If you know me personally, then you know that my critical approach to technology developed right alongside the first wave of social media, that novelty which I had the strange misfortune of coming of age along with.
Now, in 2023, with the country balanced on a razor’s edge before another wretched season of division, the absence of virtue at the social media platforms seems to be apparent to all. There is revisionist thinking even among those with a stake in the system. As for the possibility of corporate space providing a freedom worthy of democratic ideals, Jill Lepore puts it with concision and force:
This is flimflam. Twitter never has and never will be a vehicle for democratic expression. It is a privately held corporation that monetizes human expression and algorithmically maximizes its distribution for profit, and what turns out to be most profitable is sowing social, cultural, and political division. Its participants are a very tiny, skewed slice of humanity that has American journalism in a choke hold. Twitter does not operate on the principle of representation, which is the cornerstone of democratic governance. It has no concept of the “civil” in “civil society.” (link)
The tacit obligation to partake in this debasement of culture is pervasive among those very same individuals who profess themselves the producers of culture. The adoption of this form of media is so widespread that to forward a critique is considered bad manners. Yet the platform’s ambitions are to colonize all modes experience and bring them under the sway of their measly products. The logic of these systems is not only operational in the active consumption of the digital flow, but oozes beyond, so that lives habitually take shape according to their dictates.
Lepore points to the media’s infatuation with the rapid and stilted discourse of these platforms as the locus of larger social breakdown, but it is not as if only certain thought leaders could wrench themselves from out of the echo chamber the situation would be abated. It is the widespread adoption of these products which seems to have thrown up structural interference with our capacity to function as a polity of even nominal cohesion.
Yet the efficiencies of digital tools are thrilling, and consciously working with and against them seems necessary in any attempt at crafting a truly contemporary art. Since the crafting of any art begins with the shaping of ideas, I will attempt a digital injunction into that mental aspect of the practice. Last year, my long-running, free-to-use, and much beloved Indexhibit web portfolio finally crashed. My own bandwidth had been exhausted elsewhere, and rather than wrestle with the coding, I have switched to a new service that has offered me this posting platform. I have fond memories of personal blogs on previous iterations of the web that I found important at that time, in that spirit I will try to take up such a practice.
I am going to call the text that I build here, Synthetic, as it will be made from disparate sources, a collage of notes and images that strike me at a specific moment, but which I might not otherwise revisit. While at the level of biochemistry, “synthetic” and “organic” might cut a clean distinction, we must be careful because the concept is not so analogously expansive. While “synthetic” is suggestive of a denatured and inhuman thing, the shape of our human character is nothing if not synthetic, a melange of inherited traits and received knowledge pieced together from here and there, even as they remain in contradiction.
Capitalism calls it a business plan, for science its a hypothesis, while artists make a proposal. None of these apply here as my principals of form will be ad-hoc with ends unknown. If it serves a purpose it will find that purpose in the process of its making and without recourse to external metric. The hope is (as always with this type of thing), the self imposed pressure of making it public will lend the practice a fresh rigor, helping better trace themes that develop in my reading and thought over time. Our conditions of existence make it so we risk losing the possibility of adhering to Benjamin’s dictum that “Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.” So let it be an aide to thought, not a distraction from it.
jbm 9.2023