‘Power only lies in Relation, and this power is that of, and belongs to, all.’1
This is a historic time, and in all its revelations and contradictions it will be remembered as such. We are witnessing the real-time unfolding of a peculiar crisis. The collapse of a system in which not every and all life on earth but only the market, and thus affluent life, has been prioritised, protected, and propped up for too long. What this collapse has laid bare we ought to never forget again: power (belongs) to the people, and it resides in their relationships. It resides in their modes, movements, and (im)materialities in solidarity.
Finally, we are stumbling towards the end of 2020. A year that unearthed, airdropped, and retained a stream of catastrophes. At times days and months seemed to be never-ending, at others this year brought a tangible meaning to fast-forward. How unusual these collective experiences of unhinged standstill have felt. The whole world trapped in a mandatory stasis more or less as collateral damage in a self-inflicted arrest of the ill-mannered, those who just can’t get enough, the greedy and avaricious. ‘Nature is trying to tell us something’ declared several headlines over the past months, referring to the extractivist relation of mankind (man as a proxy for the most powerful) to everything living. But in its overt accuracy that remark ignores untold and uncounted voices, the decades-long attempts and struggles of those who have always related differently (willfully or because they were left without a choice) to the earth, to the living, to nature and technology. And how violent the ever-increased velocity of global events trickling down onto our everyday lives has been. ‘Where did February go?’ a friend uttered to me near the beginning of the year, ‘have all of these things happened for real? Time is just moving so fast.’ ‘Is it?’ I thought.
Well, some scholars and physicists once believed otherwise. Time does not move, they said, but mass actually moves through three-dimensional space and by doing that is giving up some of its time, which is the fourth dimension. The two dimensions cannot be separated from each other. Albert Einstein’s theory of time dilation – time moving slower for any observer due to their relative motion or proximity to gravitational mass—has been proven,2 and if there is one thing to know from him without properly understanding its implications, it is this: time is relative—it can vary. Of course, brilliant minds have spent lifetimes on the question what time is exactly, and not all of their theories align or even correspond (Einstein’s relationship to quantum physics, for example, is complicated). How does time work and why does it not move backwards? But it is the disintegration of the notion of time that can be usefully traced and made sense of somehow. It is true that, on a spectrum of cultural history at least, time is described as linear and moving forward. We speak of history, we try to imagine (different) futures, and we attempt to live in the moment, all at the same time. When my friend was wondering about the speed of time I was reading Physics of Blackness (2015) by Michelle M. Wright. Wright approaches the subject of time by critically engaging with the episteme of Blackness, asking where and when Blackness is instead of what it is. In this way she disintegrates the figure of time and creates a different one that is coupled to experience, moving outwards rather than along a line. In each moment we experience the now, we carry the past with us and we make the future. Time is now. And everyone and everything has a different view on and, more importantly, a different experience of this now. Wright calls this ‘epiphenomenal spacetime’ and when I encountered it I was intrigued. It has so much to do with the temporalities of today, and the realities produced by the digital.
But how and what can be called reality or realities at all when each and everyone’s perception of it is so different? When does anything become reality or real—as soon as we measure it (like time), as soon as we perceive it, or as soon as two or more people share an experience of it? On a very small scale of perceiving things it is quite astonishing how humans are able to convert and translate a tiny fraction of what they see (or perceive with another sense) into symbols and give meaning to it. Such processes are not immediate to begin with. Say, the process of how visual perception works: the human eye is stimulated by light which enters through the cornea (its outermost surface), and, regulated by the iris, passes through the pupil, hits the lens, and reaches the retina (the light-sensitive nerve layer), from which the optic layer carries signals to the brain’s visual cortex and the signals are assembled into images that make sense to us. Perception is mediated through language (not always spoken), and the most prevalent languages today—that is, the ones that are most spoken and most gatekeeping—are colonial languages which have never sufficed to describe realities for and of everyone (this is why Frantz Fanon deconstructed Blackness, for example). It is further mediated through respective media environments, which change over time—such as through the process of electrification beginning in the late 1900s and the process of datafication today. ‘What you see is what you get’ is somehow true and not true. The reality we see is not what reality is (although the real reality cannot be determined). At the same time, we do know that our respective subjective windows onto the world, our senses, capture fragments only, so what we see is in fact what we get. Right?
The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum.3
Reality is thus formed out of what our physical capabilities make possible as well as our socio-cultural circumstances. It is also the result of our imagination, which again is infused by our life experiences, the beliefs we hold, and the structures we are embedded in. From an atom to a cell to the universe, what we know is little, and what we don’t know is interminable and indeterminable.
The matter gets even more complex if we think about sharing experiences and shared reality—meaning the social reality in which we actually all live. We can have different experiences and still share a social reality. We do not always need validation in order to believe in what we have just experienced, but if, in a certain situation, another person ceases to affirm what I think I have just experienced, I will be left in doubt and disbelief. Society depends on negotiating the conditions of and rules for being together, on some kind of objective reality resulting from them: ‘If such an agreement is annulled or simply ignored, society as a whole runs the risk of becoming cynical about its own truth and therefore existence.’4 This common denominator and the ways in which we choose whom to interact with, become friends with, believe, or disregard—the ways we build relationships and thus create our social realities—are drastically dependent on each other and enforced through media and technology. And in this moment in time, right now, for so many, the world feels disconnected even though it has never been this connected.
Media and technology constitute the reality in which experiences become possible, and so they shape our understanding of the world. If life can be determined to be technical, the question of the experience of technical life today becomes crucial. It renders discernible the ways in which (not only human) life as such is being affected by an all-encompassing media-technological planetary transformation. For many this statement still seems to be an exaggeration or simply inconceivable. Media possess performative qualities, an absence in presence, or an immaterial materiality (media philosopher Sybille Krämer has written extensively about this); they are therefore prone to becoming ubiquitous without us being aware of them all the time. We wouldn’t be able to communicate properly if we were thinking about the grammar and syntax of language while speaking, yet all the while the structural dimension and materiality of language, the actual work it does, keeps being supplanted. Similarly, we interact with a variety of interfaces—more often than not with flawlessly designed screens—that hide the unthinkable amounts of infrastructure and labor needed to create them and to run the internet. We are exposed to algorithmic systems of surveillance and capture in public—at borders, airports—and through applications on our devices. Algorithms and recommender systems decide what we are offered to buy or read, where we are allowed to go, when we are profiled, and which credit we’ll receive. Media and technology are never innocent. They mirror society and they tend to hide and become opaque.
Media and technology therefore determine much more than simple connection. They enable how we relate—not only to each other, but to any thing, living, dead, material or not, any structure or system, and the world. Historically, ideas around media and technology have always been intimately intertwined with thinking about race and colonialism, that is, racial thinking as a system of knowledge that organises social life. Many extraordinary people have done research on this and pushed the boundaries of what counts as technology in the first place, subsequently finding the lineages and linkages between media, technology, and race. Scholar Louis Chude-Sokei for example, who has extensively worked on the entanglements of the African Diaspora, created an incredible testament to the overlapping imaginaries and relations of and between Blackness and technology. In The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (2016), drawing from literature (including science fiction) and the sonic, he shows how the automaton has always been a projection of the other, and in the US this other certainly was the Black slave.
The work of new media scholar Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is also vital in this context. Her 2006 book Freedom and Control, for example, shows how racialization was central to the development of the internet. ‘Race AND/as technology’, a 2012 essay, reflects on racial technologies such as segregation. Using the term ‘homophily’, she explains that segregation became the underlying principle of network sciences. The simple assumption that ‘love as love of the same’5—that the ‘same people’, as in people from the same socially constructed category, want to be together and thus only interact with each other—created the infamous echo chambers that we are now trapped in individually and collectively. As networks make assumptions based on correlation, based on other people’s behaviours that are like mine, the establishment of highly (segre)gated online communities cannot come as a surprise. The 1990s promise that cyberspace would become a place in which information would be decentralised and democratised—thereby establishing a different order and distribution of power (and) relations and more participation and freedom for all—soon had to be amended: ‘Homophily […] closes the world it pretends to open.’6 Predictive models that rely on machine-learning algorithms further naturalise discrimination.7 Recommender systems imagine a reality that was already outlined and intended. Future mirrors past, and everything that can be captured becomes part of a future modeled in the present updated in real time. What cannot be captured and computed is defeated, vanishing into the vast desert of deviances and incomputables that market logic has deemed negligible. So these networks that steer, track, and trace us through everyday life proliferate what Chun calls ‘neoliberal connections’. 8
The year 2020 has ruthlessly debunked the capitalist totality of life and by way of disrupting that life it has taught us about the meaning of contact, of connection, and of correlation. Although much of the world connected online well before the global pandemic, the pandemic has swiftly made social connection and virtual interaction a must and commonplace for many. To ‘really connect’—which colloquially means to form a bond, physically, emotionally, and spiritually—via social or other digital media in ‘socially distant’ times appears to be both an essential goal and a deranged one. The former because what digital media can offer becomes less of an afterthought, not only for non-digital-native generations and individuals, but for organizations (be they educational, cultural, or otherwise) and whole nation states. And the latter not because all social media is necessarily bad but because online connection and communication is not direct, as is the case with all communication. The facilitation of online connections is literally modeled or, better, molded for the purpose of extracting the most value out of users by collecting as much of their data as possible to sell it commercially. And precisely by paying attention to relations between or among things, rather than only looking at the thing, it is possible to obtain an understanding that otherwise might have been concealed. What becomes clear here is the level of manipulation inherent in this form of connection. Every major platform used on a daily basis turns its users into targets of advertising and their data into currency. The relation is not reciprocal nor in any way beneficial to the user’s needs or desires.
Online connections have long since become as much of a resource as offline relations became under capitalism even longer ago. How can we not only virtually connect, but really relate to each other (in German I mean by this, eine Beziehung aufbauen, sich aufeinander beziehen), rely on each other, and be concerned with one another? The abstraction of social relations makes it hard to disrupt business as usual, it sometimes even lets interference seem unimaginable. (Although both is only true for those whose life is not constantly threatened by the usual.) Where to begin at all, what to deconstruct, dismantle, or destroy? The concentrated monopolised power of the five biggest tech giants that people are up against is not reduceable to the total accumulation of money (and means of production), which other non-tech companies, oligarchs, and criminals (all can be the same) may also have, but emerges out of their ability to hyper-manipulate and control relations and time, and thus alter reality. The present moment demands that we see beyond our respective realities because otherwise mutuality, and other abstract relations such as solidarity, cannot be built. And we are already seeing this across the globe: people defy the algorithms of the oppressors, online and offline, disobey the institutionalised structures of oppression, and suddenly an answer to what reality is lies within reach, in the relations between more-than-human, other-than-human, and human. This is for real—’Nothing is true, everything is alive’.9