Re: <nettime> A new avant-garde of Public Truth

I have my doubts on whether an avant-garde is possible any more.

Firstly, we are in an attention economy where attention is the scarce and determining resource. One of the primary means of grabbing attention is through novelty, and any avant-garde is seen as a potential that can be mined for novelty, their product is stripped of its foundations in critical thought and repackaged as pure novelty. I have seen this in my own field of architecture where people like Rem Koolhaus, Frank Gehry, or Zaha Hadid sought to project themselves early in their careers as an avant-garde of iconoclastic rebels, but very quickly became co-opted as vehicles of mainstream branding exploited by corporates as well as authoritarian states. One might argue that this applies only to aesthetic production, but everything, including politics, gets mediatised and aestheticised today.

Second, social media has led to the emergence of what Rand Corporation titled as “the firehose of falsehood”: a propaganda technique in which a large number of messages are disseminated repetitively and rapidly across multiple channels with little regard for truth or consistency. Attention space is grabbed by the unceasing onslaught of these messages, and the multiplicity of sources leads to belief in their truth, especially when they confirm prior bias. The first time the use of this technique came to light (covered in the Rand Corporation report) was by Russia in Crimea in 2014, and subsequently in the US election of 2016. But it has successfully been used by many others, a notable case being the current BJP government in India (see Swati Chaturvedi’s book “I Am a Troll” - https://www.amazon.com/Troll-Inside-Secret-World-Digital/dp/9386228092). The relationship between media and truth has always been problematic. But with the firehose of falsehood, even what we may call ‘media’, and consequently a conceptualisation of the public realm, has become an elusive shadow.

In such conditions, it is unlikely that an avant-garde can emerge - perhaps the avant-garde was purely a 20th century possibility. Hope must lie elsewhere.

Best,

Prem

On 15-Mar-2022, at 5:06 PM, David Garcia <d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk> wrote:

Discussions querying the authenticity of the FSB dissident source do actually matter. And comes back to Brian Holmes intervention on the 26^th of Feb in which he
argued that we should celebrate the fact that in the run up to the war instead of trying to strategically manage the truth, the US and Britain instead “basically made their intelligence
public as it came in. And the intelligence was spot on. What a weird feeling: trustable intelligence. Compare what happened before the Iraq War. It's nowhere near the same circumstances, but still,
positive.”

Brian concluded with the rallying cry: “Truth is a culture, but an almost dead one. I think it could be the basis of a new avant-garde.”

So taking Brian’s position on board I do think that caring about the authenticity of the FSB document matters on many many levels that go beyond Ted’s suggestion that authentic sources are as trivial
as “asking about its provenance, as if it were an artwork or last will and testament.” Particularly given the reports of recent arrests of Sergey Beseda head of Foreign intelligence and Anatoly Belyukh,
his deputy.. all of which suggests that the search for scapegoats has already begun.

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