The notion of nature as distinct from humanity, and as malleable, has radically changed the planet, bringing all its living systems to the brink of collapse. This continues to be driven by consumerism as the primary human relationship to one’s subjecthood. The result is individualist hedonism, the fantasy that death can be negated, and the mandate to pursue individual happiness while considering suffering as a personal failure. Clearly the food system we rely on and the chemical products we consume damage us and the planet. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

The challenge for sabotage will be to erode the gap between unavoidable delay and avoidable delay, to make avoidable delays appear unavoidable, both as a threat to employers who pay poor wages and to enable the kind of unprovability that sabotage hinges on and weaponizes. (Did the power just happen to go out, causing everything to go quiet? Or did someone knock it out?) The tactic will try, again and again, to pass resistance and fatigue out from an individual body expected to work faster, more repetitively, or for less money, back into the system of production and circulation itself.

Successful hoarders tend to share one commonality: the information they distribute is collated, with rigor, and often tied to an organized movement for radical action. This methodology separates the “collection” from the endless stream of “content” we see today. It removes all distractions from the hacker class’s chief aim: the production of new knowledge and culture, made freely available, as part of a larger move towards collective transformation.

Can a theory of information forged twenty-five years ago still apply today? After all, in a number of ways, the “free movement” seems to have emerged victorious: there is “free” content, “free” software, “free” information everywhere—even as we might debate how free it really is. 

We are in a strange transition. The previous global order, in which states wielded ultimate authority, hasn’t quite died. At the same time, large corporations have stepped in to deliver some of the services abandoned by states, but at the price of privacy and civic well-being.

My point is not that the breakdown/insight model is fundamentally wrong. Those paralyses can provide a certain kind of epistemic gap for asking questions about what commonly comes as second nature. At the same time, it would be a mistake to rely on such an interval or space as a meta-structure for critical work. For example, a default move within the frame of contemporary art over the past two decades: defunctionalized objects pulled out of usual circulation or infrastructural location appear to offer a kind of freezing and deictic insight, as if a hunk of undersea internet cable on a gallery floor confronts us with the materiality of communication. Yet a moment of paralysis, or even of the decoupling of the informational from its material substrate or mechanism, does not automatically generate the kind of critical or political thought one might want to follow from it.