Queen of Wands (Reversed)
Being seen should simply be terrifying, not a career.
This is a WiP. It is not complete and i will return to it at some point. I am practising uncurated visibility here, please and thank you.
The ancient greeks believed visibility was the core of life. Had you met Socrates[1], he would have encouraged you to know yourself, yes, but not in a vacuum; it was always through someone else's eyes. Athen's society was built on perception, your place in it determined by how you were seen, and an offence to reputation was equatable with death.
One could argue visibility is the core of life today, as well. Social media has the single purpose to show, it doesn't really matter what. But it certainly has no purpose to know. Whether you post a picture of your lunch, a video of children being killed in Gaza or an excerpt from an essay on technofeudalism[2], everything becomes content. And content isn't supposed to make you think, it's supposed to make you engage. Or spend, could be money, could be time. Neither of those things is ever done with full awareness. Not even half awareness, for that matter.
It is a comfortable alternative, for sure: you can relieve yourself of your complicity in a unfair system that lets a genocide carry on unopposed by posting an AI generated picture of a place in Palestine[3], or a black square to absolve yourself of your privilege. What you can't do is pretend to be seen. No one can see anything that isn't already decided by the 21st century version of a german dictator: the algorithm. What is shown to you preaches to the choir and the choir sings back. Social media is a tool that we all collectively decided could be used to express individuality, too. But the result is that we sell ourselves like products, and even worse, we aspire to. Influencers manage to make a living out of it, we strive to do the same. So we perform in a way that the market could like, if it ever gave us a chance, a lucky break.
Being seen should simply be terrifying, not a career. Neoliberalism managed to turn market logic into a second nature and a system of legitimacy, be it economic, political or cultural. Now, we are offering one more evolution to the idea of human capital: the monetization of every second of our day. Forget labor dictating free time, in a Venn diagram those two classes would fully overlap. And the one called "life" would be contained inside and not the container for both. Whatever we are showing is not the truth. It is certainly not knowledge. And it absolutely is not an expression of ourselves. The greek would have seen through it, called it rhetoric and deemed it unfit for anything but corruption of young minds. I call it a safety blanket: it helps me forget I have no power and soothes the unimaginable horror of being truly known. Which is exactly the opposite of what any tool of self-expression worthy of the name should ever do. Through someone else's eyes, said Socrates. Not through someone else's screen.[4]
To be fair, I would not recommend this. Apparently, he was unbearable. ↩︎
May I suggest reading Yanis Varoufakis and posting about it on Instagram? You can then decide whether to call that ironic or reappropriation. ↩︎
Are all eyes still on Rafah, would you say? ↩︎
I would like to point out that although we are not on social media, this is indeed a deeply filtered attempt at visibility. The two words I used to described beeing known, "terrifying" and "horror", are the dandelions amongst the pavement's cracks. You look for those if you want to see the earth still existing. My queen of wands was reversed, after all. ↩︎
Talk back, darling?