Mckenzie Wark Quotes

In some ways, the great danger for this commodified universe is our boredom with it ... There is this sort of dialectic that you could tease out, that even in this overdeveloped late-capitalist world, that boredom was still this kind of critical energy that you could work on and try to theorize and then act on, to find other kinds of belonging, other kinds of desire, other kinds of life.

In Japan itself it seemed as if theory had been absorbed the same way Japanese media culture absorbed everything else—by turning it into a spectacular subcultural style.

The dominant ruling class of our time owns and controls information.

We act in and against a world that remains other to us. Reduced to nothing but users, and our actions forced into the commodity form, our collective work and play produces a world over and against us, one that massively persists in its own habits of functioning.53 Worse, collective human labor made a world for a ruling class that keeps making not only itself but us in its image.

Evangelion is not so much an original as itself already a copy of popular anime elements, “an aggregate of information without a narrative” or a “grand non-narrative” (O38). This results in part from industrial changes. By the ’90s, any product can spawn all the others: a series of stickers or a company logo could bloom into a series of manga, TV or film anime, games and more. By now “the narrative is only a surplus item

One thing that the left and right now seem to agree on is that the society in which we live is called capitalism.1 And strangely enough, both now seem to agree that it is eternal. Even the left seems to think that there is an eternal essence to Capital and that only its appearances change. The parade of changing appearances yields a series of modifiers: this could be necro capitalism, communicative capitalism, cognitive capitalism, platform capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, or computational capitalism.

Wright advocates for some salutary counterhegemonic strategies, based in geographic rootedness, local public goods, and worker’s cooperatives. But one has to wonder whether such things are all that viable (at least as traditionally conceived), given that the forces of production drive increasingly abstract relations of production, which appear then as transnational legal and treaty forms protecting information as private property. Trebor Scholz proposes a form of platform cooperativism as a more contemporary approach.47 The vectoralist stack needs to be countered with a counterstack on the infrastructural level.

I will note in passing that we shared a dislike for both writers and scholars who treat some body, or some body of work, as if they owned it.

The preferred worlds to simulate were either sci-fi or Edo-period Japan, as if the two breaks of the Meiji restoration (1868) and the occupation (1945) had not happened. Azuma links simulation to the practice of détournement or the fan-based making of derivative works, which “official” products then borrow from in turn: “the products of otaku culture are born into a chain of infinite imitations and piracy” (O26). Simulacra thus float free from both the notion of an historical time and from the authoring of original works.

Boredom isn’t a longing, a lengthening of time. It is a spacey feeling, of being spaced out. What is boring is a space in which either one cannot act, or one’s actions amount to nothing. [...] What displaces boredom is the capacity to act in a way that transforms a situation.

Everything is digital and yet the digital is as nothing.

Once games required an actual place to play them, whether on the chess board or the tennis court. Even wars had battle fields. Now global positioning satellites grid the whole earth and put all of space and time in play. Warfare, they say, now looks like video games. Well don’t kid yourself. War is a video game—for the military entertainment complex. To them it doesn’t matter what happens “on the ground.” The ground—the old-fashioned battlefield itself—is just a necessary externality to the game.

Even critical theory, which once took its distance from damaged life, becomes another game. Apply to top-ranked schools. Find a good coach. Pick a rising subfield. Prove your abilities. Get yourself published. Get some grants. Get a job. Get another job offer to establish your level in bargaining with your boss. Keep your nose clean and get tenure. You won! Now you can play! Now you can do what you secretly wanted to do all those years ago... Only now you can’t remember.

Everything has value only when ranked against something else; everyone has value only when ranked against someone else. Every situation is win-lose, unless it is win-win—a situation where players are free to collaborate only because they seek prizes in different games. The real world appears as a video arcadia divided into many and varied games.

The rave situation is a temporary, artificial environment made by the combined labors of the promoter, DJs, lighting designers, sound engineers, hosts, and all those paid to make it happen. They construct a situation that confronts the ravers with a set of constraints and possibilities. The ravers bring their freedom: their moves, raw need, and their arts of presence. For the situationists, the constructed situation had a revolutionary potential, for what the form of life could be after the abolition of the commodity, the spectacle, the whole oppressive totality. I remember some of those intentions still being present in some eighties and nineties rave scenes. Today's raves are hardly a situation that prefigures utopia. They cannot prefigure futures when there may not be any. The constructed situation of the rave may be all some of us have -- even if the revolution comes.

Eso que denominamos «yo» no es más que un conjunto de malos entendidos

He tought I refused the big favours in pursuit of something still-larger, permanent. But the opposite was the case. I did not want to be in his debt. I wanted him to hold me, which he never would, but I wanted no hold over me of any other kind.