Being caught reddit-handed, or the pleasures of policing for free

I got in trouble at the weekend when I set up a reddit account (my first one ever) and, having had a rather cursory reading through the rules of the group (or subreddit) I had joined, I was kicked out. I had, it seems, gravely violated the rule no-links-to-your-personal-blog-are-allowed-on-this-subreddit. Mind you, the link was inside a post that was the equivalent of half a Microsoft Word page, but what does that matter? Out I went. First infringement, red card. Harsh policy (zero tolerance); excellent policy-implementation.

Source: Fear and Loathing in Bioethics

The episode has left me thinking. Not about dis-affiliation from groups but about this idea of being spotted, of being handcuffed (metaphorically speaking), of being caught red-handed.

So I’d like to start by noticing this language of apprehension and its potential for rhyme. Reddit, red-handed. Just for fun. (Couldn’t help it.) Also couldn’t help thinking about the way reddit is organized, as a means of dissemination and dismissal at the same time. But I need to be well understood: by reddit I mean pretty much all of social media, and with it pretty much everything that takes place online.

Nobody has asked for it

Now allow me a few words about the avatar that ‘caught’ me. I checked his/her/their history – as one does in such circumstances, I’m sure. They haven’t posted anything original in one year. Ever since their last post they’ve been engaged in replies, more or else, but also in the territorial and emblazoning (to them) actions of policing the space in search for intruders. Now that’s an interesting aspect, because nobody has given them a sheriff’s badge for doing so. Nobody gives any such badge to any such vigilante on the internet. And I mean nobody, because the actual work, the real work of fending and defending, of blocking and dismissing, is done not by human beings but by algorithms. What human beings can do is alert those algorithms when they come across incriminating practices such as (I had to find out) my own. And that’s exactly where the issue finds its grounding. In the fact that individuals offer their time and resources to serve algorithms. Take it as a dystopian panic if you will, although I don’t mean it that way. And so the deeper question that imposes itself is this: isn’t this loyalty to the algorithm somehow a manifestation of the loyalty to another kind of abstractions? To the abstractions represented by ideologies?

Algorithm, the latest materialization of control

All ideologies need materializations. They cannot dwell in the abstract because they’re supposed to address concrete social items: human beings. Yes, this itemization that we’re subjected to comes hand in hand with the externalization of our concerns. Stuffed with the dictates we are exposed to like some docile teddy bears, we take pleasure in controlling others, in exercising this weird, dehumanizing (algorithmizing) power: the ability to find the right places where others do wrong by a given system.

The vigilante who caught me reddit-handed had a concern larger and seemingly more important than the actual reason he had presumably joined reddit for. He was there to discuss books. That’s what the group was for, that’s what the group was asking for. The rules were clear (I found out after reading them closely): you don’t post unless your posts are related to book discussions. It’s with this kind of adamantine restrictiveness that the issue of participation was imposed on the members. And yet, the individual who ‘caught’ me (I want to insist on this word because I want, in essence, to insist on the process of being criminalized – which is precisely what rule-breaking leads to) did not post a reply to my contribution. No, they chose to ‘report’ me (another word of the same resonance). Content was not important. What mattered was that a forbidden object was present in a forbidden place. I’m not trying to defend myself because I know that would sound pathetic; and it wouldn’t even be the purpose of this very post. But here’s the issue: twenty lines of text mattered less than one link half a line in length. All the rest was discussion of a book! What’s more, it was a reply to a question posted by somebody else.

But let’s move on

A few weeks ago I wrote about the phenomenon of synopticism: the inversion of the panoptic gaze to the point where we’re no longer dealing with a figure of authority watching over and super-vising the subjects but rather with the situation where subjects watch around themselves in order to police the space of their social interaction as if they were law enforcers. Policemen without a payroll. That’s precisely what Foucault pointed out throughout his career: the disciplining of the individuals to the point where they become guarantors of the discourse’s functioning. There are many other illustrations of the phenomenon. Think of all the white supremacist movements and their urge to protect a presumed universality by clearing it of a presumed non-white threat.

From Django Unchained. Source: giphy

Think of the neighbor who peers into your own bedroom. Think of the entitlement to install surveillance cameras on one’s own property.

This last example is a really interesting one, and possibly closer to the online vigilance I’m trying to bring up in this post. In essence, a camera set up on one’s property will not annul a theft. It is not the camera that deters a thief from breaking and entering but the fear of being caught on it. Not only that, but the camera is not a security object per se. It does not hinder access. Like even the loudest alarm ever, it is not a blocking device. If a thief did not know that a camera existed he or she would just move on undeterred; the theft would go as planned. At least an alarm system draws attention to its own presence when it goes off. Not a camera, though.

Then what’s the point? What does the person who installed the camera gain from having installed it? Peace of mind? I doubt it. We, the outsiders, are not the only ones who know that a camera is completely incompetent against a break-in. The owner knows it too. So the camera doesn’t demarcate for them a worry-free territory. What it does demarcate, though, is a space of policing. If the camera catches the intruder the owner can use the image to refer the intruder to the legal discourse. The owner, therefore, has little to gain for themselves but a lot to gain for the discourse.

Unpaid work makes the world go round

This is the externalization of concern I was talking about. The state of being-concerned does not serve the individual. He/she remains on duty but without being remunerated for it. They give away an important asset (their generosity) in order to fulfill the purposes of power.

I’m familiar with the term ‘leave without pay.’ It is very carefully pointed out whenever an individual transgresses certain rules concerning not-engagement in the workplace. But I haven’t heard any instance of ‘being on duty without pay’ (voluntary work excluded), although a lot of what happens in terms of this policing of the social sphere by unemployed individuals points precisely in that direction.

Source: Huffington Post

‘Pay’ needs to be regarded not necessarily as monetary remuneration. These days, when visibility has become a currency in itself, social capital needs to be understood in terms of the benefit drawn from having been involved. In what? In anything. Anything, that is, that has significance to the discourse of visibility.

And so back to my poliziotto. I mean not to him-him but to what he represents. To recapitulate, what have we here? Someone in the service of an algorithm. Someone acting for the benefit of a site that’s not his own, from which he gains very little, possibly nothing. Someone who’s settled into a regulated territory and has inhaled all the fumes of the site, in such a great quantity that now they’re high on the idea of duty. Which is not even an idea anymore, but rather an internalized practice. And that, without going into any other details, is characteristic of the disciplined society we’re inhabiting. Nothing new in itself. Nothing outrageously unknown. Just another instantiation of an age-old propensity towards self-subjection, something Foucault spent entire books talking about. And talking, and talking.

Writing and power

Writing is one of the most efficient forms of taming. Not because of its being a perfect vehicle for the dissemination of power discourses, but because it features important characteristics of power itself.

Handling the abstract

Systems of power interfere between world and subject, so as to direct the gaze of the latter away from the former and concentrate attention on the discourse of power itself.

Source: Elite Daily

Writing marks precisely this kind of interposition. Prior to the written sign (in what Walter Ong called "oral cultures"), the link between the subject and their world was an unmediated one. In order to speak, the speaking subject referred straight to things. He/she inhabited the utterance, as well as the world. Once the written sign comes about and once it starts acting as a representation of the world, this direct link is lost. Henceforth, the subject no longer refers to the world but to the sign. The world is lost behind a veritable barrage of signs, which now exercise their tyrannical influence over the subject by limiting their choices to that which can be written. The unwritable is ugly, undesirable, underdeveloped.

The myths of representation date back to the installation of these abstract signs. And it is perhaps not without significance that the earliest forms of writing were instruments of power, available only to the king and the temple.

The very foundation of our concept of history depends on writing and its attributes. The straight line, the undeterred progression from point A to point B, the development of a logical argument, the organization of events along a common trajectory, the sense of evolution – all of this is a product of writing. Indeed, Darwin would not have existed without the alphabet. To reach the stage where we can think of ourselves as products of evolution we need, first and foremost, to have had an idea about how things can progress, how they can order themselves linearly, how they are subject to causality. These are possible only after writing; writing, which cuts through the chaos of the world and separates things from signs, concrete objects from abstract representations.

The straight line and the promise of survival

It is when the linearity of writing is put under question that we come to realize how important it really is. In Mallarmé's throw of dice, in Apollinaire’s calligrammes, in all the efforts of Concrete Poetry, the experiment, the taking of the rule unseriously, is felt like a discomfort. Having to devise a new geometry for the poetic space (for the very space of writing itself) appears as a transgression. It is with this transgression and the feeling of discomfort that comes with it that power asserts itself as unavoidable.

Source: Sewaholic

Power is advertised as an ideal place of eternal bliss. Power promises the comfort of the commonplace, the corner where the mind ceases to be restless, irregular, and chaotic. There is pleasure in transgressing the predicates of power, no doubt, but this pleasure is one of the masochistic type: it takes pain as a premise.

Every discourse contains in itself the ability to turn into tyranny. And this tyranny, this ultimate assertion of power as unavoidable, is achieved through techniques of control, but also through claims to eternity. Constraint and generosity: the two major mechanisms through which power is maintained in place.

What's interesting is that, at some point, writing's major promise of infinite preservation ceases to be a promise and becomes a naturalization, a right. It becomes what-things-really-are: a fact, an argument, a certainty.

Writing promises to be lasting, and ultimately – ever-lasting. Writing preserves what otherwise would be lost in a sea of speeches. Writing is, in other words, the real solution to the problem of the Tower of Babel. It posits itself as evidence of what-things-really-are.

Life without writing is unavoidable. This kind of ultimate declaration can be found in the foundational statements of all systems of power and their accompanying ideologies.

Road traffic without road signs is impossible.

Life without a system of economic exchange is impossible.

Wealth without capital is impossible.

A city without streets is impossible.

Identity without Big Brother is impossible.

Afterlife without righteousness on earth is impossible.

All these are statements of power. They are employed in order to reassure the subjects that the system works, that it is efficient, that it is the only option there is. And so writing behaves like power, since it asserts its fundamental capacity to record, to make history, to form consciousness.

And since we're talking about consciousness, it's worth nothing that in an ideal power situation the subject gives away their agency. In writing, the subject loses his/her ability to memorize because he/she gives their ability away to writing, thus asserting writing as a system of absolute storage: the room where nothing ever is lost.

The safe haven

Systems of power create products that reflect back onto the system itself in order to idealize it by means of abstract formulas. See the rules for good writing: the pedagogy of it, the schools and libraries and theaters erected in order to glorify it, the idealization of the things of writing and of the writer's figure, the hierarchization of species of writing so as to highlight the ideal to the detriment of the marginal.

When writers themselves talk about writing, this idealization is at its best articulation. Sylvia Plath:

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy of creativity is self-doubt."

Here, on the one hand, writing is put forth in terms of audacity. On the other hand, though, it is judged in terms of its very means of materialization. So it looks like we're talking about two different notions of writing: the technology and the means of expression; the craft and the tools. The overlap is not at all irrelevant, since by employing the tools one justifies the authority of the craft. And why is self-doubt "the worst enemy of creativity?" Because (ridiculously simple!) by not-writing one ceases to be the subject of writing. This self-doubt is the doubt of a self that has been constructed in relation to writing as a system of power. If the writing subject doubts himself, he consequently doubts writing's ability to manifest itself in the subject; i.e., his faith in the ideology of writing is shattered. This is why, as perceivable in Plath's admonition, writing, like all power, comes about with a demand to be employed.

Source: Charlotte Rains Dixon

Access to power is often described as an act of courage. Power absorbs (in order to prevent) the rebellious energies of its factions. And so, dealing with power means dealing with that which is too much for the individual to bear. One needs to have "the outgoing guts to do it" in order to access the apparatuses of power. One needs to be a hero in order to write. With this statement, it is not the subject that is being glorified, but the discourse itself, and the ideology that is an articulation of it. Writing is not only a technology, it is also a safe haven. It is the place where one is promised freedom, provided one has correctly employed the tools.

"You must stay drunk of writing so reality cannot destroy you" (Ray Bradbury).

And so we come to embrace that which writing can give us. We partake in the "joy of writing," in the "pleasure of the text," in the "incredible lightness of being [with words]". There is a lot to enjoy in writing, just like there’s a lot to enjoy in every system of power, in every ideology.

The side that's always bright

What is fairly easy to notice is power's reflective justification. Its apparatus of self-promotion runs on references to a past that has always been directed towards the glorious present. This is the myth of the Golden Age, the narrative that keeps power alive. In the case of writing, it goes like this: without writing we wouldn't have had books, cathedrals, roads, cars, computers, marriages, burials, jobs, conscriptions, supermarkets, cemeteries, cafes, philosophy, ethics, literature, history, cards, the game of Monopoly, cinema, theater, air conditioning, tractors, profit, capital, politics, inspiration, news, distribution of wealth, social welfare, Sunday markets, fast food chains, the beautiful art of calligraphy, Chinese and Japanese pictographs, payrolls, accountancy, urbanism, laws, order.

While this is true (and it doesn't take a double-decker of intelligence to see the truth of the statement), it is also true that without writing we could have had the alternatives. The long list given above (far from complete, of course) is a list of effects of writing. It doesn't prove anything – especially it doesn't demonstrate the unavoidability of writing. It merely catalogs late developments of a system of power. This is a very efficient method of self-assertion, which works perfectly with ideologies, because it glorifies power nostalgically and sets it in stone.

Source: LHS Writing Center

Power doesn't operate in terms of the conditional tense. It is what it is, not what it could have been. There are no if's, no but's, no let's-assume's. What you see is what you get – the ultimate justification of power, its most resounding victory. All could-have-been's are obliterated. They never existed, therefore they could never have existed. Which is false, because any current form of power was, back in its day, itself an alternative, one choice among many, one path to be taken at a crossroads.

Of course, with power things cannot be presented as haphazard. What's more, power falsifies all evolution, to the extent that its current state is presented as the only evolution possible, the only end of the only road ever given. That, once again, is the way power asserts itself, how it rejects all competition.

Power aims towards monopoly, and it is not hard to see, from the above, how that might be the case when it comes to writing. Verba volant, scripta manent. In this, speech is made impotent compared to the alphabet. Hence the confidence in written things: newspapers, books, official notices. "It's true because they wrote about it in the paper" is an argument that still holds, now, in the third millennium. It is the argument of the power of writing; the argument of writing as power.