…Shitty birthday to us, Shitty birthday to us… Let’s have a look at the presents first. This would not have been necessary, you are so nice to us! (picture cropped for obvious reasons):

(from a humiliation thread for cybermasochists on an online forum)

As you remember from previous shituationist shitty birthday speeches, they always had some parts of history and about recent archievements, and then drifted of to poetry or just were obscure mashup pieces of shituationist theory. Same should go for the 5th year anniversary speech, no? This one is a bit different, and I will explain why furtheron. These speeches are not only posted because we like rituals and formalisms, which is possibly why we are still listening to the big drum at night in the 21st century, but also to evaluate our tactics. You might wonder why a techno blog has a tactics debate, but then, this is what is different about this techno blog. We have quite strict ideological programme. Let me explain.

In the society of adventure, the only adventure that remains is boringness. Boringness is a constructed state completely different to boredom. “Boredom is the reflex to the objective grey” (T. W. Adorno), boringness is what we propose: an aesthetic that does not aim at recognition and visibility, but at impact. So unspectacular that it breaks out of the order of the spectacle. Deviance, to act outside the norm, can mean the search for comfort, even if the act itself seemed to aim at finding adventure. People who are bored seek entertainment, and will find lots of it without deviant behaviour in mass culture. But people who feel uncomfortable with this mass culture will find their comfort in deviant communities. We define this as social comfort: these precarious moments of feeling alone in presence, or connected in moving ambivalence, free association instead of unification. Since it is not possible under present social conditions to feel good with the global human society, we see a limit of the concept. “Shituationism means to realize that the spectacle of situationist comfort is shit. That we only do shit on a pile of shit to get out of the shit.” In the style of our evaluation we also accredit the limitations of these modes of freedom. And through that we make the deficit of any positive reference to the idea of freedom tangible. Progress is when social modes change towards a reconciliation of global equality and diversity.

So what is the situation with shituationism in 2013? We have downgraded the blog a bit, we didn’t network and communicate that actively in this channel as before, the reason being that everyone of the core team has other projects that draw a lot of energy. These do not have to do anything with rave culture, so they do not show up on this blog, you could sum them up with focusing on the one hand more on building non-temporary spaces rather than having events, and on the other hand targeting the xenophobia that became more obvious again in these times of crisis. So we ourselves did organize less rave and art events than before. We are under the impression that we still have allies, even though a lot of the old ones went missing (Shelter, AKNE, etc.). For example our podcast series of exclusive mixes is running with constant updates. We are still promoting what others are organising, and our recommendations have become more specific, instead of just giving you the weekly party dates. This fits with our belief that it is pretty important to know what you are trying to archieve and not just throw a party to reach maximum levels of fun. Raves are a pretty specific form of art and community and in both terms we want to underline what we think is worth saving and denounce the numb hedonist escapism. This is a step from rave criticism in the sense of art criticism (“The critic is someone who makes a spectacle out of his very condition as a spectator — a specialized and therefore ideal spectator, expressing his ideas and feelings about a work in which he does not really participate.” Guy Debord), towards an analysis of the form of the rave itself. This project is not in any way evolved, the ideology of shituationism is just a preparatory fundament for it.

While raves are mostly joined for having fun, to escape, to make use of your free time in an extreme and dense way, they are also spaces and times of exploring progressive modes of sound, dance, comfortable togetherness, visual and other forms of excitement, and so on.  While we agree that sometimes the outcome of the experiment are just zombies that stumble home on friday morning after thursdays rave, we still would like to ask if they are that much different zombies than the sleepy school kids on their way to class that cross their way at the metro station in the morning, as they leave and head for their respective institutions. Both in school and in the club different modes of destroying and evolving your mind and the rest of you can be imagined and are performed, that’s all.

Thanks for the attention and everything, see you soon and write us from time to time. May only love tear us apart.