The Black Hole Manifesto
Or: the revolution will be an infinitely dense region of spacetime collapse
I keep having this nightmare.
It’s the kind where I wake up. The hour is sometime before dawn, when even the sirens have quieted, and there’s an intruder at my feet: a slanted parallelogram of brutally white light thrown from the window to the bedroom wall.
I squint. I have seen enough alien abductions to know when one ought to stay in bed. But this is a dream, after all, and even if it weren’t, the arrival of aliens would raise some unsettling and ultimately welcome questions. So I pull myself upright and shuffle out into the cold kitchen. Stand at the glass door and grimace.
It’s horrible. It’s so bright.
It’s hard to describe. But I will try: picture a cage in the shape of a squat cylinder, with two rectangular wings extending outward from the center at ninety degrees. The structure is sheathed in a grid of light cold, hard, piercing lights. One might mistake it for a divine apparition, if not for the utter impassiveness of the thing. This is no heavenly palace; it is a temple to insomnia, a crystal lattice of perpetual wakefulness.
I look awhile, my feet growing cold against the tile. It’s early, still, too early for my sleep-heavy brain to form much of a thought. But the ache at the back of my retina is unmistakable, and even at this preverbal hour, the barest of convictions manages to take shape: too much light…
The following morning I might forget this dream — if not for that it happens every single night. Because, as it turns out, the shining carapace beyond my window is not an invention of my subconscious mind but, in fact, a perfectly real scaffold encasement erected atop the public school across the street from my house.
I have lived opposite the school for two years. Not once have I seen its lights turned off. I have no idea what use they serve, and have considered submitting a light pollution complaint to the Department of Buildings. But in New York, whose top tourist attraction is the light pollution equivalent of spraying tankers-full of crude oil into the nests of baby terns, it should come as no surprise that, unless the disturbance is coming from easily policed vehicular high beams, the DOB doesn’t get involved.
So it has become a fact of life. I wear an eye mask to sleep.
Yet as much as I shut them out, the lights beyond my window have in the past few months become the locus of my existential unease. They stand to my mind as the source of everything that makes the world of today feel so empty and relentless and dull. It hardly needs saying, but something is seriously fucked: in the proliferation of surveillance technologies that track our irises and heartbeats; in the mechanization and attendant “hackability” of electoral politics; in the seemingly hopeless advance of climate disaster; in the civilian deaths that parade across my screens like so many Temu ads, in the feeling that my human agency is nothing more than a bunch of pushes and nudges and dings and red dots and that my human self is nothing more than a matrix of advertising coordinates; to put it simply, in the absence of mystery. We are closer than ever to living in a world of perfect knowledge, and it all feels perfectly meaningless.
Yes, that is the matter: it is too much light.
But hey, this is an old idea. It trades on the long (Western) identification of light with knowledge and rationality. The notion that total illumination might actually suck shows up as early as the late nineteenth century. Europe was in a frenzy of industrialization and militarization when writer John Ruskin, beholding it all, heralded a new kind of hell:
Full shone now its awful globe, one pallid charnel-house—a ball strewn bright with human ashes, glaring in poised sway beneath the sun, all blinding-white with death from pole to pole—death, not of myriads of poor bodies only, but of will, and mercy, and conscience; death, not once inflicted on the flesh but daily fastening on the spirit.1
The French Marxist Guy Debord put an even finer point on it. Debord theorized a new phase of capitalist conditions in which all of human life is expropriated and then returned to us as a “separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at.” He called this “the spectacle,” the social function of which is “the concrete manufacture of alienation.” Existence captured, commodified and rendered visual: forty years ago, Debord was theorizing today’s surveillance and attention economies with eerie precision. His characterization of the spectacle echoes Ruskin: “it is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity.”
This web of associations surfaced in my conversation last week with Jon Taplin, who got in touch through my work with the School of Radical Attention. Taplin has had a crazy life; like Forrest Gump, he seems to have been present at the defining moments of each decade since mid-century. The guy was Bob Dylan’s tour manager, for goodness’ sake, and, after a series of comparably impressive side quests, now dedicates his days to writing book-length critiques of the tech billionaire class.
At issue was the question of a “counterculture”: we wondered what the counterculture of Taplin’s youth would look like in 2024, or whether such a thing was even possible.
Things look grim. Taplin wagered that an authentic counterculture is improbable.2 We have come to identify too closely with consumption, he reasoned, citing the rise of influencers as the most final metastasis of this logic. We are overwhelmed by nihilism.3
My feeling was even bleaker: a counterculture is not only morally improbable, it is structurally impossible. From my cuspy millennial-slash-Gen-Z perch, contemporary “culture” appears almost perfectly coterminous with its digital representation: my music, art, literature, conversations with friends, worldviews, affective experiences aka "vibes", expressions of rage and dissent and subversive intent, even my reading habits are all registered through my devices, rendered as data and reproduced on my screen. In concrete terms (who owns this data, and who profits from it), these parts of myself, and these social dynamics do not belong to me or to my community. Yet I can look at them. At night, my bathroom ceiling is cast with their pallid glow.
This is Debord’s spectacle: the materialization of my estrangement made visible.
Put differently: for something to count as culture, it has to exist; for something to exist, it has to be visible;4 and as far as I can tell, nothing that is visible has escaped the expropriative scrapers of the computer programs that matrix our existence.5
But I found this conclusion troubling. Surely a counterculture must be possible, right? I know too many good, self-possessed young people, peers of mine who courageously and lovingly insist on a livable future in spite of overwhelming evidence in favor of despair. These people sustain me on a daily basis, and I can’t, in good conscience, write off their commitment to a more compassionate world.
The question, then, is this: if dominant culture relentlessly assimilates all that can be seen, how would a counterculture look?
The answer, then: it wouldn’t.
The counterculture wouldn’t look like anything. It wouldn’t appear at all, because to appear is to lose the battle already. The counterculture must be invisible; it must exist without capitulating to the terms by which we collectively agree that something exists. To the incessant, pervasive, inhuman light of total alienated knowledge the counterculture must deploy the cover of darkness. And not only darkness, which after all implies the possibility of imminent illumination, but some countervailing force which obliterates light, which consumes it.
If such a counterculture existed, it would behave something like a black hole.
We cannot “see” black holes. But we know they are out there. They exert a powerful gravitational force on everything they touch. What’s more, they create an event horizon from which nothing — no meaningful information, which is to say no possibility of knowledge — can be extracted. They are fundamentally resistant to the datafication of the universe. They eat that shit for breakfast.
Any viable counterculture must exhibit the qualities of a black hole: invisible, resistant to extraction, “dark.” It cannot outshine the spectacle — it’s the shine that’s killing us and plundering our sleep.
The interior of a black hole cannot be observed. It is the cosmic materialization of “negative capability” par excellence. This implies uncertainty as the price of freedom. The counterculture must surrender the illusion, the endless, corrosive pursuit and fetishization, of total knowledge. We must submit, instead, to the gravitational force of our mutuality. The only livable world before us is a world that cannot be known in advance.
What does this look like in practice? Many of you will be unsurprised to hear me invoke communities committed to practices that cannot be tracked and commodified. (This is a big idea in my community.) But knitting circles do not a countercultural revolution make, at least not entirely. The question is how to fashion political technai that not only evade visibility but swallow it hole, that actively mystify the shared world. A politics of not-knowing the future, but of moving into it nonetheless. When vision itself has become the condition of our exploitation, how can we “envision” a more livable world?
As you will have noticed, the above paragraphs have the trappings of a manifesto. This is too bad, since a manifesto is an embarrassing thing to write — particularly when there is just one person writing it. I suspect this is why manifestos are so often penned by collectives: no single person gets pegged with the risible self-seriousness that the genre implies.
It’s a curious genre, and curious word: one letter away from “manifest”, that magic wand of grifter life coaches, and (to be more generous) the allowable fantasy of two-point-five generations facing an increasingly hamstrung political future. Manifest conjures morning affirmations and vision boards; manifesto conjures burning flags and sabres held aloft.
But another face of these words returns to the meaning of their original Latin root: that which is obvious. By this definition, the manifesto is an act of analysis, in that it points out the existence of something self-evident — perhaps something so self-evident that it has gone unseen.
I’m not going to write The Black Hole Manifesto. So I am cheating — reneging on the promissory nature of the title (which is probably what made you click in the first place, muaha!). By its own logic, to bring such a text into existence would render it powerless, yet another scrap of content in service of the spectacle.
After all, black holes aren’t something we see. They are implied by the pull they exert on the things around them. A proper Black Hole Manifesto, therefore, would be nothing but a tug at one’s imagination, the ultimately unverifiable sense that a group of people going by such a description is possible. It is a politics that can only ever operate in the conditional tense.
For due diligence (ie. to make sure I’m not plagiarizing this thought experiment), I googled “Black Hole Manifesto” and found this trippy, awesome instructional film: Black Hole Manifesto: Five Steps to Look at the Unseen. It is on Vimeo, and it has been viewed four times over the past year.
And while it doesn’t perfectly articulate the ideas considered above, it’s certainly close enough to make me wonder if the kinds of communities I am describing don’t already exist. Maybe I just don’t know about them. Maybe they don’t know about themselves. Maybe they are reading this right now. And maybe I ought to bring a physicist onboard; these metaphors are growing reckless.
Can a black hole contain the knowledge of its own existence?
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Email me: rustmenagerie (at) gmail (dot) com
Cited in Jonathan Crary’s Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (53).
For an incisive diagnosis of our “nihilistic age,” check out this interview with Wendy Brown, which knocked my socks off. Thanks to SC for the rec.
My girlfriend Raiane has an obliquely related take on the question: there is no “mainstream” anymore, she says. The internet has created so many subcultures that the existence of the dominant culture upon which the counterculture depends is impossible. In effect, she and I agree. The dominance of any one “culture” has been replaced by the dominance of the general form of culture’s abstraction and commodification. How else can we explain the weird universality of the word “content” these days? Music, images, text, whatever — it’s all content! One lead is in the classic (and critiqued) distinction between form and content. The transformation of all things into iterations of an endlessly variable “content” suggests a unity slash homogeneity of “form.” What is the form? The form is data, made visible. Or, to borrow again from the Frenchman, the form is the spectacle.