Ritual uncertainty-navigations can channel negativity into collective political sabotage

Evidence

I have emphasized that our fuzzy navigations of speculative technologies create bonds within ephemeral digital spaces through rituals that are not necessarily a “symptom” of anxiety but can be a way of countering it as a pathologized individual condition. Such rituals thus diverge from the self-destructive nihilism epitomized by the condition increasingly described as “doom scrolling” condemning people to vicious circles of narcissism and negativity. In their most radical forms, “doom scrolls” can deliberately channel such negativity against the perpetrators who have inflicted precarity in the first place—moving from self-sabotage to collective acts of political sabotage, aimed at revealing anxiety’s systemic causes. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 347

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends earlier chapter material on homo speculans and speculative rituals as bond-forming rather than pathological. — connects to: Sharing feelings of misery and attributing them to impersonal structures builds collective political subjectivity — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1885; Threshold events can propagate collective political emotions — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1955; Suppressed communities escape intolerable reality through eschatological expectation