A Step Aside : Ending Capitalism Without Adversity
3TS and ST stem from the need to characterize daily practice by citizen groups that deploy their successful institutional arrangements and affordances under the radar of and outside the competency of traditional institutions. Both concepts do not try to define any tangible essence, but rather articulate social dynamics of the committed groups.
As much as the concept of Third-Technoscape forms an adversarial response to the ideologically tainted concept of ‘third space’ now popular in social sciences to capture informal and non-economical practices such as hackerspaces and other grassroots collectives into the mainstream framework of a society subjugated by the market (home, workplace, and what’s in-between, on the condition it’s measurable and marketable), 3TS also provides a narrative for society to defend itself from the hegemony of capitalist recuperation.
The Third-Technoscape requires genuine human activity, and requires social ties that are not submitted to the market economy. That is not to say that the Third-Technoscape fosters free labor: on the contrary, most of the work done in 3TS is hardly accounted for in ‘the economy’, barely recognized as work in the classical sense, and certainly not promoted as such nor encouraged within the institutions. But this derives from the invisibility and non-recognition of non-trade-economy in the institutional frameworks: the Third-Technoscape remains an ‘externality’.
Embracing and promoting the use and co-creation of singular technologies empowers our local peers, and inspires more to share the love and realize the importance of free technologies production that respect and uphold diversity, and institutional arrangements that respect the living, the body, and the trans-individual. That a large majority of public funding goes to promises rather than supporting existing practices put an unbearable pressure on society, and keeps the Third-Technoscape marginal. If institutions want to let something auto-regulate, it must be grassroots citizen networks working in solidarity and for the advancement of knowledge with delight, rather than short-sighted private interests full of fear and control sickness.
Once the dark matter of society, the Third-Technoscape now highlights the artificial asymmetry in public funding that keeps it marginal although it forms the majority of successful grassroots endeavors in society in resistance to capitalist hegemony. Will the institutions realize that prowess of citizens to come up by and among themselves with working solutions where the subsidized private sector keeps promising marvels without delivering anything but barriers to the free development of the Third-Technoscape?
In the Third-Technoscape, social fracture is not one that needs reduction, but the result of smashing an axe of direct action in solidarity into the square-cornered flat screen of media propaganda to look and act beyond its wall. Where power needs to reduce the fracture, and smoothen out difference, the Third-Technoscape embraces divergence and unity-in-diversity. As with aikido, the Third-Technoscape requires a step aside to let the adversary fall from its own weight. This change in the perspective and the quality of regard enables the ‘disintegrated’ to unfold their creative solidarity without resentment that plagued radical social movements and brought them to impotence.
