Dani Arnica & Joshua Abelow
Anti-Magic
April 15 - May 21, 2022
2831 Mission St.
You can make your own consciousness go poof. You can disbelieve in yourself and make yourself disappear. I call it anti-‐magic.
If you design a society to suppress belief in consciousness and experience–to reject any exceptional nature to personhood–then maybe people can become like machines.
That’s happening with BUMMER (‘Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent’). The BUMMER experience is that you’re just one lowly cell in the great super-‐organism of the BUMMER platform. We talk to our BUMMER-‐connected gadgets kind of as if they’re people, and the ‘conversation’ works better if we talk in a way that makes us kind of like machines. When you live as if there’s nothing special, no mystical spark inside you, you gradually start to believe it.
*excerpt from Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
(2018) by Jaron Lanier
