Double, Double Toil & Trouble, Part I
Digging into the fleshy textures of communities, conviviality and conspiracy.
🔊 “Watching the people get lairy, It's not very pretty I tell thee…”
Watercolour painting by Martin Richman - https://www.martinrichman.comSomething Wicked This Way Comes
It’s been a long while since I launched a puckish probing piece.
A great deal of wonderful life events happened during the spring and summer, so no apologies for the choice to simply savour all the flourishing under the sun. Nevertheless, a sincere thanks to existing subscribers for patiently waiting!
To those who are new to these eclectic curation of contemplations,
I’m writing from the The Big Smoke, the city known as London.
I hope your curiosity about my series of musings will be satisfied.
This concept of a pome-grenade aims to rehabilitate the metaphor of a ‘truth bomb’ to lessen collateral damage, and rouse for more creative rummage instead. You can also listen to the playlist of soundtracks from each edition so far.
In keeping with Monty Pythonesque inspiration, my inquiries might dance on the blasphemous and heretical. Social media platforms continue to provoke trigger-happy fingers to fire-off flame wars, and I admit to getting entangled in its quarrelsome mechanics. Rather than succumb to the impoverished range of emoji reactions, I endeavour to investigate its ongoing cultural confrontations, aiming to create pathways for germinating reflections.
Full disclosure, this is no attempt at journalism. I like to play at being a field operative of whatever you want to call these ‘times’ - whether stranger than fiction, SNAFU, metamodern, or anthropocene. Readers are welcome to un-pick & mix from troublesome thoughts thrown, and perhaps some serendipitous or sagacious insights might be known.
There’s certainly plenty of hysteria about the business-as-usual spectre of evil or rising threats to society. However, what if, the triumph of the malignant is, not because that some Trump card prevails as such, nor that good folk do nothing, but rather, that ‘wicked’ people are always up to (scheming) something?
I’ve been giving attention to the undercurrent of what takes place behind the screens of curated newsfeeds. While there are many ongoing blazing hostilities relayed by the news, for this dispatch, I shall address a recent flare-up of discord I’ve personally experienced. My focus will be less political ‘global village’ and more about conflicts that arose from a local residential situation, i.e. how renting is increasingly becoming gamified into echo chambers and mob-rule popularity clique-based contests.
To Do Unto Others…
Has anyone recently taken a mandatory Diversity In the Workplace compliance training course? As a university lecturer, I had to review legal definitions and scenarios, then pass a multiple-choice test. In the event that a colleague was to make a questionable faux pas during a casual conversation, the protocol is for the incident to be documented and reported. It’s a reminder, that the original surveillance aren’t CCTV cameras or wiretapping, but simply other people watching, listening and forming opinions or judgment - i.e. your neighbours and colleagues, with eyes and ears for playing spy games.
There’s the notion that silence can lead to complicity, so different groups of “We” are encouraged to speak out, use our voice, stand up for beliefs, share truths and stories, to practice advocacy. People are meant to be clued up about theoretically being badge-wearing and flag-waving allies of equality, diversity and inclusion, but on closer inspection, the practice and experience of these is unsurprisingly, far messier.
To provide some personal background, I was born in the Philippines, which meant that my childhood was shaped by specific types of cultural structures:
1) a post-war 20th century nationalism, strongly influenced by American patriotism, with its political Constitution, prolific flag ceremonies with national anthem and pledge of allegiance to the country,
2) a Folk Catholicism, which was the legacy of Spanish conquistador campaigns of the 16th century, and
3) a Southeast-Asian flavour of archipelagic1 kinship, with large extended clan-family households that stretch to include local provincial communities and global overseas diasporic relations.
In the eighties, I grew up already connected to a large community by consanguinity alone, knowing all their names and birthdays. Try to imagine the size of a clan, where my father has x10 other siblings, and my mother is one of x9. Each aunt/uncle, would have their own partners, with at least x3 children each, so there’s already x50 plus first cousins. Then you take into account the staff of numerous domestic helpers, with different roles, such as nursemaid/nannies, designated cooks, housekeepers, laundresses and drivers. From an early age, I had to figure out my place and belonging in the world, by weaving through layered customs of conduct - how one behaved with family relatives that befitted the reputation of our surname, polite and formal etiquette at public events or social occasions, guidelines for being a law-abiding citizen whether at school or work, and unavoidably, the religious rules and rituals on how to be virtuous followers of the imported polyglot Christian faith.
A snag with the philosophical theory that emphasises the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will - is that a person’s self (or selves) is extended. American sociologist Kenneth Gergen (currently at Swarthmore College) discusses in Relational Being: Beyond Self And Community (2009), how human beings live in worlds of relational confluence [confluentia: to flow together]. This might read as obvious enough, yet one doubts as to whether average social media users are as self-aware of how identities through online profiles have become relentless ‘hive mind’ negotiations, as with the latest bandwagon effect of joining Bluesky. Maybe you’ll remember Margaret Thatcher being controversial that ‘there is no such thing as society’. Perhaps you’re already knowledgeable about the realities of rationalized conformity of Orwellian Groupthink, the dangers of self-reinforcing feedback loops [check out Matt Klein’s AUDIENCE CAPTURE], and you might be keen to read more about constructed myths of belonging through ‘imagined communities’.
Whatever your preferred keyword to recognise an individual’s fundamental need to pursue both personal development and social solidarity, it’s useful to recollect different sources of social cultural analysis. In 1784, Immanuel Kant wrote about ungesellige Geselligkeit or anti-social sociability, then in 1991, Kenneth Gergen challenged the old Descarte notion of cogito ergo sum - with “I’m Linked Therefore I am”. Additionally, it’s worth resurfacing the 1964 investigations of astute scholar Marshall McLuhan, densely shared below:
“The principle of numbness comes into play with electric technology, as with any other. We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed, or we will die. Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness and unconsciousness, in addition.
With our central nervous system strategically numbed, the tasks of conscious awareness and order are transferred to the physical life of man, so that for the first time he has become aware of technology as an extension of his physical body. Apparently this could not have happened before the electric age gave us the means of instant, total field-awareness.
With such awareness, the subliminal life, private and social, has been hoicked up into full view, with the result that we have ‘social consciousness’ presented to us as a cause of guilt-feelings. Existentialism offers a philosophy of structures, rather than categories, and of total social involvement instead of individual separateness or points of view. In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin.”
There’s much to digest in this chunk from the critical edition of Understanding Media, and that’s an understatement given the demand for instant snackable TLDR2 content. The continuous cultural narrative, is that today’s technologies have phenomenally escalated at faster pace, and greater scale, the very old and long traditions of flawed masses of humans who muddle, misinterpret and miscommunicate with their various entangled relationships and connections. It’s humorous to note that the English expression for describing someone who lacks the ability to realize they are being used by someone else, is called ‘a tool’. Fools make tools, and tools shape fools. I suppose social squabbles have always been the human karma, dharma, or collective individuation drama.
Using Media ≠ Understanding Media
It’s of serious concern, that the disembodied platforms of socialising with others, is constrained by limited computer programmed labels, generic mechanics and monetised algorithms. Artificial Intelligence is still only advanced data analytics that churns more of the input it’s been given, yet people are willing to surrender their cognitive functions to the newest high-speed information calculator. The distribution of black mirror portable devices don’t require any proper or mandatory instructional media training, and customers aren’t inducted to read through citizen journalism guidelines or educational critical thinking app. Meanwhile, in the UK, anyone over the age of 13 who wants to go fishing for salmon, trout, freshwater fish, etc, must first obtain an Environment Agency Rod Licence, whereas mobile phones have become the upgraded pacifier replacements for young infants.
The joke seems to be, that there are MORE multi-channel methods of connecting with the many, and people are profusely communicating in terms of spread, distribution and breadth, BUT they are also communicating LESS in terms of depth and meaning.
When the communications technologies were relatively slower with snail mail and wired telephones, perhaps it was easier for people to directly know someone based on consistent experiences through real time interactions in physical spaces, i.e. actual face-to-face time. Not enough people question how people are triggered by content, because they were pre-loaded with context to begin with, but thankfully there is increasing discernment that social media platforms are being used for psychological information warfare.
Perhaps our smart technologies have indeed made us dumber - in the sense of the now outdated definition for those who are ‘mute’ and ‘speechless’. Are we more articulate at conducting in-depth conversations, or are we just snappy chatty? Friends as followers and subscribers get thumbs up/down, digitised hearts and emoji characters, but how much do we truly like, love and talk with all these people that we’re attached to via our profiles? When many are rejecting voice notes and declining phone calls, and preferring to ‘type’ out thumb-based comment flame wars, why have we come to assume that we properly know who people actually are when we 'debate’ them via devices and argue about fragmentary status updates or fleeting stories? How much caring is there in the digital sharing, and does online sharing reflect authentic offline caring?3
There’s so much peer pressure to virtue signal that one is a decent person/friend who supports all the social justice causes and defense of human rights - and while ‘looking good’ is easy enough to curate, there’s more to doing good than meets the eye. This framing is relevant for an incident involving my now ex-neighbours in a certain trendy and desirable area in East London. My paid membership from what I thought to be a relatively peaceful rented living situation was disdainfully terminated due to gossip mongering, and it’s become another case study of how the tyranny of social screening as controlled by algorithms, de/forms the ethics of civil reciprocity in real life.
Despite the odd hesitancy for people these days to distinguish malicious intentions through clandestine scheming, there’s more to life than what’s documented and captured. Do you acknowledge that much takes place that is unseen, and are you willing to explore behind the scenes of what’s going on?
Hell is Other People
In 2021, I moved into a flat, located within a gated Mews - rows of converted dwellings, that is set back privately from the main street. The units are clustered around a long concrete yard, used for carparking, with social areas created into small urban garden patios, mostly reclaimed by chairs, benches, tables and plants. The Covid-19 pandemic was the dominant concern then, and admittedly, this ‘global’ panic did encourage local groups to harmoniously form and bond with sincere support and cooperation. Rituals of survival, resilience, and belonging, emerged in various ways - from the strange and soulful, to the questionable, invented and enforced. My contribution to where I was renting, was the beautification and maintenance of a section marked by a much loved concrete ‘Lockdown Table’ that the neighbours made together. I planted a lemon, lime, and olive tree, and through the years was one of the caretakers of the greenery around. It was a very inviting space to soak the sun during spring and summer months.
There were large gatherings for meals, drinks, and all sorts of convivial creative activities. The cross-pollination of celebratory parties among the units constantly resulted in requests for the return of wayward glassware, generous exchanges of recycled and borrowed items, invitations of other socials and friendly favours. Unsurprisingly, there was a very lively WhatsApp group for both playful banter and practical chatter. Eventually, new members move in, and one of the resident artists also provided additional hospitality, by turning their ground floor window into a free ‘coffee station’. It quickly became a popular haunt of the neighbours, especially as a ‘smoke hole’ for those with tobacco habits. It was a very quaint bar-hub-in-the-wall reminiscent of my travels to Italy and France, or simply like the Filipino sari-sari stores. The coffee window scene became a regular Instagram vignette, the stories appearing like the opening credits start of the Friends sitcom, featuring neighbours tagged by their “@” profile handles. It was very hashtag cool artsy vibe and insider tribe.
Familiarity breeds contempt
It can be a lot of fun and games when one can flock and mingle with other chirpy caffeinated neighbours. The trouble with community, is that you need to preserve the communis by having shared and ‘common’ things. The task of asserting one’s authentic Self, in a web of interrelations, involves intricate calibrations with varying benefits and trade-offs. Personally, I am prone to be keener on the quality of conversations instead of the beverage. Whether hot drinks or more alcoholic concoctions, the main attraction of gatherings are anchored in the more scholastic spectrum of The Breakfast Club. When away from my home lair, I’m present at The Long Now London meetups, attending classes with The Kundalini Yoga Collective, devising commercial projects in partnership with Flux Trends, and figuring out educational solutions for the creative industries at Kingston School of Art.
I have always disliked passively listening to or chiming in on gossip (tsismis in Tagalog), and more significantly, when one is a part-time university lecturer, and full-time Cultural Ecologist working on other income streams seeking community practice opportunities, passing clocked hours in idle chit-chat or surface tittle-tattle is not at all an option.
Consensus can quickly turn into conflict if one becomes too divergent from the crowd. To cut to the chase, as it became evident that I deviated from the demographic group profile of where I lived in Hackney Wick, I was distanced from becoming one of ‘them’ by abstaining from joining frequent fam-bam gang hangs. It didn’t take much to be isolated and ‘othered’, perhaps as the anti-social serious nerd weirdo, rather than revelrous popular party-goer. The scarcity of honest conversations or whole-hearted interactions with my neighbours, resulted in being a convenient scapegoat of unfavourable opinions.
In absence of any inter-actions, I was judged based on impressions from the scant information that could be seen about me. Such public periscopes about who I was/am, is through Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. It only took a sample size of eye raising ‘stories’ and ‘posts’, and it was enough for a few antagonistic critics to use my name in vain as fodder for hearsay. Of course, I cannot fully know what exactly took place, with who, where and when. This is why partaking in rumour mills is pernicious and toxic. I am able to only surmise how I’d been the target of a clique coup, to be replaced by someone more favourable, and a handful of neighbours (witnesses) signalled I’d been the subject of whispered tales behind my back.
I was condemned for my supposedly controversial takes on current events, in particular, that I dared to inquire skeptically about the moral panic of the far-right riots this summer. None of the neighbours sought to speak with me directly, yet found the words instead to influence others into deeming me unsuitable and unacceptable. My flat-mate then made certain conclusions, and I was given notice to seek somewhere else to live, because of ‘not connecting’ and making things ‘uncomfortable’ - despite not having had any disagreements, nor committing any tangible offence or terrible behaviour. “Can’t sit with us?” Can’t live with us either it seems.
Is this an example of being cancelled based on “having different points of view”? Surely, it’s reasonable enough for people to express their changed preferences of who to live with. I was clearly unfairly ousted based on prejudice, from people who simultaneously publicly profess to being allies of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Prejudice:
is an opinion or attitude formed beforehand without sufficient information or from misinformation, that unfavourably affects our thinking about a person or group of people; we feel 'less positive’ about them
To whose Self do we stay true?
In the play Huis Clos / No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, three characters confined to a physical holding room, are also trapped by the judgments of their fellow inmates. "Hell is other people" because of how we are unable to escape the watchful gaze of everyone around us - the panopticon of preconceptions and perceptions. Even then, as of now, is there an authority or expert that decides who ‘I’ or ‘you’, as (insert name) really am/are? In Tools for Conviviality (1973), Ivan Illich explored how tools should be designed to encourage participation, trust, and sociability, rather than enforce power. We must remain wary of cameras and screens, and not trust devices as All Seeing Eyes, to be the source of truths, for indeed “We are threatened by the emergence of an epoch which takes the show for image.”
How might we more meaningfully flesh out our soulful characteristics, away from machine minds and machine hearts? I offer three provocations:
🔴 “In our daily relationships we encounter only partial persons, fragments that we mistakenly presume to be whole personalities. Stability and coherence are generated in our co-active agreements. But these agreements are not binding, and disruptions can occur at any moment. I am not proposing that social life is a grand charade, in which we are all wearing masks to suit the occasion. The metaphor of the mask is misleading, as it suggests there is a “real self” just beneath the guise. For the relational being there is no inside versus outside; there is only embodied action with others… authenticity is a relational achievement of the moment.”
— Kenneth J. Gergen: The Saturated Self - Dilemmas of Identity on Contemporary Life (1991)
🔴 “Traditional visions of action often resort to organic metaphors for their allusions: conflict was chin-to-chin. Combat was hand-to-hand. Justice was an-eye-for-an-eye, a tooth-for-a-tooth. Debate was heart-to-heart. Solidarity was shoulder-to-shoulder. Community was face-to-face. Friendship was arm-in-arm. And, change was step-by-step.”
— Timothy W. Luke: Identity, meaning and globalization: Detraditionalization in postmodern space-time compression (1996)
🔴 “A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”
— C.S. Lewis: Learning in Wartime (1939)
Hi, I’m Rina. I teach Understanding Media & World-building to 1st years, and Customer Mindfulness to 2nd years at Kingston School of Art. I’m on a mission to usher in the revival of the Humanities, scheming for more soulful ways of creative flourishing. I’m looking for accomplices for developing cultural arts business ideas with Rogue Futures Initiatives. Am available for podcast interviews, guest lecturing, and delivering bespoke Cultural Ecology workshops.
Archipelagic means relating to or characteristic of a group of islands and the surrounding sea. The Philippines is located in the Pacific Ocean near the equator, and consists of around 7,640 islands with more than 150 languages.
Too Long, Didn’t Read
It seems the tagline ‘Sharing is Caring’ was trademarked by The Salvation Army since 1950 - https://trademarks.justia.com/761/80/sharing-is-caring-76180417.html
So much in this. Difficult personal testimony but contextualised into deeply pertinent teaching. As ever, lots and lots to pore over. And that clip from Freaks – jeepers, I've not seen this before and it shudders. Thank you for sharing all, intercessional brain servings.
Also, Clique Coup is absolutely our new Bauhaus band name.
So much here that prompts... thoughts, deep, complicated thoughts. And I'm so sorry for what you've had to go through Rina... I don't even have the words, how awful.
Bizarrely, over the course of the weekend (at the People's Day of Death in Liverpool) Freaks was referenced more than once, and I did at one point find myself chanting "one of us, one of us, one of us".