"A Shift in the Structure of Experience"

I have been intrigued for years by this opening line in a poem by Anne Winters titled The Displaced of Capital (2006) It rang true in a way I couldn't quite articulate till recently learning about the "gaming community", about live streaming your life and about Twitch, phenomena that is only new to me thanks to my almost absolute ignorance of popular culture. But awhile ago I watched my grandson sitting on the couch watching a person playing a video game on-line and I was fascinated by his total involvement in this once-removed, virtual experience. At the time I thought it was just incidental, an oddity. Now I am seeing it is the future. I'm just not sure how terrified I should be.


"Unnoticed, the narrative has altered...down to the very molecules in my brain, as I think I'm thinking..." Winters captures the sense of remove, the "shift" which is changing everything, though not in the way Naomi Klein imagined. How then does this new structure, this voyeuristic anti-experience propel new capital accumulation? Apparently video gaming is now a multi-billion industry not just through direct sales but through gaming competition, Leagues, play-offs, superstars with coaches and promoters and lucrative sponsorships, in other words the whole "sports" apparatus now applied to shooter games. In a bizarre twist, as these gaming celebrities are being watched their fans can "chat" on forums like Twitch so that they can feel part of an "inter-active" experience and community. They subscribe and send other financial support and I'm sure they are advertised to. So plenty of exchange.

Then there are the IRL (in real life) professional streamers who have an army of obsessed fans watching them perform life. Their existence, however banal or contrived, is the entertainment for which their fans pay. These fans also have a chat community so that they might be indirectly involved in this reality as such.

Obviously we are dealing with a complex socio-political phenomena, but I start with two questions; Is Capital actually overcoming a barrier through this strange form of production? And who are these people with enough time on their hands to do the observing? The barrier I feel Capital is attempting to push through is the anomie, disaffection and alienation, the estrangement and ennui inherent in modern life. "Drama equals views equals money" is the livestream mantra and the "patch", however temporary, for what Marshall Berman termed the "perpetual disintegration...ambiguity and anguish" felt by so many. This modern milieu is transferred into what Berardi characterized as a "psycho-pathologic economy of ironic detachment", hence the vicious online trolling, the "terrifying digital mobs", a Purple Army of lonely chatroom geeks haunting the Web day and night. A new "spectre" poised on the razor's edge of this new "structure of experience".