A Stronger, Loving World to Die In: An Examination of the Proliferative Systems of the Internet

GEOG 390IS: Spatial and Geographic Systems Theory

Rohan Ghatak

Modernity and postmodernity allow for the creation and utilization of multiple narrative

structures and tools to delineate and analyze history and lived experiences, and account for

different modes and epistemes in social change and either fulfill or disrupt the aims of a larger

master narrative of sorts. The tenets of structure in either case allow for the reinvention and

reworking of different systems of power to accommodate the analyses of different incidents and

events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From the mid 1980-s onward, the inclusion of

the Internet in the scheme of a narrative of any sort becomes intensely problematic, because of a

variety of reasons, which I shall discuss in depth. This paper proposes to discuss the evolution

and contemporary manifestation of the Internet, with especial focus on the concept of the

Internet as a colony within itself and its somewhat paradoxical role in the context of global and

local revolutions.

The internet and virtual twenty-first century culture has proved to be a black swan in

itself. Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines black swans to be events within an epoch or a period of

history which, isolated within their temporal framework and analyzed from only a current

perspective, appear to be sudden and completely unprecedented, but which, in hindsight, are seen

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to have been only a natural outcome of prior events and proceedings. In case of virtual 1

encounters, the naturality of being, so to speak, is replaced by the immediacy of existence:

information, which exists to communicate, is in a constant dichotomy with data, which is the

constant stream of facts - in numbers or in strings of words - that seeks to create a background

and space for the utilization and creation of information. The break between data and information

occurs in within an epistemological framework: data provides the epistemological groundwork

for the creation and propagation of meaning (or information) itself. Data is the means of

communication without which communication cannot occur. It has no temporal value and is a

consummate tool of rationality. Communication, in representing facticity and opinion, modifies

and redefines data in terms of private and personal boundary, and in the process, creates its own

specific epistemological geography, one that redefines itself even as it propagates its own

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (Random House: United State, 2007), xviii : 1

“First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status,human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”The triadic nature of the black swan, thus allows it to create for itself an entire set of discourses based around, paradoxically, its non-existence. The foremost example that Taleb uses is that of 9/11, which surprised a media and nation at large, but which, in retrospect, could be seen as having its roots within American aggression in Middle Eastern territories since the 1980s, which again had its roots in the ideological conflicts of the cold war. All explanations from the media, and from a still-nascent social network, around the time of 9/11, focused on its apparent shock value without completely taking into account the historical reasons why such an incident might have had precedent to occur. It was thus the non-existence of the event that became so much more crucial for the actual event to gain any semblance of reality. The observation of an event as such depends on factors such as contemporary (or immediate) perception, retroactive remembrance and future modification. In discussing these factors of observation, Taleb outlines the basic principles of communication that Niklas Luhmann dwells upon in far greater detail in his treatise on systems theory. One of the crucial breaks between these systems (sic) of thought occurs when dealing with the notion of the attainable: for Taleb, the attainable is that which has reached the status of a Black Swan that has already occurred. For Luhmann, the attainable is the mesh of events and historicity in which all of life remains enmeshed. The formal is inorganic in its consideration of historico-spatiality; the latter is wholly organic. The reinforcement of a dichotomy, even in the case of events and eventuality, is especially important in the case of the internet, where the organic and the inorganic coincide to create its own mechanism, instead of a mere system, one which discards all divisions to construct its own self-sufficient temporal ontology.

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agenda. Perhaps the most crucial difference between data and information is the self-aware

sentience of the latter. Information, whether or not transmitted through social systems, is aware

of itself - either because of its user or because of a mass awareness on a virtual scale. This

awareness allows for it to transcend its technological and ontological limitations and instead

allow it to assume the forms of both the medium and the message.

In Being and Event, Alain Badiou writes, “If there exists an event, its belonging to the

situation of its site is undecidable from the standpoint of the situation itself. ” The eventuality of 2

an event, at least according to Badiou, is inseparable from the site of its occurrence. An event,

thus, for Badiou, is inextricably tied to its spatio-historic location. It is important to note that this

location is both spatial and historical, instead of being merely temporal: not only does it carry

within itself the manifestation of history and an entire ontology, it is also representative of its

entire history as well as the history of its spatial and geographic location. In this sense, it is

analogous to the case of a spider that Henri Lefebvre points out in The Production of Space: “It

Alain Badiou, Being and Event (Continuum: 2007) Tr. Oliver Feltham, 1812

Later on, Badiou writes, “Either the event is in the situation, and it ruptures the site’s being ‘on-the-edge-of-the-void’ by interposing itself between itself and the void; or, it is not in the situation, and its power of nomination is solely addressed, if it is addressed to ‘something’, to the void itself.” (182) The question of the void is of paramount importance when dealing with the multifaceted nature of the internet itself. Is the void a void of meaning or a void of function? The utilitarian question of function ties into one of the fundamental facets of the Internet: the fact that essentially, it serves as a mode of utilitarian escapism. It is, simultaneously, site of confession and escapism. Either way, it serves as the site for the creation of a space that, while purportedly one without judgment, serves the same function as the blood-line that Foucault refers to in The History of Sexuality, Vol.1: One which depends on the propagation of blood and its existence in order to direct itself. The void is at once the fear of not being important or necessary (the fulfillment of a class-war or a war over space,for example) as well as the complete and total negation of possibility: the internet rests on the infinite possibility and probability of interaction and interpretation. These two possibilities form the basis of bio (or blood) control (or, in Foucault’s words, the right to death and the power over life), and as such, determine the predicate nature of an event. Biopower and thanatopolitics or the politics of death form a consummate virtual system that rests upon the event that is the power of blood itself: the controlling politico-historical systems of sovereignty and governmentality (to use Foucault’s example) are diffused in an electronic virtual medium, and this diffusion is accompanied by the loss of meaning in information through its conversion into mere data.

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is nature (or instinct, or providence) which governs the spider's activity and which is thus

responsible for that admirable and totally marvelous creation, the spider's web with its amazing

equilibrium, organization, and adaptability” . The spider’s activity, at least in a Marxist sense, is 3

to create, produce and consume all entirely on its own terms. This ontological completeness on

part of the spider is perhaps emblematic of the metaphorical function of the spider itself: as a

self-contained entity, it is able to sustain itself spatially solely on account of its own prodigious

producing capabilities. It is these capabilities that confront the sole lack on part of the organism:

its inability to sustain itself. The question of sustenance is a crucial one when considering the

mechanisms through which the internet functions. Mautarena and Varela define an autopoietic

system in the following manner:

“An autopoietic system is organized (defined as unity) as a network of

processes of production (synthesis and destruction) of components such

that these components:

(i) continuously regenerate and realize the network that produces them,

and

(ii) constitute the system as a distinguishable unity in the domain in

which they exist.” 4

The autopoietic nature of the Internet manifests itself through different forms and virtual

outlets. I have attempted to formulate four broad categories:

Henri Bachelard, The Production of Space (Blackwell: London, 2007), Tr Donald Nicholson Smith, 3

173

Autopoiesis and a Biology of Intentionality, Varela, 19914

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• Social media

• Finance

• Virtual subcultures

• Procedural applications

Autopoiesis in social media proceeds through the dual processes of popular, non-virtual

culture seeping into and influenced by the subcultures on the Internet. Even within social media,

there exists different penetrative aspects to the data transmitted therein. Twitter, for example, is

an almost exclusively text-based social media network, while Youtube, on the other hand,

transcends its primary boundaries as a video-sharing website to become, instead, a node at which

data changes to information and vice versa. The origins of either site are of some interest when

considering the different ways that they impact communication and understanding: Mark

Zuckerberg’s creation was, at the very outset, one built on exclusivity, and as the site became

more popular, the parameters of exclusivity themselves have been broken. The exclusivity in

Zuckerberg’s creation is one of docility: to be a member of Facebook (or, indeed, Twitter,

Tumblr, or any other microblogging network) is to submit oneself to a constant penetrative

rundown of personal identity. The specter of the confessional that marked the rise in biopolitics

in the nineteenth and early twentieth century has transcended the very act of confessing itself,

and has instead become the medium as well as the message for the choice of being part of a

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social network. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault writes, “The primary concern was not

repression of the sex of the classes to be exploited, but rather the body, vigor, longevity,

progeniture, and descent of the classes that ‘ruled.’ This was the purpose for which the

deployment of sexuality was first established, as a new distribution of pleasures, discourses,

truths, and powers; it has to be seen as the self-affirmation of one class rather than the

enslavement of another: a defense, a protection, a strengthening, and an exaltation that were

eventually extended to others at the cost of different transformations-as a means of social control

and political subjugation.” This means of control and authority based much of its success in the 5

elevation of the political into the private, distorting the previous model of the confessional in its

processes.

The traditional model for the confessional - a closed room and the anonymity of the

sinner - has been replaced by a nearly-agoraphobic, endless, digitalized space, and it is within the

confines of this space that identity is dissociated, regenerated and finally, proliferated. Individual

identity does not have to remain constant within the boundaries of the Internet: there is a

complete freedom of anonymity wherein an individual can choose to multiply their identity

endless on the same website or different websites and assume different personas on each one. It

is important to note, however, that such anonymity is only a process in itself and is not present in

a teleology of social media: a video belongs to a certain user and features certain individuals or

visual characteristics which carry with them the hallmark of a set individual or group of

individuals. So too on Facebook, where different pages that might be created or different

accounts that might be set up by the same person all serve the ostensible purpose of

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction (Vintage, 2007), Tr. Robert Hurley, 1235

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communication. These methodologies are, of course, fundamentally different, but through a

utilization of media, they are able to modify the nature of technology itself to come closer to a

general awareness of postmodern ontologies. Anonymity, then, would appear to be a crucial part

of such an ontology: the fractured, dissipated identities which the Internet creates must seek to

recognize themselves as being fractured identities in enough of themselves, and the telos, then, in

terms of social media, is an attempt at simply accepting one another.

This procedure and aim of acceptance is completely autopoietic as well: there emerges a

dialectic of identity which, within a virtual system, is the same as a dialectic of being. A single

set of numbers, letters, characters or some permutation thereof irrevocably defines a single

individual. Varela’s dialectic of identity, which involves:

(i) a dynamical term which refers to an assembly of components in

network interactions and which are capable of emergent properties:

metabolic nets, neural assemblies, clonal antibody net- works, linguistic

recursivity;

(ii) a global term which refers to emerging properties, a totality which

conditions (downwardly) the network components: cellular membranes,

sensory-motor body in space, self/non-self discrimination, personal ‘I’. 6

might be hierarchized, but in the case of social media, the hierarchy is dissipated to form an

equipotential ontology. Anonymity grants equality, but this equality is not a commutative one. It

is an event which can occur only because it has already occurred: the very founding of the

internet, as a historical, cultural and technological episteme, allowed for the generation of a

Varela, 146

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structure which was and continues to be built around expression. Every single voice on the

internet can speak and generate whatever opinions or conclusions it wants, but it is perhaps

incorrect to claim this as an example of equality. The space that the internet created for itself

functions similarly to the architectonics of the spider: the space is waiting to be filled up by

individual presences, which are then overtaken by the idempotent possibilities of virtual space to

assume identities of their own. Thus, an ontology which was already created is recreated

endlessly. In The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan pointed out, “The new feeling that

people have about guilt is not something that can be privately assigned to some individual, but is,

rather, something shared by everybody, in some mysterious way. This feeling seems to be

returning to our midst... [it] is an aspect of the new mass culture we are moving into—a world of

total involvement in which everybody is so profoundly involved with every- body else and in

which nobody can really imagine what private guilt can be anymore.” This guilt of being is the 7

foundational structure of social media, and is the empty space that allows for the assumption and

magnification of voice and identity.

Guilt, then, collides and coincides directly with the purposes and aims of communication

to form another separate notion of being itself, one that, in its manifestations is not that far

removed from the notion of a colony. Indeed, in its implications, social media on the internet

have characteristics similar to the necropolitics of a teleocracy that Achille Mbembe speaks

about in his seminal essay, Necropolitics. In this essay, Mbembe argues that “colonies are zones

in which war and disorder, internal and external figures of the political, stand side by side or

alternate with each other. As such, the colonies are the location par excellence where the controls

Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage (Los Angeles:Gingko, 2001), 61 7

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and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended—the zone where the violence of the state of

exception is deemed to operate in the service of ‘civilization.’ That colonies might be ruled over

in absolute lawlessness stems from the racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror

and the native.” 8

Foucault’s arguments about biopolitics are thus extended systematically to include the

idea of a racialized (and gendered) system of oppression that exists to produce death. If the focus

within necropolitics happens to be, as Mbembe opines, the management of the multitudes via the

extraction and endless consumption of geographic resources, then the virtual image of

necropolitics would indicate that the multitudes, or the online subject, so to speak, is at once

controller and controlled. This is particularly true in case of online multi-player gaming, where

the success of a single user depends as much on individual skill as on combined effort. The strict

state of differentiation which is a necessity for the production of a necropolitical state outside the

broad realms of the internet is necessarily eliminated: the ontological completeness of a virtual

system liquifies the differences between people and people-objects and instead creates a space

where everything is capable of consumption and also has the potential of being consumed. “The

controlled inflow and the fixing of movements of money around zones in which specific

resources are extracted has made possible the formation of enclave economies and has shifted the

old calculus between people and things. The concentration of activities connected with the

extraction of valuable resources around these enclaves has, in return, turned the enclaves into

Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, Public Culture Vol 15, No 1, 248

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privileged spaces of war and death. War itself is fed by increased sales of the products

extracted” . 9

The teleological aim of the virtual subject is transformed from being to merely replicate

its own death via an autopoietic process to the necessity of upholding that death as a viable

economy: one within which the dissolution of the virtual subject into the consumed object is the

telos of all autopoietic mechanisms and which forms the distinct backdrop for the creation of a

master virtual colony. Within such a colony, there is no clear historical or spatial discrimination

between the colonizing and colonized except for constant shifts in apparent loci of power. The

only constant remains the creation of a constant dialectic of self and subservience which is

perfectly in tandem with the allegiances which different fractured identities on the internet owe

to one another in their different systems of self-consumption. The production of space in a

colony comes about through the creation of the deaths of its workers. Necropolitics crucially

undermines the relation of the self to identity insofar as a social structure goes, and carefully and

systematically dismantles the very identity of the individual to formulate a new part-identity: that

of producer of self- death. 10

The profilerative spaces created on and through the Internet have as a special property of

their own a combined racial, sexual, gendered, and colonial admixture which branches out in

Mbembe, 339

In The Production of Space, Lefebvre writes, “For the Ego to appear, it must appear to itself, and 10

its body must appear to it, as subtracted — and hence also extracted and abstracted -from the world. Being prey to the world's vicissitudes, and the potential victim of countless dangers, the Ego withdraws. It erects defences to seal itself off, to prevent access to itself.” (202) Even within all the conditions of anonymity that I have just outlined regarding the virtual individual, the Ego is perhaps the bare minimum of being that is required by the individual to sustain itself within virtual and technological discourse. In a necro-technological system, the Ego becomes part of a modified Pleasure Principle: it exists to destroy itself, and that destruction is what is being produced.

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different combinations of these privileges to create a quorum of discourses that modifies and

distorts anonymity to create the conditions necessary for the successful implementation of its

own colony. Indeed, the a priori subject of historicity - the straight white Christian male - has

been replaced, at least within the focus of contemporary virtual discourse, by the Queer Person

of Color (QPOC). The politics of virtual anonymity on the internet are thus the politics of

oppression: whereas the focus of the former a priori was grounded on a blind assumption of

privilege, the QPOC has every right to be indignant and furious at a historical sense of prejudice,

oppression, and in several cases, genocide. Such politics of oppression, on a virtual territory at

least, have taken the form of increasing blind fury bordering on hatred. Oppression politics of

this nature also have certain hallmarks and icons that they adopt for themselves, usually emblems

of popular culture such as Rihanna, Kanye West, Beyoncé, Zayn Malik, et all. In the case of

either a priori, there is an imbalance in the very structure of being and within the assumption of

an identity. The creation of an a priori is an event in itself, and the episteme it represents is one

of negation: in the case of the historical a priori, it is a legacy of colonialism and a vindication of

unlawful, unjust and immoral authority. In the case of the QPOC, it is the manifestation of

rightful anger and recognition of identity transformed into the desire for radical action without

the benefit of history or being to allow it to be transformed into a qualitative entity.

Either a priori disregards the existence of the other, the former does so because it can, the

latter because it has been systematically decimated by the former. In either case, within

technological discourse, the assumption of a new a priori only allows for the formation of a

locus of racial and sexual anonymity in itself: the anonymous being becomes a metaphor for the

QPOC. The QPOC exists only as a representative, and it is through this model of representation

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that the “real”, “outside” world makes its most important intrusion into virtual existence. Racial,

gendered and colonial politics ensure that an individual not identifying as male or a person of

color can exist only in relation to everyone else with that same characteristic: they exist through

being represented and representing in turn. Similarly, in technological discourse, the QPOC is,

paradoxically, taken to represent a single identity that is diversity itself. This is most prevalent on

microblogging sites such as tumblr, which utilize different streams of information and

understanding to create a model for global and localized behavior following the oppression

suffered by QPOC. However, the formation of these models is prototypical of the erasure of

individual identity within a necropolitical virtual system. The produce in the case of the internet

is most assuredly not death, but it is, instead, the dissemination of data. The oppressed have

hitherto had to have their bodies, minds and identities sold in order to exist in some valued form

or another. On the Internet, however, the politics of death is equivalent to the politics of non-

meaning. There is a complete epistemological breakdown within the creation of different identity

groups, and this breakdown is the dissonance of non-meaning. Structures of power that

internalize subjects’ bodies and identities must dissipate and diffuse within strictly grounded

technological codes in order to be recreated in different fashions and infiltrate the identities

present within anonymity.

The means and methods of communication on the internet itself are worthy of a closer

look. For Niklas Luhmann, communication is possible only through a synthesis of three different

selections, none of which are self-contained or self-complete and each of which is

epistemologically plausible only because of the presence of the others. “Like life and

consciousness”, Luhmann writes, “communication is also an emergent reality, a self-generated

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state of affairs. It comes about through a synthesis of three different selections, namely the

selection of information, the selection of the utterance [die Mitteilung] of this information, and

selective understanding or misunderstanding of this utterance and its information.” Luhmann’s 11

thought, grounded in the logocentrism inextricable from Western thought, gives us an important

clue about the nature of communicative discourse within technological forums: there is always a

selection to be made, and this selection, within its boundaries of self-reflective and self-reflexive

thought, is not a unique property of the individual, but, instead, is a necessary and essential

quality of the systems that make up the internet itself.

The value systems of identities that proliferate virtual discourses are of paramount

importance when considering the nature of oppression and sustained revolt that the Internet has

the potential to create. If, as Luhmann claims, all systems of communication are completely

closed system, then the apparent paradox of the internet as a closed system as well as the most

open agency imaginable must be resolved. To treat the internet through logocentric terms of in

and out, closed and open is, perhaps, to detract from the nature of the medium that is the Internet:

it simply is; it is beyond the purveyance of mere ethical or spatial codes. It is indeed completely

closed in the sense that it is ontologically complete: it anticipates every apparent paradox and

Niklas Luhmann, Theories of Distinction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), Tr Joseph 11

O’Neill, 157Later on, Luhmann writes that “Not only information and utterance but understanding is itself a selection. Understanding is never a mere duplication of the utterance in another consciousness but is, rather, in the system of communication itself, a precondition for connection onto further communication, thus a condition of the autopoiesis of the social system.” The linguistic and meta-ontological structures that ground all communication are, thus, driven by a need to propagate themselves but at the same time aware of their intrinsic inability exist forever, in the sense that temporality is always governed by historicity and a sense of spatiality.

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episteme within itself, and is its own Black Swan. Temporality, at least within a virtual space, 12

is abandoned in favor of decisions: keystrokes are simply made, choices are simply abandoned.

The “What if?” question of historical temporality is replaced by an endless series of what if’s

which are all constantly profilerating within the realm of virtual discourse and whose presence -

by virtue of their absence - dictates and determines the spatio-temporal spread of the internet. In

the case of Twitter, for example, the 140 character limit for every tweet allows for a compactness

to its own ontological completeness: every character and every word hints at what else it can say,

and different internet abbreviations and slang only serve to signify alternate processes and

“realities”, so to speak, which dictate the historical and political immediacy of that which is

finally expressed on screen. There is nothing beyond communication on the Internet, because in

the trend of virtual communication, consciousness is transferred electronically and virtually to be

present for fracturing, dissipation and diffusion. Thus, Luhmann’s statement that

“Communication has no goal: It happens, or not, and that is all that one can say on that

point...goal-oriented episodes can be formed inside of systems of communication, to the degree

that autopoiesis functions, just as consciousness, too, can posit episodic goals for itself, without

this positing of a goal being the goal of the system” indicates the absence of any 13

epistemological boundary whatsoever when considering the nature of virtual discourse. The

teleological end that necropolitics involves itself within is the gradual replacement of meaning

Taleb, 193: “The only way you can imagine a future "similar" to the past is by assuming that it will 12

be an exact projection of it, hence predictable. Just as you know with some precision when you were born, you would then know with equal precision when you will die. The notion of future mixed with chance, not a deterministic extension of your perception of the past, is a mental operation that our mind cannot perform. Chance is too fuzzy for us to be a category by itself. There is an asymmetry between past and future, and it is too subtle for us to understand naturally.”

Luhmann, 16113

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and coherence with non-meaning and complete incoherence: the moment at which strings of

characters and numbers signifying coherent information cease to communicate but instead

represent self-contained epistemological blocks of analysis pertaining to the body of the

virtualized subject.

These bodies are each conglomerations of different identities, and the only point at which

these different identities might conceivably coincide is within the intrusion of the economic.

Payment options for individuals are indicative of the presence of some form of electronic

transaction - one which requires the admission of a non-virtual identity, one which has a singular

ontological status and whose diffusion is strictly controlled by its tangible physical and political

presence within larger systems of financial, historical and governmental power. Certain forms of

electronic payment act as conglomerates of virtual transactions and banking to the extent where

they resemble a complete corporation unto themselves. PayPal is a perfect example for this:

using one linked account, an individual has the option of paying for purchases on a variety of

websites. The final, politico-historical end of individual identity - that of the consumerist pawn

within a capitalist scheme - is swallowed up by the Internet, and thus, a Marxist end to history is

ended by a stream of data. This data, however, thus carry within itself the power and ability to

change and transform individual identity, or at the very least, grant it the ability to progress

temporally.

Consider different proofs of identity that are necessary to accomplish certain actions such

as purchasing cigarettes or alcohol or be allowed entry through airport security. An individual

must necessarily possess certain abilities or characteristics which render them capable of

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performing that action: a person needs to be twenty-one years old to purchase alcohol and must

have a government-verified pictorial ID in order to be granted permission to board a flight. In

either case, the temporal or political characteristics of the individual are what allow their proof of

identification to be as important or definitive as it is: the picture ID in question attains its

temporal and consumerist value only on account of the dual characteristic of the individual in

question. Nonetheless, the individual cannot perform an action without this proof of their

identity, this proof that they have modified and in a very real sense, created. This proof then

allows them to become a complete figure able to lawfully carry out certain actions. There is a

process of intermediaries here, obeying an autopoietic mechanism: the ID itself serves to verify

the individual’s ability to consume and create, but also stamps the individual with the authority

of ability, these abilities being of different types and classes such as function and nationality

among others. There is no isolated moment any longer for becoming a single individual, but

instead, that moment becomes a geographic and physical entity in itself: a marker present in the

former of some form of plastic or paper, defining the individual even as it is defined by that same

person. This process of definition stops only at the point of complete inclusion of the subject into

the mechanisms of virtual governmental relations: agencies such as PayPal, which exist within

the Cloud of digital information, break down the materialism represented by physical identity to

create a corporeal simulacrum: transactions and purchases are made online, often anonymously,

and the process of such transactions depend upon the choice of the virtual subject to abandon

their actual beings and instead multiply their abilities to consume and produce. Space itself is

multiplied, and the products are products of dissolution, and not merely death.

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Internet subcultures such as 4chan and Reddit, for example, depend upon mass

anonymity where singular identification carries with itself the hallmark of an unwelcome

governmental physical structure. Subcultures proliferate using the TOR browser and the Silk

Road, which are anonymous website operations on which it is impossible to trace the location or

identity of any particular user. The Silk Road refers to itself as the Internet Marketplace, and it is

joined by The Armory, a repository of ammunition which can be paid for using Bitcoins, the

currency of anonymity. Such subcultures have as their main foci extreme violence and misogyny,

often accompanied by racism, and these sites are often splayed with colorful and violently

worded messages of rape and mass genocide. The recent federal dismantling of the Silk Road

notwithstanding, this subculture remains firmly entrenched within virtual anonymity. Far more

than mere objectification of bodies, breasts or genitalia is the conversion of living bodies

themselves into virtual transactions for the benefit of empty fantasies, all of which tie into a

system of constant consumption that relies on the presence of more - more pornography, more

sexualization of breasts and other body parts - in order to embrace fully the potential of its own

ontology, one that necessitates its own protracted end. A virtual transaction infiltrates and

penetrates the world outside a computer, but even as it does so, it envelops a real-world ontology

to create its own virtual-real sphere, and it is within this sphere that the borders and boundaries

of a space are finally and wholly destroyed: just as the home of a spider is its own creation and

being, the home of the Internet is the virtual subconscious of the geographic world, and its

sustenance is the active ontologies of spatial, geographic and political agencies.

Even a spider requires an external locus of food, and it is this sole lack that discriminates

it from being an autopoietic entity. The internet, much like the spider, has a manufactured space

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of its own, one without connotations or denotations of habitat. The internet not only carries

around its spatial container with its virtual presence but also constantly reinvents, redefines and

recreates it. Through the process of this recreation, it is able to systematize its geographic

presence to instead redefine the topographic nature of virtuality itself. Users from different

corners of the globe adapt to and utilize different features of the internet, every single keystroke

and every single virtual action becomes part of a larger conglomerate, one that has every action

and virtual decision as part of its history. This history is not one that is static, nor is it one that is

marked by any episteme as such, in the sense that Foucault uses the term in The Archaeology of

Knowledge:

“By episteme, we mean, in fact, the total set of relations that unite, at a

given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological

figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems; the way in which, in

each of these discursive formations, the transitions to epistemologization,

scientificity, and formalization are situated and operate; the distribution of

these thresholds, which may coincide, be subordinated to one another, or

be separated by shifts in time; the lateral relations that may exist between

epistemological figures or sciences in so far as they belong to

neighbouring, but distinct, discursive practices. The episteme is not a form

of knowledge (connaissance) or type of rationality which, crossing the

boundaries of the most varied sciences, manifests the sovereign unity of a

subject, a spirit, or a period; it is the totality of relations that can be

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discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyses

them at the level of discursive regularities” 14

Contemporary epistemes within virtual discourse are most fully apparent within the generation of

an entire virtual syntax that seeks to communicate and inform through an appropriation of

visuality. The appearance and popularity of memes is testament to this effect: websites such as

Memebase and 9Gag are updated every minute with contributions from all across the globe, with

different forms of memes including images of animals forming the backdrop for a humorous,

ironic and usually pithy message, webcomics and the inclusion of non-virtual cultures such as

Pokémon. There is no single user to be traced for the creation or generation of a particular

phrase or meme: a single GIF on tumblr is a result of far more than a few minutes spent on

Photoshop - it represents a cross-section of the fault lines that are drawn at the coalescing of

popular physical culture and virtual anonymity. The spectacle of the private confessional, in this

case, is replaced by a multiplicity of both sinner and forgiver: the audience that listens to the

confession and creation of a new visual text is the same audience that seeks to be heard

The reverse anthropomorphization which occurs in the creation of these memes allows

for a transcendence of the confessional principle: Identity, diffused through different networks of

propagative virtual discourses, becomes fluid and undermined ontologically. Subsequently, the

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (Vintage:2012), 211 14

The episteme, for the historico-political period defined by the internet, would thus have to represent the constantly evolving technological advances made in the past two decades, and also the political movements that have contributed toward making the Internet the paradoxical haven of free speech which it is. As such, far more than any of the intellectual movements of the twentieth century that have determined the cerebral shape of that era, the Internet is marked by its paradoxical, albeit ontology. It is total and whole within itself, with its own self-referential and self-complete set of ideological relations, and it is within these relations that it sets up its own rules

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nearest and most stable mode of identification is thus with a non-human one. Animals are very

reliably just objects and entities without any hope of interpersonal linguistic communication, and

the transference of feelings is perhaps at once a response to and an admission of biopolitical

power. Luhmann writes that “forms such as language offer an evolutionary advantage, forms

that can also serve as media and that can, on the basis of their considerable discipline

(specification of sounds that can be expressed as words, grammatical rules, etc.) de-link

themselves and can be freed from an immense variation of possible links so that other forms

(prágmata, complexes of ideas, theories, etc) can impress themselves.” 15

The form and structure of language itself is modified further when considering the

resources that virtual communication utilizes to further itself. Applications (or “apps”) serve twin

purposes of utilitarianism and aesthetic virtue. Ostensibly designed for productivity, apps

introduce a duality to different autopoietic processes: even as an operation such as a time-table or

an organizing activity is being carried out through an app, the temporal framework of the activity

determines the productivity and the longevity of the app itself: there must be an endless sequence

of activities and actions in order for the app to have relevance. Apps perhaps function as archives

in themselves, not only storing information but modifying the processes of storage even as those

processes are set into effect. This multiplicity of function and identity is a common element to

every single instance of virtual discourse outlined so far in this paper: there is so single clearly-

defined function. Every virtual function changes, but these changes do not depend on

temporality. True to the nature of the episteme, the relations governing this virtual era are ones

that propagate constant discursivity, but even in the absence of any locus, they consistently

Luhmann, 17715

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refuse to modify themselves to patterns of reinvention or reinterpretation: patterns are replaced

by dynamic systems.

Dynamic systems of this sort, however, present an interesting situation when concerned

with the question of the initiation or perpetuation any semblance of actual physical social

protest. During the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movements in Fall 2010, for example, Twitter and

tumblr became the preferred avenues of communication between protesters and non-protesters.

Maeve Dwyer writes that,

“Public space is represented as a consumable good, frequently in conjunction

with commercial space. This representation takes the form of department

stores and shopping areas made in space reserved as POPS and the role of the

commercialized street as a forum for public expression and speech.

Historically issues playing a role in public space are the design and control of

public space, symbiosis of vision and power, and the meanings and uses of

culture. Occupy is trying to fight the conception of culture as something that is

purely seen and material, encapsulated into something tangible, such as the T-

shirts Jay-Z was trying to sell with the 99% logo, yet many have fallen into

the trap of OWS-related goods such as shirts and buttons, the visual

consumption of culture. Commercial and institutional forces struggle to

impose a coherent of vision of space, to claim it. Occupy is striving for a

culture more democratized and politicized than commercial. It may be said

that the movement serves as an answer to making culture more democratic in

a city that is becoming a cultural object produced to appeal to the affluent.

Zuccotti park and other occupations around the city and country, even though

temporary, attempt to create a space not represented through symbols but

through their own spatial practices.” 16

Maeve Dwyer, The Revolution Will Not be Televised, It Will be Live-Streamed, 10116

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The inherent democracy present in public space is first replaced by an empty space within

the internet, and the assumption of a political identity within that space problematizes the issue

of choice and revolt further. “If ,” as Badiou writes in The Rebirth of History, “however big a

demonstration is , it is always a tiny minority. Its power consists in an intensification of

subjective energy (people know they are needed night and day; enthusiasm and passion are

everywhere), and in the localization of its presence (people rally in sites that have become

impregnable - squares, universities, boulevards, factories, and so on)” , then the subjective 17

latent energy of an entire virtual populace should be enough to create a strong and globally

consummate emancipatory force. The fault lines drawn within the cybersphere, however,

including the praxis presented by the duality of the a priori, is perhaps emblematic of the

institutionality of different forms of oppression within the internet. As Dwyer goes on to write,

“Cell phones too have taken on a role as actors in the Occupy Wall Street

protests. Always out, occupiers with phones with photo and video

capabilities are able to create a version of Foucault’s panopticon of their

own, monitoring the police...As episodes of police brutality and arrests

happen, the cry “camera out, cameras out” can be heard as crowds of

people rush toward the scene to take pictures and video of the scene.

Livesteams and constant twitter and blog updates take it to another level,

bringing the engagement into a larger social sphere and integrating those

social spheres – making the immediate space accessible to a potentially

global audience via the ceaseless connection facilitated by technology

such as phones.” 18

Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History (London: Verso, 2012), 5817

Dwyer, 105-10618

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The inclusion of technology within a completely concrete and physical activity such as

protest or demonstration only serves to introduce a completely penetrative form of governmental

control to a movement aimed at constructively creating a stable future for real human bodies.

The real-time inclusion of history within technology perhaps leads to the creation of a historico-

technological simulacrum, one in which the idea of being and event themselves are transplanted

into an inorganic forum of data itself. The immediacy of action and the realness of change are

lost and converted, instead, into guidelines for following the needs of the a priori. Methods of

“ceaseless connection” at once serve to make people aware of revolt and protest, but the

methodology of awareness again breaks down different value-systems of empathy and replaces

them with a gauntlet toward virtual discourse and dominance. The intensification of public

sentiment that is necessary for a revolt or a protest to achieve its fullest aims is completely

converted to a mechanized form of virtual popular currency within and through which all revolts

are instantly digitalized, and at the heart of this digitalization is the autopoietic mechanism that is

built on a foundation of non-meaning and which has to program its own end, one of mutual

dissonance, dissolution and death. The subject for enquiry at this crossroads of virtuality and

physical existence is no longer merely defined by skin color, gender, sexuality, ethnicity or able-

bodiedness: bodies are territory for the expression and expansion of data, and data, with its

potential for meaning and empathy, shall create its own unobservable and inalienable a priori of

sheer rigorous rationality.

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Badiou, Alain. The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2012.

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Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. 1978. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1990.

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