A public call to go quiet

In Harriet Arnow’s The Dollmaker, her rural protagonist, Gertie Nevels, uses a folding knife to perform an emergency tracheotomy to save her son’s life. Later in the novel, she and her husband have been forced by war and economic circumstance into slums and urban factory work, and her husband uses the same knife to commit a desperate murder. I’m going to reverse that symbolic narrative to talk about using a vicious tool to perform a virtuous act . . . sort of.

I’m using a technological grid and a technological platform and a technologically organized set of relations to suggest ways of thinking, making, and doing to break our dependency on all three.

During my sojourn through special operations in the military, I was involved for a time in something called tradecraft — the same things that drug dealers, spies, informants, and secret organizations do to conceal their actions and purposes. One of the main things we were trained for was . . . get this . . . non-technical communication. Waaaay back in the eighties, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, those who had reason to use covert communications were aware of all the ways that technology serves to expose our actions and purposes, that is, to surveil.

We used techniques called static dead drops, moving dead drops, toss drops, brush passes, personal meetings, live drops, far bona fides, near bona fides, counter-surveillance routes, load signals, abort signals, dead phones, cover stories (“legends”), safe houses, ratlines, invisible ink, easy disguises, clothing switches . . . all that cool shit. These means of communicating without creating technical “signatures,” of course, are labor-intensive and slow. They require excruciatingly detailed planning and lots of writing and the division of people into compartmented “cells.” But people could — and some probably do — use them today, with a few precautions (like not carrying a smart phone and knowing where security cameras are located), to securely communicate outside the gaze of the technogrid . . . or in many cases right under its nose, using “social camouflage” — that’s where unremarkable appearance and cover stories come in.

There’s an analog to this — because I’m not suggesting people organize into underground cells — which I’ll call the alternative to politics. Let me explain.

This argument has two parts. The first part is the lack of efficacy of politics for those who lack large sums of money and institutional power . . . that would be most of us. The second part is twofold; let’s call it (a) working within your capacity for control and (b) “taking the target off your back.”

When I say an alternative to politics, I don’t mean anything like “don’t vote,” though if you don’t want to vote, don’t. I mean politics, as most of us understand it, is not the rational, deliberative, democratic process most of us would like to imagine. In fact, it is this imaginary politics and the belief that regular people can make actual politics live up to the ideal of some rational, deliberative, democratic process that has us spending a great deal of time and mental effort, and even some physical effort, tilting at windmills and thinking we’re slaying dragons.

Politics, the real kind, is the exercise of power. As such, the political machinations that are effective are expressions of already existing power—that is, great concentration of wealth in the form of money. Money confers power on those who accumulate tremendous sums of money, because money has become necessary for all of us to survive, and because money operates in an environment of enforced scarcity. We depend on money for survival, but there’s a limited supply, which forces us to do things for people who have large sums to dispense. Pretty basic, yeah?

In addition to money-dependency, there’s scale. The greater the scale of any social formation, the greater the degree of impersonality and the greater the necessity for bureaucratic management. Bureaucratic management requires institutions, and institutions require money. These bureaucratic institutions are layered, the greater the scale of the social formation, the more layers. Here in my little town, we have a city government (chosen by a few rich families), a county government (chosen by the same rich families), a state government (chosen by the state’s richest families and a constellation of national and international businesses), a collection of regional governing bodies (appointed by the people chosen by the rich), and the federal government (with elected officials and appointees chosen by the rich). The further up one goes through the layers, the less accountable they are to anyone except the rich, but even at the lowly town level, the politics are locked in. The nearer one is to the lower layers, of course, the greater the role of patronage and the easier the buyoffs.

These institutions of the rich are vertically and horizontally integrated. If you get past the rich in one arena, they simply flank you from another. If you get past the primary elections, they’ll hit you in the general with everything they have, and if that fails, there are always the courts — also selected by the rich before elections and appointments even begin. The January 6 hearings in the news right now are featured as a defense of democracy, which is laughable. They are a defense of procedures that were established by and run by the rich, who throw a public relations bone to the masses called elections, where a few outliers can legitimate the lie, give people false hope, and still make no difference. (Don’t get me wrong, Trump and his entourage should be perp-walked into federal prison for a whole host of reasons.)

No account of modern politics without this public relations aspect is complete. Politics in our digital media age is papered over by propaganda, performance, and spectacle. The media, in turn, is owned, operated, and controlled by the rich. Public relations is a main battle front in modern politics. Which should tell us something about “fighting battles.” Not simply that fighting may not be the best way forward in almost any case, but also that fighting battles against those who build and own the battlefield, make the rules, and command most of the forces in play . . . is kind of stupid. Again, I’m not making some kind of bitter-old-trot case against political participation (I’ve never been a Trot). There are obvious cases where tactical participation in political processes do make certain kinds of difference.

The problem with political activism, on the other hand — speaking as a veteran of that practice — is it becomes an all-consuming vortex of false hope, defeat, self-recrimination, and new false hopes. It eats up time, effort, and money in hopeless causes. Those in power love political activism. It brings potential problems out into the open where they can be dealt with easily . . . led along, then crushed. It keeps these potential problems occupied with battles that have already been decided against them.

The powerful have been trained to identify and deal with threats. Announcing you are a threat to power is maybe not such a great idea, even if it gives you some dramatic satisfaction, some street cred among your peers, about being a brave rebel.

So . . . what?

Let’s begin by thinking like spies, informants, poachers, burglars, and drug dealers. These are people who get things done, but the smart ones understand the special power of low visibility, of not attracting attention, of being plain and quiet as a form of invisibility. I’m going on the internet now, as someone with a small audience, to say publicly . . . there are advantages, lot of advantages, to going quiet, to doing things that don’t appear threatening.

It’s a hard idea to get our heads around in a period when everything is about drawing attention to ourselves. You can try it as a thought experiment, or an actual experiment. See how un-noticeable you can become. In the postmodern attention economy, this is almost a revolutionary act. Try to become someone who is eminently forgettable. Present neither a threat nor an opportunity. Elicit neither scorn nor pity nor even curiosity. Appear neither friendly nor aloof. Become a wraith.

The “alternative to politics” analog is to fly nap-of-the-earth . . . under the radar. The powers’ pantopticon is fueled by our own attention-seeking and the unending quest for convenience. The panopticon is triggered by key-words, like NSA internet surveillance, and key-actions. This begins with a transformation of consciousness and desire. Quit imagining you can change the world, quit trying, and over time you’ll accept reality and quit wanting to. Quit putting yourself through that . . . the fixed game, the battles already decided.

Power is not absolute at these great scales. It can’t observe or control the totality of the granular. Ask any drug dealer. They know. The interstices are where you actually have some capacity for control. Five people can’t even win a local election. They can build a garden, though. They can organize a potluck. They can run a soup kitchen. They can clean up a littered lot. They can give out free coffee at a park. They can repair someone’s roof, set up a swap meet, teach prisoners to read, clean someone’s house who can’t or doesn’t have time, take some kids fishing, repurpose junk, teach a craft for free, organize a picnic . . . you see where this can go. And they can poach . . . see Certeau for what that means; we wouldn’t want to trigger the panopticon.

And there may be occasions for tradecraft. Use your imagination. Just be sure what you’re doing is within your span of control. If not, it’s off the table.

Lo-visibility. The Joycean weapons of “silence, exile, and cunning.”

Peace