Escaping 1997

Escaping 1997
=============
by Oli on April 16, 2024

<https://olimould.files.wordpress.com/2024/04/image.png>

Have you noticed that we're stuck in the year of 1997? If you call
recall that time, it was the apotheosis of neoliberalism with Bill
Clinton securing a second term as US president and Tony Blair
blustered into Number 10 riding the coattails of Cool Britannia
culture and associated celebrities. While the presidents and prime
ministers have changed, the socio-political fabric of capitalist
realism has not. Furthermore, 1997 saw perhaps one of the most
affective tricks used by the architects of this neoliberal peak to
nullify critique. Because as Blair entered government, he set to task
marketizing whatever of the artistic and cultural landscape was left
over from Thatcher's gutting of the Arts Council, creating the now
artistically malignant, obdurately pervasive, and globally ubiquitous
creative industries.

<https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/39227/the-creative-
industries-are-hurting-not-helping-artistswe-need-a-new-model>

<https://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/8435>

1997 therefore signalled the highly effective conquest of market
ideologies within the cultural realm, and we have been paying the
very high price--both figuratively and literally--ever since. That
is because the paragons of this neoliberal profit-generating-machinic
perfection knew all too well the power of the human imagination in
creating alternative worlds. The artistic spirit and the political
weapons it can wield needed to be tamed and domesticated in the
service of extending neoliberalism's reach into the cultural sphere.
Neoliberalism's goal is to rein in the artist, to give her no other
option than to use her immense talent and skill to create surplus
value that can be extracted. Hence, the practices of artistic
production in the service of the radical imagination of a better,
just, inclusive, common future, via political economic implements of
austerity and a broader push towards 'professionalisation', became
overwhelmingly redirected towards the reproduction of the neoliberal
present day.

<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68267257>

Art that is resistive, overtly political, subversive, or essentially
cannot be appropriated into a neoliberal mindset is now, in the eyes
of the system, merely a hobby; a quaint pastime that because it
doesn't have an immediate financial motive, can only really be
tolerated so long as it sustains people to do other work that does.
In essence, living in 1997 means that art is first and foremost a
financial activity that replicates the social conditions of 1997 ad
infinitum, and doesn't err to realise any of the multiple possible
post-capitalist futures that exist beyond that. You can be artistic
as you please, as long as it paints a picture that already exists.

Technological lock-in
=====================
Of course, to suggest that we're still in 1997 is absurd given our
digitally connected world, right? The democratising technologies of
the world wide web, planetary information and cultural systems,
real-time news consumption, smart phones, and social media; they all
wrought such a seismic shift to our creative and artistic
sensibilities that surely, we're beyond the analogue 90s? Sadly not.
As Cory Doctorow aptly put it, the internet has undergone rampant
enshittification at the hands of corporations that operate under the
same neoliberal logic that smothered the world in 1997 (which
incidentally, was the year that google.com was officially registered
as a domain). Furthermore, the decreasing barriers to entry for
creative work and artistic production that the digital revolution has
brought about has simply ramped up the "hobbification" of the power
of art. After all, anyone with a smart phone can call themselves a
photographer, but all this does is decrease the ability of actual
professional photographers to make a living through their art, and
hence tightens neoliberalism's hold over the reins of the artist.

<https://archive.is/ARIcW>

<https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230417-hustle-culture-
is-this-the-end-of-rise-and-grind>

<https://olimould.files.wordpress.com/2024/04/image-1.png>

And anyway, where has this supposed emancipating digital revolution
led us? The unleashing of artificial intelligence and it's highly
deleterious impact upon art and culture. Many of the critics of AI
bemoan how rather than the future we were promised of robots and AI
replacing the manual work, domestic tasks and back-breaking labour so
we can all enjoy a life of leisure, creativity and commonality, it
has instead usurped the artist, the author, the musician, the
filmmaker; those people who are at the forefront of imagining a
better world. But surely, from the point of view of a capitalist
realist, that is the very point! AI is the creation of the nonpareils
of neoliberalism in the ideological crucible, Silicon Valley, so of
course it will look to further nullify the human artistic
imagination. Indeed, via AI's incursion into art, the automation of
the process of artistic appropriation has been totally perfected.
Before the dawn of AI, neoliberalism had to expend valuable resources
(in terms of policy diktats, resisting protests, implementing
austerity on cultural institutions etc.) in marshalling artists into
servicing the perpetuation of 1997. Now, that entire process itself
is automated, and artists have become locked out of the production
process entirely. Those reins on the artist have become chains. AI
has been sent from 1997 to terminate the post-capitalist future.

Therefore, as Mark Fisher said so prophetically, there has been a
"slow cancellation of the future" and in the time since 1997--30-odd
years of cultural and artistic impotence characterised by irrelevant
remakes, cinematic universes, band reunion tours, and endless
nostalgia industry--he has been proved depressingly correct. Nothing
new has penetrated the cultural zeitgeist that has irrevocably
shifted the status quo of capitalist realism that the Thatcherite
forms of neoliberalism perfected. Even while the broader political
pendulum swings between the pervasive neoliberal consensus of 1997
and the reactionary fascism that it brings about, it exists as part
of a fractalized political economy that continually gravitates around
the original appropriation in 1997 of culture by neoliberalism. Those
fractals become ever more nuanced with the introduction of AI, given
that it scrapes existing images, text, video--often without the
permission of the artist--to replicate the images, words, and films
that the prompts ask it to. Hence the automation of banal artistic
production that AI has ushered in has done away with any semblance of
newness that might have been present with human artists, instead
producing a future that is a highly complex, algorithmic, and
machinic, but ultimately simply a continual rearrangement of the
present. Hence, we are doomed to be administered palliative reruns
and remakes until capitalism has metastasized into a season ending
climate catastrophe.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ>

Material matters
================
The key to escaping 1997, and to enter the twenty first century that
we were promised, is therefore not to try and battle neoliberalism
for the future (that is a battle that cannot be won as the fight is
rigged anyway), but to smuggle the very real practices of artistic
materiality from the past. This is more than simply working with our
bodies artistically (and hence removing the threat of AI), to think
this is to fetishize corporeal artistic practices. Instead, focusing
on the materiality of our collective cultural practices means leaving
something tangible and visceral in the world that affects it: an
object, an echo, a vibration, an experience.

Walter Benjamin can help us understand this when he argued that in
pre-modern (read pre-capitalist, or at least, pre-industrial) times,
art held an 'aura', a unique, almost mystical quality that was tied
materially to its place and creation in time and space. The aura of a
painting, a sculpture, an image, or a text was intrinsically
connected to the artwork's singularity, its creative process, and its
embedded history as a single, authentic object. It was in many
respects, anti-technological.

<https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf>

<https://olimould.files.wordpress.com/2024/04/image-3.png?w=1024>

An approach sympathetic to this Benjaminian view may perhaps signal a
form of neo-Ludditism, recovering manual crafts, analogue
technologies and even a revivification of revolutionary practices of
Situationism, Surrealism and their ilk. Maybe that's needed. But
refusing technology will only go so far. As Fisher argued in Acid
Communism, there is a materiality in the consciousness of
revolutionary thought. He was arguing for a revival of the
psychedelic culture precisely because it was uncapturable by the
neoliberal machinery. He argued that "despite all the mysticism and
pseudo-spiritualism which has always hung over psychedelic culture,
there was actually a demystificatory and materialist dimension". For
Fisher, there was indeed a subversive potential to contemporary
culture (i.e. that which exists in the pervasive present of 1997) if
it can only navigate the alluring, yet dangerous, tentacles of
neoliberal appropriation. He saw many subcultural movements such as
rave, punk, hip-hop, arthouse cinema and even individual artists able
to do this because they had a material aspect. Within rave culture,
its emancipatory potential came about by people being together, often
illicitly in abandoned warehouses, taking illegal drugs. Punk wasn't
just about the music, it was about tangible phenomena like fashion,
the venues, the styles, the very human way of interacting with each
other (by famously swearing on TV). Even the newer music genres of
grime and dril rely on a distinct connection with place, often a
stigmatised urban territory.

<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/17/
humanitys-remaining-timeline-it-looks-more-like-five-years-than-50-
meet-the-neo-luddites-warning-of-an-ai-apocalypse>

<https://my-blackout.com/2019/04/25/
mark-fisher-acid-communism-unfinished-introduction/>

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtHPhVhJ7Rs>

<https://www.urbangeographyjournal.org/journal/book-reviews/
terraformed-by-joy-white>

For Fisher, the beating heart of any subculture was its potential to
serve as catalysts for emancipatory social transformation, albeit on
a 'small' (personal, local or urban) scale at first, but with the
power to echo through society. The gatherings and expressions of
like-minded subversives, whether through underground music scenes,
radical artistic communities, hackers, or cyberpunk collectives, were
not isolated phenomena. They were dynamic material microcosms where
new forms of resistance and resilience took shape. Subcultural
spaces, mostly in the Western urban environment (notably around
Southeast London where he taught in Goldsmiths) incubated innovative
paradigms of thinking, collective identities, and modes of critique.
These, he fervently believed, were the building blocks of a new
social order.

Escape
======
1997 saw the imposition of neoliberalism into art practice, the
marketing of the creative industries as a global policy initiative,
and the professionalisation of culture as a financialised incentive.
In so doing, it nullified the very DNA of art, that of human
emancipation, political fermenting, and revolutionary potentialities.
It then unleashed AI onto the world to eradicate that potentiality
completely.

1997 leached the very materiality of artistic practice from us.
Reclaiming it represents an act of resistance, a way to reconnect
with the elements of creative practice that are yoked in human
experience, emotion, and interaction. By reasserting the material
value of the tangible over the virtual, the emotive over the
commodified, and the common over the individualized, the public over
the private; maybe we can begin to escape the 1997 neoliberal time
loop we're stuck in.

From: <https://tacity.co.uk/2024/04/16/escaping-1997/>