This issue of Making and Breaking seeks to map out some of the dominant psychogeographies of the present. Reworking the Situationist heritage and applying it to our time, many of the approaches presented within it extend beyond the city and the physical environment, going into the virtual dimensions of digital socialities, social media infrastructures and their affects, exploring shifting sociopolitical grounds and socio-economic factors, identifying new forces of power and potential sources of emancipation.

At a time when it has become intellectually fashionable to celebrate the looming apocalypse as post- or transhuman payback, we urgently need to reinvigorate our desire for the future. Our inkling is that approaching cultural production in psychogeographic terms might help identify what blockages are at play in constraining it to addressing what feels like only a handful of topics, in a handful of ways.

In our hyper-connected, late capitalist society, the concept of psychogeography needs to be expanded. Any thorough understanding of the psycho-topography of contemporary urban life requires the inclusion of the digital dimension. 

For this issue of Making & Breaking, geographer Letizia Chiappini takes us on a trip through life in the city today, with all its real life influences from social media, while asking what the purpose of such new, critical psychogeographies could be?

In the bestselling young-adult fiction trilogy The Hunger Games and the subsequent blockbuster film franchise, children are forced to murder one another in the titular televised gladiatorial spectacle, all for the pleasure and glory of an exploitative dystopian regime. In one of the most successful TV serials of all time, Game of Thrones, warring elite families of a fantasy kingdom toy with the fate of several continents through eight blood-drenched seasons. More recently, the South Korean Netflix drama Squid Game became the most streamed series ever, depicting a world where hundreds of heavily indebted people are manipulated into travelling to a secret island to compete in sadistic and lethal versions of children’s games for the pleasure of bored and perverted billionaires.  

What are we to make of the startling global success of these spectacles? Certainly, the theme of being trapped in a violent, unwinnable game has precedents, but it has never been so popular. Perhaps it is because the vast majority of people living under the direct rule of capital in the 21st century also feel like they, too, are caught up in an unwinnable but compulsory game?  

Making & Breaking spoke to the Los Angeles-based designer Liam Young about his practice of speculative world-building and the psychogegraphical imagination it requires today to build aesthetic bridges into a desirable planetary future.  

“Our images about our future are entirely outdated and outmoded. They’re based on the failed ideals of boomer environmentalism, rooted in a particular idea of 60s and 70s environmentalism that centred our own actions and a certain scale of individual performance of aspirational futures around actions like recycling, being vegetarian, growing your own vegetables, and so on. These are all things that we should be doing as a matter of course, but they do nothing in the context of the scale of crisis that we find ourselves in now. Perhaps in the 60s and 70s, we had a chance with that scale of action, but we’ve well and truly blown past the magnitude that those efforts operate at. Today, planetary-scale action is what we desperately need.”

Artists !Mediengruppe Bitnik with Gordan Savičić and Selena Savić reiterate psychogeographies of the present through a double negation of online rating systems. Through resisting tech industry’s extractive approach to crowd-sourced content, and highlighting its role in privatising collective experiences via algorithmic regimes, they explore engagement with digital systems in ways that promote public, collective interests.

“Join me, if you will, on a rapid passage through the varied ambiences of AI…” Dan McQuillan, author of Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence, takes us on a transportive walkthrough of the contemporary state of AI and all its less-visible, and lesser-known, dark sides – including what the current state of things not only holds within the now, but what it indicates for the trajectory of artificial intelligence’s development into the future.

Aylin Kuryel and Fırat Yücel (Image Acts duo) visit artist Steven Monteau’s atelier in Bordeaux to see the new psychographical tools he and his friends have been building: cameras made out of discarded, residual police ammunition left behind during the Gilets Jaunes protests on the streets in France. In this reportage, the Image Acts duo takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour of Monteau’s highly political photographic practices, while analysing what these new tools and practices can contribute to mapping psychogeographies of the present, and perhaps even the future.

Amsterdam-based collective Experimental Jetset offers some reflections on the current emergence (or perhaps re-emergence) of “street libraries” in cities like their own, placing these makeshift libraries within the architectural tradition of the modern kiosk, and the literary lineage of psychogeography. The street library is considered as being part of the semiotic infrastructure of the city, functioning as a vital, urgent interface between the built environment and the printing press – while making the case that walking is still a form of reading (and vice versa).

These reflections are interlaced with (or, interrupted by) a selection of snapshots of book covers, as found by Experimental Jetset during their daily walks past the street libraries of Amsterdam.

“As we pilot our glider from one of the many glass-paneled skyscrapers of Villedor to land on the rooftop of what strikes us as a loose rendition of Pei, Kung and Boada’s Bank of China tower in Hong Kong, we first strike down our machete in the skull of a lone zombie, quickly salvaging whatever loot we can from the unsuspecting victim…”

In this psychogeography of apocalyptic games, the collective Total Refusal drift through the landscapes of contemporary computer games, in search of signposts for alternative futures. Will they find, among the retrotopian ruins crawling with cowboy-capitalist supermen and badass supergirls, anything that challenges the an-aesthesia of contemporary capital?

What is the relationship between jokes, dreams, empathy, politics and class consciousness? Jokes are often said to explore what is unsayable, a way to raise what we don’t talk about. In this sense, jokes are like dreams – jokes and dreams are both popularly assumed to reveal anxieties and desires, and these may be personal or political or both.

In his contribution to this issue of Making & Breaking, Tristam Adams argues that it is the empathic dissonance jokes foster that holds opportunity for progress and class consciousness, asking if the empathic dissonance and plurality that jokes deliver might be part of new, ethical and political practices.