Sociopoetic Economies: Mail-Art's On-Sendings to CyberWarfare's Viral Manipulations

The structural economies, or what I call sociopoetics, of artworks like Ray Johnson’s “on-sendings” and other mail-art projects, now, in 2020, illuminate the workings of cyberwarfare. On-sendings’ sociopoetics include participants’ desire for involvement in a network, the call to complete and send incomplete works, and outsiders' bemusement. This type of analysis starts with Yuriko Saito’s application of aesthetic interpretations, usually confined to artworks, to broader realms and everyday life outside of museums, galleries, and studios. To appreciate how both on-sendings and extreme rightwing bots manipulate participants, as the crucial aspect of the messages's content, one studies theories of gift exchange, desire and identification, and sociopoetics. The avant-garde and experimental artists dreamed of changing hearts and minds using automatism for progressive politics, and they would shudder to realize that extreme right-wing viral manipulations use those same strategies and structures; in fact, the lineage now includes Q-anon, 8chan, and Putin's manipulation of elections using a structure analogous to the sociopoetics of networked art. To illuminate this type of on-sending manipulation, I coined the portmanteau neologism, cyberripulators, that combines Cyber-, Rip (as in digitally copy and send on; to catch a wave in surfing social media; and also a tearing up of the legitimate news media channels), and (man)ipulators (with machines and superseding "man"). Reading right-wing disinformation (that occurs by sending-on memes, tweets, and snippets), in terms of on-sendings explains how these manipulative structures operate. Art history has urgent importance.