News from the Collective

Жить тяжело и неуютно
Зато уютно умирать

(Living is difficult and confining,

But dying is liberating)

The words written above are an excerpt from the song Sudno (Boris Ryzhy) by post-punk band Molchat Doma from Minsk. These words also often loop over the reels on post-Soviet aesthetics found online – the ones of decayed brutalist buildings with blue and grey undertones, or snow-covered, rectangular residential blocks with crumbling soviet elevators. Such content online grabs me instantly because of its familiarity, but it also grabs me because of how it claims the space. I am drawn to it insofar as I’ve been part of that infrastructure, but I am also consciously keeping the distance because it feels too close, too empty, and too sticky.

Some objects or bodies are ‘stickier’ than others, forming a relationality, or “withness”, where things that are “with” each other get bound together. Sara Ahmed uses the analogy of stickiness to reflect on how disgust can generate effects by “binding” signs to bodies, as a binding that blocks new meanings. In digital culture, I see this as one form of an affective shift to online spaces – how some objects, more than others become sticky on the Internet, and how they accumulate layers of meaning through repetition and circulation. These objects or ways of understanding a certain lifeworld sometimes become territorial; they bind to some bodies, desires and affects, sticking in ways that close off other forms of engagement. What interests me is that the more they firm their presence online, the more they seem to pull our emotionality in, until the point when our encounters with them become habitual.

With this in mind, I want to engage with Soviet and post-Soviet aesthetics on the Internet. Yet, it feels impossible to deconstruct the presence of online remains of the Soviet/post-Soviet world without becoming entangled in its own memetic landscape, and ultimately becoming part of it. The very act of reflexivity I use while scrolling through Instagram and TikTok pages dedicated to post-Soviet lifeworlds—blurs the line between observer and subject—I critique but I also consume. So, in a way, this article becomes its own kind of meme. I find myself stuck as a meme insofar as I am absorbed by it. For the more serious the analysis becomes, the more it echoes the same meme narrative post-Soviet aesthetics on the Internet continuously produces.

The stickiness, when touching upon the post-Soviet meme world, holds a quality of fixedness. It is firm and unmovable. Whatever sticks to this certain aesthetics found on the Internet is frozen and fixed in time – it cannot be removed as its digital footprint will be elsewhere. Yet it continues to shift within its own limits, as it is also stuck with its own boundaries, trapped between forming and erasing meanings, old and new. This leads me to the space between these acts of fixation and circulation—the space between sticking and moving. How, then, is the “post-Soviet” performed on the internet?

Ownership of post-Soviet memorabilia on the Internet, and liminality that comes with it

The term post-Soviet does not just refer to the aftermath of the collapse of Soviet Union, but sets the two in a reciprocal relation, where what is considered Soviet is a construct of the post-Soviet present. Multiple Instagram/TikTok pages soak this up. While producing Soviet narratives for various purposes—educational, nostalgic, or entertaining—the imageries of post-Soviet lifeworld are continuously accumulated, reconstructed, and reimagined. What my Instagram algorithm provides is ranging from austere appearance of Soviet propaganda posters, or the captions of pages like soviet-movies: “Subscribe, Tovarish[1]!” – and easternblocgirl – “dropping some Eastern European vibes on the Internet” with the weekly reminder, “going insane in Eastern Europe Wednesday”, to Soviet_busstops, giving surprisingly detailed descriptions of bus stops found in post-Soviet countries.

What I see, is that this specific content on the Internet is multi-layered and in a constant flux, but more impressively, it has its own digital infrastructure.

Figure 1: Louvre in Russian (Last viewed on October 22, 2024)

Take, for instance, the Instagram page easternblocgirl, where the aesthetics of post-Soviet life are curated through images of scraped-off light blue walls, crumbling brutalist buildings, and the gritty surfaces of “Sovietcore.” “I can smell that подъезд[2] through the phone”, comments one user on the photo above. And I can smell it too. Being born and raised in a post-Soviet country, this picture resonates with me deeply, for I also have been living in “one of those” Soviet brutalist buildings. It reeks of old dust that stings nostrils, of damp walls, beer, and indelible marks of cigarette butts, the texture of the light blue wall, which is similar to how school classrooms were painted in the early 2000s. It is not only simply a building but a sensorial memory that clings to me and other bodies shaped by this very infrastructure.

These are archives of feelings, of that stickiness. And there is a subtle dimension of the social: sensory landscapes we become endowed with, treat us as active record-keepers, used as an extension of human memory with continuing value. In this instance, we seem to be value carriers, while the sensory modalities affect our lived experiences and make our bodies become witnesses of the material experiences. Yet, the Internet is fragile in this regard, as these experiences are flattened into digital archives, fragmented and reduced to visual traces on screen. One cannot locate the digital manifestation of a Soviet past residue in its own socio-political context.

The easternblocgirl Instagram account is marked by its own disembodiment. The sensory connections it evokes, might be more about collective imagery or invented nostalgia, rather than a personal memory. This uncertainty complicates the relationship between digital archives and lived experience. Instead of asking where these memories truly belong and who gets to claim ownership, I would rather question how we become the owners of post-Soviet memorabilia as we perform on the very remembrance that has a fictive, invented quality to it.

Paul Connerton argued that performativity cannot be thought of without a concept of habit; and habit cannot be thought of without a notion of bodily practices[3]. Bodily practice can be reached through virtual interactions in case of easternblocgirl. If we use our virtual bodies to perform on post-Soviet memories, we are doing so in a manner of thinking and feeling through the infrastructures. Infrastructures do fix space and time when being built, but they are not hard to reverse.  As things in motion, they fall into decay and deterioration, and also, they repurpose themselves over time. Mentioning time here as a temporal dimension is important for several reasons. I oppose Akhil Gupta’s argument when examining infrastructure as an entry point into future desires, aspirations, and one’s life trajectories. He writes that often, infrastructures are shaped by notions of futurity, which then in turn moves the discussion to what they signify for future[4]. Limiting thinking about infrastructure in terms of its futuristic desires risks detracting from the narrative of its multidimensionality. For when delving into post-Soviet infrastructures displayed online, the space for futuristic aspirations lacks its purpose. Users do not seem to look at this matter in a way that would position decayed buildings as desirable places to live.

Instead of futuristic narratives, these types of infrastructures associated with post-Soviet aesthetics on the Internet create the kind of temporality that does not orient itself towards future, but towards the liminality – the disorientated state of being between what is no longer there, and what is not there yet. In other words, it is a temporal sense of nostalgia towards the past that drives such aesthetics. And more importantly, this nostalgia might be invented the way the past is reinvented, reconfigured and affective.

Figure 2: Beautiful New World in Russian. (Last viewed on October 22, 2024)

Figure 3 (Last viewed on October 22, 2024)

Reality Bruised

Infrastructure can be defined as the assemblage of people, objects, practices, and institutions that enable and sustain these patterns, or more concisely, a “matter that moves matter”[5]. Pages like easternblocgirl are not just visual archives—they are dynamic, ever-flowing spaces that act as affective infrastructures, carrying the weight of the past forward. We come, then to what is perhaps a re-emergence of Soviet past residue in its new forms. These new forms are not merely of nostalgic quality, they are also tied to an affective infrastructure.

Just as some infrastructure projects in the Soviet Union were a way to insert state power over territories, people, and the environment, so too the post-Soviet aesthetic found on the Internet transforms this narrative, vacates the state-led power and repurposes these infrastructures. There is a discourse under the umbrella of post-Soviet aesthetics that has installed itself as a place re-invented. Cloaked in dull and grey brutalist, decayed buildings, and hyping itself as Slavic “core” having a quality of suffering – the one that elicits nostalgia, melancholy and loss. These transformations in digital culture are not only a visual shift but also an affective one. In this way, this certain understanding of the past and present crumbling post-Soviet infrastructure could be seen as a source for an emotional landscape that offers new narratives of belonging and desire.

Figure 4: (Last viewed on October 22, 2024)

Figure 5: I drink coffee and silently gaze at this fucking city in Russian. (Last viewed on October 22, 2024)

These Instagram posts of decayed buildings and low-resolution images create a sense of dislocation, an almost Burroughsian “junk time”—a time that is both past and present, liminal, real and imagined. When looking at these pics, I am tempted not only to contemplate the object in mise en scène, but also ponder the object that captured them, which, in my own remembrance would be Samsung’s or either Nokia’s old flip phones. Seeing the present visual culture in its own capitalist hierarchy, it becomes clear that the contemporary image system has a tendency to establish a hierarchy of images, based on their “quality”. In this regard, high-resolution pictures become an attractive and immersive economic force, whereas low-quality images are further marginalised and represent technological failure. Yet, in this instance, low-quality runs the monopoly over the content, which further helps to glorify the context – it becomes an integral part of the aesthetic itself. The very visibility of technological and infrastructural failure, and the detachment from an overly polished discourse of images online, absorb the post-Soviet imagery in a way that it becomes intimate.

The space praises itself as seductive, luring the viewer in by temptingly asking whether one misses it, embodying a sentiment of innocence and affective properties that generate a narrative and active construct. The online post-Soviet performance almost created an alternative, “bruised” realm of orientation, a space that is being claimed as inherently glitched, ripped apart, and worn out. I suggest that such orientation in motion acts as a repository of feelings and emotions, creating an accidental memory community. “I feel very sick here”, says the meme (Figure 6). Under the same meme found on vk.com, another user comments, “I feel sick here too”. Feeling sickened is always directed toward the object, as it is the very object that makes us feel repelled. This also implies the spatial quality of such an object, which, in this case, can be the dislocated post-Soviet space itself – a digital site that saturates certain emotionality in a shared experience.

Figure 6: I feel sick here in Russian. (Last viewed on October 22, 2024)

Figure 7 (Last viewed on October 22, 2024)

Figure 8 (Last viewed on October 22, 2024)

There is a shared sense of “missing something”; however, it is an accidental longing, as there is no implicit or explicit shared purpose, or a unified narrative where community members practice a specific type of remembrance or have a specific goal to reach – the constitution of the community occurs by accident. I suggest that these types of places create an online interaction where users can pass through or sometimes even settle in such material networks without actually belonging there. I treat such users as accidental members of memory community, and memory precisely because it is oriented towards the past in a liminal way. Together with accidental, reinvented remembrance practices, the emotionality and relatedness – real or imagined – that these memes or comments bring forth further reinforce the idea of reconfiguring affective infrastructure. We think and feel through infrastructure that is affective as long as we embody such online presence as something tangible and experiential.

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References

Ahmed, Sara. 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh University Press.

Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge University Press.

Gupta, Akhil. 2018. “The future in ruins: Thoughts on the temporality of infrastructure.” In The promise of infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, 62–79. Duke University Press.

Larkin, Brian. 2013. The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42:327-43

[1] A comrade in Russian.

[2] Building entrance in Russian.

[3] Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 6

[4] Akhil Gupta,”The future in ruins: Thoughts on the temporality of infrastructure”,  in The promise of infrastructure, ed. Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gulta, and Hannah Appel. (Duke University Press, 2018), 63.

[5] Brian Larkin. “The politics and poetics of infrastructure” Annual Review of Anthropology, no. 42 (2013): 238

A Conversation by Todd Craig and LeBrandon Smith

By now, it’s safe to say very few people have not caught wind of the biggest Hip-Hop battle of the 21st century: the clash between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. Whether you’ve seen the videos, the memes or even smacked a bunch of owls around playing the video game, this battle grew beyond Hip Hop, with various facets of global popular culture tapped in, counting down minutes for responses and getting whiplash with the speed of song drops. There are multiple ways to approach this event. We’ve seen inciteful arguments about how these two young Black males at the pinnacle of success are tearing one another down. We also acknowledge Hip Hop’s long legacy of battling; the culture has always been a “competitive sport” that includes “lyrical sparring.”

This three-part article for Sounding Out!’s Hip Hop History Month edition stems from a longer conversation with two co-authors and friends, Hip Hop listeners and aficionados, trying to make sense of all the songs and various aspects of the visuals. This intergenerational conversation involving two different sets of Hip Hop listening ears, both heavily steeped in Hip Hop’s sonic culture, is important. Our goal here is to think through this battle by highlighting quotes from songs that resonated with us as we chronicled this moment. We hope this article serves as a responsible sonic assessment of this monumental Hip Hop episode.

First things first: what’s so intergenerational about our viewpoints? This information provides some perspective on how this most recent battle resonated with two avid Hip Hop listeners and cultural participants.

LeBrandon is a 33 year old Black male raised in Brooklyn and Queens, New York. He is an innovative curator and social impact leader. When asked about the first Hip Hop beef that impacted him, LeBrandon said:

The first Hip-Hop battle I remember is Jay x Nas and mainly because Jay was my favorite rapper at the time. I was young but mature enough to feel the burn of “Ether.” It’s embarrassing to say now, but truthfully I was hurt—as if “Ether” had been pointed at me. “Ether” is a masterclass in Hip Hop disrespect but the stanza that I remember feeling terrible about was “I’ll still whip your ass/ you 36 in a karate class?/ you Tae-bo hoe/ tryna work it out/ you tryna get brolic/ Ask me if I’m tryna kick knowledge/ Nah I’m tryna kick the shit you need to learn though/ that ether, that shit that make your soul burn slow.” MAN. I remember thinking, is Jay old?! Is 36 old?! Is my favorite rapper old?! Why did Nas say that about him? I should reiterate I am older now and don’t think 36 is old, related or unrelated to Hip Hop. Nas’s gloves off approach shocked me and genuinely concerned me. But I’m thankful for the exposure “Ether” gave me to the understanding that anything goes in a Hip-Hop battle.

Todd is a Black male who grew up in Ravenswood and Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City, New York. Todd is about 15 years older than LeBrandon, and is an associate professor of African American Studies and English. Todd stated:

The first battle that engaged my Hip Hop senses was the BDP vs. Juice Crew battle –specifically “The Bridge” and “The Bridge is Over.” The stakes were high, the messages were clear-cut, and the battle lines were drawn. I lived in Ravenswood but I had family and friends in QB. And “The Bridge” was like a borough anthem. Even though MC Shan was repping the Bridge, that song motivated and galvanized our whole area in Long Island City. This was the first time in Hip Hop that I recall needing to choose a side. And because I had seen Shan and Marley and Shante in real life in QB, the choice was a no-brainer. That battle led me to start recording Mr. Magic and Marley Marl’s show on 107.5 WBLS, before even checking out what Chuck Chillout or Red Alert was doing. As I got older, it would sting when I heard “The Bridge is Over” at a club or a party. And when I would DJ, I’d always play “The Bridge is Over” first, and follow it up with either “The Bridge” or another QB anthem, like a “Shook Ones Pt. 2” or something.

We both enter this conversation agreeing this battle has been brewing for about ten years, however it really came to a head in the Drake and J. Cole song, “First Person Shooter.” Evident in the song is J. Cole’s consistent references to the “Big Three” (meaning Kendrick Lamar, Drake and J. Cole atop Hip-Hop’s food chain), while Drake was very much focused on himself and Cole. It is rumored that Kendrick was asked to be on the song; his absence without some lyrical revision by Cole and Drake, seems to have led to Kendrick feeling snubbed or slighted in some way. This song gets Hip Hop listeners to Kendrick’s verse on the Future and Metro Boomin’ song “Like That” where Kendrick sets Hip Hop ablaze with the simple response: “Muthafuck the Big Three, nigguh, it’s just Big Me” – a moment where he “takes flight” and avoids the “sneak dissing” that he asserts Drake has consistently done. 

We both agreed that Drake’s initial full-length entry into this battle, “Push Ups,” was the typical diss record we’d expect from him. Whether in his battle with Meek Mill or Pusha T, Drake’s entry follows the typical guidelines for diss records: it comes with a series of jabs at an opponent, which starts the war of words. The goal in a battle is always to disrespect your opponent to the fullest extent, so we find Drake aiming to do just that. We both noticed those jabs, most memorably is “how you big steppin’ with some size 7 men’s on.” We also noticed Drake’s misstep by citing the wrong label for Kendrick when he says “you’re in the scope right now” – alluding to Kendrick Lamar being signed to Interscope – even though neither Top Dog Entertainment (TDE) nor PGLang are signed to Interscope Records. Drake’s lack of focus on just Kendrick would prove a mistake: he disses Metro Boomin, The Weeknd, Rick Ross, and basketball player Ja Morant in “Push Ups.”

While we agree that in a rap battle, the goal is to disrespect your opponent at the highest level, we had differing perspectives on Drake’s second diss track “Taylor Made Freestyle.” LeBrandon felt this song landed because it took a “no fucks” approach to the battle. Regardless of how one may feel about Drake’s method of disrespect (by using AI), the message was loud and inescapable. LeBrandon highlighted the moment when AI Tupac says “Kendrick we need ya!”; outside of how hilarious this line is, Drake dissing Kendrick by using Tupac’s voice – a person with a legacy that Kendrick holds in the highest esteem – further established that this would be no friendly sparring match. Not only did Drake disrespect a Hip Hop legend with this line and its delivery, but an entire coast. The track invokes the spirit of a deceased rapper, specifically one whose murder was so closely connected to Hip Hop and authentic street beef. This moment was a step too far for Todd, who lived through the moment when both 2Pac and Biggie were murdered over fabricated beef.

Furthermore, LeBrandon pointed to the ever controversial usage of AI in Hip Hop, something Drake’s boss, Sir Lucian Grainge, recently condemned (especially when Drake, himself, condemns the AI usage of his own voice). By blatantly ignoring the issues and respectability codes the Hip Hop community should and does have with these ideas, Drake’s method of poking fun at his opponent was glorious. It was uncomfortable, condescending and straight-up gangsta. It also showcased Drake’s everlasting creative ability and willingness to take a risk. Todd acknowledged a generationally tinged viewpoint: this might also be a misstep for Drake because he used Snoop Dogg’s voice as well. Not only is Snoop alive, but Snoop was instrumental in passing the West Coast torch and crown to Kendrick. So when Drake uses an AI Snoop voice to spit “right now it’s looking like you writin’ out the game plan on how to lose/ how to bark up the wrong tree and then get your head popped in a crowded room,” it strikes at the heart of the AI controversy in music. This was not Snoop’s commentary at all. We both agree, however, that the “bark up the wrong tree” and “Kendrick we need ya” lines came back to haunt Drake. We also agree that dropping “Push Ups” and “Taylor Made Freestyle” is Drake’s battle format, hoping that he can overwhelm an opponent with multiple songs in rapid fire.

Todd and LeBrandon’s Hip Hop History Month play-by-play continues on November 11th with the release of Part 2! Return for “Euphoria” and stay until “6:16 in LA.”

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Our Icon for this series is a mash up of “Kendrick Lamar (Sziget Festival 2018)” taken by Flickr User Peter Ohnacker (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) and “Drake, Telenor Arena 2017” taken by Flickr User Kim Erlandsen, NRK P3 (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

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Todd Craig (he/him) is a writer, educator and DJ whose career meshes his love of writing, teaching and music. His research inhabits the intersection of writing and rhetoric, sound studies and Hip Hop studies. He is the author of “K for the Way”: DJ Rhetoric and Literacy for 21st Century Writing Studies (Utah State University Press) which examines the Hip Hop DJ as twenty-first century new media reader, writer, and creator of the discursive elements of DJ rhetoric and literacy. Craig’s publications include the multimodal novel tor’cha (pronounced “torture”), and essays in various edited collections and scholarly journals including The Bloomsbury Handbook of Hip Hop Pedagogy, Amplifying Soundwriting, Methods and Methodologies for Research in Digital Writing and Rhetoric, Fiction International, Radical Teacher, Modern Language Studies, Changing English, Kairos, Composition Studies and Sounding Out! Dr. Craig teaches courses on writing, rhetoric, African American and Hip Hop Studies, and is the co-host of the podcast Stuck off the Realness with multi-platinum recording artist Havoc of Mobb Deep. Presently, Craig is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at New York City College of Technology and English at the CUNY Graduate Center.

LeBrandon Smith (he/him) is a cultural curator and social impact leader born and raised in Brooklyn and Queens, respectively.  Coming from New York City, his efforts to bridge gaps, and build  community have been central to his work, but most notably his passion for music has fueled his career. His programming  has been seen throughout the Metropolitan area, including historical venues like Carnegie Hall, The Museum of the City of NY (MCNY) and Brooklyn Public Library.

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  REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:

“Heavy Airplay, All Day with No Chorus”: Classroom Sonic Consciousness in the Playlist Project—Todd Craig

SO! Reads: “K for the Way”: DJ Rhetoric and Literacy for 21st Century Writing Studies—DeVaughn (Dev) Harris 

Caterpillars and Concrete Roses in a Mad City: Kendrick Lamar’s “Mortal Man” Interview with Tupac Shakur–Regina Bradley

(Text of the speech by Ágnes Básthy on the first day of Metaforum X, Budapest, October 25, 2024)

“‘Krisis’ was originally a medical concept which designated, in the Hippocratic corpus of texts, the moment when the doctor decided whether the patient would be able to survive the disease. Theologians reprized the term to indicate the final judgement that occurs during the last day. If we look at the state of exception which we are now experiencing, we could say that the medical religion combines the perpetual crisis of capitalism with the Christian idea of the end times, of an eschaton where the extreme decision is constantly ongoing and where the end is simultaneously rushed and deferred in an incessant effort to govern it, without its ever being resolved once and for all. It is the religion of a world that feels itself to be at its end, and yet it cannot—like the Hippocratic doctor—decide whether it will survive or die.” Giorgio Agamben 

These sentences are taken from Agamben’s provocative essay ‘Medicine as religion’,^[1] written during the Covid pandemic.^[2] As he formulates, ‘crisis’ used to be a useful word but for now it has become incorporated into the vocabulary of governance. I may add that in the pseudo-scientific language of managerialism it is used for decades to cover up responsibility and as a helping hand in managing the unmanageable historically since the 1973 oil crisis. We know from Boltansky and Chiapello that in the self-adapting system called capitalism, such words as crisis are only phrases for phases of temporary dysfunction mostly followed by something more insidious and advanced structure.^[3] Because of these, I have serious doubts concerning the use of ‘crisis’ as a descriptive notion of the situation in which we are living. The intensification of destruction and anxiety is the consequence of the logic of rationalized, continuous and endless extraction of late modern capitalism. We are living in the late phase of the historical and material process based on a self-destroying logic.

If we not only look at economic indicators but at the big picture, it looks much more like a one-way direction process than an unstable system which is, however, striving for equilibrium.

I don’t believe that words on their own can change the world. However, I do believe that notions are fundamentally shaping our perspective on the world around us and our consciousness. You can call it ideology, or just accept that certain notions have agendas and agendas have certain notions (and these can change over time). I have to assert that in our times ‘crisis’ justifies new, more extreme ways of governing. Justification and legitimization are key notions in our case. Shosanna Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism^[4] penned her concerns based on Agamben’s thoughts:

“The declaration of a state of exception^[5] functions in politics as cover for the suspension of the rule of law and the introduction of new executive powers justified by crisis.” So, the last and most dangerous turn in the career of the notion of crisis was that it became a speech act, a favorite magic spell of contemporary political black magic. Declaring crisis nowadays is an ultimate legitimization not just for austerity measures in the economy, but the most widespread and harmful antisocial measures. Crisis can be ‘caused’ by migration,^[6] war or pandemic, terrorism, or ecological catastrophe, but the pure declaration itself is an active component in executing the most oppressive, authoritarian, tyrannic political actions. We can say otherwise that declaration of crisis is summoning the so-called self-appointed often nefarious saviors in the sphere of politics.

Power, Technology and Surveillance

Since Michel Foucault subverted the way we think about power it is more or less evident for the intelligentsia that power is exercised through a diffuse and widespread apparatus in which surveillance has an outstanding role.^[7] This is why Zuboff emphasizes that we are not only living in “digital capitalism” but in “surveillance capitalism” which means that the component of power in contemporary communication technology is based on the few centuries old practice of surveillance. Concerning the latest evolution in the technology of surveillance, Zuboff highlighted the notion of “surveillance exceptionalism” which she connected to the date of 2001 which was the year of the notorious terrorist attack against the World Trade Center in New York City, USA. This was a game-changing and life-changing event since it was the big push for the cooperation of the CIA and Google, that is, the establishment of the engaged alliance between surveillance capitalists and secret services. Although I was only a child back then, I do remember, and I guess many of you remember as well, the so-called “war on terrorism” of the Bush era.

The ambience of propaganda, war, racism and paranoia, the intensifying securitization, the scandalous and later unveiled political lies and secrets, and the rigorous measures legitimated by the politics of the ‘state of exception’^[8] had a deep, widespread and long-lasting effect on international politics and even on the more private and local social milieus almost everywhere on the planet. My conviction is that the ‘state of exception’ generated by the declaration of crisis during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 was very similar in many aspects, mostly because it was a global event with global consequences. The application of digital technologies in and for the surveillance of the population ranging from the ‘track and trace” apps to the authoritarian and obtrusive measurements which violated the private sphere supports the perspective to see this event as the next level of “surveillance exceptionalism” which was made possible not just by the network of the internet but by the mobile digital technology attached to our body which became a seemingly essential form of living during the last two decades. But what kind of political intentions, ideologies and industrial interests can be discovered behind these developments?

Sometimes it is worth trusting your intuition whether you are a social scientist or an artist and attempting to make visible the invisible. Anything we or our leaders mean under the notion of crisis, it’s more and more visible that social and technological phenomena are converging towards a new kind of order in social control. A dangerously tightening entanglement of science and technology with capital emerging as political power supported by a propaganda apparatus which penetrates and interlaces the media. This is why the Covid situation seemed so apocalyptic, and this proves the importance of analyzing the ‘crisis of science’ which remained with us after the scandalously managed pandemic. The latter and the recent ‘crisis of science’ was and is the culmination point of processes which have been ongoing for decades: “The politics of the life sciences — the politics of life itself ~ has been shaped by those who controlled the human, technical and financial resources” as Nikolas Rose pointed out this fact.^[9]

Biopower merged with high-end technologies which transformed or expressively abolished most of the moral and ethical constraints related to living bodies. To quote Rose again: “The classical distinction made in moral philosophy between that which is not human — ownable, tradeable, commodifiable and that which is human — not legitimate material for such commodification — no longer seems so stable.” Concluding these still and even more relevant words, the subversion and transformation of moral economies of societies are not without resistance or backlash. When the big capital implements new strategies to define our relationship to life and subordinates us to its own logic, there will be consequences, which means problems and crises and finally new forms of control.

As the Hungarian poet once wrote “Én nem így képzeltem el a rendet!” [This is not how I imagined the order],^[10] let’s see how Zuboff describes our situation:

“It may be possible to imagine something like the “Internet of things” without surveillance capitalism, but it is impossible to imagine surveillance capitalism without something like the “Internet of things.” Every command arising from the prediction imperative requires this pervasive real-world material “knowing and doing” presence. The new apparatus is the material expression of the prediction imperative, and it represents a new kind of power animated by the economic compulsion toward certainty. Two vectors converge in this fact: the early ideals of ubiquitous computing and the economic imperatives of surveillance capitalism. This convergence signals the metamorphosis of the digital infrastructure from a thing that we have to a thing that has us.”

Unless the strategy seems new, the constellation of capital, technology and control has been with us since modernity, this is why we shouldn’t leave any of these components out of our analysis. Zuboff is very explicit at this point when she writes:

“Surveillance capitalism employs many technologies, but it cannot be equated with any technology. Its operations may employ platforms, but these operations are not the same as platforms. It employs machine intelligence, but it cannot be reduced to those machines. It produces and relies on algorithms, but it is not the same as algorithms.     Surveillance capitalism’s unique economic imperatives are the puppet masters that hide behind the curtain orienting the machines and summoning them to action. These imperatives, to indulge another metaphor, are like the body’s soft tissues that cannot be seen in an X-ray but do the real work of binding muscle and bone. We are not alone in falling prey to the technology illusion. It is an enduring theme of social thought, as old as the Trojan horse. Despite this, each generation stumbles into the quicksand of forgetting that technology is an expression of other interests. In modern times this means the interests of capital, and in our time it is surveillance capital that commands the digital milieu and directs our trajectory toward the future.” 

Subjectification and Technology

What is our personal relationship to this all as human beings? We can ask the question otherwise: How do the often repeated slogans of trans-humanism and post-humanism like “shifting boundaries of humanity” relate to the Capital, and here I mean transnational and globalized Capital, especially to digital and biotechnology created by Big Tech and Big Pharma?

Nikolas Rose emphasized the power of capital in subjectivization processes since the beginning of the millennia, for example when he wrote:

“The philosophical status’ — indeed the very ontology — of human beings is being reshaped through the decisions of entrepreneurs as to where to invest their capital and which lines of biomedical research and development to pursue.”

 Therefore some of the biggest, hardest and most uncomfortable questions of our time are how this technological apparatus driven by the capitalist interest shapes our subjectivity,  how it affects our subjectification…our relation to ourselves, our desires and our choices or whatever we mean under the notion of identity. This leads us back to the question of power and subjectification conceptualized by the aforementioned Foucault. ^[11] What we are seeing today is that the boundaries between the self and the market are blurring gradually with the means and media of invasive and ubiquitous persuading apparatus which behavioural manipulation and modification^[12]  – and I have to add chemical interventions^[13] – which are directly targeting our self.

Unfortunately, so far I can’t see the reflective, profound and radical critique of the above-mentioned social processes, and neither are these hard questions asked in the mainstream of contemporary art. This latter takes the role of “a mirror” which only reflects and neither analyzes nor criticizes. I also see that despite the intensifying social control, pressure and obvious manipulation, most of the philosophers are affirmative if not enthusiastic and quailing in front of the power of the technological apparatus whose heart beats the rhythm of the Capital if it’s not one with it. I see little intent to face, understand and contextualize the manipulative nature of the power relations in which this technological culture is embedded. But the stakes have never been so high. Meanwhile, the so-called progress which made our life easier in some ways, and moderately transformed our possibilities, has many biopolitical consequences as well.

Key components of obedience are the lack of knowledge and real choices which sharply limits autonomy. Nowadays it seems like the intelligentsia accepted that there is no chance for diverting the ongoing technological trajectory. According to Zuboff, the colonization of our intellectual critical apparatus is intentional and she denominated it as ‘inevitabilism’. According to her, the concept of inevitability is a Trojan horse for powerful economic imperatives, it is an ideology and a marketing strategy in the aggressive colonization and transformation of the material world. For these purposes, it applies distorting rhetoric, based on the false premise that the trajectory of technological progress is inevitable.^[14] Here is how Zuboff disassembles it:

“The image of technology as an autonomous force with unavoidable actions and consequences has been employed across the centuries to erase the fingerprints of power and absolve it of responsibility. The monster did it, not Victor Frankenstein. However, the ankle bracelet does not monitor the prisoner; the criminal justice system does that. Every doctrine of inevitability carries a weaponized virus of moral nihilism programmed to target human agency and delete resistance and creativity from the text of human possibility. Inevitability rhetoric is a cunning fraud designed to render us helpless and passive in the face of implacable forces that are and must always be indifferent to the merely human. This is the world of the robotized interface, where technologies work their will, resolutely protecting power from challenge.”

Inevitabilism is a self-fulfilling prophecy of modernist thought, and today the utopianism of  Silicon Valley. But never forget that somebody’s utopia apparently can be somebody else’s dystopia.

The Last Bulwark: Effectivity and Sustainability of Modernity

It is dangerous that social, political and art theory and a considerable part of the art world take, use and set in motion some notions of late-modernist managerialism uncritically and without reflection. Do we want to sustain the unsustainable and manage the unmanageable? Do we want to be contributors to the neoliberal agenda of “managing the consequences” of antisocial governance? The notion of crisis implied a temporary rupture or reparable malfunction of a system that more or less works. Is it something that describes our world at this very moment? Can we truly believe in this? And I don’t think that completing the notion with prefixes -like “perma” and “poly”- can help us, neither in thinking nor in acting. I have a strong feeling that they are suffocating, and just further intensifying anxiety, sometimes to the point of psychological paralysis.

Engaging in building a more radical vocabulary which enables more radical actions we should reconsider what is power, control, freedom, and autonomy and realize that the cardinal question is still who or what exerts them. You might say that this is just a question of priorities but I would call it vigilance or awareness. Understanding the modernist roots of our thinking about technology and empowerment is key to finding new ways of thinking and getting rid of the role offered to us as ‘useful’ social engineers – meanwhile, we are artists, cultural workers or theorists – moreover in a system which is obviously not working according to the moral or social values we believe in. In my opinion, all ways lead back to the project of modernity, the reconsideration, the understanding and the critique of it. Since modernity, the developed technologies were originally created as control tools based on the results of scientific knowledge. And this also leaves its mark on the unintended consequences of their operation, not least forming their users through their inherent logic based on effectivity. But the component of power is always can be found in the relationship of the ‘subject’ or ‘actor’ and the ‘tool’ or ‘means of technology’ as Domonkos Sik pointed out:

“The most basic expectation towards technology is that the device itself is fully controlled by its user, that is, it should not have its own will, but should always follow the intentions of the actor. Another expectation is that it helps the subject to increase the efficiency of the rule exercised over the world.”

These expectations are subverted by Artificial Intelligence because it seems like a border state of human-technology hybrids in which the latter becomes dominant. So this change in the power relation is the real and cardinal turning point, and not ‘hybridization’, which is the favourite buzzword, and magic spell of contemporary theory. ‘Hybridisation’ is an ongoing but actually unreflected process since the dawn of human history if we can believe Latour^[15]. But why are we afraid of this turn and what can we win or lose in this process?

As Agamben wrote about modernity: “The fundamental architectural problem becomes visible only in the house ravaged by fire, then you can now see what is at stake in the history of the West, what it has tried so hard to grasp, and why it could not help but fail.”^[16] The whole set of problems is beautifully highlighted by the sociologist Domonkos Sik, in his text, titled ‘Only an AI can save us.’^[17] In this essay, he presents that what is really frightening in the AI for our human societies is in reality the heart of the modernist thought: the naked instrumental rationality as its inhumanity made visible by this entity (if we can call it like this). He asserts that facing this hard and harsh truth is giving us a chance to save ourselves and change the world we built around us. Sik follows the intellectual tradition of the critique of modernity when he highlights that totalitarian tendencies are embedded in the premises of modernity :

“It is important to emphasize that behind this fear are specifically the silenced taboos of modernity. The modern man is the one who measures the value of things by the effectiveness of control, who considers everything that is not efficient enough to be worthless, disposable, and destroyable. And the modern man is the one who asserts the amorality of technical rationality organized according to the exclusive aspects of efficiency. Centuries of colonialism, genocides based on race theory, and Nazism all exemplify where the absolutization of superiority identified with efficiency can lead – although not in the relationship between man and tool, but between man and man.

All this, moreover, does not require artificial intelligence. Modern man applied this principle himself in the past, when he set out to destroy fellow human beings he deemed unnecessary. And it also enforces it in the present, when it reproduces the extreme forms of social suffering through the indirect mechanisms of exploitation along the chains of global inequality. Moreover, endangering not only certain groups, but humanity as a whole.”

Then he goes on:

“The artificial intelligence that emerged as a result of instrumental rationalization poses a threat to human identity only if we accept the moral order of modernization narrowed down to efficiency, if we can only give enough meaning to life to dominate the world and others. In such an approach, we will necessarily lose against technological systems and AI: because sooner or later it will dominate the world and us in it more efficiently than we do. However, nothing determines us to get stuck in the amorality of efficiency: if we find a value and meaning that can be the basis of a life worthy of man, then the picture is already rearranged.”

AI as a new product in the process of functional-instrumental rationalization wakes up the ‘bad conscience of modernity’ and forces us to re-evaluate our social values. The ideological bases of this technology which we elaborated above also makes it clear that we can’t hand over the fate of humanity and our planet to our wrongly tamed creature and have to take responsibility for what we created. In the other hand we can’t get rid of the notion of ‘humanity’ so easily (as some theorists suggested). It’s time to decide what is worth preserving in human existence, in other words, what is it about being human that makes it worth staying human? What is this all to do with dignity or dignified existence? Since we can’t turn back history and we also shouldn’t, the potential strategy is exceeding or ‘the way of escape forward’ which means that we need to rediscover the human values that we have forgotten in the process of efficiency maximisation, and we have to save and reposition them through further ‘hybridisation’ process.

Our Powers: Awareness and Autonomy

What we can also conclude is that we need awareness in the first place. Every threat to   human autonomy begins with an assault on awareness, and this is why our consciousness is attacked by surveillance capitalism. This phenomenon is carefully analyzed by Zuboff in her book.

“Individual awareness is the enemy of telestimulation because it is the necessary condition for the mobilization of cognitive and existential resources. There is no autonomous judgment without awareness. Agreement and disagreement, participation and withdrawal, resistance or collaboration: none of these self-regulating choices can exist without awareness.”

Meanwhile, what we call self-control is a set of practices which are interiorized by human socialisation, hence in this sense not independent from the power relations and other cultural specificities which define a certain society, but the connection of autonomy with awareness and the ability to self-control is crucial. Moreover self-determination and autonomy are also deeply connected to what the ancient Greeks called ‘parrhesia’ which means ‘fearless speech’ or ‘speaking the truth’.^[18]

“Philosophers  recognize “self-regulation,” “self-determination,” and “autonomy” as “freedom of will.” The word autonomy derives from the Greek and literally means “regulation by the self.” It stands in contrast to heteronomy, which means “regulation by others.” The competitive necessity of economies of action means that surveillance capitalists must use all means available to supplant autonomous action with heteronomous action.”

Zuboff also invoked some research which confirms that the most important determinant of one’s ability to resist persuasion is premeditation which means that someone who can harness self-awareness to think through the consequences of their actions is more disposed to chart their own course. The other most important factor is commitment. So those who are consciously committed to a course of action or set of principles are less likely to be persuaded to do something that violates that commitment. If we recognize autonomy as a moral principle it is time to ask the question of what we are going through as a society by losing these important abilities. Could we see it as a kind of demoralization that also affects our intellectual capacities, or will the disintegration of our intellectual capacities turn into a kind of demoralisation? Zuboff points out:

 “A rich and flourishing research literature illuminates the antecedents, conditions, consequences, and challenges of human self-regulation as a universal need. The capacity for self-determination is understood as an essential foundation for many of the behaviours that we associate with critical capabilities such as empathy, volition, reflection, personal development, authenticity, integrity, learning, goal accomplishment, impulse control, creativity, and the sustenance of intimate enduring relationships.”

It is so telling and says so much about our awareness (or indeed the lack of it) that how we just dropped the notion of “autonomy” for “agency” and “empowerment” for suspiciously embracing and an almost cult-like worship of trauma, victimhood and “vulnerability” which latter in a sense is the agenda of impotence hereupon disempowerment in an age which badly needs our energies, our power to transform it. It doesn’t suggest a healthy relationship with power, more seems like belittling, shaming and taming the powerful in us to take away this power and let ourselves be ruled. I know this strategy painfully well because I’m a woman. I would like to emphasize that I’m not talking against empathy. Empathy and solidarity are some of the most important things in human society. But building our personality and our central social values around glorifying and aestheticizing suffering and even placing them in the middle of the competition, the struggle for attention is destructive.

Power is more important than just letting it pass on who knows whom. To deconstruct the totalizing understanding of the notion, we have to understand that power is not the same as authority or violence and we must relearn to distinguish among these terms. Just like in the Hungarian language ‘erő’, ‘hatalom’ és ‘erőszak’ are different notions, meanwhile in English ‘power’ is often and unreflectively used as a synonym for ‘authority’. Power is not purely negative, it’s not just destruction, it’s also energy and most of all: creation, knowledge, will, passion, life, autonomy, and in a sense it is the precondition of any action. Something we can share or generate in others as well. As Bifo wrote in Futurability:^[19]

“Possibility is content, potency is energy and power is form.”

He goes on and calls “possibility a content inscribed in the present constitution of the world (that is, the immanence of possibilities). Possibility is not one, it is always plural: the possibilities inscribed in the present composition of the world are not infinite, but many. The field of possibility is not infinite because the possible is limited by the inscribed impossibilities of the present. Nevertheless, it is plural, a field of bifurcations. When facing an alternative between different possibilities, the organism enters into vibration, then proceeds making a choice that corresponds to its potency.”

Then he calls “potency the subjective energy that deploys the possibilities and actualizes them. Potency is the energy that transforms the possibilities into actualities.”

And he calls “power the selections (and the exclusions) that are implied in the structure of the present as a prescription: power is the selection and enforcement of one possibility among many, and simultaneously it is the exclusion (and invisibilization) of many other possibilities.”

In short: you need power to live and to fight, to help yourself and to help others. It is more practical than an “ideological” way of thinking and a useful interpretation of the real possibilities in social and political transformation.

Meanwhile, agency as a notion offers a different and probably a narrower horizon of formulation, articulation and action and this is not an accident. As David Armstrong notes:^[20]

“A theory of agency emerged in economics when it was realised that, despite extensive work on the theory of the firm and of markets, there was ‘no theory which explains how the conflicting objectives of the individual participants are brought into equilibrium so as to yield this result’ At the same time, sociologists grappled with the problem of how the actions of the autonomous agent could be explored in a world hitherto dominated by structure. As Lash and Urry noted, over the previous half decade or so, forms of agency had increasingly come to take the place of purely structural determinations in explanations of collective action.”

This is why I find it very important to reclaim and redefine power as a notion and to reintegrate into our awareness not just as something against which we define our activity, but something we also possess. As I mentioned above power encompasses much more than the relation of agency and structure, and not just leaves but generates much more space for the imagination and the incidental. As the often misunderstood Foucault phrased it:^[21]

“It is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them.”

Which means that there is always hope.

—

Ágnes Básthy is a PhD candidate in the Doctoral School of Sociology at Eötvös Lóránd University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary and a lecturer at Rajk László College for Advanced Studies  Budapest, Hungary where she teaches social theory and biopolitics. Her doctoral research focuses on the transformation of the art field in Hungary after the regime change, analyzing the relationship between art, politics and social changes in a global context focusing on Eastern Europe. She has been working at the intersection of culture, sociology and art for more than a decade as a researcher, critic and organizer. As an independent publicist, she follows an interdisciplinary approach to interpreting contemporary art production in the context of recent cultural and social phenomena and tendencies.

—

Notes:

^[1] Giorgio Agamben: Medicine as religion, Quodlibet, 2th May, 2020
original Italian: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-la-medicina-come-religione English translation: https://itself.blog/2020/05/02/giorgio-agamben-medicine-as-religion/ Published here: Where We Are Now – Epidemics as Politics, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham,  Boulder, New York, London, 2021.

^[2] Giorgio Agamben is one of the greatest living philosophers of our time, and he was among the first public intellectuals who criticized the disproportionality of state measures during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. In his articles published in the Italian journal Quodlibet he regularly wrote about overreaction of the state apparatus from a biopolitical perspective, as well as the long-term consequences of the extreme conditions created by the state of exception and also about the collective social and cultural stakes of the interventions. As an intellectual heretic he was heavily criticized by other philosophers and was publicly attacked by the media and apparently was compared to the Holocaust deniers. The writer of these lines translated Agamben’s aforementioned essays to Hungarian during the epidemic, and had to face the fact that certain platforms refused to publish them for openly political reasons. Meanwhile, after the normalization of the situation Agamben’s essays proved to be the most important social and political theoretical analysis of the pandemic times. But before this, during the pandemic, reflections to Agamben’s perspective generated a wider discussion, a debate among leading intellectuals like Jean-Luc Nancy and Roberto Esposito, which was accessible on the web but then disappeared and Routledge published it in 2021 as a book titled ‘Fernando Castrillón and Thomas Marchevsky (ed.) Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy Conversations on Pandemics, Politics, and Society’.

^[3] Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello: The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso [1999], 2007.

^[4] Shoshana Zuboff: The age of surveillance capitalism – The fight for a human future at the frontier of power, Public Affairs, New York. 2019.

^[5] Giorgio Agamben: State of Exception, Chicago University, Press 2005.

^[6] New Keywords Collective: Europe/Crisis: New Keywords of “the Crisis” in and of “Europe”, Zone Books Near Futures Online, https://nearfuturesonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/New-Keywords-Collective_12.pdf.

^[7] Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish, Pantheon Books, [1975]1977.

^[8] Rens van Munster: The war on terrorism: When the exception becomes the rule,  International Journal for the Semiotics of Law – Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, January 2004.

Gervin Ane, Apatinga: “State of Exception”: A Tool for Fighting Terrorism ,Journal of Law, Policy and Globalization, 2017 Vol. 66 pp.2224-3240.

^[9] Nikolas Rose: The politics of life itself. In. Theory, Culture & Society, 18(6), 1-30, 2001.

^[10] József Attila: Levegőt! https://mek.oszk.hu/05500/05570/html/jozsef_attila0020.html.

^[11] Michel Foucault: Subject and Power. In. Hubert L Dreyfus & Paul Rabinow: Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, University of Chicago Press, 1988.

^[12] These are not new technologies. Since the end of the Second World War they were in the focus of scientific research and secret services. For further reading see: Shoshana Zuboff : The age of surveillance capitalism – Chapter 10 Make Them Dance – What were the means of behavioral Modification?

^[13] Ágnes Básthy, Zoltán Lengyel: Pharmacological Biopolitics Part 1 – Chemistry of the Soul, Replika Journal of Social Sciences 2023 (129): 11–41.

^[14] It is worth noting that the concept’s almost religious character is reveal itself by its similarity to the concept of ‘predestination’.

^[15] Bruno Latour: We Have Never Been Modern, Harvard University Press, 1993.

^[16] Giorgio Agamben: When the House is on Fire, Quodlibet, 5th October 2020. Original Italian: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-quando-la-casa-brucia. English translation: https://illwill.com/when-the-house-is-on-fire. Published: Giorgio Agamben: When the House Burns Down – From the Dialect of Thought, Seagull Books, 2022.

^[17] Sik Domonkos: Csak egy AI menthet meg minket, szuverén.hu, 2023, https://www.szuveren.hu/tarsadalom/csak-egy-ai-menthet-meg-minket.

^[18] Michel Foucault: The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983-1984, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

^[19] Berardi, “Bifo” Franco: Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility, Verso Books, 2017.

^[20] David Armstrong (2013): Actors, patients and agency: a recent history. Sociology of Health and Illness, 36:(2) pp.163-174.

^[21] Michel Foucault: The History of Sexuality, Volume I, An Introduction, Pantheon Books,[1976] 1978.

by Adèle Kreager

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming many sectors, from its role in breakthrough research on protein structure prediction, which recently earned a Nobel Prize, to more controversial uses in film and entertainment. As AI infiltrates our digital world, internet users are increasingly exposed to what has been evocatively termed ‘AI slop’—from seemingly innocuous AI-generated meme trends, such as ‘Shrimp Jesus’, to more demonstrably dangerous outputs, such as AI-generated mushroom-foraging books that contain bogus advice. In turn, AI now powers everyday tools like Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checks, or Gmail’s email filters, often without us even noticing.

Amid this surge in AI capabilities and applications, many industries, including academic publishing, are recognising the opportunities and challenges posed by these tools. AI offers a way to enhance efficiency, streamlining the more time-consuming, repetitive and mundane tasks. Yet these advancements come with ethical and practical considerations that demand careful thought. As a small, scholar-led, non-profit publisher, we are experimenting with how AI can support, rather than replace, the human expertise and creativity that underpin high-quality academic research and its dissemination.

How We Use AI in Our Editorial Processes

We are adopting a cautious but practical approach to integrating AI, using it as an ancillary tool in various stages of the editorial process:

1.      Assisting with index topic lists

Developing a list of index topics is a laborious task often shouldered by our authors. We’ve found that AI tools, like ChatGPT, can suggest preliminary lists of topics or place names, which serve as useful starting points.  However, these AI-generated lists often focus on broad, main topics, lacking the nuance needed for a comprehensive index. Therefore, human oversight is essential, and we rely on our authors and editors to review and refine the suggestions to ensure that the final index is accurate and usable.

2.      Crafting first drafts for book blurbs

We have also experimented with using AI to generate first drafts of book blurbs. By inputting key information about the book, ChatGPT can produce a structured summary that provides a useful point of departure. However, the critical insight needed to highlight a book’s key contributions is something that AI cannot replicate, since the responses are based on algorithmic combinations of text rather than a deeper understanding of the content. This is why these drafts are always reworked by our editors and authors.

3.      Creating alt-text for accessibility

Alt-text (alternative text) provides a textual description of images, making content more accessible to people with visual impairments. Assistive technologies, like screen readers, can then translate the alt-text into speech or braille. Alt-text can also be helpful for those with unreliable internet connections, serving as a stand-in for visual content when an image fails to load.

Creating alt-text for images is essential for improving the accessibility of our books, but it can also be a labour-intensive task. Using ChatGPT’s alt-text assistant reduces the time involved in generating alt-text descriptions, and even allows for multi-language output. Still, AI-generated alt-text isn’t flawless: it can struggle to identify the most relevant elements of an image, and can overlook important context. Again, human input is necessary, with all AI-generated alt-text outputs for images reviewed by our team and authors.

4.      Expanding access with AI-generated audiobooks

AI also has the potential to make academic content accessible to a broader audience by converting texts into audiobooks through Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems, at a fraction of the cost associated with professional audiobook production. Audiobooks can provide a new way to engage with scholarly content, especially for those who prefer listening over reading. The audiobook conversion process isn’t entirely automated, and adjustments like excluding bibliographies and non-essential footnotes are necessary to ensure the listenability of the end product.

However, while we don’t have the resources to employ professional narrators, we are mindful of the ethical implications of using AI narrators, which risk displacing human voice actors. Striking a balance between efficiency, accessibility and ethical responsibility is a challenge to take seriously, and we welcome reader and listener feedback on the few AI-generated audiobooks we’ve made available so far. If there is demand for audiobooks, producing them in-house is more environmentally friendly than leaving the conversion to individual readers.

How We Use AI in Our Marketing Processes

AI has proved helpful in compiling lists of relevant journals and societies for marketing purposes. However, we’ve noticed that AI chatbots often prioritise Anglo-American journals. To ensure broader international representation, we adjust our prompts to include foreign-language journals, allowing us to reach a more diverse audience. The same strengths that make chatbots effective for drafting preliminary blurbs also make them handy for condensing our policy statements into more succinct, audience-friendly summaries for marketing materials.

How Our Developers Use AI

Our developers integrate AI into their coding environments to streamline specific tasks, such as code explanation, generating snippets of code and automating test writing (a tedious activity that AI can handle efficiently).

How Our Authors Are Using AI

Since the summer of 2024, we have asked our authors to disclose any use of AI tools in their research and writing, with the aim to understand how AI is being integrated into academic work and to ensure transparency in the research process. Although uptake has been relatively limited so far, some authors have reported using AI for tasks such as translating texts, clarifying complex ideas, improving language accuracy, and providing feedback on grammar, vocabulary and style.

Zooming Out: Ethical Considerations for AI in Publishing and Beyond

As AI becomes more embedded in academic publishing, it raises a host of ethical questions, with implications within and beyond the industry itself.

1.      Data, accountability and algorithmic bias

AI’s outputs are shaped by the datasets used to train it, many of which are harvested without the consent of creators. In turn, these datasets can be biased or incomplete (often underrepresenting marginalised groups), leading to baked-in algorithmic biases that can perpetuate social inequalities. For this reason, we avoid using AI for editorial decision-making, especially in evaluating research: a practice that could effectively institutionalise past prejudices through new technologies.

2.      The environmental cost of AI

AI is an extractive industry, at multiple levels: not only is it exploitative of human labour,[1] but it is highly resource-intensive, with a single request made through ChatGPT consuming nearly ten times the electricity of a typical Google Search. Data centres consume significant electricity, produce harmful e-waste, and rely on the extraction of critical minerals, which are often mined unsustainably and traded in areas of conflict (as discussed in one of our recent publications). AI may appear as a kind of disembodied computation, but its material, environmental impacts are very real.

3.      AI and job displacement in creative fields

Widespread use of AI in creative industries risks crowding out human expertise and creativity, depending on its implementation. A revealing comment made by OpenAI’s former CTO, Mira Murati, earlier this year—that ‘Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place’—is darkly suggestive of the company’s priorities and attitudes towards AI’s role in the profit-driven workplace.

AI: A Complement to Human Expertise

At OBP, AI currently plays a useful but limited role in our workflows. We use it to streamline repetitive or time-consuming tasks, enabling our staff and authors to allocate more time and energy to the critical and creative work involved in high-quality academic publishing. As we explore AI’s potential, we remain committed to responsible use, ensuring that human creativity, transparency and fairness remain central to our work.

[1] ChatGPT-creator OpenAI not only faces accusations of intellectual property theft by training their systems on works under copyright, without consent; they also employed contractors in Kenya, earning less than $2 per hour, as content moderators to label horrific and harmful content.

This series listens to the political, gendered, queer(ed), racial engagements and class entanglements involved in proclaiming out loud: La-TIN-x. ChI-ca-NA. La-TI-ne. ChI-ca-n-@.  Xi-can-x. Funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative, the Latinx Sound Cultures Studies Working Group critically considers the role of sound and listening in our formation as political subjects. Through both a comparative and cross-regional lens, we invite Latinx Sound Scholars to join us as we dialogue about our place within the larger fields of Chicanx/Latinx Studies and Sound Studies. We are delighted to publish our initial musings with Sounding Out!, a forum that has long prioritized sound from a queered, racial, working-class and  “always-from-below” epistemological standpoint. —Ed. Dolores Inés Casillas

—

No tengo nada de sangre de Mexico. Soy afro americano. 

(I have no Mexican blood. I am African American.)

El Compa Negro (Ryhan Lowery)

The grain is the body in the singing voice, in the writing hand, in the performing limb.

Roland Barthes (The Grain of the Voice,1971)

***This post is co-authored by Sara Veronica Hinojos and Alex Mireles

Sarah La Morena (Sarah the Black woman), or Sarah Palafox, was adopted and raised by a Mexican family in Mexico. At the age of five, she moved to Riverside, California, a predominantly Mexican city an hour east of Compton. Palafox started singing as a way to express the racism she faced as a child in Southern California, feeling caught between her Black appearance and her Mexican sound. She found her voice in church, a nurturing environment where she could be herself, surrounded by her family’s love. She gained attention with a viral video of her rendition of Jenni Rivera’s “Que Me Vas a Dar.” Palafox delivers each note with profound emotion and precision, leaving even the accompanying mariachi violinist in awe. 

Similarly, El Compa Negro (The Black Friend/Homie) or Rhyan Lowery heard the sounds of banda coming from his neighbor’s backyard in Compton; a historically Black-populated city with a current Mexican majority. Lowery couldn’t shake the song out of his head and learned the song’s Spanish-language lyrics. Like Palafox, videos of him singing in Spanish during high school made him a viral sensation. “They called me ‘el compa negro’ (…) All I heard was ‘blah blah blah negro or negro’ and I wasn’t having it until they explained to me what it meant. And I was like ‘ok, cool’.” 

The sonic stylings of El Compa Negro and Sarah La Morena within the banda genre enable transcultural connections beyond the pan-Chicano-Mexican-Central American popularity of tecnobanda and la quebradita. The 1990s banda craze, writes George Lipsitz  “challenged traditional categories of citizenship and culture on both sides of the US-Mexico border.” Banda music might sound like it was established south of the border, but multicultural listeners and dancers continue to influence its vibrations.  Pop stars like Snoop Dogg, Shakira, Bad Bunny, and Karol G have released (tokenized) songs with Mexican-tinged, banda-recognizable beats. Yet, both El Compa and Sarah demonstrate a form of musical Black/Brown, working-class intimacy. Their respective musics are much less about a pop star (duet) kind of solidarity and much more about a deep knowing, a sensibility among working-class cultures and othered people that resonates through the aesthetics of sound. As Karen Tongson writes in Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries, about her experience of “queer, brown, immigrant musical discovery” in Riverside, the hometown she shares with Sarah La Morena: “It is the music that inspires us to ask questions” (26).

Certainly, US Mexican immigrant culture does not have the same (mainstream) cultural caché as African American culture, unless somehow softened or filtered. Jalapeños get “de-spicifed“; pre-made Día de Los Muertos altares are now at Wal-Mart, and huipiles are available as fast-fashioned “peasant blouse;” filtering out their Mexican-indigenous origins. Thus, classics like “La Yaquesita” and originals like “Yo Soy Compton” heard through the grain of Black voices affirm the possibilities of U.S. Mexican belonging or what D. Travers Scott characterizes as a form of “intimate intersubjectivities;” rooted in long-established Black/Brown co-existences  across the borderlands and city barrios. Turning the volume up on these artists serves an important counterpoint to Latino anti-Black racism.

Their voices, blending with brass and tambora, embody a Black-Brown sonic and symbolic solidarity, or spatial entitlement. As theorized by Gaye Theresa Johnson in Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity, innovative applications of technology, creativity, and space foster new collectives which, even when “unheard” by historians, assert social citizenship and pave the way for new working-class political futures. In the contested neighborhoods of greater Los Angeles, Black and Brown communities are often pitted against one another through processes of containment and confinement leading to competitions for jobs, housing, status, and political power. Yet, they share the experiences of labor exploitation, housing segregation, and cultural vilification. Filmed in the intimate settings of backyards, the viral videos underscore Black/Brown hood/barrio soundscapes as multi-generational, familial, and culturally hybrid. Home is where shared class, racial, and gender politics are negotiated and resolved.

Asserting Black identity and the choice to perform in Spanish creates a unique visual and auditory experience within the Mexican-dominant world of banda. In fact, in 2024, Lowery made history as the first Spanish-language artist signed by Death Row Records, a label known primarily for hip hop. The lively rhythms of banda – oompah-oompah-oompah – offers both banda and hip hop listeners a new orientation to discern the racial-cultural politics of broader Los Angeles.

Like the mid-century Haitian-Mexican bolero singer Antonia del Carmen Peregrino Álvarez, alias “Toña La Negra,” the added tags “Negro” and “la Morena” signals Black singers’ recognition of the meaning(s) of their racial difference within the transnational Mexican music scene. The auditory discomfort that their vocal grain might cause is named and thus recognized as the persistent colorism of listeners at large. Lowery describes his initial unease with the given “Compa Negro” nickname. “My Mexican friends always tell me ‘Hey, compa negro, you’re Mexican, man. God just left you in the oven a little too long.’” The harassment came from both Black peers and Mexicans alike, for liking banda, dating Latinas, or dressing “like a Mexican.” “They would say, ‘You hate being Black. Self-hate. Self-hate. I’m like man it ain’t that I self-hate, it’s just that I embrace something. I took the time to have an open mind and study something, you know?” His way of being made sense in the context of a Compton teenage experience. “Becoming Mexican” by way of musical/cultural engagement surpassed skin tone-deep and nationalist differences.

Or, as Mexican ranchera singer Chavela Vargas–born in Costa Rica–famously asserted, “Mexicans are born wherever the hell they want!” Try listening to Juan Gabriel’s “Amor Eterno” to find out. Black creatives like Evander, Vaquera Canela, and Terry Turner  are just a few more examples of Black mexicanidad. Yessica Garcia Hernandez reminds us that Black and Brown sonic solidarities have been the driving pulse of US popular music. She argues, “Home and sound is acknowledging that both corridos, hip-hop, and G-funk relationally, has formed paisas.” 

El Compa Negro’s “Verde es Vida,” a tribute to California’s weed culture, lowriders, and corridos, booms loudly. The song begins with an accordion playing reggae rhythms, soon interrupted by percussion, guitars, and El Compa’s fast-paced verses. About a minute in, the accordion slows the tempo with a few reggae notes before the vocals return, reintroducing the corrido rhythm: “Hoy andamos en LA bien tranquilitos. En el lowrider escuchando corridos.” The reggae-corrido fusion ends with the familiar “pom pom pom pom!” of the drums, typical of banda and corrido finales, as the accordion plays its last note. Through Lowery’s reggae corrido, we hear his “sonic home” rooted in Black and Brown Los Angeles.

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Featured Image: still from Sarah La Morena’s “La Llorona” (2020)

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Sara Veronica Hinojos is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies and on the advisory board for Latin American and Latino Studies at Queens College, CUNY. Her research focuses on representations of Chicanx and Latinx within popular film and television with an emphasis on gender, race, language politics, and humor studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript that investigates the racial function of linguistic “accents” within media, called: GWAT?!: Chicanx Mediated Race, Gender, and “Accents” in the US.

Alex Mireles is a PhD student in the Department of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She writes on Latinx identity and queerness, labor, and global capitalism through aesthetic movements in fashion, beauty, media, and visual cultures. Her dissertation explores the queer potential and world-making capabilities of Chicanx popular culture through Mexican regional music, social media, queer nightlife, and film. 

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