Re: <nettime> 10 Preliminary Theses on Trump

[Iain Boal <boal@sonic.net>]

Greetings from Berkeley.

We knew of course how the Bannon/Breitbart axis would spin our 'radical
act of negation', viz. the choking of Sproul Plaza and the blocking of
access to a campus pulpit for Yiannopoulos and his fascist theatrics.
For sure, social media were instrumental, though hardly causal. The
blockade was coordinated by a combination of wireless neo-technics
(Signal feed) and old-skool amplification (bullhorn). 

These negative victories should be celebrated and need their
remembrancers, especially when they seem to leave no trace. But here in
the Bay Area, it was the 'freeway revolt' of the early sixties - the
world's first - by a cross-class, trans-ethnic alliance of San
Franciscans that saved from destruction the Golden Gate Park panhandle
which was a key site in the struggle for unlicensed performance and free
expression. Such spaces were the 'condition of possibility' for the
local pulse of antinomian energies and collective resistant intensities
code-named the sixties. 

Looking back, most of our victories have been won in the open air, by
direct action. And will continue to be. 

Iain


> On Feb 2, 2017, at 8:14 AM, Ian Alan Paul <ianalanpaul@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> .....

> "Re 1: Resistance against Trump has already become manifest, not as
> radical acts of negation, but as diffuse articulations of discontent.
> The resistance is in the streets already, attracted not by pure
> negativity, but by Facebook events.  That's the "gasoline for the fires
> to come" (and can we update that metaphor for the 21st century,
> please?)"
> 
>   I would resist the conclusion that facebook / social media has much to
>   do with what we've been seeing at airports over the weekend, or at UC
>   Berkeley yesterday evening (
>   [1]http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Protesters-storm-Milo-Yiannopoulo
>   s-event-at-UC-10901829.php ). This is an open question of course, but I
>   do think that the rush of media theorists to look at protests as being
>   manifestations of social media posts has deeply clouded analyses in the
>   recent past (looking at the movements of the squares, for example),
>   just as I think it does with how people are thinking about Trump today
>   (as a product of memes). There's certainly a relation, but I don't
>   think it's a causal one.

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