Although the Raver’s manifesto explicitly rejects politics it does, however, critique existing structures of societal participation. In the language of a digital native it says, “We seek to re-write the programming that you have tried to indoctrinate us since the moment we were born. Programming that tells us to hate, that tells us to judge, that tells us to stuff ourselves into the nearest and most convenient pigeon hole possible.”
This sentiment is echoed, albeit in far more politically articulate language by the Situationists whose searing critique of the ‘nullity’ of French universities of the ‘60s makes for entertaining reading. Their 1966 pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life: considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual, and particularly intellectual aspects, and a modest proposal for its remedy, was brought to the attention of the English-speaking world by a radical student newspaper of NSW University in Australia- Tharunka whose contribution to the global social change movement is discussed later.
In this piece the Situationists assert what is utterly misguided about current analysis of student life: “Everything is said about our society except what it is, and the nature of its two basic principles–the commodity and the spectacle. The fetishism of facts masks the essential category, and the details consign the totality to oblivion.” Now (2018) we have the plastic arts, theatre, dance and opera needing to achieve a ‘wow factor’ to survive as a cultural commodity. Thus, in Sydney, for example, the Vivid festival has morphed from an edgy energy efficient light festival collaborating with Brian Eno into a massive tourist pleasing repetitive spectacle, classical operas are performed on the harbour and an entire ex industrial island is given over to ooing and aahing crowds of Biennale goers.
The new business fetishism is ‘big data’. As usual with any new technological ability it is the big corporations, the military and government security apparatus who are the first to exploit it. If you search ‘big data’ in Google one of the first items to appear is from IBM: “IBM® Spectrum Conductor Deep Learning Impact …. enables you to build a deep learning environment that allows data scientists to focus on training, tuning and deploying models into production.” Essentially this is about monetizing ‘data trails’- every click you make- which are created at the rate of 2.5 plus exabytes each day. So, if you’re not “accelerating the journey from ingest to inference with elastic distributed training and hyperparameter search optimization…” you’re simply not in the game!
We are being scored one click at a time. As Cathy O’Neil so passionately points out in her book Weapons of Math Destruction, (2016) those scores are fed into algorithms which can and do often make discriminatory correlations between say, geolocation or level of sophistication in word usage to credit worthiness. If you were an Obama supporter, you would have been pleased and impressed with his micro-targeting based on data analytics to raise funds for his election campaign but less enthusiastic if workers are subject to scheduling software which enables companies to calibrate working time to minutes. Japanese production methodologies used to apply JIT (Just In Time) to warehouse inventory now it applies to employees.
Regarding the passive role the student plays in modern capitalism our Situationists rather eloquently suggest, “…he (the student) basks in a schizophrenic consciousness, withdrawing into his initiation group to hide from that future. Protected from history, the present is a mystic trance.” Disdain for the French student positively oozes from much of the Situationists’ polemic On the Poverty of Student Life, (1966). The authors assert that the student is complicit in the misery of others while he constructs “…an imaginary prestige for himself.” There’s more in similar vein: again ‘he’ ‘is a stoic slave’ who is deluded about his own autonomy. Not only is the student “…the most universally despised creature in France…” but also his idealism is so passé and he “…is already a very bad joke.”
In addition to these impugnments of the student coupled with vitriolic eviscerations of late capitalism itself the Situationists have no truck with reforms from the left or the right. Even the organization of demonstrations with fellow students illustrates “…political false consciousness in its virgin state…” Thus, it would appear that a future post-revolutionary society has no use for youthful rebellion. However, they do confine their bleak analysis to students in particular rather than youth in its entirety. They concede that youth as exemplified by the ‘blouson noir’ in France whose equivalent in UK were the Mods and Rockers and Bodgies in Australia “…(are) the new carriers of revolutionary infection.” However, before dissecting and evaluating the revolutionary potential of various groups in European society and finding them all wanting, they put their Adorno cards on the table by stating that the ‘Idea of Youth’ is a pseudo category. Indeed, Adorno himself said in 1968 that even student protests were produced by his famous ‘culture industry’. In an article titled Brown Shoes Don’t Make It, in the 1970 Schoolkids edition of Oz, 18-year-old Charles Murray, did not need Adorno to understand the nexus between Rock Around the Clock and Decca or Brando’s The Wild One with Columbia. Referring to the summer of love in 1967 Murray reflected on the commercialization of the underground scene where the culture machine had “…taken it over, re-packaged it and sold it back to itself.”
This follows from previous essay.
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