"The strength and the weakness of the real anarchist struggle resides in its viewing the goal of proletarian revolution as immediately present (the pretensions of anarchism in its individualist variants have always been laughable). From the historical thought of modern class struggles collectivist anarchism retains only the conclusion, and its exclusive insistence on this conclusion is accompanied by deliberate contempt for method. Thus its critique of the political struggle has remained abstract, while its choice of economic struggle is affirmed only as a function of the illusion of a definitive solution brought about by one single blow on this terrain–on the day of the general strike or the insurrection. The anarchists have an ideal to realize. Anarchism remains a merely ideological negation of the State and of classes, namely of the social conditions of separate ideology. It is the ideology of pure liberty which equalizes everything and dismisses the very idea of historical evil. This viewpoint which fuses all partial desires has given anarchism the merit of representing the rejection of existing conditions in favor of the whole of life, and not of a privileged critical specialization; but this fusion is considered in the absolute, according to individual caprice, before its actual realization, thus condemning anarchism to an incoherence too easily seen through. Anarchism has merely to repeat and to replay the same simple, total conclusion in every single struggle, because this first conclusion was from the beginning identified with the entire outcome of the movement. Thus Bakunin could write in 1873, when he left the Federation Jurassiene: “During the past nine years, more ideas have been developed within the International than would be needed to save the world, if ideas alone could save it, and I challenge anyone to invent a new one. It is no longer the time for ideas, but for facts and acts.” There is no doubt that this conception retains an element of the historical thought of the proletariat, the certainty that ideas must become practice, but it leaves the historical terrain by assuming that the adequate forms for this passage to practice have already been found and will never change."

This essay was written in response to those questioning the value of using the state's own artifices as a battleground. Although this essay does not provide a perfect solution, It can hopefully serve as the basis of illuminating discussion.

***

Although a majority of the internet is commodified and serves to reinforce this paradigm, this is not an intrinsic condition of the internet. But a product of the culture in which the internet was discovered. Though websites like Facebook and eBay will continue to exist, since they serve both as expedients and abstractions of social phenomena already occurring within a culture, their existence does not preclude other designs.

There is nothing stopping someone from establishing an alternative network whose design accounts for different parameters. Our problem is not due to constraints of the medium. Its potential is only confined by the boundaries of our minds. Heinously, mental limits are reinforced by prevailing themes in culture, the existence of shackling symbols, and what Situationists deemed the Spectacle.

It will only be through confronting these artifices that new methods and potentials will emerge. Till we fight far enough, we will unfortunately be fighting blind, but this does not make the fight less noble. Making the conceit that I too am a product of my time, I propose one method of moving forward.

The deployment of capsule sites within corporate space. If a website can be defined as one or more webpages of related content identified by a common domain name, a capsule site is a meta-structure built within the confines of existing domains, though not bound to them, that can be navigated by some means, allowing it to be interfaced with as if it were a website within itself.

The structure is not given shape by a common domain but by the connections between individual nodes. Capsule sites can be built with hyperlinks or hashtags; as long as there is a means of navigating from one node to another, it is possible to launch a capsule site. But how is the structure useful?

Imagine an eco-activist campaign. The goal is to spread awareness of and garner support for legislation protecting the planet. To gain traction, the activists first decide to target three companies with large carbon footprints. They prioritize these social media accounts, not only because of their environmental impact but also because of their large followings. The activists then choose a hashtag for their action campaign. For instance, they choose #GreenToday29.

This is done to connect the nodes to a unique handle, forming a network. They then generate content typical of campaigns of their type — infographics, art, etc. — and deploy them on the target pages. In effect, they have created a campaign website within the social media accounts of these brands, successfully subverting the space while also increasing their cause’s exposure by capitalizing on those brands’s existing audiences.

This guerrilla approach to creating networks using existing domains can be applied to numerous campaigns and projects. Through the intelligent deployment of capsule sites, we can not only succeed in organizing and executing direct action, but also radically reorganize the way we navigate the web.

"To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one's self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray."

Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

There has been some criticism lodged against us. Claims have been made that our activism is merely engagement. That our movement is sort of sofa ersatz activism. However, in order for this argument to hold true, you must make a central conceit. That the concrete world is somehow more real than the digital. Members of The Kollectiv do not view the net from this narrow scope. We see the digital realm as an extension of the more abstract plain of technology. We see the space, though incorporeal on a macroscale, to be very real.

The average user in 2024, spent a 1/5th of their life online. Whether engaging with shopping, posting, or just browsing the net this is a significant portion of time. Enough time is spent on the net that a culture has emerged around various social media sites. Artifacts are made that can only be interacted with in the digital space. And people can become totally enmeshed in a digital world if they wish. Interacting with the greater world almost exclusively in the digital realm. 

An extreme example would be an individual who works as a digital nomad, does all their shopping online, and interacts with others exclusively through social media. Although this individual would be seen to be living a fringe net lifestyle, this way of life is very possible. To argue that activism should not be done through the medium of technology is only alienating. It does not serve one's greater purpose. 64% of the world is online. That is 5.52 billion souls. 

Though The Kollectiv adopts a view of the internet separate from those informed by commodity and corporate interest, the economic activity on the net can’t be ignored. Imagine the disruptive potential of a boycott. The sheer volume of activity allows the activist to make lasting change on the world. We can look back to The Gamestop Short Squeeze. A grassroots political action originating in Wallstreets Bets. To go further back in history we can make reference to the initiatives of net.artists. Groups such as the VNS created works like the “A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century”. Work like this advanced both feminism and digital art. To write off the digital landscape as a lesser landscape of reform, activism, and engaging art, one would have to ignore the efficacy of these movements. 

Going further into the political landscape we can look at the example set by Net Strike. A software that was deployed by activists in the 90’s for digital sit ins. It essentially was a tool for groups to orchestrate DDOS attacks. A vector of protest, that has unfortunately been taken from the general public and is now deployed heinously by state actors to suppress movements. This reversal if anything shows that net activism should be more staunchly defended. The internet is now often the first point of contact individuals have with any movement. And it is also the center of global operations. Are rights on the net should be defended, advanced, and clearly defined. The right to protest should not just extend to the physical space, when the digital space is becoming such a driving factor in our lives.

The Kollectiv’s digital graffiti campaign and its current food disparity initiative is only the beginning. We plan on continuing to mobilize people to be the change they want to see in the world. By establishing our ad hoc hyperlink structure: essentially a website built within the framework of another. We will be raising awareness for our cause. Making people think about the effects of food disparity, while considering new ways to experience the internet. Are either of these aims ignoble? I do not believe so.

 We are continuing in the footsteps of activists such as The Electro Hippies. Advancing methods of protest into the 21st Century. We are also continuing the efforts of situationist thinkers. Now that globalism taken home and the internet has pushed commodity and spectacle into our home. We must attack it at its source if liberty is to continue to flourish and grow for future generations.

 To ignore the possibilities of change now is rob the children of the future of their potential fruit. That is why I continue to call for the development of net.art and methods of activism on the web. Not only to raise awareness for causes affecting us here and now, but to change the landscape of the internet for the people of the future.

Ghost cream

“Ghost Cream”: Created as a part of a food disparity direct action campaign initiative of The Kollectiv. I’m starting to see the scanner as a medium in itself. A form occupying the middle ground between photography and collage. You can get interesting effects from applying various substances to the scanner. The way the light hits will affect the end result. I feel the ethereal glow of this piece with the mundane, almost kawaii subject matter made into ectoplasm by the machine, which fits well with the concept of digital graffiti and the greater hip-hop culture ethos.

"Both in this life or any previous incarnations I have been able to check out, I never wanted to be President. This innate decision was confirmed when I became literate and saw the President pawing babies and spouting bullshit. I attended Los Alamos Ranch School, where they later made the atom bomb, and bombs bursting in air over Hiroshima gave proof through the night that our flag was already there. Then came the Teapot Dome scandal under President Harding, and I remember the unspeakable Gaston Means, infamous private eye and go-between in that miasma of graft, walking into a hotel room full of bourbon-drinking, cigar-smoking lobbyists and fixers, with a laundry hamper. "Fill it up boys, and we talk business."

I do not mean to imply that my youthful idealism was repelled by this spectacle. I had by then learned to take a broad general view of things. My political ambitions were simply of a humbler and less conspicuous caliber. I hoped at one time to become commissioner of sewers for St. Louis County--$300 a month, with the possibility of getting one's shitty paws deep into a slush fund--and to this end I attended a softball game where such sinecures were assigned to the deserving and the fortunate. Everybody I met said, "Now I'm old So-and-so, running for such and such, and anything you do for me I'll appreciate." My boyish dreams fanned by this heady atmosphere and three mint juleps, I saw myself already in possession of the coveted post, which called for a token appearance twice a week to sign a few letters at the Old Court House; while I'm there might as well put it on the sheriff for some marijuana he has confiscated, and he'd better play ball or I will route a sewer through his front yard. And then across the street to the Court House Café for a coffee with some other lazy bastards in the same line of business, and we wallow in corruption like contented alligators.

I never wanted to be a front man like Harding or Nixon--taking the rap, shaking hands, and making speeches all day, family reunions once a year. Who in his right mind would want a job like that? As commissioner of sewers I would not be called upon to pet babies, make speeches, shake hands, have lunch with the queen; in fact, the fewer voters who knew of my existence, the better. Let kings and Presidents keep the limelight. I prefer a whiff of coal gas as the sewers rupture for miles around--I have made a deal on the piping which has bought me a $30,000 home, and there is talk in the press of sex cults and orgies carried out in the stink of what made them possible. Fluttering from the roof of my ranch-style house, over my mint and marijuana, Old Glory floats lazily in the tainted breeze.

But there were sullen mutters of revolt from the peasantry: "My teenage daughters is cunt-deep in shit! Is this the American way of life?" I thought so, and I didn't want it changed, sitting there in my garden, smoking the sheriff's reefers, coal gas on the wind sweet in my nostrils as the smell of oil to an oil man or the smell of bullshit to a cattle baron. I sure did a sweet thing with those pipes, and I'm covered, too. What I got on the Governor wouldn't look good on the front page, would it, now? And I have my special police to deal with vandalism and sabotage, all of them handsome youths, languid and vicious as reptiles, described in the press as no more than minions, lackeys, and bodyguards to His Majesty the Sultan of Sewers.

The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. Then I met the gubernatorial candidate, and he looked at me as if trying to focus my image through a telescope and said, "Anything I do for you I'll depreciate." And I felt the dream slipping away from me, receding into the past, dim, jerky, far away--the discrete gold letters on a glass door: William S. Burroughs, Commissioner of Sanitation. Somehow I had not intersected. I was not one of them. Perhaps I was simply the wrong shape. Some of my classmates, plump, cynical, unathletic boys with narrow shoulders and broad hips, made the grade and went on to banner headlines concerning $200,000 of the taxpayers' money and a nonexistent bridge or highway, I forget which. It was a long time ago. I have never aspired to political office since. The Sultan of Sewers lies buried in a distant 1930s softball game.

What would you do if you were in the President's place? You would be inexorably pressured by the forces and the individuals that made you President, and by your own desire to be President in the first place; so you would wind up doing just what they all have done. It's enough to stop any sane man from wanting to be President."

-Bill Burroughs

Hello, Everyone. I am part of an activist group of digital graffiti artists. We are planning a digital direct action campaign to fight world hunger. We are also rooted in situation-ist and surrealist theory. So, I figured I'd share with you all.

We are The Kollective.
We are a cybernetic art group, and we are worldwide.
We embrace digital graffiti.
We seek to reclaim digital space for the people through incendiary art.

In this spirit, we invite you to engage in our first group action.

On Thanksgiving Day, 2024, we shall stage a digital demonstration.

We intend to occupy the comment sections and inboxes of America's biggest fast food chains and food distributors. This list includes Tyson, Wendys, McDonalds, etc.

The reasons are threefold:

To bring attention to food disparity in the U.S. and World Wide,
To show direct action, protest, and reclamation of digital space is possible: Even in the face of an internet more and more heavy handedly policed by the state,
And lastly, to foster new forms of media: an art for the age of the cyborg.

If you'd like to get involved in our direct action campaigns now or in the future feel free to reach out.

I'd upload the full video directly, but reddit says 22 minutes is too long.

Youtube link: https://youtu.be/bsORER6OgyA?si=5uLQDolSrOTQxaLN

“On this alone, on the legal title, the bourgeois rests. The bourgeoisie is what he is through the protection of the state, through the state’s grace. He would necessarily be afraid of losing everything if the state’s power were broken. But how is it with him who has nothing to lose, how with the proletarian? As he has nothing to lose, he does not need the protection of the state for his “nothing.” He may gain, on the contrary, if that protection of the state is withdrawn from the protégé.

Therefore the non-possessor will regard the state as a power protecting the possessor, which privileges the latter, but does nothing for him, the non-possessor, but to – suck his blood. The state is a – bourgeoisie state […]

The labourers have the most enormous power in their hands, and, if they once became thoroughly conscious of it and used it, nothing would withstand them; they would only have to stop labour, regard the product of labour as theirs, and enjoy it. This is the sense of the labour disturbances which show themselves here and there.

The state rests on the – slavery of labour. If labour becomes free, the state is lost.”

Max Stirner, The Unique and The Property

I wonder how many more paragraphs it takes to make this "non-reductive"? If only i was an AI. No, i am limited by this neural cortex feeble brain that i beat with too many drugs, but it keeps me unique.

Thesis 85

“The weakness of Marx’s theory is naturally the weakness of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of his time. The working class did not set off the permanent revolution in the Germany of 1848; the Commune was defeated in isolation. Revolutionary theory thus could not yet achieve its own total existence. The fact that Marx was reduced to defending and clarifying it with cloistered, scholarly work, in the British Museum, caused a loss in the theory itself. The scientific justifications Marx elaborated about the future development of the working class and the organizational practice that went with them became obstacles to proletarian consciousness at a later stage.”

-Guy Debord, The Society of The Spectacle

Thesis 91

“[...]Bakunin fought the illusion of abolishing classes by the authoritarian use of state power, foreseeing the reconstitution of a dominant bureaucratic class and the dictatorship of the most knowledgeable, or those who would be reputed to be such. Marx thought that the growth of economic contradictions inseparable from democratic education of the workers would reduce the role of the proletarian State to a simple phase of legalizing the new social relations imposing themselves objectively, and denounced Bakunin and his followers for the authoritarianism of a conspiratorial elite which deliberately placed itself above the International and formulated the extravagant design of imposing on society the irresponsible dictatorship of those who are most revolutionary, or those who would designate themselves to be such. Bakunin, in fact, recruited followers on the basis of such a perspective: “Invisible pilots in the center of the popular storm, we must direct it, not with a visible power, but with the collective dictatorship of all the allies. A dictatorship without badge, without title, without official right, yet all the more powerful because it will have none of the appearances of power.” Thus two ideologies of the workers’ revolution opposed each other, each containing a partially true critique, but losing the unity of the thought of history, and instituting themselves into ideological authorities.”

Guy Debord, The Society of The Spectacle

Ce monde si étrange l’est à la mesure de notre étrangeté à nous-mêmes.

Parmi tant de nuisances – dont aucune encyclopédie ne saurait faire le tour -, la nuisance essentielle est bien cette aliénation, d’autant plus efficace qu’elle est devenue une sorte de seconde nature, et même envisage très sérieusement de remplacer la première.

« Remède à tout » restitue précisément le contenu, l’étendue et les caractéristiques de ce mal universel, en réactualisant et en prolongeant la théorie critique du spectacle, dans sa centralité subversive.

Could someone please explain to me Vaneigem's philosophy and how it contrasts with Debord's?

Would you say that a someone who identifies as a situationist or neo-situationist must accept communism as the positive vision and ends for situationism? I mean yes situationism is indeed Marxist, but it also diverges from Marxism quite a bit as well. Personally I agree with and Identify as a situationist but i accept a more pluralistic anarchism as opposed to explicitly any "communist" system.

"Images — millions of images — That's what I eat — Cyclotron shit — Ever trying kicking that habit with a-po-morphine? — Now I got all the images of sex acts and torture ever took place anywhere, and I can just blast it out and control you gooks right down to the molecule — I got orgasms — I got screams — I got all the images any hick poet ever shit out — muh power's comin — muh power's comin' — MUH POWER'S COMIN' [he goes into a faith healer routine, rolling his eyes and frothing at the mouth] ...and I got millions millions and millions millions of images of ME, Me, mee..." ["Nova Express" (1964) -William S. Burroughs ]