14 loosely-connected thoughts on how that KONY2012 strawman is full of shit

1. So a few times this last week I noticed one person or another casting aspersions on online campaigning with some smug variation or another of a line like 'Hey, online campaigning slash clicktivism is cool. We got Kony, right? KONY2012!'.

2. Maybe it's been going on longer than that but a) I am not that perceptive and b) I keep getting distracted by the majesty of the fucking sky. Seriously, that thing is amazing. I just stare at it like a fool.

3. If you don't know what KONY2012 was, it was an online campaign based on lies. The lies got found out and so it failed. What I am calling the KONY2012 strawman is the notion that because that campaign failed, online campaigns are necessarily a waste of time.

4. No-one actually puts it as bluntly as that, because if they did you might realise they are full of shit, but I will and you should and they are. Because here's the thing: the magic ingredient that causes a campaign based on lies to fail when the lies are found out is that it is based on lies and those lies are found out. It being online or offline makes not the tiniest fucking whit of difference to that.

5. I have noticed that some of the people making that argument - such as it is, since it's not spelled out - are people skeptical of the ability of anyone to do anything useful about anything. Some of those people, like Helen Razer, make a living by eloquently expressing that skepticism in print. Others are seduced by the combination of said eloquence and their own paranoia into repeating the argument. It's still a bad argument.

6. By paranoia I mean - and I'll go into detail about this another time - if you're alive now in a rich country you simultaneously suspect a) you're not doing all you could to help keep alive the thing-of-all-things that gave and gives you life, and b) that maybe there's nothing you can do OMIGODWE'REALLDOOMED.

7. re a), you're probably right. My humble suggestion is that repeating bullshit is not the way to deal with that. My humble suggestion is that instead you walk outside and gaze up into the infinite sky and ask the thing-of-all-things if it could use a fucking hand not bleeding to death and if so what it suggests and then see what it says and then go and do it. That will bring you as much peace as you can reasonably expect from this life.

8. re b) this is an old argument. It's half right. Our salvation lies in the other half. The half that's right is that there are forces larger than us and we don't have perfect freedom - all our choices are constrained by history &c &c - and many of those forces are dire.

9. The other half is fuck you, don't try and wriggle your rich-country way out of doing what you can with what freedom you have. It's 2014. You have so much power. DON'T FUCKING WASTE IT.

10. The thing-of-all-things is saying this through me. I asked it to speak through me and now I just say whatever shit comes out of my mouth. It's also saying it loves you very much: I LOVE YOU VERY MUCH. BUT SERIOUSLY, WAKE THE FUCK UP AND QUIT WASTING TIME.

11. I have been blessed this last 12 months to get to hang out with campaigners who don't care whether you're skeptical and who are getting on with doing what they can to save what ecological and social furniture they can as the flood of late capitalism sweeps lo! across this earth. All of these people use online campaigns as part of what they do.

12. Since those people are overworked and operating on the scent of a coaly rag, partly because you have not yet had that conversation with the thing-of-all-things have you and so they are doing it without you, trust me when I say they would not bother a second with online campaigning if it wasn't useful. Seriously. Think it through for more than a few seconds: why would they waste those precious minutes otherwise?

13. Sure there's all kinds of useful questions to ask about efficacy, especially around turning online actions into offline ones. But when it comes to thinking about those questions I trust the people who are actually using online tools to try and do something useful more than I trust the people who make a living out of putting hopelessness into fancy words.

14. Whatever your other views on online life, it's clearly a big chunk of how we are social, now, or you wouldn't be reading this. It's not a magic space somewhere else. So the fancy hopelessness people should quit trying to pretend we should cordon it off from how we work to keep the thing-of-all-things from bleeding to death. Because a) if we did that they'd just criticise us for that, because their schtick is critique, not efficacy; and b) their KONY2012 strawman is full of shit. X

Fuck yeah language

I did this thing today where I gave away the chance to have an interesting day. I swapped it for money. This was 2014, it was a thing back then. We called it 'work'. I had three jobs of work. Today I was a four billion year old technician in the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, a giant cavern on the side of an ancient river. The wind blows past it and it sings, it can't help it. It's like a giant termite mound just there, all shot through with tunnels and secrets.

I was walking around at work, four billion years old and then I got bored and decided to be a system of rivers and oceans, walking around the convention centre. As luck would have it I had an ocean inside me. Some time before LIFE had done this thing where it wrapped bits of ocean in membranes and sent them off onto land to see what was what. I was one of those. My veins were rivers, rushing around. My bones marine fossils or somesuch.

This was back in 2014 and we had this thing called language

o man
It was so fine
you could do almost anything with it
ah it's hard to explain and maybe you had to be there but man
it was really something

FUCK Y
            E
                 A
                         H L A N G U A G E
it was so good

I was drunk on it, which had its dangers. One time I got too drunk and I vomited a whole bunch of it up, letters and syllables blergh! all over the floor like
aft me i a the whe is is is an t y u i o p

Outside there was some giant explosion going on. I could see it through the window. It hung in the sky and made things warm. You could see by the light of it. It felt dangerous and daring, navigating by the light of an explosion. I liked it. X

13 thoughts on the so-called environment

1. We have this word we use, 'environment'. I think we shouldn't use it, or at least that we should put ironic quotes around it when we do, like I just did.

2. The word divides the world into two parts. All 'environment' means is the bit that isn't you, or us.

3. Once you use the word, you think of yourself and your 'environment' like they're things, as a couple of options amongst all the things there can be. And you regard this 'environment' like you regard other things, as a potential object of interest or not. “John is interested in cakes. Miranda is interested in cars. Ralph is interested in the environment.”

4. Once you've decided there's these two things in the world, us and our 'environment', the only way you could look after this so-called environment is by being a good person, by being altruistic. Rather than just looking after yourself, you will be a good person and look after this thing that is not you.

5. The Deep Ecology movement calls the altruistic ecology, the one that divides the world into us and not-us and then says we should be nice people and look after the not-us bit, 'shallow ecology'. They also regard it as doomed, because most of us can't sustain selflessness for long.

6. They say what we need is not a more altruistic way to be a self, but a more realistic sense of what a self is.

7. Because the self that's created when we believe in words like 'environment' in anything other than an ironic or pragmatic sense is pretty much bullshit. There is no environment, and there is no us. All there is is an ecology, a mesh of stuff interacting, eating each other and shitting each other and fucking each other and giving birth to each other. We're just the bit of it that has the capacity for abstraction, and therefore the capacity for forgetting.

8. We're like almond blossoms forgetting we're part of the tree, or people on TV thinking they'll persist when the screen is turned off. All they are is a pattern, a configuration of the screen's radiance. When the radiance fades, so do they.

9. How to remember? They say logical argument won't work. That to remember what you are, that you're a fold, a twist, a knot in a sticky inescapable web, a knot with the capacity to forget but still just a local tying-together of much longer threads, takes something else, something that operates on your little heart-of-hearts. Because in your little heart-of-hearts you think you're something else. But your little heart-of-hearts is full of shit on this one and so is mine.

10. Woundedness is part of it, I think. To remember your knottedness in a world that forgets is to walk through a world of people who keep self-harming, punching themselves in the face and hacking at their limbs and putting out their eyes. It's an experience full of tenderness.

11. It's also to be part of a vast lineage: the lineage of life and of survival. We are the direct descendents of everyone and everything in history that managed to stay alive. Did you know that millenia ago the dominant form of life on earth shat oxygen? That's why we have so much of it. But they were so good at it that they threatened to wipe themselves out, to drown the world and themselves in their own shit.

12. What happened? They - our ancestors - evolved into something that ate oxygen. We are here because our ancestors learned to eat their own shit.

13. That's funny and disgusting and mysterious, and that might be the third thing. Our embeddedness and knottedness runs deeper than logic or language. We're made of it and it's hard to talk about. But one thing we can say about it is survival is fundamental to this funny mysterious disgusting lineage. Our ancestors are the survivors, the ones who didn't get voted off the island and so, potentially, are we. If we can remember who we are.