The Hologram as a Smuggling Project
Some of what I learned passing around a dangerous social technology
It is at nearly every other Community of Practice (monthly online meetings where anybody practicing or interested in the Hologram protocol can come to meet others) that we talk about how we talk about The Hologram -to our friends, collaborators, family. This endlessly fascinating translation work reveals so much about the different cultural, class, linguistic, etc etc etc contexts that the practice has migrated to.
These discussions also show the distinct personal opinions about what makes up the core of the project. What values find people the most important about The Hologram? What words will they always use to describe it? For instance, some of us, mostly deserters of academia and the art world, try to use the word “care” very sparsely when talking about the practice because where we come from care seems to have lost its real world weight. So, we attempt to stick to the material by talking about a “health protocol”. Others emphasize the peer-to-peer or diy or collectivist nature of the Hologram project because they want to align it with other, sometimes ancient, often more informal, mutual aid practices -like explaining to your mom who lives in rural Hungary or in a Chinese migrant community in a big U.S. city that hologramming is basically what she does with her female friends over WhatsUp when somebody is sick. Sometimes, when I talk about The Hologram, I focus on the long-term commitment and the possibility that one might have three friends who would be their living medical record for decades. Other times, I say it is an experiment: something to take and run with, to adapt and try on in different constellations first. Sharing about The Hologram comes from the bottom of my heart. Finding the entry to a common language is more confusing. It is tricky to figure out what words will enable developing a shared understanding of this practice. The difficulty lies in part exactly in the fact that we are talking about a practice, so something that is done (not just an abstract idea). Any practice is necessarily kind of beyond words. Guessing what language to use also involves a lot of assumptions.
A couple of years ago, I was asked to teach a Hologram workshop at a cultural institution in Prague. Bringing this project home has always been equally exciting and nerve wracking. For one, I was very invested in The Hologram being understood because I wanted to feel recognized for what I do. Czechia is a place I’m from but no longer belong to. Perhaps because of the history I share with this country I have the annoying conviction that I know what’s wrong with it and what would be good for its people. A familiar familial feeling? As it happens I was convinced that The Hologram would be a useful break down machine for reforming the patriarchal habits and xenophobia that seemed to be ever present when I was growing up in Prague. Anyhow, here I am at a cultural center, at the invite of one of its curators. They asked me to introduce its closely knitted team -everybody from technicians to accountants to PR to the artistic director- to the protocol. A true dream situation. Not only because seeing The Hologram deployed in institutions has long been a big wish, but also because the cultural institution in question has been a place that has already been doing a lot of interesting “outreach”, moving from Fine Arts to a more social center model. I tanked the whole opportunity within the first ten minutes of the workshop.
I was describing The Hologram to lead the group into an opening exercise. Amongst the first introductory sentences, I excitedly declared the Hologram to be an anti-capitalist project. That was it. Half of the faces fell, eyebrows were raised. The air became thick with fears and disapproval. What most people in the room heard me say was that I was trying to sell them on a communist project. And, by communist they meant belonging to the authoritative socialist regime of the past’s East Block. They heard closed borders and the government controlling all production and reproduction. They heard farce elections, political persecution, total cultural censorship. What I meant was a world where our survival doesn’t have to depend on waged labor. I meant no borders, I meant collective governance. We were never able to bounce back from that misunderstanding. The gates were closed. I was clocked as, at best, a silly idealist who is too young and too washed out by the West to know what they are talking about. At worst I was somebody dangerous. It was the hardest workshop I have taught to this day.
I’m sure that if I changed the presentation and described what I see as anti-capitalist work and dreams without mentioning capitalism, we would have been in connection. If I talked about the tragedy of monetizing experiences of care; about the importance of building resilient communities independent of the state and big companies… I know that the workshop would have gone very differently, if I led with an alternative world in which everybody who cares is cared for. I could have talked about the transformative potential of a society where we are deeply curious about our neighbors. We could have discussed a future where we unite around the current struggle of having to work so much that we are all getting sick. Not only were these all things that the art center’s program was already addressing, they are also all a part of Czech culture in general. Czech people are a folk with a deep history of solidarity and rebellion against any kind of overlords. As I was crossing the border between the Czech Republic and Germany, on my way from the workshop back to my home in Berlin, I cried into the phone to Cassie. I cried about my failure, about being misunderstood, about being a foreigner in the place I come from.
All kinds of border-crossing work is exactly what seems most pressing to do in these times. Even when it has the potential to be heartbreaking. I’m much less excited to talk about The Hologram to people with life similar to the one I lead than seeing what people very different from me could see in it, good and bad. More importantly, the pressure is too high, the grinding too strong, for us to think that we could survive by keeping to our pure “chosen families” of like-minded cuties. I feel urgency in learning how to have difficult collaborations, how to work together and through things, across differences. How else could we come close to knocking down the walls that oppress and detain life?
These days, I want to learn from people who play with borders -from smugglers, movement facilitators, radical clowns who play with the police. I want to learn from all kinds of “social bandits”, from the legacy of Winnie Mandela, from ordinary people who decide to cross the line. I also believe that The Hologram is a smuggling practice in its own. We smuggle “radical” ideas of collectivity into regions infested with self-care. We infiltrate our own lives, our network, with a practice that demands a different world than the one we live in right now. The Hologram endows the person who is asking for help with “you’re legit” papers, plus three witnesses to confirm that indeed they are a total boss. We sneak in a vision of that future where everybody who cares is also cared for. To successfully pass through our contraband, we sometimes dress what we do as a cute experiment, other times we wear a suit to show we are dead serious. As a project, The Hologram crosses and shapeshifts across the borders between the art world, academia, activist spaces, private households, and friend groups. We try to re-distribute some resources (of money, attention, time, gathering space) as we move back and forth. We smuggle the abstract ideas and catchy language that we learned in “official education” out of its institutions and make it useful outside. On our way back, we bring the experiences acquired by collective doing so we could sit with them, “research” them, write about them.
Over the years, many people have pointed out how dangerous the Hologram practice is. I wonder if part of the reason has been our refusal of the authority, or legitimacy, of the lines that say that to become an expert one must narrowly focus on one Field. Most of the critique about the risks of The Hologram concerns itself with scenarios such as: What if somebody brings out something to the hologram circle that is too much for the people in it to handle? What if they wouldn’t know how to deal with the reality that is presented to them, what if they become traumatized? Or, what if they misuse the trust given to them? Say, what if somebody breaks the confidentiality? Or, what if my friendship won’t be able to stand the amount of vulnerability that is going to be built by hologramming? They are understandable fears. Yet, aren’t these all things we face every day? Most of us live in urban places where we encounter people without housing, suffering on the street, every day. I don’t have even one close female friend who has not suffered sexualized violence. It seems to me that we all have quite a lot of knowledge on how to make sense of the world, including its everyday darkness. Similarly, if we have ever been in any kind of close relationship, we have all also inevitably been through heartbreaks, disappointments, and broken trust. Yet, we are all still here. We know that without opening ourselves to the possibility of pain we won’t ever get the gifts of having our trust honored. Or, even more rewardingly, we wouldn’t get to have the life affirming experience of navigating a situation where trust gets broken and we mend it together. The lines of what we usually talk about, what we dare to do, with our friends seem to be designed much more to isolate, and therefore magnify, our suffering than to protect us. Just as state borders, these lines are there to delineate what is your problem and what is somebody else’s issue. But we are not blind and our hearts are alive. I believe that in reality, most of us feel much less borderless than we pretend to be. Personally, I will choose to witness others' hard times, and others’ joys, over the cognitive dissonance of trying to ignore them any day of the week. I have come to trust my resilience and my support network to believe I’ll survive being interconnected.
So, what I hear underneath the worries about the dangers of running a social experiment, such as The Hologram, on ourselves is a fear of a place where there is no authority to determine, and punish accordingly, what is right and wrong, illicit and allowed. The Hologram crosses many, more or less outspoken, lines: private - public, my life - others, personal suffering - collective struggle, professional - friend. It questions many of these differentiations that are considered necessary. Through practice, we have come to believe that these lines are not there to serve us, they don’t make sense for the actual life we are living, let alone for the one that we want.
I got a lot of my ideas about smuggling from an amazing collection of anthropological studies called Seeing Like a Smuggler. Borders from Below (edited by Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi, published by Pluto Press in 2022). In an essay about how common smuggling works on the relatively new India-Bangladesh border, Debdatta Chowdhury points out that smuggling challenges “common sense”. What we call common sense is the delineations we deem “obvious” about what is reasonable to do and what is not, what makes sense to do in different situations. When something is common sense, it goes without saying, which actually means that it is an opinion we don’t challenge or investigate. The catch is: all common sense is a product of the times and social environment we live in. Take the assumption that people need to pay off the debt they make because otherwise, obviously, we would live in total social chaos in which benevolence is exploited and where we can’t trust each other. In Debt: The First 5,000 Years David Graeber gives a historical example to the contrary. He tells us about the system employed in old rural England, where the use of money was very rare. Bartering for things was much more common. Even then, people were not wealthy in stuff, just social connections. It happened often that they needed something for which they had nothing in exchange. Maybe they needed material for a whole new roof, or a goat to slaughter for a wedding, or help building a wall. So, they entered into debt with others on a regular basis. Since everybody knew everybody in the village, everybody kept track of who owes what to whom. Any time, your neighbor could show up and ask for your ram, since they dug that vell with you in the summer. BUT, the debt relations didn’t go on forever. Once a year, at a festivity, all debts were canceled. It was a way to reset the village life. It was common sense for those people that we can’t live without each other, that we are all indebted to each other, all interdependent. Ergo, canceling debt is an “obvious” nobrainer. Similarly, if you would try to explain -at a different time in history, in a different place- the function of state borders, you might not find very much common sensing. So you say somebody drawing an arbitrary line on a map and then declaring who can cross it and who can’t, what you can bring over the line and what you can’t, is a way to keep social order and justice? These borders sound more like magic to me: turning one thing into something else by saying it is so. How can it be just or orderly to restrict people’s movement? Naturally, questioning or challenging common sense is a dangerous practice. Surviving the crossing of borders requires good knowledge of the lines we traverse.
Smugglers are people who study the border. They know the movement of guards and the guards themselves. Their work exposes the weaknesses in the seemingly omnipotent force upholding the line. That’s why smugglers are dangerous. However, smuggling is a little less of an us-against-them game then we would imagine. If you travel on a train from Belarus to Poland, you might witness a pretty riveting play. When the train approaches the highly militarized border, most of your co-passengers will suddenly get up and start disassembling the train. They pull out future contraband -mostly cigarettes and alcohol- from their luggage and start hiding it in secret compartments of the wagons, taping bags of liquid to their legs, putting on extra sweaters to hide cigarette boxes strapped to their torsos, etc. When the border patrol comes through they “randomly” search a couple of passengers. Often they pull a couple of people off the train. You might be able to guess from the interactions that the guards and the smugglers know each other. You see the raised eyebrows that say “You again?!” After all, the people moving the goods across the border and the border guards are part of the same region, the same communities. With a couple of people out, the train starts moving again and the great disassembling can take place once more, in reverse. In the next town, most people will get off and sell what they managed to smuggle on the street or to a small shop owner. Some of them do this dance multiple times a day. You see, what the locals know is that the police don't have enough manpower to catch and process all of them. They play the odds. They study the patting down patterns. They keep a close eye on the price differences of great many goods to know what is worth buying in Belarus and selling in EU’s Poland. Their work is dangerous and tedious at the same time. The gains are meager. But people are motivated by poverty.
Everywhere, smuggling is created by the drawing of the border and it is always, always fueled by survival needs. The sensational stories of illegal drug cartels are not untrue. But most people involved in what the state would call smuggling -and those people most likely call trading or facilitation of travel- are those who found themselves at a border that suddenly made their neighbors into foreigners and their exchange an object of extra taxation. The widely popularized examples of drug lords and black market empires serve to obscure the fact that most “criminals” engage in their work because otherwise they wouldn’t have bread the next day. Criminality in general points to the injustices in our societies, it doesn’t create them. Smuggling is presented as evil, that is, as extremely dangerous to the Society. We can see this in the example of how mainstream media and official governmental channels portray as vultures those who facilitate movement across borders for people lacking the right papers. Borders are maintained by violence. In fact, to hold a state border, we need quite an extraordinary level of threat to life: involuntary searches, detention centers, scans and checks, arms, walls, and literal killing. To excuse this outrageous amount of violence, as well as the arbitrariness of the specific laws, an enemy has to be invented that is “worse” than the border guard. Enter the smuggler. Smuggling is dangerous to the state because it shows that we can choose otherwise, even in the face of persecution.
Now there are about a million important differences between real life smugglers and hologram practitioners. Though my personal hope is that our practice can be a part of a bravery training that will allow us to cross bigger and bigger oppressive borders, maybe even the ones of nation-state legality. It is still obvious that the traders of the Belarusian border and us, practicing the Hologram in Berlin with strangers, move on playing fields with quite different consequences. The pattern I wanted to point out with this wonky metaphor -of hologramming being akin to smuggling- is the dangerous potential of the Hologram practice, and similar anarchistic social technologies. Have I made you nervous when, at the very beginning, I talked about “packaging” The Hologram in different ways? Well yes, I’m trying to smuggle some freaking hope out. I have ulterior motives, I want to see a different world. Demands for total visibility smell like a border scan. But I’ll tell you about how transparency might be the opposite of trust in another post. For now, I want to conclude by saying that there is a certain existential need to the whole Hologram project too. As Cassie said many times, the drive to spread the protocol has always been very urgent and personal for many of us. We had to create a place where our friends and their friends might be slightly better taken care of. Austerity, isolation, and destruction of life are used as fuel where we live. I don’t know if The Hologram is the best or right or most sensible way to go about it, but ideal solutions are not really on offer in the world, are they? What I have always known was that we need to figure out a way to generate a little more stability because there is so much to do. We had to start learning how to ask for and create health with our own supplies because the borders in which we are asked to operate are just making everybody sicker and sicker.