This is the fourth blog post of a multi-part series making sense of THE VOID’s online video practices in the context of cybernetic participatory culture, the legacies of tactical media, stagnating platformization, encroaching AI, and the nascent Stream Art Studio Network. Read part one, part two, and part three.
This blog post is written in solidarity with the peoples of Palestine, Lebanon, and their allies around the world.
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On Tuesday, May 7, 2024, we all cheered as a Swapfiets bike was thrown on the barricade at the University of Amsterdam’s Oudemanhuispoort historic building. A collective release of outrage and euphoria after the unjustified eviction of the first Amsterdam student encampment demanding the UvA to cut ties with Israeli universities the night before. Were we finally using the tools of the platform master to liberate the university from genocidal ties? With its limited technicity, the bike conceived and designed to perform a specific task (taking a cyclist from one place to another in a short amount of time, yet unprotected from the Amsterdam rain) was reconceptualized and repurposed as a barricade. It joined bricks, institutional signs shaming smokers, and construction fences in an effort to prevent the police from coming into a reclaimed space. Preventing the police from coming in, momentarily delimiting a reclaimed space: that’s what a barricade does. The bike’s chain will not rotate its tires anymore. No feet will rest on its pedals ever again. The bike was doomed to be violently crushed by police bulldozers from the moment it was reclaimed from a parking rack. But this bike was already something else than a bike. It was a Swapfiets. Another stellar innovation of EU-approved, “green”, Dutch Capital that transforms bikes into a service. A sociotechnical assemblage (that’s how we, academics, call them nowadays) that spans apps, stores, hip maintenance workers, an economic model probably based on venture capital and data analytics, offshore cheap production, and so on, and so on. That bike didn’t have an owner in the way we used to think we owned things. As we are all well aware in 2024, its users pay a monthly fee to experience bike-friendly Amsterdam as a local. That is, as an angry and proud bike rider. However, once you’ve lived in this city long enough, you slowly start speaking bike language and become aware that a Swapfiets user is probably not from Amsterdam, not even from the Netherlands, most probably a student, assumed to have rich parents (unlike the frugal Dutch “working class”), and an overall object of political contention no matter what they do. That bike was nobody's bike. It was the byproduct of yet another product-as-service. That evening, it was nonetheless reclaimed by "the students", giving it a new (after)life as an element in another assemblage. From being the material, user-facing presentation of the Swapfiet's UX, to becoming one more (but highly symbolic) brick in the literal structures questioning university power relations. Let’s be clear, the bike was not reclaimed by a collection of single students firmly positioned in their sociological intersectionality (let’s say, American but of immigrant parents, gen Z, queer, too-poor-for-Ivy-leagues yet wealthy enough to come to Europe, sometimes racialized by an astonishingly un-woke European public, and with a great sense of style or, maybe, simply German), but the diffused and collective subject of “the students”. The students as a collective political subject are not stable at all. It is not necessarily fixed by assigning an ID number to every student, stored somewhere in a university spreadsheet and wielded publicly on plastic student cards. Indeed, these are techniques of subjectivation by identification that clearly and quantitively demarcate students from non-students. Swapfiets are also a technology to identify students when cycling in the city. Especially in September, when the surge of blue tires is noticeable. So, it was no less than poetic justice when a Swapfiets-as-barricade suddenly reopened the political question of “who is 'students'?”. A question that had seemingly been institutionally resolved by giving out pieces of plastic, assigning numbers, filling in spreadsheets, and storing data. “Who is ‘student’?” is not a straightforward question to solve. Its solution is not ontological as the verb to be suggests, but political. As Daniel Spaulding argued in his e-flux feature On Hating Students:
“the student is somebody to whom discipline is always rightly forthcoming. Even more so when students are already hateworthy for other reasons: being humanities majors, feminists, queers, critics of colonialism. Even more abhorrent are art students, surely the most frivolous of all.”
This Foucauldian analysis/meme-format advances that the student exists only to be identified and subjected to disciplinary techniques. Yet, as the panopticon memes have shown us, not only the school is a prison but also the barracks, the psychiatric hospital, the workplace, and of course, the prison is also a prison. Spaulding rightly notes that as a subject of discipline, the student is actually in quite an enviable position: largely removed from economic pressures and explicit violence. This exceptionality is the reason that violence against students strikes as reprehensible: it’s society explicitly exerting violence onto the people it claims to protect from normalized economic and state violence in the name of a future that those very students were supposedly the main actors of. Let’s not forget that the solution to the question of studenthood is the main plot point of post-Facebook social media’s origin story. It wouldn’t be a stretch to argue that the conflation between online networking and IRL identity as well as the datafication of online and offline social relations is a byproduct of twisted interpretation of the “who is ‘student’” question. As we all know, The Facebook was originally intended as a student database only accessible for .edu email addresses on prestige US university servers. "True" fictional accounts (Fincher’s and Sorkin’s “The Social Network”) showed us that Zuck and friends reformulated the student question as one of digital identification to algorithmically solve another problem: who to fuck. Because, of course, Zuck and co. had to make sure that their sexual partners were other Ivy League students. The political question of the collective subject (and desires) is thus reduced to individual sexual desires (all millennials know that even before online dating went mainstream, we all hopped online to flirt and stop feeling like lonely losers). Regardless of unavoidable techniques of identification, what the students as a collective subject can do, how it comes to exist, changes depending on the historical moment, levels of shared outrage, social conditions, carnal desire, and, importantly, material techniques of demarcation. This subject largely exists as pure potential –it’s virtual, one may say–, waiting to be actualized into new and different shapes, as the pro-Palestinian student movement’s Instagram posts courageously remind us every time current protests and actions are inserted in a larger history of student movements. To give a banal example that is nevertheless dear to me, the collective subject of the students takes shape whenever students gossip – about their teachers, their classmates, the staff. Gossiping during the smoking break is a moment of subject formation: loitering (oh so much of it all is just about loitering) on a corner sharing concerns, topics, or subjects of interest (the hot professor; the shitty one), passions… Moments and spaces that create a sense of community in their very performance. The collective subject of the students exists only insomuch it is carried out. Only insomuch it comes back to localized social practices; insomuch it is implemented in hardware, as Rosenblatt would do. That Tuesday, another more politically charged, technique for subject formation was unlocked: reappropriating bikes for barricades. The bike-as-barricade effectively and symbolically lets some people in and out. Those who were let in were promptly pulled into the collective effort of barricade-making, providing food, and occupying the unused Amsterdam Academic Club. Those who stayed out were mostly other protestors friendly to the cause, who could always go in through a narrow opening on one of the barricade’s sides. During the early hours of the evening, those who were meant to be kept out (those who were not part of the collective subject of the students) were still just a looming threat; waiting not that far away, behind the crowd of protesters or hiding inside the university’s buildings, to which, of course, they were granted access. At that moment, they were still just a threat of violence. Potential violence rather than violence in action. Virtual, we may say. Until, one day later, they weren’t. On Wednesday, May 8, 2024, the police came in. Bulldozing the non-human barricades. Violently charging and striking against the human ones. This scene of institutional violence was repeated again and again in the subsequent two months. In Amsterdam, Utrecht, Groningen, Leiden, and many other university campuses across the Netherlands that solidarized with the Palestinian cause. The posts and streams on social media witnessing this brute use of force didn’t stop media and educational institutions from using the tactics of the far right they allegedly detest to misinform the broader public about the protests. Liberal institutions of democracy (the Executive Board of the university and public mass media) quickly re-mediatized this event through their channels, framing students as violent and unreasonable, focusing on perceived feelings of insecurity caused by face-coverings, to implicitly and later on explicitly argue that the protesting students are not actually students. Thus, non-students deserve to be brutalized, surveilled, unrightfully imprisoned, and/or revoked of their education to protect the real students: those numbers on a spreadsheet stored somewhere on Microsoft servers. Through this re(de)-subjectivation, the violence the university is authorized to exert over students goes from disciplining their bodily habits for inserting them into the workforce (good old 20th-century biopower) to brutalizing them into expendable non-subjects. Sacrificial offerings for the continuation of their own education. It seems like not even the university itself believes in the disciplining and training of the students’ bodies to produce automatisms (AKA education) anymore if they are so easily willing to get rid of them and their studenthood. I've been calling the barricade a technique of subject formation or subjectivation. If I am Foucauldian about it, the Swapfiets-as-barricade then shares conceptual space with the school, the barracks, the prison, and all those institutions of disciplinary power that produce and reproduce gestures, habits, and social distributions. But barricades are not institutions, they are tactics of resistance to these very institutions. Contestation, disobedience, occupation, protest, negotiation, and labor organizing: all tactics that are shared through technically mediated traditions of resistance. A common knowledge that is re-activated whenever scattered individuals assemble as collectives, channeling their energies and desires to change how the social is assembled. Tactics are actions that momentarily change the order of things. Institutions institute and reproduce the order of things – not moments or events, but durations across longer periods. Tactics are a singular and only momentarily valid encounter between disparate things. A sociotechnical assemblage that is always on the verge of breakdown yet, like institutions of power, tactics produce a subject too. However, this subject resists sociological, statistical, and algorithmic identification. Those who celebrated the Swapfiets-as-barricade are not necessarily the holders of a UvA card, but hopefully, something more expansive yet fragile created among chants, barricades, and warm gestures of solidarity (I am thinking about the warm soup heroically provided by a local community kitchen). Going back to Spaulding’s commentary, students are indeed “ill-fitted revolutionaries” and yet, the revolutions they (we) take part in are quite real. Students are not exactly the excess that capitalist society leaves unaccounted for and are, therefore, capable of disrupting the political as post-May 68 French philosophers would wish for[1]. In the end, we don’t escape the logic of identification as we’re not only literally assigned numbers, but most of us end up assimilating into the workforce sooner or later, even if we're not going to be able to reap its benefits anymore. The unaccounted exist today, though. The Palestinian people are of course the ultimate symbol for them (us). There are other unaccounted living in Amsterdam too. They don’t ride Swapfiets, but the much-hated fat bikes and have way more at stake in the European hypocrisies this genocide awakes than most of the identity-politics-fueled students. As Franco Bifo Berardi has recently put it:
“From Paris to Rome, from Vienna to Berlin, from Warsaw to Amsterdam, everywhere a population of old white people in need of young migrant labor force to be exploited at a ferociously low cost, but terrified of migration, votes for racist parties that promise to deport, incarcerate, possibly drown the migrants that the old dolts of Europe desperately need.”
But as education institutions increasingly fail to provide any sort of social support such as housing[2], economic future, and even education itself as a transformative experience other than discipline through merch and baton blows, the gap between these two groups narrows. I take the Swapfiets-as-barricade as a symptom and symbol: a particular that somehow contains the truth. A singularity, a brief encounter that synecdochically gives us a glimpse of the totality. I wish for this moment to illuminate how violence against students and the youth of wealthy Western European countries is connected to a larger and darker violence directed at large portions of the world. The violence deeming entire populations expendable that, through a poisonous inversion, Western European institutions often appropriate to feed fear to their populations whether it is via the trauma of the Holocaust, the long hungover of the 2008 crisis, the covid pandemic, or AI-fueled anxieties. Western Europe is poisoned by the fear and guilt of its own crimes. Techniques and tactics: one of the several things I'm trying to do in this collection of posts is to connect these two notions. Not to equate them (they do refer to different relations, after all), but to make a composition, an assemblage, with the two of them. A composition that not only allows me to think of certain ways of acting with technology as political tactics. But also, to propose tacticality and resistance (two explicitly politicized and action-centered terms) as fundamental modes of relating to technologies. To put it differently, I’d like to take the Swapfiets-as-barricade as a dialectical image to reimagine the project of an ethics of technology. A project that is now directly complicit with the violence towards students. Not only because the professionalization of ethics has predictably led to the instrumentalization of ethical commissions to postpone political action. But also, because it is precisely a professor in ethics and philosophy of technology and, most importantly, a constraining and highly institutionalized vision of political and historical change through technology who are responsible for this violence. A renovated ethics of technology shouldn’t see the Swapfiets-as-barricade assemblage as something to repress so the “real” technological development filled to the brim with buzzwords, hype, and "responsible" innovation can go on, but as the starting point for new machines, new relations, new subjects, new feedback loops of technically mediated traditions of resistance. These traditions are not a regressive anti-technological position as certain ethics of technology would try to portray them[3]. Rather, traditions of resistance to specific technologies and the social and power relations they perpetuate have always been at the center of technological development (more on that in a future post). Practices and spaces of resistance and not subjection to innovation have always been at the center of technological development. As such, it should be the starting point for the ethical, philosophical, and political reflection of technology that rejects the annihilation of ourselves and our future. 🟢 🟢 🟢 [1] I’m thinking about Jacques Rancière’s writings on the unaccounted, the yet-to-be-visible, or the “supplement that disconnects the population from itself” as well as Alain Badiou’s thinking on the political disruption of the event. [2] The Situationist International’s pamphlet on the Poverty of Student Life still applies today even among the relatively privileged social groups that become a student at the University of Amsterdam. For many of us, especially the arts and humanities students, our lives are already characterized by the impossibility of socially and biologically reproducing the middle class. [3] Curiously mirroring how pro-Palestinian protests are represented as antisemitic in mainstream media. 🟢 🟢 🟢 Part five coming soon...