My Politics
Politics, ideologies, and the future
Manifesto"Reading manifestos can feel like being on fire. We light up aflame and then are left raw and exposed. Manifestos operate as an infectious, contagious kind of document, one that purposefully ignites readers..." (The Bleeding Edge: On the Necessity of Feminist Manifestos) “Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression and so of possibility.” (A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Harroway, 1991)
Manifestos desire blood. Be free, and break things!
Marxist-feminism
"In our current society, women are the proletariat of the proletariat, a super-exploited subsect of the working class. Female oppression is everywhere; it is heavily coded into our social norms, our laws, and our culture; it is what Raquel Gutíerrez calls, “the labyrinth of male domination.”[3] For every valiant Emily Brontë, writing futuristic matinal women who break through the dark heavens of the provincially backward, fundamentally Victorian moorlands, there is a misogynistic Hegel, throwing aside his philosophical clairvoyance to raise an arrogant finger in the air, thereby vomiting: “The difference between man and woman is the difference between animal and plant.”[4] Fine, I say! If women are plants, then let us be the most gorgeous of Neriums, dripping our poison into the tongue of class society — for Hegel forgets, a plant can be just as determined as the fiercest of beasts." Revolution Through a Woman’s Eyes: A History and Manifesto of Marxist Feminism
Solarpunk
Solarpunk is eco-futurism: the discovery of postcapitalist sustainability and communities creating art and vision to imagine it. It is a movement that rejects dystopia, and embraces optimism. Yet, it is not utopia that ignores the struggles taken to get there; solarpunk acknowledges the effect of colonialism on the natural world, and is a conceptual space that embraces the "other", those who have been rejected. Solarpunk values what can be done by the individual, but also values what must be done together. From A Solarpunk Manifesto: "Solarpunk is at once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, a way of living and a set of achievable proposals to get there".
Anarchafeminism
I build on several manifestos. Sources will be listed.
Liberation for all women: Not one less! Ni una menos! Either all, or none of us will be free.
The Sovereign State is an instrument of the Sovereign Sex. The world is currently divided into states, meaning there is not a single piece of land where we can escape. So we are forced to live under state rule which, in turns, also means we are forced to live under men’s rule. [...] There cannot be a feminist state because feminism means liberation of all women and the state is the tool whereby a minority of people rules over the vast majority of them." (Anarchafeminist Manifesto 1.0 , The Ongoing Collective)
Another woman is possible.
"Women’s bodies [...] are bodies in plural because they are processes constituted by mechanisms of affects and associations that occur at the inter-, intra– and the supra-individual level. [...] [I]f we look beyond those boundaries and consider the totality of the cells comprising human bodies, as well as the relations between them [...] we [can] speak about “womanhood” outside of any heteronormative framework. [...] All the way up to ways of being woman that have not yet been invented because another woman is not just possible: it has also, always, already began. Against the violence perpetrated in the name of gender binarism, homo-phobia and trans-phobia, we anarchafeminists call for the liberation of all women." (Anarchafeminist Manifesto 1.0 , The Ongoing Collective)
Transindividual feminism, cont.
"Only if women bodies are theorized as processes, as sites of a process of becoming that takes place at different levels, only then will we be able to speak about 'women' without incurring the charge of essentialism or culturalism. [...] Developing the concept of women as open processes also means going beyond the individual versus collectivity dichotomy: if it is true that all bodies are transindividual processes, then the assumption that there could be such a thing as a pure individual, who is separate, or even opposed, to a given collectivity, is at best a useless abstraction and at worst a deceitful phantasy." (Chiara Bottici: Anarchafeminism) Every woman, or no woman! "If fighting the oppression of women means we have to fight all forms of oppression, then statism and nationalism cannot be any exception. If one begins by looking at the dynamics of exploitation by taking state boundaries as an unquestionable fact, one will automatically end up reinforcing the very oppression that one was meant to question in the first place." (Chiara Bottici: Anarchafeminism)
...The changes must begin today, not tomorrow or after the revolution. The revolution shall be permanent.
Cyber-feminism and the decentralized internet
Cyber-feminism is third-wave feminism coined in 1994, grouping feminist ideological exploration that discovers the intersections and winding backroads between the Internet, cyberspace, new-media technology, and the feminist movement.
Technology was commonly viewed as male-dominant and male-created at the time cyber-feminism was experiencing its first period of growth, so women being able to interact sufficiently with "informatics of domination", as Donna Haraway puts it, challenges the interactive and ever-changing demeaning structures of sophisticated technology.
This is where the decentralization of the web comes into play. Main-stream cyber-feminist literature has not come into the spotlight for a long while, especially as the centralized Internet has become a playground for infighting, boundary-drawing, and general ideological fracturing (with many unconscious of the real effect of fractured minorities). No longer are women utilizing the Internet as a 'socialist, feminist cyborg'.
Let's present this shift as the shift into the centralized Internet. I was born in 2008, and grew up in the capitalist jungle-landscape that is the Big Social Media Platforms. I learned as a child: do not put your personal information on the internet (it will be sold), do not send regrettable messages to your friends (it will be posted for all to see!), and do not click links on advertisements (that are posted on the platforms I use). For a long while now, I have been experimenting with the remnants of the Old Internet, the internet in which you must program, toggle, reload, click keys, and navigate on your own. There are no bleary-eyed adverts that lead you to dark websites. Why is it, then, that the Internet has turned from a place of cyber-feminism to a place of female exploitation? 40% of sex trafficking victims are recruited online, the majority taking place over Facebook, a large, centralized, ad-filled Internet platform. Why is it that when capitalism bought out, divided, and surveilled the internet, there is no longer space for women to exist? It is to blame, again and again.
The Anti-Social Network explains this very well: "We reject very little but we do not compromise in our rejection of these visions of the Internet as a walled garden, where monopolistic social media corporations are free to mass-manipulate, enjoying indemnity from the misdeeds of their users yet restricting any user-generated content that disrupts their commercial narratives; where domain registrars and infrastructure providers censor entire websites at the behest of angry mobs; where self-anointed arbiters of the moral monoculture stupidly trample over human rights in their misguided efforts to protect them."
And their solution, also eloquently put: "...We propose an alternative model of art, activism and actualization, to re-imagine the Internet as a medium of unyielding Free Expression, and harness it to empower individual actors as vanguards of independent thought and discourse. In contrast to centralized platforms, we envision federations of standalone websites as the primary conveyors of online creation, whether they be the products of individuals, startups, cooperatives, or forums of many, topical or general...this Federated Model is a revitalization of the "Wild West," the ghost of Internet past, prior to its deranged commercialization and corporate consolidation...We seek to learn from two decades of successes and failures, implement new technology and engage in civic action to strengthen the Internet against the threats that corrupt it."
Feminist thought is bred through the beauty of art, the space to regain consciousness, and the time to reflect, so it is within reason that the decentralization of the Internet will breed an absolute resurgence in the old ways of cyber-feminism, as well as many new trains of feminist thought that can only be found without the heavy-handed all-encompassing embrace of capitalistic commercial surveillance.
What is our internet now? A panopticon, and once you realize it, you'll be screaming, "Let me go!!!"
Tombstone: the useful web
The old web: a place where you could find the information, all the information, at least everything that's been written so far.
Welcome to the Capitalist Web: "No longer do we have a functional orderly design with everything clearly sectioned, or small to medium sized images placed to the side – only bland minimal pages stuffed with oversized images breaking the flow of paragraphs that take up double the space of older pages with half the content available in a whole screen making you have to scroll more – why is the web today so deprived of information?" (Bleach World, 2021<)
The internet is no longer a place to find knowledge, but a place for mindless consumption.
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