Notes on the domination and abolition of online life.
Notes on the domination and abolition of online life.
Political, Social theory, Sociology (general)
The Reticular Society theorizes the online colonization of everyday life, diagramming the cultural, political, and economic operations and algorithms of network society while searching for the means of abolishing them. As circuits of exploitation and domination invade each dimension of lived reality - integrating, isolating, and impoverishing all of what has been communicatively captured - The Reticular Society arms readers with a conceptual and creative artillery to tear open holes in our networked world.
Redeploying the situationist project against the waves of calculation and computation that informatically inundate life in capitalism's digital currents, each of the book's chapters sharpens the understanding of our online conjuncture in hopes of contributing to the insurgent project of dismantling and destituting its totalizing grip on life.
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The Reticular Society is the mutant-kin of the Society of Spectacle. Ian Alan Paul offers a critical manifesto against the cybernetic demand that everything must be connected and separated at the same time, that everyone must be networked and isolated at the same time, and that the global database leaves nothing and no one out. The Reticular Society traces how every entity, every breath, every joy, every revolt, every shard of intimacy and every savage act of care is being carved into controllable bits and bytes of binary circulation gulags as living currents and currencies. Yet the cleaving and extractive machine that eats our lives, our unaccountable potential, can be unmade by back-alley whispers, holes in border walls, with disturbance signals, in tunnels built by lovers that all together constantly create escape routes of impossible poetics, invisible connections, abolitionist gestures, and an undercommons of the inoperable that sing out beyond the totalitarian digitality of the reticular society. ~ Ricardo Dominguez, co-founder of Electronic Disturbance Theater
From the interstices of a lived reality orchestrated so that lives can be better subordinated together, Ian Alan Paul delivers an urgent reading for renegotiating what technopolitical enmeshments might entail—and why, and how—when life is provided as a networked service in an overarching concatenated and coordinated capture of all modes of existence. The Reticular Society is also a brilliant piece of literature, operating as a geometric grammatology that marks a milestone in the poetics of contemporary technopolitics. Both generous and generative, it arranges a thick vocabulary to name, address, and twist the frontlines and corners of subtle resistance. Comrade Ian gently helps me cultivate, widen, and thicken my hope for the flourishing of a collectivized and dissident digital discomfort beyond the current climate of hostile informatics; they help us focus energies, analytics, words, and practices on the technical imagination of other relational geometries. ~ Jara Rocha, associate member of TITiPI (The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest) & co-author of Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence
