by hand

“…and no one will even argue with you.”
(Ai Wei Wei (2011) on Beijing’s Nightmare City)

SMOOTH GENERATION (Berardi, 2009a:85)
the IDEOLOGY OF TRANSPARENCY (Negri, 2009:50)

“To drag out our days in a greenhouse, is that living?” they asked (Vaneigem, 1967:chpt6)

This is not a universal concentration camp, we say. It is not insane because everything is ordered[1]. That is, we live in a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom (Berardi, 2009b:48) of togetherness and team play (Bookchin, 1974:51). The stains of human passion are lost (Ellul, 1964:427) – bathed in hygiene and light[2] (Kaufmann, 2001) the clean replaces the dusty, while the bald prevails over the hairy (Berardi, 2009b:114). Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning; night and summer lose their charm and dawn disappears (Chtcheglov, 1953). Now we can (practically, realistically) conceive of a technocratic, hygienic utopia[3] functioning in a void of human possibilities (Steiner, 1974:58) while breeding aggression (Marcuse, 1968) – “the video game generation does not tolerate pubic hair” (Berardi, 2009a:85). This is real, but definitely not in the way that real things are real (Davis, 2002:6, quoting the child of a friend). This is your life, aggregated by other people’s cameras (Bill Nguyen[4]).
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[1] But the insanity of the society is rational to the degree which it is efficient (Marcuse, 1968) – the rational is always the rationality of an irrational. Reason is always a region cut out of the irrational – not sheltered from the irrational, but a region traversed by the irrational and defined only by a certain relation between irrational factors (Deleuze in Deleuze and Guattari, Undated Interview:3).

[2] But in this age of enlightenment, much of the world remains stooped in black tunnels, tracing veins deeper into darkness (Genoways, 2010).

[3] No matter how sleek and earth-friendly these devices may appear, they rise from the dirt and are mined with sweat and with blood (Genoways, 2010).

[4] Talking about Color – Quoted in Carr (2011).