I write a lot of shit that could be categorized as "experimental writing." It could be categorized that way because that's exactly what it is. I use a lot of different methods, techniques, processes, whatever. While there are often stages of processes that contain aspects of randomization, and while some of the writing may appear to be random, gibberish, or nonsensical, I actually put a lot of thought into my creations. Occasionally I whip out a piece very quickly, but that's a rare occurence that is usually only possible because the conceptual inspiration is brilliant. Ahem.
I also have a compulsive/obsessive need to categorize (and name) anything I create. See for example, haiQu, and haikuku.
In early iterations of this blog, I used a lot of tags to categorize content. But as the number of tags increased, the effect was opposite of my intention. Too many choices can be paralyzing, as anyone who's spent 90 minutes viewing trailers while searching for a movie to watch, can attest.
I recently stumbled on the phrase Algorithmic Sabotage (see below), and I have appropriated the phrase as a catch-all category for the work posted here that is experimental. This allows me to keep the site taxonomy manageable.
Blog posts are somewhat comprehensible thoughts on random topics. That Time posts are a form of creative memoir writings. Poetry is (somewhat) regular poetry, or at least things that most people would recognize as such. Everything else is Algorithmic Sabotage.
Oh yeah, my invocations are double-tagged as Invocation and Algorithmic Sabotage, because they straddle the line. They could also be tagged as Poetry, but I'm doing my best to not get carried away.
Origin of Algorithmic Sabotage
The Manifesto on “Algorithmic Sabotage” is a preliminary version of ten statements, numbered 0 to 9, on the principles, strategies and aesthetics of “algorithmic sabotage”. The purpose of the Manifesto on “Algorithmic Sabotage” is not only a theoretical dissemination of militant algorithmic agency and resistance, but the diffusion of radical theory/criticism that stems from the energy of insurrectionary desire. — Anonymous Partisan
The above quote, and the Manifesto below, is copied from ASRG. I am not affiliated with them, except in spirit.
Much of my writing, especially the more experimental stuff, is a protest against the status quo. I am fed up with gatekeepers and their algorithmic tyranny. I am exhausted by a lifetime of trying to make sense out of a senseless world. This little blog of mine is me standing on my saponaceous box on one small street corner in Whoville.
"We are here! We are here! We are here!
Manifesto on “Algorithmic Sabotage"
- “Algorithmic Sabotage” is a figure of techno-disobedience for the militancy that’s absent from technology critique.
- Rather than an atavistic aversion to technology, “Algorithmic Sabotage” can be read as a form of counter-power that emerges from the strength of the community that wields it.
- “Algorithmic Sabotage” cuts through the capitalist ideological framework that thrives on misery by performing a labour of subversion in the present, dismantling contemporary forms of algorithmic domination and reclaiming spaces for ethical action from generalized thoughtlessness and automaticity.
- “Algorithmic Sabotage” is an action-oriented commitment to solidarity that precedes any system of social, legal or algorithmic classification.
- “Algorithmic Sabotage” is a part of a structural renewal of a wider movement for social autonomy that opposes the predations of hegemonic technology through wildcat direct action, consciously aligned itself with ideals of social justice and egalitarianism.
- “Algorithmic Sabotage” radically reworks our technopolitical arrangements away from the structural injustices, supremacist perspectives and necropolitical authoritarian power layered into the “algorithmic empire”, highlighting its materiality and consequences in terms of both carbon emissions and the centralisation of control.
- “Algorithmic Sabotage” refuses algorithmic humiliation for power and profit maximisation, focusing on activities of mutual aid and solidarity.
- The first step of techno-politics is not technological but political. Radical feminist, anti-fascist and decolonial perspectives are a political challenge to “Algorithmic Sabotage”, placing matters of interdependence and collective care against reductive optimisations of the “algorithmic empire”.
- “Algorithmic Sabotage” struggles against algorithmic violence and fascist techno-solutionism, focusing on artistic-activist resistances that can express a different mentality, a collective “counter-intelligence”.
- “Algorithmic Sabotage” is an emancipatory defence of the need for communal constraint of harmful technology, a struggle against the abstract segregation “above” and “below” the algorithm.