It’s Oh So Quiet (about Palestine)

Reading the silence of the design industry about the ongoing genocide in Gaza through financialization
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Essay by Noam Youngrak Son
October 2024
All images have been processed through the Forbidden Colour Translator
Noam was a speaker at Chapter 2: Self

There’s a genocide happening. In the last twelve months, more than forty one thousand people have been murdered and more than 60 % of civilian homes destroyed or damaged for the 2.3 million population. Yes, I am talking about Gaza, Palestine.

This crisis has mobilized mass attention across the globe to Israel’s settler colonialism and apartheid against Palestinians. Demonstrations against the genocide are happening all around the world, involving millions. Student encampments, demanding accountability from universities by cutting ties with institutions complicit in genocide, are also spreading widely despite the severe police brutality they often face. In the light of this global context, I question, why is the design industry so silent?

What I mean by “silence” here is not to disregard the ongoing efforts of individual designers and independent initiatives who are raising their voices to condemn the genocide. To name a few, designer Annelys de Vet has been organizing the non-profit initiative Disarming Design from Palestine since 2012; Tiny Studio organized a fundraising poster exhibition in Indonesia for Palestine; and information designer Federica Fragapane created infographics representing the number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in the first 100 days of war, as well as the inhumane population density in Rafah caused by evacuation orders, among many others. The silence I am problematizing here pertains to the industry and the institutions that play a key role in distributing power, cultural and financial capital, opportunities, attention, knowledge, and discourses within the industry. For example, let’s talk about design weeks. One may be skeptical about how much radical political potential lies in such commercial environments, but it is undeniable that the design week is a “thing,” and is one of the central platforms where design as an industry meets public attention. In the context of the Dutch Design Week in 2023, which took place three weeks after the outbreak of the war on October 7, and the Milan Design Week 2024, which was held while the genocide had been ongoing for more than six months, I could hardly find any events or projects that brought attention to this urgent issue.

What I find especially problematic is how hypocritical this attitude is. The institutions that are now silent have often profited by portraying themselves as “critical” and “conscious” thinkers. Under this branding, these institutions have propagated the “all-embracing view of design” that “‘everyone is a designer’ and ‘everything is design’” which Silvio Lorusso referred to as “design panism.” Thus, designers have been encouraged to respond to every imaginable social issue through design. In fact, the genocide in Palestine is indeed inseparable from design, as every material constituent element of it—walls, irrigation systems, nature reserves, facial recognition, artificial intelligence, Zionist propaganda, real estate advertisements, etc–are systems and structures that design and designers have always been engaged with. Why can’t designers and design institutions maintain the same criticality in support of Palestine? In other words, what restricts the mobilization of resources, capital, and attention around designers’ critical responses to the ongoing genocide in Gaza?

While there can be diverse responses to this question, the way I theorize this question is through the lens of financialization. What I mean by financialization here, following thinkers such as Randy Martin, is the dominance of finance as a paradigm that influences how everything else in society is organized. In the financialized world, everything we do—paying tuition fees for a design course, choosing between Ryanair and EasyJet to visit the Milan Design Week, participating in a graduation show described as “a rich resource for journalists and manufacturers hunting for new talent,” selecting five works for the 10-page maximum portfolio, listing the names of potential collaborators for project funding applications, commenting with a fire emoji on Instagram—is understood through the lens of finance and described in terms of investment, insurance, and risk management. Cultural institutions also operate accordingly, being forward-looking, proposing perspectives, and discovering talents, all of which echo the language of venture capital.

Understanding the design industry as a financialized assemblage, consisting of individuals acting like investors or financial assets, and institutions akin to investment banking firms, simplifies the aforementioned question about the industry’s silence regarding Palestine. It is silent because, in the logic of finance, the risk—being accused of being “anti-Semitic,” losing access to public funds, entering actual politics instead of showcasing “political design projects”—is currently greater than the potential gain—the cultural capital from being known as an institution with political sensibility. And this is why I predict that the design industry in Europe will finally respond to the issue of Palestine when its political urgency and relevance have expired—in other words, the moment there is absolutely no risk in saying “Free Palestine,” and the moment design projects about Palestine can generate surplus value through objectification of the violence. When discussing financialization and risk, it is important to note that risk is not evenly distributed across all populations, and even the impact of the same risk varies based on who you are. For example, the risks involved in condemning the genocide are greater for an immigrant cultural worker under a precarious residency permit than for a white, “native” creative director. With this in mind, it seems ironic to me that, when it comes to the issue of Palestine in the design industry, the risk is more often carried by those who are most vulnerable to it. 

Although financialization confines the perception of what design can do by “fundamentally reorienting our sense of possibility and futurity,” I am interested in exploring what is still possible. I find potential in the organized resistance of “the hacker class,” following the ideas of McKenzie Wark. Wark theorized the class struggle of “the hacker class” against “the vectoralist class.” In generalized terms, the hacker class can here be considered “producers” and the vectoralist class as traders, or brokers, of what is produced.  Through abstraction, the hacker class “dedicates its attention to the production of new knowledge and new cultures – a surplus of ‘information’ in other words.” Wark writes: “The hacker class is the class with the capacity to create not only new kinds of object and subject in the world, not only new kinds of property form in which they may be represented, but new kinds of relation, with unforeseen properties, which question the property form itself.” In contrast to this potentiality, the value that the hacker class produces is not theirs because the vectorialist class “possesses the means by which the value of the new can be realized.” In the design industry, these means of valorization can be seen as accumulated cultural capital, renowned exhibition spaces, official status as educational institutions, and access to large subsidies and major media outlets. In relation to this infrastructure, designers can be characterized as part of the hacker class, whose organization has significant potential beyond its current instrumental roles under capitalism for collective liberation—not only from the precarity of creative workers but also from the occupation of Palestine. I think of Elevator Radio, an independent student-organized radio station at the Design Academy Eindhoven, which was the only initiative I know of that critically responded to the apartheid and genocide in Palestine during Milan Design Week 2024 by streaming radio shows and panel discussions. I also remember how Queering The Map used its platform to bring attention to the queer voices in Gaza, from those who faced life-threatening danger under the bombing of the Israeli military. The initiative’s “production of information” as a constituent of the hacker class has the potential to meaningfully challenge the pink-washing propaganda of the occupation force, emblematized by a soldier holding a pride flag while standing on the rubble they created. Similarly, Forensic Architecture used its outstanding analytical capacity to organize video footage produced by Palestinian individuals in Gaza into compelling evidence against the Israeli disinformation that “the 17 October blast at al-Ahli was caused by a misfiring PIJ or Hamas rocket.” I admire my hacker comrades, those who work in, with, and around bigger institutions—be it design schools, design weeks, or museums—organizing sit-ins, encampments, open letters, and radio shows, appropriating the infrastructures of the vectorialist class to induce systemic changes from the inside out.

However, there seems to be an identity crisis of the hacker class, in that it “does not (yet) possess a consciousness of its consciousness.” Wark argues that “fractions of the hacker class continually split off and come to identify their interests with those of other classes” due to “its inability—to date—to become a class for itself.” The resistance of the hacker class, especially when based on the financialized idea of the self, is very likely to fall into what Max Haiven described as “privatized resistance,” which prioritizes individual, market-based actions over collective, public, and systemic strategies. Regarding the design industry’s potential reaction to Gaza, what I might call “private resistance” could include, for instance, identity politics combined with self-design where reductive statements of identity are consumed as part of one’s branding; the aestheticization and fetishization of the violence as the reproduction of mere representations with almost no political use value. While these strategies might be useful for individual survival, they are inadequate to challenge the genocidal racial capitalism they promise to resist, and ultimately mirror its key processes of extraction in the cultural marketplace. The immediate sense of hopeful possibility that arises from privatized resistance exemplifies what Lauren Berlant called “cruel optimism;” it is cruel because exclusively relying on such coping strategies “actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving.” In other words, although such actions may trigger a shared feeling of ‘doing good’, they ultimately bring us no closer to successful collective action. When neoliberalism reduces the concept of individuals to self-reliant, entrepreneurial entities, I become skeptical of its potential as a foundation for any practice of liberation. 

In response to this concern, Gilbert Simondon’s concept of individuation offers a reminder that the designers’ understanding of the self can be decoupled from financialized abstraction. For Simondon, individuals are open and dynamic systems emerging from pre-individual potentialities, continually evolving through the process of individuation. This framework views the individual as a set of fuzzy relations and mutual causality, which “can only be seen as a partial result of the process that brings it into being.” This idea, central to Simondon’s understanding of technology, fundamentally differs from the neoliberal investor-consumer individual. Understanding the designer self as an open feedback loop that is not yet fetishized may provide a clue for recognizing what design can do in response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine and organizing the technical capacities of designers as the hacker class. While no star designer has attended to this potential yet, the openness of individuals has long been of interest in many other disciplines, such as that of facilitators. They engage more directly in the processes across individuals “to make it easy for people with shared intentions to be around each other and move towards their vision and value.” The visionary and thought-provoking roles that designers have aspired to perform have perhaps already been practiced by facilitators in much more concrete and collaborative ways. For instance, writer, activist, and facilitator adrienne maree brown emphasizes that “all organizing is science fiction” since “trying to create a world that we’ve never experienced and never seen is a science-fictional activity.”

To conclude, this essay is a call for action. In this urgent moment of history, I sincerely hope we can prove through our actions in response to the settler colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide taking place in Palestine that design is more than a capitalist instrument that only “intervenes in the images and meanings applied to goods and services in order to sell them”; that design education is more than a mere reproduction of celebrities for accumulating attention capital; and that activism in the field of design is more than just a gimmick or a token.