Доброволецът-генетик на балканския дигитален фронт
The volunteer-genetician at the Balkan digital front
Amateur science flourishes on the internet, profiting from the deinstitutionalized milieu and the easy way to publish and get feed-back. Evolutionism and racial theory have made a spectacular comeback in the Balkans, furnishing multi-media ‘evidence’ for authochtony, europeanness, and ancienty. The case-study of the debates on DNA testing, developed in the last decade, will be taken as an example of the way in which Balkan lay youths appropriate complex scientific theories and use them in heated nationalist debates.
Киберфолклор: творчеството на дигиталните народни маси
Cyberfolklore: an outburst of creativity by the digital masses
Folkore as a spontaneous philosophy (Gramsci) has been pushed to extremes by the new digital communications: conspiracy theories, urban legends, strange technological superstitions. The social function of maintaining communities has been replaced by forwarding of links, which implies the substitution of the performer, which his talents and prestige by the hub within the social network. The anonymity of the exchange seems to be, in fact, an essential part of the folklorization of the new hi-tech communication platforms making it possible for authorship to be erased and social norms to be transgressed.
Nationalism as a Subculture?
It sounds blasphemous to describe as a subculture the most precarious civic engagement of the Modern Times, going to extremes, such as the ethics of self-sacrifice – neither of the knight, nor of the warrior, but of the common citizen – nationalism. I am taking the liberty of putting such a hypothesis to the test here, in view of the tendency, observed in the Bulgarian youth in particular, to shift from the rationally political to the media-based emotional register. We understand less and less what they want to happen in the state; whereas they inculcate on us who they hate and love in ever more figurative ways. Needless to say that the most serious mobilizations around this symbolical obscurity, extending all the way from the extreme-right racism to the left protectionism of the labor market, are taking place on the net today.1
The City Taking Place from Below
The battle for the city is fought on at least three fronts. On the one hand, there is the strong-willed power of the city-builders imposing the norms. It is them we know most about – starting from Hippodamus who re-built Miletus and Octavian Augustus who bestowed glamour on Rome, continuing with the Cartesian rationalization of Manhattan with the master plan from 1811 and the grand renovation of Paris by Baron Hausmann, up to Stalin’s new town Magnitogorsk or the neoliberal Shanghai.
