac-
tion sequences are the bread and buter of Hollywood, of
course, but these flms, lacking much of anything beyond
a narrative of survival, have really long ones. Tey favor a
brutal, fast-cuting, and inelegant editorial style. Te flms
are dominated by extreme lighting and a dour palete. Te
combat is incredibly graphic without really being horrify-
ing, sloppy and ungraceful without being brutally realist.
And its not just the style or the narrative: In these
flms the audience isnt asked to relate to the protagonist
or their group through empathy or sympathy. Te char-
acters generally arent kind to each other, and the dynamic
within the group is one of competition and hierarchy, not
solidarity or love. (In Apocalypto and Centurion, the main
internal drama is who is the fastest runner; in Pompeii and
Gladiator, its who is the best fghter; in 300 and Scorpion
King, its whose leadership and authority is the most valid,
etc.) Instead, you are meant to identify with the group, de-
spite its internal unpleasantness, because you, like them,
fear oppression by a yet more unpleasant and hated enemy.
In these flms, the audience sees an apocalypse that
has not only already happened but was, in fact, the founda-
tional moment for society, the birth of some eternal aspect
of the present. It is not that the characters move on into a
bright and happy future: In the most reactionary of these
flms, the protagonists all dierefecting, perhaps, the sui-
cidal drive of fascism, which sees the total sacrifce of the
individual for the production of an omnipotent and eter-
nal group as its platonic form of political action. But the
18 THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT
collapse of the societies pictured is just the end of a world,
not the world. Tese flms refect, in their muddled and idi-
otic way, a recognition that the end of empire could just be
the end of a certain form of life, and that particular social
formations present within empire will outlast its particular
political or economic arrangements, up to and including
the existence of nation-states or capital. Tis is what makes
many of these flms more than just conservative or reac-
tionary but right-revolutionary: Tey imagine a fundamen-
tally overturned world in which the political and economic
structures are destroyed but current forms of social orga-
nization (the anti-black racial order, patriarchy, militarism)
are strengthened in the process of their ending.
Tis is most obvious in the only Ancient Apocalypse
flm that provides something other than pure resentment
to get you through: Te Croods (2013). Te Croods is a
charming dadventure about a three-generational family of
cavemen who believe themselves to be the last humans on
earth and have survived the violent fate of all their neigh-
boring families by adhering to high-intensity safety pro-
cedures and paranoiathey hide in a cave closed up by
a boulder every sun down. Life for the Croods is one of
bare survival, day-to-day struggle with no other horizon.
But when a young man appears who knows how to pro-
duce fre and tells them that the world is ending, well, the
world starts ending. Te ground literally collapses beneath
their feet. Te family has to take a long journey into the
mountains (toward Tomorrow) during which the dad
has to learn to give up some of his protective role as pater-
familias and embrace both the technological innovation S
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WILLIE OSTERWEIL 19
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( umbrellas, fre and torches, animal domestication, whis-
tles) and domestic uncertainty (going from living in one
particular cave to being nomadic) of the younger genera-
tion if they are to live happily in their new world.
Because it is a kids movie, the Croods dont drench
themselves in the blood of their groups enemies: Instead,
they struggle against the world itself. What threatens them
is natural disaster, earthquake and lava, and prehistoric
monsters, including a giant bird-cat-dinosaur. Compared
with other Ancient Apocalypse movies, the groups inter-
nal hatred and competition is signifcantly toned down.
Despite patriarch Nic Cages rote misogyny, the flm
ends with all of them loving one another. Te flm is not
the no-future suicidal parable that most of the other An-
cient Apocalypse flms are but a sort of neoliberal utopian
propositiontechnology, openness to change, plus the
family can get us through an apocalypse. It has before.
Te Croods eventually arrive at a tropical paradise of
plenty, far from the arid cave where the movie begins. Te
young girl (who is ostensibly the protagonist, although its
really the dad) is named Eep, which sounds an awful lot
like Eve. And in the fnal happily-ever-afer montage the
Croods have basically invented leisurethey race on the
giant dino-cats, they sunbathe in lawn chairs, take a family
vacation photo, etc. Tey go from being creatures of sur-
vival to ones of leisureand only the apocalypse allowed
such a transformation to occur.
But while Te Croods pictures a happily-ever-afer, the
rest of the subgenre tends to be much bleaker. Te possibil-
ity of an ever-afer at all is as happy a future as there is to look
forward to. Like Te Croods, these flms ofer up a series of
survival techniques to face apocalyptic dissolutionmil-
itarism, xenophobia, the family, becoming-mythall of
which are sufcient to let their protagonists escape total
destruction. Dramatic irony flls in the rest. Te audience
watches these flms from a position of great historical dis-
tance: Tis apocalypse happened and this is our pastal-
though just who that our is is quite obviously at stake in
these stories of racial, tribal, and national supremacy.
Noah screenwriter Ari Handel, when asked about
the decision to use all white actors in his flm, explained
that this story is functioning at the level of myth, and as
a mythical story, the race of the individuals doesnt mat-
ter. Teyre supposed to be stand-ins for all people. But
taking white people as the model for all people is what
white supremacy is. By connecting it to myth, Noah makes
transhistorical a particular, contingent, and racist we.
Part of the appeal of this mythical white-supremacist past
to flmmakers is that it seems to justify the already racist
standards of Hollywood casting. Te historical narrative of
Greeks at war with Persians allows the 300 flms to cast
people of color exclusively as villains, flms set in ancient
Rome to cast black people only as slaves, and so on.
Likewise, in all these flms, a tribal, familial or social
group is shown to have innate qualities that mark them as
elected for survival. In Pompeii, the hero is the last Celt en-
slaved by Rome, who is apparently racially predisposed to
horse training and riding, embodying these skills even though
his tribe was wiped out before he could formally learn them.
In all these
flms, the most
consistent trait
is horror at
being in society,
the nightmare of
the social
in general
20 THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT
Te survivor, in this way of thinking, acts as an em-
bodied historical experiment, whose survival is never
arbitrary nor based on previous social power or privi-
lege. Survival is a result of something innate, genetic, or
racial, which is necessarily amplifed by a triumph of the
will. Tats why in so many of these movies (Apocalypto,
Pompeii, Gladiator, Centurion, 10,000 BC, Year One) the
protagonists are enslaved members of an oppressed or
nearly extinct race or tribe. In all six of these flms, how-
ever, we watch the protagonist become enslaved and also
see them escape their slavery. Slavery in these movies lasts
less than one generation. Te real historical and political
structures that produce slaverycapitalism, colonialism,
imperialismare made invisible in favor of a conception
of immediate physical struggle. Slavery is pictured as an ar-
bitrary and momentary thing, the most hated possible sit-
uation and yet also quite easily entered into and overcome.
And if it is so easily overthrown, then surely real historical
slaves must just not have wanted to fght enough, or maybe
just had not been made of the right stuf
IN all these flms, perhaps the most consistent trait
is horror at being in society, the nightmare of the social
in general. In any scene in which people are in the pub-
lic spherefrom drinking in a tavern to mass political
decision- makingthe crowd is pictured as disgusting,
weak, violent, bloodthirsty, ignorant and cowardly.
In Noah, when Noahs son Ham leaves the Ark build-
ing site to go to the nearby encampment, he fnds a tribe
cannibalizing its own members on an open marketplace.
Tere he enjoys the only moment of tenderness between
strangers pictured in the entire flm: Ham comforts a ter-
rifed, mute, and grime-covered girl in a ravine full of dead
bodies. In Gladiator, Pompeii, and Passion of the Christ the
crowd appears only so it can beg for bloody spectacle, cry-
ing out for the violent death of the flms protagonists. In
Pompeii, 300, and 300: Rise of an Empire, some form of
popular political control is pictured at length, in order to
dismiss it as fundamentally corrupt, corrupting, and inef-
fective. In Centurion, Noah, Apocalypto and Te Scorpion
King, meanwhile, the appearance of a stranger almost al-
ways means a fght to the death.
Tat these flms all depict societies as beyond saving,
worthy only of total overturning through destruction, re-
veals both the revolutionary tendency within apocalyptic
thinking and its ofen genocidal character. Tis is not to
read in these flms a populist belief in the true prophecy of
empires collapse, but to recognize in them a shared strate-
gy of response to collapse.
Te subgenres flms are devoted to the formation of
a right-revolutionary subject. Not every audience member
hears the call, but that should not lead anyone to ignore its
efectiveness. Te way frat boys, German Neo- Nazis and
Ukrainian separatists memetically adopted 300s tagline
Tis is Sparta! and formed weight and combat training
groups inspired by the flm, and the way Christian conser-
vatives held mass screenings of Passion of the Christ indi-
cate that they understood the flms exactly as they were
supposed toas calls to political action.
Te lef tends to think of the revolutionary rights re-
lationship to crisis as equally opportunistic as its own. If,
for the lef, crisis is not actually a moment of fundamental
change within capitalism but rather reveals the true nature
of capital and the state and can be used to organize accord-
ingly, then it sometimes assumes that the right does the
same. Te right is seen to use economic collapse to drum
up resentment, hatred, bigotry, and nationalismto pro-
duce false consciousnessas a way of explaining the crisis
rather than performing a structural analysis of capital, the
state, race, class or gender. By blaming collapse on cultur-
al decadence or weakness caused by an internal enemy,
hidden in plain sight within the nation, the right propos-
es to reintroduce order and justice by coming to power
and puting said population in its place. Tat population
might be government bureaucrats and feminist killjoys or
WILLIE OSTERWEIL 21
it might be Jews and immigrants, but the function of that
population is always the same.
While some right-wing parties, particularly in Europe,
do take this relationship to crisis, a diferent form of right-
wing politics is refected in Ancient Apocalypse flms. Like
much of the lef, many on the far right have moved beyond
the party as an organizing structure and reject the concept
of coming to power by capturing the state. Tey take the im-
minent collapse of capitalism (at least as it is currently con-
stituted) more seriously than anyone on the lef: Tey see
empire on its death bed and they hunker down, start gather-
ing guns and making lists of friends and enemies. Tey hope
to save the ideological underpinnings of empire even if its
particular historical formation is doomed. Its partisans begin
to murder police in broad daylight, martyring themselves in
suicidal confrontations with the state to incite others to bat-
tle preparedness. All society needs is a litle push, they think.
Tis analysis must be rejected because of its racial,
tribal, and national supremacism, because of its homopho-
bia and misogyny, because it imagines that suicidal ven-
geance is enough, because it rejects life in favor of a death
reifed forever through myth or progeny. But if it fails
because it is excessively tribal and small-minded, it also
fails because of a universalization: Tese flms (and their
partisans) imagine that the apocalypse is imminent, that
it will happen to everyone at once, within one genera-
tion and across the entirety of a civilization. But they fail to
recognize the ways in which apocalyptic collapse is already
happening but is distributed unevenly across populations.
Te apocalyptic collapse of the world of the frst nations of
America continues as a lived struggle for tribal lands and
traditions today. Climate apocalypse already has claimed
thousands of victims, from the poorer residents of the
Rockaways to the Carteret Islanders of Papua New Guinea,
who have had to fee their ancestral home as it will be fully
underwater by the end of next year.
Perhaps even more fundamentally, however, these
movies fail to understand the actual history of the con-
cepts they hope to protect. Disgust at the social in favor of
the family forgets (or never knew) that the family is a child
of the social in the frst place. Tis is why this politics favor
mythical representation over historical storytelling: they
are necessarily antihistorical, based on an act of ideolog-
ical faith (in the family, physical valor, tribal purity, etc.)
from which everything else emerges.
And here, fnally, we encounter apocalyptic Chris-
tianity. Te Book of Revelation, the Christian text of the
apocalypse, promises a heaven on earth but only afer
righteous holy justice is brought to the worlds sinners
and unbelievers through centuries of the most devastat-
ing and nightmarish hell. Unlike most of the New Testa-
ment, which joins miracles of faith with moral and ethical
precepts embodied in Jesuss acts and parables, the Book
of Revelation is almost entirely made up of images of vi-
olence and sufering. An atheist could theoretically draw
metaphysical and moral truths from the rest of the Bible.
But the apocalypse without faith in a second coming is
just a bunch of nasty shitmultiheaded monsters, plague,
fre, and earthquakewithout a point or a happy ending.
Of course, even with faith in such an eventual heaven, the
apocalypse is a prety vindictive structure of belief.
Tis is true of Ancient Apocalypse flms as well, al-
though they are all decidedly non-Christian. For those with-
out a deep faith in reactionary forms of group formation, the
flms reveal what yearning for apocalyptic survival as come-
uppance actually is: a celebration of hate, prejudice, and a
desire for death. Without a belief in a future unity-in-Christ,
or the secular image of a post-apocalyptic utopia, all the
apocalypse cult has to look forward to is its self- immolation
in the cleansing and murderous distribution of justice.
An apocalypse produced by collapse, by god or cli-
mate change, internal contradiction or nuclear bomb, will
never provide heaven on earth. Tose who eagerly prepare
for the apocalypse in order to survive it will manage only
to die of survival. If we are to live, we cannot merely sur-
vive this empires apocalypse. We will have to be it.
22 FACT CHECK!
BRIDES magazine has a fact-checker. She
does things like verify the cost of honeymoons and makes
sure that Vera Wang did, in fact, design that dress, and com-
pares the captions on winter fower-bouquet slideshows
with pictures in botany reference books. It would be ter-
rible to mistake a eucalyptus pod for a mere pussy willow.
Many American magazines, from trashy celebri-
ty weeklies to highbrow general-interest journals, have
fact-checkers of some sort. I worked as one in 2008,
when, with three other Harpers interns, I fact-checked the
Fact Check!
By ATOSSA ARXIA ABRHAMIAN
Vigilante fact-checkers only confrm our cynicism about the news
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ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN 23
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magazines Index from beginning to end. Being the pri-
mary speaker of foreign languages in the intern cubicle, I
ended up doing a lot of the international checking for the
magazine. Percentage of Russians who say one goal of U.S.
foreign policy is the complete destruction of Russia: 43.
Number of Iraqi stray dogs that Operation Baghdad Pups
has helped emigrate to the United States since 2003: 66.
I quickly learned that fact-checking is a predomi-
nantly American phenomenon. Te French dont do much
of it, most Russian papers certainly dont either, and even
the Swisspossibly the most exacting and precise people
on the planetdo not make use of fact-checkers in quite
the same way as Americans do. Yet their presses keep roll-
ing, and their readers keep reading, and their brides still
buy roses, if by another name. People even trust the press
in Switzerland much more than they do in the U.S.: 46
percent of Swiss people said they had confdence in their
newspapers and magazines in 2010. Among Americans, it
was only 25 percent.
While fact-checking, at Harpers and elsewhere on a
freelance basis, I found that I spent nearly as much time ex-
plaining to people abroad what the hell a fact-checker is as
fnding the facts themselves. It was frequently assumed that
my motive, qua checker, was not accuracy but malice
that I was out to get someone or to prove something wrong.
Te exchanges that took place between me and my sources
sounded a lot like a description in Adam Gopniks Paris to
the Moon, where Gopnik recounts a politician asking him
if a fact-checker is like a theory checkerthat is, if the
young woman siting in her Times Square cubicle would
be grilling him for intellectual consistency. Tere is a cer-
tainty that fact checking is in fact a complicated plot
of one kind or another, a way of enforcing ideological co-
herence, Gopnik writes. Tat there might really be facts
worth checking is an obvious and annoying absurdity: it
would be naive to think otherwise.
Gopniks politician and the confused foreigners on
the other end of my line werent quite right. Te existence
of facts can easily be argued against in an epistemological
context, but not ofen in a journalistic one. At Harpers, at
least, it really was about making sure the numbersmost-
ly other peoples numbersadded up. And frankly, all the
fact-checkers Ive ever known just didnt want to be respon-
sible for inaccuracies.
Te people Gopnik cites were nevertheless onto
something. A new culture of fact-checking is emerging
in the U.S.one thats much more aggressive than the
fact-checking of the past. Enabled by online data and infor-
mation and encouraged by a polarized political discourse,
factsand especially a lack thereofare being wielded
like weapons. We dont fact-check because we love facts.
We fact-check because we hate liars.
WHITHER the fact-checker? For
starters, theres the pursuit of truth and knowledge and
all else that is good in the world. Tis isnt as squishy and
idealistic as it sounds. I know many writers who were
profoundly moved by the act of fact-checking, and I, too,
found it to be a revelatory, if depressing, experience: In
more than one case, I came across an entire news sto-
ry based on a misinterpreted statistic. Still, it would be
absurd to claim that the abundance of fact-checking in
the U.S. can be explained because Americans as a people
value accuracy more than the Japanese or the French. It
would also be very hard to verify.
Tere is an under-explored fnancial reason for
fact-checkers. Published errors not only look bad, but un-
der certain circumstances, they can lead to lawsuits, which
are very expensive indeed. I spoke to a media lawyer who
told me the National Enquirer employs its law frm, Wil-
liams & Connolly (of Pentagon Papers fame), as their pri-
mary fact-checking operation. If theyre willing to spend
that kind of money to carry out tasks more commonly rele-
gated to interns and philosophy majors, consider the size of
the potential litigation.
24 FACT CHECK!
Ten theres the third reason: politics. Increasingly, for
American readers, there are no mistakes, only covert ideol-
ogies. And out of necessity, TV networks, newspapers, and
some magazines have bought into this mentality wholesale,
serving up laborious platers of fair and balanced to con-
sumers who lack the will and perhaps also the capacity to
engage in any critical analysis of the information they are
fed. Tey compete with one another on the terrain of ac-
curacy and neutrality. And it is because the U.S. media
is so obsessed with its own so-called objectivity that pred-
atory checkingan ofshoot of the traditional checking in
newsrooms and magazineshas dominated the discourse.
Checking is no longer just a link in the editorial sausage ma-
chine; it is an integral part of the public political discourse
and a fxture in American popular culture. An army of pro-
fessional and citizen fact-checkers have taken the process
out of the newsroom and into the open.
Tis new wave of checkers what the New York
Times public editor famously called vigilantesare dif-
ferent from the editors and aspiring writers at newspapers
and magazines who silently bulletproof the stories their
magazines publish (Peter Canby, the New Yorkers head of
fact checking, has acknowledged that checkers are distin-
guished only by their mistakes.) Te vigilantes work with
a very diferent goal. Teyre guerrillas; they live to pounce,
to catch their enemies at their most vulnerable moments,
and to parade their heads around on a stick, declaring
smugly: untruth!
Te patron saint of this new fact-checking scene
is Craig Silverman, who runs a blog turned book,
regretheerror.com, and has a column on Poynter.org. Sil-
verman calls fact-checking the new American pastime
and is a serious and measured commentator: He appears
genuinely concerned with seting the record straight, and
writes at length about the importance of accuracy in jour-
nalism and the efect it has on public information. (Hes not
above calling people lying liars, though.)
FactCheck.org, which is run by the Annenberg
Center, is another somewhat serious operation that ex-
haustively nitpicks politicians statements. In the vein of
FactCheck.org are ABC and the Washington Posts online
fact-checking operations. Finally, theres PolitiFact and its
notorious Truth-O-Meter, a digital graphic used as though
truth can be measured with the same instrument you stick
into a chicken to make sure its reliably free of salmonella.
In late 2011, Politifact was embroiled in a micro- scandal
involving its lie of the year. Te lie in question was a
statement made by members of the Democratic party that
Republicans voted to end Medicare. Tis statement, said
Politifact, was a complete exaggeration: Republicans mere-
ly wished to privatize the program.
Politifact did nothing to clarify the problem. In
fact, it made things worse. Even afer the sitea Pulitzer
Prize winner!decided that Democrats had been lying
egregiously to the public for an entire year, people still
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We dont
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love facts. We
fact-check because
we hate liars
ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN 25
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disagreed, largely across ideological lines, about the se-
mantic problem of whether or not ending Medicare as we
currently know it could be described as ending it, period.
As a result, Politifact began to be regarded as siding with
Republicans. Brilliant.
Unsurprisingly, media innovators (are there ever not
media innovators?) are trying to get past the problem of
partisan checking. Truth Teller, one of the apps up for
consideration in the Knight News Challenge hopes to cap-
ture, analyze, and fact-check events and speeches as they
happen.
One of the biggest complaints about political cover-
age is that it allows untruths to go unchecked, reads the
proposal. Truth Teller instantly dices the rhetoric and calls
out statements that do not refect reality. Te app aims to
go beyond the capabilities of humans by using an algorithm
to parse political speech in real time and determine seman-
tic intent and context that would be compared to the news
organizations data and Wikipedia. Tis would result in
a live video displaying the truth level of a speakers sen-
tence, along with reactions from Twiteran ultra-ultra-
high-tech Truth-O-Meter that tweets.
Even if you value truth, its easy to be discouraged
by reading these fact-checking blogs. Teir motive is a
sound oneostensibly, theyre there to verify that pub-
lished work and public statements are correct. But to what
end? Can you convince a rabidly partisan public that the
statements that have been hammered into their heads are
false? If this sort of predatory fact-checking were actually
efective for anything but sport, a great number of pol-
iticians would be out of business by now. Call it check-
ing for the converted, or debunk-tainment: Te tone of
it is smug, not informative. Tis brandishing of facts is
also a gateway to laziness. Why produce thoughtful and
coherent critiques when you can just wield truth-bytes
like weapons? Gopniks theory checker would serve a
higher function in combating the lazy narratives of main-
stream news than a hundred corrected factoids.
UNTIL recently, the defensive/traditional
and ofensive/vigilante sorts of fact-checking rarely ven-
tured onto one anothers turf. It wouldnt make any sense
for a checker at a magazine to draw atention to all the
mistakes she found in a soon-to-be published article, and
vigilantes just dont do quiet. But in the later months of
2012, a confation of behind-the-scenes bulletproofng and
dirty-laundry exhibitionism emerged that spoke to a great-
er cultural shif in the way we think about truth.
Te Lifespan of a Fact, a book based on (but, as it
turns out, not accurately confned to) a series of exchanges
between author John DAgata and fact-checker Jim Fingal,
came out in November. Te book is an extended annota-
tion of an essay that DAgata wrote for the aptly named
Believer magazine that deals loosely with the suicide of a
teenager in Las Vegas in 2002. Lifespan draws atention to
the traditional fact-checkers role in the publishing world.
And through Fingal and DAgatas dialogue, it highlights
the tension between the role of the fact-checker and the
claims of the artist.
If the fact vigilantes suggest an outer limit to the re-
velatory powers of accuracy, DAgatas willful ignorance of
such standards provides the opposite limit. Artist or no,
facts do mater. As it turns out in Lifespan, DAgata is indul-
gent, lazy, self-centered, and has no respect nor regard for
his audience. When Fingal tells him as much, DAgatas ex-
cuse for everything is merely artby which he means that
the number nine sounds beter than the number eight, ergo
its okay to lie to readers about how many seconds a suicidal
teenager spent falling to his death. Rather than taking his
interns sound advice, DAgata spends a great deal of energy
explaining that he isnt a journalist but an essayist and that
this is enough to liberate him from the prosaic constraints
of reality. So its fting that a month later, DAgata became a
punchline in another scandal: Mike Daiseys.
It was hard to ignore the Daisey fasco, but for the sake
of clarity, let us recap: Daisey, a monologist, gave a moving
26 FACT CHECK!
45-minute performance about his experience at the Fox-
conn plant in China. He called it Te Agony and Ecsta-
sy of Steve Jobs and broadcast it on Tis American Life to
massive acclaim. During the monologue, Daisey described
meeting underage workers, poisoned workers, maimed
workers; he claimed to have gone to a meeting of a secret
workers union in a Chinese Starbucks. People believed his
monologue to be true, mostly because it was presented as
such, and by that time, the Times and other investigations
had confrmed that all these things were happening at some
time or another. Te problem was that Daisey hadnt seen
them himself. He was creating a composite to beter draw
atention to his cause.
Drama ensued. Tis American Life dedicated an entire
episode to essentially shaming him. Te episode entitled,
Retractionserved as catharsis for public radio, for Ira
Glass, for anyone whos ever been misled or whos ever mis-
trusted the media. It is nothing less than excruciating. Daisey
breathed through his mouth audibly and paused for long pe-
riods of time before answering Glasss questions. Glass tone
took on an uncharacteristically stern edge. Tis American Life
could have reacted diferentlymaking a straightforward
statement about the inaccuracy of Daiseys report, issuing a
press release, banning him from the premisesbut instead,
Tis American Life theatrically burned Daisey at stake, as
though to say: Dont hate the liehate the liar.
It makes sense that public radio took such a defen-
sive approach: it has ofen been a for its perceived liberal
bias. But this kind of lashing out against inaccuracy, rather
than dealing with it in a tasteful and direct manner, has
become its own form of theater. Tis American Life had
another good reason to own the mistake. Tey tried to
fact-check Daisey before the piece came out and failed
to catch errorshe had planned his lie too well, but ulti-
mately not well enough.
Many commentators have said that its impossible to
fact check someone whos determined enough to fabricate
news in the frst place, and with limited time and resources
dedicated to the operation, theyre probably right. Tere
will always be pathological liars in all parts of life who will
get away with, and even make a living of of falsehoods,
only to be exposed later on in a turn of karmic justice.
But the problem with Tis American Life-style retroac-
tive fact checking is that it doesnt focus on the facts them-
selves: it gives undue atention to liars or mistaken reporters,
confrming all our cynicisms about the news while morally
empowering whoever uncovered the error. In the end, we
dont learn about the facts. We learn about the people who
dont care about the facts. Facts become weapons, but the
story rarely deepens. And worst of all, it wont make the Da-
iseys and Kellys of the world disappear. Well just know who
they are, where they went, and what they lied about.
Tis brandishing of
facts is a gateway
to laziness.
Why produce
thoughtful,
coherent critiques
when you can just
wield truth-bytes
like weapons?
Tis essay was originally published in March 2012
LAURIE PENNY 27
IN 1893, the celebrated reporter Nellie Bly went
to visit Emma Goldman in prison. Te young anarchist
provocateur was held in the frst Manhatan jail to be called
the Tombs; it was built on the wreck of an old swamp and
stank of rot and feces. Te two women had both grown up
in poverty and obscurity, and found fame, if not fortune,
by writing about the conditions sufered by women and
the working poor. But while Bly was lauded for circling the
globe in only a fetching checkered traveling cloak, Gold-
man was locked up for incitement to riot.
Bly was one of the only journalists to show Goldman
any sympathy and the frst to understand her importance
as a cultural fgure. In Blys piece, Goldman is permited to
speak her truth at length, along with some girly chat about
clothes of the frivolous sort that Goldman would never
have stooped to in her own writings. Tese are the details
that never make it into the manifestos but nevertheless
make the politics a hundred times more human.
Te reporter mentions Goldmans precocious
talentshe is barely 25and lists the six languages she
can speak and write. We are invited to be impressed. Ten
Bly comes to the mater of marriage and whether Gold-
man believes it to be a universal good, the ultimate balm
of a womans life:
I was married, she said, with a little sigh, when I was
scarcely 17. I sufferedlet me say no more about that.
I believe in the marriage of affection. That is the only
true marriage. If two people care for each other they
have a right to live together so long as that love exists.
When it is dead what base immorality for them still to
keep together! Oh, I tell you the marriage ceremony is
a terrible thing!
REVIEW
Little Orphan Nellie
BY LAURIE PENNY
Nellie Bly was the frst girl reporter, but as the exception,
she was always playing by someone elses rules
Nellie Bly, Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings. Penguin Classics. 2014.
28 LITTLE ORPHAN NELLIE
No counterargument is ofered, or even entertained.
Bly agrees with Goldman but cannot say so directly. To do
so would not have been in character, at least not the char-
acter as whom she made her living.
Some people seem born to break down walls. Nellie
Bly was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in Pennsylvania in
1865. She was the 13th of 15 children and, following the
early loss of her father and her mothers remarriage to and
scandalous divorce from a mean drunk, she struggled to fnd
teaching work. Her frst break in journalism came when she
sent an excoriating leter to the Pitsburg Dispatch, respond-
ing to an article about What Girls Are Good Formar-
riage, motherhood, and obscurity, according to the original
columnist, whose name is lost to history. If girls were boys
quickly it would be said: start them where they will, they
can, if ambitious, win a name and fortune, wrote Bly, then
20. Gather up the real smart girls, pull them out of the
mire, give them a shove up the ladder of life, and be amply
repaid. She signed her leter as Orphan Girl.
Te editor, George Madden, was so impressed that
he ofered her a job. Because womens writing was consid-
ered unseemly, Madden decided that Cochran should have
a pen name. He took Nelly Bly from a minstrel song: a
white man bestowing a white girl with a name created by a
white man for a fctional black serving girl. From the start,
Cochrannow Blywas caught between the stories men
wanted to tell about girls and the stories girls would tell for
themselves, given the chance.
Bly is now remembered less for the stories she wrote
than the stories that sprouted up around her. Maureen
Corrigan notes in the introduction to the new Penguin
edition of Blys collected journalism that Nelly Bly has
become a headline, not an author. Her femaleness is
phrased now, as it was in her day, as a fascination; the ed-
itorial furniture, neatly preserved in the Penguin edition,
sells her in the manner in which Victorian circuses might
advertise a traveling freak show: See this Young Girl Write
Hard-Hiting-Stories Just Like a Man!
Bly racked up a lot of frsts in her meteoric career.
Just a year afer being hired by the Dispatch, she had lef
for New York, where the frst mass-circulation newspapers
were being printed, wangled a job at the World, and made
her name with stunt reporting. She was to become the
most celebrated reporter of her age, at a time when jour-
nalists did not expect to become household names. Bly
was also the frst decoy to allow the patriarchal press to feel
really good about itself for allowing a litle woman into the
big boys club.
Gonzo journalism is now read as a macho practice:
turn up somewhere ripped and stoned and undercover
and immerse yourself in a culture or practice, then write
viscerally, from the brain and the gut. In fact, women were
doing it frst. Bly was just 21 when she got herself commit-
ted to Blackwells Island Insane Asylum to report on the
dispiriting conditions sufered by the inmates there: the
beatings, the starvation, the cold. Her feature in the World
drew public atention to the plight of the mentally unwell
in the U.S. and led to some limited reforms.
From the start, Bly is a natural writer. Her voice is
caustic and confdent, lilting efortlessly between the gush
and private wonder of a schoolgirls diary and the rigor of
the most celebrated political reporters of her time. Bly was
a celebrity, working at a time when a revolution in news-
paper technology had coincided with a surge of interest
in womens liberation. She was the right face for the right
time. Te fact that she was also tremendously talented in
the literary and practical craf of journalism was at once
the whole point and somewhat beside it.
By the time she headed out on her infamous round-
the-world dash, atempting to circle the globe in fewer
than the 80 days described in Jules Vernes novel, she was
already famous. Strong Men Might Well Shrink From the
Fatigues and Anxieties Cheerfully Faced by Tis Young
American Girl, cries her home papers report, preserved
in this edition, describing how the wind rufed Blys fair
young cheeks. Bly made her deadline and was greeted by
LAURIE PENNY 29
cheering crowds in New York. Te resulting column series,
which became a book, is not about the world at all. Rather,
its about Nellie Bly, the mannish young woman, the myth.
We hear more about the outfts she was wearing than her
impressions of the nations she glimpses out of the dining
cars of cross-country sleeper trains.
Te round-the-world dash is by far the weakest part
of Blys oeuvre as presented in the Penguin collection. For
a start, the speed at which the young reporter is travel-
ing means that she barely has time to speak to anybody
at all or to dig into the fesh of a place as she does in her
undercover work. She is uterly focused on beating the
self-imposed deadline, as if to miss it were to sacrifce her
carefully built credibility. Bly sees the countries she visits
mostly through train windows and the portholes of ships,
and she sketches the people who actually live there in
hasty and ofen racist caricatures.
As a young provincial reporter, Bly went to Mexico
and wrote without sentiment or stereotype of the lives
she saw there. In four short pages you get the starkness
of inequality, the taste of a fresh tortilla, the gentleness of
strangers. Te women, like other women, sometimes cry,
doubtless for very good cause, and the men stop to con-
sole them, she observes.
On her Round the World trip, Bly has no time for
such nuance. Te inhabitants of Aden, then a British colo-
ny, are simply black people of many diferent tribes and
litle naked children who ran afer us for miles, touch-
ing their foreheads humbly and crying for money. Tat
language, like Blys legend, is dressed in an outft of patri-
otism. She is always that Plucky American Girl who can
dash around the globe, troting out the hasty racial stereo-
types as well as any pufed-up British colonial ofcer.
Te mainstream press has always been a treacherous
trough to drink from. As her career continues, you can feel
Bly fghting for maturity in her work against a climate that
wants one thing from her and one thing only: her own sto-
ry. She struggles to shake the wide-eyed excitement of the
precocious girl-essayist at its proper time. Its as if Eliza-
beth Cochran, the anonymous Lonely Orphan Girl, is try-
ing to write her truth, but Nelly Bly, celebrity reporter, is
covering her mouth. Her struggle with persona plays out
on the page. In the decades afer her retirement, Nelly Bly
was writen about in books, taught about in schools, and
memorialized in songs (she appears as a side character in
the traditional Frankie and Johnny, which was covered
by Elvis). Until now, though, almost nobody bothered to
read her actual work, at least not in a systematic way. It has
taken a century for Blys journalism to be collected in print.
Blys zeal to write about the women the world had
failed, the women locked in madhouses, trapped in bad
marriages and dead-end jobs in airless tenement rooms,
started early. Te stories she wrote received space in re-
turn for a certain imposed sensationalism: Her editors
give a measured investigation into the working lives of
young women in box-making factories in Manhatan the
pre-clickbait title What Its Like to Be a White Slave. Te
more Bly struggles to expose the conditions of women in
the poorest parts of America, the more Blys editors treat
her as a fascinating trinket. Not only is she a young woman
who can spell; shes actually talking politics.
Some of these interviews and essays are collected
here under the chapter Te Woman Question, playing
neatly into the notion, as popular now as it was a cen-
tury ago, that there is only one. Bly had many diferent
questions about women. She wanted to know how they
lived and worked, where they were permited to go, why
they were paid so much less than men, not only in the
professions to which they were slowly being admited,
but in factories, felds, and farms. She wanted to know
why nobody was talking about women except as dolls
or drudges.
Te prison interview with Goldman is not included
in this collection, although it is among Blys fnest pieces
of political writing. When Bly asks Goldman (then at the
start of a long, dangerous career of exile and agitation)
30 LITTLE ORPHAN NELLIE
how she imagines her future, the political prisoner tells
her: I cannot say. I shall live to agitate to promote our
ideas. I am willing to give my liberty and my life, if nec-
essary, to further my cause. It is my mission and I shall
not falter. Entirely unbothered by notions of journalis-
tic objectivity, Bly ties of the piece by calling Goldman a
modern Joan of Arc.
Blys rebellion could be rehabilitated; Goldmans
never was. In 1893, when they could not vote, leave their
husbands, or own property, women could rebel but not
too much. You could be the exception to the rule as long
as the rule remained intact. Nellie Bly was not permited
to become the writer for the ages that she might very well
have been. In the end, there was only one story that ed-
itors were interested in hearing from her, and it was not
the story of the tenement boxmakers or womens sufrage
activists. It was the all-American story of the lonely orphan
girl made good.
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MALCOLM HARRIS 31
COMMUNISTS are not
supposed to like capitalism. If theres one thing everyone
knows about communists, its that we dont like capitalism.
Capitalism, as described in the writings of Karl Marx, is an
organized system of exploitation in which the many labor
for the proft of the few. Capitalism takes human behav-
iors and personal relations and shapes them into market
behaviors and market relations, leveling diference and
originality along the way. It is bad, and we are against it.
Tats the Marxism for Dummies line, and for most
intents and purposes its not wrong. But Marx has a more
complicated relationship to the capital relation than hes
usually given credit for. In Marxism, capital is a neces-
sary historical phase that displaces feudalism and rapidly
increases human productivity. Teres a contradiction in
the code: Trough capital, the amount of labor necessary
for the production of a given object is indeed reduced to a
minimum, but only in order to realize a maximum of labor
in the maximum number of such objects. From this ten-
dency, Marx deduces a way not out but through capitalism:
Te more this contradiction develops, the more does it
become evident that the growth of the forces of produc-
tion can no longer be bound up with the appropriation of
alien labor, but the mass of workers must themselves ap-
propriate their own surplus labor. Once they have done
soand disposable time thereby ceases to have an an-
tithetical existencethen, on one side, necessary labor
time will be measured by the needs of the social individ-
ual, and, on the other, the development of the power of
social production will grow so rapidly that, even though
production is now calculated for the wealth of all, dispos-
able time will grow for all. For real wealth is the devel-
oped production power of all individuals. Te measure of
wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labor time, but
rather disposable time.
REVIEW
Turn Down for What?
BY MALCOLM HARRIS
In imagining a homogenized future labor force, accelerationism ignores how capital
opportunistically sustains diference to survive
Robin Mackay, ed. #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader. Urbanomic. 2014. 448 pages.
32 TURN DOWN FOR WHAT?
Capitalism reduces the cost of being alive to a minimum,
but just to shrink the workers slice as the pie grows. Even-
tually through this process it becomes evident that the
owners are parasites, and the expropriated expropriate the
expropriators. If all this is the case, then it logically fol-
lows that we shouldnt be trying to slow the expropriation
down, but rather we should atempt to speed the system
toward its inevitable doom. Tis dynamic is the premise
for the collection #Accelerate, new from the radically odd
publisher Urbanomic.
Starting with Marxs Fragment on Machines
from which Ive drawn the quote above#Accelerate is
a chronologically arranged atempt at an accelerationist
reader. Accelerationism is the bend of theory that fol-
lows Marx through Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Franois Ly-
otard, and the 90s Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit
(among others), concluding that its counterproductive
to try to block capitals fows and that revolutionaries
ought to increase those fows number and speed instead.
Te collection draws its hashtag from a piece near the
end, #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Pol-
itics by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, which was ex-
traordinarily popular on Marxist social media in 2013
all the more remarkable considering the manifesto has
nothing to do with cats.
#Accelerate (the manifesto, not the reader) was an
internal memo of sorts to the Marx-infected lef about
our relationship to technology and production. Te two
London-based academics seek to redeem Marx as the
paradigmatic accelerationist thinker and argue that a
lef politics an ti thet ical to tech noso cial ac cel er a tion is
also, at least in part, a severe mis rep res ent a tion. At a time
when capitals most prominent fgures and frms claim to
be the embodiment of technosocial acceleration, when
lefists are assaulting people wearing Google Glass in the
street, this is a controversial position to take. We do not
want to re turn to Fordism. Tere can be no re turn to Ford-
ism, Srnicek and Williams write, positioning themselves
not so much against as past the 20th century bargain be-
tween capital and organized labor and defnitely against
the deluded democratic socialists trying to keep the New
Deal dream alive.
Its too bad that #Accelerate and the reader it led to
arent writen for a general audience. Post2008 econom-
ic crisis, Marxist critique has ventured cautiously outside
the classroom and the movie theater into mainstream
economics. Neither Keynesian liberalism or free-mar-
ket conservatism has an adequate explanation for why
the proceeds of labor are accruing to a smaller number
of profteers. Marxism predicted it, and more and more
people across and beyond the conventional political
spectrum are willing to listen. Accelerationism takes the
restoration of the historical Marxist project seriously,
but its still shaking of the mental shackles of academic
philosophy, and its proponents lack the interest, training,
or perhaps the ability to communicate outside a small
self-selected group.
As a mostly 20th century academic reader, #Accel-
erate includes some of the worst examples of self-indul-
gent lef academic frivolity. We can track the evolution
of Anglo-French accelerationism through the Ferment
section, which reads in part like a game of Marxist tele-
phone on acid. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guataris daring
fusion of Marx and Freud yields Lyotard endorsing the joy
of being fucked by capital yields Gilles Lipovetskys fool-
hardy acceleration of critique. Class struggle falls out of
these accounts, as the authors arrogantly pronounce that
capitals blender has abolished such distinctions.
Although these pieces of writing are useful in con-
structing a genealogy, I wonder what purpose they serve
acceleration itself. If we are for technosocial accelera-
tion, then surely one of the things we can leave behind
is leftist professors from the 1970s who thought what
is important is to be able to laugh and dance. They
laughed and danced into tenure and home loans, and
now here we are.
MALCOLM HARRIS 33
COMPARED with Marx, the
late 20th century accelerationists werent very accurate in
their ideas about the future of work. Lyotard compares
work under accelerating capitalism to prostitution, which
he images to be passive, a question of enduring how many
penises per hour, how many tons of coal, how many cast
iron bars, how many barrels of shit. Here he sees the jou-
issance of anonymity, the jouissance of the repetition of the
same in work, plugging us in here, being plugged in there.
Its a vision of work not unlike Te Matrix, with humans
as bateries for machine-capital, living orifces for plugs.
But the 21st century hasnt just meant the acceleration of
factory work; it has meant displacement by automation,
and the growth of the service sector, the centrality of com-
munication technology. If all work comes to resemble sex
work, its because service work requires more personality,
imagination, and initiative from laborers, not less.*
Part of what these accelerationists believe is that
capital is efacing diference of all sorts. Kapital ... does
away with all privileges of place; hence its mobility its
machinery obeys only one principle of energetic connec-
tionsthe law of value, equivalence, Lyotard writes in
Energumen Capitalism, the same essay where he credits
hairdressers and no sex, womens lib and gay movement
clothes stores with accelerating the abolition of sex dif-
ference. With a more nuanced take, Shulamith Firestones
Two Modes of Cultural History is the only piece in the
collection specifcally focused on diferences between
workers. She opposes two gendered forms of imagination:
the feminine fantastic and the male empirical. Trough the
acceleration of capital, she imagines the two combining,
as technology makes possible what had previously been
considered magic. When the male Technological Mode
can at last produce what the female Aesthetic Mode had
envisioned, Firestone concludes, we shall have eliminat-
ed the need for either.
While #Accelerate is totally unconcerned with racial
division, Marxist sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silvas 2003
Racism Without Racists predicted a less rosy but structurally
similar dissolution of the black-white American racial bina-
ry and the development of a colorist spectrum. And though
the magical tech changes that Firestone imagined are com-
ing true, and though the demographic changes Bonilla-
Silva predicted are here, these binaries seem to be sharpen-
ing in postcrisis America, not blending. What gives?
While Marxism is ofen hesitant to get bogged
down in race and gender divisions, capitalism displays
no such compunction. Te philosophers in #Accelerate are
more interested in higher-order abstractions like the hu-
man. In his piece Labor of the Inhuman, Reza Negar-
estani rejects what he labels kitsch Marxism.*
One makes a claim in favor of the force of beter reason.
Te Kitsch Marxist says: Who decides? One says, con-
struction through structural and functional hierarchies.
Te Kitsch Marxist responds: Control. We say us. Te
Kitsch Marxist recites: Who is us? Te impulsive re-
sponsiveness of kitsch Marxism cannot even be identifed
as cynicism. It is a mechanical knee-jerk reactionism that
is the genuine expression of norm consumerism without
the concrete commitment to producing any norms.
Its important for Negarestani that we tune out these
objections before they name any real social divisions. But

* Between 1977 and 2006 there has generally been an in-
crease in opportunities for workers to exercise autonomy
over their work activities: all three measures indicate that
there has been a statistically signifcant increase in workers
mean (average) reported freedom to exercise discretion
and autonomy over their work. Arne L. Kalleberg, Good
Jobs, Bad Jobs (2013).

* Its unclear whether or not Negarestani draws this term
from Trotskyist turned neoconservative culture warrior
David Horowitz, who used kitsch Marxism frst in his
1999 book Hating Whitey: And Other Progressive Causes to
refer to lefists who center white supremacy in their analy-
sis. It is worth noting that both authors might very well be
referring to the same people.
34 TURN DOWN FOR WHAT?
these divisions are what lends capital its fexibility and en-
durance, what has allowed it to keep going despite its core
contradictions. Capital cant aford to pretend race and
gender dont exist, and neither can communists.
Even though it barely comes up in #Accelerate, per-
haps the best example of accelerationist political practice
put gender front and center. Wages for Housework was a
70s campaign that sought to bring womens unwaged do-
mestic labor under the wage relation so that housewives
could strike and engage in the struggle for free time. If
technological innovation can lower the limit of necessary
work, and if the working class struggle in industry can use
that innovation for gaining free hours, the same cannot
be said of housework, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma
James write in the pamphlet Te Power of Women and
the Subversion of the Community. To the extent that she
must in isolation procreate, raise and be responsible for
children, a high mechanization of domestic chores doesnt
free any time for the woman. Its a common misconcep-
tion that capitalism simply means wages for labor; capital
has used womens unwaged labor to bear the costs of repro-
ducing labor power across the board. As Dalla Costa and
James write, the entire class exploitation has been built
upon the specifc mediation of womens exploitation.
How does capital answer this demand? Much like
Negarestanis kitsch Marxist, capital disaggregates. In
Barbara Ehrenreichs 2000 Harpers essay Maid to Or-
der, she looked at when capitalism did start paying wages
for housework, from inside the cleaning industry. While
Dalla Costa and James wanted to claim the wage so they
could reject it, Ehrenreich writes about how white Amer-
ican feminists arguedto Congress no lessthat paying
for housework would allow women to leave the home
for beter jobs outside the home. Tey were right, Ehren-
reich reports, insofar as there has been a decrease in wom-
ens unwaged labor and an increase in womens participa-
tion in the waged labor force. But part of that increase has
been performed by the women who come in to do their
housework, and as moms become employers, they try to
decrease labor costs too.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there
are more than 1.4 million people employed as maids,
housekeepers, and cleaners1.3 million of them wom-
en, and over 60 percent of them women of color. Tis
kind of labor is notoriously hard to measure, but Ehren-
reichs research suggests that in areas near the U.S.-Mex-
ico border, only one-tenth of paid domestic labor is on
the books. Te BLS puts the yearly average housekeeping
wage at $19,570, which is both below the poverty line for
a family of three and no doubt infated by underreporting.
Domestic workers without immigration papers not only
lack the so-called protection of the law; theyre constantly
vulnerable to deportation. So much for Lyotards doing
away with all privileges of place. As Evan Calder Williams
writes, the days and bodies of humans are still far cheap-
Capital cant
aford to pretend
race and gender
dont exist. Tese
divisions are what
lend it fexibility
and endurance
MALCOLM HARRIS 35
er than any automation, provided money knows where to
look. And it always has. White supremacy and the gender
division arent archaisms that capital will puree into a fow
of neutered beige singularities; theyre labor relations,
and integral ones.
Capitalism doesnt function according to the philos-
ophers universal termsor economists for that mater.
Its a reckless structure, but in predictably circumspect
ways. Te American criminal justice systemwhich lib-
ertarians imagine capitalism could survive withouthas
focused more on race as productive technology has im-
proved, incarcerating blacks at an increasingly higher rate
than whites. Once released, the formerly incarcerated take
a record with them, one that marks them forever as a sec-
ond-class worker, unable to demand the same wages and
protections.
Accelerationists couldnt predict this new Jim Crow
because theyre always expecting capital to double down. In-
stead, the owners split. Capital is not only able but required
to maintain a host of diferent labor relations at the same
time. Two million (mostly young, mostly women) Amer-
icans work in illegal unpaid internships. Black unemploy-
ment is consistently twice as high as white unemployment.
More than 60,000 imprisoned migrants worked in U.S. fed-
eral detention centers last year for 13 cents an hourless
than two percent of the minimum wage. And thats just
within the U.S. Who is us? isnt just a kitsch Marxist
knee-jerk; its exactly the question capital asks and answers
over and over a million times a day in order to survive.
WHERE does this leave us communists?
Firestones vision of a world with the full achievement of
the conceivable in the actual is crawling forward, threat-
ening to walk any day now. Teres not much analysis of
specifc frms, innovations, or individuals in the #Accelerate
collection; the authors display a stodgy Scrabble players
unwillingness to use proper nouns outside citations. I can
understand not wanting your philosophy to turn over as
fast as popular Internet companies do, but there are costs
to being contemporary, and one of them is shelf life. Ana-
lyzing particular moves and agents can tell us more about
accelerating capital than meditations on what constitutes
the human.
In his piece about the disruptive food substitute
Soylent, Bhaskar Sunkara sees both the capitalist and com-
munist potential. Soylent is a powder you add to water to
create a hyper-nutritious shake. Te company claims
and so far no one has refutedthat people can subsist on
Soylent alone. Its a new product and a major jump in the
direction Firestone envisioned: Imagine making hunger a
thing of the past! Imagine food decommodifed, a free fow
of nutrition to hungry mouths, whoever, wherever, and
whenever they are. Disrupting starvation is a Silicon Val-
ley wet dream, but its never been the food product thats
the problem. Instead, Soylent is more likely to disrupt
lunch breaks. If we end up living in a world where we pay
per second to kiss the nutritious gruel spigot, well know
for whom the Soylent pours.
Innovations like this continue to lower the cost of
geting workers from one day to the next. Te sharing
economy, for example, is a communist-sounding sector of
the new economy based on people using their goods and
skills in common. Teres no need for everyone on a block
to own a chainsaw, so if one neighbor owns one, she can
go online and lease it to her neighbors. Its the same thing
neighbors have always done, but rationalized and beter
suited for a population thats used to relations mediated
through money. Sharing resources is another kind of ef-
ciency, so it can mean one of two things: proft for owners
or free time for workers. If you dont need to buy a chain-
saw, you can aford to work a litle bit less or you can aford
to be paid a litle bit less.
Te line between dystopia and utopia is a thin one,
Sunkara writes about Soylent, and its just as true about
the sharing economy and Googles driverless cars. Tat
36 TURN DOWN FOR WHAT?
MALCOLM HARRIS 37
line is the diference between smooching in the backseat
of a solar-powered robot car on your way to the beach
with a cooler full of synthetic burgers, and beginning
your workday on the cars integrated videochat, using the
screen as a mirror so you can wipe the unsightly glob of
Soylent from your chin. As labor efciency improves, that
line between what could be and what is gets thinner, tall-
er, beter patrolled. Along with labor efciency, owners
ability to calculate the divisions they need to make in or-
der to keep the system stable also improve, as does their
ability to enforce them.
We can see what that looks like in the accelerat-
ed U.S. client state of Israel, where a technologically ad-
vanced over-class has built a literal apartheid wall between
themselves and a pseudo-stateless Palestinian working
class, while simultaneously maintaining a separate though
equally threatening labor relation with African immi-
grants. How do the Israelis see through walls they build?
Te same way accelerationists do: Tey read Deleuze. In
2006, Eyal Weizman talked with members of the Israeli
Defense Force for Freize about how they use philosophy:
I asked [paratroop instructor] Naveh why Deleuze and
Guatari were so popular with the Israeli military. He
replied that several of the concepts in A Tousand Pla-
teaux became instrumental for us [] allowing us to ex-
plain contemporary situations in a way that we could not
have otherwise. It problematized our own paradigms.
When I asked him if moving through walls was part of
it, he explained that in Nablus the IDF understood ur-
ban fghting as a spatial problem. [...] Traveling through
walls is a simple mechanical solution that connects the-
ory and practice.
As American police militarize and anti-immigrant
fascist parties rise in Europe, we can see a sort of Israelif-
cation across the west. Technosocial acceleration means
dystopia with a lot of intersecting market and non-mar-
ket mechanisms of control to keep it that way. Capital can
build walls and crash through them too; owners play by
their own rules, their own geography. Capital draws, re-
draws, and enforces lines between workers according to
structural necessity: It knows how to fght a class war as
a race war and call it a drug war; it knows if you subject
women to a culture of physical, psychological, sexual,
and emotional abuse, you can pay them less; it knows
borders arent for keeping people out, theyre for con-
trolling the wages of the people they let in. What here is
worth accelerating?
Unfortunately, theres not much of a choice. No
amount of diligent union organizing, tech skepticism, or
sharing is going to slow capital down. Saying youre an accel-
erationist is like taking a picture with the Leaning Tower of
Pisa: You can make it look like youre doing something, but
it truly doesnt mater whether or not youre even alive. Te
real accelerationists arent working on dissertations; theyre
working at Google or McKinsey or theyre designing the
massively open online courses (MOOCs) that are puting
grad students out of work. It doesnt make any more sense to
be for technosocial acceleration than against it.
Tat doesnt, however, make me a pessimist. Im not
quite blithe enough to repeat Maos Te situation is excel-
lent, but all that potential free time is looking more and
more appetizing by the day, especially as people are ground
down to produce it. Te easiest means of production to
seize, the ones nearest at hand, are inalienable from our
bodies. Human capitalour ability to use the productive
tools around usis a vital component of technosocial ac-
celeration. Were geting more capable, faster and faster. A
credible communist threat would ofer people another use
for their accelerating abilities besides creating value for
profteers or trying to become one of them. If Marx was
right in his more self-assured moments, then were nearing
the point when it becomes intolerable that all these innova-
tions and efciencies are hurting more people than theyre
helping. We wont get there any faster by wishing it so or
identifying with the process, but in the mean mean mean-
time, we can prepare. We can undermine capitals atempts
to divide us by cleaving to the underdog every time they try
another split. We might even get really good at it.
38 NO LIFE STORIES
GIVEN what we now know about the NSA
and Google and Verizon and Acxiom and all the other
components of the Big Data surveillance machine, it seems
natural to see in this infrastructure the long-prophesized
r ealization of Big Brother. It makes for a recognizable fear,
comforting in its familiarity. But it is also misleading. If me-
dia scholar Mark Andrejevics most recent book, Infoglut:
How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Tink
and Know, is right, the overt and explicit appearance of Big
Brother serves only to conceal the possibly more troubling
fact of his ultimate indiference.
Tats not to say we are not being watched. Surveil-
lance has become as thorough as technology permits it to
be, as the legal restraints devised to limit it in earlier eras
have become outmoded, irrelevant. Given that many are
becoming alert to the surveillance threat through the way
its borne by the atomizing technology of smartphones, we
tend to imagine the problem is that it can single us out and
expose us. Surveillance is conceived as a kind of panoptic
voyeurism that selects us for unfair scrutiny and treatment,
require us to adopt a superfcial conformity as camoufage.
It plays on our worry for our personal reputation.
But Andrejevic argues that in an era of mass surveil-
lance, the surveillance apparatus doesnt care about our in-
dividual story. Instead Big Data is interested in broader sta-
tistical profles of populations. Mass surveillance controls
without necessarily knowing anything that compromises
any individuals privacy. To the degree that they have access
to the devices we use to mediate our relation to everyday
life, companies deploy algorithms based on correlations
REVIEW
No Life Stories
BY ROB HORNING
Big Data hopes to liberate us fom the work of self-constructionand justify
mass surveillance in the process
Mark Andrejevic, Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know. Routledge. 2013.
216 pages.
ROB HORNING 39
found in large data sets to shape our opportunitiesour
sense of what feels possible. Undesirable outcomes need
not be forbidden and policed if instead they can simply be
made improbable. We dont need to be watched and brain-
washed to make them docile; we just need to be situated
within social dynamics whose range of outcomes have all
been modeled as safe for the status quo. Its not: I see what
you are doing, Rob Horning, stop that. Its: Rob Horning
can be included in these diferent data sets, which means
he should be ofered these prices, these jobs, these insur-
ance policies, these friends status updates, and hell likely
be swayed by these facts.
Tis form of control is indiferent to whether or not
I believe in it. I cant choose to opt out or face it down
with a vigilant skepticism. I can decide to resistI can toss
my smartphone in a lead bag and refuse all social media
but these decisions wont afect the social infrastructure I
am embedded in. At best, such self-abnegation will register
only as a marker of my quirky noncomformity. It may only
feed consumerism new symbols of rebellion to market.
As it has become feasible to scale surveillance up, the in-
stitutional logic of surveillance, Andrejevic argues, has turned
itself inside-out. What mass data collectors want, be they the
state agencies trying to ensure stability or commercial entities
hoping to mine for marketing insight, is not potentially in-
criminating information about you as an individual so much
as mundane information at the scale of populations. Te
macro-level goal is to construct a working model of society in
data, so the more conforming you are, the more you need to be
watched, to weight the models properly:
In population-level intelligence-gathering, authorities
count on the fact that the vast majority of those details
are collected are innocent because it is against this back-
ground of unsuspicious or normal activity that the anom-
alies of deviant and particularly threatening behavior are
meant to emerge.
Since the data of average people establishes the backdrop
statistics of normality, being a compliant citizen makes es-
sential to surveillance rather than exempt. Tis level of sur-
veillance is thus no longer intended to enforce discipline,
as in a panoptic model of social control. Instead it aspires
to sink into the hum of technologically mediated everyday
life. You get watched not because youre a person of inter-
est but because youre probably already perfectly ordinary.
Tis approach to mapping the social in data works
not only for crime detection but also for targeted market-
ing. Data paterns that indicate a life transition (death in
the family, divorce, pregnancy, job loss, relocationall of
which render one especially vulnerable to advertising) can
be detected in among one group and exploited across the
groups that have similar statistical profles, in degrees cal-
ibrated to the level of correlation. Since this form of sur-
veillance is not particular to individuals, whether the data
is anonymized doesnt mitigate the sorts of intervention
it can warrant. Correlations amid anonymized data still
can be used to shape the opportunities available to and the
interventions visited upon others, Andrejevic notes. Un-
der these conditions, trying to protect individual privacy
through making collected data anonymous becomes an
irrelevant tactic.
SURVEILLANCE
has aspired to become as ordinary as the population it
seeks to document. Social media, smartphones, wearable
trackers like Fitbit, and other interlocking and ubiquitous
networks have made surveillance and social participation
synonymous. Digital devices, Andrejevic notes, make our
communication and information search and retrieval prac-
tices ever more efcient and frequent at the cost of gener-
ating a captured record of it. Surveillance thereby is linked
not with suspicion but with solicitude. Each new covetable
digital service, he points out, is also at once a new species
of data collection, creating a new set of background norms
against which to assess people.
Tanks to the services ongoing proliferation, it has
40 NO LIFE STORIES
become increasingly inconvenient to take part in any so-
cial activityfrom making a purchase to conversing with
friends online to simply walking down the streetthat
doesnt leave permanent data traces on a privately owned
corporate server. Te conveniences and connectivity
promised by interactive technologies normalize what An-
drejevic calls digital enclosureturning the common
space of sociality into an administered space in which we
are all enlisted in the work of being watched, churning out
information for the entities that own the databases.
Te transformation of social behavior into a valuable
metacommodity of marketing data has oriented communi-
cation technology toward its perpetual collection. We be-
come unwiting employees for tech companies, producing
the data goods for the companies true clients: companies
who can process the information.
With the way surveillance is shaped and excused as
interactive participation, we experience it not as a curtail-
ment on our privacy so much as information overload:
Each demand for more information fom us comes joined
with a generous provision of more information to us. Much
of the surveillance apparatus provides feedback, the illu-
sion of fair exchange. For instance, we search Google for
something (helping it build its profle of our what we are
curious about, and when and where) and we are immedi-
ately granted a surfeit of information, more or less tailored
to instigate further interaction. What is known about us is
thereby redirected back at us to inform us into submission.
Purveyors of targeted marketing ofen try to pass of
these sorts of intrusion and fltering as a kind of manufac-
tured serendipity. Andrejevic cites a series of examples of
marketing hype inviting us to imagine a world in which re-
tailers know what consumers want before the consumers
do, as though this were a long-yearned-for miracle of con-
venience rather than a creepy efort to circumvent even the
limited autonomy of shopping sovereignty. In the world of
database-driven targeting, Andrejevic argues, the goal is,
in a sense, to pre-empt consumer desire.
Tis is a strange goal, given that desire is the means
by which we know ourselves. In hoping to anticipate our
desires, advertisers and the platforms that serve ads work
to dismantle our sense of self as something we must ac-
tively construct and make desire something we experience
passively, as a fait accompli rather than a potentially un-
manageable spur to action. Instead of constructing a self
through desire, we experience an overload of information
about ourselves and our world, which makes fashioning a
coherent self seem impossible without help.
If Big Datas dismantling the intrinsic-self myth
helped people conclude that authenticity was always an
impossibility, a chimera invented to sustain the fantasy that
we could consume our way to an ersatz uniqueness, that
would be one thing. But instead, Big Data and social media
foreground the mediated, incomplete self not to destroy
the notion of the true self altogether but to open us to more
desperate atempts to fnd our authentic selves. We are en-
ticed into experiencing our self as a product we can con-
sume, one that surveillance can supply us with.
Te more that is known about us, the more our aten-
tion can be compelled and overwhelmed, which in turn leads
to a deeper reliance on the automatic flters and algorithms,
a further willingness to let more information be passively
collected about us to help us cope with it all. But instead of
leading to resolution, a fnal discovery of the authentic self,
this merely accelerates the cycle of further targeted stimu-
lation. Te ostensible goal of anticipating consumer desire
and sating it in real time only serves the purpose of allowing
consumers to want something else faster.
So as surveillance becomes more and more total, An-
drejevic agues, we experience our increasingly specifed and
information-rich place in this matrix as confusion, a loss of
clarity or truth about the world and ourselves. Because ex-
cess information is pushed at us rather than something
we have to seek out, we are always being reminded that
there is more to know than we can assimilate, and that
what we know is a partial representation, a construct. Like
ROB HORNING 41
a despairing dissertation writer, we cannot help but know
that we cant assimilate all the knowledge its possible to
collect. Each new piece of information raises further ques-
tions, or invites more research to properly contextualize it.
Ubiquitous surveillance thus makes information over-
load everyones problem. To solve it, more surveillance and
increasingly automated techniques for organizing the data it
collects are authorized. In a series of chapters on predictive
analytics, prediction markets, and body-language analysis
and neuro marketing, Andrejevic examines the variety of
emerging technology-driven methods meant to allow data
to speak for itself. By fltering data through algorithms,
brain scans, or markets, an allegedly unmediated truth
contained within it can be unveiled, and we can bypass the
slipperiness of discursive representation and slide directly
into the real. Understanding why outcomes occur becomes
unnecessary, as long as the probabilities of the correlations
hold to make accurate predictions.
Tis modern-day phrenology is the end of theory
that Chris Anderson famously announced in an of-cited
2008 Wired story that argued that the scientifc method is
obsolete in the petabyte age of massive data sets. Be-
cause big data sets turn up correlations beyond our ability
to explain them, the logic of explanation is being rewriten
culture wide. As Andrejevic notes, An era of information
overload coincides with the refexive recognition of the
constructed and partial nature of representation. Authori-
tative accounts of phenomena become contingent, vulnera-
ble to accusations of being slanted in their incompleteness.
Te doubt about narratives plays into the hands of
what Andrejevic calls the postmodern right, which seizes
on the idea that not only are all truths constructeda
centerpiece of the critiques of power that emerged from
the lef in the 1960s and 70sbut they are nothing more
than constructions, with no possible basis in fact or caus-
al explanation. Nothing is true and everything is political.
Any set of standards that could arbitrate between compet-
ing explanations can be exposed as a higher level of bias. So
anything one might not want to acceptglobal warming,
endemic sexism and racism, structural unemployment, or
really any theory about an aspect of social lifecan never
be sufciently demonstrated and can always be dismissed
as an incomplete account, a biased curation of information.
Te same is true of the self. Te vast pool of data about
us, combined with the social media to circulate and archive
it, makes it hard to escape the sense that any partial repre-
sentation of ourselves is not the whole truth, is somehow
inauthentic and easily disprovable with more data. De-
veloping a personal narrative, a life story, can feel futile and
outmodedinefective at what sociologist Erving Gofman
calls front stage management, as well as being demonstra-
bly incomplete. So instead we may turn to data management
strategiesalgorithms and networked recommendations
and predictive analyticsnot only to understand the world
but to understand ourselves. Tese let us, in Andrejevics
words, bypass or short-circuit the problem of comprehen-
Individual doubt
about being able
to process all the
information about
ourselves provokes
a surrender to the
machines that can
42 NO LIFE STORIES
sion and the forms of discursive, narrative representation
upon which it relies.
Individual doubt about being able to process all the
information about ourselves, stoked by media entities ca-
pable of overloading us with information that will seem rel-
evant to us, provokes a surrender to the machines that can.
Instead of inventing a dubious, distorted, inauthentic life
story to make sense of our choices, we can instead defer to
something that supposedly cant be faked: data. Big Data
benefts by persuading us that we are the least trustworthy
processors of data about ourselves. Te degree to which we
believe our own life stories are unreliable, to others and to
ourselves, is the degree we will volunteer more information
about ourselves to data miners for processing.
Left: Dash Snow, Fuck the Police, 2005. Press clipping, semen.
Right: Kim Piterrs, Fuck the Police, 2009. Yellow-toned X-ray radiography of Fuck the Police, 2005.
Images courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London. Photos by Zarko Vijatovic.
ROB HORNING 43
IN the era of post-truth, critiquing power as dom-
ination through ideological narratives collapses into an
endless critique of critique, in which any dispute reveals
only that everything is disputable. Andrejevic argues that
the powers that be use the expanded media space to engulf
any dominant narrative in possible alternatives, to highlight
the indeterminacy of the evidence by promulgating endless
narratives of debunkery to suck critique into the cluter
blender and highlight the contingency, indeterminate-
ness, and, ultimately, the helplessness of so-called truth
in the face of power. Whoever already has power cant be
challenged by rational arguments, which cant escape accu-
sation of bias through omission, if nothing else.
In the absence of an agreed-upon protocol to arbitrate
between competing stories, everyone may feel entitled to
their own version of the truth, and any empirical atacks on
these truths can feel personal atacks on ones taste and
autonomy. Andrejevic points this out in discussing how Fox
News maintains its implausible reputation for credibility in
surveys of news consumers. But these personal versions of
truth are no more concocted in isolation than ones musical
taste; they are more like refractions of the cultural zeitgeist,
an emotional climate of what feels true.
Adjusting that emotional climate for various niches
becomes a shortcut to social control: By adjusting the buzz
volume about certain notions (i.e. Obama is not a legit-
imate President, organic food tastes beter, job creators
are on the sidelines because of economic uncertainty),
they can become received wisdom rather than dubious as-
sertions subject to empirical evaluation. And ubiquitous
data collection and media consumption means that specifc
types of appeals can be targeted at or fltered out for par-
ticular audiences in algorithmically driven eforts to mold
their feelings. If successful, the afect can then spread social-
ly from these converts through some of the same channels,
creating the desired mood fog.
Tis is why defying the prevailing currents of ideology
at the individual level doesnt constitute meaningful resis-
tance. We no longer are controlled through learning ideo-
logical explanations for why things happen and what our
behavior will result in. Instead, we are constructed as a set of
probabilities. A margin of noncompliance has already been
factored in and may in fact be integral to the containment of
the broader social dynamics being modeled at the popula-
tion level. Expanding the scope of individual agency doesnt
disrupt the control mechanisms enabled by Big Data; it may
in fact be a by-product of that controls efcient operation.
We are ostensibly free to believe what we want, but then,
Andrejevic argues, Freedom consists of choosing ones
own invented version of history invoked for the purposes of
defending the individuating logic of market competition.
Since Big Data lumps people together on the basis of the
statistical implications of actions they would never bother to
consciously correlate, they are lef to essentially do what they
please within confnes they cannot perceive. So we may feel
liberated from indelible typecasting by our consumer choic-
esby liking a certain kind of music or wearing a certain sort
of clothes. Self-conformity is not necessary to identity in the
age of the malleable archive, the generative database.
As the recent Facebok mood-manipulation study
shows, social-media platforms aim to reshape our experience
of the self in terms of what Andrejevic describes as statistical
proxies for afective intensities. Correlations in data sets are
used to shape user experiences (ostensibly to make their use
more satisfying), which in turn feedback the behavior model-
ing led the administrators to expect. You may never know that
you have been afected by the discovery that, to use a specu-
lative example Andrejevic ofers, someone who purchased a
particular car in a particular place and buys a certain brand of
toothpaste may be more likely to be late in paying of credit
card debt. But it will dictate your economic opportunities
and thereby reinforce its truth. And because the members
of these groups dont even know they have been put together
for purposes of control, they cant form the sort of solidarity
necessary to object to this mechanism of administration. Te
44 NO LIFE STORIES
logic of aggregation is distinct from collectivity, as Andreje-
vic notes, and may be deployed to militate against it.
Big Data promises a politics without politics. Te
trust necessary to ratify explanatory narratives is displaced
from the seemingly intractable debate among competing
interests and warped into a faith in quasi-empirical mecha-
nisms. Yet the idea that a higher level of objectivity exists at
the level of data is itself a highly biased conception, a story
told to abet capitalist accumulation. If unexplained cor-
relations are politically or commercially actionableand
in capitalist society, proft arbitrates thatthey will be de-
ployed. Te correlations that pay will be true, the ones that
dont will be discarded. Proft becomes truth. (Tis is espe-
cially true of prediction markets, in which truth is literally
incentivized.) Making money becomes the only story it is
possible to convincingly tell.
Te denigration of objectivity joined with an improv-
ing facility at manipulating the emotional milieu leads to a
nightmare political scenario that Andrejevic outlines:
Tis asymmetry [of control of databases] would free up
politicians to engage in infoglut strategies in the dis-
cursive register (promulgating reports that contradict
themselves endlessly, piting expert analysts against
one another in an indeterminate struggle that does litle
more than fll air time, or perhaps reinforce preconcep-
tions) while simultaneously developing new strategies
for infuence in the afective register. Fact-checkers would
continue to struggle to hold politicians accountable based
on detailed investigations of their claims, arguments, and
evidence, while politicians would use data-mining algo-
rithms to develop impulse- or anxiety-triggering messages
with defned probabilities of success.
Far from being neutral or objective, data can be stockpiled as
a political weapon that can be selectively deployed to eradi-
cate citizens ability to participate in deliberative politics.
Many researchers have pointed out that raw data is
an oxymoron, if not a mystifcation of the power invested
in those who collect it. Subjective choices must continually
be made about what data is collected and how, and about
any interpretive framework to deploy to trace connections
amid the information. As sociologists Kate Crawford and
Danah Boyd point out, Big Data is the kind of data that en-
courages the practice of apophenia: seeing paterns where
none actually exist, simply because massive quantities of
data can ofer connections that radiate in all directions.
Te kinds of truths Big Data can unveil depends
greatly on what those with database access choose to look
for. As Andrejevic notes, this access is deeply asymmetrical,
undoing any democratizing tendency inherent in the broad-
er access to information in general. In his 2007 book iSpy:
Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era, he argues that
asymmetrical monitoring allows for a managerial rather
than democratic relationship to constituents. Surveillance
makes the practice of making ones voice heard basically
redundant and destroys its link to any intention to engage
in deliberative politics. Instead politics operates at the ag-
gregate level, conducted by institutions with the best access
to the databases. Tese data sets will be opened to elite re-
searchers and the big universities that can aford to pay for
access, Crawford and Boyd point out, but everyone else
will be mostly lef on the sidelines, unable to produce real
knowledge. As a result, institutions with privileged access to
data bases will have ability to determine what is true.
Tis plays out not only with events but also with re-
spect to the self. Just as politics necessarily requires intermi-
nable intercourse with other people who dont automatical-
ly see things our way and who least acknowledge alternate
points of view only afer protracted and ofen painful eforts
to spell them out, so does the social self. It is not something
we declare for ourselves by fat. I need to negotiate who I am
with others for the idea to even mater. Alone, I am no one,
no mater how much information I may consume.
In response to this potentially uncomfortable truth, we
may turn to the same Big Data tools in search of a simpler
and more directly accessible true self, just as politicians and
companies have done. Identity then becomes a probability,
even to ourselves. It ceases to be something we learn to in-
stantiate through interpersonal interactions but becomes
ROB HORNING 45
something simply revealed when sufcient data exists to
simulate our future personality algorithmically. One is lef to
act without any particular conviction while awaiting report
from various recommendation engines on who we really are.
In this sense, Big Data incites what Andrejevic, fol-
lowing iek, calls interpassivity, in which our belief in
the ideology that governs us is automated, displaced onto
a big other that does the believing for us and alleviates us
of responsibility for our complicity. Surrendering the self to
data processors and online services make it a product to be
enjoyed rather than a consciousness to be inhabited.
THE work of selfood is difcult, dialectical, re-
quiring not only continual self-criticism but also an aware-
ness of the degree to which those around us shape us in
ways we cant control. We must engage them, wrestle with
one another for our identities, be willing to make the pain-
ful surrender of our favorite ideas about ourselves and be
vulnerable enough to becoming some of what others see
more clearly about us. Te danger is that we will setle for
the convenience of technological work-arounds and abne-
gate the duty to debate the nature of the world we want to
live in together.
Instead of the collective work of building the social,
we can setle for an automatically generated Timeline and
algorithmically generated prompts for what to add to it.
Data analysts can detect a correlation between two seem-
ingly random pointsintelligence and eating curly fries,
say, as in a 2012 PNAS research paper by Michal Kosinski,
David Stillwell, and Tore Graepel that made the rounds
on Tumblr and Twiter in Januaryand potentially kick
of a wave of otherwise inexplicable behavior. I dont know
why I am eating curly fries all of a sudden, but that shows
how smart I am! Advertisers wont need a plausible logic
to persuade us to be insecure; they can let spurious data
correlations speak for them with the authority of science.
Unlike the Facebook mood-manipulation paper, the
curly-fries paper enjoyed a miniviral moment in which it
was eagerly reblogged for its novelty value, with only a mild
skepticism, if any, atached. Tis suggests the seductive
entertainment appeal these inexplicable correlations can
providethey tap the emotional climate of boredom to
spread an otherwise inane fnding that can then reshape be-
havior at the popular level. Were much more likely to laugh
about the curly fries paper and pass it on than to absorb any
health organizations didactic nutrition information. Our
eagerness to share the news about curly fries corresponds
with our willingness to accept it as true without being able
to understand why. Its WTF incomprehensibility enhances
its reach and thus its eventual predictive power.
Likewise, the whimsical reblogging of the results from
patently ridiculous online tests hints at how we may opt in
to more entertaining solutions to the problem of self. If
coherent self-presentation that considers the need of oth-
ers takes work and a willingness to face our own shortcom-
ings, collaborating with social surveillance and dump ing
personal experience into any and all of the available com-
mercial containers is comparatively easy and fun. It returns
to us an objective self that is empirically defensible, as
well as an exciting and novel object for us to consume as
entertainment. We are happily the audience and not the au-
thor of our life story.
Tus the algorithm becomes responsible for our po-
litical impotence, an alibi for it that lets us enjoy its dubious
fruits. By trading narratives for Big Data, emotions are lef
with a basis in any belief system. You wont need a reason to
feel anything, and feeling cant serve as a reliable guide to
action. Instead we will experience the fuctuation of feeling
passively, a spectator to the spectacle of our own emotion-
al life, which is now contained in an elaborate spreadsheet
and updated as the data changes. You cant know yourself
through introspection or social engagement, but only by
fnding technological mirrors, whose refection is system-
atically distorted in real time by their administrators. Lets
hope we dont like what we see.
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