Behind the desire to blockchainify social relations and organizations is an older desire to formalize sociality. This desire is one admits on one hand the need to embrace the anarchic material, psychical, social and aesthetic production of social formation – which unspools in so-called “lumpen” milieus of art spaces, nightclubs, queer families, mutual aid chats, and community spaces. But they are haunted, neurotically, by the watchword of Silicon Valley: scale, or rather, scalability: a social form’s potential to scale. Scalability is not ready-made; social relations must be contorted and molded to scale.
Scalability is written as hard protocol. Take on one hand the concept of object orientation in computer programming. A set of actions and functions are recognized by the programmer as reusable, or reproducable (The Character or item in the game, the Bubble or particle in the Processing sketch). Those actions (verbs) are templated (objectified), and given attributes: properties and methods. Objects are instantiated across local domains with local variations (the enemies in this.world are blue, the enemies in that.world are red), but in according the global formula delimiting their possibilities. Flexibility is the other watchword. Stretch out for a moment: how flexible do you feel in these technofeudalist regimes?[
On another track: In organizing the labor union at SAIC, I rushed to put on my socialist hat despite my affinity with the anarchic. The scale of organizing 400+ faculty from disparate domains of practice and pedagogy required, so it is wagered, some formal and discursive unity. The professional unionists come in with strategies, calendars, and conversation templates. Communicate with your comrades about your frustrations with the employer, we all have those in common. And away things go: communicate communicate communicate, whatever is incommunicable is noise.
I think it is worth listening a lot more to noise. I think about my friend Claire, who in response to union efforts, said that they would organize a party, cook a dinner, but they’re not going to get on a fucking zoom meeting. In the union’s terms, their noise has signaled their classification as a “2-supporter”, where as the designation “1-activist” implies their signaling participation in union efforts, aside “3-undecided” and the final “4-anti-union”, which signifies their participation by way of opposition. Four Become One. The possibility of receiving the signal is which is both encoded by the union as a set of criteria, loose or otherwise, which is to be decoded. May Four Solidarities Flourish.
In that noise, a lurking potential unrecognizable to the union’s hard protocols, not defined by their rank and file objectification. Noise extremely heard, not as a signal to be recognized, classified, and objectified, but as a nascent proposal: we don’t know yet what a party or a meal can do. Modes of Listening.