News from the Collective

By the OBP team

The recent wave of government censorship in America under the Trump administration has sent a chilling message to US scholars, librarians, universities and publishers alike: the freedom and stability we often take for granted in order to undertake and publish research is not guaranteed. As publishers committed to open access (OA), the suppression, distortion, and erasure of research is antithetical to our core mission: to share rigorous academic work freely. This is why we have signed the Declaration to Defend Research Against U.S. Government Censorship, and we urge others to do the same.

The assault on academic freedom is not a hypothetical risk; it is happening now. Government agencies have restricted the terminology that can be used in government-funded research, frozen funding for politically ‘sensitive’ topics, and removed publicly available data from official sources. Researchers have been targeted for pursuing knowledge that challenges political narratives, while universities have been threatened with the removal of funding in order to coerce their obedience to the administration’s will. In response to these actions by the American government, we have even seen attempts by scholarly societies to censor published research without informing the author. These acts do not merely impact the individuals and institutions directly involved; they strike at the very heart of scholarly integrity and global knowledge production.

We believe that OA publishing is crucial because it is an act of resistance against censorship and control. When knowledge is published OA, it can be accessed and shared in many places with no restriction – making it much more difficult to smother once published. When knowledge is openly available, it cannot be erased.

At OBP, we do not limit research to a single proprietary platform. We distribute widely and openly, ensuring that scholarship is available across multiple external repositories, platforms, and archives, freely available to download and share. This decentralization means that if one source is lost or modified, the research remains available elsewhere, safeguarding it for future generations. It ensures that authors' hard work will not disappear due to political pressure or institutional instability. By publishing OA, authors have confidence that their contributions to knowledge will persist, no matter the challenges ahead.

Arguments for the benefits of OA often focus on the reader: the reader’s access is not inhibited by a paywall or a price for a physical copy that is too expensive to afford. But OA can also liberate and protect the author, ensuring global reach for their work, and safeguarding it from erasure under political or institutional pressure. However, for the freedom to publish and preserve one’s research to be meaningful, it must not be dependent on the author’s ability to pay a fee.  This is why we use a Diamond OA model that does not charge authors, and support other publishers in developing the same via our work on Copim’s infrastructures.

OA is often perceived as a risk: can a publisher risk shifting to an OA model; can libraries have confidence that their OA investments are worthwhile or that an OA initiative is ‘sustainable’; can authors take the risk of publishing with a less well-known Diamond OA press? But in a world where old certainties are crumbling – where censorship, platform instability and political interference pose real threats – OA offers something traditional publishing cannot: resilience. Once knowledge is openly available, it cannot easily be silenced. In this light, OA is not a gamble: it is a safeguard.

Open Book Publishers stands unequivocally against threats to academic freedom. We will continue to support researchers in sharing their work freely, without fear of suppression. We urge our colleagues to recognize the urgency of this moment and join us in this commitment.

What do our authors say? We share here a post from Ash Lierman, author of The Struggle You Can’t See: Experiences of Neurodivergent and Invisibly Disabled Students in Higher Education, who writes from their perspective as a US-based researcher, author and librarian, and as a disabled and transgender person. Read Ash’s post.

Sign the Declaration to Defend Research Against U.S. Government Censorship here. Use the hashtag #DefendResearch to spread the word.

12th of March

I finished watching the film No Other Land and it’s raining outside. It is a documentary on the destruction of the occupied West Bank villages of Masafer Yatta. The documentary—a collaboration between Palestinian Basel Andra and Israeli Yuval Abraham—was conspicuously awarded an Oscar earlier this year. It depicts the undying strength and perseverance of the resistance movement in the face of Israeli military units and settlers who casually murder civilians, demolish educational and domestic infrastructure, and pour cement into wells. It’s raining outside and I feel tired and suddenly so sad.  I spent months avoiding feeling the weight of the world and my news feed.  I chose to enjoy my privilege and laugh, drink, and dance in the collapsing world.  I align my avoidance with the distraction from grief, the heavy claustrophobic feelings of sorrow and helplessness. It is much easier to look away or trace the blurry contours of destruction and death. To look directly would mean to deeply consider the millions of individuals casually murdered, amputated, raped, missing, or living under unjust and violent regimes and slip into the valley I have been avoiding. Empathy fatigues.

The objectives of the film are to fracture empathy fatigue by depicting the complexities and rewards of multi-ethnic allyships and resistance. Although residents of Masafer Yatta have stated the film is important to platform and personalize the war, No Other Land has been criticized by the pro-Palestinian movement Boycott Divest Sanction as a film that promotes normalization of the occupation, represents an Israeli voice, and optically formalizes the apartheid state. The directors are accused of accepting an award by the blatantly hypocritical and bullying empire of America, which finances the genocide and mutilates people and lands to access the valuables hidden in the folds of landscapes so violently fought over. However, by publicly denouncing the film due to the inherent need to radicalize the narrative of resistance, BDS disregards a locally produced chronicle and attempts to monopolize the sculpting of dissident imagery.

18th of January

I go to a literary evening with Nicholas Schultz presenting his new book Land Sickness to examine the emotional and political fatigue he defines through “the new ecological class.” Land Sickness is an auto-fiction travelogue describing the planetary interconnection and agony through a series of personal climate-related decisions of mobility and consumption facing those privileged with a choice; flight or bus? Veggies wrapped in plastic? Vegan or dairy? “It seems that I exist from others, like a spider in a web, sustaining myself by catching and feeding off them. ” The author describes the relatable anxiety of helplessness. In the discussion following the book presentation, he spoke of the forlorn aesthetics of the Green Party and the climate protests, criticizing the lack of visually informed and emotively charged resistance collectivities and their weak use of symbols. He addresses the ongoing discourse regarding leftist movements’ apparent incapability of injecting hope and action to fracture the fatigue of helplessness through evocative aesthetic narrative. I ask what he thinks of direct action as a form of resistance, and the sweet Danish sociologist predictably and proudly refers to his undying belief in democracy and political methods. How Scandinavian of him.  Schultz states this very seriously, as if a reality existed in which current infrastructures could solve the well-documented and studied wars, ongoing genocide, mundane inequalities, extractivist mechanisms, and the climate collapse knowingly driven by just a few massive corporations interlacing moral and economic dependency and decay. The democracy he believes in is what we are witnessing—a subjugation to a grid of suffering imposed through an undying belief in diplomacy and the phantasma of politics.

I feel fatigue in my bones and a fog in my brain. I feel saliva thicken in my mouth. I feel disgusting, as if a mirror has been placed in front of my face and I am a brat that does nothing, nothing at all. I want to rip out my eyes and peel off my idiotic white skin. Later on my friends and I refer to the lack of visual and ideological narratives to represent the left in inspiring, productive, and revolutionary ways. Luigi Mangionni, a young man who murdered Brian Thompson, the CEO of the biggest insurance company in the US, with a 3D printed gun in December 2024, is mentioned as the only recent example of inspirational and sexy leftist resistance. One of the only images of resistance that trended in a generative way and gave disillusioned leftist communities the feeling of possible change and action that transcends veganism and infographics; “Don’t forget Congo!”, is an image showing a zoomed-in photo of Luigi’s six-pack and the text UTOPIAN LANDSCAPES. This meme functions as an image of resistance and hope because it is reflective of the memetic hive mind and connotative forms of communication: those rooted in emotion, belief, and experiential associations. Unlike denotative systems—which rely on literal meaning, objective framing, and the strict logic of alphabetic code—connotative communication spreads through affect, intuition, and shared cultural subtext. It doesn’t explain; it evokes. Similarly, long-form student protests in Serbia against their authoritarian, autocratic, and corrupt president, Vučić, are effective as triggers of hope, because of their use of symbols, DIY flags, collectivity, horizontality, and youth as connotative forms of expression and mass action. Unlike a different set of protests in Serbia and the Balkans protesting the construction of a lithium mine, which proved to be less viral due to their smaller size, shorter longevity, and lack of visceral honesty and associative strength. Objecting to lithium mines in our European backyard of western Serbia, thus preferring extractivist infrastructure to be located in the jungles of the Congo in Africa, doesn’t resonate because interlinking moralism and political solutionism is a flaccid agenda of resistance . The Serbian students protesting their government on a delusional and systemic rather than representative level is simply a more potent and resonant cause, avoiding the hypocrisy that has consumed the web that held the radical left.

Utopian Landscapes,
Anonymous meme, IG account dank.lloyd.wright

25th of February

I go to a conference called Tactics&Practice#16: Are You a Software Update? organized by the Ljubljana-based institute Aksioma to find out more about optical collectivity, evocative imagery, and AI-generated imaginariums of dystopian landscapes. Lesia Kulchynska, a visual studies researcher and independent curator who aligns online political recruitment strategies to classical advertisement models, posited in her lecture that image production and the production of violence coincide. She speaks of Ukrainian car arsonists drafted online, where regular individuals are hired as contractors to make a video or image of a burning car. The contractors are encouraged to set a car on fire and film it—even if a vehicle had already been torched, the gig-workers are told to reignite the scorched metal shells and set them ablaze again. “The job is to produce an image of violence and create media content, not the act of violence itself.” The media content functions as an advertisement image, aiming to evoke your desire to be part of a fictional, already existing collectivity, striving to outline the future as a fact and shape what is to come. “Pain is a marketing goldmine,” and political recruitors as advertisers don’t need to explain the benefits of an action, but rather “locate the source of the pain.”

The Lure of War, Lesia Kulchynska, Aksioma
screenshot of Tactics&Practice #16: Are You A Software Update?
25.2, Kino Šiška, Ljubljana

The Tactics&Practice conference concluded with Donatella Della Ratta, a media theorist specialized in Arabic-language media, whose striking performance addressed the AI-assisted conjurations of future realities. Similarly to potent advertisement mechanisms, the future can be rendered and thus rework the present through the synthetic realism of AI-generated urbanities. Curiously, the conference took place one day before the official Donald Trump Instagram account posted a bizarre, AI-generated video of Palestine as a utopia of “consumption and technology.” The short-form video showed Gaza specifically as a renovated Riviera of hotels and shopping centers centered around a huge golden statue of Trump, while Donald in the flesh and Netanyahu are rendered by the pool drinking cocktails as money rains from the sky. Donatella could not have possibly known that only a few hours after her lecture concluded this viral reel would be published, clearly demonstrating the reality of her words. Using AI-generated vivid imagery functions as “a vision so seamless, it no longer feels like a possibility but an inevitability.” She tells us that by looking at and consuming the images of these mutated landscapes and societies, we assimilate them in silence through our eyes and the optical unconscious—“a future that has not yet arrived but has already been seen.”

28th of February 

I go to the opening of a Jan Krmelj new theatre production, O.I.L., to see an alternative present that has not yet fully arrived in the form of a three-hour-long theatre play. Through a disembodied narrator, a journalist, and five members of an activist collective describing their backgrounds, past direct actions, and a geopolitical podcast series that was interrupted by an abrupt flood, the play constructs a parallel reality that seems so real, the viewers’ optical unconscious fully accepts it. The method of reality construction the director uses is devised theatre or collective creation, where the actors build on personal, real, and emotive life experiences throughout rehearsals to develop storylines and characters. The narrative is anchored around a mix of fictional and real events and is closely knit with the multiple media used. Actors film each other and a miniature replica of the stage throughout the performance, exchanging the camera that streams the zoomed-in perspective onto a projection behind them. Framed up close, a small tank of water and spilled ink become a slowly spreading oil spill, and miniature cars sprinkled with baki ng soda become a snowy parking lot in a Russian city built around an oil refinery. The radical collective walks the line between activism, vandalism, and art; Spotify is hacked to play a single audio, government parties’ sites are manipulated, algorithms are adjusted and steered, a fake political party is constructed online that grows a public backing, and the United Nations Climate Change internal conference is infiltrated and compromised. The mode of communication in O.I.L. is connotative on multiple levels, using parallel visual and sonic methods to construct an evocative and alternate state, where the conditions of reality can be adjusted. Although Krmelj’s work is generative in cultivating the possibility of cyber direct actions as scaffolding for the fictional left, the seemingly inevitable dystopic narrative is still the informing anchor of his current work.

NAFTA, Jan Krmelj
photo: Dorian Šilec Petek
28.2, Mini teater, Ljubljana

24th of April

While listening to the discussion around the book Land Sickness, watching the lectures of Tactics&Practice and to a lesser degree during the film No Other Land and the theatre play O.I.L. I couldn’t help but wonder why contemporary cultural producers rely exclusively on carefully layered critique of the system and opposition. What would happen if the narrative was flipped from criticizing dystopian realities to optically and conceptually building appealing utopian possibilities? Although all the cultural events I attended so far in 2025 attempt to construct and address a still-forming fictional leftist collectivity, they don’t go far enough. While these authors integrate familiar hooks and symbols, their communication often falls short—audiences are fatigued by dark analytical critiques, sweeping moralism, and the constant invocation of political solutions. We—the weepy bourgeois as well as the disenfranchised—are already (intimately) familiar with viral genocide, humanitarian and environmental catastrophes, and the extraction mechanisms pillaging our landscapes. We are also familiar with the ineffectiveness of existing political parties—whether through complicity or paralysis. Alternative methods of imagined leftist resistance movements must transcend critique as a means to an end by co-opting the reality-sculpting techniques of the radical right: persuasive visuals of collectivity, strategic virality, digital recruitment models, and AI-generated speculative futures. Such systems of communication have proven to be extremely efficient in the post-internet era of primarily image-based communication and utilize virality, propagative efficiency, mass appeal, and pain relocation. We—members of the fictional left—know it’s time to change the rules and inverse the narrative to grow alternative imaginariums of realities we want to live. This can be done by working towards pushing the memetic infrastructure that already exists past its aesthetic overload to a productive level of community simulation. Communities that will blossom in realities that will be seen, imagined, felt, and ingrained into our optical unconscious as powerfully as today’s dystopias. The seeds are already planted across the globe. All we need to do is to help them grow.

This text was originally published in Slovenian on Disenz.net

“I at once grew closer to it and more skeptical of it.”–Mike Pepi

I’m trying to make sense of the complex systems that accompany my experience of reality–everyday & everywhere–and I mean two things in particular: internet and my (human) (sub- and conscious) mind. 

In an age dominated by digital platforms, we find ourselves both drawn to and skeptical of the internet’s pervasive influence. The paradox of decentralization, the shifting dynamics of social media, and the ever-evolving relationship between humans and technology. Are we truly breaking free, or simply shifting to new systems of entrapment? As we navigate an ecosystem of algorithmic feeds, ephemeral interactions, and data-driven intimacy, we must question whether decentralization alone can address the deeper socio-political forces shaping our digital existence.  We must rethink the emotional attachment to inanimate objects and the belief that devices are alive enough to be a fulfilling part of our lives.

***TRENDING NOW*** “Decentralisation, a Libertarian’s signature fixation” wrote Mike Pepi in his book “Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia”. A read that gave me a lot to think about in terms of our beliefs in technology. It’s greatly paired in time with the rise of interest in decentralised, federated platforms. Rising amounts of users express interest in moving away from Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Whatsapp) mostly to the Fediverse. To keep posting in an “ethical” way, to rescue the feeling of safety on the internet, to keep up with the world and run away from algorithmic addiction patterns. What I notice in my surroundings is not fully “moving away from Meta” but adding another application to your plate. Yet where does the need to post come from? Does there have to be a reason? Shouldn’t sharing be inherently innocent? Shouldn’t it exist outside the realms of profit, popularity or materialistic gain?  Yet we’ve learned about and observed the development of media dependency, both emotional as well as financial, exemplified by the influencer syndrome and an entrepreneur pandemic. We are the subjects of exploitation–in an attention economy we pay constantly, unnoticed. We pay and at the same time we are the product itself. Our existence on the platform makes the engagement of others possible.

“[I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a death of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”–Herbert A. Simon 

The attention economy generates negative externalities for society that impact both individuals and communities. The Wikipedia page for attention economy states that “attention economics is also relevant to the social sphere. Specifically, long-term attention can be considered according to the attention that people dedicate to managing their interactions with others. Digital media and the internet facilitate participation in this economy by creating new channels for distributing attention. Ordinary people are now empowered to reach a wide audience by publishing their own content and commenting on the content of others.”

I want to think for a moment about pre-internet ways of distributing information, coark/information boards for example–something similar to your feed on platforms nowadays. You would have to make an effort, most likely a conscious effort, to go to this type of board to get yourself familiar with upcoming events, probably on a local scale. There you would find informative words or images. Sharing wasn’t as random as it appears today. You can access a message in forms of words or images anywhere, anytime. The ease of action enhances greediness. Posting can be greedy, and don’t get me wrong, I’m not in any way against posting, I find it fascinating. It is about observing how humans will take as much space as is given to them, to a point where the resources reach scarcity and there is a big hole in the system. A grand idea of a platform that was supposed to contribute something meaningful to your life got blurry a long time ago. And I mean it on both ends of the platforms (users and owners). I want to believe that the idea behind platforms was community building and to serve the users. It’s sad but I think that as humans we’re sinking below the horizon as we are drowning in a flood of an individualist sea, desperately trying to breathe before we all sink down below, together but separate. Platform owners play a crucial role in shaping our experiences, it’s nothing new and we all know that the algorithmic feed is supposed to keep you on the platform for as long as possible. Unintended effects include amplifying the spread of misinformation, online bullying, hate speech, brainrot, and mentally unwell people all over your feed. The AI algorithms predict whether the posts are valuable for the user based on their behaviours on the platforms. You don’t own your feed in the same way you no longer own your attention in the algorithmic labyrinth. Moving away from Meta to the Fediverse brings back the control over your own feed, for now it’s designed for the user to have complete customisation of their own landscape. Additionally, the role between user and  owner is a bit more blurry, as every user in a way “owns their own server”.

I came across the term “Global Switch Day”. The 1st of February was supposed to be the day of leaving Meta and moving to the Fediverse. But it’s far more complex than that, people don’t just “switch” globally, no matter how good the idea is–it takes more to form a movement than just posting an image. A lot of social media users don’t even know what the Fediverse is. Let’s start here: Fediverse is a mashup of two words. Federation and universe. To federate means to form an alliance, so the Fediverse is really an alliance of smaller websites or apps that federate content with each other. This work is decentralised, meaning no single company controls it, and users have control over their data. Some of these websites or instances are run by corporations, while others are run by individuals. Each of these websites has their own rules and local feeds, but users on one site can easily interact with users on another site because they’re using the same protocol–an open source tool that connects websites into one global network. The most popular Fediverse protocol is ActivityPub. If you post on one website it gets federated to all of your followers on other websites that use the same protocol. They can comment and share as if it was on the same website they were on. Mastodon is one of the biggest apps in the Fediverse. You can interact with people on Mastodon from your Pixelfed account–it’s like being able to comment on a YouTube account from your Instagram account. Fediverse is not only for social media, but also for blogs and websites (WordPress, for example). This is the technical aspect of how it works, but there’s also a bigger idea behind this. Mastodon founder, Eugen Rochko, has a vision for democratising social media. The platform itself holds no power in banning or blocking users. Users are able to host their own servers with their own rules. When hate-speech servers do appear, other servers can band together to block them, essentially ostracizing them from the majority of the platform. “I guess you could call it the democratic process,” Rochko says. They can only block it from their end. Here comes a doubt whether such a behavior can lead to echo chambers of hate speech servers, accelerating far right or any type of radical ideologies together within their own groups. It can, and probably will, happen. On a platform like Mastodon it’s just easier to not promote such content, to detach from it. But the problems don’t disappear. Technical solutions won’t solve social problems. Disconnection, ignorance and negation of political and privacy related aspects of social media usage is a problem outside of a technical solution. We might think we are raising awareness but in fact we are changing our feed governance. I think in order to actually change existing social media landscapes right now we need to change how we see the Internet. It is not only a digital network but a reflection of already existing power relationships and social conditions.

There are roughly 400 million monthly metaverse users with circa 80% of them being under 16. There are predictions that by 2030, there could be as many as 5 billion metaverse users. Humans are not so good at making predictions, but I could see that coming. I can’t help to think that platform consciousness should be discussed as widely as any other cultural education. Institutions are far behind platforms and rapid changes. Unaware users choke compulsively on dopamine hits, robbed of their attention. Subconscious feelings of building a connection when entering  Create Mode and posting on Instagram stories or any other social media platform. Everything we used to create, explore, and make meaning with in the world has collapsed onto platforms and is accessible from a single device. Attention is data. Everywhere and nowhere.

I’m checking the statistics of Mastodon number of users (btw it’s very easy to access this data on the official Mastodon page, but not that easy to find X stats). Indeed we can see a rise in the number of overall users while the number of active users decreases. Since I started seeing a lot of people I follow on Instagram posting their alternative media handles, I can’t stop thinking about the future of Fediverse and similar initiatives. The idea is great but… I think we are all aware of what’s happening and we see it, but we may not be able to think alongside what we see. The interconnectedness and constant flow of information, utopian dreams, normalisation of hyperstimulation, communication all the time. Meaningless contact and consumption. Most people think that if there’s a problem and they take action, it solves the problem but in fact it only puts us in a new environment to further deal with the problem and to take further actions. The problem is not gone, we just deal with it in a different way. We are in a feedback loop, the systems we’re living in are not designed to solve the problem, if the problem was solved we would no longer need those systems.

In the end, for many it’s just another application to open, though freshness encourages contact–desire to be seen, to create. Feeling of belonging from the 3 likes under your morning coffee post on a microblogging app. Shallowing human interaction because what could’ve been shared with one person/a group of people directly and intentionally is addressed anonymously to a digital void waiting for a reaction of someone who relates. A lack of intentionality, hazy mental states. Intentional inexistence, objects that have no existence outside the mind or protocol mediated mind projections. For example, assume that you’re thinking about Hello Kitty. On the one hand, it seems that this thought is intentional: you’re thinking about something. On the other hand, Hello Kitty does not exist. This suggests that you are either not thinking about something or are thinking about something that does not exist (Hello Kitty lore is beside the point). Our mental states are consumed by stories mediated through bits, pixels and metadata. Relationalism holds that abstract objects have actual existence but they exist outside space and time. Concrete mental objects are formed in the mind of the receiver. There’s so much of online phenomena and digital wonders that don’t belong anywhere else except these spaces and our minds. Is existing online enough to define one’s existence or does it belong to fiction? I’m thinking about copypastas, digital folklore, AI generated videos. They get stuck in your head. Scrolling down you witness intentional inexistence. AI influencers on TikTok with millions of followers, keeping up with content that in a way, doesn’t exist, yet holds a place in one’s mind (tiktok.com/@magalu tiktok.com/@jankyandguggimon). A growing, never ending need for communication, shared fantasies and more technofixes that are trying to address issues which are first and foremost socio-political problems.  

*Talking* To The Void. Context of Distance. Misinformed. 

Did platforms (microblogging) replace diaries? Posting– direct contact with other humans? Digital intimacy taking over the need to meet with other humans? We ignore the people around us to keep up with what’s happening in our digital lives. We ignore the beauty of intimacy being remote from others. Apps and devices are becoming the main companion. iFriend, chatGPT as a therapist. Realities are mixed, lines are blurry. The greediness of space and of muchness. Social media breaks the Dunbar’s number in a performative sense. Micro-blogging, short sentences being released to your 3 followers. I’m still on Instagram–it’s easy to be there–all my friends are, people whose work I’m interested in are there. It’s not so easy to leave when you already have a network. It comes with a cost. Platforms are haunted by the idea that is long gone. The global switch day shift did not happen, but is slowly happening in the back. I want to believe… but what needs to shift it’s not the amount of users on platforms but the way we approach them. New platforms are coming to terms without the disappearance of the conditions which formed them in the first place. Ordinary social media are here and will likely remain for a long time. Individual people, smaller initiatives and institutions are standing in front of a decision–to keep up with Meta or abolish the multinational technology conglomerate by moving to open source, ethical media. But there’s so much choice in alternative media it can feel paralysing and at the same time unnecessary.

To soothe an inner scream for peace, to find an alternative in belonging that feels at least less “artificial”. To regain yourself in the digital, to own yourself and your communication again. To feel like you have any control over the digital and that it’s not controlling you. To be fair, I don’t know how many apps I have left in me. I downloaded Mastodon and Pixelfed but I find it difficult to navigate. I see myself not even wanting to engage. I gave it a chance but now I’m empty of excitement. Bathed in algorithmic feed recommendations, in comforting bubbles of repetitive and familiar media, you get addicted to a certain type of reality. To change the governance of your feed is like going out of your favourite cafe, where you  never have to make any decisions anymore because the barista remembers your order, and rediscovering the outside world. Suddenly the amount of possibility, action, and decisions you can make about your consumption are overwhelming. It’s no longer entering the place and getting your iced matcha latte with coconut milk and a sourdough pain au chocolat, but you have to first choose the place, read the menu, make the decision yourself and sit with it. From what I observe on my humble Mastodon feed, the moment of moving to the Fediverse is not only changing the platform or the app but also changing our relationship with it. For now on Mastodon I mostly follow people I know in real life as it’s challenging to navigate and reach outside of that circle. Everything feels personal. Morning coffees, afternoon coffees, brief thoughts, pictures of pets. It feels like the early era of Instagram, an innocent photo you took with your smartphone posted right there for your friends to see, just without an Amaro or Nashville Instagram frame. At the same time I love it and just don’t know what to do with it. I wish I could drink coffee with my friends and hear their stories IRL. I know it’s natural to want to be noticed and heard but I don’t know if I can open another app for that. It’s my inner doubt. Alongside this doom but there’s also the possibility of finding communities and environments to engage with, the difference is that it’s back in your hands–you have to search for it, through tags, through followers of followers or their reposts. The agency is yours again. And it can feel empty at first. Empty and confusing, like you’re suddenly no longer fed with digital MSG. But at this point I’m not sure how, and if, I want to, eat from these plates. A restless longing for better circumstances that may not happen in the digital, on any platform–decentralised or not.

And I feel we don’t see it that way, but we want to be addicted, to feel the belonging. Addiction culture. Continuously discontent, constantly feeding ourselves. A Tamagotchi effect. iPhones became our new Tamagotchis despite the animal inside being our ego, fed by the constant interaction with a device. It is clear that humans tend to attach emotionally to inanimate objects devoid of emotions of their own. The development of an emotional attachment towards machines, softwares or software agents. Consumers tend to believe, subconsciously or consciously, that devices are alive enough to be a fulfilling part of their lives. A symbiotic relationship between a human and their phone–a companion species. You touch it, hold it, feed it with your attention. It mediates your relationships, makes keeping up with the world accessible always, everywhere. It’s not your brain but it feels like it is when it’s storing your memories. When you can’t access it in your own head, you can look it up. Algorithmic communication addiction. Constant stimulation. Alive-enough, inanimate objects will take our life away from us if you let them. Life, if not directly lived, is experienced.  Through platforms, screens, rating-infused activities. The world is losing the spice of surprise, awkward silence and the beauty of not knowing. New decentralised media are a great start for giving the power back to the users, but there’s a lot of work to be done on our end to rebuild our relationship with the world in terms of intentionality and feeling content without the content.

Klaudia Orczykowska explores digital micro-realities through a blend of critical and personal writing. Her work focuses on the emotional and cognitive dimensions of internet culture, with a particular interest in aesthetics, platforms, and identity.

The work in the current exhibition  ‘We Work Like Peasants While AI is Out There Painting and Writing Poetry’ at POST Nijmegen (NL) is hopeful. The hope is, according to Lieke Wouters’ introduction in the accompanying brochure, that we might all become Luddites.

“Ever since the Luddite uprising was put down in 1810s, working people have been locked into a similar state of anxiety over how technology will impact our livelihoods. For two hundred years, we have rarely been free from concern that this machine or that program will make our work redundant, less skilled, or simply worse”, according to Brian Merchant in his seminal book on the Luddite struggles. Today, these concerns are mainly focused on the advances in artificial intelligence and surveillance. There is renewed attention for refusal, resistance and re-imagining of technological innovations at work by digital Luddites or more general through algorithmic Ludditism. At the exhibition, on display until may 11, you can immerse yourself with some of the most recent artistic efforts in this direction.

The artists in this exhibition are critiquing bullshit jobs and algorithmic exploitation, creatively mobilizing against work algorithms. They work against, and look beyond, the dystopia of inhuman societies and numbing labor. It is indeed reminiscent of the Luddite struggle, but applied artistically to today’s technological innovations. It shows the promise of this type of work and evokes further experimentation and creative resistance for the future.

Unlike the Luddites, these artists are not actually smashing the physical infrastructure of oppressive technologies. They are showing different ways to resist and reimagine the possibilities of creative disruption and opposition. An example is Ana-Maria Cojocaru’s 2174: Future ruins of an Automated Past that visualizes the current repulsive design of self-service checkouts and entrance gates in supermarkets and shows how in the future these places might be left ruined, destroyed and abandoned. Such visualizations question and provoke. It could be supplemented with further calls to action, for example Not to Go to the Albert Heijn anymore, or invitations to defiant research on how to counter supermarket surveillance like the Miscalculating Risk project that varia hosted in Rotterdam, or which La Quadrature du Net is working on. There could be more literature available and further linking of actual social movements working in this direction. Still, the exhibition proves a welcoming starting point for imagining creative forms of conspiring against such development we all encounter in our everyday lives.

The more moving work in the exhibition is a three-channel video Unknown Label by Nicolas Gourault about the “invisible, underpaid and sometimes mind-numbing labor to support new automation processes.” It shows the work of microworkers that are employed to draw the outlines of people and objects in video footage of self-driving cars. They talk about their questions and dreams during this monotonous work, and we can listen to the music they put on while doing their tasks. The video also narrates how workers investigate ways to use for example a VPN to be able to work as though they are from another country with higher wages. It connects you with these ‘ghost workers’ and gives insight into the micro-resistance they engage in. It is about their personal habits, thoughts, the patterns of their everyday work life. It shows the interfaces they have at their disposal.

The video offers a close look at the complexities of today’s work related resistance. Luddites’ of today have to engage with data mining, abstract power relations, uncertain futures, chokepoints of creative labor markets, and all kinds of technologically erected barriers to alternatives, as Jathan Sadowski argues in The Mechanic and The Luddite (2025). The video supplements the abstract analyses, and the tactics and strategies of algorithmic agency as recently theorized by Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré in their 2024 book Algorithms of Resistance. In this video a more embodied and personal story is shown which tugs you in. Through the personal encounters, we might get a feel for some of the existing weapons of the weak for today’s world.

The tech platforms and systems can, and must, be resisted collectively. It needs some plan or collaborative strategy. Logjams could be one of them. Tytus Szabelski-Rozniak shows in the exhibition a trio of blue panels that explain what a logjam can bring about. A logjam is for example created when you order many cheap items to one place. What happens next? Many riders could appear in one place. It is possible to agitate among the riders. Media attention could be used. A strike could be called. The panels show such possibilities in rather simple diagrams. Does the strike succeed when there are platform negotiations? Would the platform rise wages for non-strikers? Or can we envision new relations between riders and for example restaurant owners? Should we even consider establishing a novel co-op platform? It likely all starts with protest or subversion. The outcomes will often not be what we hope. But we can at least creatively investigate the options and map out probable outcomes. We better come prepared. The panels oversimplify and suggest some clear logic for what in real life will be more fuzzy processes, but at least they visualize some more hopeful Luddite inspired disruptions, and some scenarios to better avoid.

I certainly got hope it will lead to further collective action and more (future) instances of Luddite resistance. As Craig Gent recently wrote in his book Cyberboss: “While technologies of management are intended to curb and direct worker (mis)behaviour and extend control to every corner of the workplace, worker resistance demonstrates guile against adversity, displaying cunning intelligence to re-thread power and technology against management”. Indeed, this is the hope that this accessible and congenial exhibition conveys.

Maybe not all of us will become Luddites. Still, as the machines are ‘hurtful to commonality’ according to the writings of the Luddites (that Kevin Binfield collected) we can at least involve as much people as possible and insist on the commonalities between us all. In this way multiple forms of resistance can be connected, and collective concerns can be shared. We would need more exhibitions like this, we could engage more people, organize workshops and exchanges like the ECHO event during this exhibition, and learn from each other’s experiences. As this exhibition is nicely situated in de Paraplufabrieken, next to the publisher and printer Proces-Verbaal, a hairdresser, the nice atelier of the performance duo Naaistreek and also the bookkeepers of Buro Queer, it made me think how to further find commonalities in these surroundings. And also how to get even more self-organized collectives and social movements involved. I think the connection to (former) squats or the kind of infoshop (56a) that Sanela Jahiç shows in the exhibited work “No to AI, Yes to a Non-fascist Apparatus” could be important. Especially when, as Dan McQuillan (as part of this work) explains, the technologies get ever more necropolitical and fascist. More artists and designers, writers and academics, activists and publishers, hairdressers and bookkeepers, could and should be somehow involved.

Artists are the ones taking the lead here, while they are themselves also under pressure of platforms and algorithms. Artists struggle with AI that takes over painting and writing poetry, like the exhibition title states. But there is also something promising, as these artists seem to be able to take up Luddite action against work as the main concern of their work. It is interesting to see where this leads to in the future. Like Alina Lupa shows, contributing an opening performance to this exhibition, artistic protest and opposition can be empowering, investigative, promising. It can lead to further future organizing and experimentation. And maybe, by explicitly relating to and resisting new technological developments and by taking cues from the Luddites, it can become even more so.

Will artists all become Luddites in the future? Well, at least this exhibition invites further bold creative inquiry of work in relation to latest technological developments. Luddism surely remains a prominent and provocative source of inspiration for further developing this in the future. Can we force the hidden operations of contemporary tracking and surveillance into view and (at least temporary) annul their effects, like the Luddites already did with earlier technological innovations some 200 years ago? How to take this on without being “crushed by the full power of a violent state” as, in the words of Brian Merchant, the Luddites were back in the days? Andrew Culp and Thomas Dekeyser propose in Counter Signals 5 (2024) that it is about finding new forms of sabotage that evolves “alongside the social-technological transformation of computing”. They propose we look at the work of CLODO (Comité Liquidant ou Détournant les Ordinateurs), or the protesters in Hong Kong which were tearing down surveillance cameras “not simply to render them inoperative, but to photograph, from up close, the products and logos of the large network of corporate-state actors facilitating state surveillance and oppression”. Will artists in the future be ready to develop further creative work in this direction? Just considering this might, I think, at least spark some additional bold experimentation and exciting future creative action.

Los Angeles, April 9, 2025

Dear Geert,

Writing to friends in Europe to explain what’s going on in the United States in the Spring of 2025 is like taking notes on a mental patient to feed to an AI therapist. One can’t capture everything, and there’s no certainty that any diagnoses will be either forthcoming or accurate. In fact, the AI therapist may exacerbate the condition via a reflexive repetition that confirms confirmation bias. Such is the nature of the vortex in which we find ourselves. Since my last letter, the news has been dominated by first the Signal scandal (I refuse to default to calling every disgrace in Washington “Something-gate”) and then the tariff nightmare that Trump labelled “Liberation Day” for the American economy.

There are so many reasons the Signal chat was front and center in the media. First, and perhaps most importantly, because it’s a perfectly solipsistic story about the media itself: a journalist is inadvertently added to a discussion about an ongoing operation held by people at the highest levels of the American security infrastructure on an insecure messaging app. Not only that, but the journalist is someone Trump and his minions particularly loathe. Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor of The Atlantic magazine and one of his big successes was a well-sourced story about how the flag-hugging president holds actual soldiers in contempt, calling them “losers” and “suckers.” The media has already gone over the obvious issues in the Signal scandal at endless length—just the use of a commercial app to discuss a military action in Yemen  is a first order security breach—but what they missed is how this whole fiasco demonstrates the vainglory of the US’s new, looksmaxxing ruling class.

Looksmaxxing is a triumph of Internet mindfuckery. Young on-line men now have a vocabulary and set of products and procedures that mimic the beauty regimes that women have been subjected to for, well, millennia. Looksmaxxers obsess about the angles (canthal tilt) and the interpupillary distance (IDP) between their eyes. They do “soft” interventions like targeted work outs, cosmetic tweaks, and “mewing” (tongue exercises to shift the shape of the jaw). “Hard,” i.e. surgical, interventions, are the next logical step. To scroll through looksmaxxing TikTok and Reddit forums is to enter a dreamworld that blends “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” plasticity with Incel insecurities.

There’s an unseriousness to looksmaxxing that belies its brutal impact on those it ensnares, and it could only exist amongst the terminally online who are desperate for the approval of those equally under its spell. The idea of using a commercial messaging app to discuss war plans made more sense to me when I started to think of their group chat as a more grown-up but just as unserious version of looksmaxxing that I’ll call cloutmaxxing, a way to signal power. The chat concerned airstikes on Houthi militias, but in the end it was less about communication than it was about vice signaling, a way to demonstrate prowess. The people on this chat were no longer marginal figures. Rising from being rank-and-file members of Congress, keyboard warriors, or TV talking heads, they now have jobs with real real badass credentials. Yet the Signal scandal demonstrates that they are sad little Virgins with new haircuts masquerading as Alpha male Chads (I feel sorry for you if you recognize all this manosphere language— if you don’t, stay away from Wikipedia, you’ll just feel worse at the end).

Hence the now infamous fist/flag/fire triptych emoji that Mike Waltz, the US National Security Advisor, sent to the others in this chat, including the Vice President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense. On Signal, Waltz was cloutmaxxing, emulating the bravado of teenage boys shitposting about their campaigns on Overwatch 2 or Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Waltz’s triptych signals performative rather than actual competence. To looksmax the part is to cloutmax the script, and what we’re seeing here is the Dunning-Kruger effect of overconfidence meeting the inevitable bubbling-up of imposter syndrome, all subsumed into a cultural battle against what Elon Musk called “civilizational suicidal empathy.”

One of the key figures in this chat was the even more over his head Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. Hegseth has been looks- and cloutmaxxing since his college days at Princeton. He may have been righteously accused of being a drunk, a sexual abuser, and an Islamophobe, but these are all signals to the MAGA faithful that he’s not restrained by wokeness (or much afflicted by empathy either). Even his on-record mismanagement of tiny veterans’ organizations did not disqualify him from taking over the largest bureaucracy in the world (and its most powerful military) because Hegseth looks the part. He was a host on a Fox News weekend show, and his belligerence to liberals, women, and trans people was amplified by a rugged jawline and suits cut to looksmax his fitness. Rather than a mea culpa after this security breach, the next day Hegseth ditched his American flag-lined suit jacket for a tee shirt to work out with Navy Seals, a sartorial choice that allowed him to show off his guns (tattooed biceps rather than actual armaments). The red-pilled pathos of all of this maxxing would be funnier if these weren’t men who can casually call in lethal strikes virtually anywhere in the world, from Greenland to the Heard & McDonald islands.

Greenland, of course, is now part of Trump’s Greater America project, a return to 19^th century territorial aggression, and a place that Europeans understand full well is actually in danger. Heard & McDonald may require a bit more explanation for all but the most news-addicted amongst us. They are two small islands 2,500 miles from Australia inhabited exclusively by penguins. The US is not looking to clobber these flightless birds with its elite Seals (“America’s enemies fear them—our allies trust them” posted Hegseth after his workout) but rather to hit them with tariffs. That there is neither trade nor even human beings on the islands did not prevent the Trump administration from lumping this territory in with everywhere else in the world on Liberation Day.

Donald Trump has no consistent ideology, and few ideals, but one idea that has stuck with him for years is that “they’re ripping us off”: “they” being the rest of the globe and “us” being the US. Trump is a serial grifter as well as being a projector of his own vices so it makes sense that he sees trade as a zero-sum rather than expansive process, with winners and losers rather than partners. So, in early April, against the advice of almost every reputable economist, and every historian with the slightest acquaintance with the effects of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the 1930s (hint, they contributed greatly to the Great Depression), he instituted an incoherent strategy that wiped out trillions in wealth as he single-handedly tanked stock markets around the world. Trump and his sycophants justified his actions with multiple and contradictory justifications: the tariffs would be kept in perpetuity, they were a negotiating tool, they would be paid for by other countries, they would be a short and painful readjustment that Americans would have to live with, they would improve America’s industrial might, they would address the crisis of masculinity by bringing back high-wage working class jobs, the list goes on and shifts every few hours or so.

There’s even a new, vaguely left conspiracy theory that Trump wants to destroy the American economy in order to consolidate power in the ruins, but that seems like too much intellectual work for him to have planned. In my last letter, I warned you not to underestimate Trump as stupid, but I certainly didn’t mean for you or anyone to buy the ridiculous canard that Trump plays three-dimensional chess. He and his administration in its second iteration are driven by traditional right-wing compulsions – lowering taxes on the rich, reducing services for the poor, and making sure women know their place. Add in anti-immigrant populism, anti-trans scapegoating, racist dog whistles and bullhorns, and a fully activated attack on reason and its defenders in science, academia and what remains of the civil service, and you have Trumpism. But to fully understand how it was sustained and grew, you have to understand its dynastic origins.

Trump is the heir to a vicious fortune. The New York Times estimated Donald inherited the contemporary equivalent of four hundred million dollars from his father Fred Trump. The elder Trump was a developer during the post-WWII era when public funds were made available to build the closest that the US ever got to social housing. Fred mastered the dark arts of Gotham development in that period: buy off politicians, grift from public funds, make deals with gangsters, stiff contractors, and rent to as few people of color as you can get away with. Donald the heir added in a gambler’s temperament and showy style to his father’s stolid villainy. But, of course, inveterate gamblers lose and when they do, they lose big.

Those of us who have been watching Donald for decades wondered how people could vote for a person who has gone through six bankruptcies and who couldn’t even make money in the casino business, but we underestimated how television recast this failson as the business hero of his own imagination. See the fin-de-siècle trilogy he didn’t write (of course an ADHD-addled heir needed ghost-writers) but that bears his name — Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987); Trump: Surviving at the Top (1990); and Trump: The Art of the Comeback (1997) — which traces his (imaginary) parabolic career. These books were bestsellers, and inspired T.V. producer Mark Burnett to build a reality competition show around him which Burnett called The Apprentice, which bailed Trump out of his post-casino financial crisis.

There is a subset of gamblers that have enough backing to survive their inner demons and outer losing streaks, and Trump during his political career certainly falls into that category. His return to the tables leaves both the country and the world exposed to Trump’s only driving force right now, which is to wreak revenge on his enemies and continue to accrue as much power as possible, if only to be able to humiliate any and all who do not join his cult. For just shy of a hundred days, his luck has held, but as the American poet Bret Harte wrote, “The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.” All of this leaves me fearing for the future, not only because of what Trump controls, but even more so because of what he doesn’t.

When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7^th, 2023 they were able to succeed because by October 6^th, the Israeli intelligence services, like the security forces and the judiciary, had been locked in conflict with Benjamin Netanyahu, a leader who had to stay in power to stay out of jail. Economists speak of October 29^th, 1929 as Black Tuesday, the start of the bear market that led to the Great Depression, but Monday, October 28^th was like any other day in the Roaring ‘20s, with unregulated markets and endless speculation. On the 27^th of June 1914, the multicultural Austro-Hungarian milieu Joseph Roth wrote of in The Radetzky March seemed impregnable. The next day, Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, and that ended not only the Archduke’s life but also the society Roth evoked so carefully. As for the world war, Roth wrote it “could clearly be seen coming, as one might see a storm brewing over the edge of a city, while its streets are still basking innocently under a cloudless sky.”

The brilliant Roth was a nostalgist and melancholic, and I hope I am neither, but as I watch the United States abandon its allies, insult its friends, and feast on its seed corn, what most worries me is that we are somehow in an extended day before. The luck cannot hold, and the sheer meanness of it all makes the solidarity to resist that much harder to generate. That the day before keeps recurring, doesn’t imply that the day after won’t finally arrive, and that’s what scares me.

Yours—

Peter

—

Peter Lunenfeld lives in California. His most recent book is City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined. He is a professor the Design Media Arts department at UCLA. His first letter from March 24, 2025 can be found here).

Socialism with hyperreal characteristics. The traditional urban-rural dichotomy is disrupted by a four-decade modernisation speedrun. Custom Doraemon Tesla parked up beside caged chickens. Temporal collapse. Cousin purchases cucumber lays with Weixin’s biometric palm scanning after haggling with elderly farmers for produce by the roadside. IP is rendered obsolete. Chinese aunties sporting Kuromi x Balenciaga pyjamas stroll by the river. Culture is stripped from context. This process is only accelerated by the geolocked internet. Everything is appropriated, remixed. Everything is predicated on speed: manufacturing, livestreaming, trends, people. Everything everywhere all at once.  

• Written in my notes app in Zhuzhou, China after falling sick with a fever whilst visiting my grandmother.
  

Simulacrum and Sino-futurism

AI gorilla sofas, car headlight eyelashes, horse heels, Peter Griffin chin mousepads. Pastiche, cryptic and surreal products run rife on the domestic, Chinese, shopping platform Taobao (more widely known by its international counterpart Aliexpress). The pandemonium of manufacturing assemblages sees mass production churn out and transform bizarre, AI-generated ideas (literal and figurative) into reality. ‘The aesthetic of Sinofuturism combines gloss with grime’. While it is often conflated with contemporary China, Lawrence Lek proposes Sinofuturism as a form of Artificial Intelligence, one that is: ‘addicted to learning massive amounts of raw data’ with an ‘unprecedented sense of collective will to power’. Just as the unknowable consciousness of the Artificial Other poses a threat to humanity, the Orientalist Other instils fear into the western subject by its alleged unknowability.

This techno-orientalist stereotype is particularly pertinent after the AI arms race’s latest DeepSeek saga. Through machine learning and ‘copying rather than originality’, Sinofuturism partakes in a Yellow Techno-Peril to overcome inconsistent distinctions between China’s ancient past and its contemporary modernisation. Almost a decade after Lek’s proposition and two decades after China’s ascension to the WTO, this geopolitical and techno-cultural aesthetic has only further proliferated in its factories and manufacturing hubs. Functioning like a large neural network, these structures devour vast quantities of global production processes, transfiguring their morphologies into slop-like, hallucinogenic innovations. Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined. If Artificial Intelligence and Deepfakes produce infinite digital timelines, then Chinese manufacturing manifests these into infinite physical realities. If you can conceive it, you can make it. One AI Gorilla Sofa please .

“Copy everything. Respect for historical tradition is a main principle of Chinese aesthetics. Replicating old masters, memorising old texts, following moral standards, are all part of this tradition. But Sinofuturism absorbs everything. Nothing is sacred. Authorship is overrated. Copyright is wrong.” 

• Lawrence Lek, video essay ‘Sinofuturism’

The notion of China as a site of extreme copy and counterfeit culture reveals a racialised trepidation harkening back to the days of Yellow Peril. Daniel F. Vukovich argues that this sinological form of orientalism is rooted in a project fear of Chinese mimicry threatening the dominance of western hegemony. Homi Bhabha’s mimicry with sinic characteristics. One scroll on reels or TikTok will reveal a collective anxiety of Xi aura-farming on the agricultural fields of Huawei and BYD. This point is shared by Laikwan Pang, who relates the logic of the counterfeit to the logic of capitalism. In the article China Who Makes and Fakes, Pang notes that a pirated product has the unique semiotics of a magical (pre-modern) and self-reproducible simulacrum (post-modern) object. The ‘aura’ that Walter Benjamin coined, or otherworldly, abstract power (as Marx postulated) granted to luxury goods is destroyed by the replica or counterfeit. The IP rights regime and commodity fetishism and its application of ‘authenticity’ or social logics to these objects is questioned. Counterfeit LVMH and Kering handbags are frequently manufactured using the same designs, materials and labour as their authentic counterparts and sometimes even within the same factories. Balenciaga Pandabuy Warriors exist as an extreme manifestation of commodity obsession, fully displaying the performative promise of reaching the ultimate signified.

The dichotomisation of creation and the copy, one which ‘reifies creativity and condemns mimesis’ is an outdated modernist framework that sees creativity as abstractly new. In our hyper-referential world, mimicry and derivative labour is the dominant form of cultural production. Online, witnessing the dissemination of Lao Gan Ma memes and drill beats sampling ‘Red Sun in the Sky’ unveils this flux of semiotic drifts. Appropriation is diminished as unimaginative, but industrialised creativity is a function of replication, a contention that Adorno has analysed extensively. Likewise, China innovates through an industrial piracy where production becomes an iterative, collective process rather than a system of individual authorship. This concept, named ‘Shanzhai’, sees iterative evolutions of commodities become a form of continuous industrial mutation. Bootleg Shanzhai iPhones from the early 2000s pioneered dual sim slots before Samsung or Apple. Many contained eccentricities to the extent that seeing Shanzhai iPhones accommodating electric razors or watches was not an uncommon sight. This haphazard, mishmash of concepts and components is reflected in a distinctly Chinese landscape of cultural production. Life in China today unfolds with a lucidity, and a dreamlike strangeness, exacerbated by the velocity of technological shifts. Anything and everything feel possible; I consume osmanthus cream cheese explosion lava lattes by day and go raving to the pulses of a Chongqing temple club by night.

The China-verse and Non-linear Temporality

While living in China, I have attempted to articulate this feeling of entering alternate timelines and riding the currents of temporal shifts, a prevalent attitude shared by our digital cultural milieu. Under Douyin content farming livestreams that have crossed the deterritorialized internet, a feeling of ‘watching interdimensional cable’ is professed. Under the lustrous and oversaturated cyberpunk edits of Chongqing or Shanghai, some ask: ‘is this AI?’. Others declare that ‘China is the future’. Gabriele de Seta, in the article Sinofuturism as Inverse Orientalism explicates this phenomenon:

“It posits some sort of equivalence between China and the future: China is the future, China comes from the future, the future will come from China, and so on.”

Many diasporic Chinese people, like me, are familiar with a pressure to improve their Mandarin skills, because it might aid our careers sometime in the future. Likewise, Sinofuturism implicates a future-oriented temporality. These speculative imaginaries have roots in the writings of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) around the turn of the Millenium. Notably, in 1994, the esoteric accelerationist turned right-wing grifter Nick Land, who now resides in China, proclaimed that ‘Neo-China arrives from the future’. Likewise, the less meth-pilled Sadie Plant wrote of an Asian convergence of ‘bamboo mats’ with the ‘manufacture of computer games’ in the collapse of modernity. However, de Seta posits the problematic nature of this cyber-exotic techno-orientalist discourse. Namely, the denial of ‘coevalness’ or the assumption of a colonial linear temporality.

These futurist temporal positionalities of China have a ‘shizogenic use of time’, an anthropological framework that is predicated on a temporal distancing of the Other. De Seta contends that it is precisely this ‘denial of coevalness’ that Sinofuturism partakes of, whereby China is temporally bounded to other timelines. This notion is contingent on a western conception of temporality that views history as linear and time as a continuity divided into discrete instants. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s Infancy and History interrogates this concept:

 ‘Western man’s incapacity to master time, and his consequent obsession with gaining and passing it, have their origins in this Greek concept of time as quantified and infinite continuum of precise fleeting instants. A culture with such a representation of time could have no real experience of historicity.’

 Other ethnofuturisms, such as Afrofuturism, understand that upending hegemonic and colonial frameworks must come from counternarratives that emanate from the periphery of western time. Categories of blackness and Otherness produced under enlightenment philosophy serve to maintain a separation from historicity, as Denise Ferreira da Silva argues, it ‘transubstantiates juridico-economic effect into a moral defect’ by constantly reproducing categories of being, sameness and difference that consistently place blackness outside of the development of history. Thus, it is imperative to seek emancipation outside these categories of being, such as the Kantian subject and Hegel’s racial others that are reproduced by the framework of time. Therefore, this necessitates the rejection of the colonial linear trajectory of time, rather than be conjured as part of techno-orientalist fantasy.

Rather than placing China in the futurity of a linear, chronological timeline, we can understand it to have a field-like quality, one that Agamben frames as charged, suspended and transformative. Chinese cultural and technological production shows that ‘there is nothing radically new; we can see history as an enormous process of mimesis’. Pang notes how this notion of time as fluid and circular is evidenced in the traditional Chinese calendar and even in the narrative structure of Chinese novels. These reject chronological succession, seeing time as non-linear and simultaneous. History is absorbed and futures are pre-empted. “It makes no sense to produce visions of the future. It’s already here”.

———–

Sinofuturism. Available at: https://sinofuturism.com/.

Agamben, G. and Heron, L. (2020) Infancy and history: On the destruction of experience. S.l.: Verso.

Da Silva, D.F. (2014) ‘Toward a black feminist poethics’, The Black Scholar, 44(2), pp. 81–97. doi:10.1080/00064246.2014.11413690.

de Seta , G. (2020) ‘Sinofuturism as Inverse Orientalism: China’s Future and the Denial of Coevalness’, SFRA Review , 50(2–3). Available at: https://sfrareview.org/2020/09/04/50-2-a5deseta/.

Dirlik, A. (1996) ‘Chinese history and the question of orientalism’, History and Theory, 35(4), p. 96. doi:10.2307/2505446.

Pang, L. (2008) ‘`China who makes and fakes’’, Theory, Culture & Society, 25(6), pp. 117–140. doi:10.1177/0263276408095547.

———–

Lina Deng is a London-based British-Chinese interdisciplinary artist. Her experimental approach moves fluidly between performance, new media, sculpture, and theory-inflected research. She’s deeply invested in how the internet shapes consciousness through digital absurdities, algorithmic pastiche and the attention economy. Loitering through our ever-evolving, schizophrenic digital landscape, she interpolates the psychic-ontological shift brought about by content collapse and the spiritual residues of spectral ecologies.

I

As a ’90s kid, I remember too well us school kids singing and dancing to the songs at the top of the charts on music shows such as Ingigayo (인기가요) and Music Bank (뮤직뱅크). It was what one might call the “pre-K-pop” era: there were a lot of solo artists performing in various genres, and the notion of idol culture as we know it now was only fledgling. Without the mass production system or the global distribution that has come to be the norm in today’s K-pop, first generation idol groups around the new millennium—H.O.T., Fin.K.L, god, Sechs Kies, S.E.S.—not only set up these business models and standards, but also inspired the music and aesthetics of later generations. The group aespa’s cover of “Dreams Come True” by S.E.S. is an exemplar case, and NewJeans, with their unflinching Y2K aesthetics and sound, take us back to the millennial through and through.

What are we to make of this return? I wonder if the return of the millennial across South Korea’s cultural sectors has to do with the old, daunting problem of capitalism. The kids born in the ‘90s are now adults with buying power, and nostalgia always sells. It’s by no means new to ask this, but still: are we at a cultural impasse where we cannot tell—and sell, for that matter—genuinely brand-new stories? What “genuinely brand-new” means is also another question. 

Interestingly, though, it is also about aesthetics. The millennial aesthetic is not just a trope that is old, marketable, and familiar to a consumer base; it was always something inherently futuristic. The K-pop scene around the millennial was abundant with references to cyberworld and AI, keeping pace with the emerging and developing presence of the Internet. The group CLON immediately comes to mind: named after the term clone, the group was performing futurist visuals and electronic techno sound and dance throughout the early 2000s. If our contemporary culture and music scene is bringing back this specific aesthetic of the past, this is then already always a look toward the future—that is, by reviving the old that was all about the future yet to come, we also, in the now, desire a new future. It is the very mode of thinking or imagination that also travels with the return of the millennial as a product.

K-pop today has been witnessing new generations of bands that showcase futurist visuals and sound such as EXO and aespa. Now, despite these well-produced and -invested bands–and the whole industry wired toward mass production and profit-making–I want to direct us to another scenario where this neo-millennial touch is much more than simply the most up-to-date upgrade for the old and familiar financial success plot. By way of what I might call comparative listening, I ask that we attune ourselves to how sound not only travels across time and space but propels us to look toward the future that has not yet come. To this end, I begin with a story of a cultural phenomenon in the early K-pop scene: long before K-pop became a global sensation, a young former-actress Lee Jung Hyun was offering her listeners a flight through sounds that deterritorialize and relocate them onto a different spatiotemporal plane.

II

Amidst the early idol wars of the millennial that came to define K-pop as we now know it, we also saw and heard something unprecedented. We were certainly not ready when a 19-year-old female singer made her debut on a major ground wave television music show on the last day of October 1999. On this day, Ingigayo, a now defunct weekly Sunday live music program, aired Lee’s first performance of “Wa” (와) which was an instant sensation across the country. It starts with a camera zooming in on an extraterrestrial planet with a ring around it that says, “LEE JUNG HYUN Let’s Go To My Star.” Accompanying this visual cue is the likewise out-of-this-planet sound effect that instantly transports the audience to her “Star,” wherever that might exactly be.

After setting up the otherworldly soundscape, Lee begins to introduce herself, except that, aside from occasional decodable words—“zero,” “Korea,” “Jung Hyun,” etc.—the introduction falls short: we cannot really hear what she is saying or, more to the point, meaning. It is here, at the point of “zero,” ungrounded on our planet Earth and distant from any system of meaning at hand, that Lee sends out the invitation to her own planet and embarks on her almost ritual-like performance with such full force, showing the audience that this sound and these dance moves of hers are the very power source of the not-yet visible spaceship. (Cue the windy stage effect!)

Lee’s memorable entrance to the scene was almost instantly followed by both financial success and cultural impact. Right after her performance aired, Lee began to win every competition on every major music show; she showcased her repertoire with variations, although keeping with her futuristic, spacey visuals and sound. Everyone from elementary school kids to celebrities on TV imitated Lee’s pinky mic and her gargantuan, “big eyed” fan, not to mention her unique techno dance moves. It was as if Lee’s debut statement—“Let’s Go To My Star,” also the title of her first album—came to realize itself by, quite literally, transporting the people of earth to her star, where different aesthetics and politics apply. The visual and aural shock of Lee’s strong experimentalism shifted and transformed the cultural terrain of the Korean pop music scene, taking the viewers and listeners to possibilities and futures that had no name yet.

Can this be a starting point where we can imagine futures yet to be charted? It is no secret that this futurist aesthetic introduced at the turn of the century is even more widely visible and audible in K-pop today. EXO, for instance, owes its group name to exoplanet, and as their story goes, members are extraterrestrial beings that came to planet Earth, without any memory or the superpowers they once had off-planet. Or, we could look to aespa: like EXO, their narrative takes us deep into a future where members in the “real” world encounter and connect with their avatars (called “ae”) in the “virtual” world. 

Throughout these cases, the futurism of the millennial that Lee pioneered seems to be calling to us once again, only to be reinforced in and through the new market that has been expanding larger than ever. Again, capitalism and the laws of the market seem to be victorious. But how did Lee do it in the first place—where did she find her inspiration? When there was hardly any precedent of the systemized or mass-produced storytelling that has now come to be the norm of the K-pop industry, Lee was single handedly telling a story that no one in the K-pop history would have easily come up with, and sound was the very centerpiece. 

As many of Lee’s contemporary commentators pointed out, her music combines then-emerging techno rhythm and sound with Korean traditional music; her mixes feature thumping beats accompanied by traditional instruments like ajaeng (in “Wa”) and kkwaenggwari (in “GX 339-4,” often performed live as an intro to “Wa”) that delivered historically and culturally readily available sounds to the South Korean audience. This surprising, genre-bending mix of musical and sonic repertoires left many listeners unsure whether her music was of the past or future. Lee further added to this hybridity by overdubbing the fast-paced techno rhythm with slow dance moves inspired by tai chi, as she revealed in her interview with Section TV. In another interview with the national evening paper Munhwa Ilbo (문화일보), Lee said that she found techno in Europe four years ago and that it was now widely spread across Europe and the United States. She added that, when she was recording the album, techno was just being introduced to South Korea, and that she wanted to popularize the genre further by making the title song more accessible. 

This was the origin story of “Wa”: as one of the earliest exponents of techno in the K-pop scene in the 90s, Lee needed more familiar components—lyrics about love and betrayal, traditional instruments, etc.—to ease the audience into the new technological sound. And it is sound that connects all these nodes of Lee’s story. It was the fusion of Korean traditional music and European techno that allowed Lee to open up a whole new terrain of music that no one had heard of. In other words, it is as if sound allowed Lee to travel time and space, crossing and crisscrossing different genres of different periods and places through music. It is useful to go back to the latter interview, where we can glimpse her exposure to a wide-ranging repertoire of international music traditions:

I enjoy listening to various kinds of music like Indian, Cuban rock, Eastern European, and African, but these genres remain inaccessible to many domestic listeners. Dedicated music fans might be able to access them by downloading files from the internet or something, but the ninety percent of people cannot. That’s the reality of our country. 

It was these sonic crossings between different eras and parts of the world that inspired Lee not only to produce and introduce new sounds to the domestic scene, but, in and through those sounds, to herald the very future of K-pop. When there was barely any systemic approach to music production or any music streaming service in existence like Spotify or even YouTube—MTV was the closest thing we had—Lee was embodying the force of sound itself to cross times and spaces and present something totally new, taking all of us to her star.

III

Lee’s story of sound as an interstellar force to cross temporal and spatial boundaries sends us not only to today’s K-pop but, rather unexpectedly, to midcentury America, where K-pop as such could not have been known. Lee’s florid, even lurid, out-of-this-world attire and futuristic electronic sound reference a notoriously occult figure of the mid-20th century American music scene: Sun Ra.

Jazz composer/pianist, leader of the independent record label/space travel agency El Saturn, the myth incarnation and many more, Ra claims to have come from outer space to bring all the Black people on earth back to where he came from through his music—where, as he says in the film Space is the Place, “sounds of guns, anger, frustration” of earth are no more. In a 1968 prose “My Music Is Words,” Ra writes:

To me all types of music are music but all types of music are not Space Music. According to my weigh of things: Space music is an introductory prelude to the sound of greater infinity. It is not a new thing project to me, as this kind of music is my natural being and presentation. It is a different order of sounds synchronized to the different order of Being.

On another occasion, Ra said of his space music that “the vibrations of it will just put them over in the sound and the sound becomes like a spaceship and lift ’em on out there.” This self-claimed rescue mission through new music and its “sound of greater infinity” was not merely a pretentious rhetoric or gesture. Ra was one of the earliest exponents of the portable electronic synthesizer Minimoog. Initially trained as a jazz pianist and having played in the big band tradition with jazz giants like Fletcher Henderson, Ra turned to what may be called “space sound engineering” to introduce space travel through otherworldly sounds.

As many scholars agree, Ra is considered one of the initiators of Afrofuturism. While the term itself was coined by Mark Dery in the 1990s, Afrofuturism describes a pre-existing, distinctive aesthetic style and politics of a group of work by artists—Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Tricia Rose, among others—who imagine and secure Black life and presence in a future where robots, cyborgs, and superhumans can be imagined without difficulty. Dery describes Afrofuturism’s core feature as “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.” This “African-American signification” onto the future carried urgency because this future was, at least before Afrofuturists arrived, mostly white. Dery further asks, “Isn’t the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers—white to a man—who have engineered our collective fantasies?” 

Grappling with this white-oriented future scheme and the contemporary narrative of “progress and conquer” under the headings of the official government space project and the expansion of suburbs, Ra offered an alternative space project: we’re leaving this planet earth behind and turning toward somewhere we can build a different future, and this will be done through new music, new sound: “Space Music.” Indeed, sound has long been a crucial theme and tool for black aesthetics and politics. Black studies scholars—Fred Moten, Alexander Weheliye, Louis Chude-Sokei, Tsitsi Jaji, andré carrington, Daphne Brooks, Anthony Reed, Carter Mathes, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Tao Leigh Goffe, Matthew D. Morrison and more—take up Black sound (and often its relationship with technology) to discuss alternative stories of American racial history and future fraught with tensions, but not without hope (one of Afrofuturism’s main themes). Even long before this, though, Black artists had been engaging sound as power, from work song and holler to Blues and Jazz to Hip Hop and dance. Janelle Monáe immediately comes to mind as a contemporary figure who blends this sonic legacy with Afrofuturist features. She even directly comments on Ra’s precedent by conjuring up again his mirror-faced, black-hooded companion in Space is the Place in her own music video, “Tightrope.”

I’m by no means in a hurry to draw a line of influence or causal relationship between Lee and Ra. In fact, I’m not interested in saying that Lee somehow found this long tradition of Black sound and futurist aesthetics and “applied” or even “developed” it for her own use. Rather than setting up some sort of a kinship between Lee and Afrofuturists that may even remotely come across as appropriative, I’m much more interested in thinking, by way of juxtaposition, about whether it is possible to imagine Asian futurism informed and shaped not only by Afrofuturism but by K-pop. Ever since Dery’s inaugural coinage of the term, Afrofuturism has long been recognized for its versatility as a powerful concept to generate other kinds of futurity or futurism. For example, in his chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, De Witt Kilgore writes that “Afrofuturism can be viewed within this more general political and aesthetic project, imbricating the experiences of the African diaspora with those of colonized peoples in Asia, South America, and elsewhere” (570). Dawn Chan confirms this root of Asian futurism and ponders upon its possibility, inspired by Ryan Lee Wong: “If Afrofuturist thinkers have created speculative realms of their own accord, carving out counterfactual worlds that might cast the shortcomings of our current one in high relief, might there be analogous ways for Asian artists to recast techno-clichéd trappings toward more generative ends?”

Despite all these ongoing discussions and questions, Asian futurism to this day remains significantly under-developed and -theorized. Further developing such a concept, not to mention its larger and broader—louder—cultural significances, seems to be in order, especially in light of the recent surge in successful renditions of the Asian future-scape as in A24 films like After Yang (2021) and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). So, how do we do this? My modest proposal would be that we listen; that we attune and thus open ourselves to the sound’s power to travel far and wide. 

This is not about finding quintessentially “Asian” sound, as techno-orientalism might have us do; it is rather about recognizing sound and music as an aggregate of energies that transports you to different spaces and times—to myriad possibilities and futures yet to be charted. Famously, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari say as much when they comment on sound’s reterritorializing force: “sound invades us, impels us, drags us, transpierces us. It takes leave of the earth, as much in order to drop us into a black hole as to open us up to a cosmos. . . . . Since its force of deterritorialization is the strongest, it also effects the most massive of reterritorializations” (348). Taking sound’s reterritorializing nature up in the study of popular music, Josh Kun talks of Audiotopia, “music’s utopian potential, its ability to show us how to move toward something better and transform the world we find ourselves in” (17). Sound and the sound of music, as it were, move us beyond the confines of our present world and toward futurity.

It is, then, precisely the very difficulty of identifying an aesthetic and/or political genealogy between Lee and Ra that propels us toward a new futurism. The seemingly random parallel across time and space between the two artists makes more sense now—it confirms, if not strengthens, the mobilizing force of sound to travel far and wide—cross-culturally, cross-historically across eras, periods, nations, continents. Lee’s and Ra’s very taking up of popular music and its sound for their temporally and spatially distant futurist projects attests to this sonic force and, with it, the possibility of sonic world-building that, through its mobile energy, transports the listener somewhere not here and now. 

In The Woman Warrior, whose title I borrow for this essay’s, Maxine Hong Kingston ponders upon her leaving home for America. In this moment of mixed regret and nostalgia, Kingston also learns to see things and the world more clearly: “Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity.” Relocation is never easy, but it also brings, along with shocks and traumas, new perspectives and understandings. Kingston talks of “the new way of seeing,” but can it also be of listening? Is it a pure coincidence that this passage appears in the chapter titled “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”? If we can let our ears channel the invisible sounds of the world(s) alongside what we see, leaving or relocation may, at once and any moment, become reterritorialization. 

In this way, sound calls for comparative approaches that extend from one culture and history to another, and asks for comparative work, both critical and creative, that welcomes sound as a hearing aid with which to listen to the world(s), both known and unknown. If, as sounders and soundees alike, we are lifted and opened up by sound and reterritorialized elsewhere, it only makes sense to look and listen away from where we already are or what we already know, and towards learning what other worlds and other-worlds might teach us.  Let the sound open us, let ourselves sound out what we learn, then may we be able to finally begin to find courage for another beginning, another future.

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Featured Image: Lee Jung-Hyun (cover) on 2000’s STAR BOX “asian futurism” music video box set. via flickr

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Hoon Lee is a PhD candidate in English and Associate Instructor at Indiana University Bloomington. His focus is contemporary American poetry, poetry and institution, lyric theory, popular music, and sound studies. He is specifically interested in how poetry disrupts institutionality by creating spatial and temporal alterity, offering us alternative forms of living and future survival. He holds a BA in English Education and an MA in English Literature from Seoul National University, South Korea.

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