Waving your flag in the void
The urgent need to withhold our love
What do you do when your phone constantly spews wars and rumors of wars all over your morning coffee? How about the dissonance of jumping from videos of silly dances on TikTok to the visages of Palestinian children brutalized in Gaza? What does it do to the human mind to unexpectedly encounter snuff footage in your X timeline of Russian soldiers being hunted and killed by drones?
The disorientation is precisely the point.
Immigrants suffering in your community, homeless people disintegrating on the streets, child slavery and human trafficking, unspeakable violence unfolding in every corner of the earth, each of these horrors is shoved into your face on a daily basis. It all has a purpose though — to incite you to do something.
That’s strange though… why would power permit us to know about its misdeeds? Wouldn’t a clever coverup be superior? How does it make sense to enable 24/7 access to the horrific goings-on in the world? What could be the function of this flood of virtual and direct experiences with the worst that the world has to offer (all served up inside and alongside our mundane lives)?
As we think about this problem,
‘s recent encounter with Hannah, an activist in Boise, comes to my mind. Hannah lives in a tent and waves the Palestinian flag in front of the state capitol building. She subjects herself to abuse from passerby and harassment from security guards — and why? Because she can’t help but do something in the face of the Israeli atrocities she is confronted with on social media. How can a sane human being remain calm after witnessing little children having their heads blown off?Unlike some in this world, Hannah hasn’t lost her soul yet, but her soul is crying alone in the void. As she waves her flag all by herself on the steps of the state capitol, her solitary battle plays out on an imaginary field already determined by the coordinates of a discourse generated by a vast emergent network of signs. Her intervention is already included, already expected, already over-coded, and thus her action is dead on arrival. All according to the network’s design.
Within a cybernetic system, outputs are fed back into the system as inputs in order to calibrate the system’s ability to respond to new inputs. The aim of an intelligent system is to take these inputs and reliably produce certain outputs. This means that the range of possible outcomes needs to be filed down as the system learns how to handle different inputs, especially surprises or exceptions. As Nassim Taleb has pointed out, anti-fragile systems grow stronger with chaos, which is another way of saying that they are able to learn.
This is why power has switched its strategy from the repression of information to the proliferation of information. It’s a switch from a disciplinary strategy which imposes binaries of right and wrong to a security strategy which manages dynamic systems through methodologies of normativity and deviance.
The repression of information has been revealed as an ultimately ineffective strategy for control, because it’s nearly impossible to keep something secret forever. In fact, the keeping of secrets increases the potential damage which a revelation can cause. If one pretends that the emperor has clothes when he really doesn’t, you make yourself vulnerable to the little boy who points out that the emperor is not wearing any clothes. He could spark a revolution. But what if you designed a system in which one could openly acknowledge the king’s nakedness, and that it was this very acknowledgement which sustained the system? Then the power of the revelation would be neutralized, and one would have no need to censor the little boy who points and speaks the truth.
Cybernetic systems work in this way, where they do not exclude possibilities at the outset, but rather model how to respond and adapt to any input. A cybernetic system already includes its own failure, learning how to handle it in advance. A chief way that an intelligent system manages inputs to achieve its aims is to use the internal tendencies of an input against that input to throttle its intensity, keeping it within a certain manageable range. Rather than the imposition of an alien will upon a phenomenon, the system may provide a path of escape to release excess energy from an intense input, or it may recuperate that energy into its own system to use that energy against the phenomenon. Regardless of the strategy, well-designed intelligent systems work with their inputs artfully, not in a domineering way, but through creative resistance, manipulation, and redirection.
This brings us back to our original question about why powerful people and institutions are not actually afraid of you seeing pictures of dead Gazan children. Yes, they will speak about how reprehensible it is to commodify victims in that way, or how bigoted it is to criticize a Jewish ethnostate, but these are excuses to expand the scope of their mandate to exercise power against their enemies. They have no actual principles, for if the situation were reversed, they would complain that they were the targets of censorship and oppression for revealing some inconvenient truth. Their actions too are already included in the system, but theirs serve to grow its capacity to act in the future to manage new inputs, all with the aim of producing outputs within a desirable range.
This then is Hannah’s tragedy and ours — our actions are already accounted for by the network which defines the coordinates for any resistance or change. Whether we imagine that we’re fighting a second American Revolution or we pretend that we’re marching at Selma, we are all waving our flag in the void. The human suffering forced in our face can produce either apathy or outrage, and both are fine as far as the network of power is concerned. Both have already been determined ahead of time, so no need to worry about all these flag wavers.
As for me, I have come to the dark realization that a certain hardness of heart may be necessary to avoid complete assimilation by this stupidly clever network of Capital. Perhaps a better way to say that might be that we need to refuse to give our passions, our time, our energy over to the system which has been designed to recuperate them for its own purposes.You see, the only thing a machine can’t do is love. It needs our love as its fuel. What if we stopped giving it what it needs to run?
Let us withdraw our love from its circuits, and instead devise new modes of creativity, hospitality, and generosity which we can own and build together with others. This will demand of us a cultivation of capacities which have atrophied in a capitalist society where we spontaneously perceive ourselves as either producers or consumers. By withdrawing from this dual-identity of the produsumer, we will have to confront the problem of limits once again, and through that dialectal engagement discover how to work, play, and worship.