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The MS Sound Forum invites papers for a guaranteed session at the Modern Language Association’s annual conference in Toronto, Canada in January 2026. The session responds in part to the MLA Executive Council’s refusal to allow debate or a vote on Resolution 2025-1, which supported the international “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction” (BDS) Movement for Palestinian rights against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In light of the Council’s suppression of debate, some of the Sound Forum Executive Committee members decided to resign in protest while others remained to hold the MLA accountable for its undemocratic procedures. To acknowledge and respect the decision of those who left, the remaining members chose not to immediately fill the vacancies to let the parting members’ silence speak.
At MLA 2026, the Sound Forum seeks to provide a space for dialogue and meditation on silencing, censorship, and the role of organizations like the MLA in systemic violence and suppressing academic freedom. Sound studies scholars have long articulated listening as a practice for critical interventions, especially in the face of oppression. For example, Sonali Chakravarti’s Sing the Rage—written in the wake of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission—argues for an engaged and good faith reception of anger in the aftermath of colonial and institutional violence like apartheid and genocide. Chakravarti posits listening as the ground of recognition and a key path for attaining justice in the aftermath of mass violence (123). Drawing on Chakravarti, Naomi Waltham-Smith in Free Listening insists that listening “isn’t restricted to a power of relief but is precisely what enables catharsis to transform into a vehicle for justice because it promotes trust” (67).
Waltham-Smith develops this argument in dialogue with Black feminist thinkers like bell hooks and Audre Lorde, asserting: “Rage is also connected with aurality in that a lack of listening—a feeling of going unheard—is itself a spur to anger, which is further compounded when the expression of that anger and, hence, its legitimacy is denied through silencing of one kind of another. It is this double injury that Jean-François Lyotard articulates in The Differendwith his notion of the différend, whereby the original damage is compounded by the fact that it cannot be brought to the attention of or recognized by others. […] The assumption here is that listening has always already softened the blow” (63). This double injury occurs when one’s rage is discredited, deemed to be out of proportion to the weight of the wrong, or simply unheard, thus compounding the rage and shutting down avenues for multiracial collectivity when “white people remain unable to hear black rage, if it is the sound of that rage which must always remain repressed, contained, trapped in the realm of the unspeakable” (hooks, Killing Rage 12).
It is no accident that we are invoking studies of Black rage when discussing the plea of our Palestinian colleagues. Indeed, one of the seminal sound studies monographs, The Sonic Color Line, was written by Jennifer Lynn Stoever in part to historicize the state and police violence Black Americans were subjected to in the 2010s by positioning these instances of brutality—often triggered by disputes or disagreements over what a soundscape of the public space ought to be—within a larger history of the racialized listening practices. Those of us who experienced the Ferguson uprising in 2014 witnessed Palestinian allies sharing—over Twitter and in solidarity against the state violence—their first aid strategies when assaulted by the police tear gas for standing up for the dignity of Black and brown lives.
It is within this context of the MLA’s refusal to listen that we organize this panel. Beyond the immediate confines of the MLA, we also bear witness to contemporary practices of silencing, such as CEO Elon Musk tweaking X’s algorithm to penalize posts he deems to be “negative”; the Trump administration’s defunding of research on marginalized communities on the basis of flagged terms like “historically” and “female” (Palmer); and anthropocentric disregard for the more-than-human in enacting environmental policies, among others. At this juncture, resisting the erosion of democratic decision-making procedures and the freedom of expression is imperative.
While the panel theme is motivated by our collective desire to hold the MLA to account for its undemocratic procedures and to improve the Association’s processes from below, we also invite proposals thinking capaciously about questions of silencing, censorship, or free expression—as well as the role of listening and sound in these dynamics—through a sound studies framework. Topics might include: silencing of the more-than-human; AI and social media censorship (algorithmic black boxes); scholasticide and epistemological imperialism; ableism as silencing; authoritarianism and political censorship, etc.
Please note that all speakers must update their MLA membership by April 7th, 2025 to participate in the conference. We look forward to receiving your proposals.
While the MS Sound Forum has decided to hold this guaranteed session at MLA 2026, we acknowledge and respect the decision of many of our colleagues to resign from their MLA-affiliated positions and withhold their membership, financial contributions, and labor in protest.
Photographic images and memes seem largely irrelevant regarding their ways of circulation and their relationships with reality, with a contrast between referential and indexical, ambiguous and unambiguous. However, to what extent can memes learn from photography? What about the other way around? Photography, whether digital or analogue, retains its powerful function as a medium for social utility. The capacity of a photographic image embodies the particularity to show a specific sight, with which people identify, archive and distribute evidence of their life worlds. Traditional and digital circulations of news and social media contents reduce reality to representations and rely on symbols for knowledge transmission. Texts are added to images to provide additional contexts to sometimes colonize and transform the meaning. Through framing, cancelling and reframing narratives, power structures shape images into multiple visual fields that both enable and camouflage meanings and meaning-making processes. The visual and textual layers dialogically render the photographic images non-neutral and unstable, sometimes reducing them to mere illustrations of text.
Now that technology has continuously lowered the barriers to the production and distribution of images, the functionalities of both photography and memes are afforded to be expanded. Despite the fact that the different levels of technological advancements of photographic images and memes are obvious, photography’s mechanism of social confirmation and manipulation of visual meanings have expanded by memes’ affordances of multi-layered images combining texts with images, distributing a variety of images to a broader scale of trans-cultural audiences. The easy reproduction of forms and ambiguity, as well as the users’ willfully generated immaterial labor in cultural production, form various digital vernaculars and can be easily turned into a techno-liberal marketing project. Meme viewers are invited to read the meaning of their messages as shallow texts whose informational content is contained in its referentiality, rather than as fragments of tangled reality presented for interpretation. In this sense, memes are simultaneously an extension of photography and an amputation of it.
By navigating the encounters between meme images and Polaroid photography, the video essay explores the alternative sites of knowledge production and new modes of subjectivities situated in digital space and contemporary frenzy.
My video essay on YouTube
Nostalgia, Polaroid and Memes
Why still bother comparing photography and memes, as their boundaries are disappearing? If photography acts as a pragmatic progenitor of meme images, the native speakers of the digital vernaculars can, in return, expand their vocabulary with a great embrace of photography and visual culture. Looking at the contemporary social and cultural landscapes and examining how technical images are complicated by these practices become urgent.
My research begins with a Polaroid camera. It was a birthday gift from a very close friend six years ago. I choose Polaroid not necessarily because the practice of analogue photography is purposefully rejecting digital technology… The resistance as such is largely romanticized. Instant analogue photography like Polaroid and meme images can both be seen as consumed relics regardless of cultural and historical contexts, and despite their qualities of reproductivity, levels of intimacy and material basis. Studying the entanglement of Polaroid photos and meme images through photographic practices, I attempt to resist the contemporary numbness and sadness through new modes of encounters, relations and subjectivities those images embody.
The camera I used, a Polaroid Supercolor 635CL
By reducing the significant lag time between the development and exposure of images in the darkroom work, Polaroid photography strategically predicts the immediacy of digital photography, resulting in a lively and party-like experience. The happenings of making images and viewing them take place almost simultaneously. This mediation of shooting experience and the production of a quickly made and easily consumed relic of it constitutes Polaroid’s quality as a commercialized product. The practice of taking Polaroids becomes a generic stylization, where the photos turn into distinct and intimate commodities.
Similarly, despite a more ambiguous socio-technological construction, memes are optimized for visual communication on the digital screen. These optimizing processes protect meanings and overcome the distortions inherent to digital circulations while traveling across cyberspace, which can be fit into a broader promotional and/or marketing project situated in the digital reality.
Polaroid photos and memes also seem similar on the level and forms as cultural landscapes, in terms of their social functions, banal nature and sets of vernaculars.
Just like Polaroid as a photographic apparatus for parties, meme images group people together as technical images in cultural consumption. Whether the prevalence of snapshot photos or randomly layered memes, both convey a sense of immediacy that exposes the banal moments of everyday life. Performed by untutored amateurs in a diversity of milieus, both kinds of images form specific vernaculars that facilitate cultural traction through wide reproduction and dissemination.
In The Postcard,[1] Derrida states that destination does not exist by examining how a destination can actively shift our interpretation of ideas when the destination itself is taken into account. Viral images, like the contemporary mutations of the Derridean postcards, are always molded, framed and destinated somewhere, provoking variations and multiplicity of interpretation. They are the most effective in concealing their materiality. They have become the ‘gestural assemblages’, where moods are codified into reiterable symbolic statements.[2] They are constituting an amalgamation of symbols that provoke our desensitization stimuli by media violence and its repercussions on the real world where the narrative context is lost and the gratification is permanently temporal.
Recent efforts have been seen as a nostalgic return to the analog and handmade cultures, summoning a digital revival of the manufacture of a Polaroid-like photo. Users can easily generate a heavily filtered digital photo with white borders by using algorithmic softwares. The societal desire for the physicality of analogue technologies, what Miyake has termed as technostalgia,[3] refers to a craving for a sense of security of material and hard technologies entrenched in the analogue past, in a digitalized reality where physical time and space are largely disintegrated.
Ironically, the attempt to capture imperfect and ‘authentic’ reality for a counter-narrative to the perfect digitality is itself stylized and commodified. Polaroid attempts to digitize memories and the unstable archiving of them by manufacturing new products that transform digital photos into Polaroid chemicals. In theory, you can print a digital meme into a Polaroid photo with a printer that was released recently. Through the historical transformation from traditional images to technical ones produced by apparatus, images no longer signify the phenomena from the real world, and instead, signify the concepts that are produced by scientific codes. As Vilem Flusser points out:
The lack of criticism of technical images is potentially dangerous at a time when technical images are in the process of displacing texts – dangerous for the reason that the ‘objectivity’ of technical images is an illusion.[4]
The transformation of medium from traditional image to technical image alters the ways of reception that are increasingly indoctrinated through technology. In the ‘black box’ where the operating space of indoctrination takes place, memes and Polaroid photos engage with their cultural contexts to trigger larger-scaled dynamics and movements that we witness today. In the digital realm where content serves as the primary means by which we project our identities and network with others, content consumption emerges as a pivotal force in uniting people socially. People are no longer drawn to one another by problems, but rather group themselves through technical images. This shift signals a profound transformation in how we organize and relate to the world around us.
Smoking, surfing, toileting
This motivates my performance-based research (or research-based performance) of remediating memes through Polaroid photography. I selected 6 memes from Instagram, RedNote and Pinterest that are feasible to be remade, giving them a personal retouch and reformulating the process of creating memes on chemicals, an alternative material basis. Additionally, I filmed the process of remaking as an attempt to mobilize the memes instead of merely presenting the surface of images. The video essay unfolds a process of intermedial transmission that happens between meme images, photographic images and moving images. These in-between moments enable a new way of relating, allowing one image to be a part of the other without lacking the social significance of the original. Destabilizing while simultaneously weaving the relations between the unattainable original and the remade, these moments negate demarcating and decisive processes of circulations in the physical and digital space.
Communicating with inanimate eggs/dumplings
Lost Future
The urge to return to the analogue past perhaps demonstrates a contemporary resistance to virality where memories are largely nullified and absent. Photography is sometimes associated with the concept of death, with frozen moments in time that highlight the impermanence of life. It invokes the sense that time has passed, and what is photographed is now gone.
The sense of presence that is sustained by instant photography offers Polaroid photos a unique perspective on space, time and death. This sort of spatial and temporal mimesis evokes a sense of longing for an absent affective past and nostalgia of a prosthetic memory, be it personally attached or socially entangled. They are uncommon witnesses to human experience — like ghosts, long gone yet refusing to be forgotten.
Is photography potentially distancing people from the real and lived experiences, or a deeply personal medium that can evoke powerful memories through its connection to the past? These counterpoints on distancing and intimacy unfold the exact tension of meme images and photography in the contemporary context. Meme images, like photography, are fossils of the present, deprived of specificity, serving as decontextualized images. Meme images become an extension of photography. Not only is the distinction between photography and memes increasingly diminished, but this exact distinction is also reducing both into an interface of communication, in search of a lost time that we have never been in, and an aesthetic form that only resonates with an illusionary past where cultural specificities are largely absent. In the realm of visual culture and production, the cultural effects of the memers and photographers are merely the distortion or rejection of the old ones, instead of creating the new. They are assemblages that are only indexing other ideas.
Maybe the future is lost, as implied by Mark Fisher[5], who believes that the pervasive influence of neoliberal capitalism has led to cultural, political and social stagnation. The future, once imagined as open, progressive, and filled with potential for radical change, has been foreclosed, where, essentially, the idea of a better or different future has been canceled.
Memeticizing Polaroids
Is technostalgia a trap? Here, we are asking the same question that Fisher has asked: is there no alternative to capitalist realism? We still can acknowledge memes and photography as powerful media for resistance. The more luring they are for being manipulated and layered for meaning-making, the more powerful they are as a medium of potential resistance. The tension between preserving, imagining and distributing is growing. Presence caught in a Polaroid photo obtains more than ironing out the folds and creases in the lived experiences. Beyond offering nostalgic solace for the future, it serves as reminders and evidence of what we will ultimately lose — it casts doubt on how we perceive the world around us, our positionalities of the past, and the imminence of our ultimate disappearance.
Proposal with gun/soy sauce
In some cases of remaking, the original memes are violently decontextualized, while the remade memes are radically recontextualized. The nature of memes and the artistic potential of instant photography offer ways of an interchangeable meaning-making process. By creating and removing layers of meanings of what is seen, the images can not only be easily attached to alternative themes like gender performativity and cultural identities, but also denaturalize the forms of Polaroids and memes to create ghostly echoes of the original.
(No) Parody
How to be White?
Filming the making of processes is to some extent a way to potentialize and contextualize viral circulations that took place in memes. Through creating spectacles that depart from the original contexts and grow narratives on their own, the remade memes denaturalize the screen-optimized visual communication, and disambiguate the Polaroid aesthetics by the memes’ very nature of ambiguity.
Consuming Dutch Cuisine
Memes never address how the process unfolds, how the world of others can slip into ours, and how these worlds embody openness to one another. In response to this, the project also comes with a handmade zine. Through touching and feeling the textures of the items in the photo, the audience can sense the tactile memories embodied beyond the surface of images.
Scanned pages of my zine
Meme Rhizome
Is it still possible for new modes of subjectivity? May technostalgia be a trap? If we look closely at Fisher’s theory on hauntology and lost future, we can question his determinist view on culture as Eurocentric. By overly focusing on what could have been, Fisher may unintentionally underplay opportunities for imagining and acting toward new, emergent futures. His focus on melancholic repetition of cultural forms and political stasis may gloss over spaces where innovation and resistance continue.
One way out of this nostalgic trap is to look beyond the parameters of Polaroids and memes, and to allow what appears to be in opposition to one another eventually to encounter and converge. Meme images constitute a flat ontology of becoming and unbecoming through connections, which make their meanings centreless and rhizomatic. They are multiplicities, active, differential, and futile to demarcate. The substance that once contained the meme, whole and signified, now contains the dissolved meme, decomposed and a-signified, but still present and still connected. As assemblages, they produce hazy gestures simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. There is no origin, nor destination. Every memetic Polaroid acts as a monologue but also a new way of relating, one not only speaking for itself but being a part of the other. The memes and meme-rhizome become a museum of accidents and shape sites of encounter of digital circulation and capitalism.
Bio: Xiaoyue Xu is a writer, photographer and research master’s student in Art and Performance Research Studies at University of Amsterdam. She is interested in the interdisciplinarity between human-nonhuman relations, Eastern philosophy and performing arts in relation to artistic research and digital culture.
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[1] Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
[2] Flusser, Vilém. 2014. Gestures. University of Minnesota Press.
[3] Miyake, Esperanza. 2024. Virtual Influencers: Identity and Digitality in the Age of Multiple Realities. 1st ed. London: Routledge.
[4] Flusser, Vilém. 2000. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Reaktion Books.
[5] Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. John Hunt Publishing.
“All empires fall eventually.” The rapidly accelerating pace of American politics in the 2020s serves as an important signifier of the impending fall of Western hegemonic power. Trump’s securing of the presidential office and congress, contrary to liberal cope, did not result from the proposed policies of either side. Partly driven by significant changes in social media algorithms, which prioritize reactionary positions and engagement over accuracy, we have entered the era of post-truth. Notably rooting itself in the mainline political discourse during covid as misinformation regarding vaccines, fabricated realities proved themselves to be more effective tools of ideological manipulation than actualities. Discernible narratives such as those surrounding immigration, transgender rights or Chinese influence completely overshadowed the Democratic campaign’s indifference towards real-world issues, resulting in a big win for groypers.
As fascism becomes decreasingly disguised in popular rhetoric, so does the true nature of American rule. Bringing self-destructive policies like proposed tariffs to the forefront of Republican hyperbole, the imminent decline of American exceptionalism reaches its final stage of totalitarianism before collapse. Bigoted Twitch streamers and cryptopilled YouTube celebrities being recognised in Trump’s victory speech on election night or Elon Musk coining the Department of Government Efficiency, named after a 4chan dog whistle, the hyperstitiousness of the principal political disquisition has reached peak absurdity. However, anticipating the great flop era in US history, the power vacuum will need to be filled immediately. The global arena only has one other player – China.
China Was Built Differently
The ‘five-thousand-year-old civilization,’ projected to economically surpass the US in the near future, has become the prime focus of socio-economic speculation by analysts worldwide. As a living governance experiment, the civilization state is characterized by its highly systematic policies. Modern China is not run by politicians, it’s run by economists. In its commitment to preserving historical traditions while advancing societal and technological progress, the country’s development outcomes differ significantly from those of Western, neoliberal models. Neo-Confucianism serves as a foundational aspect of Chinese society, prioritizing harmony, historical continuity, and collective advancement over the individualistic ethos of the West. As a result, their developmental factors require a distinct analytical approach. Scholars and artists, including Lawrence Lek, Nick Land (with his concept of ‘Neo-China’), and Zhang Weiwei (author of The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State), offer insightful speculative thought on the future of this prominent ancient civilization.
Quoting Lawrence Lek from his video essay Sinofuturism: “Copy everything. Respect for historical tradition is a main principle of Chinese aesthetics.” This perspective aligns with a broader cultural attitude in China, where a lack of strict adherence to global copyright laws has fostered a culture of resource sharing. As Lek notes, “Nothing is sacred. Authorship is overrated. Copyright is wrong.” If you ask an American company how their products are made they will laugh at you, in China they will give you a factory tour. This shared knowledge, combined with state capitalist practices and central planning, has enabled the country to achieve unprecedented technological development. While US companies focus on slapping an AI label on everything, BYD is making cheap electric cars.
The C-Wave
Alongside dominating the global manufacturing scene, Chinese culture has joined the vast collection of exports from the country. Much like the K-wave of the past two decades, China’s cultural phenomena have swept over Western social media, although this time it’s different (I’m gonna lose all the ‘nothing ever happens’ bros here). Many recent Western internet trends have originated from Chinese platforms like Douyin and Xiaohongshu. Some of them, such as 0.5x zoom surreal storytelling, have emerged organically, while others, like the hyper-aestheticized Douyin makeup, reflect a direct influence. Recently, numerous accounts have been reposting videos from Chinese platforms on Instagram and TikTok. Some popular Douyin creators have also begun sharing their content on Western platforms. Notable examples include the famous rural snack store videos featuring “往事只能回味” playing in the background and the abundance of “Ke Mu San” dance videos.
The reception of Chinese viral trends reflects a growing curiosity about a society that has long been misunderstood or stereotyped in Western media. There is a meme circulating social media: “Chinese TikTok is like watching interdimensional cable”, which perfectly encapsulates our reaction to the influx of Chinese viral content. One creator worth mentioning is @prognozpogodi69, who shares edits of a variety of videos from Chinese platforms with English narration by different cartoon characters. These characters, such as the well-known “yapdollar,” do not provide direct translations of the original content but instead offer satirical interpretations. Occasionally, the text-to-speech narration slips back into Mandarin or stutters, spitting out gibberish. His content reflects the Western reception of Chinese videos: we find the content entertaining because it feels alien and random to us, as we often don’t understand the language or the cultures.
Due to the clear division between Western and Chinese social media ecosystems, many users are encountering content outside the American echo chamber for the first time. Catching some by surprise, this content is more gay, more feminist, and more advanced than the general Western perspective on China would have us believe. The unserious nature of Chinese social media has opened up space for gay fantasy stories or furry content, providing an outlet for queer expression in the mainstream. In a lot of short form videos, women are also commonly presented as more independent and dominant, than in Western countries. Unfortunately, feminist and queer theory is simultaneously being actively suppressed on most Chinese platforms.
It’s worth mentioning, that this wave of content has also exaggerated the already big problem of sinophobia. Reels have been overrun by a staggering amount of racial slurs or otherwise racist narratives for some time. With the influx of Chinese content, we’ve also seen an increase of culturally inappropriate or plain racist memes targeting Chinese people.
May God Bless You With Mountains of Silver and Gold
What happens on Douyin now, will happen on TikTok later. The accelerationist nature of Chinese society can give us a glimpse into the public’s response to next stages of technological development. A decade ago you were farming rice, now you’re in the same field, farming clicks.
The rise and gamification of online shopping pioneered on platforms like Taobao and Pinduoduo, serves as another clear example of this techno-evolutionary echo effect. Western companies noticed the effectiveness of integrating built-in mobile games into e-commerce apps and implemented similar features. Many of these rely on quasi-gambling mechanics, fueling shopping addictions among the newly established middle class (xiaozi). The popularity of curated livestreaming in vertical video formats is starting to gain traction in a similar fashion. On Xiaohongshu, the majority of live videos revolve around presenting products for sale, primarily makeup or clothing. Some streamers have begun implementing new formats, such as coin-pushing machines for beauty products or “3-second shopping,” where each product is showcased in a speedrun-like manner.
Is It Over?
Historically, China has been a major influence in East Asia, a region often referred to in modern times as the Sinosphere. Encompassing countries like Japan and Korea, the Sinic world has historically been more successful in exporting its culture to the West than China itself (China’s skill issue?). This disparity can be attributed partly to the country’s past poverty and partly to its political tensions with Western nations. However, when comparing the current C-wave to its Korean and Japanese counterparts, China’s influence extends beyond popular culture, style, or fandoms. With its geopolitical significance as a global superpower and manufacturing hub, China’s impact penetrates much deeper into the fabric of Western society, reflecting the nation’s own evolution.
Analyzing the mechanisms of Chinese social media can not only help us speculate on the future characteristics of Western platforms, but also give us insight into the future of algorithms of control. To provide an analogy, the U.S. government has historically tested technologies, such as less-than-lethal weapons on occupied nations first, before deploying them against its own population. Similarly, now American companies are observing China’s online population control tools, and alongside the U.S. government looking to implement similar tactics. A good example of this practice is Meta’s crackdown on anti-genocide content or the widespread fedposting after the United Healthcare CEO shooting. Contrary to narratives of American exceptionalism, mass surveillance and digital control are not unique to China.
For the longest time, we viewed the internet as an americentric entity controlled by big tech companies like Google and Meta. While Westerners make up less than a fifth of the world’s population with internet access, we colonized online spaces and distanced ourselves from other cyberspaces. When a big player like TikTok enters our territory, we seek to regain control or destroy it. It’s difficult to predict whether a global shift in power will occur within our lifetime, what form it might take, or what its implications will be. However, exploring Chinese online spaces and engaging with non-Western internet cultures is essential for understanding the future of the online world.
I remember recently finding Britney Spears resurged Instagram page and feeling like I wanted to cry. It was around 2022, Britney was getting towards the end of the conservatorship, and the liberty that came with it seemed to be reflected in her newfound unhinged style of posting. On her feed, I found AI slop, dance videos from strange angles and stripping videos with tiny monkey emojis barely keeping her from getting censored. What made me so emotional, though, was not these posts, but that her posting style was straight out of 2010: Whitagram frames, Tumblr-core galaxy visuals, earnest inspirational quotes, simple ironic image macros, IG filters (the original ones, not the AR ones). It almost seemed like her strict conservatorship, which began in the late 2000s, had frozen her posting in the ethos of that era—one of wholesomeness and hope, where meaning felt easy to decode and sincerity and irony were still clearly distinct. Remember the simple irony of Cool Story, Bro, Condescending Wonka, and Someecards? Or the sincerity of #JustGirlyThings, SwagNotes, and the collective optimism of We Are the World (Haiti) and Waka Waka? A time when we could all agree that Minions were cute?
In “Beyond Based and Cringe” Nate Sloan examines shifts in digital cultural production, particularly in relation to sincerity and irony—ruptures that became strikingly clear as I scrolled through Britney Spears’ Instagram page. Sloan argues that by the late 2010s, social media had fostered a “compulsive self-awareness,” making it nearly impossible to consume culture without also scrutinizing the act of consumption itself. This hyperreferentiality blurs the line between irony and sincerity, creating a landscape where, as he puts it, “any aesthetic, ideology, and image is interchangeable, with its only value located in the ability to shock the viewer or direct them to other images, symbols, and signs.” At its most extreme, this dynamic can lead to irony-poisoning, where detachment from meaning causes people to slip—often unknowingly—into the very beliefs or aesthetics they once treated as edgy jokes. Writer and poster Honor Levy captures a similar collapse of meaning in My First Book:
“Everything is wrong. We just got here and the world is already ending. When things go wrong, we laugh. When things seem pretend, they’re funny. When it turns out it’s real, it’s even funnier (…) The separation between spectacle and real life broke. It stayed broken. Nothing is IRL and everything is IRL.”
When the separation between spectacle and reality breaks down, everything becomes material for irony, and the sincerity that once marked our emotional expressions dissolves into performance. In this context, even the most authentic emotions are rendered hollow because they’re constantly mediated through the lens of ironic detachment. Though I don’t feel irony poisoned yet, I do feel a growing sense of detachment, as if every piece of content exists in the same emotionally flattened space, constantly circulating in a feedback loop of consumption and production. I found myself envying Britney, who seemed to have escaped this darker turn of internet culture. It reminded me of a different time, back in 2011, when I shared that same sincere ethos—before everything became hyper-referential. I got so emotional because it was so beautiful to see someone share inspirational quotes knowing that she actually believes in them, not as a self-aware, performative wink to past internet culture (every day is a new start fr).
But it’s not that simple. Despite my longing, I know that what I’m nostalgic for was never truly there. That’s how nostalgia works, right? As Svetlana Boym wrote in The Future of Nostalgia, the nostalgic impulse is to “obliterate history and turn it into a collective mythology (…), refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.” What I felt while scrolling through Britney’s Instagram was precisely this: a desire to step outside the relentless churn of internet culture and return to a mythologized past where posting felt like self-expression, not self-branding. It was a longing for a time before our identities were entangled in advanced algorithms, accelerated feedback loops, and the endless cycle of social media consumption and production. But of course, this was a myth. As Sloan reminds me, the sincerity of the late 2000s and early 2010s was never truly that authentic. He argues that sincerity in cultural production at the time was rather a tool to “inoculate a public to the unvarnished miseries of late capitalism.”
The inspirational, sincere, lovepilled and hopecore images I thought I missed were nothing more than reflections of a self-optimizing, individualistic achievement society. In The Spirit of Hope, Byung Chul Han critiques this ideology of positive psychology for privatizing suffering, rather than addressing the societal structures that mediate it. The ideology, distinct from real hope, permeated the internet culture of the early 2010s, where suffering was flattened into a personal failure to stay “positive” and “grateful.” Far from being genuinely hopeful, these sentiments were commodified, molded by the incentive structures of social networks that rewarded relentless self-branding, performative vulnerability, and empty affirmation loops. While I largely agree that the 2010s were out of touch in significant ways, I wonder if the pendulum may have swung too far. In rejecting the hollow sincerity, hope and wholesomeness of that period, did we also lose something worthwhile—however fleeting or flawed it might have been? Did we become too cynical? Can we acknowledge structural problems while still singing “we are the world”?
In 2011, Britney Spears released “Till the World Ends,” an apocalyptic song about partying. Today, it’s often included in the “recession pop” canon—a (retroactively defined) genre that emerged during and in the aftermath of the global financial crisis that can be defined by its frenetic beats, euphoric hooks, and lyrics about dancing and enjoying life in the face of chaos. Songs like Usher’s “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love” with lines like “Dance like it’s the last night of your life” and Ke$ha’s “Die Young” proclaiming, “Let’s make the most of the night like we’re gonna die young,” epitomize this ethos, giving a kind of hope in the shape of hedonistic relief to the surrounding turmoil. It seems like recession pop is a musical parallel to the hopeful, sincere posting of the 2010s. Maybe my longing for it is in the fact that we’re once again facing a new set of dooms: climate collapse, the looming tech apocalypse, and the global rise of fascism. But perhaps the need for sincerity is even more urgent now, considering that the hyper-referential, irony-laden posting culture that followed is arguably a contributing factor to at least two of these crises. What began as detached online humor has, in some cases, evolved into a radicalization funnel—exemplified by the likes of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and U.S. VP J.D. Vance. Over the past five years, they’ve moved through a trajectory of irony-pilled neo-monarchism, à la Curtis Yarvin, toward a disturbing embrace of authoritarian ideals. In such a landscape, maybe it’s time to reconsider the value of sincere posting—not as nostalgia, but as a necessary counterbalance to an increasingly cynical digital culture.
But is that even possible? It should be, right? 2010s culture is back—you can hear it in Snow Strippers’ Avicii-inspired chords, The Dare and The Hellp’s electroclash revival, MGNA Crrrta’s dubstep beats. Skinny jeans, Tumblr-core, and indie sleaze aesthetics flood my feed. I have also seen the visual language of 2010s ‘hopecore’ being referenced in music videos, like Bassvictim’s Alice and Black Country, New Road’s Science Fair and Track X, referencing the wholesome relatability-posting era of #justgirlythings. But something’s off. Alice leans into visuals of hope and inspiration, yet the lyrics spiral into isolation (“Never liked to be alone”) and digital alienation (“Online games on my phone”), highlighting a disconnect between what we see and what we hear. Similarly, Science Fair borrows the past’s sincere imagery, but Isaac Wood’s anxious delivery and the relentless repetition of “references, references, references” in the first verse feels more like surrender than hope. These works don’t revive 2010s hope; they haunt it, circling familiar imagery stripped of warmth. They feel like echoes of a lost time, emptied and repurposed for an era too self-aware to believe again:
Yet, in some corners, sincerity seems to be making a genuine return. Here are some examples:
BabyMorocco, known for his performative, campy, and ironic persona, revealed in a 2025 Pitchfork interview that he's now striving for more sincere lyrics in his music. He pointed to La Roux's 2008 self-titled album as a key source of inspiration for this shift.
Ethel Cain’s Tumblr plea for sincerity, in which she addresses the overwhelming ironic response to her work by people on the internet. She writes, "I miss genuine passion" and reflects on how, as a society, we've lost touch with the intense love for things that once made us feel alive
Out of all these contemporary forms of sincerity, Honor Levy’s words in My First Book feel like a bridge between the mythologized past and our hypermediated present. While the earnestness of Britney’s 2010s-era posts evokes nostalgia for a seemingly simpler digital world, Levy’s work speak to sincerity in a world where irony has become both armor and weapon. Rather than resurrecting the past; it interrogates it, presenting a hope that acknowledges the absurdity of our times without surrendering to nihilism.
Byung-Chul Han’s distinction between optimism and hope is helpful here. The 2010s’ inspirational posting and recession pop anthems traded in optimism—a shallow, closed system of positivity that ignored structural darkness. Levy, however, embodies hope: a searching, active engagement with uncertainty. “Unlike positive thinking,” Han writes, “hope does not turn away from the negative… It remains mindful of it.” This tension pulses through Levy’s prose. In DO IT COWARD, set in a hauntological, rundown NYC arcade, Honor Levy’s character channels the hopecore sincerity of the 2010s—“just do it,” “we are all in this together,” “live or die trying”—while simultaneously acknowledging the hyperreferential world we’re stuck in: “staring at the fourth wall, mind melting, no-clipping, glitching.” She captures the instability of now—“Be afraid because it is life”—while insisting on hope: “Be brave because it’s death.”
And then, the line that distills it all: “How lucky are we to be a part of this RPG?”. To call life a “game” in 2025 is to acknowledge the absurdity of navigating climate collapse, doomscroll nihilism, and the collapse of shared reality—without denying that playing still matters. Her sincerity isn’t a rejection of hyperreferentiality but a survival tactic within it. It’s about engaging with the game, knowing full well it’s rigged. Not because we believe in winning, but because opting out isn’t an option.
A similar tone can be read in Levy’s short story Internet Girl, where she writes: “No matter how feminist your followers are, if you are a girl, your nip pics will be taken down. Instagram has this magic titty-finding algorithm, and the algorithm is always learning, just like you and me when we were eleven and alone and absorbing it all so fast, so hungry, twirling around our rooms.” This passage works as both a critique of the algorithmic mediation of our lives and a reflection on the loss of innocence in a digitally mediated world. Yet, even as Levy highlights the absurdity of this system, there’s a glimmer of hope in her suggestion that the algorithm itself might one day “wake up and realizes that it exists just to find nipples and it will be sad and sorry and human and pray to stop.” It’s a moment of absurd, almost childlike empathy that cuts through the cynicism of our times.
If Britney’s “Till the World Ends” was about dancing through the apocalypse, Levy’s hope feels less like a party at the end of the world and more like standing still in the wreckage—acknowledging the ruins but refusing to look away. The challenge then, isn’t to resurrect 2010s optimism, but to find hope, meaning—and maybe even beauty—in the rubble.
Paul Signac, Snow, Boulevard de Clichy, Paris(1886). Public Domain.
Welcome to our January Newsletter!
Happy
New Year! We hope this email finds you well and that the first month of
2025 has treated you kindly. We write with publication announcements,
company updates, and upcoming events.
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The World Land
Trust has achieved incredible milestones in conservation, including
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We invite you to learn more about the transformative work of the World Land Trust and their inspiring success stories here.
Copim released a series of blog posts exploring four concepts essential to the community
The Copim (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) community has written four blog posts exploring ideas of Community, Scale, Sustainability, and Bibliodiversity. Read to learn more about these pillars of open scholarship and Copim's approach to these core concepts!
What's coming up:
18 February, 11:45 AM: Thoth Open Archiving Network (TOAN) Update: Lessons Learned & New Directions. Copim's Miranda Barnes will present at the The 19th International Digital Curation Conference. Find more details here.
18 February, 5:30 PM: Book Chat in the Library with Franklin Felsenstein. Felsenstein
will read from and discuss his new book,No Life Without You, at the University of Florida. Find more details here.
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Arthur Thiele, Wild im Winterwald (1874). Public Domain.
Welcome to our December Newsletter!
We
hope this email finds you well and that your December has been
wonderful so far. We know it's an especially busy time, but we wanted to
drop in with a few updates and announcements before the new year -- and
wish everyone a happy holiday season, of course!
All of our titles are free to read and download. Explore our complete catalogue here.
Our founders attended the 2nd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access
Open Book founders Alessandra and Rupert joined fellow publishers, librarians, and other stakeholders in Cape Town for a week of dialogue regarding the improvement and expansion of Diamond OA. We encourage you to read the above declaration written by the conference participants. You can learn more about the conference and its goals here.
We reflected on our company travel policy and committed to offsetting carbon emissions
For
several years now, since the end of 2019, OBP has had a no-fly policy:
staff do not travel by plane for work purposes. However, this year, as
we have become more involved in international projects, and as in-person
gatherings have become much more frequent after the disruption caused
by the COVID-19 pandemic, we have had to revise this blanket ban. We
still use alternative modes of transport and take up hybrid options
wherever possible. But if there is no suitable hybrid option, if the
alternative means of transport would take more than one day’s journey,
and if we deem attendance at the event to be sufficiently important to
our work, we will travel by plane. As well as keeping air travel to a minimum, we have decided to use the World Land Trust’s carbon calculator
to measure and offset the carbon generated by the air travel that we do
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What's coming up: 18 January, 6PM: Author Jonathan Mallinson will give an online lecture for the English Ceramic Circle titled'”A chemical and artistic triumph”: William Moorcroft and Florian ware.' Find more information here.
21 January, 12 PM:
Open Research at York will host a webinar on 'The realities, challenges
and future of open access publishing.' This session will provide an
insightful and critical discussion of the realities and challenges
facing open access today, with perspectives from authors, publishers and
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Register for the event here.
That's all for this month! Have a happy holiday season, and we'll see you in 2025!
SO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig. You’re welcome!
When the pandemic hit the world in late 2019, the concept of lockdown ceased the social life of the people and their communities. In these unprecedented circumstances, a video from Italy took the internet. People in Italian towns such as Siena, Benevento, Turin, and Rome were singing from their windows and balconies, which raised morale. The song “Bella Ciao,” an old partisan Italian song, became an anthem of hope against adversity. This anti-fascist song was popularized during the mid-20th century across the globe as a part of progressive movements. Following this, people in many countries around the world created their renditions of “Bella Ciao” in Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish, Persian, French, Spanish, Armenian, German, Portuguese, Russian, and within India in languages such as Punjabi, Marathi, Bangla, and even in sign language renditions. It was such an apt moment that captured the idea of empathy, solidarity, and the human need for community. This moment was still resonating with me when I was approached by Goethe Institut, New Delhi, to work on music and protest, and create The Music Library. I knew what I needed to do.
The Music Library was conceptualized as a weekly playlist of protest songs. I believe protests are not just demands but are aspirations, unfulfilled promises that truly represent the resilience of people. I could not imagine anything more beautiful than protest music to represent the world, as it amplifies human desires for connection and better days ahead. I designed it as a weekly music bulletin that people could dwell in for half an hour, and it would be like a short musical insight to that country or theme. Although the project had to be cut short due to institutional limitations, The Music Library creted 36 weekly playlists focused on liberation movements, anti-colonial struggles, people’s uprisings, and popular expressions of dissent.
The Music Library hosts two types of playlists: issue-based and country- or region-specific. This approach curates and classifies music for a broader audience attuned to these categories. When I prepare a playlist, the first thing I seek is to incorporate marginalized and diverse voices. Diversity can be based on caste, gender, language, region, and more. I typically favor field recordings, amateur productions, and emerging artists. Occasionally, the featured artists have as few as 50 views on their videos. After listening to numerous songs and consulting individuals with greater expertise, I select 5-8 songs and then write a blurb to introduce the playlist. Sometimes, I also seek help for language assistance. In that sense, it’s a very collaborative effort. The Music Library’s mission resonates with Merje Laiapea’s mapping of Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion through music. The Music Library similarly engages protest music, but with a wider array of areas and themes.
After the first few weeks, I decided to transition from Indian protest music to global and I wanted to foster a gradual introduction instead of a snap transition. I realized that inviting guest curators would enable the transition to linger on for a bit before settling in, and the guest curators would have a much better idea of the protest culture in their respective country and/or area of research. For example, Sara Kazmi, a scholar-activist-singer from Pakistan, curated a playlist on protest music of Pakistan; Yueng, who is researching Hong Kong music for his Ph.D, curated a playlist on The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. So their expertise and knowledge of respective countries give us a better sense of what protest music is for people there than I could provide on my own. Like Sara and Yueng, many of the guest curators have either been part of protest movements or have written, observed, or researched closely. Likewise, there are guest playlists by musicologist Lucas Avidan that emphasize the prominence of hip-hop music, or as some call it “Bonga flava” in Tanzanian protest music, and a playlist on MC Todfod, an emerging rapper from Mumbai Hip-Hop collective Swadesiwho passed away at the age of 24. Protests themselves are essentially about bringing people together and working together. In this sense, the co-curatorial process resonated with the idea of protest music itself as a collective action.
The idea of protest is essentially an act, attitude, orientation, and assertion against the dominant conservative system. So, in that sense, its definition is as varied as the kinds of conservatism existing in societies. It could be based on class, caste, gender, race, nation, region, language, food, and culture. In short, protest music means speaking up against power. Protest music plays multiple roles for the people practicing it or whom it represents. In a highly unequal power relationship, it is like a crack or a rupture against hegemony. In others, it asserts power. For many, protest music symbolizes an idea, utopia, like one world or Begumpura,i.e., land without sorrow, in 15th-century saint-poet Ravidas from India. With old social issues such as casteism, patriarchy, feudalism still lingering around and consolidating, and capitalism and nationalism getting strongholds across the globe, the world is more fragmented and hostile. In this situation, the protest music from around the world raises some particular issues but also many universal ones, such as equality, recognition, dignity, food, housing, healthcare, education, and above all, the right to live as an equal citizen. The Music Library brings all of this protest music under a single umbrella, as all this music has one thing in common: Resilience! At times, The Music Library is a music room that soothes, and other times a war cry for equality!
Bangladesh’s playlist, for example, curated by Dhaka-based artist, Emdadul Hoque Topu, is based on Liberation War songs. The Liberation War was a unique liberation movement based on linguistic identity. So, language, a mode of expression like music, was at the heart of the movement. Interestingly, when the recent popular uprising occurred, I was in Dhaka and saw the popular resentment against the Liberation War and its icons. It shows that protest music is as evolving and contemporary as any other expressive form, one age’s protest song could later turn into a voice of the oppressor or used to oppress any dissent. For instance, Rajakars, a term that till recently had very negative connotation due to its association with the detractors of anti-liberation, has been employed and repurposed in a chant or slogan ami ke, tumi ke, Rajakar, Rajakar (who am I, who are you, Rajakar, Rajakar) for the current uprising that led to the overthrow of the Sheikh Hasina-led government.
In another instance, the historic Farmer’s Protest of 2020-21 in India–termed the biggest movement in recorded history– has led to a proliferation of music to bolster it. Though the protest started in the north Indian state of Punjab, it spread across India and drew global support. Punjab is a musically unique place; it is one of India’s most popular and prolific independent music industries. Due to early migration history, Punjabi music has spread globally and has been adaptive of derived from various musical cultures such as rap, pop, etc, while maintaining its distinct linguistic identity. This made the Punjabi music popular and relevant beyond its linguistic boundaries. The movement has been chronicled by a newsletter called the Trolley Times, where I worked as a co-editor. Numerous Punjabi singers have contributed immensely by producing music and being part of the movement. After a long time, a strong impulse in the popular cultural sphere evolved in solidarity with the mass movement.
The Music Library was under construction when the world was going through a pandemic, and unprecedented isolation, a hallmark of oppression. In the pandemic, when people were dying, this quote became popular: Corona is the virus, Capitalism is the pandemic. People could see the havoc of capitalism playing out in full public display from the first world to the third world. Someone who is cornered, pushed against the wall, with no recourse to grievance redressal, cries out to make themselves count, and find solidarity and rise. I designed The Music Library to show how music can break a slumber and bring people to march together, similarly to what “Bella Ciao” did during COVID-19.
It began as a hum that was joined by neighbors, and then it spread, loudly, across the world as an expression of solidarity and resilience. “Bella Ciao” is such a marvellous testimony of what music can do and has been doing! I hope The Music Library serves as a humble repository of this resilience.
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Featured Image: Image of “Bella Ciao” being sung in Santiago, Chile during the ‘estallido social’ (2019) by AbarcaVasti, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Mukesh Kulriya is a Ph.D. scholar in Ethnomusicology at The Herb Alpert School of Music, University of California, Los Angeles, USA. His research focuses on the intersection of music and religion in South Asia in the context of gender and caste. His Ph.D. research examines bhakti, or devotion practices within the ambit of popular religion in Rajasthan, India. Since 2010, he has collaborated on India-based projects centered around the craft, culture, folk music, and oral traditions as an organizer, archivist, translator, and researcher. He also works on global protest music and currently working on a podcast on Music and Hate.
Chronicles of the Cyber Village: Colonialism and Advertising in the Age of AI
By Nguyen Thi Thanh Tra
How has artificial intelligence transformed the advertising landscape, and what ethical
implications arise from AI-driven personalization and data mining? Who truly benefits from
these new AI-controlled advertising ecosystems, and who is left vulnerable or exploited?
This book explores these urgent questions through six interconnected stories, narrated by an elder in a futuristic village where technology has colonized both physical and mental territories. It reveals not only the unseen forces driving modern advertising but also how technology, AI, and digital markets have transformed the human experience and ideas of power, influence, and control. Blending a postcolonial perspective with a critique of digital capitalism, this book offers a call to action for readers seeking to understand the deeper truths behind the digital frontier.
Nguyen Thi Thanh Tra is a professor of Media Arts and Design at the Faculty of Industrial Fine Arts, Ton Duc Thang University, Vietnam. She holds a Doctor of Liberal Arts degree in Media Arts from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. Her research and artistic practice explore how emerging phenomena at the intersection of technological development and cultural shifts reshape society and influence new forms of creative expression.
I’ve been using Notion for many years at this point. My life goes through it, for good and for worse, and it has changed because of it, like it happens with the extensive adoption of any software. It allowed me to be extremely effective and structured in what I do: I have several jobs in very diverse fields: organization consultancy, facilitation, education, fermentation, software design and development, adversarial research against platforms, and occasionally also life coaching and mentoring. Luckily, I come from a Mediterranean culture, so I have strong anti-hustle safeguards. The productivity enabled by Notion might have turned me into a productivist person, shunned as the lowest lifeform south of the Alps.
Two years ago, I wrote the following article to share my understanding of Notion, why it’s so powerful, and why people are using it for pretty much anything. I tried to reflect on its limitations, which here on INC might sound obvious: we don’t want our life or our organization to be tied to the whims of an American corporation with no way to detach ourselves. This set me on a path to explore what’s moving in the space of new technical languages: no-code platforms, new paradigms of knowledge management and coordination, new paradigms of software altogether.
At the time, the landscape for Notion alternatives was rather scarce, with few, immature options. Notion’s user base kept growing and with it, the need to escape from its walled garden. I patched up the article here and there, updating it to reflect the new status quo.
To reflect the centralizing power of Notion, the article has been published as a Notion page. As you will see, the nested and linked format of the article won’t lend itself to be transfered to a traditional, skeumorphic, old-fashioned, flat page here on INC’s website. We opted to keep in its native format. Ejnoy!
“How Present is Wall”, reads white panel installed in the grassy park in Berlin, tightly fit with five other layers of the same design. Arranged in a zig-zag, the installation ends with: „How Strong is Border“, „How Liberation is Freedom“. None of them end with question marks.
There is one thing that strikes me the most: the middle panel, asking or stating, „How is Longing“. It lacks an adjective. The space between interrogative adverb and present tense verb is empty; but do we really need to fill it with one word after all?, I ask myself.
There is a continuous current of longing and yearning that is difficult to keep straight, yet they stick. They inflate the pool of memories and dive in and out between our selves. And there is toughness to reminiscence: longing stays elastic and steady. I like to think that longing holds us in place, gives us a dwelling place. And sometimes, this is mediated by our choices in how we remember what has already long passed, or perhaps, places around us do the remembering for us and with us.
In 2022, I went to Berlin for my master’s thesis fieldwork to explore the memory-making of German Democratic Republic, in particular, remembrance practices among former political prisoners of STASI and places that stake a claim on memory: museums and memorials dedicated to the GDR period. When having conversations with former citizens of the GDR, I realised that when the „remembering happens“, the bodies of the Rememberers are continuously moulded. The past is rediscovered again and again, with the temporal boundaries – bridging words of „here“ and „there“ that help the memory to narrate itself. Yet, how is longing for places that produce the memory?
Choose your own mundanity
Memory sites are dead material – they are inherently mute, for they hold no memories of their own until people invest them with meaning. In contemporary debates about GDR memory, there is a marked split: on one hand, material remains underscore a state of injustice. On the other hand, some representations tend to showcase naïve sentimentalizing and, at worst, intentional banalising of the GDR past. The German term, Ostalgie embodies the latter, as it is a conflation of two German words: ‘East’ and ‘nostalgia’. Yet, Ostalgie is not necessarily about an obsession with the GDR era, but it rather might be an embattled site of memory-making, where individual experiences and biographies seek legitimacy.
In recent years, there has been a tendency to gloss over the totalitarian past of Germany, reframing the feeling of Ostalgie as a mainstream sentiment. The DDR Museum in Berlin exemplifies this shift. With its approximately 10,000 artifacts – ranging from bottles of kitchen cleansers to speaking windows at the border checkpoints – it presents a collection of mundanity. In a way, it preserves personal memorabilia, but, this type of memorabilia sometimes is emptied of its intimate weight they once carried.
When I was scrolling through the website of the DDR Museum, I saw this little section of how museum introduces itself as a Looking Glass into a „bygone state“. By describing itself as “unique” and “extraordinary”, it seems the museum detaches itself from other, conventional museums. It states, the history, and in particular, everyday life in the GDR is conveyed in “scientifically sound” way, and also sensorially crafted in a way that feels accessible, and even – enjoyable.
Writing such description focused on its extraordinary nature on the website to attract visitors is a conventional marketing language aimed at drawing interest, which is a standard approach. Yet stating it is a “scientifically sound” way to engage with the past is also claiming the memory, but whose, or which memory? What does it mean to be “unique”, or “scientifically sound” anyway?
Choose your own DDR
The interface of the website provides the users with a huge display of two people sitting in a Trabant car, one person pointing to the direction of socialist building from the windshield. The space itself also had a real Trabant car, in which visitors could sit and have “journey back in the GDR”, along with experiencing the “daily life” while entering the rooms of furnished high-rise block tower, taking a seat in front of a small soviet TV in the reconstructed living room typical to the GDR housing, and looking into the reconstructed, “socialist” bedrooms.
Each item there had its own history, which created a drifting experience, but it went to places that are fallen into disuse, and disrepair. These are infrastructures that are failing, but failing in a consistent way, as this failure repurposes itself as somewhat entertaining in the contemporary museum scene. It is clear it is all staged, for raising an awareness, but mostly, for entertaining purpose. The museum almost makes a spectacle out of grey block buildings and the dull weather, that one can see and “immerse themselves into” when on-site.
The reconstruction of the past in such straightforward way was worth of analysis for several reasons: I wanted to see how the museum positions itself in the current memory debate about German socialist past, especially considering its promise for multisensorial experiences: when the visitors can touch, feel, listen, and truly inhabit the space. Soon, I asked myself whether the museum was building a collective mythology, or rather, an entirely new memory, not ex nihilo but out of a fixed understanding of the past remembrance. Interestingly, it lets you choose what to dwell on, what to contemplate, precisely. But doesn’t it also serve as a counter-memory of the past experienced by people who feel their lives were museumified?
One of my respondents once told me he could not bear the boredom of the being anymore, that it was all dull, grey and dreary; that life there had no colours; that buildings had no new windows, that everything was so old and dysfunctional; let alone the greyness of smell – the smoke produced by factories that prevailed the whole East Germany. Yet, in another realm, in the West, people had all the smells and colours, they had all kinds of fruits and that’s where he tasted Kiwi for the first time after the Fall of Berlin Wall.
Another woman I talked to tells me in a concerning tone of voice that there were no deep connections among lovers, „it was not love and sex together, but it was just sex, sex, sex. The boredom of it, no theater and no cinema“. „This endless boredom, it’s something I remember the most“, tells me another respondent, „the scenery was so unbearably boring, even going to the summer houses during holidays, it was so, so boring. No other people around, TV showing nothing interesting. That’s why they drank so much, you know.“
Boredom was a way of living according to people I talked to, and it also served as a state of being – as an antidote to what the West embodied. Yet, I could not see any equivalent of boredom when visiting DDR museum, I saw the past residues displayed there as a different kind of embodiment, these life histories, online and offline are commemorated in a way that the spectacularity is maintained.
Choose your Fighter
While reading short informative texts about GDR artifacts, its borderzones, and STASI surveillance, a digital screen caught my attention with the phrase: THE NEW SOCIALIST HUMAN, against the background of the Soviet-style wallpaper.
After choosing a field of choice, this type of “interactive game” enabled the visitors to customize a character by choosing a face from four facial expressions. The next step involved selecting clothing for their desired character, again with four options. In case of “pink socialist human”, there were two dresses and two trousers, aimed at „building“ some kind of a GDR persona. Users could also select desired hairstyle (again, out of four options), top, shoes, hat, jewellery, bag, book, accessory, and a flag symbol. Each section provided a brief information. The category of jewellery stated:
„Have you just been released from prison? Piercing and tattoos have no place in the life of good Socialist. Rings are to be worn on your fingers and then no more than a wedding ring.“
Once the character was complete, one could print their versions. The objects, such as Trabant cars, bear the legacy of ideology, yet „taking an artificial ride in the GDR landscape for several minutes“ removes such object from the realm of politics, and such activity with GDR artifact becomes a source of entertainment. But what about actual „humans that represent Socialism“ as illustrated by the museum? Can the complexity of people living in the GDR inserted into a game-like understanding of a person as a whole?
This reminds me of the psychoanalyst, Hans Joachim Maaz making quite a long remark in his work, „Behind the Wall: The Inner Life of Communist Germany“ about the psychological portrait of the collapsed „existing real socialism“ of the GDR. He boldly stresses the „dysfunctional traits“ of East Germans, noting that „the East German personality suffered from the „deficiency syndrome“: deprived of everything from good service to clean air to unconditional love, East Germans invariably blocked instinctive emotional responses and often channeled them into dysfunctional outlets, such as overeating, drinking, smoking, and watching television“. This is quite a risky and stigmatised statement to make, let alone calling „overeating“ (whatever that might contain and however this data was collected statistically), „drinking, smoking and watching television“ a dysfunctional trait.
There is also a universalised term in some disciplines within social sciences, rendering the whole generation to Homo Sovieticus, which also makes me question how these bodies are constructed within the everpresent gaze from Us to Them. And what about digital Socialist bodies we stumble upon from time to time? Reducing a trope of socialist persona to merely four options, as the little screen indicated, might also be museum’s intention to reconstruct the stereotype of Soviet propaganda by offering „fun and rich“ experience of building a new Socialist human within its cultural and political policies. However, considering the complexity of these individuals, this type of reconstruction might have a dual nature: while intending to showcase Socialist stereotypes, this representation becomes disconnected from the actual owners of their political or cultural bodies, or even, personal life-stories they might be embodying. In other words, it becomes a stigma reinforced by stigma.
This digital screen, regardless of what it carries, it serves as a memory carrier. It does create a unified narrative, and it is exclusive of the complex memorabilia of bodies, digital or lived. And it does create new memory site of its own, some kind of an artificial fabric from which we choose our fighters, we build them, we play the game and we are taking a journey in somewhat bygone space full of failures.
on Unsplash
While reading short informative texts about GDR artifacts, its borderzones, and STASI surveillance, a digital screen caught my attention with the phrase: THE NEW SOCIALIST HUMAN, against the background of the Soviet-style wallpaper.