through europe

I’m not a fan of Nanni Moretti and I don’t like all his movies, but when I watched Habemus papam I fell on my knees recognizing the greatness of this film. Despite being set against the Barroque background of the Church of Rome – mundane manifestation of otherworldly power, – the movie in fact focuses on contemporary depression: the world built by men has gone beyond human reach, entering the orbit of a technical divinity who has escaped human control. The world that technical power has subtracted from divine will is too complex, too fast. It is so cruel that it cannot be elaborated according to the categories of human thought. The category of divinity itself is only the frail projection of human illusion, and God is useless when we can finally understand the ultimate truth: that there is no truth in our history, no hope – only the pleasure of senses and poetry, and the pleasure of collective construction, which is collective illusion, a sensuous bridge over the abyss of the inexistence of meaning. Caminante no hay camino, el camino se hace al andar.

When we know that there is no path and no arrival point, walking demands an exceeding amount of energy. And energy gets exhausted when entropy gets hold of the brain.

America, 1858. Two individuals, an ex-doctor and a freed slave, turned into bounty-killers. They have zero concern for the welfare of their society and seem to be irreconcilable to each other but actually, as the tradition of spaghetti-westerns wants, they are associated by practical, monetary and private reasons. A true 'union of egoists' in the Old West, as Max Stirner would put it.

 

This was the intriguing subject of films as the Dollar Trilogy or Butch Cassidy, to which Tarantino owes more than a reference. “Egoistic unions” Leone-style have emerged, in fact, as an opposition to the lovely “liberal unions” of Traditional WASP Western movies – where the autonomy of action of the Lone Gunman, even when motivated by personal issues, was only a replacement of an evanescent State. On the contrary, in their temporary alliance, the bounty killers keep a healthy distance from an oppressive Society: they don’t respect it – they only utilize it. They transform the Law into their own property and their own creature.

I never met Aaron Swartz, but he was my brother, although much younger than me.

I cannot interpret his suicide. Suicide is never the effect of a single cause, and it is always impossible to “explain” death.

Nevertheless.

Nevertheless I know something about the causes that pushed Aaron to do what he did.

He was a computer programmer, creator and developer of the web feed format RSS, and a writer, an activist and also a Harvard researcher. Recently he played a prominent role in the SOPA campaign (Stop online piracy act) which had a successful outcome.

Aaron was known – by his friends and by FBI as well - for a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls.

In 2008, Swartz downloaded, and released, approximately 20% of the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database of United States federal court documents managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.

According to federal authorities, over the course of a few weeks in late 2010 and early 2011 Swartz, having a JSTOR personal account as a research fellow at Harvard University, downloaded a large number of academic journal articles via JSTOR.

It was as if time had never been allowed inside the room. There were no windows and no pictures on the walls. Cream wallpaper stretched up to the ceiling, then broke into the circular pattern of shadows projected by the hanging lamps. The synthetic fur covering the floor purred along with the movements of the President’s feet over it. The President looked around the room, then towards a point right a couple of metres behind the screen of his computer. The muscles in his shoulder relaxed, lowering his elbows just below the edge of his desk. He wished that his were still the times of ticking clocks, counting the cascade of minutes as mothers repeat their lullabies night after night. But sound also seemed to have sunk silently into the rug, in the pores of the wallpaper. It had to look like his decision had been taken through doubt and suffering, and he needed the proof of passing hours.

The President run his hand along the balding top of his hair. The foundation was wearing off, and the edge of a scale rubbed against the tip of his fingers. He kept playing with it for a while, running it under his nails, one after the other, as deep as it could go without hurting his flesh. Social etiquette was an unnecessary concern in the depth of his underground bunker. There was no need to conceal his nature any more than a man would silence his bowels in the privacy of his bathroom. After all, it was only a few years earlier that his mutant nature had won him millions of votes during the elections. He had to tame it down to the minimum necessary visual proof, so to appear as reassuring to pure-breed humans as he was to the mutant underclasses. Hence the foundation, the human mannerisms and the elocution classes to help him control the intonation of his speeches – only dropping the mutant accent when required.

This 80 page book by Richard Barbrook and Fabian Thompsett is an extension  of the film script that forms the basis of Ilze Black’s film. Of the same name. It describes how a group was formed to popularize and play the Game of War which GuyDebord  spent the last 10 years of his life developing and playing with Alice Becker-Ho. It lists the various public venues where the group has played the game in real time, but also describes the game in detail and hints at why they think it is important. The first, unstated, is to rescue Debord, long term member and survivor of the Situationist International (SI), from the ironic recuperation of him and the SI by the cultural establishment they despised. Ironic because they were so hot on any kind of politics that could be, as they called it, recuperated, that is, absorbed by the very ‘Spectacle’ they had described. To have an exhibition devoted to them at the Pompidou Centre in 1987, and then for his personal archive to be described as ‘a national treasure’ by the French Minister of Culture in 2009 was the unkindest cut for someone who lived by the sword. The Game of War however does not fit this Debord-made safe, just as he himself truly did live by the sword, ripping of the bourgeoisie whenever possible and including with his own suicide that meant Alice would have some money. Instead, the Game claims a seriousness about not just analyzing capitalism and its monologue, but thinking strategically about how to go about participating in its downfall.