CYBERSPACE TIME CRISISGhent 23/10/13

Methods of Dreaming

Lucid explorations versus Urgencies

Urgencies: Overload

“The acceleration of information exchange has produced and is producing an effect of a pathological type on the individual human mind and even more on the collective mind. Individuals are not in a position to process the immense and always growing mass of information that enters their computers, their cell phones, their television screens, their electronic diaries and their heads. However, it seems indispensable to follow, recognise, evaluate, process all this information if you want to be efficient, competitive, victorious. … The necessary time for paying attention to the fluxes of information is lacking.” – Franco Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody

Urgencies: compulsion

Jodi Dean has convincingly argued that digital communicative compulsion constitutes a capturing by (Freudian/Lacanian) drive: individuals are locked into repeating loops, aware that their activity is pointless, but nevertheless unable to desist. The ceaseless circulation of digital communication lies beyond the pleasure principle: the insatiable urge to check messages, email or Facebook is a compulsion, akin to scratching an itch which gets worse the more one scratches. Like all compulsions, this behaviour feeds on dissatisfaction. If there are no messages, you feel disappointed and check again very quickly. But if there are messages you also feel disappointed: no amount of messages is ever enough. Sherry Turkle has talked to people who are unable to resist the urge to send and receive texts on their mobile telephone, even when they are driving a car.

Urgencies: work as religion

“In the current age of machines … humans finally have the possibility of devolving most productive processes to technological apparatus, while retaining all outcomes for themselves. In other words, the (first) world currently hosts all the necessary pre-conditions for the realization of the old autonomist slogan ‘zero work / full income/ all production / to automation’. Despite all this, 21st century Western societies are still torn by the dusty, capitalist dichotomy which opposes a tragically overworked section of population against an equally tragically unemployed one.” – “Raidcal Atheism” Federico Campagna

Artificial precarity versus precarious life

Everyone is Peggy nowNeoliberal capitalism’s version of equality has had the effect, not of give everyone a chance to be a Don Draper, but making us all like Peggy is in the early part of the first season – forced to spend most of the day doing administration, and to squeeze time for our creativity and our thinking in the hours after the official working day has finished.

Urgencies: permanent insecurity the post-Fordist worker “lives in a world

marked … by short-term flexibility and flux … Corporations break up or join together, jobs appear and disappear, as events lacking connection ... what’s peculiar about uncertainty today is that it exists without any looming historical disaster; instead it is woven into the everyday practices of a vigorous capitalism.” – Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism

Indefinite postponement

From insecurity to where?

How do we escape and what do we want to escape to?

A new politics of security and adventure

A new politics of time