Theorizing “Algorithmic Sabotage”
The “Manifesto” articulates a systematically structured sequence of ten distinct propositions, enumerated from 0 to 9, each delineating the underlying principles, strategic approaches, and aesthetic manifestations that shape the critical concept of “algorithmic sabotage” within the expansive and intricately interwoven frameworks of digital culture and information technology.
- “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.
Interventions:
The problem with most manifestos is that every second word is more than 10 characters long. Why? Can you not write what you want to say in as few words as possible, and in a way it even can be understood by people whose native language is not English? Come on, give me an ELI5 please, I want to fight AI but I don't want to have to wade through word salad to do so.
Because when people write manifestos, they are often trying to convince the reader that they are highly intelligent more than they are trying to plainly explain themselves. They are usually a product of mania.
I remember someone in a copaganda show once saying something along the lines of “whenever someone writes a manifesto, it’s either insane ramblings, or pseudo-intellectual ramblings full of big words that they picked out of a thesaurus and misused.” And sure enough, every single time I’ve seen a manifesto, it neatly fits into one of those two categories.