Under the shadow of the cloud

Abstract

Whether or not you believe the extent of Boris Groys’ assertion above of globalised networks;1 their unprecedented sociopolitical effects are undoubtedly changing our world rapidly. On the whole, human society is operating in new and radically different ways to what it did forty years ago. Most fundamentally: we now have the internet. It is sometimes hard to keep up. Our sense of the present is perhaps becoming more extreme, more interstitial. There is a latency to this present. This is the result of the perilous gaps that occur when our technologies advance beyond our ability to properly conceptualise their implications.2 While we can easily place ourselves empirically within time and space, we are intrapsychically disembodied. Our fleshy physicality is transcended and rendered increasingly useless— implicit relations are upset in this cybernetic inefficiency. Interacting with the interface may turn one’s experience into a phantasmagoria, in a strange but thoroughly real experience. It is both banal and spectacular. The psychogeography of the network affects its conciliatory consumption. The challenge is to avoid unsolicited narcissism, paranoia, alienation, psychosis, hypnosis, apophenia, and schizophrenia through the conditions of the network; or more directly, by its enveloping interface. We need to regain consciousness so that we can adequately negotiate the contemporary subjectivities of cyberspace, and beyond that, have agency in geodesigning our own operational frameworks. This is to say that we need critical tools to recognise and scrutinise the pre-narrated facade of the network—one that is highly ideological—so that we are able to expose its politics for common access and engagement. The network assumes the image of never ending clouds and infinite flows of data. It is an impenetrable place, for it appears to disappear—a hidden heterotopia. This agenda emancipates the user through a metaphorical desynchronisation with time and an extraterritorial exemption of place. But we should not leave our finite body behind in disregard, nor submit to the boundlessness of cyberspace. Only when we are aware of its seamless image can we escape the smoothly generated sense of inevitability. It is all too easy to get lost in the spectacle. Where, in all of this, can we find the long white cloud, its lands, and most importantly; the people, the people, the people?