I’m behind on my note-taking and record keeping because of the holidays, but here is a short list of things that have happened recently.

Today, I watched the panel sessions from the Digital Utopias conference that I missed earlier in the year. The most interesting presentation was from Morgan Quaintance on internet and post-internet art. In summary, his view is that interaction with devices is usually a solitary activity and should be leveraged as an encounter with the numinous; he sees affect as a way of creating profound experiences in the browser. There’s lots to argue with here, but the intention seems sincere. I feel that the context of that interaction is not being taken into account in the argument – solo interaction is often, if not usually, in the service of work, or at least in the service of immaterial or emotional labour, the labour of constructing a self through these media and devices. The idea that this interactive space can somehow be freed of its association with work in order to provide transcendent experiences seems to disregard the role that partial attention plays in screen-based interaction. Contemplation requires solitude (Storr) but it also requires focus, and computers are basically distraction engines.

I also read this great interview with Wendy Brown by Timothy Shenk, in which the main ideas in her book Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution are discussed. The short version is that the expansion of managerial approaches, including measures and so on, into all areas of life has created a situation where democracy can’t function any more. If everything is seen as a consumerist transaction, the idea of the self as a civic subject is replaced by a self defined by an sense of personal liberty.


The grains of truth in this analysis don’t get at the fundamental transformation of social, cultural, and individual life brought about by neoliberal reason. They don’t get at the ways that public institutions and services have not merely been outsourced but thoroughly recast as private goods for individual investment or consumption. And they don’t get at the wholesale remaking of workplaces, schools, social life, and individuals. For that story, one has to track the dissemination of neoliberal economization through neoliberalism as a governing form of reason, not just a power grab by capital.