After the Mount Wilson observatory’s scientists began making historical discoveries in the late 1920′s and ’30′s, the observatory became well known as one of the foremost astronomical research institutions in the world. They began to receive many letters from ordinary people, expressing interest in their research, and offering their own astrophysical discoveries or input. Many of these letters have been collected in the edition No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again, from which the following letter is drawn.

Letter from Bobbie Merlino
to
The Observers at Mount Wilson

Dec. 4, 1932

Dear Sir:

I am a lad of 18 years of age. I appeal to you for one reason. Since childhood I’ve always been interested in planets especially the Red Planet Mars. So for this reason I write to you for inquires on, will there ever be an interplanetary expedition to Mars in the near future. I would like to accompany that expedition. For this reason I ask you because through your medium and reference I could easily be one of the accompanying aides for the cause of science.

I want to reveal that innermost secrets of mars which are puzzling the scientists the world over. I will believe and always believe that the Planet Mars is inhabited. But not in the same stature and conditions of you, me or anyone else. I’ve always wanted to visit that planet in the early future. I readily understand that this is a very dangerous expedition that we may never return but as long as I just take one glimpse at it I am satisfy if die on the Planet I’ve always planned to visit [sic]. I am not out of my mind. I am as sane as anyone and I am very serious about this matter. Hoping you take this serious, I remain

Yours truly
Bobbie Merlino

Mars One is a private, non-profit corporation dedicated to establishing a permanent human settlement on Mars. In April 2013, they began taking applications to join the mission from the public, and have received over 700 to date, despite critics skepticism as to whether the project will raise the billions of dollars necessary to fund the mission. These applications are viewable on their website, from which the following video is transcribed.

Video from Amulya Nidhi Rastogi, age 20
to
Mars One Expedition

2013

I believe I’m born to explore everything. For me it’s not just about Mars, it’s about everything out there in the unknown. I have to know what else is out there in space, for it will play a significant role in expanding the human horizon. I have to see it and feel it.

The main reason why I’m applying for this bold mission is because I choose to. My curiosity, experimentation and exploration are appropriate in their places, but it’s the will to take the journey that matters more than actually reaching the destination. My mental stability allows me to relate with people. I find common interests and similarities with them. I believe sense of humor is all about your understanding of your surroundings and how you can cheer yourself and your teammates up even in the worst scenarios, and I think I know this art.

If at all there is something like a perfect candidate, then I am a perfect candidate for this mission. Not because I think I’m such a badass, but because I try to be at my best even when things are at their worst by being very patient and most of the time I’m successful. Knowing yourself is way more important than knowing anything else. And it’s the most important aspect in making our mission a success.

Cheers \m/

A drone is an economist’s compatriot. They are perfect rational actors, their brains wired to view everything in cost-benefit analysis. A drone can be cheated, but never confused. A drone will always be convinced that its decisions are correct. How do drones communicate? In certainties. Drones are sure of their place in the world and their place in the hierarchy. A drone will seek its maximum advantage in any situation. Without the need for sleep or sustenance, a drone is a higher being. An animal perfectly evolved for the digital world.

But perfect evolution does not mean an ideal form. They are working on it, though, creating drones like the famous “Big Dog” that is more adaptable. It is able to operate, its parents note excitedly, ‘even’ in nature.

This talk of perfection is literally inhuman. It is anathema to a carnival, which is why Murmuration is so wonderful. The carnival frame allows us to discuss drones in human terms, in fears and worries, in excitation and love. A carnival is silly, as irrational as can be. And as human as can be. The carnival is a meatspace event, drawn by Murmuration in an incursion into the drone’s digital world. The carnival is, arguably, a rationalism-free zone.

While humanity is proud of its rationality and problem-solving skills, there is no question that drones are our betters. Drones are more highly-evolved employees, able to execute their employers’ commands with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of that beloved efficiency. Though still more expensive than an individual human, the drone’s patience, literal inability to do wrong, and willingness to remain an individual give it advantages that are going to multiply in the next few years and decades. The urban environment is rapidly automating and in the future will consist of drones watching drones. The city belongs to the drone, the wage-worker of tomorrow.

Which is why, perhaps, drones are better at living in cities than even humans. Corporations are citizens and we are just persons, so the cities in which we live are bent towards the former’s needs. A corporation needs order, lines of sight, pollsters, and personal data. Not staring at clouds or making animals out of paper cups. Certainly not carving a beloved’s name into bark. A corporation has no interest in trees and less public space. Sitting in the grass has marginal economic value to a rational citizen, but good gracious is it wonderful for their flesh-and-blood counterparts.

Last week, a fight broke out in Ecumenopolis over a handful of greenspace. Things are, of course, complicated but there seems to be a groundswell not over the handful itself, but over the right to a rationalism-free zone. In a city rapidly churning out malls, there is perhaps a prayer for some respite from rational-choice theory. A little space, perhaps, free from the free market.

Heartwarmingly, meatspace is coalescing. Trees and animals have joined hands/branches/paws in an attempt to reclaim the flesh-and-blood world for the fleshy and the bloody. The carnival, as a theoretical space, is part of this messiness. The celebration of a world turned upside-down, of a silly, giddy, world is what makes us animals. Not animals in the pejorative sense but in the proudly goofy sense. Humans will make mistakes that a drone may not. Humans will dance around the maypole, jump over a fire, and tie wishes with string, and they need grass and trees to do that. Humans have an attachment to the land as part of the entire concept of being human.

A drone does not have need for any of that. A drone is perfect. No meetings, no coalitions, no arm-in-arm against the political rage of the day. A drone simply works. It could fly into the shopping malls to pick up your clothing. It could protect your newly-bought clothes from the looters, while another drone directs drone traffic. The city could all be given up to drones. For those less interested in rate-of-return on investments, this seems more terrifying than exciting. This seems like the sort of reason to create a carnival, insurging into internet space of proudly established in grassy space.

The theory that supports drones, I suppose, is that they do our messy work for us. That a drone will be an extension of a human, that the drone/iPhone spectrum is more a continuum than anything else. The drone as part-angel, part-citizen.This is troubling for all the reasons explained above: if the drone is an angel, then does that make the corporation God? This would also mean that humanity is ascended, that a more-perfect evolution of the human has been found within the theology of capitalism.

That day has not yet come, and the Big Dog and its kin remain better .gif’d than manipulated. The drone-as-tool has not yet reached the bar set by drone-as-theoretical-space. Let us have a carnival every day that remains the case.

Images via author

To understand the ramifications of the recent news that the National Security Agency (NSA) has some sort of ability to look into people’s account data at Facebook, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and other various cloud-stack platforms is not easy. It seems like big news. But what does it mean? What are they doing with this data? What is the NSA, as opposed to the FBI, as opposed to the CIA? And are these powers of observation new? Those of us who live in the United States always seems to have a certain sense of “Big Brother” looking over our shoulders. To live inside the superpower is not to escape its reach, although it might seem to grant a certain privilege—and as such US citizens tend to have some sense of the power of “the government” to get at them via its many tendrils. But this idea is nebulous at best. Throughout the history of US spying agencies, its true reach is often difficult to grasp, and comes as a surprise. After all, this is the point of spying.

Let’s look at the NSA’s position within the US spying apparatus in an attempt to get a better idea of the full picture. Let’s do this in two parts: first we’ll look at what the NSA is, and then we’ll look at what the NSA does.

In attempting to figure out what the NSA is, one is beset by the old problem of bureaucracy so endemic to the government on this continent. In public school, American children are taught about the three branches of government—the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches—and how their sharing of power is fundamental to the exercise of democracy and justice for all. But what we aren’t taught is just how labyrinthine these branches actually are. While each branch may be symbolized by the clean white marble of their respective head offices—the White House, the Capitol, and the Supreme Court respectively—this is hardly where the power really flows. The judiciary is awash in the precedent of previous rulings. Any legislation is not simply voted on, but must be passed through the countless gatekeepers of sub-committees, investigative reports, and procedural offices. And the executive branch has proliferated, especially in the last half of the 20^the century and in the first decade of the 21^st, spawning more redundant offices, under-secretaries, departments, and agencies that can be sorted out in any reasonable hierarchy chart.

If we’re going to delve into the intelligence apparatus of the United States, we should start with the broad picture. The biggest element of the executive branch’s spying abilitiy is officially known as the United States Intelligence Community. These are sixteen organizations, or “partners,” spread across the various departments of the civilian executive branches and the military. They include:

Under the executive branch directly at the department level:

Under the United States Department of Justice:
#1 – Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
#2 – Drug Enforcement Administration, Office of National Security Intelligence (DEA/ONSI)

Under the United States Department of State:
#3 – Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR)

Under the United States Department of the Treasury:
#4 – Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI)

Under the US Department of Defense, the military department of the executive branch:

#5 – Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
#6 – the National Security Agency (NSA)
#7 – the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)
#8 – the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)
#9 – the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency (AFISRA)
#10 – the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM)
#11 – the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity (MCIA)
#12 – the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI)

As cabinet-level departments of the executive branch:

in the US Department of Energy: #13 – Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (OICI);

in the US Department of Homeland Security: #14 – the Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A), and #15, the Coast Guard Intelligence (CGI).

And last but not least, as an independent executive agency:

#16 – the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

All of these departments and agencies are led by the Director of National Intelligence. The reason for all these different groups is not only to unify the intelligence activities of disparate departments like the Department of Energy and the Coast Guard that would ordinarily not be in direct communication, but because each of these sixteen groups is tasked with doing different sorts of intelligence. For example, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) deals solely with aerial surveillance and satellites, while the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) deals primarily with intelligence about the naval capacities of other nations.

Of this vast bureaucratically diversified toolbox of spying agendas, protocols, and directives, the NSA is only one particular wrench. This wrench is specially designed by secret directive to deal with signals intelligence. In other words, attempt to safeguard the US government’s communications, and break into the communications of foreign nations.

A feature of the specialization within the Intelligence Community is that certain “partners” are tasked with conducting intelligence inside of the US, while others are tasked with working outside the US. A clear cut example is that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is tasked with providing military-related intelligence and therefore works primarily outside of US borders, wherever the military is or might be. On the other hand, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is responsible for law enforcement and counter-intelligence within the United States. This distinction between foreign and domestic is also linked to the Constitution of the United States, which is intended to protect the civil liberties of US citizens and maintain their rights within the justice system, whereas these protections are not nearly as strict for non-US citizens. As one might imagine, whether the particular department primarily focuses on US citizens or foreign nationals has a direct effect on what sorts of projects and methods they take on.

However, the nature of what these departments are trying to do complicates this foreign/domestic dichotomy. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in particular was established for the purpose of engaging threats both foreign and domestic, and so DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) deals with intelligence on both sides of the national borders. (For example, in addition to dealing with foreign terroist threats, I&A was involved in covering up DHS’ inquires into the Occupy movement as a source of domestic terror.) Because the threats that intelligence departments are orienting themselves towards in contemporary times are more often groups—as opposed to nation-states as they once where—departments that are only supposed to be working on one side of the border often end up crossing it to follow their target.

The NSA, in attempting to gather intelligence on critical communications, clearly does not limit itself to only reading the mail of foreign governments. In a world moving towards post-nation-state spewing information out of its ears, there is a wealth of foreign communications for the NSA to busy itself with. However, anything of interest will eventually cross to the wrong side of the border from the point of view of the NSA’s purview. In a world where borders matter less than communication, that communication is spreading osmotically. Today, by executive order, they are only supposed to eavesdrop on foreign communications. But as communication grows more complicated, so does the actions of the NSA.

The NSA was created by President Truman in 1952, through a revision to National Security Council Intelligence Directive 9, which itself was only finally declassified in 2000. It pulled the responsibility for signals intelligence from the various branches of the military to a single entity, that eventually would be called the National Security Agency to emphasize its civilian nature. Though in existence from 1952 on, the NSA first joined the US Government Organization Manual in 1957. It’s true role continued to evolve through the early 70s, as we see from certain memoranda that have since been de-classified.

In 1975, after the US Army was discovered to have been placing plain-clothes operatives at every protest or gathering of more than 20 people in the United States, and it was revealed that the CIA had been spying on anti-war activists in the US, illegally wiretapping, opening US mail, and planning to assassinate several world leaders, the Church Committee was formed to investigate the actions of the various executive branch intelligence departments and get to the bottom of any abuses of power.

Among its other findings, the Church Committee discovered that the NSA had been collecting nearly all of the telegrams leaving New York City for foreign destinations. This wholesale snooping on domestically originating communication was called SHAMROCK. SHAMROCK was a continuation of the censorship of telegrams during World War Two, that had essentially never ended.

Every day, a courier went up to New York on the train and returned to Fort Meade with large reels of magnetic tape, which were copies of the international telegrams sent from New York the preceding day using the facilities of three telegraph companies. The tapes would then be electronically processed for items of foreign intelligence interest, typically telegrams sent by foreign establishments in the United States or telegrams that appeared to be encrypted.

In those days, computerized data analysis was not as common as it is today. So this data was mostly ignored, and scanned only for particular names and entities communication. But the NSA recieved all of the telegrams in one package, and then were themselves responsible for only looking at what their directives allowed them to look at. The telegraph companies, by giving this firehose over to the NSA simply when asked to do so, were complicit in this spying. Recalls L Britt Snider, who investigated the NSA for the Church Commission:

The RCA Global executive, then retired, was the most colorful and forthright of the lot. He offered no apologies for what he or the company had done. He said the Army had come to him and asked for the company’s cooperation, and, by damn, that was enough for him.

The executive from ITT World Communications, by comparison, came to the deposition surrounded by a phalanx of corporate lawyers who proceeded to object to every question I asked once I had gotten past the man’s name and position. I pointed out to them that this was the United States Senate–not a court of law– and, if they wanted to object to the questions I was asking, I would have a Senator come in and overrule every one of their objections. They piped down after that and allowed the witness to respond to my questions.

The executive from Western Union International gave a slightly different version of the operation. He said that in his company, employees would microfilm copies of outgoing international telegrams that would then be picked up by a government courier.

All the company witnesses testified that their companies had assumed NSA was using the telegraph traffic only for foreign intelligence purposes. It did not occur to any of them that NSA might have used their access to look for the international telegrams of American citizens, nor were they aware that their companies had ever sought assurances from NSA on this point. Moreover, all were adamant that their companies had never received any compensation or favoritism from the government in return for their cooperation.

After it was reported to the public, the NSA claimed that SHAMROCK had never been very useful and had therefore been shut down, though details are still redacted and remain sketchy.

The various revelations of the Church Committee were a major reason for the establishment of the FISA Courts under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. Rather than the completely unrestrained spying of the pre-FISA days, when needing to spy on US citizens for international intelligence reasons, any government department can apply for a warrant to the FISA court, which is supposed to supply the necessary oversight. The FISA warrants are supposed to only target particular individuals and groups on firm suspicion, and prevent wholesale snooping like SHAMROCK. However, the court proceedings are secret, the applications cannot be opposed by the subject of the investigation who is in fact never aware of it, and FISA applications are almost never rejected.

The NSA has continued its spying on domestic communications in the FISA era. The US Government’s signal intelligence department may be what the NSA is, but what the NSA consistently does is collect the most information it can, and make it as accessible as it can, in order to have access to everything it could possibly need. Time and time again, this runs up against the reality of the permeable boundary between US citizens and foreign nationals that force the NSA to deviate from their direction to continue observing the rights stipulated by the constitution. The fact of this continuing collision shows that stopping any particular secret spying technology program will not stop the issue from occurring. With this tool of the Intelligence Community box, the problem is systemic.

The NSA has come a long way from ferrying magnetic telegraph tapes from New York City to Maryland by train, evolving with technology. ECHELON is a long-running program of intercepting satellite communications throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The program has precursors dating back to the 1960s, and was most expansive at the height of satellite communications. With access to nearly all telephone communications in the world, NSA only had to ask a FISA court for permission to pull out the calls of any particular individual, as they claimed to have done in the SHAMROCK program. And like SHAMROCK, this spying is done with the complicity of telecommunications companies:

It was true that governments have openly forced telecommunications companies to make their networks accessible to law enforcement and security agencies but the global operation was on a much grander scale. In 1994 the US Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) that in effect required manufacturers and providers to give agencies full access to lines and equipment. The imposition was sweetened with a $500M compensation deal.

In the ECHELON era of snooping into phone communications, the NSA has a database telephone records from all major US carriers, codenamed MARINA, that is estimated to hold more that 1.9 trillion records. The NSA was caught bypassing the FISA system entirely to wiretap US citizens only eight years ago, in 2005.

Today, most communications have moved on from satellite technology to fiber-optic data transmission, and so the NSA has moved on as well. The infamous Room 641A is a room in one of AT&T San Francisco buildings, in which the NSA has installed Narus machines that can inspect all internet traffic that passes through the main lines of the internet service provider. They have a similar database to MARINA for email, called PINWALE. For purposes of analyzing the data that is collected, the former NSA programs STELLAR WIND, and TRAILBLAZER were data mining technologies to process the surveillance of vast numbers of targets based on their activity, rather the directed warrant requests administered by FISA. These programs have since been updated and renamed to RAGTIME, and TURBULENCE, respectively. Similar data mining programs, like Total Information Awareness, TALON, ADVISE, MALINTENT, and others have been deployed by other Intelligence Community partners, mostly to be withdrawn under controversy when they are leaked to the public. And PRISM is a technology more like SHAMROCK, and ECHELON before it. It is reported to connect directly to a number of major data platforms, digging more directly at the data hosted by the platforms, rather than sampling it as it passes through the ISP, at which point it might be encrypted. The NSA has a pattern of seeking the data at the source, in total, and then claiming they only use the data they are allowed to use. From telegrams, to telephones, to data packets, to cloud data, the NSA has repeatedly gone behind the back of the public to the companies transmitting the data, and asked, paid, or forced them to give the NSA direct access to the communications substrate they want to get, in full.

Thus far, the platforms alleged to have worked with the NSA to integrate PRISM into their platforms deny doing so. But like in the days of the Church Commission, the media can only go so far. The NSA and other departments of the executive branch will forge ahead with their snooping wherever it is technically feasible, and it is only the dedicated investigations of the legislative branch that could put a stop to it.

The more systemic problem, larger than any particular acronymed department or particular code-named program, is that the US Intelligence Community is so vast, so expansive, and so hidden from public oversight, that not only is it impossible to know about all the spying capacities of the executive branch, it is virtually guaranteed that if something is technologically possible, there is some program or department currently working on it. The NSA is simply the department working on signals intelligence. Given the size and scope of the world’s communication culture, it makes sense that the NSA would be attempting to worm its way inside every cell phone and social media message that is sent. Spying is what these departments do. If they discover a new means of doing so, they will use it, until some contravening authority can discover it and put a stop to it.

Children rule. No, certain children rule the ways in which we measure fantasies of progress. I read Meagan Hatcher-Mays’ Jezebel piece, “I’m Biracial, and That Ad Is a Big Fucking Deal. Trust Me.,” before I saw the Cheerios commercial itself. The commercial, like most ads, is simple and taps into the unsupervised kiddie trope: it presents a chubby-cheeked maybe-blonde making a mess. Distressingly enough, my first reaction was to claim a resolutely anti stance to not watch the video but respond to the Jezebel post and say, “I’m Biracial, and That Ad Is the Worst Thing Ever. Trust Me.” Quickly, however, I felt it and thought, “Oh, fuck no. I’m black.” And it’s not the ad, but the liberal reactions to it, the way it becomes a siphon for deliciously delirious national imaginaries of cosmopolitan ideas of race that cracks my core. (For instance: how could they say those things about that cute little girl?!) But here I am, writing.

While it was reported, in a maelstrom of likes and RTs, by The Daily Mail, The Huffington Post and others, that on the Cheerios’ Facebook page, commenters expressed that the half-minute commercial had them on the verge of vomiting. I, too, saw the commercial and felt my insides turn to jelly. A flicker of recognition. That family looked a lot like mine: White mother, Black father, smart daughter. But what’s seen doesn’t attest to which lives and how. Living in my own reality, I saw what was not there or rather, what was being blotted out through the exaltation of the Little Cheerios Girl. In other words: who is easily defendable and who isn’t?

It’s hard enough, I would think, to hate on a beautiful little “mixie” and wonder what or how her presence, no, the way in which she is presented, eclipses other lives. Hatcher-Mays, whose hyphenated name perhaps tells us what we need to know of her wholeness, went as far to say that the commercial “validates the existence of biracial and multiracial people.” (Her emphasis.) The way we think about “mixed-race,” however, is grounded in a neoliberal narrative that is narrowly individualized (again, “Mixie Me”). What does it mean for children of color to bring into “existence” this “biracial” child who is not one or the other or even both but maybe, here, a symbol of what’s to come? Who has access to this claim? What does it even mean to grope for a way to ask such questions? When visibility becomes the proxy for “the state of things”—when it becomes a measure of who we are and that we exist, what we lose is vitality.

Even if we acknowledge the hackneyed phrase that “race is a social construction,” we must crudely acknowledge race as a political category and one that has material effects. I’m less interested, then, in the number of interracial couples (i.e. the many stats spouted in the onslaught of blog posts on the Cheerios ad), and more interested in “whose lives can be marked as lives, and whose deaths will count as deaths,” as Judith Butler wrote in the preface to Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. The interconnectedness between future-oriented images and ideals of hybridity and the demarcation of Black bodies materializes itself, I would say, in a matter of life and death.

So, where Melissa Harris-Perry tweets “Welcome to ‘post racial’ USA” with regards to the “racist backlash” of the commercial—the liberal backlash, so to speak—signals a desire for a racial world that looks like the one Cheerios presents: heart-healthy, middle-class, full of Love. (While I’m still griping: does it make sense to say at this juncture that almost a quarter of Americans are deprived of food?)

If the goal is to normalize mixed-race families, as Hatcher-Mays applauds Cheerios for, then we should all be scared for our lives. Normalization is a bit like reform—as simultaneously boring and dangerous—and, as American sociologist and race theorist Howard Winant wrote in a nod to Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, “reformism is better understood as incorporation and absorption of conflict than as conflict resolution.” Multiculturalism, multiracialism, pluralism, diversity, and the endless etc. of 21^st century neologisms fit into this schema of subsumption rather than disruption. What isn’t embraced in the script is that Blackness isn’t that normal at all.

When our discussions of what we deceptively call “racial progress” are dependent on a heterosexually dominant narrative of racial mixing whereby the child is shaped for a heterosexual marketplace of desire, we lose sight of unseeable, intangible realities. As such, they become unknowable. How does marriage and reproduction become a panacea for racism? I’m thinking here of Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive when it comes to the push for a reproductive (and redemptive) futurism. He writes:

For politics, however radical the means by which specific constituencies attempt to produce a more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child.

And later:

From Delacroix’s iconic image of Liberty leading us into a brave new world of revolutionary possibility—her bare breast making each spectator the unweaned Child to whom it’s held out while the boy to her left, reproducing her posture, affirms the absolute logic of reproduction itself—the revolutionary waif in the logo that miniaturizes the “politics” of Les Mis (summed up in its anthem to futurism, the “inspirational” “One Day More”), we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child. That figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights “real” citizens are allowed.

In the 1950s, in Reflections on Little Rock, an article on school integration, political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt insisted that laws banning interracial marriage were “the most outrageous” when it came to de-jure racism in the U.S. Suggesting that anti-miscegenation laws should be the priority, Arendt drew strong criticism. Much later, in 2003, historian Barbara J. Fields responded in her article “Of Rogues and Geldings:”

“What makes prohibition of marriage across the color line worse than forbidding someone to vote, sit on a jury, move about freely, get an adequate education, express political views without fear, or even enjoy safety of life and limb?”

Interracial marriages become a civilizing, acculturating process by which the more we fuck—no, procreate—the better off we’ll all be. We can’t fuck our way out of racism or toward a post-racial utopia. What are submerged are the histories of rape at the root of how we don’t discuss racial hybridity. “What tangled skein are the genealogies of slavery!” is the commonly quoted cry in Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, illustrating the libidinal economy of slavery and its intrusions on entangled histories of violence. How can we acknowledge histories of rape and miscegenation while at the same time staking a claim for where vectors of inequality are most pronounced?

It’s easy enough, I think, to champion for (romantic) love and family, but what happens when the desire to be seen as “normal” becomes cushioned by a persistently lacking politics of representation, revealing perhaps also how a politics of lack can draw attention to what escapes or threatens to escape? I’m thinking of anti-Blackness and how this kind of racism (and how/why do we typify?), one that exists within the permanently disfigured and maimed brown body of the Other doesn’t figure itself into the liberal narrative of interracial love and marriage.

Affective modes of survival, in which certain bodies are known—and made known—through identifiable ways of walking and talking, point to the acknowledgement of corporeal sources of social and political constructions. And maybe more dramatically, the extent to which we need to disavow that which we desire.

Representation, the impossibility of a racial visual index, becomes the setting for benchmarks on how we assess racism. The idea persists that racism exists only (or at least primarily) in people—identifiably at least—or in the extent to which they are tolerant. The Cheerios video, then, stands out as both a measure of progress, an index of how far we’ve come, and also a measuring stick of how fucked up we still are. (All those YouTube comments!)

Why should any of this be surprising? Anonymous and unverifiable trolls who can literally be turned off, disabled, by corporations with the click of a button obviously can’t be the gauge at which we know ourselves. There are titanic nameless risks in thrusting a ‘biracial’ existence as if lives exist only if they are shown, able to be shown, and able to incite viral clicks and comments.

Images via flickr, Chic Profile, Ententasmagic

Pop singers like Vidi Aldiano are nothing like the nasyid* groups, the more conventional all-male singers of Islamic ditties. Young, fresh-faced and nary a skullcap in sight, he dresses like any other young man in urban Indonesia in ubiquitous t-shirt and slim-fitting jeans. The music is like any other unoriginal minor hit song cryogenically preserved since the 1990s, the only dissonance being his lyrics. He sings about Keagungan Tuhan (The Greatness of God), urging his fellow young Muslims to pray and praise God while a group of young women and men stop a game of basketball to start dancing cheerfully to an unmistakeably teeny-bopper choreography.

The song was released during Ramadan of 2009; following the tradition in the Muslim world, people and consumables become more ‘Islamic’ during this period. Among other things, female media personalities would don the headscarf, television stations broadcast religious dramas and documentaries, and the latest Islamic film would be released to coincide with a period of penance and reflection. There has been some commentary on the rise of Islamic pop singers who combine aspects of hip hop, gospel, and generic pop to produce updated versions of nasyid. Yet recently a secularised image of Islamic pop culture has been gaining a foothold in mainstream Indonesian culture, one that is stripped of its obvious Islamic symbolisms—headscarves, skull caps, Quranic inscriptions in Arabic, and even the colour green.

Alongside their more conventional Islamic musical contemporaries, there are rock bands who, on the surface and musically, are like any other ‘secular’ rock band but sing about strengthening the Islamic faith. Similar to Christian rock bands, an Islamic rock band replaces the song’s object of love and desire from ‘you’ to ‘God’. For example Gigi, an influential mainstream Indonesian rock band, looks like any other pop and rock ensemble. Broody, long-haired, and sometimes menacing, the singer belts out a tune about the gates of Heaven and how one enters it come the Day of Reckoning. In another particularly upbeat song, set incongruously against a dark chamber lit only by floating lightbulbs, the lead singer calls upon the listener to worship. Gigi’s electric guitars and pulsating drums recall inoffensive and edgeless mainstream North American rock bands such as Nickleback and 3 Doors Down. And the song itself? It is catchy.

Some may wonder whether bands like Gigi follow a similar aesthetic and politics as Islamic punk and heavy metal groups like The Kominas and al-Thawra. There are immediate commonalities: both are unconventional musical expressions that foreground the Islamic image of its performers and appeal to a youthful audience disenchanted with values incompatible with Islam encased in Western music. But following the crackdown on punk subculture in Indonesia, other anarchic and culturally subversive groups may be not looked upon too kindly.

The mainstreaming of Islamic popular culture is further evidenced by shifts in its temporality. Previously, Islamic television programming, music, and films were only released during Ramadan. Islamic popular culture prior to the 1990s was considered a commercially risky venture and unprofitable in Indonesia. If people needed ‘religion,’ they turned to religious leaders, prayer and Quranic recitation groups, and their local mosques. Today, however, they are found throughout the year. There are now questions of whether Indonesia is becoming more Islamic, or whether Islam has become more secularised.

Rather than receding from the public sphere, religion in an increasingly secularised world has been experiencing waves of revivalism. One unintended byproduct of secularisation of society is that religion became decentralised rather than being a power wielded solely by a central religious authority. Shifting increasingly towards the peripheries of power, religion has entered the marketplace en masse. These trends and the merging of images of modernity and Islam that were once considered contradictory have created what many describe as ‘Islamic modernities’ in a landscape of multiple modernities. The Islamic modernity seen in Indonesia is a political and cultural sensibility whereby a commitment to Islam is embraced alongside approximations of western notions of modernity.

Indonesia may not be globally known outside Southeast Asia for its pop culture or a key figure of the Islamic world, but it offers interesting clues to the way the biggest population of Muslims in the world engage with the geopolitics of post-9/11. The explosion of Islamic popular culture in Indonesia parallels the development of Christian popular culture in the US, simply because it has similar basic ingredients: the liberalisation and mass marketisation of religion. For decades since the mid-1960s, Indonesia was regarded as a beacon of Islamic moderation. With communism held firmly under the lid (with the help of the US government, no less), the Suharto regime also ensured that Islam remained unpoliticised and ‘non-extreme.’ Unpolitical Islam was (and still is) a good thing for secular politicos and commentators who were wary of revivalist Islam’s power to inspire Muslims to rise, in myriad and often unpredictable ways, against western hegemonic dominance. But following the resignation of Suharto, public and political manifestations of Islam gained momentum and reclaimed the mediascape.

The big question is, then, who listens to Islamic pop music? Are they anything like the followers of Christian rock music? Do they belong to a parallel universe sequestered from mainstream culture? The 1990s witnessed the bourgeoisification of the Muslim middle classes who equated the Veblenian display of public piety with social status. Since then, the steady march of mass consumerism finds itself face to face with an increasingly conscientious set of consumers keen on making spiritual meaning of their consumption. Conditions were then ripe for the proliferation of all things Islamic: fashion, comic books, make-up, and even toothpaste could become Shari’a compliant and reassuringly halal.

For some, it is frustratingly difficult to equate Islamic consumption with actual piety. Consumption of media has become widespread rather than specialised (and sacralised) to particular space and time, and too convenient. Spiritual respite is only a click or button away, rather than being a ritualised series of practices. Savvy marketers of Islamic pop culture sell their wares not only for Muslims but for everybody, as the products are imbued with good universal values rather than those exclusive to Muslims.

Although there have been plenty of debates decrying the commercialisation of Islam, one can never really draw a clear line distinguishing between what is sacred and profane, religious and secular, worship and entertainment. It is not seen as good enough to assume that consumers of Islamic popular culture are passive recipients of God’s message, pure and transparent. The answer may lie in the media theories of Katz and McQuail who propose that consumers of media are better understood through examining why they consume certain media products, and how they gratify certain desires and pleasures. Thus the need to appear pious may be too straightforward for the huge swaths of discerning and increasingly sophisticated Muslim consumer of media in Indonesia.

The growth of Islamic popular culture in Indonesia matters a great deal when we think about the global impact of hegemonic media representations of Muslims. Since the attacks on 9/11, the Bali bombings of 2002, and the release of Islamophobic films Submission in 2004 and Fitna in 2008 by Dutch filmmaker and far-right politician Theo van Gogh and Geert Wilders respectively, producers of Islamic popular culture in Indonesia have become emboldened by a new kind of urgency, one that is characterised by the need to produce new, progressive, and thoroughly modern images of Muslims and their cherished values. The rise of Islamic popular culture in Indonesia joins the ranks of successful nasyid groups in neighbouring Malaysia and to a lesser extent, the Arabic-singing rock bands of Thailand, who are embraced by a subset of the Muslim middle-class and working class.

The production of Islamic music and other forms of popular culture such as Muslim youth-oriented novels and cinema can be seen as a concerted effort of ‘writing back’ against dangerous Muslim stereotypes, and are probably directed to an imagined West itself. But Islamic media is as much an internal circuit of representations for producers and consumer who engage with issues related to cleavages within Islam, gender and sexuality, and capitalism as it is a dialogue with the West.

*Nasyid is derived from the Arabic nashid (plural: anashid) for ‘song’ or ‘hymn.’

Images via Islamic Pop Art

It was a piece in the Guardian that first suggested out loud what was becoming a trope in the media and among the thoughts of those studying technology and power structures: Google might be beginning to act like a state. Whether the proper articulation of this idea is that Google is a state, Google acts like a state, Google thinks it is a state, Google looks like a state, or Google thinks it looks like it acts like it is a state–the implementation of the metaphor is clear. In contemporary times, the discourse surrounding Google and the nation-state are thought to have enough similarities that some sort of comparison between them is a useful avenue of critique.

Google is, of course, not a state. It is a corporation. It has no thoughts, has no intention outside of the operation of its various components and personnel, and in fact has no appearance. We see its many products, facilities, policies, the results of its lobbying, the societal effect of its various productions. But the Google doodle is not the company. No more perhaps, than a nation-state is its monuments, its executive figurehead, its flag, or its maps. What is similar about a corporation and a nation-state is that both of them are quite ideal concepts, built up through a stratified history of media, of words, of reactions to their various and diverse physical existences. These ideal concepts, these monstrous behemoths which we have allowed to rampage over the surface of the earth via our minds’ projection, have only a thin relationship connecting our ideas of them to their actual insect-like consumption of real world ecosystems. In the same manner, a single volume history of the fall of Rome can only barely relate to the actual marches of armies across Europe more than a thousand years ago. Certainly our ideas of the state and the corporation are based in reality. But it is reality flattened to the thickness of paper, stretched via the acceleration of communication, limited to the bandwidth of a metaphor. Even the corporate charter and the constitution, the kernel documents that are supposed to control the discursive existence of the corporation and the state, are merely indifferent haikus spoken to the weather, for all the indescribable detail in the barrel of a military rifle and in the LIDAR mast of a self-driving car.

By allowing ourselves to think about states and corporations in equivalent terms, we give them the ideational latitude–while we are distracted by making such idealistic comparisons, they are free to do whatever they want.

Currently, we have limited material means to control corporations and states. Those kernels of bureaucratic control that are supposed to keep the entire expansive material network in check, the charters and constitutions, are near useless when they are only interpreted by juridico-discursive systems that are largely embodied by the power of those same corporations and states. We have the ability to fight them in the streets to a degree. We can still burn the buildings down, block the lanes of traffic, and cut the cables. But to do this, we must be able to see these material capillary beds. We cannot fight corporate cops that don’t exist, or boycott nation-state products that don’t need our business. There is a material reality to both states and corporations, but we can easily miss it, distracted by the allusions we have created in our minds for rhetorical simplicity.

It may sound cliche to talk about missing the tree for the forest, but we are conned daily in this fashion. Here’s an example: consider “corporate-personhood”. In the aftermath of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a United States Supreme Court case that held that corporations and other entities were entitled to free speech (one of a series of cases granting corporations certain “citizenship” rights), the protest slogan was born, “A corporation is a person when Texas executes one”. The slogan is sardonic and clever, simultaneously protesting the notion of corporate personhood and the state of Texas’ liberal use of capital punishment. But this connection, despite its irony, is idealistically unhelpful.

The point of the Citizen’s United is not that a corporation wants to be treated like a citizen, and we need to “save” citizenship from them (and maybe cut down on executions too). Nor is the point that the US Supreme Court was somehow fooled into thinking that a corporation is a citizen. A corporation is not a citizen, and never will be a citizen. A corporation can never be imprisoned, can never be shot by police, cannot have its citizenship revoked. A corporation cannot be executed, because it has no body. It is not that the law has been interpreted to say that corporations get free speech and yet cannot be executed–it is the reality that you cannot execute something that is not alive. The Supreme Court, even in its most deluded, conservative, corrupt moment, can never conclude that a corporation has a body. But what it will do is use any number of legal loopholes to let corporations do what they please.

A corporation does not seek to be treated like a citizen–a corporation seeks to do whatever it can in order to continue to make a profit. A corporation would argue that it deserved to be treated as the incarnation of Satan if it thought it would help the corporation profit in the long run. By arguing about the interpretation of the law, we buy into the distraction. We play the corporation’s game while it picks our pocket. By ironically balking at the idea of a corporation “becoming more and more like a person”, we are giving it the latitude to push back on this ideational line of argument in order to achieve material ends. The injustice here is not that corporations can be sometimes considered legally equivalent to people. The injustice is that the law can be bent to serve corporate wishes in absolutely any way, and therefore law as a defense of citizenship is meaningless. We should not be angry that corporations might be legally “like us”. We should be angry that a legal that could conclude so even exists.

This is how class functions. The powerful consolidate their power, while attempting to distract attention from that consolidation so it may progress unchecked. And when we confront that consolidation, the class doubles down, throwing out extravagant resources to win back a single street, a single product, or a single ideological point, because it knows we have no choice but to fight that battle, and ignore the rest. While we debate as to in which situations corporations are most like states and in which contexts states are most like corporations, both states and corporations will continue to do anything that they can to increase and consolidate their own power, regardless of whether we think it is state-like, corporation-like, or neither. We lie on our backs attempting to guess what sort of monster the cloud appears to be, which meanwhile, beasts approach us across the ground. We accept these idealized, Skinner box scenario definitions, in which we are forced to decide on pain of electric shock whether X is A or Y or B. Neither of these levers actually exist in the way they are described. And while we hesitate, outside the box the experimenters take notes.

But if it is all a ruse, all a cartoon pony show teaching us that Soft Power is Magic, then why bother saving “the corporation” and “the state” from being mashed together? Isn’t it all just power and class? A corporation is a citizen, is a state, is a system—because all wars are the class war anyway? Perhaps, says the theorist. We will continue to analyze and let you know. We are waiting for history, so that we can give a conclusive reading. And meanwhile, the streets rage on.

I would say this to any CEO, any senator, professor, or protester. While we compare and contrast, categorize and conflate, reality continues unabated. I only have my singular view on reality—that of a precariat worker in Oregon of 2013, but I can tell you any number of ways that the corporations I deal with on a daily basis are not like the states with which I do the same. (I might argue that a corporation could be like the military industrial complex in its most state-like incarnations, but that is a different discussion for a different time.) I have very complex relationships with both Google and the United States, both in their idealized sense and in my material day to day life. But they are in no way similar. I cannot be jailed by Google for failing to testify at a grand jury. I don’t submit personal information to the United States in return for free productivity tools. Google doesn’t shoot people in my neighborhood. I’m not applying to test new consumer gadgets produced by the government. I’m not attempting to pay more tax to Google so they can fix the roads and fluoridate the water in my city. And I don’t wonder if the government is rolling out an update to my communications infrastructure.

This seems like the part of the essay in which I get all anecdotal and folksy, and that is because it is. But it is also the part where we stop speaking in the discourse of headlines and the colon-separated subtitles of topical books about “change” and “disruption“, and starting thinking about how actual people in the street relate to the systems around them. For people who are in the jaws of corporations and/or states, this is no idle, metaphorical comparison. This is not about “seeing like a state”, or “thinking like a corporation”. This is about thinking and seeing like a person persecuted by these things, using only the ideas handed down to them by thesis-writers and commentators. It is one thing to spin a yarn about the state and corporations being similar. It is another to see through the shadows, and see how states and corporations in terms of power and class. And it is another thing yet again, to actually attempt to push back against that power and class. We are all in trouble here. And while on some days it may seem like a good idea to talk about states and corporations as two “hands” of the same “body”, there are other days when our bodies are in actual danger, and we need our hands to be as material as possible, to shield the blows.

Over the course of June 2013—in conjunction with THE STATE—Murmuration will post no less than one work a day involving the concept of drones, to establish a virtual festival celebrating the work of creators in all mediums, to stimulate and inspire future works, and to extend the ongoing conversations on the topic of drones through fictional and creative forms. Murmuration is a project by Adam Rothstein and Olivia Rosane.

The drones are here and they do drone on.

Just last week, the Obama administration publicly acknowledged for the first time that it had used UAVs to target and kill U.S. citizens, even as the President proposed new limits on the use of “remotely piloted aircraft commonly referred to as drones.”

A week later: four more people were killed in a drone strike in Pakistan, startling the commentariat up into a cloud of activity as they ask what has changed and what has stayed the same.

Like a child folding a parent’s newspaper into an “unmanned” aircraft and tossing it skyward, we launch our festival from the headlines.

The goal of our festival was and is not to exploit the current moment, but to understand it. To do so, we felt, we had to go beneath and beyond conscious arguments into the realm of art and fiction. What does it mean to live in a time in which someone sitting in one place can fly a plane that drops a bomb half a world away? How does the drone’s existence alter human existence? What has changed and what has stayed the same?

The answers fluttered down into our inbox and delighted us with their creativity and insight. The works of art and fiction that we will post this month come in many forms: poems, stories, ruminative essays, drawings, photographs, films, musical compositions, even a video game. They answer the question from the perspective of pilot, plane, and target; bewildered observer and grieving loved-one. Like drones themselves, they are varied in design and purpose, to the point at which it would be difficult to categorize them together–outside of the word: drone.

Art and fiction are not arguments with which we are meant to agree or disagree. They paint a landscape of impressions, from which questions rise, like birds (or drones) into the air. What all these pieces of culture share is a serious engagement with the idea and implications of the drone. So starting today, we release them out into the internet so that you may wonder with us at the peaks and valleys of this murmuration.

We call this collection a festival. We use the word festival to imply a gathering of artistic expressions around a certain theme during a limited time period. But isn’t a festival also a celebration? Does a “festival of drone culture” inevitably celebrate drones and the destruction they have wrought?

Festivals are not as simple as they might seem. Mikhail Bakhtin theorized the “carnivalesque” as a characteristic of festivals that move against the standard order. Roles are reversed, traditions are refuted, and the established world is turned upside down as the bottom of the hierarchy catapults itself to the top. This is the sort of festival that Murmuration intends to be. This is no conference of the Unmanned Systems Industry. This is not a Presidential Speech. This is an attempt to recode powerful technology with art and fiction. This is a deployment of the drone as a cultural node, a fictional character that refuses the rhetoric and mechanics of political and robotic systems and instead speaks in the many voices of the artists and writers who imagine it. Art and fiction are uncontrolled, free to depart from the established talking points and waypoints and seek new destinations. The character of the drone is not controlled by military satellites from above, but by the people from below.

The drone is a complicated carnival character because its nature and tradition are still being discovered and disputed. The dream of a machine that is physically remote (and so maybe one day mentally as well?) from its controller is not inherently a martial one. But we live under the heel of the military industrial complex, and our dreams are first and foremost funded for military application. In this way, the drone reminds us of the conventional airplane—a machine that is at once the creative fulfillment of an age-old human fantasy and a device that metes out unprecedented destruction, shielding the destroyer from what s/he destroys.

But what is the established order of the old dream of flight? Who owns it? Who controls it? As in the early days of aviation, it is the rich and privileged who have the chance to play with these new technologies, to experience them as stimulating hobbies and not as metal predators buzzing overhead. But resource disparity doesn’t stop the people on the ground from hacking the machines above. A technology’s current application, programed by the powerful, does not have to code its future, which can be imagined by anyone. One of the most vexing questions posed by industrial civilization is exactly this: why is so much ingenuity wasted to exploit and destroy. Couldn’t we use it for something else instead? Can we make technology carnivalesque by liberating it from war, or has technology forever been profaned by its first deployment as a weapon?

By calling for and publishing art about drones even as we call for and publish art about drone strikes, we are displaying two faces of the drone, on a mask, worn by ecstatic dancers hailing from all points on the network. The mask is less a Janus face than the mask of a hydra; the more we cleave into these fictional forms, the more they multiply and divide. We don’t justify the violence, we absorb it into the many steps of a dance. This festival’s dance is of both the creative technology and the destructive weapon, the promise of techno-utopia and the harbinger of techno-apocalypse. This is a confused and confusing movement. Can a weapon have so many expressive faces? Can the drone exist apart from the military that uses it? Or does the glint on the wing merely blind us to the fleshy corpse it leaves behind?

These are questions Murmuration will ask as a festival, and the pieces we publish will complicate these questions further. What Murmuration does insist is that the impulse to create can and must do battle with the impulse to destroy. If research and development can’t take up this task, then art and fiction must.

Enjoy Murmuration!

—The Editors

Adam Rothstein

Olivia Rosane

Images via Tumblr and Dazed

From the 2011 riots in London to the Arab Spring, I’ve heard a lot about the effects of crowds on human behaviour. Mass Psychogenic Illness is the official term (or rather, the term taken up within the standardisation of the medical system) and Mass Hysteria is the term used when relating to women. (Shortly after Frau Troffea’s little dance, they started burning witches at the stake.) But official dismissal aside, it is terms such as revolution, occupation, or [fill in your blank], that are used when it comes from the bottom up.

During the French Revolution, wax was used as crowd control. Busts of figures revered by the people—eerily similar to heads on stakes—were placed in the public town square, and traffic was forced to flow around these obstacles. Somehow through the chaos it worked, and a new system was born. During the Dance Epidemic of 1518, however, it was the dancers themselves who were placed in the square. A hired band and all, their presence was meant to cure the populace. But in the end the town leaders were wrong, and it was not the band that was put on a pedestal, but the fear of Saint Vitus himself. The town leaders underestimated the fear that they induced for control: more and more dancers joined, and a new system was born from old.

Now consider the idea of a plague endemic to technology and society today. (After all, as I discussed earlier, it is in times of crisis that the hidden yet communicable symptoms of plague most readily emerge.) Error: public squares become filled with dancers, the Blue Screen of Death appears with its lines of code, feet echo loudly, cursors blink menacingly, and the familiar monuments of the interface disappear behind the symptoms of their own infrastructure. New systems are created, yet technology continues to loop. Social media become tools, flash mobs become standardisations, new terms become used to define, and the symptoms become hidden away yet again.

But don’t get me wrong, changes can and do occur. Cures can be made that are external to the symptoms, but the fact of the matter is that fear is here to stay. After the dancers were ‘cured,’ the fear of Saint Vitus was replaced by the fear of breaking moral laws, and one system looped into another; the tune of cybernetics cannot be broken:

The events of May 68 gave rise to a political reaction in all western societies…Capitalism was very quickly restructured, as if an army were being put on the march to war.

Frau Troffea may have been joined by an army of many limbs flailing in error, but the sounds of their marching only looped to produce useable data for the town leaders themselves:

With cybernetics, the production of singular subjectivities and the production of collective totalities work together like gears to replicate History in the form of a feigned movement of evolution.

As if an echo, the beats of military drums come to resemble the tapping of individual feet. Cue military cadence: My Girls A Pretty Girl. Frau Troffea this ones for you.

[echo/lead lead/echo]

Voice 1:
Title: Formal Self Reference on the narrative
writing created during the Dance Epidemic of Strasbourg, Dated December 20-12. (twenty-twelve).
Voice 2: Title: Official Assessment on the medical dataproduced during the Dance Epidemic of Strasbourg, Dated 1947.

Voice 1: Introduction: The majority of the story comes from the connected mind mappings.
Voice 2: Voice 2: Introduction: The majority of the data comes from the writings of Paracelsus.

Voice 1: As they are in movement the facts are all deemed to be truth and this writing is the final conclusive analysis of all the looping.
Voice 2: As they are in writing the facts are all deemed to be truth and this report is the final conclusive analysis of all the data.

Voice 1: This formal report stands in place of all previous writings. It is official and held up technically.
Voice 2: This formal report stands in place of all previous accounts. It is official and held up lawfully.

Voice 1: Table of Contents.
Voice 2: Table of Contents.

Voice 1: Section 1:Official Trajectories
Voice 2: Section 1: Official Terminologies.

Voice 1: A. Chorea Lasciva. Coined by Paracelsus in 1518, its victims were often women, whose thoughts were never heard and whose dancing style was never recorded.
Voice 2: A. Chorea Lasciva. Coined by Paracelsus in 1518, its victims are named choreomanics, meaning those whose thoughts are lewd and without fear and respect.

Voice 1: B. Tarantism. Mass psychogenic illness. To be confused with the Tarantella theme of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest based on Carey Grant’s walking like a tarantula.
Voice 2: B. Tarantism. Mass psychogenic illness. Not to be confused with the Tarantella the folk style of dancing created in Italy in the 16th century with a fast upbeat tempo.

Voice 1: C. Plague. Death. Monument.
Voice 2: C. Plague. Cure. Monument.

Voice 1: Section 2: Concept.
Voice 2: Section 2: Context.

Voice 1: Strasbourg, 1518, a city of kubernesis and ships of fools. Printing Press used as technology of power and control.
Voice 2: Strasbourg, 1518, a city of riverways and abundant trade. Printing Press used to provide information to the public.

Voice 1: Section 3: Methodologies
Voice 2: Section 3: Methodology

Voice 1: A. All records are those of moral law not voices.
Voice 2: A. All records will be given equal weight.

Voice 1: B. They will then be coded and considered in capital.
Voice 2: B. They will then be coded and considered in detail.

Voice 1: C. After, analysed and cybernticized.
Voice 2: C. After, analysed and categorized.

Voice 1: D. Finally, Looping, Looping, Looping. //Repeat //
Voice 2: D. Finally, Looping, Looping, Looping. //Repeat//

The plague, despite the death, can be used as a ‘cure’ for society. Epidemically new technologies are born that endemically hide the system (symptoms) from which they harvest. So many people died during the Black Death that timekeeping was created in order to efficiently make the most of the people left to continue agricultural production—cue watches, town clocks, bells, and whistles. With the Dance Epidemic, however, the doctors became the technology themselves. As a media of the day, Paracelsus was the voice of the system of the cure: dictating its terms and its future, taking over from the local practices of peasant women as doctors, and speaking for the dancers themselves. With mass dancing in public, wax tablets became replaced by the mass media of the printing press. Posters went up with warning signs; stories of ships of fools were circulated. And perhaps it is the most symbolic of all that the first known image of a printing shop was combined with that of the dance of death.

Cure is the currency of capital, plague the symptoms of its circulation, and out of this movement one set of fears becomes another. Social media and flash mobs all feed into the loop. And so do Frau Troffea’s dancing feet, and so do yours. Come to your feet and take a stand, and yet your feet become the standardisation of the desires of capital. Just as wax tablets represent both sides of the fear (effigy and religion, cadaver and medicine), cue Brannock Devices. The dancers’ feet are standardised for efficient selling. But what about those that have blisters from dancing without end, that are half way between this side and that, with the fear of deformity? What about our body, our trance, our individualism, our dancing styles?

The marching sides meet in the middle of the loop. Cue battle scene.

Voice 2: Section 4: Conclusions
Moral codes must be established for the benefit of the people. Standardization must be used to ensure the greatest spread of these moral codes and capital
Step 1: We will no longer provide stages so that dancing can occur in public squares and places of trade. Step 2: Build altars of sacrifice to Saint Vitus but these will be funded and included in Schwortag and the state’s rule, not the church.
Step 3: To prevent further dancing,as it will inhibit our society, /strengthen trade and the spread of capital throughout the land.
Appendix

Voice 1: Section 4: Beginnings
Moral codes are run through the benefit of the invisible hand of cybernetics. Brannock devices/ must be used to ensure that these hands reach the feet in efficient ways.
Loop 1: Separate representations in order to bring death to the ideas that go beyond places of trade. Loop 2: Re-connect communication in order to establish a sense of life and build individualistic communities, not the people.
Loop 3:/To prevent further technophobia, as all the dancers illustrated an aversion to objects, tighten yet keep separate individual desires.
Appendix

Paracelsus may have officially named it one thing, but we have never heard from the dancers themselves. The printing press may have circulated stories and announcements, but we have no record of what kind of dancing was actually happening. There are loopholes to the system: codes break down and need to be built from scratch again, the virus corrupts the computer beyond repair, error happens, bodies are deformed, and cures do not work. And just as I admit that I may only be telling some symptoms of the story, and only perpetuating one side of the fear, can we ever really escape? What was Frau Troffea’s body trying to tell her? Did she transcend the system into a trance? Forget standardised shoes and ships of fools, what about Bundschuh movements and peasant revolts? What happens to the medical data we give and the standardisations that are produced? And what is a cure after all?

Again, I’d like to know what she really felt, and perhaps from there find the real ‘cure,’ as in eliminate not preserve. The y-chromosome from the Black Death is just one slight mutated remove from the one present in society today. Cue the next part of the story, and the tune changes from public dancing to ‘make the remaining dancers wear red shoes and dance around Saint Vitus’ shrine.’ It is, somehow for me, the tale of The Red Shoes at its best here, and the moral of the story is not about love or hate, one fear or the next, or even dancing. Rather, it is in the power of putting the shoes on your feet and wobbling beyond control. It is the in-between that matters.
Data data data still data data data—repeat to find the liminal Data data data still data data data—repeat to find the liminalData data data still data data data—repeat to find the liminalData data data still data data data—repeat to find the liminalData data data still data data data—repeat to find the liminalData data data still data data data—repeat to find the liminal

All images rahel aima

Once upon a linear time a new comic came into the world, and its name was Doktor Sleepless. It was heralded as Warren Ellis’s first big, long, major meaty work since the legendary Transmetropolitan, which had inspired—and continues to inspire—angry young journalists like Penny Red to go out into the world and call it on its bullshit.

From the first whiffs of it leaking onto the ‘net, I could just tell this would be the equivalent for me:

You are never going into space.
You will never own a jet pack.
Your car will never fly.
HIV will not be cured in your lifetime.
Cancer will not be cured in your lifetime.
The common cold will not be cured in your lifetime.
Don’t these things bother you?

Suicide is the third biggest killer of teenagers in the United States.
In 1999 more people in America died from suicide than from homicide.
Do you think about this?

As anyone who ever read MyDeathSpace.com for any period of time know, the leading cause of death in America is automobile accident. This is generally interpolated into a number placed under the heading “accidental death.” When the operation of cars is the leading cause of loss of life I’m not entirely sure how it comes under the term “accidental death.” It wasn’t a fucking accident, it was done by someone with a car. It’s 2007 and we don’t know how to operate cars without killing people. It’s not a fucking accident if it was caused by someone getting into a one-ton metal bullet that cannot be operated with complete control at all times.

In Europe in 2004, 13000 kids—persons under the age of fourteen—died due to poor water. It’s 2007 and the society does not yet understand how to operate water.

Are you thinking about this now?

People keep asking me what DOKTOR SLEEPLESS is about. This is what it’s about.

Someone stole your future. Don’t you ever wonder who?”

—Warren Ellis’s Livejournal

To say my life was primed for this comic would be… accurate. On top of this, Ellis was doing rather experimental things with how the comic interacted with the world. Starting with deliberately creating a “datashadow” for it, inspired by the way fans of the show Lost obsessed over every episode for hidden clues. And hiding clues within the comic. And on the datashadow itself.

This is the story-within-the-story of the hereto-now secret origins of grinding.be

It began with a Ning. Remember Ning? The once free social-networking site? That since-boarded-up squatters’ zone—like Geocities and many other angel investor-driven user-generated, cyber wotsits—that swallowed its community with it, only traces of which were preserved on the wiki. It was from there that the ‘elite mental patients of the future’ were recruited. I think I was member #9 of that place; somewhere in the top ten. Hitting refresh on the datashadow almost hourly, waiting for a promised revelation. And there it was, hidden in a link to the text within the story that drove Doktor Sleepless’ madness, The Darkening Sky.

It was in that place that the most obsessive fans gathered to dissect each issue, and to theorise on the larger themes and possible story arcs. It was there that I made the closest friends that I’ve still never met. That I still talk with daily. From which a message went out from the Internet Jesus: who wants to bring the Sleepless into the world? And five were chosen, and Grinding lurched into the world with the dawning of 2008, from the Backmatter of issue #4 of the comic itself:

Our mission? To find outbreaks of the future. Seeds of the near-future microcosm captured in the comic.

Or was it? As we spread our techno-tendrils out into the internet, captured them in our RSS Readers and Google Alerts and links from fellow travellers, and revealed the seeds of that science-fictional dystopia … well, it was that last word that stung the most over time. Dystopia. Like cyberpunk before it, this was a Warning Sign of a future that had been stolen.

Surely the real message was to find the seeds of a better world, whilst continuing the core mandate: to remind people that they live in the future, that they’re science-fictional creatures.

This was how I came to realise that in actuality, the grinding.be team was a human-machine dropped into the really real world to aid in the formation of planetary rescue; a metafictional outreach program from the mind of Warren Ellis to paradoxically prevent the creation of the universe he created. To stand in the gap, as Hickman puts it in S.H.I.E.L.D. To embrace the co-evolution of human and machine and to build the best of all possible futures.

And the alt-me from the AI ‘verse winked.

The things that surround us that are of the future we don’t pay attention to as much as we should. Possibly because they are not the things we were promised.”
—Warren Ellis, Captured Ghosts

And our remit was also to give them, the readers, the Grinders, a narrative constructed for that purpose. Because narratives are ontological engines, through which we can radically reframe people’s self-awareness and vision, and thereby create Ontological Rescue Mission Squads. Along the way, as I’ve grinded my futurist stats, I’ve been fortunate to find myself a proper mentor of sorts: Futurist, inventor of VRML, and legendary techno-pagan, Mark Pesce. And having an epiphany one day some years ago now, I put it to him that I was now a Militant Futurist, fighting for a better world. And he succinctly replied, as all gurus do, “there’s another kind?”

So we shine an equal light on the seeds of future worlds both better and worse, that they may be seen as what they truly are, and might become. And scatter into the winds of the internet thought-bombs to be exploded in the minds of the post-public. Which is how a single tweet sent from a supermarket car park can catalyze a world-wide movement of networked resistance.

And the soldier-me from the other timeline smiled.

The best way to predict the future, is to build it
—Peter Drucker

This is what they don’t teach you in Futurist School. Because no such place exists.

What does exist instead, is MBA programs. Where you’ll find many futurist types lecturing, and key science-fiction books such as Charles Stross’s Accelerando being commoditised. Whilst Charlie himself keeps jobbing away, his advance for that book long gone, having to half-seriously contemplate the high-selling paranormal romance market to keep himself in delicious sandwiches.

This is part ii of a series. Part i can be found here; stay tuned for part iii next week!

Images via SciFiFur, Comixty, grinding, Doktor Sleepless