This blog is dedicated to agency. Anyone interested in the capacity to intervene in the world will have to scrutinize everyday life, and its role in the social structure. The next step is to move from critical analysis to active engagement.
Entrepreneurial ideology describes this self-referential mode of action as “lifestyle design” or “life hacking,” but this strategy has relevance beyond the world of business. It can’t be reduced to a way of generating leisure time. After all, enjoyment of consumer commodities is also a kind of work; our lifestyles are already designed by the complex apparatuses of industry and the state, and it is up to us to orient this design in a different direction. Lifestyle design can be practiced not as an atomized individual seeking profit, but as a member of a global laboring collectivity.
Here is a preliminary list of goals and responsibilities:
- Self-defense from control. A collection of defensive maneuvers, designed for protection from the damage that surveillance and exploitation can inflict on bodies and brains. To those who consider this reactive and conciliatory, please remember: knowing when to retreat is an essential element of victorious warfare.
- Commitment to scientific inquiry. One function of the many ideologies on today’s scene is to provide cognitive maps that allow us to navigate social life. Now it’s clear that we have to push further into science, generating theories which can explain observable phenomena, ensuring reproducibility of results, and rigorously using knowledge to innovate and revolutionize practice.
- Redistribution of information. Popular exchange of information is omnipresent, and allows the oligopolistic industries of communication to exist—we add to their profits with every click. It’s necessary to protect this collective labor from exploitation, and to contribute to free and universal access to the means of communication.
- Production of a subject. The ultimate mission is to transform global society; organizing an anti-state movement through social media is only one recent expression. We’ll have to begin with the potentialities that already exist, and facilitate their organization into collective subjects that can intervene in reality.
This blog is a space in which problems are described and strategies for design are developed.
