Not that I plan to commit any crimes, but if I ever get arrested for one, I wonder what random pieces of paper the cops would grab from my house and present to the press as a “manifesto.” And what parts of it would the media then selectively quote to support whatever narrative they’re trying to construct about me?

People write things all the time. Sometimes they’re journalling. Sometimes they’re just jotting down ideas. Or at least that’s what I do. I have scattered notes all over my house in boxes, drawers, notebooks and computer files. Surely, this is not so unusual.

Not many people write manifestos, though. These days, the literary genre is mostly associated with murderers. White supremacists. Misogynists. Lone wolves who got radicalized online. Their barely coherent screeds are part confession, part stream-of-consciousness rant. We present them to the public as evidence of diseased minds. People read them out of morbid curiosity.

But a good manifesto is so much more than that. There is something so satisfying about a vision for the future expressed in a series of clear, bold, numbered declarations - a political project boiled down to a simple list collectively agreed upon.

This is not an easy thing to accomplish. When I co-founded the Lab Synthèse art collective, half a lifetime ago, the first thing I wanted us to do was publish a manifesto. At the time, I was drawing inspiration from an unlikely mix of influences: William S. Burroughs’ Apocalypse, Guy Debord’s Situationist International, a documentary about wine. There were only five of us in the group, but we couldn’t agree upon a single idea. It was a very dysfunctional and short-lived collective. Our manifesto never manifested.

Last week, I was chatting with a professor of information studies about the masters program to which I am applying. They asked if I was familiar with the Feminist Data Manifest-No. I was not, but I checked it out as soon as we ended the call. It is “a declaration of refusal and commitment. It refuses harmful data regimes and commits to new data futures.” Wonderful!

I was reminded of another recent example: the Manifesto on Algorithmic Sabotage. I’m also thinking of Kevin Yuen Kit Lo’s book, Design Against Design (which I recently picked up at Expozine but haven’t had a chance to fully dive into yet). These are all declarations of refusal and commitment meant to inspire us into action.

There’s nothing particularly inspiring about Luigi’s so-called manifesto. Evidently, many people found his (alleged) murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson more inspiring than his words. For a brief moment, before we knew who he was, the murder suspect existed as a sort of folk hero in our collective consciousness, instantly memeified, inspiring various micro-genres of TikTok videos, and generating much discourse on platforms like Bluesky, followed by the inevitable handwringing in op-eds and blog posts.

I don’t have much to say about all that, except that I think it was easier for people to project their own frustrations and fantasies onto him when he was an empty vessel, just a nameless guy with a surprisingly charming smile who dared to do something many have probably fantasized about doing at some point in their lives. People from across the political spectrum seemed to come together in a rare moment of class consciousness and solidarity. Maybe they didn’t condone the assassination, but they certainly understood where the anger was coming from. They even vowed not to snitch! For a dizzying moment, it almost seemed like the conversation was shifting, about to realign not along the left vs right divide, but in terms of regular people vs billionaire CEOs and out-of-control corporations.

But then he was caught in a McDonald’s. And now we have his name. And his Twitter timeline. And his Facebook history. And his shitty little manifesto, which lacks the eloquence of his simple gesture on the streets of New York.

Now we can figure out if his politics are “good” or “bad,” and insist that he’s not one of us, but one of them. Now we can reject him as an aberration. The status quo will be maintained.

Was it all a fever dream?

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This week’s recommendations

• A great report at The Intercept about a counter-terrorism expert who joined Facebook to help them keep hate groups off the platform, but quickly became disillusioned with how they were enforcing their own policies.
• A really thought-provoking piece by Ali Alkhatib that challenges our definition of Artificial Intelligence: “We should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through. AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power.”
• And finally, this six-part essay on Slop Infrastructure by Eryk Salvaggio is also fantastic and goes really deep on how the proliferation of AI trash on social media is not just a byproduct of generative AI, but its whole raison d’être: “a technology built on the excess information we are lost in with the intent of producing more of it.”