A friend of mine dragged me to a “hackathon”, a couple of weeks ago. Those meetings are said to be out-of-fashion, “so 1999”, but some still take place in cities at the global periphery. I don’t know how to code, but you know how humdrum global periphery is — anyway, there was I.

Sure, it was nothing like Hegel meeting with Napoleon in Iena and facing the “Spirit of the world” riding a horse — I am not even close to Hegel and there were just a flock of young men in lousy t-shirts. They spoke up on a stage, one after the other, set problems to be solved within 24 hours. Then, they gathered into small groups, scattering backpacks around, turning the local leisure center into a teenage bedroom. Nonetheless, there was a coalescent energy, there was a focused determination which had little to do with teenage bored moaning. And not more with “buddening” adults’ hobbies.

Actually, when they spoke, they made TED conferences sound like old, cosy, Motown records — even like elevator music. Why? because they had something more. As law historian Pierre Legendre puts it: “To rise up, human voice needs words, pictures and a body. It needs all that and a fourth dimension: it needs a reason to live.” Well, you can clearly feel it rise up, when youth finds a reason to live, however bad it is.

To be honest, I had been brooding for a while upon the similarity between present start-ups and the 1970’s punk “music” movement.

In a 2012 book entitled The Age of the Multitude, Frenchmen Henri Verdier and Nicolas Colin have usefully wrought together a number of concepts — old and new — to help entrepreneurs and public leaders through the digital revolution. As start-upers themselves, they disclose some precious trade secrets. Among their armful of observations, one has particularly caught my attention: “You only create a start-up to overthrow.”

Connections immediately sparkled: Lipstick Traces, by Greil Marcus, sprang up in my memory, himself remembering the first time he heard the Sex Pistols: “What remains irreducible in this music is its desire to change the world.”

Not far behind, 1597 Hotspur spoke, through Debord’s 1967 voice — “If we live, we live to tread on kings.” And 1649 Abiezer Coppe echoed under Hamlet Machines’ 2008 cover— “I overturn.”

Start-upers, punks and other movements Greil Marcus traced down, share more than the David v. Goliath stance. They are also egalitarian, raw and direct. You are one in the crowd, climb onto the stage and pitch: you can topple the Establishment because, well, you are mental. You have nothing to lose. You don’t have a “legacy” tied to your ankles. You have no social norm to abide. You want to make the biggest companies and States collapse. Everything is true, everything is permitted.

You don’t need any capital — neither a factory nor a 24-track recording studio — for your friend’s parents have a garage. That room, in-between public and private spaces, that dirty, crammed and rough room shelters all tricks and things, digital or musical. Garage bands and start-ups take the place of the shiny cars of our suburban society, not only physically: their noise travels even faster—through “cacophonic chrome cassettes” or the internet. And they find their audience, with astounding traction, an audience eager to leave “before-land” behind, pereat mundus — should the world perish.

the two allegorical figures of negativity

Negativity flows. Start-upers receive the free, enthusiastic and concrete support of the many — a relation which has nothing to do with clientele or salary life, which even has to do with the hatred of clientele and salary life.

Under Mark Andreesen’s 2011 now classical motto “Software is eating the world”, Henri Verdier and Nicolas Colin compare the digital revolution to a barbarian invasion devastating every sector of the economy and even maybe of the government. The metaphor is strong, but remains unclear. Are we thinking of the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 or of an anonymous razzia by the stealthy Scythian hordes?

Every negation is double, every negativity has two faces. The digital revolution is no exception. The first allegorical figure is Tancredi’s, in Lampedusa’s Leopard. His famous quote, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change” reverberates in all revolutionaries’ nightmares; maybe reveals an inconscious desire of some among them. Will the world be different after we’ve changed it? Or will we just have changed sides, traded masks?

The economic translation of Tancredi’s motto is “creative destruction”. Joseph Schumpeter, who coined the formula in 1942, called it a “gale” — capitalism is not only ever-changing, it’s not only a mesmerizing harlequin suit, it strives on destruction and violence. He warned that “the capitalist process, in much the same way in which it destroyed the institutional framework of feudal society, also undermines its own.”

But “creative destruction” is now much more than the credo of an ancient faith in business cycles: it is a prophesy that (job) destruction is a lever for “creativity”, i.e. here: productivity and profit.

For Tancredi, as well as for neoliberal pundits, negativity is a moment of positivity. As Debord wrote in 1967, “In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.”

Some of the great figures of digital negativity are Tancredis. Steve Jobs told students to drop out school, Jeff Bezos is on his way of ruining every retail shop — revolutionaries may applaud. But, either because of the historical capitalization of their companies, because of their buying the Washington Post, because of their digital rights management, they also personify the most powerful Establishment ever.

It may be a strange view, but why not see Alaric looting Rome in 410 as a desperate attempt to “change things to make them stay the way they were”? As Raoul Vaneigem noted in 1967, “host desecration is still a tribute to the Church.” Theodor Adorno expresses relentless views about the “role” of barbarians, in Minima Moralia (1951):

117. Il servo padrone. — (…) The creation of barbarians through culture is however constantly deployed by this latter, in order to preserve its own barbaric essence. Domination delegates the physical violence, on which it rests, to the dominated. While these latter are given the opportunity of letting off steam with their warped instincts in what is collectively justified and proper, they learn to practice what the noble ones require, so that they have what it takes to let the noble ones remain noble.

The other allegorical figure of negativity is Johnny Rotten, now John Lydon. Nothing like an aristocratic salvagery: irreconcilable. At any age. At any rate.

Metropolitan Museum of Art may pay tribute to punks’ impact on high fashion, Christie’s may organize punk memorabilia auctions, Rock and roll Hall of Fame may want to induct the Sex Pistols (and receive a “cordial letter” back from John Lydon’s own hand), Pretty vacant may be played during the London Olympic opening ceremony… well there is no reconciliation with the Establishment. And there won’t be any, ever.

In the digital revolution, that allegorical figure of negativity could take Aaron Swartz’ face. He led his life at the core of digital political stakes: people’s access to common goods through the networks. Prosecuted by the State because he had given free access to academic journal articles, he hanged himself at the age of 26.

His friend, the law professor Lawrence Lessig, who coined the phrase “Code is law” in 2000, is still alive. He is currently walking the roads of New Hampshire to fight against United States Congress “legal bribery” by reframing the financing of political campaigns.

To point out individual persons to personify that half of the negativity is easy rhetoric, but it is misleading and unfair. It would be more relevant to uncover ties between Open source community and Free Spirit heresy… But this would probably lead us away from the punk movement into the techno one, beginning in the late 1980's: anonymity, interoperability, relation to machines and programing, do-it-yourself, underground strategies, nomadism, military fatigues and a whiff of paranoia…

Not the old v. the new

Those two allegorical figures, can we always clearly separate one from another? I am typing those words on an Apple computer; I can’t wait that Sub Sole publish this already-too-long text on Medium and Twitter; my IAP, though disruptive, is not exactly a parangon of virtue. Sometimes, the story ends and you can try and tell who is who by discovering the start-uper’s “exit strategy”. But who would we be to despise someone who prefers disgrace to death?

Following Gramsci, we often picture our time of crisis as a moment between the dying old and the unborn-yet new. I think it is not helping. The decisive battle, in our digital age as well as in any other age, is not between old positivity and new negativity. It roars within negativity itself, and it is an absolute war between winners and those, like Rimbaud in Mauvais Sang, who know they have been of an inferior race, for ever and ever.