I was first introduced to cybernetics when I was studying the overlap between analog BDSM and digital culture studies. In this context, I learned that cybernetics was the language of digital technologies: answering a series of “yes” and “no” prompts to eventually put out a response.
We value output. We worry when a computer doesn’t respond to a command…or a human misfires in the social script.
I use “trauma” as a tag regularly. It’s burnout, answering “yes” to too many commands that I couldn’t keep up my performance for and collapsed in the Spring. Now I fear timely requests; I can’t keep up with homework on a schedule but bust out work when I want to–if I want to; I write rent checks months in advance. I can’t schedule. In February, watching deadlines slip by me, I avowed I would never take another online class. In this first full semester online, I look away. I’ve lost control.
I would be at peace, more than ever, if the institutions that expected the performance of mental wellness from me were depowered and gone. I have lived this argument since 2015, yet here we still are. My resistance to our current social institutions through critical thought and expression has made it so I feel like I have a voice. I can respond to command with defiance, our bleak future with alternatives. But on the computer seven days a week just to keep up with college, which no longer antagonizes or enriches me, my spirit is gone. I feel so weak.
Incoming the social justice/media project. I barely have the energy to investigate what “social justice” really means and if an anarchist project like I belong to can even compromise with a progressive-wash of retribution. Not to sound like a political realist here, but “social justice” is not a threat to the system that has us held hostage to its economic ideals but a negotiation within the conception of politics. Power remains in the allocation of resources, of material and meaning. And yet I condemn this negotiation only knowing resistance, defusing meaning and redistributing material on the ground. I imagine change on the small-scale, in the comrades I follow on social media, neighborhoods I belong to, protests I frequent, and queer-frat-sorta commune where I live now: where I see it. And in manifestos, I feel it. But in social justice and reform, hope disappears.
Social justice waits on the response of those who wield power. There is no wrest of control, no true agency but instead reimaginations of citizenship and belonging on the State’s terms. Social justice is not a horizontal power movement but a horizontal plea to existing power.
Reimagining belonging in the university institution in the terms of what it wants, which is pre-COVID-19, is draining me of my will to continue learning this way. Why would I want to entertain politics that reimagine this society in the terms of its sanctity?
I do not have control in the society we live in; I am marginalized based on its categorization and limited by those categories in the agency I have. It’s legislation and prejudice that limit how I can act, and in execution…
So we come to the prompt of the social justice/media project itself. Yes, I want change. Yes, I want systemic change. No, I do not categorize that change as “justice” unless that system does not exist afterward. I can’t conceive of a social justice that is radical, and a radicalism that wants to play equivalence and values with the system.
Then how will I complete this project in a way that can enrich me? How do I convince a group that wants progress that moving forward is about the same as telling someone to get over it? I don’t want or have the energy for a social justice approach that doesn’t work with an understanding of and ethic against domination. The State of things is not our friend.
Change is not altering a few settings. Taking control into your own hands is painful. It is an expression of endurance. For the oppressed, it is finally getting a “yes” to existing; but isn’t it much easier to be the one who says “yes”?