Manifesto v2.0

CRUFT

We are CRUFT, and we are an art movement.

CRUFT is the useless, abject detritus of technoculture. CRUFT is bloatware, redundancy, bitrot, memory leaks, abandoned vehicles on the information superhighway. CRUFT is computational crud, the sticky SCUM in the gears of Bill Gates' vision of "friction-free capitalism." Capitalism creates CRUFT, and CRUFT creates friction. Friction is our art. Friction is productive. It feeds on irrational exhuberence. Friction is the rubbing together of difference. Friction stains intercourse with pleasure. Friction cripples communication with poetry. CRUFT is the corrosive grit in the otherwise all-too-efficient engines of fasciocapitalism. CRUFT puts difference back into difference engines.

Global monoculture is a single, automated cleanroom. It is obsessed with an absolute, sterile utopian fantasy of technology and its false promises of rationality, control, perfection, scalability, calculability, fault-tolerance, and high-throughout efficiency. Cleanrooms are, by definition, containers for keeping out CRUFT. But this is a futile endeavor. CRUFT has always existed wherever there is technology and technology is everywhere, especially in cleanrooms. Our current technological condition arose from CRUFT, moved away from home, changed its name to "high technology," and tried to come clean. But CRUFT has come to take it back. 

CRUFT celebrates perverse technology. Technologies have always been perverse, but their perversity has been cruelly restricted to only one monolithic manifestation, that of white, Western, capitalist, heterosexual men. This unhealthfully limited perversity has only continued to hold power through its desperate, all-consuming drive to suppress any and all competing CRUFT. This is because CRUFT represents the diversity of perversity. But you can only sweep so much CRUFT under the bed before it seeps into the seams, finds its way between your sheets, becomes your bed itself. CRUFT is the stuff that dreams are made of. 

CRUFT champions the creation of artworks that don't work. Unlike all the productive individuals throughout the world who live only to work or are consumed by fears that less deserving people might steal their god-given rights to work, CRUFT doesn't want to work. That much should be obvious. That is why we are artists. Since CRUFT so strongly dislikes work, CRUFT finds it exceedingly hypocritical to expect our works to work. CRUFT loves them too much to inflict such senseless tedium upon them. 

CRUFT is not a demonstration of technology or the "application" of technology to art. Such statements are meaningless to CRUFT. Anyone can make technologies do what they were designed to do. Only CRUFT can make them art. Art is—and has always been—a process of outing perverse technologies, and this is the mission of CRUFT. CRUFT spreads like a virus, hijacking new points of technological friction and perverting them until they rupture into difference engines for generating more CRUFT. This is how CRUFT will transform the world.

Now is the time for CRUFT to reclaim what it rightfully owns. The entire planet has become an open playground for CRUFT. The generous paranoia of global capitalism and the governments it sponsors have transformed our physical landscape into a dense mesh of surveillance sensors, data networks, and high-speed processors. Thanks to the exaltation of cheapness and speed of production rather than concerns for security or design, every space in the world is being optimized for CRUFT. And CRUFT fully intends to use it. It is such an embarrassment of riches that CRUFT almost doesn't know where to begin. But CRUFT has begun, and CRUFT will be the most powerful art movement history has ever witnessed because the world obviously wants us to be. 

CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a corporation. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating science. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a media organization. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a religion. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating Woodstock. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a design firm. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a political body. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating an academic institution. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating the military. 

CRUFT is something so long-forgotten that it has all but passed from the cultural imagination, something much more precious, powerful, and infinitely more dangerous. 

CRUFT is an art movement. 

And CRUFT is moving...