Anarchy Bang: Episode Thirteen - Structure and topics

From Anarchy Bang

Episode 12

This week we are going to discuss structure in conversations, presentations, and in how anarchists present information. This week's discussion is inspired by Waldemar and their comment on Episode 12. Have our discussions up till now been too abstract and removed from daily life? Do conversations benefit or suffer for structure? If our goal is to grow the conversation how have we done so far? What could we do to improve?

Join in the conversation!

Sunday at noon (PDT or -7 UTC) at https://anarchybang.com/
Email questions ahead if you like
The real time IRC is a chaotic mess (and pleasure). There are better ways to connect to IRC but it involves some reading
The call in number is (646) 787-8464

There are 11 Comments

I mean, big radio shows sometimes have to wait for callers, maybe a small radio program makes it harder to consistently count on callers, specially since a part of people who will listen to it are on different time zones. It’d be interesting to know what percentage listens to it live vs recorded. This is not a critique, just saying that even if you do your part right, you might still get shows without callers.

Notice how the same dynamic repeats: When people do livestreams on youtube, twitch, instagram, etc, the live comments/chat feed is going by at a fast speed, with many comments. Of course, it’s a lot of lower effort blips, vs those who call who might gather their thoughts beforehand in order to avoid embarrassing themselves in front of everyone.

“Have our discussions up till now been too abstract and removed from daily life?“

Not necessarily, the fact that they may be things that people don’t get to talk or hear about in their daily lives might make it interesting to them. I think in many cases ya’ll are basing what you say on your daily lives, which can different from your listeners daily lives, but that doesn’t make it invalid. Maybe if you had a team of marketers with surveys you could know what your listener’s daily life looks like, and taylor your content to that target demo, but obviously that’s horrible, right.

“Do conversations benefit or suffer for structure?”

If by structure what is meant is a topic chosen beforehand, then not necessarily. But since it’s a live program and not a rehearsed affair, it’s nice to have the felixibility to change the topic on the fly, like with a real life conversation. Like improv or stand up comedians which respond in real time to their audience. If a topic is not garnering interest, or the conversation is stalling, you could ask callers to call about some else they’d like to talk about.

But if by structure what is meant is the “performance/content - audience/spectator” arrangement, then rip. You forgo being anti-spectacular by deciding to make radio, i think.

“If our goal is to grow the conversation how have we done so far?”

If by grow the conversation you mean longitudinally across time, since you’ve had various episodes already, then definitely. If by grow you mean how much “views/hits” or listeners you’re getting, then only ya’ll can tell, since you’re the ones with the stats on that, and this last aspect is not just dependent on your content, but also on advertising.

Holys hit! Hope I didn't piss anyone off. LOL! My comment wasn't meant to be harsh or a total rejection. As stated above a lot of the show host's daily life does come through at which point I find myself craving more of that as a spectator (as ironic as that may seem from a SI perspective, but oh well). Unfortunetly I find that doesn't seem to last or they don't get into it enough. Im always wondering what's happening in the @ scene up in Berkley, and what their critiques of that are. All the hosts are quite interesting people, thinkers, and anarchists. They need not one monolithic topic to spark interest from listeners and would-be callers, but it's all too easy for me to say this not having walked a mile in there shoes as a (semi) public figure. Yet these are just my felt impressions, however inperfectly articulated they may be.

The title was shortened a bit clumsily in order to fit the “subject” heading character limit, it should be:
“Against Spectacular [Non]Violence, Towards Anti-Spectacular [In]Action”
It will be evident that bracketing in “[In]action” is meant to include alongside agile maneuvers, acts of refusal of work or participation, as well all those activities, like rest and play, that will be liberated from the confines of the realm of leisure.

As a segue between a meta-conversation about the way it's structured I propose that next week discussion about the hot-button/controversial topics around “violence” be given an anti-spectacular slant.

There's much to be said against the backdrop of the barrage of spectacular attacks the have painted the totalitarian media/urban (it's one and the same) landscape with gore and grief. This message is not directed at the macabre celebrities which have already been dealt with by the usual suspects. It's directed at the [un]willing spectators of these unfolding debacles.

A! mentions half-jokingly, with malice and a nose for a good sensational click-bait headline, that maybe they should resort to covering topics like Atassa/school-shootings/mass-shootings/suicide-bombings by lone wolves, which the mainstream media already regularly have a field day on, and count on for their ratings. Yet the often dull “Anarchy Radio”, hosted by John Zerzan, has succumbed to following the news cycles, discusses these same events it each time they happen, to the show's detriment. The same can be said with the always topical, frequently liberal, only occasionally interesting “IGD” and “This is America” podcasts; following the news cycle and keeping their fingers on the pulse of the trending topics just to trail far behind the ratings of their mainstream counterparts. All they amount to is soundbites blown away by the breeze that comes in through the Overton window, a mere porthole in the claustrophobic barracks of the unimaginative confines of "public discussion".

The less discussed aspect of these attacks is the most visible one, hiding in plain sight; the spectacular aspect. Something to be said about how the video from the recent tragedy in New Zealand went viral, and was censored from YouTube, while at the same time its contents being broadcasted even more widely by the mainstream media. The mass responses, the vigils; the government responses, the publicity stunts. The trolls and wingnuts in the comment section having their field day spinning the story to push their ideological lines.

An anti-spectacular critique of attentats can be put forth, evading trap of the well-critiqued and put to rest false dichotomy of "violence" vs "non-violent", but how actions and inactions can be either spectacular or anti-spectacular. How movement or stillness (maneuvering vs positioning) can be oriented against the grain of the status quo, instead of piggybacking mainstream media or current events.

One could imagine a close reading via détournement mimicking the format of Gerdeloos' “How Nonviolence Protects the State” and almost going paragraph by paragraph and replacing “non-violence” with “spectacular [non]violence” and a few minor changes for legibility and coherence. Reiterating the points made against non-violence and against “violence” as a distinction, broadening the scope to include the tired tropes of stale militancy. Spectacular [Non-]Violence is deluded, ineffective, and tactically and strategically inferior.

One could begin by considering “propaganda by the deed” as being a concept contemporaneous with the communism that has come to pass and the critiques the put the nails in its coffin. Examining it with an anti-spectacular lens can make you see that propaganda is among the crudest tools employed by the states using the concentrated form of the spectacle, like the U.S.S.R. France and U.S.A. were among those mentioned by Debord as refining the diffuse form of the spectacle. Now, so late in the game of the integrated form of the spectacle, some are still playing catch-up in competing in this rigged game, while those who boasted their intention to never play it again are long defunct.

Can you force people to be free? No, but you can help by destroying or rendering inoperable, the structures that aid in their subjugation, like prisons, or spectacular structures, like screens, theaters, museums, even cities. Under the rule of “free speech”, “radio silence” is consider an act of censorship, of treason, an unacceptable violation. The halting of the reproduction same ongoing development of the “public discourse” the hegemonic culture, framed in endless screens. Riots would ensue if people can no longer consume their leisure from their many preferred streaming platforms.

De-platforming, by stepping on the stage of street confrontation, or setting foot on an amphitheater or auditorium, is not interruption the functioning of the spectacle (which would be negating the stage, a literal de-platforming), but suddenly spicing up the play by adding an element of improv. It makes the whole ordeal and the event more interesting and more memorable. It does not break, but reinforces the cycles that feed the “feeds”; the spectacle which is the means and the end of the ruling class. Or de-platforming by doxxing, ruining the public facade of working-class racists -unmasking them onstage, so to speak- as opposed to “taking them to see the back of the sauna”, as the Finnish saying goes. It's not really “de-platforming” but new iterations of a screenplay of ritualistic confrontations.

That logic of the spectacle is that of the “event” around which people must gather around to participate as spectators. Since spectacular disruption is part of the scheduled programming, what's required is a interruption of the broadcast. Yet the spectacular mediation is so insidious that people will still sit behind a TV screen that displays “no content” or “no signal”, or watch the DVD logo until it bounces against a corner, and then cheer. People sit in front of the bare screen of the movie theater until the movie starts. They wait in long lines at the box office before that, form traffic jams by themselves, to and from, work. Obstructing a road is foolish, as they were seemingly made for the purpose of traffic jams.

City blocks, police blockades, improvised barricades in riots, and black blocs, are all part of the city planner's diorama, the criminologists' simulations, and the commanders' holographic real-time 5th gen multi-domain battle arena virtual display. Instead of learning to beat the computer at chess, learn to unplug the computer; you'll win every single time. We've only begun to imagine the ways in which we'll refuse to play the game.

In a world turned on its head, and it's the only world we've known, the true is only a moment of the false. That's why what circulates as popular knowledge in the form of idioms is often the ruling class' values & world view. “There's no such thing as bad publicity”, for us, only the opposite is true; there is no such thing as good publicity. Drawing a mustache on the face of our enemies on a billboard only makes them more handsome. It serves them even as an opportunity to make a public response of indignation, it allows them to gather an audience around an event. “It takes two to argue”; false. It takes only one, taking turns, or arguing against a straw-person, or a straw-person troll arguing by itself. But a if tree falls in a forest, and there's no one there to hear it, it doesn't make a sound.
This is also commonly known as “don't feed the trolls”, which leads to another truism, that anons provide a toxic environment. But what could be more toxic than what the big-name talk show hosts spew on air, or some of these big personalities that like to step on podiums to debate and beat down their opponents with “logic” and “reason”? Both are counterparts of the same spectacular arrangement, some are famous and renown, others infamous and unknown. Engaging in contrarian squabbles makes people double down on their points and find more lethal arguments, as good arguments are rhetorical weapons, as well as entertaining spectacular flourishes.

Trolling as a phenomenon is blamed on online anonymity, but its the spectacular platform which is culprit. They are just like hecklers in a theater, some bold enough to do it from the front row. The spectators revolting against the imposed rigid role of an audience. Trolling is not criticism, it's a content-less opportunist exploitation of a vulnerability as an expression of revolt within these authoritarian mediations. A sophisticated enough spectacle, and sophisticated enough audience, can manage these interruptions, and ensure that the show does go on.

Rhythms of vulnerability mark the interstices in which very conspicuously “nothing is happening” and “no attention” is being paid. Flipping around the urban terrain in an inverted Nolli map, the most visible monuments are the most insignificant points of attack. What's presented are baits, traps, commonplaces are pitfalls. There is an inverse relation between what is symbolically charged and what makes for a good target. A bullet on a courtroom window is less effective than a well-snipped wire.
A molotov in the middle of the street in broad daylight, in a televised ritual confrontation, is one of the highlights that guarantees attendance to that scheduled play that's perennial to that civil theater.
Meanwhile, an inconspicuous snip of some cables in some key places can have great results.

Every parade, every march, every sticker, every communiqué, is resigning to representation, is pining for the attention of spectators, and worships the spectacle. Including this comment. That's not a contradiction. A TV program can tell you to turn off the TV, but only turning it off, and never back on regardless of what the content of the programming indicates, is the subversive action, since it breaks the relationship of the spectacle, a relationship between people mediated by images.

It can seem utterly impractical to think of maneuvering or positioning oneself against the spectacle which encompasses the entirety of “the Economy”, which engulfs almost all aspects of daily life. Therefore people's livelihoods depend ever more on the work and leisure within and for the spectacle; both becoming more indistinct with each innovation, as noticed by the S.I. Yet they could not imagine to the degree and speed with which it would develop, the last “told you so's” provided in “Comments”.

Debord's “Game of war” teaches us to cut overextended lines of communication, while extending and covering your own. Not frontal attack, not perpendicular to its flanks, not towards it's rear,but always elsewhere; only surprise is unassailable. In the spectacular logic of warfare and the stratagems deployed within it, the enemy presents itself where it wants to direct attention to. The place for attack is never taking place in the featured center stage, nor the crowd, nor backstage in the dressing rooms, nor in the script for the play, nor with the director, nor with any of the individual actors by themselves. The place for attack is eliminating the entire theater as a function. The functioning theater structure has the capacity to recuperate everything that happens within it. This within is not merely an architectural interior, it is the framing around a media event, a date. Anything happening near or related to this date will be framed as happening in reaction/submission to it.

While avoiding the spectacle like the plague, publishing can still have its place, similar to the distinction ya'll made in your previous program of “art vs craft”. Printed manuals can be of use. personal context and from dirty actions compromising specifics, these conversations and publications must be off-line. Things we can no longer say, conversations we're afraid to have in a semi-public place, must be operationalized into the equivalents of the famous eco-abotage monkey-wrench guide, but instead of forest defense, anti-spectacular [in]actions. In contrast to books bought as products commodities à la commodity fetishism, in the Lukács-Debord sense, not in the original Marx sense (the latter which mutualists and anacaps hate, the former which they don't even know of, or have even barely begun to understand).

Situationists were pioneers of spectacular techniques in order to advertise their anti-spectacular savvy. They understood the recuperation of their own efforts because they willfully played into the traps of the spectacle, by going for innovations in high visibility. Stagnating in boring repetition, the managers of the system and marketers and publicity crave for novelty that will reinvigorate it, and critique that will help it adapt and make it more resilient. We must deny them these inputs, starve them off these ritualized feed-back loops, these iterative processes and chain reactions. By slowing the pace of their always diminishing returns, their projections overshoot by an unacceptable and unsustainable margin.

All further innovations must not be broadcasted or posted. The way to share them is to teach them on a need-to-know basis, to someone who is going to use them as your accomplice, not as your enemy.
Once they are inevitably picked up by the enemy, and reverse engineered (they won't necessarily be sophisticated or unknown to them ,maybe they'll just guard themselves better or be more worry, move resources to the targets already exploited from where we will have moved on from. The logic away from “events”, towards a daily life. Or current lives are so fragmented and regimented by spectacular events that the notion of daily life against the logic of the spectacle is hard to imagine for many.

As to the matter of if museums should be destroyed “A.T.R.”, along with television, the Internet? Though we can no longer believe in “Revolution” in this day and age, it can be said that the only way to carry it out was by doing precisely that, and much more, in order for there to be any “after” it.

Word for word Pat Buchanan and several leading neocons have used literally the exact same criticism of the left that Aragorn used in this podcast. Highly regrettable that he can't even conceive that avowed nonleftist anarchists can hate nation states of every hue but hate the ones the most dominant ones even more without being enchanted by any form of antimperialist trope.

source please

and several leading neocons with no backup or citations!
it's not effective!

Don't let another anon disempower you. Do it yourself.

Do it yourself. This is basic political content. If you haven't bothered to pay attention for the last 20 years then you don't deserve someone else give it you you on a platter. No wonder you sad fucks are a dying minority.

Add new comment