16 March 2011: "Some bro tweets abt his first 'first.' Has 'first' commenting on HIPSTER RUNOFF gone too far?"

This post is about communicative capitalism. Carles is concerned about the emptying of discourse in the public sphere, of the replacement of intentional communicative gestures with purely notional ones, utterances that merely call attention to their existence as utterances without attempting to contribute to the information commons. In this case he refers to the paradigmatic example of readers' commenting on a weblog writings not with a reasoned response but merely a spasmic denotation of having been the first to register a response.

This aggressive act of colonization attempts to transform the field of discourse into a zero-sum competitive realm of privatized property, devoid of the will to instigate collective debate or initiate an epistemological dialectics. As Carles describes this graphological declaration of hostilities:

I rushed to comment
To be the first to see the post
To metaphorically plant the flag of my nation
on the moon that is this fresh HRO post

Though Carles stops short of explicitly employing metaphors of virginity, as were often employed by the first wave of European conquerors, the phallic implications of the flag-planting remain unmistakable: such comments as "First" literally rape Carles's inscriptions and violate their denotative and connotative purity, encrusting them with intentions from another semiological orbit, so to speak.

It didn't have to be this way, as Carles himself laments. Once, it seemed that the digitization of discourse and the public sphere would lead to an instantiation of Habermas's ideal speech situation, with democratic and uncoerced participation in public debate possible for perhaps the first time on a broad and undifferentiated scale. But this implicit promise of enhanced and widely distributed networks has not been realized in praxis. The ideal speech situation has never manifested itself; instead a Hobbesean world of nasty, brutish, and short declamations has emerged: "Are comments still an important, unique aspect of the blogosphere?" Carles asks, "or is it just where 'trolls and cowards lurk' to say mean things abt artists and relevant humans who are contributing something real 2 the world?" The answer is a foregone conclusion of course; that is to say, it is always already both. The utopian promise of uniqueness contains within it the unrevokable license for cowardliness and belligerence. With regard to "contributions to the world," it confronts the real with the Real. Human "relevance," Carles suggests, can be reduced to the effort to announce one's being and claim territory before one is denied the metaphysical space to breathe. All else is just "down the shitter," in Carles's terminology, meaning that it is no better than scatological ejaculations or the noises of flatulence.

So what is the status of the "Blog Theory" to which Carles obliquely calls his readers' attention? It seems likely that this is a reference to the 2010 work by political theorist Jodi Dean entitled: "Blog Theory: Feedback and capture in the circuits of drive." Clearly the repetitive cycle of claiming commenting priority is a manifestation of the circuit of drive, a return that masquerades as a way forward, an irresistible yet pointless impulsivity rooted in seemingly meaningless gestures that nonetheless raise the stakes of subjectivity. Carles expresses drive in this post in terms of spiritual possession: "something inside of me took over." It is too facile to label this something the unconscious; more likely it is the embedded subjectivity of the online medium itself that inhabits users as they attempt to seize its functionality. That is to say, the medium itself structures subjects as "firstwavers" cognizant only of reacting, of having their twitches monitored and transmitted through the global nervous system of the internet. They are neurons that only know how to fire, their creative expressive capacity nullified. Thus they are compelled to communciate but incapable of speaking anything other than their own priority. Narcissism degree zero.