Bumper-sticker and Dumper-skipper — Işık Barış Fidaner

To have an intuitive analogy to characterize the form of interaction that was brought about by social media, let’s talk about bumper-stickers. This term ordinarily refers to a witty message stuck on a car that you see in traffic. In the case of social media, the phrase marks an interspace in which people stick together by bumping into each other. Bumping can refer to a number of things:

1) Enjoying a fortuitous encounter.
2) A comradely fist bump as in sports.
3) A cautionary fist bump as in Covid [1].

Bumper-sticker ultimately means the following: People manage to stick together best when they preserve the bumping character of their encounters. Their interaction turns reactive and begins to suffer:

1) When chance and fortuity are cancelled by arbitrary assertions of necessity.
2) When comradely trust is cancelled by obligations to whatever “powers that be”.
3) When caution and distance is cancelled by stickiness (sticking viscously like goo).

When sticking coagulates into stickiness (needs into neediness), it becomes impossible for the parties to exercise fidelity to their interaction, and this is when bumping turns into dumping. There are two stages of dumping:

1) The person dumps his/her Self on the interlocutor, using him/her as some kind of spiritual toilet.
2) The person dumps the interlocutor after turning him/her into an uncanny Echo of his/her own problems.

This process (better known as “psychotherapy”) just repeats the famous myth in which Narcissus rejected Echo and became addicted to his beautiful image [2]. The essential problem in degenerating bumping into dumping was already expressed in the words of Jesus Christ to Mary Magdalene: “Noli me tangere” literally means “Touch me not” or “Don’t be clingy”. In our context, it means “Let’s keep on bumping and let’s avoid dumping.” Bumping is the proper way of sticking together in comradely fidelity. When dumping begins, the spiritual goo spreading on the ground burns one’s feet and one cannot help but skip away. So let’s call this other aspect, dumper-skipper.

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “El Sıkışmadan Yumruk Tokuşturmaya”

[2] See “Ego is Echocide before Ecocide”