fluid machines

A Twitter user stream is a kind of fluid machine (reminiscent of the T-1000 cyborg in Terminator 2) that is comprised of the followers of the largest account in a group of users who are also followers of one another. It’s not the number of followers that makes a Twitter stream strong; rather, the strength of a given stream depends a majority of its members having discovered each other through their shared following of this person AND for those members to have had few if any other people that they followed in common prior to when they started following the Big Fish Twitter account.

The users who make up the fluid Twitter stream machines are what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “desiring machines”: smaller machines (users) that function as circuit breakers in the larger circuit of the various Twitter streams that they are connected to.  In addition, these smaller machines produce their own flow of desire—which will sometimes run in a direction counter to the overall flow:

“There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale.”

According to D&G, the main goal of a desiring machine is to appropriate that which is outside of itself. This is the movement that creates the essential dynamic that keeps Twitter flowing. A Twitter user tries to gain more followers who are receptive and responsive to their tweets.  The goal is to get them to become followers, but also to retweet and hopefully even reblog what they write about.  Every amplification extends the amount of Twitter domain that a user “covers”—each mention adds to the percentage of the Twitterverse that a desiring machine can claim.

I made the choice to no longer make choices.  I’m aware of it being a contradiction—similar to trying to will yourself not to will, or to a dog chasing its own tail.   It’s a failed endeavor from the start, but in these Kafkaesque times (which I’m coining as such because of our AWARENESS that we’re living in a matrix of constructed reality coupled with our apparent inabilty to change this fact) failure is no longer reason enough not to do something—in fact, a truly post-post modern artist seeks out failure on a grand scale.

I don’t mean a petty failure, such as never bothering to try—but the kind on the scale of betting the farm—a fantastic, extravagant crash and burn—like a start-up that declares bankruptcy a few short months after being bank-rolled for zillions as being the brains behind the next big thing.  I’m talking the kind of failure you can only make when you work your ass off for something.  Olympic failure—on the level of preparing for years for something that takes you mere seconds to blow.

When yr afraid of being laughed at or called a fool, you start holding back.  You get scared of failure, instead of learning to embrace it as part of the process—part of life. The strange corrosive power of such a tiny yet powerful fear is entirely made-up—this doesn’t stop us, however, from living our lives around our harbouring of it.  Again, this is very Kafkaesque—our overly self-conscious lives are exemplerary of his short piece, The Tormenting Demon.

Just because something doesnt exist doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

The idea of failure and fate have much in common:  neither exists but both are very real—as real as the ever fleeting present, and as real as a future that is constantly in flux.  Nothing is definite—nothing is set in stone—by embracing your fate or your failure—by choosing not to choose and going with the flow of your life, you undermine any power that either possiblity once had—destroying it at the same time that you affirm its reality.

It is in this way that we make our own fate—a task as tricky and ultimately empowering as giving a message to your father to deliver to your mother during a moment in the past when you don’t yet exist:

“No fate?” No fate but what we make. My father told her this. I made him memorize it in the future as a message to her… Never mind. The whole thing goes, ‘The future’s not set. There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.’ —John Connor discussing his mother, Sarah Connor, in Terminator 2, Judgment Day