Hyperpetty

Michael Stumpf

“Negativity is a positive task” -Paul Virilio

“Liberation is the exposing of repressive enjoyment” -Ray Brassier

“The forgetting of death becomes death by forgetting” -François Bonnet

“We never communicate” -Jean Baudrillard

The Hyperpetty: the pettier-than-petty

If hyperpettiness exists, today it would be conditioned by our interfacing with technologies of the networked participant; then, a general phenomenology of our technological machines and interfaces would be an exposé of human technological-communicative interactivity. What would this phenomenology have to say to us, from the vantage of the stack, the server, the abandoned TV screen? Would it speak of a sort of replacement of a sort of ‘genuine’ participation, with and for the whole, with an algorithmic facilitation of our engagements? Could it be that humanity has been remade in the image of its own technologies, mind becoming a mere prosthetic relay or circuitry for said technological interfaces, in part due to our inability to think in any way from the vantage of our actual machines? If this could be, then perhaps hyperpettiness at its operational core would truly be a turn of pettiness itself towards the project of human, a turn away from what it is that qualifies us as human: our humanness itself.

Reason as emotional engineering

If we are living in the (end)times of collective obsessive compulsion(s) in which collective technologically-mediated participation is the drive of such hyperpettiness, then we would be collectively compulsed to do and seek anything to take our minds off of our species’ increasingly impending extinction*. Distraction becomes our final ‘salvation’. If we can establish that emotional energy is the main concern of an attention economy, then perhaps we can establish that we are in need of a renewal of emotional engineering proper as such. As Padraig Henry (@k_punk_unlife) has insightfully pointed out in his reading of Spinoza, “Reason is something to be attained — a non-human, abstract-material map for escaping identity and achieving flatline communion with uttunul; Spinoza says you cannot just leap out to reason without undertaking such decoding. So reason = emotional engineering”. How would it be possible to habitualize this form of reason, of emotional engineering? Perhaps we must start with ourselves…

*by extinction, it is more so the extinction of the modernized way of living on Earth, which must give way to a ‘terrestriality’ as Bruno Latour would have it, as Nature has been forcing us into regardless of the societal desire to disregard this climactic-environmental heed

Applied Baudrillardianism

A prime example of hyperpettiness could be any time one has the desire to be negative to another person while online (networked-interfacing communication with the world). Such a virtual action founded in outrage when scaled to a collective level finds us trapped in synchronized, homeostatized ‘cycles of outrage’. As Padraig Henry states, “Outrage reflects a fundamental political misunderstanding, both of our opponents and of the war they are waging. As there is an infinity of things to be outraged about, outrage indefinitely locks us in reactive wars, fought on the enemy’s ground and terms.” So in seeking hyperpetty actions online, we not only negate real action but additionally continually win over the war to the victors who have already won. [see Hidden Brain podcast’s ‘Screaming into the void’ episode for a good summary of the science of viral outrage] It is undeniable that outrage gives us pleasure on an evolutionary level, and this is precisely the readymade architecture of the hyperpetty playground we know as social media (SM). This is why there is little check or balance on outrage anymore, as these are precisely the emotional engineering strategies of the victors: your rage, your emotion itself, is their profit.

Perhaps one of the first ‘fatal strategies’ in the spirit of Jean Baudrillard would thus be to stop reveling in all forms of online vitriol, and to begin understanding its situated-ness in the evolution of the pleasure principle, as well as to stop quantifying social feedback as a means to an end. We could reflect on the modus operandi of sculptor and sound artist Harry Bertoia whose credo said, “Creative and ever without possession, action without self-assertion, development without domination”. This is reminiscent of the Grecian concept of askesis, or a sort of quasi-spiritual mindfulness that can serve as the basis for a sort of self-discipline, which perhaps can function as
a true buttress to our need for an undertaking of emotional (and behavioral) re-engineering (or unlearning/re-orientating) beginning with the individual.

In my reading of the works of Baudrillard, I find many of his ideas quite applicable to some of these scenarios (namely hyperrealities created en masse by what he calls the ‘ecstasy of communication’, engendered by the postmodern condition). I find this sort of ecstasy of the desire to participate and to communicate to be the engine of the conditioning of hyperpettiness,
in terms of a mutation of the hyperreal’s actual reality principle into a more base form or swiftness of judgement of others that is already inherent in our categorizing natures. As the hyperreal is at its core a simulation of the real, based on some aspect of the real, which itself becomes more real than the real as such, in the same sense, the hyperpetty would then be a simulation of the essence of human pettiness, based on some aspect of innate biological human pettiness — the pettiness in our nature — that itself becomes more petty than petty, in thereby turning us away from our true purpose of the further development of the potentiality of human. Baudrillard would say that in an Umwelt of hyperreality “we never communicate” and that thereby digitally-native Millenials (and all younger generations) have always lived in the very scenario of the onset of hyperreality (think Jurassic Park, the early 90’s) — although Baudrillard says himself that part of the problem of the hyperreal is precisely that we could never locate, historiographically or otherwise, its precise onset, like a needle lost in the haystack of human history. This is because of the reduction of everything to the digital or the infinitely reproducible image, that is, to mere appearance and disappearance, to the play and ceremony of the image: the domination of looks, the domination of the sensation of the eye/sight/the gaze/visibility. This phenomenon has only perfected itself further with the ubiquity of the screen via devices such as the smartphone (how ironically named) which began its silent domination in the West by the late 2000’s — such is the nature of the mutable phenomenology of the machines — until it proliferated across the globe. We notice this additionally in the ubiquitous use of social media and all the
hyperpetty-addictive architectures which they are founded upon by design (think Instagram, notifications, the app-ification of Life itself). To quote a parallel idea via Baudrillard, “Cinema is fascinated by itself as a lost object just as it (and we) are fascinated by the real as a referential in perdition.” As such he expounded that, “we are no longer fighting our shadows, but
transparency” (The Art of Disappearance).

Pettfluentiality and conviction

Social media is a major mediator and facilitator of the conditions for the hyperpetty — virtual ‘actions’ people are enabled to take using SM, such as
unfollowing/blocking/downvoting/commenting, etc; the hyperpetty is more petty than petty: think a petty interaction with a stranger in the street who says something unpleasant in passing versus a troll on SM who is able to make more than a ‘passing’ remark, and even has the power to attempt to destroy an online persona/assassinate a person’s very online character in the court of anarchy of the Internet. We are well beyond the point where the toxicity of the-being-online has begun to make its hideous appearance in the form of severe addiction to the Internet itself (from which people actually do die), as well as to their own appearance (and even aura) as reproduced by their SM network/existence/selfie/presence in the hive of informational flow as determined by the arbiters of technology. It would seem that the more petty the cultural commentary today, especially in the context of SM, the more social clout awarded via the cybernetic setup and monetization of interactions: pettfluencers! It seems rather undeniable that this matrix is negative for human society in the long term, in the way that the petty (the pettier-than-petty) is always voraciously prioritized. As Virilio has said, “Interactivity is to information (in the fundamental sense of the word information) what radioactivity is to nature” (The Accident of Art).

If the condition of the postmodern (or what we may begin to recognize now with hindsight as the true preindustrial!) can be associated with a ‘vertigo of identity’ for the subject, then perhaps the hyperpetty allows for, in the basest way, the fulfillment of identity, in the form of pett-fluentiality; praise for the very level of trollery, or negative-nihilistic prodding/poking at another’s virtual identity, which creates a positive feedback loop of pettfluence (the more hyperpetty, the more pettfluence). We can easily begin to see how such online pettiness fully bleeds into our ‘IRL’ lived timelines as well, becoming another appendage to the hyperreal phenomenon itself. As Guy Debord famously said, “the spectacle epitomizes the prevailing model of social life, above all the triteness of what passes for critical consciousness, above all those institutions devoted, as they say, to learning…the violence, that is to say, of an array of preapproved attitudes, poses, lifestyle choices, and disaffections [[think idpol]]…whatever your longing, the Ideal Commodity has already expressed it for you, even this. It is everything and nothing and is just as naked. As naked as any “passionate intensity” that “bears witness to a lack of true conviction” (from Soft Commodity to Commodity Hardcore, simply dial the number).” But on the flipside as Nietzsche warned, “convictions are prisons”. Perhaps the crux may be to bear no convictions as the very means of bearing any true conviction!

Baudrillard has said that there is nothing more real than a television, turned on and playing, alone and abandoned in an empty room. This in fact may be the ‘perfected vision’ of the hyperreal — we would not even need to know what is on this metaphorical TV, it is simply on — it has taken on a life unto itself — the ghost inside the machine is living and breathing in its electricity. Perhaps Netflix is happily, amusingly playing on its screen, for no one at all.

Admissability of thought & the politics of recognition

Can we envision any alternative to this hyperreal, hyperpetty, networked, online existence? How can we manifest and bootstrap a fatal strategy that is in any way scalable, for offline Life? Was this not what much of the pre-COVID DIY scene offered, in essence? Perhaps even this retrospective analysis is idealistic? Should we begin to ban the use of screens in such spaces, the ‘carving out’ of offline-ness as the new form of the simulacra of the sacred event or spiritual-collective act (Bataillean sense)? Perhaps we need a return to the unassailably covert hyperlocal/ism: to ‘secret’ societies of a new sort, now ‘secret’ in the sense that they operate on a shared self interest in offline activation e.g. crypto/algo raves? Perhaps this is the beginnings of another fatal strategy? At the very least, it would seem such measures about becoming more intentional about understanding that these very spaces are for creating offline Life, and thereby for recovering non-mediated human interactivity and participation, perhaps a sort of open-source localism of the event. As Baudrillard foresaw and advised, we should, “promote a clandestine trade in ideas, of all inadmissible ideas, of unassailable ideas…for we are already in a state of full-scale prohibition. Thought has become an extremely rare commodity…which has to be cultivated in secret places following esoteric rules.”

I think it is also important to think about the politics of recognition, especially keeping in mind as a talisman that the surface has overtaken the depth, as the image has overtaken the core: what has been lost as a result? We have only begun to ask the questions… Also let us reflect on the realization that representation is merely a means to no ends, namely a means of the reproduction of capital and spectacle. To quote Boris Groys in his excellent essay “Anti-philosophy and the Politics of Recognition”:

Indeed, the word “recognition” is politically ambivalent. A politics of recognition is often understood as a politics of including the excluded. But such a politics of inclusion, which presupposes the improvement of the living conditions of the excluded, is precisely directed towards the elimination of the meta -position that is occupied by the excluded. The politics of total inclusion aims to get rid of the space outside of society, to eliminate any external, potentially critical position towards society as a whole. This politics calls for everybody to play by the same rules, to obey the same laws, to pursue the same goals, to be seen and treated like everybody else and to see and treat everybody else in the same way. Obviously, the inclusivist recognition runs contrary to a philosophical, exclusionist recognition that does not aim to integrate the excluded into the societal whole but rather uses the recognized precisely as a point outside the society from which this whole can be contemplated, criticized, and eventually transformed. Politically, here lies the difference between social-democratic and communist politics — between improving the situation of the working class inside the existing bourgeois society and establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat. It is important to see that the choice between inclusivist and exclusivist forms of recognition does no t depend on “what the working class really wants.” The reason for this is very simple: the individual members of the working class are confronted by the same choice. They too can try to become integrated into society and make a career inside it, or they ca n try to change it in its entirety. If the subject chooses the path of philosophical recognition, they also choose the path of revolutionary activism — or in other words, they choose the risk of death.

Rationality and hyperpettiness

If for Quentin Meillassoux, “rationality allows us to think in an intelligently-insane way”, then irrationality on the flipside would be allowing one to think in a stupidly-sane way, that is, exactly the way people think when choosing to interact via SM. Hyperpettiness is therefore premised on our own choice to think irrationally with our own attention-expenditures rather than rationally, to become ‘users’ of the sort of irrational hyperpettiness that the capitalist market/marketer feeds on for their attention economics. [Perhaps this is the ‘lower valence’ state of energy required by a late capitalist subject?] Capital is making us irrationally hyperpetty. This is deeply damaging to the social fabric of any society. In today’s online ecosystem, acts of hyperpettiness may please a participant in the form of a few serotonin droplets from likes/hearts in the immediate future, but in the slightly-further-off-than-immediate-future it has already succeeded in beginning to trap users into further pursuing, irrationally, a life which is increasingly being mediated by social media giants. In this way, SM has been devised to reward users for their negativity [‘hotness’ or ‘controversial-ness’ or ‘woke-ness’] of a given ‘take’ on a given topic in order to spur on in a positive feedback mechanism furthermore hyperpetty engagement, which is ultimately all to ensure market success/profit of SM corporations, not healthfulness/positive development of the mind of the user. This form of libidinal entrapment into becoming a user of hyperpettiness — a pettfluencer — used by SM corporations to spur on online engagement of the subject not only profits the corporate owners of the given company, but also directly detriments the broader social fabric of any society thereby, in hoarding attention to purely hyperpetty ends. If we are all to become accustomed and conditioned to the fundamental hyperpettiness of online-mediated discourse (or what François Bonnet refers to as a sort of daily
‘synchronization’), what implications does this have on our species’ very ability to think rationally, whether individually or collectively (or, non-fascistically)? In the words of Padraig Henry, “in place of liberal commonsense, we need to insist on taking Marx’s Gothic descriptions of capital very seriously. Capital is the hypernatural vampire, the zombie-maker, the self-engendering monstrosity, a planetary artificial intelligence.”

Final reflections

In his formulation of metamodernism, Hanzi Freinacht has said, “‘economy’, or to ‘economize’, is all about behaviors and relations. It’s about the behaviors we spend our time doing and towards which relations we direct our attention.” This cognizance of our existence in an attention-based economics pairs well with Bonnet’s insistence on a return to mortality, beyond the synchronized repetition of routinized interaction and towards difference, towards the multiple, and away from uniformity and homogenizing systems of control and domination. As Bonnet said we must kill off our “selfishness to infinity” which SM libidinally provides us with in full, which can be accomplished by remembrance of our mortality, mindfulness of our finitude as the gateway to a fuller, more enriched and aware, presenced experience of Life and being.

-Michael Stumpf
Chicago, May 2021