Disempowerment
Published June 10, 2021
The lived experiences of
scrolling exceed the systems of data extraction that fostered them. Even if encoded
into silicon semiconductors and designed as tools of control, these networks
are not stable: they are a collectively assembled, precarious body of distributed
cognition made up of communication and distribution networks, interfaces,
processors, and millions of datapoints, images, and individual bodies. As a
symbolic form, the scroll synthetizes these distributed networks into something
else — an individualized aesthetic experience resembling that of the soundscape:
one that privileges vertigo, movement, touch, embeddedness, and disempowerment
over scopic fantasies of control, stable substantiality, or total agency. Even
though contemporary social networks are predicated on the infinite cultivation and
management of the self, this process of individuation only occurs when distorted
by seemingly alien socio-technical networks and the cultural trends circulating
on them. As TikTok’s endless scrolling interface shows, the scroll is not a
game to be won. Nor is it a space to be solved, but somewhere to live and spend
your time in. It does not give its users the goal of externally intervening on
reality, but that of inhabiting a musical map representing the complex ecology
of agency in which we are imbedded. And, potentially, of attesting each other’s
collective existence.
Feautured sounds:
New Slaves Outro (from Kanye West’s “New Slaves”) - ashaw
Feautured places: Barcelona Design Museum; Mercat dels Encants; Placeta de Sant Miquel; Plaça de Narcís Oller
Related to on TikTok: @dancepraxis; @talkingcities; @luismuiz; @nam_mac; @csshuffle; @titan_of_joy; @inverse; @lookmumnocomputer
Other related media: “AI: Data Bodies, Collective Individuation, and Social Project” talk by Alejandra López Gabrielidis and Toni Navarro;
“When You Leave this World | Kentucky Route Zero and the Poetics of Hypertext” Video-essay by Hugo M. Gris
Further reading: Haraway, D. (1988).“Situated Knowledges: The Science
Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”. In Feminist Studies 14, no. 3
(p. 575–599).
New Slaves Outro (from Kanye West’s “New Slaves”) - ashaw
Feautured places: Barcelona Design Museum; Mercat dels Encants; Placeta de Sant Miquel; Plaça de Narcís Oller
Related to on TikTok: @dancepraxis; @talkingcities; @luismuiz; @nam_mac; @csshuffle; @titan_of_joy; @inverse; @lookmumnocomputer
Other related media: “AI: Data Bodies, Collective Individuation, and Social Project” talk by Alejandra López Gabrielidis and Toni Navarro;
“When You Leave this World | Kentucky Route Zero and the Poetics of Hypertext” Video-essay by Hugo M. Gris
Further reading: Haraway, D. (1988).“Situated Knowledges: The Science
Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”. In Feminist Studies 14, no. 3
(p. 575–599).