LaBelle on utilising the network for collectivising people. Sonic Agency, chpt 3.
LaBelle explores the tensions between our digital networks and political agency. He points out the intensity of the digital condition is due to a constant exposure to otherness. Digital media connects us to a chain of other bodies, cultures, identities and ideas, therefore extending ourselves into the network. The forces of this extension are both “internal” and “external”: as LaBelle points out, we have an innate curiousity for the “other”, in it’s disturbing nature, for the potential of connection or even love, while at the same moment we are pulled by algorithms to take part in cognitive labour and data production for the production of capital.
The algorithms used by digital mass media companies harness our desires for connection to take part in an endless stream of communications. LaBelle points out the “restless activeness” of this condition; the digital condition requires a “sheltering” and “commonality” that can protect us from exhaustion and instability. Yet at the same moment, we must expand our reach to the “other”, towards diversity, in a time of intense precarity and domination, where more and more humans are in need of care and resources.
LaBelle’s conclusions of this chapter propose questions about these tensions: that the network may decrease our prejudice, particularly if we disrupt regular patterns of consumption, and at the same time increase our need for sheltering and commonality, which can mean an isolation from that network. He asks how can we utilise the power of the network, to bring political democracies into global power structures? By structuring grassroots movements in the way our economies have been globalised, may we have a chance of resisting global capitalism?
LaBelle’s nuance in relation to the digital condition, that it is neither wholly bad or wholly good, inspires my ideas for the radio project. We want to use internet streaming for its accesibility and reachability. We also want to use UAL’s resources to fascillitate this streaming, so they can be burdened with any costs and euipment it may require. In alignment with LaBelle’s readings of “pirate politics”, we are looking for alternative streaming methods that do not rely on large streaming services. How can this theory of “squatting the network” by imagined in the form of the radio project at UAL?