Smashing the (Un)Control Machine
“I broke out my camera gun and rushed the temple — This weapon takes and vibrates image to radio static — You see the priests were nothing but word and image, an old film rolling on and on with dead actors — Priests and temple guards went up in silver smoke as I blasted my way into the control room and burned the codices — Earthquake tremors under my feet I got out of there fast, blocks of limestone raining all around me — A great weight fell from the sky, winds of the earth whipping palm trees to the ground — Tidal waves rolled over the Mayan control calendar.” — William S. Burroughs, “The Mayan Caper”.
The author William S. Burroughs proclaimed, “smash the control images, smash the control machine” in “The Mayan Caper” from his 1961 novel The Soft Machine. Burroughs believed that the word and image have been used throughout human history to control thought. He used the Mayan civilization of Meso-America as a trope for this focus. Whether or not Burroughs was historically correct in his assessment of the “Mayan control calendar” is largely irrelevant today, if one pays attention to Burroughs more simple claim that images and words populate the imaginations of people when they are broadcast using the electronic mass media. Mass media for the majority of Burroughs’s life (1914–1997) was broadcast using the one-to-many model.
In the lifetime of William Burroughs, newspapers, television and radio beamed messages into the lives and minds of millions of people every day. This network of one-way information channels (if one ignores the heavily censored Letters to the Editor and talk back radio) is largely irrelvant today in an ocean of user driven digital content.
Twenty seven years after the death of Burroughs, anyone who can access the Internet can fashion their own ‘camera gun’ and begin beaming images into the minds of others. As a revolutionary force, the writings of William S Burroughs provide us with a set of principles that can be used to understand how the ruling order is replaced in relation to the digital media sphere. The blogs, wikis, live feeds, podcasts, web journals, micro blogs, RSS feeds, communication platforms and forums of today are soft weapons that ‘take and vibrate images to radio static’, breaking them up, distributing them and making the digital food of revolution. Digital communication with its millions of channels is now the media ‘uncontrol machine’.
In his fiction Burroughs paints a picture of a bygone society where one delves, “into the interior: a vast subdivision, antennae of television to the meaningless sky. In lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out” ( Naked Lunch p.11). Today it is nearly impossible to shut much out in the average suburban Western home, and controlling production of media content is like trying to contain a solar storm. Millions of channels circle the planet offering input and output possibilities for anyone with a story or an image. Among the many, the Chinese government attempts censorship in the face of this image horde, but there are always holes in any Great Wall. In my previous occupation as an academic, a colleague travelled to China to give a series of lectures on film and the digital image. She was of course unable to access YouTube, so she Skyped instructions about which videos to rip off the site and I sent them to her from Europe via the file-sharing site Sprend. These videos were then shown in a Chinese university lecture hall. This is just one crude example of how information always finds a way. I would like to mention some others.
The 2011 attempted revolution of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement was radio-sonic, if one judges by the radiating ‘i’ logo of the Global Revolution livestream site. Twenty-four hours a day, beginning on September 17 2011, people began occupying Zuccotti Park (Liberty Park) in Downtown Manhattan in New York. Coinciding with the physical occupation is the digital barrage of Twitter (micro-blogging run off hashtags), the live video stream, forum discussion, archives of links and comments, blog posts, still images, podcasts, live audio streams, email lists and YouTube videos. This river of information sparked Occupy [enter-town-name] around the USA and even overseas. What could be negatively relegated as a collection of disenfranchised and left-leaning complainers quickly evolved into an idea (“occupy everything” seems to be its slogan, and it came with a manifesto and daily reflections). The ability of digital media to spread this idea (and I am doing it right here) is a testament to the tenacity of the word virus. The need to overcome the dominant dream narratives is most recently articulated by popular Slovenian philosopher Slovoj Zizek when he spoke at OWS on 9th October 2011 and said, “The ruling history has even limited our capacity to dream”. However, the dream of authenticity goes on.
The OWS movement was an early example of high profile digital image barrages connected to popular protest and resistance. In a rough time line that also shows a growing sophistication, these include the 2008–2009 Israeli-Gaza War, the 2009 election protests in Iran, the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, the civil uprising in Syria, the Black Lives Matter movement in the USA and globally, the democracy movement and the Shahbag Square uprising in Bangladesh, Defund the Police, the global electronic intifada, election and religious law protests in Iran, the mass protests against sexual violence in India and the reactions to the 2023–24 genocide in Gaza. These are examples of ‘taking the camera gun and rushing the temple’.
The dialogue around the Israeli-Gaza War of 2007 was mostly conducted on the Internet via Twitter. The 2009 election protests in Iran were Twitter based, but many of the feeds from the micro blogging site were located outside the boarders of the Islamic Republic. However, videos built an enormous following online for the ideas and demands of the dissident forces in Iran. This culminated in the murder online of Neda Agha-Soltan on 20 June 2009, with a video of the shooting death of a beautiful young woman on a street in Tehran that went viral. As Neda gazed into the camera lens, blood gushing from her nose and mouth, the viewer was propelled into the human drama of a cruel and unjust situation.
Since Elon Musk purchased Twitter in October 2022 the ideology and tone of the platform have changed considerably. Today, Twitter is a far-right social network. Other microblogging plateforms such as Mastodon and Blue have taken up the discourse of more radical change. However, perhaps the most radical current platform for the digital discourse of political and social change is Telegram. However, the owner of Telegram, Pavel Durov, was arrested last month in France amid an investigation into crimes related to child sexual abuse images, drug trafficking and fraudulent transactions associated with the app.
But to look back upon the roots of this digital anarchy, on 17 December 2010 a street vendor in the town of Sidi Bouzid set himself alight in protest over long term persecution by corrupt local street officials. Mohamed Bouazizi died on 4 January 2011, at 5:30 pm local time. Protests began immediately afterwards, and built up until President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia with his family on 14 January 2011. The rest is history, and the role of social media in the build up to the flight of Ben Ali is contentious. Wikileaks is said to have played a significant role in the turn of events in Tunisia, along with high unemployment, inflation and official corruption. However, the Tunisian uprising is clearly an example of the masses no longer believing the official control narrative of the government. The speed of the revolution in Tunisia stunned the world.
As Mohamed Bouazizi lay dying in his hospital bed, Ben Ali visited him on December 28 2010, promising to appoint a new Minister of Youth and to look into the unemployment problem (running at around 40% in Sidi Bouzid ). What resulted from the visit was an undermining of the official information line, with Al Jazeera reporting, “For many observers, the official photo of the president looking down on the bandaged young man had a different symbolism from what Ben Ali had probably intended.” The game was over for Ben Ali and a new set of images are still being developed to replace the old in Tunisia.
The revolutions in Egypt and Libya seem to follow a similar pattern to that of Tunisia, as information channels are gradually developed and become dominant, in form if not in content. This progression often mirrors the changes occurring in the streets and corridors of power in each nation. Images replace images as power shifts. Flows of information supporting one group or idea become larger, more regular and more widely distributed, as support grows and gains are made on the ground. What is different from the usual flows of propaganda in any political changeover is that the sources in these contemporary changeovers are multiple based on weight of numbers. While major broadcasters such as Al Jazeera covered the assembly in Tahrir Square in Cairo from atop the buildings around it, creating a visual metaphor of distance and collectivity, the real coverage was happening on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and countless Egyptian blogs. Wael Abbas, Sandmonkey, Hossam Eid, Ali Seif, Nora Younis, Misr Digital, and Baheyya were some of the most popular blogs.
It must also be remembered that in the last weeks of the regime of Hosni Mubarak the Internet was shut down for the entire of Egypt in an attempt to silence dissenting images and ideas. Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates commented on the shut down in a highly perceptive analysis, “Whenever you do something extraordinary like that, you’re sort of showing people you’re afraid of the truth getting out.” In the same story by The Huffington Post it was revealed that efforts to shut down such an information network inevitably fail. As they did for Hosni Mubarak. At the moment the same techniques emplyed by the Mubarak regime are used in the occupied territories by Israel.
The 2023/24 war/genocide in Gaza is now being conduted behind a digital media blackout. Israel is “afraid of getting the truth out”. Controlling the narrative has become the most vital element in policy and in provocation across the world. It is telling that the Ukraine War is still being broadcast via digital channels. This is permitted by the West (the USA still has a controlling influence over the infrastructure on the World Wide Web). Since October 9 2023, the 2.3 million residents of Gaza have been experiencing a devastating near-complete communications blackout, exacerbating their suffering as they endure heavy bombardment by Israeli forces and remain under complete siege with almost no water, food, fuel, or medicine.
On November 16, 2023, due to fuel shortages, Internet and telephone services went down in Gaza. This also resulted in a suspension of humanitarian aid convoys because humanitarian agencies could not communicate. On November 18, services were partially restored, after some fuel was allowed in and allocated to telecommunications. On November 21, an Israeli strike against a telecommunications tower in North Gaza led to a telecommunications blackout in that area. An organisation called Connecting Humanity provides internet access to people in Gaza using donated eSIMs, allowing them to connect to networks outside of Gaza. However, by December 2023 only 200,000 people living in Gaza (around 10% of the population) had received limited internet access through an eSIM.
The demonstrations against sexual violence in India and the Shahbag Square uprising in Bangladesh, with the subsequent 2024 Quota Reform Movement, are further examples of digital media playing a central role in the toppling of dominant control systems. Gender equality and campaigns against sexual violence in India have also relied on social media. An average of nearly 90 rapes a day were reported in India in 2022, according to data from India’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). The true figure is likely to be much higher, as many such crimes go unreported due to fear of reprisal, prevailing stigmas around victims and a lack of faith in police investigations. Much of the dialogue around the horrific sexual violence in India is conducted online, particularly through social media platforms. The results of the wave of protest following the gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh by the occupants of the bus she was travelling on (including by the driver) in 2012 tore Indian society apart and exposed its rotten partriarchial core. The struggle for basic rights for women in India continues and it is much via digital channels.
Abdul Quader Mollah was convicted on five of six counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes at his trial on 5 February 2013. A member of the Al-Badr militia during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, Mollah was convicted of killing 344 civilians among many other war crimes, and was sentenced to life in prison. This led to the 2013 Shahbag protests that demanded capital punishment for the convicted war criminals and the disbandment of Jamaat-e-Islami. Jamaat-e-Islami started a violent counter-protest in the country, demanding the release of its convicted and accused leaders.
Protesters perceived Mollah’s sentence as unduly lenient, leading bloggers and online activists to mobilize additional protests at Shahbagh, resulting in heightened participation in the demonstrations. Jamaat orchestrated several counter-protests challenging the tribunal’s validity and the protest movement, advocating for the release of those accused and convicted.
On 15 February, blogger and activist Ahmed Rajib Haider was killed outside his house, by members of a far-right terrorist group Ansarullah Bangla Team affiliated with the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami, leading to widespread condemnation and outrage during the heightened time. On 27 February of the same year, the war tribunal convicted Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, a prominent right-wing fundamental-Islamist, of war crimes against humanity and subsequently sentenced him to death.
The subsequent 2024 Quota Reform Movement in Bangladesh was also conducted through digital platforms. The 2024 Bangladesh quota reform movement, also known as the July Revolution, was a series of anti-government and pro-democracy protests in Bangladesh, spearheaded primarily by university students. Initially focused on restructuring quota-based systems for government job recruitment, the movement expanded against what many perceive as an authoritarian government when they carried out the July massacre of protestors and civilians, most of whom were students.
The protest began in June 2024, in response to the Supreme Court of Bangladesh reinstating a 30% quota for descendants of freedom fighters, reversing the government decision made in response to the 2018 Bangladesh quota reform movement. The government sought to suppress the protests by shutting down all educational institutions. They deployed their student wing, the Chhatra League, along with other factions of the Awami League party. These groups resorted to using firearms and sharp weapons against the demonstrators. The government then deployed Police, RAB, BGB and other armed forces, declaring a nationwide shoot-at-sight curfew amid an unprecedented government-ordered nationwide internet and mobile connectivity blackout that effectively isolated Bangladesh from the rest of the world. Later, the government also blocked social media in Bangladesh.
On 4 August, thousands of protesters convened at Dhaka’s Shahbag intersection in the morning, obstructing it as a form of civil disobedience to demand the resignation of the government. This was followed by hundreds of casualties. The following day, the protesters called for the Long March to Dhaka in defiance of a nationwide curfew to press Sheikh Hasina to resign. The long march of crowded people to Ganabhaban forced her to resign. She, along with her sister Sheikh Rehana, then fled the country to India via military on 5 August 2024.
Conclusions
Attempts are still made in digital media sites to summarize these movements in a single form of language. In doing so the summary attempts to return a movement to the singular, what the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin called a monoglossia, which identifies the locus of control with the authoritative interpretation of the word. The OWS movement is one example of this, where a major digital news site took pictures of 34 people in Liberty Park and they said “This should give you a pretty good idea of the different types of people occupying Wall Street” .
Back in 2011, Buzzfeed’s summary of who was occupying Wall Street forces the question; “where did the occupation begin and end”? Was the video feed running 24 hours a day part of the occupation? What about the forums, blog posts, videos, and Tweets? Were they part of the occupation? If they were, where are they? With millions of channels open all over the Internet, the Occupation of Wall Street became part of the infrastructure of the World Wide Web, which as its name suggests, is worldwide. There is no place for an idea, as it occupies the world as a virus does, in time but not in space.
The forms and practices of the OWS movement have been copied around the world. Perhaps not so much copied, as manifested. It is contagious and how it is going to end we do not know yet. The idea of moving “beyond clicktvism” and taking the ideas from the screen and implementing them in the streets has not been exhausted. In November 2016, shortly after Donald Trump was elected as President of the United States of America, an anonymous Twitter handle called “Sleeping Giants” (SG) started publicly notifying organizations whose ads appeared on Breitbart News, an online publisher known for spreading far-right narratives. With the aim “to make bigotry and sexism less profitable”. SG leveraged social media to encourage users to pressure organizations to withdraw their ads from Breitbart. The SG movement shed light on the opacity of programmatic advertising and incited more than 4,000 organizations to blacklist Breitbart, allegedly reducing its ads revenue by more than 90%. Today, Trump is once again seeking to become President of the United States of America. Activism and digital channels of communication are again at the forfront of politics and social change.
(This text contains descriptive passages of various protest organisations that are taken directly from Wikipedia. Attribution is done with the links that appear in each passage).
Originally published at http://soulsphincter.blogspot.com.
