... 0.0 <nettime> The ABC of Tactical Media Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Fri, 16 May 1997 09:38:11 +0200 (MET DST) (This manifest was written for the upcoming opening of the web site of the Tactical Media Network, hosted by the Waag, the Society for Old and New Media: http://www.waag.org/tmn). It will contain the archive of the web site and on-line journal of Next Five Minutes 2, a database of addresses, the archive of VPRO TVs "Worldreceiver" program and a new "broadcast site" with samples of new work, made by tactical media groups from all over the world. Contact: roos {AT} waag.org). The ABC of Tactical Media By David Garcia and Geert Lovink Tactical Media are what happens when the cheap 'do it yourself' media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture. Tactical media do not just report events, as they are never impartial they always participate and it is this that more than anything separates them from mainstream media. A distinctive tactical ethic and aesthetic that has emerged, which is culturally influential from MTV through to recent video work made by artists. It began as a quick and dirty aesthetic although it is just another style it (at least in its camcorder form) has come to symbolize a verite for the 90's. Tactical media are media of crisis, criticism and opposition. This is both the source their power, ("anger is an energy" : John Lydon), and also their limitation. their typical heroes are; the activist, Nomadic media warriors, the pranxter, the hacker,the street rapper, the camcorder kamikaze, they are the happy negatives, always in search of an enemy. But once the enemy has been named and vanquished it is the tactical practitioner whose turn it is to fall into crisis. Then (despite their achievements) its easy to mock them, with catch phrases of the right, "politically correct" "Victim culture" etc. More theoretically the identity politics, media critiques and theories of representation, that became the foundation of much western tactical media are themselves in crisis. These ways of thinking are widely seen as, carping and repressive remnants of an outmoded humanism. To believe that issues of representation are now irrelevant is to believe that the very real life chances of groups and individuals are not still crucially affected by the available images circulating in any given society. And the fact that we no longer see the mass media as the sole and centralized source of our self definitions might make these issues more slippery but that does not make them redundant. Tactical media a qualified form of humanism. A useful antidote to both, what Peter Lamborn Wilson described, as "the unopposed rule of money over human beings". But also as an antidote to newly emerging forms of technocratic scientism which under the banner of post-humanism tend to restrict discussions of human use and social reception. What makes Our Media Tactical? In 'The Practice of Every Day Life' De Certueau analyzed popular culture not as a 'domain of texts or artifacts but rather as a set of practices or operations performed on textual or text like structures'. He shifted the emphasis from representations in their own right to the 'uses' of representations. In other words how do we as consumers use the texts and artifacts that surround us. And the answer, he suggested, was 'tactically'. That is in far more creative and rebellious ways than had previously been imagined. He described the process of consumption as a set of tactics by which the weak make use of the strong. He characterized the rebellious user (a term he preferred to consumer) as tactical and the presumptuous producer (in which he included authors, educators, curators and revolutionaries) as strategic. Setting up this dichotomy allowed him to produce a vocabulary of tactics rich and complex enough to amount to a distinctive and recognizable aesthetic. An existential aesthetic. An aesthetic of Poaching, tricking, reading, speaking, strolling, shopping, desiring. Clever tricks, the hunter's cunning, maneuvers, polymorphic situations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike. Awareness of this tactical/strategic dichotomy helped us to name a class of producers of who seem uniquely aware of the value of these temporary reversals in the flow of power. And rather than resisting these rebellions do everything in their power to amplify them. And indeed make the creation of spaces, channels and platforms for these reversals central to their practice. We dubbed their (our) work tactical media. Tactical Media are never perfect, always in becoming, performative and pragmatic, involved in a continual process of questioning the premises of the channels they work with. This requires the confidence that the content can survive intact as it travels from interface to interface. But we must never forget that hybrid media has its opposite its nemesis, the Medialen Gesamtkunstwerk. The final program for the electronic Bauhaus. Of course it is much safer to stick to the classic rituals of the underground and alternative scene. Bu tactical media are based on a principal of flexible response, of working with different coalitions, being able to move between the different entities in the vast media landscape without betraying their original motivations. Tactical Media may be hedonistic, or zealously euphoric. Even fashion hypes have their uses. But it is above all mobility that most characterizes the tactical practitioner. The desire and capability to combine or jump from one media to another creating a continuous supply of mutants and hybrids. To cross boarders, connecting and re-wiring a variety of disciplines and always taking full advantage of the free spaces in the media that are continually appearing because of the pace of technological change and regulatory uncertainty. Although tactical media include alternative media, we are not restricted to that category. In fact we introduced the term tactical to disrupt and take us beyond the rigid dichotomies that have restricted thinking in this area, for so long, dichotomies such as amateur Vs professional, alternative Vs mainstream. Even private Vs public. Our hybrid forms are always provisional. What counts are the temporary connections you are able to make. Here and now, Not some vaporware promised for the future. But what we can do on the spot with the media we have access to. Here in Amsterdam we have access to local TV, digital cities and fortresses of new and old media. In other places they might have theater, street demonstrations, experimental film, literature, photography. Tactical media's mobility connects it to a wider movement of migrant culture. Espousedby the proponents of what Nie Ascherson described as the stimulating pseudo science of Nomadism. 'The human race say its exponants are entering a new epoch of movement and migration. The subjects of history once the settled farmers and citizens, have become the migrants,the refugees the gastarbeiters, the asylum seekers, the urban homeless.' An exemplery example of the tactical can be seen in the work of the Polish artist Krzystof Wodiczko who 'perceives how the hordes of the displaced that now occupy the public space of cities squares, parks or railway station concourses which were once designed by a triumphant middle class to celebrate the conquest of its new political rights and economic liberties. Wodiczko thinks that these occupied spaces form new agoras. which should be used for statements. 'The artist', he says, 'needs to learn how to operate as a nomadic sophist in a migrant polis.' Like other migrant media tactitions Wodiczko has studied the techniques by which the weak become stronger than the opressors by scatering , by becoming centreless, by moving fast across the physical or media and virtual landscapes. 'The hunted mustdiscover the ways become the hunter.' But capital is also radically deterritorialized. This is why we like being based in a building like De Waag, an old fortress in the center of Amsterdam. We happily accept the paradox of *centers* of tactical media. As well as castles in the air, we need fortresses of bricks and mortar, to resist a world of unconstrained nomadic capital. Spaces to plan not just improvise and the possibility of capitalizing on acquired advantages, has always been the preserve of 'strategic' media. As flexible media tacticians, who are not afraid of power, we are happy to adopt this approach ourselves. Every few years we do a Next 5 Minutes conference on tactical media from around the world. Finally we have a base (De Waag) from which we hope to consolidate and build for the longer term. We see this building as a place to plan regular events and meetings, including coming The Next 5 Minutes. We see the coming The Next 5 Minutes (in january 1999), and discussions leading up to it, as part of a movement to create an antidote to what Peter Lamborn Wilson described, as 'the unopposed rule of money over human beings.' 1.0 <nettime> The DEF of Tactical Media David Garcia nettime-l@desk.nl Mon, 22 Feb 1999 13:01:36 +0000 The DEF of Tactical Media By David Garcia and Geert Lovink [or part two of the ABC of Tactical Media, posted to nettime in the spring of 1997, http://www.nettime.org and the zkp4 reader, http://www.desk.nl/~nettime] Campaigns and Movements Although a global conference, the first Next 5 Minutes, held six years ago (1993), was dominated by the first large scale encounter between two distinctive cultural communities. On the one hand, Western European and North American campaigning media artists and activists and on the other hand their equivalent from the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, dissident artists and samizdat activists, still basking in the after glow of the role they played in bringing down the communist dictatorships. In the excitement of discovering each other, these two communities tended to gloss over their ideological differences, understandably emphasising only the shared practice of exploiting consumer electronics (in those days mostly the video camcorder) as a means of organisation and social mobilisation. We referred to these practices, and the distinctive aesthetic to which it gave rise, tactical media. Although the differences between these two groups were under-played at the time, they were nevertheless profound and illuminating. In the United States and Western Europe, tactical media, both then and now, are overwhelmingly the media of campaigns rather than of broadly based social movements. They are not a megaphone representing the voice of the oppressed or resistance as such. Once upon a time in the West, there were movements without one specific campaign. They were into questioning every single aspect of life, with 'the most radical gesture.' "We don't want a piece of the cake, we want the whole bloody bakery." But now there are a plethora of campaigns detached from any broadly based emancipatory movement. In contrast, central and eastern European media tacticians, or the "samizdat media", had been very much part of broad social movement. A movement that resulted in the dismantling the Soviet Empire. They tended, in the early days, still to be if not exactly starry eyed, then uncritical, about their future under a market economy. Six years later, the consequences of unaccountable global capital flows have bitten deep. And although less utopian about the emancipatory potential of new media there is a general convergence of many tactical groups around the principal of learning the lessons of global capitalism. While refusing to leave globalism to the investment houses and multinationals, these groups combatted global capital with global campaigns. And present in these strategies is the faint hope that if a campaign generates enough velocity and resonates with enough people, it might just take on some of the qualities of a movement. Simulation Vs Real Action For many, the urgency of some of the questions we are facing generate an angry scepticism around any practice that raises art or media questions. For real actionists the equation is simple, discourse = spectacle. They insist on a distinction between real action and the merely symbolic. From this perspective media tacticians are accused of merely talking not doing anything. By focusing on the media question we are accused of just creating more empty signs. And there is much in the current European political reality to support this critique. After all the expansion of the media realm has not automatically resulted in an equivalent growth in emancipatory movements and critical practice. It has merely resulted in an accumulation of self-referential topics. Media these days are accused of fragmenting rather than unifying and mobilising. Paradoxically, that is partly because of their discursive power to elaborate on differences and to question rather than just voice propaganda. Although our favourite topic remains the end of media, the era of a total implosion of the whole spectacular media circus. This however remains the utopian option (which should not mistaken for abandonment or surrender). Meanwhile at least for the Next 5 Minutes, we continue to languish in a world in which many struggles appear to have left the street and the factory floor and migrated into an ideological space of representation, constructed by and through the media. This is often characterised as a shift from public space towards virtuality or a shift from social action towards the mediated. In a time where we can see such growth in media channels where there is a tremendous expansion of various cyberspaces it is a nonsense to talk about "a return to the real". In fact one might even ask whether any meaningful politics can exist outside of the media sphere. The current debate about "net activism" is the focus of the "merely" symbolic Vs the "real action" discussion, with critics voicing scepticism about whether you really can provoke a campaign by just sending out hostile commands via the internet or whether on your own, you can construct a movement via technical means or through mediation only. Another level of critique addresses the problematique nature of self referential campaigns, that is campaigns that do not go beyond the media, such as the open source movement or the "WE WANT BANDWIDTH" campaign (http://www.waag.org/bandwidth). Although we believe that there can be no effective campaign if you have not tackled the media issue we are aware that this is just our assumption, perhaps our arrogance. We know how easy it is to lose oneself, to dive into an attractive and fatal media trap. Attractive because it is so vast, there is always more information, more channels, more software and the political issues within that sphere of contestation, the severe struggles within the media industry is a universe in and of itself. So yes we must be wary of the self-referential campaigns that are friction free, appropriating the glamour of activism without the sweat and tears... It is true we are vulnerable to the accusation of being trapped in the same old safe assumption that all power struggles are being fought out in the media space. However to believe this would be to believe that the campaigns to damage Shell, Nike or McDonalds have just been fought on the level of pure semiotics. It is a too easy and luxurious position to disdain the media question altogether. The point is to ask the right questions about what has more effect and what brings us nearer our goals? These questions imply analysis and in the end a judgement. In part the trick is to emphasise topics which lie outside of the media realm whilst at the same time retaining sophisticated media tactics. The Maclibel campaign is a classic example of a campaign which would like to construct itself into a movement. Like every group it depends of the willingness of local groups to identify itself with it. The Macspotlight site is a collection of links to sites, bringing together this variety of local groups. The whole project makes a dialectical move whereby a single a campaign organised from Oxford is translated into a translocal movement with broad appeal addressing billions of people. Temporary Alliances and Hybridisation Although a shared agenda may be emerging we should also be realistic about the differences. We have no unique overriding identity around which to organise. We create no positive models for anyone to identify with, let alone follow. Our alliances are still relatively loose with a tendency to fragment into an infinite number of gangs and subcultures. This why we still do not have this "world federation of tactical media practitioners". Perhaps we are just a diverse collection of weirdoes both men and women, who are off-topic by nature. Of course there is an element of pleasure in knowing that you are with your 20 dearest friends on your own "real audio" channel but this is swiftly accompanied by the realisation that it will be indefinitely confined to these twenty friends and what seemed like an opportunity has become a ghetto. We are then faced with the question of how to leave the safety of our own self created biosphere. So we begin again, looking for new coalitions while trying to avoid falling into the traps and limits of institutionalised politics. Unfortunately, the Internet has not freed us from the necessity or perils of having to deal with institutional politics. Indeed there is no Internet without power, cable policy, money and access rights. Beyond analysis and judgement the tactical is also about reclaiming imagination and fantasy. The classical rituals of resistance are no longer reaching large parts of the population, this is the crisis of direct action, which is in part a failure of imagination. An exception is the epidemic of pie throwing. The ritualised humiliation of power with a pie in the face. A highly mediatised practice, the pie does not exist without the image, its only meaning is as a media event. We could see it as a primal way of attacking power. You identify a locus of power and you pie him (http://www.gloup.gloup.com) A leap into perfect simulacra, creating the perfect sign, or rather the poisonous countersign. The pie is the perfect poisonous countersign. The secret wisdom of the tactics of radical alienation, in which the further you go, the more likely you are to implode into reality. Its time to intensify our semiotic guerrilla wars on corporate images. Tactical media in the context of The Next 5 Minutes is a deliberately slippery term, a tool for creating "temporary consensus zones" based on unexpected alliances with people whom you might normally never meet based on a desire to be released from the tiredness of self satisfied groups and communities. But at the same retaining the right, when the time has come, to disconnect. Our aim is to retain our mobility, and our velocity, to avoid the paralysis induced by the essentialistic questioning of everything, in which everyone is an object of suspicion and nothing is any longer possible. One of the most well trodden of tactical routes remains hybridisation, connecting old with new, the street and the virtual. We should be clear that hybridity is neither our ideology or our goal it is more like our dirty realism. Hybridisation is often seen as per se good, generative of infinite possibilities to switch between channels, mix up the signals, intentions and disciplines, naturally operating in accordance with the economic and technological shift towards synergy. Let us be clear, in our case hybridisation is about survival, it is not really our choice. For those who make the mistake of treating it as an ideology, there is simply no way back, there is no place for negativism. Taking this route we inevitably arrive at the dialectic free zone of Europe's new politics. Hybridity in this world is about connectivity in the sense of promiscuously connecting everything with everything, the neo-liberal idea of anything goes as long as its connects. In this world the critic is seen as a destructive trouble-maker, failing in their sacred duty to connect. This is where tactics end and choices will have to be made. Is this the end of the roaring media age? Not for the time being... But for sure a reconsideration what we are actually intending to transmit on all these channels. 2.0 <nettime> Garcia/Lovink: The GHI of Tactical Media Andreas Broeckmann nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 15 Aug 2001 15:50:44 +0200 [this text will be published in: transmediale.01: DIY Media, Berlin 2001 (forthcoming, autumn 2001); it is posted on the occasion of David's half-centenial birthday!] David Garcia and Geert Lovink The GHI of Tactical Media An interview by Andreas Broeckmann, July 2001 ab: In 1997, you wrote The ABC of Tactical Media, and at that time the concept of 'tactical media' was already a few years old. It had grown out of the cooperation of media artists and activists in Amsterdam and has been closely identified with the Next 5 Minutes conferences, although important models of tactical media usage have also come from elsewhere. And then the concept was first related mainly to video and TV activism, which have been eclipsed in the last years by the Internet. A follow-up that you wrote in 1999, The DEF of Tactical Media, tried to sketch some of these changes. Do you think that it makes sense to speak of Tactical Media as a general attitude and practice that pervades different media, or is Tactical Media a summary term for a whole host of different media practices, each with their own culture and politics? gl: Or even aesthetics? No, I don't think so. Tactical means tactical. It's a really open, short-term concept, born out of a disgust for ideology. It is pretty much a post-1989 phenomenon, surfing on the waves of events, enjoying the opening up of scenes and borders, on the look out for new alliances. Curious, not afraid of differences. I am not sure if tactical media are bound to certain media or platforms. It is about a form of art meets activism with a positive attitude towards contemporary digital technology. It is more exploratory than confrontational. To some extent self-reflexive. There are a lot of rituals and phrases which have to be thrown out in order to be able to make new start and reach new audiences. Let's face it. This excitement has grown and resulted in a whole new generation of (net) activism, covered by the mainstream media. We are living in interesting times. This cannot be said of new media arts which was at its height in the early to mid nineties. Today's activism has profited from it, though. There is no fall-back noticable towards a grey dogmatic non-aesthetics, which really surprises me. ab: The 'grey dogmatic non-aesthetics' of earlier tactical media? Is this the result of a more 'pop'-oriented attitude in activism? A new generation that is less tied up in clean, fundamentalist ideologies? Java activists versus the telnet-generation? gl: No, I think the distinction is a more primitive one: online versus offline (which, by the way, are not contradictory practices). It is not even punk versus techno. The DIY aesthetics I am referring to here is one which cares for the self (image), it has grown out of a curiocity, and is done with precision. It is against the sloppy attitudes which implicitly say that form doesn't matter anyway. I am talking about an activism with style. Not a particular style. Having, and maintaining, a style is quite something these days. It is hard. I am not sure if I would call it 'pop,' because that term, for me, is refering to 'popular.' That's not what I mean. Sophisticated and rich styles activists use often are unpopular. The aesthetic program does not even have to be about a certain 'look.' I am talking about a higher, critical awareness of style rather than the correct usage of this or that contemporary icon, software, color set, patterns or typography font. ab: David, you have always strongly advocated a tight linking of media activism and art. This relationship has been very strong in a particular segment of media art practice, but it has sometimes fallen between the camps of established contemporary art and political activism. How would you describe the link between the two - or the complex in which they articulate each other? dg: Yes, this is true and the reason for my position is not theoretical but the result of my first experience of seeing tactical media at close hand, in action in what I still believe to be one of the most important and effective campaigns of recent years. This was ACT UP a mobilisation against the AIDS policy of the Reagan administration of the time, which in choosing to ignore AIDS was a policy of silence. Artists played a critical role in both organising and giving shape and a kind of charismatic momentum to ACT UP. I believe it was the artist collective Gran Fury in their exhibition Let the Record Show who created the slogan (or equation) that became the symbol of the AIDS activist movement world wide: SILENCE = DEATH An activist carrying this statement on banners or wearing it on badges or sweat shirts were not delivering a simple polemical message from an earlier era of politics with its rigid command structures. They were developing a new language for the era of communicative networks. The activists were "wearing" a statement which required completion by others, to wear this logo was to draw people into conversation. Not a command but an invitation to discourse. Intimate media, a "user language" for both activism and the visual arts. This took the rhetorical tropes of the likes of Jenny Holzer and Barbera Kruger into a new and tactical dimension. ab: Do you mean what Geert refers to as a 'style' - tactical media as an attitude more than a technical definition? dg: Yes, rather than the use of any particular medium it is this quality of creating effective user languages (virtual or otherwise) that *engage* and *deploy* rather than *authorise* and *require* that characterise the tactical practitioner. The posters, videos, installations, murals graphics and television channels such as The Gay Men's Health Crisis were not only successful as art and as activism but were successful as art BECAUSE it was effective activism. The AIDS tactitical practitioners, collectives like Gran Fury or individuals like Greg Bordowitz (who is still working) are true hybrids leaving behind the older categories to forge something else, something necessary, something which required a name. In N5M we chose to call it tactical media. Maybe the term itself is a tactical solution, an improvisation that has proved a curiously successful stop gap measure like the X in algebra. There is a text by the Critical Art Ensemble which encapsulates what I think is still the best take on tactical media: "There has been a growing awareness that for many decades a cultural practice has existed that has avoided being named or fully categorized. Its roots are in the modern avant garde, to the extent that its participants place a high value on experimentation and on engaging the unbreakable link between representation and political and social change. Often not artists in any traditional sense refusing to be caught in the web of metaphysical, historical and romantic signage that accompanies that designation. Nor are they simply political activists because they refuse to take a solely reactive position and often act in defiance of efficiency and necessity ... For those of us who are involved in tactical media felt a kind of relief that we could be any kind of hybrid artist, scientist, technician, craftsperson, theorist, activist, could all be mixed together in combinations that had different weights and intensities. These many roles of becoming artist becoming activist, becoming scientist, etc., contained in each individual and group, could be acknowledged and valued. Many felt liberated from having to represent themselves to the public as a specialist and therefore valued." I can't put it any better so I won't try. But I will add that this model and its continued use makes it something more than simply a "short term concept". ab: Geert, in a new text called The New Actonomy which you wrote together with Florian Schneider, you describe the new possibilities of media activism that are emerging, but you also point to the potential dangers that people have to be aware of. The Internet as the master medium of the 1990s has, in the last two or three years, fallen into what looks like a depression. Some say that the party and the hype are simply over, others that we are entering into a more realistic stage where the importance of the Net as a medium will continue to grow, while the utopian hopes subside in the face of all sorts of critical reality checks. These reality checks are also closely tied to a crisis of the general belief in globalisation and the fast-aging 'new economy'. Does this crisis create room for tactical media practices, or does it make the life of media activists more difficult? gl: It is indeed true that advanced net activism (not the adolescent 'hacktivism') is much closer to dotcom business than many would suspect. The new actonomy is open for business, constantly searching for funds, just as tactical media no longer fully depend on state funding. For a good reason: there is a common interest in innovative net concepts, software, interfaces, usage of streaming media, free software and open source etc. This might mean that the current wave of net activism will face a setback in a little while because it's just behind the dotcom wave. The stagnation of bandwidth is a real concern, for example, also for activists. The same counts for the e-cash crisis and the absence of a functioning micro payment system. Activists, sitting on their explosive content, would really benefit from alternative e-commerce systems, not based on credit cards. It is of course good for social and political work on the Net that the cyberselfish robber mentality of the dotcoms has gone. But do not forget the flip side of this. With libertarianism losing its hegemony there is also the danger of throwing away the baby with the tub water and giving away the cyber freedom to corporations and the state. That should never happen. It is also up to activists to fight against censorship, lobby against the flood of desastrous legislations etc. ab: The French theorist Felix Guattari has used the term 'post-media' to describe a potential system in which the mass media are pushed aside by a multiplicity of small, heterogeneous, digital media, a network or rhizome of practices that foster the emergence of more differentiated, less homogeneous subjectivities and group subjectivities. Howard Slater has taken this idea up and points out that the cheerful clutter of independent media activities on websites, music labels, in zines, at demonstrations, mailing lists, etc., are the kinds of post-mdeia operations which Guattari saw the beginnings of in the Minitel and free radio movements in France in the 1970s and 80s. However, rather than fulfilling Guattari's utopian hope, the mass-medialisation of digital media seems unstoppable and threatens to turn the Net, as well as the computer in general through the software door, into a one-way medium. Is the hope for 'DIY media', which we also tried to promote through the transmediale.01, futile? gl: Not futile. It's a struggle. You don't get media freedom for free. And most of all: you can't buy 'technological freedom.' It doesn't come with the equipment or even with the software. It is only a matter of time until we will see the first full-scale civil war, fought with Linux software on both sides, causing thousands of deaths. Why not? Is there something like inherently good software? No. The Internet is beyond good and evil and simply mirrors human nature with all its flaws. A radical and open, independent media infrastructure is produced by people and their ability to connect with each other and create a "culture." DIY media do not go anywhere if it just means Do It On Your Own. The trick is to create loose ties and provide a relative autonomy for seperate units. The units can be individuals, groups, collectives, associations, circles of friends, from the same discipline and generation, in contact with the rest. The opposite of DIY is DBO, Done By Others. There is indeed a danger that Internet will become a professional medium, in the hands of others. But that's only the case at the macro level. On the micro level there is still so much possible, especially for those who wanna stay off the radar for a while. ab: David, in how far can education play a role for this kind of post-medial practices? You have been teaching at the art academy in Utrecht for several years now: has it been possible for you to translate the attitudes of art and media activism into the curriculum? dg: Actually where I have been teaching is the department of Interaction Design in a building far away from the main art school and devoted to Art, Media and Technology. To my surprise I have found key questions within interaction design highly applicable to the central problems of art and activism. These are the problems of action in relationship to observation. Historically there was a separation of observation and action in 17th century science and was mirrored in the same period by artists stepping out of the workshops of the artisan and into the isolation of their private studios. But in all areas of science and culture interest has again returned to the one area that was excluded namely action. This can be seen by analysing the discipline of interactive art and design as action or 'behaviour' lies at its core. Earlier forms of art could be perceived as constructed out of three primary components: appearance, content and structure. To this triangulation interactive artists and designers have added a fourth and defining component, "behaviour". Not simply the behaviour of the user but of the system as a whole which is made up of machine AND users. In this model, the work of art includes the whole system, the machines and the people. Success in these new forms of interactive art depend on being able to integrate a visualisation of the behaviour or action of the system into the work itself. It is in this context in both interaction design or tactical media that I apply the same maxim "visibility is not achieved through prediction, but through support". This summer at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the artist George Legrady and the computer scientist from Helsinki Timo Honkela worked together (with others) to produce the installation, Pockets Full of Memories (www.pocketsfullofmemories.com) in which neural networks are used to create an artwork that evolves over time, refining its decisions in relationship to the different contributions that each museum visitor makes to the system. This is an artwork - and a supportive environment - that learns! Works like these are creating a new chapter in the history of culture. But we are confronted with the fact that along with this new chapter comes a new set of problems. As Gerard de Zeeuw, an important teacher and intellectual who recently retired from Amsterdam University wrote : "Action remains the area of the unexpected, of the invisible, of that which changes without pattern. Stepping into the river still seems as unique as it was 2500 years ago!" ab: For me, this conflation of interactivity in media art, action in a political sense, and behaviour - which seems to be a form of action that is non-subjective and driven by outside forces - is not unproblematic and I wonder whether it is possible to get all of this under the umbrella of 'tactical media.' gl: No. For me tactical is the expression of a nineties temporality, in search of new a alchemy, to break out of the high art versus raw activism of the outgoing eighties with its dogmatic infightings and institutionalized new social movements. For me the whole idea of tactical media geared up towards Seattle and the IMC phenomena. There's a phenomenal renaissance of media activism going on around the globe. I was just at the second Media Circus conference in Melbourne (www.antimedia.net/mediacircus). I also attended the first one, in September 1999, a one day event, during the East Timor crisis. Media Circus doubled in size. There were 350 mainly young people during the weekend. Last night, in Sydney, there was the first Active Sydney Fair (www.active.org.au/sydney/fair), with a crowd of at least 500. Naomi Klein spoke and she warned of summit tourism, the crackdown of authorities against the massive street protests. There is a gap between abstract topics of third world debt, world trade agreements, financial policies and the daily misery, with its concrete, local struggles. I don't think internet activism, or tactical media for that matter can fill that gap. What we can do exchange concepts. The rapid growth of anti-border groups, supporting illegalized migrants, is a good example there. A fight in which the tactical imagination plays a key role (see: www.deportation-alliance.com). ab: David, when you started the Next 5 Minutes series 10 years ago, you were a free-lancing artist, whereas now you are teaching at an academy. Do you see areas where the academic system is opening up for more diverse and critical approaches to media in art and design? dg: Recently my possibilities in the academic framework have been greatly expanded with the founding of the Ph.D. program Design for Digital Cultures which is a European doctorate sited at three very different European colleges, the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Utrecht and Portsmouth University. My objective over time is to make spaces for the people, theory and materials which have emerged from tactical media into an active component within the Digital Cultures program. This is not simply a question of curriculum it is a question of supporting and enabling the researchers who are part of the program to contribute to tactical campaigns, projects and conferences. For me this program will only be successful if we are involved in *action orientated research*. The first stage of this will include explicitly linking the program to the development of the Next 5 Minutes edition 4. The ball started rolling in a recent seminar in which I participated at New York University where they have launched a research program on tactical media, from this event came the notion of N5M4 as a loose alliance of rolling research groups. The aim is that these groups should form an active network of research nodes, each of which would be working on a specific synergy theme - ideally it should include groups such as NYU - Sarai - Critical Art Ensemble - Open Streaming Alliance - Technics (UK) - to name but a few. The process would involve a structure of regular "development meetings" and smaller planning meetings (on-line is fine but not enough - face to face is still the highest bandwidth -) to ensure that the nodes keep each other informed and are able to borrow freely from each other. In contrast to many previous tactical events I favor experimenting with an approach in which the meetings identify *objectives* and come to (fasten your seat belts) *conclusions*. Under these circumstances The Next 5 Minutes Conference/tribal gathering would remain but be informed by less random approach. N5M would be the platform for presenting the results of our researches. The results could take many forms and be in many media but it would also include programming the conference itself which would obviously want to draw from beyond its own network. I envisage this process beginning November 2001 with research and meetings proceeding throughout 2002 and would culminate early in 2003 with The N5M4 event and conference in Amsterdam with possible related events in other locations. ab: A final question. What David describes in relation to the development of the Next 5 Minutes as a research movement raises the question of the sites, institutional and informal, of tactical media practice. While institutions are no doubt necessary for creating a sustainable practice and infrastructures, the tactical always also seems to imply a 'hit-and-run' attitude which cannot be tied down in such structures. How would you see this tension and how do you think the field can be developed most fruitfully? Do we see the emergence of new, stronger alliances? gl: I do not see it as a tension yet. Institutionalization is a problem which only comes in time. Let's say after five or ten years when an original scene has broken up into fragments. There are indeed people who dig in and do not know how to move on. They are the power brokers. They end up taking all the credits, taking the money from ministeries, foundations and sponsors. But in most cases it's power over a dead territory. Creative individuals can't deal with the kind of bureaucracy that comes with today's institutions. I would love to see more hit and run companies taking off in the new media arts and activist sector. In that sense the dotcoms can be a good lesson. This is mainly because the arts and culture still depends on government resources. It hasn't found ways to generate its own income, nor does know how to negotiate with sponsors. The result is an incredible waste of time. I would love to see a fund where you could apply and get an answer in a few weeks time. We need art and activist ventures. The only way to do something quickly and initiate something new these days is to do it without any money, which sets off the well known self-exploitation cycles. There must be ways to break out of that logic. dg: I want to emphasize that when I see N5M as a research process I mean *action orientated research* not research for its own sake. To Geert's emphasis on speed and mobility I would add (not substitute) a slowing down to analyze, reflect and evaluate; not so much digging in, as digging deep. Let me demonstrate with some local media archeology; I have been re-reading the proceedings of the first event where I met and worked alongside Geert. The Seropositive Ball, held in Amsterdam in 1990. The project arose out of a necessity for something beyond the perception of AIDS as an exclusively medical problem. It combined activism and all the arts with an embryonic culture of computer mediated communications. But at the time we were heavily and to a degree justifiably critiqued by New York activists. This is what Gregg Bordowitz said to us more than a decade ago: "the way the conference is organized is based on a utopian notion of a free exchange of information, instituted through technology. A use of technology that is unquestioned, uncriticised, unproblematised. The notion that a universal space can be established through phone links, faxes and modems. If there is one thing that is established through the kind of work we do is that there have never been such things as universal categories, principles or experiences. In future I would like to see conferences which reflected the interest of the people with the most at stake, in which there was some acceptance of difference that isn't evened out or erased through some notion of free exchange through some neutralmeans that remain unquestioned ... To me this destroys community ... collectivity." Next 5 Minutes 1 (1993), which followed The Sero Positve Ball at the Paradiso, was to a degree driven by a desire to answer this critique. But I am not sure whether any of the N5M conferences have yet been successful. Interestingly I recently re-met Gregg in the tactical media seminar in New York. He has remained a AIDS activist and video-maker and has been part of the successful campaign that fought the drugs companies who were trying to prevent the use of cloned drugs in South Africa (a case where the issue of intellectual property is a matter of life and death). Gregg is still committed to fight AIDS world wide. To me the continuity of this struggle, this "digging in" with values other than "hit and run" is inspiring. Personally I also found value in a closer scrutiny of the past of what Geert described as our fragmented "scene" not for history's sake but for the sake of making us less likely to repeat mistakes and re-invent the wheel. Time has come to question the assumption that ephemerality must always be a virtue. Manifestos of the tactical (including our own) assume that we must reject the permanent, the monumental. Defacing public monuments is a knee jerk reaction of many street protests. I think there is something to be learned from the American Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King when they appropriated the Lincoln Memorial as a means of tapping into a broadly based community memory. In Amsterdam we also have a great example, the Homo Monument which is a beautiful and effective public site for reflection and mobilisation. On the question of the tension between informal tactics and institutionalization, like Geert I also don't see tension, but for different reasons. The perceived tension is based on the misapprehension that tactical media is by definition always on the outside of institutional power. Power exists where it enacts itself and that may or may not be within institutions. I know plenty of "power brokers" who operate on the outside of institutions. Nor do I accept the romanticism of the statement "creative individuals can't deal with bureaucracy". An important reason for introducing the term tactical was to leave behind the rigid dichotomies of mainstream vs underground, amateur vs professional, or even "the creative individuals vs uncreative individuals". From Paper Tiger to the BBC's video diaries we discovered that the tactical cuts straight across the marginal vs mainstream dichotomy. It is the contexts in which tactical media are made that influence the tactics deployed, and these contexts (and their tactics) are multiple. 3.0 [spectre] Questioning the Frame coco fusco spectre@mikrolisten.de Thu Dec 16 21:51:30 CET 2004 IN THESE TIMES http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1750/ Questioning the Frame Thoughts about maps and spatial logic in the global present By Coco Fusco December 16, 2004 Terms such as " mapping," "borders," "hacking," "trans-nationalism," "identity as spatial," and so on have been popularized in recent years by new media theories' celebration of "the networks"-a catch-all phrase for the modes of communication and exchange facilitated by the Internet. We should proceed with caution in using this terminology because it accords strategic primacy to space and simultaneously downplays time-i.e., history. It also evades categories of embodied difference such as race, gender and class, and in doing so prevents us from understanding how the historical development of those differences has shaped our contemporary worldview. Technocentric fantasy The rhetoric of mapping and networks conflates the way technological systems operate with modern human communication. According to this mode of thought we are to believe that we live inside the world of William Gibson's Neuromancer and that salvation is only attainable via very specific technological expertise unleashed against the system-i.e., hacking. Consider the heroes of Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters such as The Matrix whose power lies in their knowledge of "the code." It is implied that we operate in networks because computers and the Internet have restructured "our" lives and because global economic systems have turned us into global citizens. Hacking then comes to stand for all forms of critical engagement with preexistent power structures. I'm just a little too old to believe these new media mantras unquestioningly. This rhetoric implies two possible explanations for the difference between the networked present and the non-networked past. The first explanation suggests that no one on the left before the age of the Internet practiced subversive manipulation of existent media, tactical intervention, investigative reporting and infiltration of power structures. It also would seem that before the dawning of the networks, no one knew what being an organic intellectual was about, no one elaborated alternative communication systems and no one was aware of or sensed a connection to geographic regions other than Europe. The second explanation would be that electronic communication has produced a form of networking that is so radically different as to imply a neat break with the past. In either case, these arguments conveniently situate their advocates outside history, since either way tactical media practitioners have nothing of value to inherit from the past. While I can understand that there might be a dearth of knowledge about tactical interventions of previous centuries, I am perplexed by the apparent loss of short-term memory of many cultural theorists now in vogue, who were alive and active in the '70s. Can we forget Daniel Ellsberg's publishing of the Pentagon Papers, the uncovering of the Watergate scandal, the break-in to an FBI office by an anonymous group that led to revelations of COINTELPRO and the Freedom of Information Act, the many Senate investigations of FBI corruption, the widespread solidarity with Third World independence movements, the plethora of underground and alternative presses and global mail art networks-all operated by radical activists, artists and intellectuals? Those of us who can at least recall the ways that these strategic interventions transformed political and cultural life in that decade necessarily cast a skeptical glance at the messianic claims of technocentrists. The shift from Eurocentric internationalism to a more globally inclusive worldview came long before the age of the Internet. It was launched outside Europe and America, and emanated from the geopolitical margins. The process took place across a range of fields of knowledge, culture and politics. This revision of the world picture was catalyzed by postwar decolonization; the Non-Aligned Movement launched in 1961; and civil rights struggles in the developed world, including the Black Power and Chicano movements-all of which invariably affirmed their alliances with Third World revolutions. This political process was expanded upon by a postcolonial understanding that various diasporas shared transnational connections and that these diasporas were produced by the economics and politics of colonialism and imperialism. The historical bases of these movements are consistently obfuscated by the technocentric rhetoric of networks and mapping that emanate from Europe, North America and Australia. Instead of dealing with these histories, contemporary discourses on globalism and new technology tend to dismiss postcolonial discourse as "mere identity politics." They tend to confuse bureaucratic efforts to institutionally separate the concerns of ethnic minorities with what always have been the much broader agendas of anti-racist political struggles and postcolonial cultural endeavors. I am a great admirer of the practice of electronic civil disobedience and have used "hacktivist" software such as Floodnet to engage in online protest actions myself. But I find the willed historical amnesia of new media theory to be quite suspect, and even dangerous. One of the reasons I chose to make a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert, a video art piece about the Angela Davis case, was because I wanted to reexamine crucial histories that are now being forgotten within the contemporary conversations on globalization. The alienation caused by multinational corporate domination (otherwise known as Empire) that many middle-class young adults in the Global North feel is just the last chapter in a long history of reactions against imperial projects. Mapping mistakes Another issue of concern is the new media culture's fascination with mapping-a fascination that it shares with the military strategists. The news of the Iraq war frequently involves men in uniform pointing to or better yet walking across maps of various Middle Eastern countries-so when I then walk into galleries and cultural conferences in Europe and find more men (without uniforms) playing with maps, I start to wonder about the politics of those representations. In the American media, maps dominate representations of warfare. While realistic depictions of the violence of war via photographs and film have been banned from American television news, maps are acceptable to those in power because they dehumanize the targets. Similarly, in the context of the art world, maps have come to abstract and thereby silence individual and group testimony. New media culture uses maps to read the world in terms of extremes. Contemporary cultural theory is rife with renderings that celebrate macro views and micro views of the workings of the world, both social and biological-which is to say, maps of vast spaces and physical phenomena and maps of the most minuscule thing. We hear over and over again about global systems and panoptic vision on the one hand and genome chains and nano-entities on the other. When I first noticed this phenomenon I was struck by how it complements the resurgence of formalist art criticism's love affair with the grid. By this I am referring to the return in the '90s to the definition of art as a search for "perfect forms," and a celebration of the formal characteristics of objects and surfaces. What I have become more concerned about as time goes on, however, is how this fetishizing of spatial extremes enables the resurgence of Descartes' idea that humans are rational, autonomous individuals and that the human mind and mathematical principles are the source for all real knowledge. However objective they may appear, maps do have a point of view, and that is one of privileged super-human sight, of safe distance and of omniscience. The mapmaker charts an entire field of vision, an entire world, and in doing so he (yes he) plays God. Whether you are beholding the map as a viewer or charting it as the cartographer, you rule the world before you, you control it, and, in putting everything in its place, you substitute a global whole established through pictorial arrangement for an actual dynamic engagement with individual elements and entities. The psychological motive behind assuming that position of power is not questioned, nor is the predominance of white male techno-elites in that discourse seen as anything more than incidental. It is as if more than four decades of postmodern critique of the Cartesian subject had suddenly evaporated. Those critical discourses that unmasked the way universals suppress difference, which gave voice to the personal experience of women, the poor and disenfranchised minorities, are treated as inherently flawed by both the progressive and conservative discourses of globalism. Progressive media advocates dismiss these discourses of difference as "essentialist" while Republicans decry them as "the tyranny of special interests." But both provide ideological justification for the dismantling of legislation protecting civil rights. Viewing the world as a map eliminates time, focuses disproportionately on space and dehumanizes life. In the name of a politics of global connectedness, artists and activists too often substitute an abstract "connectedness" for any real engagement with people in other places or even in their own locale. What gets lost in this focus on mapping is the view of the world from the ground: lived experience. What is ignored is the pervasiveness of the well-orchestrated and highly selective visual culture that the majority of Americans consume during most of their waking hours. Most people are not looking through microscopes and telescopes and digital mapping systems to find truth about the world. They are watching reality TV, sitcoms, the Super Bowl, MTV and Fox News, all of which also offer maps of a completely different kind: conspiracy theories that pit innocent Americans against the Axis of Evil, embedded journalists' hallucinatory misreadings of foreign conflicts, allegories of empowerment through consumption and endlessly recycled, biblically inspired narratives of sin and redemption. Going off-grid Finally we should consider what is being left off the maps and why? What has happened, for example, to institutional self-critique in the art world? Why has such examination become taboo in exhibitions or unpopular with artists who gravitate to political subjects? Why in the midst of myriad investigations of corporate control of politics and culture is there little or no attention paid to corporate control of the museums and of corporate influence in art collecting? Why is it acceptable to the art world for an artist to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but not to address the pressure put on the organizers of global art exhibitions to showcase a disproportionate number of Israeli artists? Why is it fine for black artists to celebrate the construction of black style but not to make visible the virtual absence of black people as arbiters in the power structures of the art institutions, galleries, magazines and auction houses where black art is given economic and aesthetic value? We live in a very dangerous time in which the right to express dissent and to raise questions about the workings of power is seriously imperiled by fundamentalisms of many kinds. Now more than ever we need to keep the lessons of history foremost in our minds and to defend the critical discourses and practices that enable differing experiences and perspectives to be heard and understood. There are just too many important parallels to be drawn between COINTELPRO and the excesses of law enforcement brought about by the Patriot Act to be dismissive of history. Socially conscious artists and activists, rather than embracing tactics that rely on dreams of omniscience, would do well to examine the history of globalism, networks, dissent and collective actions in order to understand that they are rooted in the geopolitical and cultural margins. Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and an associate professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts. Her most recent publication is Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (Abrams, 2003). 4.0 "say you want a revolution....." was Re: nettime: [Fwd: rewired Zeit- name.space] MediaFilter nettime-l@desk.nl Sun, 16 Feb 1997 01:53:48 -0500 to the tune of "REVOLUTION" by the Beatles: "you say you want a revolution well, you know, somebody's got to pay..." The foundations for the existance of free art and free media are threatened by the disappearance of funding and resources which have until now been the blood of existance of the culture scene as we _knew_ it. Many within this scene have converged to discuss the concepts of "Tactical Media" and other progressive, democratic approaches of creating and distributing media which emphasize cultural diversity and respect for human rights. Most, if not all these cultural gatherings, i.e. Next 5 Minutes, and others were funded by a variety of public and foundation money. There is no guarantee that this will be the case in the future. The 1998 funding for MuuMediaBase in Helsinki is in doubt, for example. They are unsure if they can maintain their current level of operations in the future. The question is, if there is the motivation to create an open space on the net for free art and media, how will it be achieved? How will it be funded? During the early phases of name.space, known as "panet" (permanent autonomous net), it was stated that the only way to assure the uncensored presence of our media in the future,is to buy the bandwidth and server resources. In a sense, to make our own channel. In order to create a place on the internet dedicated to the furtherance of free thought, free art and free media, an economic infrastructure must exist, or we must forever be at the mercy of whatever interests control the network you are on. The radikal search engine at disinfo.com was cut off because of the nature of its contents (Time Warner??--pulled the plug??). The "Disneyfication of Media" threatens to censor or at least marginalize independent artistic content and free media. (look back to "The Disappearance of Public Space on the Net" <a href="http://mediafilter.org/ZK/Conf/Conf_Email/March.30.1996.18.49.13"> Disappearance</a>) The idea of establishing an expanded domain name space seemed to be the perfect way of putting into practice many of the ideals often discussed around the topic of "Tactical Media". The idea of decentralization--of anonymity and privacy--the assertion of independence from the government legacy of the net--and, the establishment of decentralized, localized economy. It is clear that the name.space initiative has enormous economic potential. This was known from the beginning and should be clear to anyone who even thought about the scale of the project. The question was, how to develop this economic potential? ******HOW TO: Setting up dns is technically a relatively simple operation. Creating new names in the toplevel namespace is as easy as typing in the name and address in the proper format in a classical BIND style file. Nothing special. A new tld is created. Getting people to recognize it is the next step. Given that in order to be universally resolved, the new tld must be in the database of the current hosts recognized as root-- 10 machines run by military, government, university and private operators. The process for gaining inclusion into the current root database ranges from applying for a new toplevel via internic (you have to be a country, or prove why you should have it through a lenghty and tedious application procedure). Or, create a service that people can use on a "closed circuit" until such demand proves its viability (where name.space is today). Under US Law, the current rootserver hosts must provide access to their facility by their competitors on a non discriminitory basis. (We just need to ask them for it!) The U.S. Department of Justice, Anti-trust division has confirmed this to the name.space legal counsel. "Your case is a carbon copy of MCI vs. ATT" they said. If the Rootservers refuse, they are in violation of the law and subject to Anti-Trust violations. According to the USDOJ representative, There is no argument in this case. The law is clear in their opinion. (the case begins this month). What name.space must prove is that it can provide a reliable service. At this stage, with only several thousand users, there have been no failures and users have been praising the name.space service. The number of servers is increasing, and the levels of connectivity are improving. By the time the name.space service is recognized by the current rootservers, it will have the capacity to handle the dns traffic of the net to its new toplevel names. The size of a dns request is quite trivial compared to loading an average web page. 1 web page may equal 1000 (or more) dns lookups. Don't be deceived by visions of millions of dns requests. The specs for nameservers set out in RFC 2010 establish that a rootserver handle 1200 requests per second. Most of our servers can do that already. The ones which don't will be upgraded so they do. The load will not reach that level immediately. Most of the demand will come in the next year as the number of users in the new toplevel namespace increases. Until then the current rootservers would handle most of the load. This time period should yield cash flow to pay for the network overhead, operations and upgrades. ***The operative is cash flow. Where does it go? There are several networks and individuals who are directly involved with the implementation of name.space. Everyone so far has been working on a volunteer basis. As soon as the name.space database is universally resolvable, an annual fee of $25 will be charged per name for registrations. Those charges will be waived for educational nets and discounts will be offered to non-profit organizatons. Income will pay for the servers and connectivity and development of the name.space network: desk.nl dds.nl v2.nl muu.autono.net ljudmila.autono.net icf.de thing.net mediafilter.org zero.tolerance.org name.space has agreed to pay operating expenses to each of these networks, and also issue to each of them shares in the company. Individuals who have contributed programming and development skills to the name.space project will be paid for their work and/or issued shares of the company. [We still need someone with unix/perl/c and networking expertise to support the development of the dynamic dns updater that Andreas Troeger and Paul Garrin are currently developing on the ppc platform]. Technical personnel will be paid to operate the various facilities, as necessary. The surplus network and server facilities are dedicated to keeping free media free--non commercial space of uncensored free content. The entire infrastructure of name.space is oriented toward cultural support at its foundation. Should the revenue reach an appropriate level, it would sponsor full scale conferences, lectures, workshops, and other international cultural exchanges: (Next 5 Minutes in NYC 1998). ***On the question of registries sharing the toplevel namespace: The dynamic update system now under development is a helper application to dns software which allows the dns registries to act as a travel agent would in booking an airline seat. This allows any registry, including internic and alternic, to register under all new and old tld's without conflict. This registry package is being offered to the other nets in name.space who are interested in running registries in their area. The name.space website is a fully functional, fully automated name registry system. This system, together with the dynamic update system will enable the sharing of the toplevel namespace by the independent registries, thus creating opportunities for our affiliates to handle registrations, and therefore generate revenue for their nets. Name.space is dedicated to keeping the toplevel namespace public. The decentralized registry model will allow for many local name registries to share all the toplevel names without conflict. It also includes multi layered authentication to prevent spoofing the database (today's dns doesn't have this feature). This dynamically updated enhancement to dns brings us closer to the functionality of the future X.500 protocol which has a much larger database capacity than dns. By the time the dns database grows to 15,000-20,000 toplevel names, (the speculated upper limit of the current version of the BIND software), X.500 may already be in wide use. (X.500 is a large scale sophisticated dynamically updated database with authentication and supports multiple encryption types--security is not available with dns). Then there will be no issue as to the size or scale of the "directory of the net" in X.500 land. Forget the concept of "DOMAIN". DOMAIN=TERRITORY=DOMINATION Abandon the nationalist/militarist paradigm of dns. THINK VIRTUAL The names used in dns are simple aliases to numbers. Using a new mnemonic in the namespace to address content, or what has been discussed as "CONTENT ROUTING" combined with "VIRTUAL DOMAINS" and "SOFT VIRTUAL DOMAINS" (<virtual host> config in Apache server, Welcome PlugIn for webstar 2.0) and eventually "DYNAMIC IP ADDRESSES" the idea of Heath Bunting's "WANDERING WEBSITES" or for "STEALTH NETS" become possible. ***The Question of the Business Model of name.space In order to function legally in accordance with the laws of the State of New York, and the US Federal Laws, name.space has chosen to register as an S-corporation, privately owned, for profit entity. This is not extraordiary or unusual. Many other nets surrounding us are also companies in accordance with their local laws: xs4all.nl, dds.nl, desk.nl, internationale stadt, thing.net, Waag, and others exist as businesses. Some may receive support from corporate, foundation or state sponsors, but the future of that support is not guaranteed. The question of wheather or not to operate name.space as a non-profit was simple to answer. No. Profit is ok if it is applied to good cause. The bureaucracy of non-profit is too stifling in the USA. Name.space was started with private investment, from money earned by me from exhibiting my artworks, lectures, and other jobs including producing video for Nam June Paik. Others have volunteered their time on a limited basis, and contributed their server resources. Andreas Troeger has spent the past 6 months, full time, programming the registry and update system. Many of us highly respect George Soros and his generous and vital support of culture and "open society"....all funded by profits made by one of the most dispicable acts of capitalism (next to real estate) - --currency speculation. But his money is eagerly sought after for arts and media in Europe... which is excellent. One capitalist has great ideas onm how to use his money to better society...or at least to enable others to try and make society more humane. Name.space may never reach the scale of the Soros Foundation, but its agenda is the same. How can we use capitalism to fund our future existance in the face of growing abandonment of the public sector? SUPPORT NAME.SPACE KEEP FREE MEDIA FREE for more information, go to: black.hole http://black.hole http://blackhole.autono.net MediaFilter.org http://MediaFilter.org name.space http://name.space http://namespace.autono.net Coming next: Part 2--Public Relations, Perception Management, and InfoWar... Tactical Media in Practice. - --Paul Garrin mf {AT} mediafilter.org don't abandon hope or succumb to cynicism.... 5.0 <nettime> Peter Lamborn Wilson: Response to the Tactical Media Manifesto Pit Schultz nettime-l@desk.nl Mon, 19 May 1997 18:51:35 Fax from Autonomedia 05-12-97 Response to the Tactical Media Manifesto: A Network of Castles Tactical media, then, would be a kind of filth--an organic process--as compared with the ideological cleanliness of strategic media (the "author"). Do we need a defense of filth, or a theory of filth--as fertility, as pleasure, as relaxation from the rigidities of "Civilization"? Not nostalgia for the mud, but the mud itself ? Or would such theorizing simply become another kind of tidying-up process--an erasure of its own theoretical object? The tactical problem consists of the need (or desire) to stay ahead of representation --not just to escape it, but to attain through mobilization a relative invulnerability from to representation. And the problematic aspect of the problem is that all media--even tactical media--deal in representation. Thus one can follow the trajectory of a given tactical medium, through ever greater representation, towards the fate of being subsumed into some strategy. And the fatal black hole toward which so many of these trajectories vanish is Capital--of course. Everything is a process of being cleaned up. To preserve its autonomy the tactical medium wants to remain dirty--it can never let itself be surrounded and cleared by strategy, by ideology. It must stay out ahead, drifting before all possible waves, uncertain even of its own trajectory. By another paradox, this uncertainty itself becomes a "principle." It comes to occupy the space of a strategy--and thus to define a strategic space. No "authors" need to be implicated. A messy organic process--involving both reason and unreason--not imposed or categorical--emergent. Shape-shifting. Dangerous and plagued by failures. But not aimless or undirected. In effect--strategic. Media as technologies ("machines") are perfect mirror-representations of the totality that produces them (or vice-versa). The internet, for example, mirrors not only its military origin but also its affinity with Capital. Like globalism, it breaks through borders--it is a "chaos," like Capital (which seeks the Strange Attractor of the numisphere, where the numinous and the numismatic are one and eternal). One might even speak of "nomadic" features ("migratory capital"). Like Capital, the Net is drawn toward virtuality, cognitive prosthesis, disembodiment. But (the "vice versa" process) media tend simultaneously toward the production of the totality:--a complex multi-feedback relation. In one sense, tactical media would then have to engage in the destruction and/or subversion ("substruction") of this complex--driving a wedge between the machine and the totality. Such action would imply that the totality is far from total, that there will be interruptions along the feedback lines, breaks in "service"--missing zones, and zones of resistance. Ad-hoc, constantly mutating, determinedly empirical, at this point tactics begin to coalesce into a strategy ("spontaneous ordering"). Because this strategy has no "author" (and is not ideologically driven) each tactical medium--each tactician as medium--will be able to seek direction from it without losing autonomy to it. Thus the complex interplay between tactic and strategy is one of mutual validation or "co-emergence." At this point, the metaphor of the castle--introduced by the Manifesto--takes on an added luster, or perhaps a baleful gleam. The Nizari Ismailis (the so-called "Assassins") structured their polity around a network of remote castles, most of which were inaccessible to every medieval military tactic--even prolonged siege, since they were supplied with their own gardens and water. Each high castle typically protected a fertile valley and was therefore self-sufficient--but full communication and even economic activity could take place within the network thanks to the "porosity" of medieval borders. And thanks to the policy of assassination or threatened assassinations, kings and religious authorities hesitated to interfere. This went on for centuries. Some years ago I remarked that the Nizari model for utopia had been rendered impossible by modern technologies of war and communication. Perhaps it would be interesting as a thought-experiment to see if this negative judgment still holds true. From a military viewpoint of course it does--the "isolated castle" (or commune or the like) can still be eliminated by the push of a button. But "the military" must have a reason for such action. Since "assassination" is an absurdity (e.g. the Unabomber)--and even "militance" must be re-defined--there may be no immediately apparent reason for the military to suppress a given "autonomous zone." The question of communication technology is trivial by comparison, but interesting. The Net as a "military" structure is "accessible to all," and even as Capital absorbs the Net these tactical areas of indeterminacy persist--the same holds true for all "intimate" or tactical media. Thus the "network of castles" becomes possible--but the real question is whether the castle itself is possible. Like any institution the castle will exist in part as a representation of itself in media. The Assassins' castles were rooted partly in the imaginaire, in the image that pervaded medieval media (text, work-of-mouth, legend), in the image of mysterious inaccessibility and danger. The Mongols finally destroyed Alamut not by direct assault but by demoralizing it with an even more fearsome image (pyramids of skulls from China to Hungary, etc.). But at its height of power, Alamut could dispense even with assassination, since the image alone sufficed to ward off all military and political attention. Under the regime of global neo-liberalization or pan-capitalism that triumphed in 1989, the nation-states of the world have begun to "privatize" all social functions for the collection of taxes for the support of military and police force, and the use of that force in the interests of Capital. The "natural law of the free market," however, clashes with the remnants of social ideology embedded in such structures as the UN, the EU, or even the "old" liberal or conservative regimes of certain states. Politics in such situations becomes a matter cognitive dissonance. This is exacerbated by the appearance of "new media" which mirror the global totality but also enhance the cognitive dissonance (negative feedback, "noise") inherent in the representations of the totality. Capital seems to have a logic of its own--the tendency of money to define all human relations, if you will--but in truth neither capitalists nor politicians can really penetrate this logic or understand its direction--much less control it. Huge conceptual gaps open in the structure of the "totality." The question remains: are these gaps strategic? The gaps cut across sedimentary layers of actuality, and the gaps themselves tend to shift position, change shape, open and close. Geography as well as the virtual space of the image, space as well as time constitute the mutating forms of these potential tactical regions. some will be zones of depletion, in which all power has been shut off (there are rumors of strange tribes around Chernobyl...); others will be accidental autonomous zones which might involve classes, groups ("refugees") or specific areas. Some will be liberratd zones (Chiapas), others will be deliberate seams. Some will be "unseen," others will enter into representation. In the midst of such fluidity, there must emerge some islands or rocks. Castles will be occupied in the confusion, and later there will be no military advantage in destroying them. The castles will not be defendable, but they will be irrelevant, unassimilable--to "remote" (even in the middle of ancient cities)--apparently pointless. An air of shabby eccentricity might be useful here. Another reason for Alamut's success was that any king who allowed it to exist could consider the possibility of a secret alliance, whereby money could be used to purchase immunity from the dagger--or perhaps even a contract on some other king--or most interesting of all, access to the secret sciences (astronomy, engineering and hydraulics, political philosophy, medicine, yogic techniques, etc.) of the Nizari observatories and libraries. In modern terms we might say that capitalists and politicians are so confused and ignorant about new media (far moreso than the average artist or 14-year-old) that large sums of money are currently being spent on "secret sciences." Out of the conflict between Capital and State over monopolies of representation, gaps can be produced--and made big enough to contain castles. All this of course remains on the level of tactics. But the construction of a "network of castles" would constitute not only (in itself) a pleasurable act of autonomy and self-organization, but also a "strategic" structure, or rather an organic and embodied complexity out of which a strategic dimension might well emerge. Tierra y libertad Peter Lamborn Wilson NYC April 1, 1997 ---- Some notes on the document history of the manifesto of tactical media: The official version of the manifesto was posted to nettime and is available as "The ABC of Tactical Media" at http://www.waag.org/tmn Peter Lamborn Wilson obviously answers to a previous version of the document which was sent around earlier this year: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/others/ABC.TXT and David Garcia one co-author wrote already a new and own version of it: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/others/TACTICAL.TXT /pit 5.1 <nettime> On the tactic of tactics McKenzie Wark nettime-l@desk.nl Thu, 22 May 1997 18:16:43 +1000 (EST) Whenever a term passes backwards and forwards a few times without much reflection, i'm inclined to look up its origins. And so: 'tactic' -- which seems to have a greek root, meaning to order or arrange. And 'stratagem', which Caxton took to mean 'artifice to surprise an enemy'. A device or trick. Its root is the word stratos, or army, modified with a suffix that means 'to lead'. I find the idea of the device or trick more interesting than that of ordering or arranging. Trick media, ruse media, media strategems -- that sounds more encouraging. The problem is not so much escaping or staying ahead of meaning, as camouflaging one kind of sense in another. How can media vectors connect subjectitities together in such a way that they can conduct a conversation that might pass unnoticed, or remain misread, in the midst of all the others? Such a conversation, such a subjective endeavour, wouldmost likely not be spatially or economically autonomous, but might nevertheless have an aspect of itself that remains free from capture by the prevailing vectors of capital and media. But lets face it, talk of strategy and tactics is boys' talk, part of a retrograde fantasy we can all live without. The language of 'mobilisation' is itself part of the problem, and a hold over from the cold war. Intellectuals, artists, media people are supposed to join the ranks of this or that 'movement' to fight agains this or that foe in this or that 'emergency'. Suspension of aesthetic, ethical and political freedom for all can then be legitimised in the name of a higher calling. So its not a choice of tactics or strategy, but a choice of an authoritarian language for media practice or a democratic one. The mobilisation of 'forces' or escape from the grid of compliance, whether to the dominant power or its mirror image, the avante garde that would take its place. Its more than a question of metaphors. Language doesn't represent anything. It connects things and people. It proliferates and reproduces itself in the process. The trick is to get the connecting and reproducing sides of language to work towards the production of plurality, difference, zones of liberty where meaning is neither led from the front nor punished at the margins. Confrontation seems to me to usually involve the reproduction of the language of confrontation and authoritarian relations between people and things. Language becomes a matter of giving orders, announcing decrees, denouncing heretics, definig limits -- and pronouncing all of the above to be necessary in the name of this or that emergency. Escape, on the other hand, is something else. It usually requires a ruse, a cover, a fold in the coding. It appears to be one thing, but it might also be something else. A favourite example: 'burn baby burn' -- a slogan from the Watts riots, tucked in a fold in a disco song: "I heard somebody shout burn baby burn disco inferno burn the mother down!" The virtual side of media is the ever present potential that some completely different subjective event will form out of what seemed like quite routine utterances. Its always threatening to vere towards flux. In the flow of media, as in the flow of water, order is always temporary. Its always on the verge of escaping towards pure difference. Another example, from the endless riches of what Lester Bowie called the Great Black Music: Aretha Franklin, singing gospel as a teenager. Conventional words of piety. Suddenly she shrieking, 'Never gonna die! Never gonna die!' Her voice jumps straight into another realm, somewhere beyond meaning, into sense itself. Its as if the vibrations of her body transmit themselves, across space and time, across means of recording and distribution and reproduction, from her body to mine. An event outside meaning, or maybe inside it, hidden in the folds of it. Waiting to transmit. There are any number of languages in which one might talk about media: aesthetic, ethical, political, but surely the military is the least necessary of them. And don't buy the old furphy about the 'military origins' of the internet. The internet has many origins. Its a hybrid of a whole bunch of technologies, pioneered in lots of different places and organisational contexts. There is no necessity embedded in its origins. The net is what it becomes. Do we know yet what the net can do? I don't think so. The collective experiments have only just started. We have some idea what you can do with a book or a song, they've been with us a long time. We've suffered from some pretty extreme experiments with the so-called mass media. We've had the telephone for years but nobody has bothered to think much about the democratic potential of this remarkably distributed kind of media. And the net... we're just starting, even though the technology goes back about 20 years now. That's nothing. But the diversification of creativity on the net is still held back by a much older 'technology' -- language itself. Always the old terms! 'Tactical media', 'Net art' -- like calling a motor car a horseless carriage. It is waiting for a revolution in language to reveal what lies hidden in its virtual folds. McKenzie Wark Sydney 22nd May, 1997 Netletter No. 13 __________________________________________ "We no longer have roots, we have aerials." http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/~mwark -- McKenzie Wark 6.0 <nettime> WorkSpace Manifesto Geert Lovink (by way of Pit Schultz <pit {AT} contrib.de>) nettime-l@desk.nl Sun, 17 Aug 1997 00:25:51 +0200 note: This text was written for the presentation of WorkSpace in the Documenta Halle in Kassel/Germany which took place on August 14, 1997 as a part of the 100 days program. We heard only two days in advance that the free slot would be available for us. The only text about Hybrid Workspace was written by a number of people, in a great hurry, just before the final deadline of the Documenta X shortguide, in May. For this improvised presentation, for the first time we looked into the growing audio, video and text archive of the WorkSpace project. We also thought it would be necessary to also have more theoretical text, a first attempt to reflect on the work we are doing here in Kassel. In the second part, the tactical media network presented their work. Special guest was the Colombian videomaker Silvia Mehija. You can see the lecture in real video: http://www.mediaweb-tv.com/english/dx/gaeste_frame.html + more audio stuff: http://www.icf.de/RIS ------- First Analysis of the temporary WorkSpaces By Pit Schultz and Geert Lovink For the Hybrid WorkSpace presentation 100 days program, Documenta X, Kassel '50 days, 120 guests', August 14, 1997 *how to write a manifesto* -- a document type description Classical modernism brought us a new textual format for the multipurpose use in the alien environment of technical media. The manifesto was introduced by several avantgardist artist groups at the beginning of this century as a document type to mediate an emphatic moment of urgency, the utopia of the radical new. Today, the manifesto returns as a useful form of electronic discourse that locates itself into the heart of cybernetic power. It does not just articulate a hierarchical voice from above, representing the wishes of others. It does not just promote the project of one predominant world model, it even cannot be taken seriously in every detailed claim it may make. In the main, the digital manifesto is a highly efficient form of communication which provides a frame of immediacy and presence for those formulating it. The digital manifesto no longer makes the distinction between endless interpretations and the decisive logic of punctual statements, it articulates a profound, and often artificial subjectivity without reclaiming absolute power in the real world. It creates an ambigious mode between visibility and virtuality which makes it useless to serious forms of executing power by virtue of its very absence. Paradoxically, only through the fact of its powerlessness and marginality the digital manifesto can claim to speak in the name of superhuman forces. The digital manifesto, as found in countless instances on the electronic networks, is not rewriting the human command-line-interface as it is known from before the War. In the times of the Nets, after deconstruction is over, the manifesto is a node which attracts other texts, including audio and video, and plays with the viral potential of being able to get forwarded, redistributed, quoted and translated. The digital manifesto functions as a media genre which speculates with maximum attention and possible media exposure. It mimics the gesture of broadcasting in the times of democratised xerox publicity. By definition the digital manifesto has a strong message. It claims an imaginative totality, a possible future, a virtual territory, knowing that it exists amongst a multiplicity of other manifestoes, which all put into concrete practice the passion for polemics and rethorics of public imagination: "I had a dream" (in Martin luther King's famous opening words). You may find the digital manifesto all over the net refering to its outside, and refering to each other just by the fact that they express a will to be heard, to be heard about an extreme form to see the world. The digital manifesto is the opposite of the self-referential contemplation from within the system. It breaks through the chains of endless interpretation of existing textuals material. It is stating the obvious, claiming the impossible, and deserving the full field of pragmatic possiblities to the limit where they become truly speculative. Next to the document types such as the pamphlet, the declaration, the statement, the sermmon, the agenda, the charter or the petition, and in distinction to the essay, the article, the report, or other lengthy textes, the digital manifesto performs a compression which deals with the need for shortening, cutting and selecting from the media streams. From the very beginning it anticipates broadcasting and what it can do to a text. "Keep it short, my attention span is limited." (J. Sjerpstra) The typical form of the digital manifesto is a long list of paragraphs, which functions like as a crystal, where one paragraph can reflect all others. The potential character of this text type is not hidden or embedded in a set of characters and narrations like in a novel, or allegory. In a digital manifesto the need for far more possibilities meets the desire to touch the level of the real and serves a popular info-vehicle in the struggle for attention. *representation - media - image* Nowadays, if you are working in the field of the new media, you are very squarely confronted with the institutional power of the image. The multi media are out there, but apparently some media are more equal then others... Those which work with an interface of visual representation are also those which are the most appealing to consumers, advisors, media theorists, and museum curators. Optical media have traditionally a predominant role in the process of constructing the truth and representing the invisible. When it comes to reflexion about reality, our Western language is full of terms which privileges the visual above all other senses when speaking about the truth. The direct way of exersizing power over people's dreams and visions is by controling the sphere of images. This plays a crucial role not only in religion and advertisement but all fields which need the services of representation of power through visualisation as a form of celebrating and mediating its legitimacy. In the new media industry which is specialized in the development of *interfaces* most of the work goes into the production of demos (see Peter Lunenfeld in nettime). Finally it needs a surface to cover the emptiness of the final products with a shiny glamourous aura. The aim being to produce media products that succesfuly suggest content, context, and communication. To produce a psycho-physical stimulus through visual information is a skill that has been learned from the various avant-gardes by putting their experiments into the commercial context - without taking the social, political and idealistic world models of modernism, of course. This format speculates with the investments made by the users, like their craze on the stock market, the investments into an 'economy of ideas', and the simulated empty products snatching away the peoples' attention/money without satifying their desires. As long as a product is in demo mode it produces wishes by reiterating the promise of the tremendous potentials of the full version always to come. The problems of media design have not yet been properly discussed. Some tend to see this 'artisan' practice more in its classical terms, where design is the final phase of the production process. In the information business, however, design plays the role of architecture, since it structures activities and organises knowledge and memory. Navigational design determines the modes of orientation and in the best case predics all possible moves and interpretations by the users. The best interface is the one which becomes invisible. Electronic images are bringing you to the other sphere behind the screen, they are stimulating the imagination, they are trying to mediate between programmers and users, they are pretending to give technology a human face and are helping to reorganise business and workflows. Electronic images are fulfilling an initiative role in the first encounter with the realm of new media, they are mediating today the sphere of [to-morrow's] dream time, the mythological nomos, the realm of the uncouncious. The aesthetics of total dispersion of the televised image do not break through the screen of the representational paradigm. The celebration of optical media exchanging the role of painting does not say much about the average media users which even probably wish they could see real paintings again. It is the the play with the modes of visibility and invisibility, the aggregates of mediation between possible modes of representation expanded from the flat tableaux of the computer screen, to different frames of code and transformation, which can easily circumvent central authorities of quality control just by finding new combinations, or creating new hybrids and different intensities. On the carrier of digital media, such very private mixes introduce for a while the pure joy of doing it yourself. Before the old institutions or commercial enterprises move in, other fields for tactical use are already there. *hybrid* Hybridity has many names, many faces. One of these is the merger we are witnessing between video-technology and the Internet. But the much-vaunted wedding of TV and Web may well never happen. The cult of the interface culminates in its current brief to unifify all media under one big browser. The most recent manifestation of this idea is the 'setup box', the 'network computer' and the attempt to reinvent Television on the Internet in the so called 'Push Media'. During the phase of the war of standards we see a diversity of interrim media, a variety of sub-standards, incompatibilities and central giant media which try to include and swallow up small media. On the technical level hybrid systems are very often the pragmatic way of resistance, and an attempt at finding the best possible solution aside from the one which consist of dominating the market by including different or older systems. This quite resembles the status quo prevailing in pop culture, where hybridity as cultural policy works against 'apartheid' and the sweet promises of a totality which is hidden behind the concept of the 'Gesamtkunstwerk'. Hybridity as postmodern condition is not a strategy but a starting point [ - or a benchmark]. There is a certain threshold where the dirtyfication, mixing and opening of systems gets rejected. The double face of hybridisation needs both a critique in the context of the expansion of global capital and an analysis of its possiblities of emancipation at the micro-level. On the dangerous road which leads to becoming a Media-Gesamtkunstwerk the concept of hybridity looses contact to subjects and serves as a model of sophisticated organisation and domination. *work* "Networking is notworking." (George Soros) Beyond the ideal of full employment and the scenario of a jobless economy there are many practical examples of inventing new forms of work. Whether this takes the form of a neo-liberal part-time McJob or some activity within state-run dole-for-work programmes, or some kind of occupation within the fast-expanding black money economy, or a slave job in a sweat shop in the "Little Asias" sprouting all over the place, or just a new, formalised way of neighborhood help, the traditional concept of work is changing rapidly. And very often it does so by applying information technology. Also, at the same time, a certain type of "autonomous work" seems to perstist. It drudges on at the limit of complete exhaustion, working with the bare achievement of the existential minimum as reward, within settings endowed with low resources and next-to-no budget. It must be the lure of some different gratification than money which motivates some people to work so hard in the non-profit-media. And yet this could become the model for many more people. Work is still the golden road to self-realisation. To detach it from the curcuits of capital begs the question on which economy it should rely. It is all too easy to state that through the rise of neoliberalism many sectors of the public sphere are being privatised as well as other resources are getting exploited in an irreversible way, which also means that there are no ways in turning back the clocks. While everybody seems to reluctantly agree on the fact that not much money has been made on the net to date, one keeps betting on a big boom triggered by the global information networks. The main issues at stake here are the emergence of new types of jobs in the service sector and a need for more and lifelong education. Yet, in the same breath, one oversees the existence of a shadow economy of gifts, a do-it-yourself culture of producing public content without prospect of making the big buck. Apart from the small community of net experts which earn their keep with advisory or journalistic work, or the even smaller band which finds their little niches in the art world, the vast majority of small content producers are private individuals which like to publish what they like for the sake of it. This process of democratisation of the means of production, as sore and basic as it is, realises a big dream of many social utopians. The only drawback being that the glory and class consciousness of the new virtual working class does not seem to come very much into existence. While we have all possible tools for more media freedom still in front of us we are often unable to do anything, hypnotized as we are by the pronouncements about the rise of total marketization. Avoiding self-exploitaion and burn-out on the one hand, sell-out and alienation on the other, the exploration of the possible modes of finding work in the new media is a challenging task indeed. While the trap of an ascethic ideal as well as the tragedy of a realised utopia makes you hyper-sensitive against false promises, you still have to work it out. *space* Different kind of spaces deserve different kinds of action. The media space is defined by its participants: there's no content without social context. And there is no way of defining a media space either without someone accessing it. The problem with spacial metaphors is that they do not normally include any time model. A combination of a time model with a social model, with a definition of the modes of access to a set of media equipment can already be enough to build a model of a small cyberspace. (You can do that at home, like the radio-amateurs in the 20ies did.) It could describe the ways a network can dynamically change, the multipliticity of layers of accessablity, and the diversive ways how to represent a set of datas. It could emphasize the importance of relying on mutually agreed-upon standards, not only in the definition of interfaces between the machines or parts of programs, the software and the hardware, or different pieces of hardware. These same standards also occur on the level of social associations, in form or jargons, marks for orientation, certain conventions of naming and adressing the yet unknown. In this way a cultural space could evolve, which is completly constructed by the definitions and interdependencies of the actors which create it through their actions and decisions. Cyberspace, besides its geographical extension, is a pure social construction. It has as many dimensions as there are nodes within it [male or female?] it is more a vectorial space, or an imaginary one describable by fairly abstract mathematical models far beyond any three dimensional metaphors. To bind a cyberspacial social environment to a physical space therefore may well render the need for a metaphorical architecture obsolete. Through social contacts (and the attention they bring with it) a more fuzzy process of forming a hybrid space which combines the real and the virtual becomes productive. But the connection between the real and the virtual realm will not go smoothly. It is a never ending story of disruptions, bugs in the human-to-human communication, conflicting standards and cultural glitches. The virtual should not become a quasi parallel world, nor should we return to the tactile solidity of the 'real' cities, the so-called nature or the social that might have existed once. The temporary workspaces and gatherings we are organizing do not intend to produce a concensus. No constructive solutions here. Our aim should be the design of problems and conflicts, free content, not the synergy of all technical media. *** 7.0 <nettime> strategies for media activism (code red lecture) Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Tue, 2 Dec 1997 00:57:46 +0100 (MET) Strategies for media activism By Geert Lovink Presentation at the forum event of 'Code Red' The Performance Space, Sydney, November 23, 1997 "Erkenne die Lage" (Gottfried Benn) It is my personal commitment to combine cyber pragmatism and media activism with pleasurable forms of European nihilism. Not the apocalyptic, conservative culture of complaint which post modernism has left behind, but short heroic epics on the everyday life of the media, reporting from within the belly of the Beast, fully aware of its own futile existence, compared to the millennial powers to be. We ani's no salespeople, trying to sell the award winning model amongst the digital cities, some exotic Amsterdam blend of old and new media or yet another disastrous set of ideas, made in Europe. Instead, we are trying to exchange models, arguments and experiences on how to organise our cultural and political activities, finance media projects and create informal networks of trust that will make live in this Babylon bearable. New media is a dirty business, full of traps and seductive offers to work for 'the other side'. There are no ways to keep your hands clean. The computer is a deadly machine when it comes to inclusion and exclusion. We, the workers on the conceptual forefront of cyberculture, have to admit that we are (not yet) politically correct and have failed so far to pass the PC-test. This is not because these criteria are deliberately neglected, but because the passions lie elsewhere. For the time being, the struggle is about the definition of the terms under which the 'information society' will become operational. The 'Short Summer of the Internet', now rushing to its close, is about the production of cultural and political concepts, which may, or may not, be implemented on a much larger scale. What network architecture will be used? Do we accept the dominant software and screen design or do we look for alternatives? Is there still space for theory and reflection, meaningless playing around? Is the production stress overruling creativity? Later on we will find current concepts back as 3D-animation, java scripts or human-machine interfaces. The terminal workers, producing one demo after another (as Peter Lunenfeld has recently described it) are determining future formats of the new media which will shortly become standards, ready to be commodified. A further growth of new media products may need a phase of consolidation on the level of marketable products. The 'digital revolution' could therefore soon reach its counter-revolution, the Digital Thermidor (let us all hope that it will not turn violent against its Wired-visionaries that once so passionately preached their 'Californian ideologies'). There is less and less reason to make fun of 'Dinosaur behaviour' of the apparently outdated and 'tired' multinational corporations. Restructuring programs are in place now. The CEOs have listened carefully to the cyber-libertarian visionaries and have drawn their own conclusions. The network economy is well under way - and so is the 'Long Crisis'. Kevin Kelly's saga of the 'Long Boom' (in Wired magazine) turned out to be a hilarious mistake in the light of the current Asian (now global) currency crisis and its simultaneous environmental disaster. But sure he will keep on insisting that we simply have to route around the problems. Economics are benevolent if you are on a religious mission. As John Perry Barlow once said about the Internet, connecting every synapse with any other synapse on the world: "It is not a good thing or bad thing, but it is a holy thing." And believers can ignore any crisis, as long as it not theirs. "Holding the Negative." (Andre Simon) The political economy of new media is not a favourite topic on conferences that deal with art and technology. Dry economic facts about the upcoming take-over of this emerging branch may spoil the celebration of the Computer-Aided-Renaissance. The belief that many small Davids can beat a few big Goliaths is still around. The ideology of economic liberalism has entered the rational of the creative part of the virtual class in a deep, unconscious way. The same can be said of state officials who still hold powerful positions In financing new media projects. But the fact is that the gold rush is over. Prices of web-design have fallen sharply. We can see the rise of the html-slaves, employed without contracts or health insurance, producing code for little or no money. Small businesses disappear, not only ISPs but also in the art and design sector. On the macro-economic level we have witnessed an unprecedented series of mergers in the telecommunication and media sector. This has led, for example, to the near monopoly position of WorldCom (which now owns 60% of the access business in the USA). Or take the Spanish telecom giant Telefonica and its Intranet, which will soon control the entire Spanish speaking world. We do not need to mention Microsoft here. This may only be the return of the suppressed, after a period of post-modern comfort, in this case late monopoly capitalism. The undermining of the promising small and decentralised 'many-to-many' ideology also comes from within the IT-sector. The development of the ultimate multi-media device, web-TV, turns out to be a classical Trojan Horse. The much hated one-to-many television, news and entertainment industries have now found a way to neutralise a potential competitor. Soon the content of web and TV will be the same. In this respect, all these push media are claiming the available bandwidth. Older features of the Net, like the news groups, with their democratic and decentralised logic, are dying out and are being replaced by monitored and edited on-line magazines and chat rooms. Internal surveillance of net-use and private e-mail is on the rise due to the introduction of intranets of buildings, companies and entire countries. Another alarming tendency may be the withdrawal from the Internet of universities and research centres that are now working with much faster and secure computer networks. This dark picture results in he question -- "What elements of the glory days of net hype, dating back to the period of 1989-1992, remain? Perhaps the answer is the phrase "On the Internet no one knows you are a dog." Indeed, and no one cares: a tragic end of the once so liberating politics of identity. What counts now are the commercial use of avatars, the number of hits on a site ("2 million a day"), the rise of webvertisement and the final putting into place of electronic commerce. What form of organisation media activism could take? While some truly discouraging stories from the economic forefront are on the rise, it is good to keep returning to the old question:" What is to be done?" A return of negative thinking could play an important role in the development of strategies for media activism. There is plenty of good will, and ruthless cynicism. What lacks is playful negativism, a nihilism on the run, never self-satisfied. Not just nomadic as a Lebensphilosophie, but rather tactical, an ever changing strategy of building infrastructures and leaving them, when the time has come to leave the self build castles and move onwards. The explorations into the fields of the negative not only imply the hampering the evil forces of global corporate capitalism, but also formulating a critique of the dominant alternative formula: the Non Governmental Organisation. The NGO is not just a model for aid organisations that have to correct the lack of government policies. It is today's one and only option to change society: open up an office, start fund-raising, lease a xerox-machine, send out faxes... and there you have your customised insurrection. "How to make to most of your rebellion." The professionalism inside the office culture of these networked organisations is the only model of media-related politics if we want to have a (positive) impact, or "make a difference." (as the ads use To call it). We will soon have to reject this bureaucratic and ritualised media model altogether, with its hierarchies, management models, its so-called efficiency. "The Revolution will not be Organised." These are not the words of some chaotic anarcho-punkers or eco-ravers, calling for spontaneous revolt, right now, tonight. The crisis of the Organisation is our 'condition humane' in this outgoing media age. And it may as well be the starting point for a new, open conspiracy that is ready to anticipate on the very near cyber-future. Not anymore as a Party or Movement, nor as a network of offices (with or without headquarter), new forms of organisation may be highly invisible, not anymore focussed on institionalization. These small and informal communities easily fall apart and regroup in order to prevent the group from being fixed to a certain identity. "The site less visited." Media activism nowadays is not about the expression of truth or a higher goal. It is about the art of getting access (to buildings, networks, resources), hacking the power and withdrawal at the right moment. The current political and social conflicts are way too fluid and complex to be dealt with in such one-dimension models like propaganda, "publicity" or "edutainment." It is not sufficient to just put your information out on a home-page, produce a video or pamphlet etc. and than just wait until something happens. The potential power of mass media has successfully been crippled. Today, reproduction alone is meaningless. Most likely, tactical data are replicating themselves as viruses. Programmed as highly resistant, long lasting memes, the new ideas are being constructed to weaken global capitalism in the long term. No apocalyptic or revolutionary expectations here, despite all rumours of an upcoming Big Crash of the financial markets. Unlike the Russian communist world empire, 'casino capitalism' (Robert Kurz) will not just disappear overnight. Heaps of deprivation and alienation is ahead of us. But this should not be the reason to lay back and become console socialists. We need organisations of our time, like the global labour union of digital artisans, networks of travellers, mailing list-movements, a gift economy of public content. These are all conceptual art pieces to start with, realised on the spot, somewhere, for no particular reason, lacking global ambition. These models will not be envisioned by this or that Hakim Bey. They are lived experiences, before they become myths, ready to be mediated and transformed on their journey through time. Media activism constantly mediates between the real and the virtual, switches back and forth, unwilling to choose sides for the local or the global. Tactical media are creating temporary hybrids of old school political data and the aesthetics of new media, which deals with interactivity and interface design (see the article by David Garcia and me in nettime/ZKP4). As a next step, this is being implemented on both the level of the social personal level where our wetware bodies meet, and that of the 'non-located' technical network architecture. Activists are developing now 'negative software', (anti-)racism search engines, (temporary) public terminals, free groupware, anti-aesthetic browsers against both Microsoft and Netscape, electronic parasites that live on corporate software and content. Recording is not enough. Reality.net, equipped with tons of web cams can be fortunate and collect evidence, but it can as well add to the spreading paranoia about the surveillance by the Corporation-State. Sometimes it may be appropriate to detect and delete camera's. Neither eco-fundamentalist nor techno-utopian, media activists are taking risks and acting freely. This may sometimes be in a criminal way, if necessary (like computer hackers), thereby ignoring legal standards (censorship, copyright). The narrow frameworks that reformists have negotiated over time, like 'privacy' and 'freedom of expression' have to be defended and practiced openly. These can only be guaranteed with the help of an independent, democratic media structure, not owned or controlled by the state. Big media corporations will be the last to defend media freedom. It would be foolish to expect anything in this respect from Murdoch, Bertelsmann or Time-Warner. The same can be said of the efforts of isolated political lobbying groups which fight for better legislation... A 'light' and independent media infrastructure is not merely expressing diversity. It is not enough to correct the main strain media and facilitate communities with their own channels. Being a 'difference engine' on the level of representation may put out a lot of use full public content, but it does not touch on the 'media question'. What interests us most are the ideological structures which are written into the software and architecture. But is not enough to subvert or pervert this powerful and still mysterious structure. It is possible to continue the earlier approaches of freeware and shareware within the now hyper-commercial environment of new media. The same can be said of the efforts to develop databases of free content, a now still marginal activity that will soon gain importance once everyone will have to pay for the content to download. This public sphere cannot come into being in a purely global, commercial environment and obviously also not in places where the state has absolute control over the nation's intranet and firewalls. It is in this 'third place', the public part of cyberspace, that the media activism will start to flourish. 8.0 <nettime> Hacking Activism alex galloway nettime-l@desk.nl Wed, 10 Feb 1999 23:25:24 -0800 [NETTIMErz- The following dialogue grew out of a request by the Electronic Disturbance Theater to collect interviews on the topic of tactical media in general and FloodNet in particular. This interview and others will be excerpted and collected as supporting documents in a forthcoming chronicle of the EDT's actions entitled "Hacktivism: network_art_activism." -ag] Hacking Activism An Email Dialogue Between Alex Galloway and Geert Lovink Alex Galloway: Let's talk first about the Zapatista FloodNet actions (http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html) in the context of tactical net.art. There was a lot of talk at this year's Ars Electronica festival about how the FloodNet was technically flawed. Do you think it works? Can electronic civil disobedience ever move past simple "consciousness raising," to actually realizing material change? Geert Lovink: I don't think this is the best way to approach this issue. "Flaws" are something for the hackers and sysops to address, like Rop Grongrijp or others. FloodNet has bad karma because of particular mistakes they made; I cannot defend them, nor do I particularly want to attack them. We have been working for several years on a thorough foundation for net activism. For example, this was a major topic at the Galactic Hackers Party in 1989, one of the first big "new" media events we organized in Amsterdam. Today, the net is no longer merely a tool, it is our everyday (artificial) life. For us it is a strategic theatre of confrontation. Yet the hackers still have that fresh, almost utopian attitude about the internet. For them the net is something precious, something that shouldn't be destroyed by things like denial of service attacks. Activists these days are not properly informed of the delicate balance within technology. For them, a corporate server is just another artifice to be destroyed, or rather, disturbed. AG: Let's talk about software more generally. I think that, perhaps, the Web Stalker (http://www.backspace.org/iod) was the first real piece of tactical software (at least for our recent net.history). And now I'm searching for sequels. The browser seems like a perfect place for tactical interventions. Where else do you see this happening? The open source movement is one place... But what about network infrastructures? Operating systems? Where should we, as tactical programmers, *go* today? GL: The open source movement is clearly an interesting area but what interests me most is how to build a public interface for movements like this. To be successful the movement must both effectively disseminate its software and surround the software with a lively, appealing political discourse. It could be our task, as mediators, journalists, artists and critics, to transform the issue of, for example, operating systems into a political question. Paul Garrin's name.space has failed so far in this (and so has nettime). The question is this: How do we turn all these abstract issues, which are debated in a very closed circle and only understood by a hand full of technicians, into a large topic, understood by the millions, so to speak. Minor decisions in the realm of technical standards taken today will have enormous effects on society later on. We are all aware of that. So, much will depend on our political skills, imagination and willingness to make coalitions, if we want to succeed. AG: You are right to note that name.space and others have failed so far to address a larger audience, yet I don't think we should discount name.space. It preceded the Web Stalker (right?) and in some ways is more massive, more effective, and more tangentially artistic (making it all the more appealing). As for operating systems, there's Jodi's new OSS project (http://oss.jodi.org) which, although purely aesthetic, somehow also seems to be a real tactical intervention into how computers are used--especially since it exists as a stand alone application (as well as a CD-ROM) that mimics an operating system. I'm delighted at the fact that, with net.art, one can't really distinguish the tactical from the purely aesthetic. I think this is what will prove its ultimate importance. I may have a slightly different take on the question of publicity and coalition-building. Why can't the ultimate success of tactical media projects be simply to produce temporary autonomous zones (TAZs) rather than liberate a larger public? (I realize this sentiment is probably not very popular with the Dutch/German tactical media community.) New technologies seem, finally, to be able to give us this TAZ option as a widespread reality for the first time. Look at our own projects--nettime and rhizome--I think that communities of this nature are virtually unprecedented. And, hey, that may be enough for me. About the open source movement. I am in favor of software development that seems to be in the public interest. However I'm skeptical of the politics associated with some of these groups. Hackers and programmers have historically never shared the same politics as the avant-garde, especially one with such a lively surrounding discourse as ours does. I've read the various hacker's manifestos floating around and I think they're garbage. They specifically avoid political analyses at the expense of the "freedom of knowledge." This is at the heart of why EDT's FloodNet was criticized heavily by HEART (Hackers for Electronic Art) at Ars Electronica this year. What we have is two groups, both doing interesting work, but with two different political styles. I'm on the EDT side. Let's move to the issue of translating traditional leftist strategies into the tactical media framework. A new method is critical. We've experienced bottom-up political movements for some time now. But, what about *distributed* bottom-up strategies? This is the machinic model, where there is no coalition, there is no core, yet there is a "movement." Is electronic activism like the FloodNet too rooted in old school leftist politics? The real question here is: How do we make the network into a medium for action and resistance? I always think of the early net.art project called "Refresh" (http://sunsite.cs.msu.su/wwwart/refresh.htm), what (I'm assuming) Alexei Shulgin described as "the friendly web-design frenzy that we have started on Sunday 6 October 1996." In that project no one really needed to know who exactly was part of the chain, yet if your computer followed the refreshes you would glimpse a sequence of interrelations. This seems to me to be a model, albeit primitive, for some type of distributed bottom-up strategy. GL: You are touching here on the question of organization. It presupposes common interests (or even "objectives," Marxists would say) and a basic set of common ethics. Today this sense of commonality has been blurred by the "culture wars"--in a good way, I would say. But the celebration of differences, chaos and complexity has prompted us to pose again the question of organization. Permanent deconstructions and cynical criticisms have turned many of the intellectuals, artists and activists into enlightened but powerless outsiders. These days, one could say that new forms of organization are formed along technical lines. For example, majordomo mailing-list software is creating specific social structures (while excluding others). The internet has the tendency to strengthen both global and local connections, but seems to neglect the nation or state level. This will backfire sooner or later. Today's organizations tend to be rhizomatic. I mean this in a negative sense. "Mille plateaux" rules. Not by choice but because there are few other attractive options. If we face the loose connections, the constant danger of decay, general anxiety over ideological commitment, panic over internal conspiracies, and the continued disintegration (after short moments of euphoria) of groups into sub-groups and tribes, we actually end up in a political climate of various, simultaneous micro cycles. The fear that others will cash in with your ideas--the fear of being appropriated--is very destructive. It has damaged common feelings, even friendships. With ongoing technological changes we should wait until new, more reliable forms of organization appear. Now we are caught up in a closed circuit of tiny techno-social experiments. "Refresh" is a good example. A good idea, but now it is somewhere on the web, with most of the links out of use. No one seems to be responsible, nor has any one come up with a follow-up. That is the poverty of net.art at the end of the nineties. AG: Are you in fact calling for a *consolidation* within tactical media? To be honest, I'm surprised that you say this. Is there anything other than simple pragmatics (i.e. the fact that we have to get things done) fueling your resistance to these distributed models? Some would say that old, consolidated forms of resistance have a track record of failure, and now we must follow the lead of Deleuze and others to find a new politics based on the "molecular" model of revolution without central organization. Personally I can testify in support of computers--they let me do the work of 10! Don't you think that the network as such gives us new possibilities for action and resistance? Do you see a trajectory from progressive political theory in the '70s and '80s, to the real material manifestations of these theories today? I'm thinking especially of the idea of the rhizome or swarm, its correlate in nomadic politics, the privileging of the TAZ over revolutionary action, etc., which now, in the case of the internet, have all found their own conditions of possibility. Now that we actually have access to real, non-hierarchical systems do you see the future of resistive politics changing? It seems that what you lament about "Refresh" is exactly what I celebrate. GL: Rhizomatic, molecular models of resistance are not new. I don't say this to sound discouraging. I would just like to point out a rich and diverse tradition. There are many histories--labeled these days as "anarchism" or popular revolts--including invisible, lesser known stories. And please don't claim that these rhizomatic models are immune to failure. Rhizomes, at times, can lead us nowhere. Nomadic praxis specifically mystifies the question of organization and survival--internal accountability is not its strong point. It cannot deal with the type of sustainable infrastructures and power politics that extend beyond the limits of one's own tribe. Today's networks cannot answer essential questions of economic survival. Hit and run actions, semiotic guerilla strikes, document theft, creating counter discourses and cultures--these are just one aspect of a complete movement. It is dangerous to extend those models to all other spheres of life. In other words, please do not make a management guru out of Deleuze. The "rhizome ideology," in my opinion, is to be understood within the French (and Italian) politics of the '70s. It was a response to the democratic centralism of the European communists at the time. Its spontaneity is its strong point, but it cannot answer what comes next when the TAZ dissolves itself. AG: One final comment on this "rhizome" thread, then I'd like to talk more about tactical net.art. You correctly situate the "rhizome ideology" in the '70s (and '80s and '90s), and I agree that the theoretical impetus was born then. However (as said above) don't you see a trajectory from progressive political theory in the '70s and '80s, to the real *material* manifestations of these theories today? My only point about Deleuze (I'm just using his name for convenience, there are clearly other important figures) is that he never had access to real, material TAZs (or rhizomes, or nomadic communities, etc.) that instantiated his theoretical interventions. To take media venues as an example, I claim that we never had access to real, wide-spread non-hierarchical systems until now, with the dawn of radically democratic networked communities. Free radio is different; your "'anarchism' or popular revolts" were/are different; moments like May '68 were *very* different. Yes, this new mode clearly "fails" in the eyes of the dominant order. Yet *our* failure (our dissolving and reappearing) in their eyes means something good to us... It means that a new practice is emerging. "What comes next when the TAZ dissolves itself"? A new TAZ, of course. Are you suggesting that we shouldn't translate traditional leftist strategies into the tactical media framework, but rather, translate tactical media backward into a more traditional leftist strategy? GL: No, forget these leftist frameworks. I have never been part of that. In most cases, people do not have the energy anymore to form a new TAZ, or even to be part of it. The rigid time economy is eating up people's lives. Perhaps what you are not taking into account is people's real disillusionment and the pragmatic realities of life. When a TAZ has been smashed by the authorities, or has dissolved itself because of exhaustion or internal conflict, only a small percentage of the participants will continue. They will become the survivors; they will crystallize into a new group or TAZ. We have described this process in our Adilkno book "Cracking the Movement" (http://thing.desk.nl/bilwet/Cracking/contents.html). The phrase "disappearing and reappearing" is way too simple, especially in this harsh, neo-liberal climate. I am an professional optimist (by nature) and it is my passion to create strategies for getting new initiatives off the ground. But your analysis of Deleuze (and his generation) not having experienced an actual TAZ is an historical misjudgment. This is mainly because you have ignored the numerous movements, world wide, which started in the late '60s, and have actually existed since then. This includes the ecology, anti-nuclear, and women's movements; squats, farms, alternative bookshops and restaurants, music festivals; sabotage, actions, strikes; and dogmatic splinter groups and armed guerillas. Current media/art initiatives are tiny compared to what was going on twenty or so years ago, when the Deleuze & Guattari duo was active. That is our sad reality at the end of the '90s. It is true, though, that in today's technological climate a TAZ has the ability to incorporate activities elsewhere on the planet much faster and cheaper than in the past. Yet simply having this ability to organize new forms of resistance does not automatically generate new social movements. Perhaps in the (very near!) future. I remain optimistic! AG: I'm an optimist too and I think we are living through a very exciting time. I think our disagreement stems from the fact that I consider the "rhizomatic mode" to be historically specific, while you're extending it to include resistive actions in general (or at least for the past 30 years). We can agree to disagree. Let's forget about the offline for a moment and get back to our first topic above: electronic civil disobedience. Do you disagree with the strategy of the so-called "denial of service" attacks seen in the EDT's FloodNet actions? If yes, what are other possible network actions that may emerge in the near future... the new forms of hacktivism? GL: The US/American establishment is preparing for the Infowar. You can read this everywhere. Secret services and military research centers have the wildest fantasies about Muslim hackers, and the damage they can cause. For me, these are all phantoms, orchestrated illusions put in place to legitimize the rise (again) of the US military budget during the late Clinton administration. Let us not fall into their trap. What is important now is to spread awareness of the fact that we are all under constant surveillance. Electronic media and networks are endangering citizen's basic civil rights (above all their right to privacy). Hacktivism should move into this area, not just temporarily shoot down enemy servers. We need to be much more careful, flexible, remain under cover. FloodNet originates from an actual public space lost and gone. Perhaps it is trying to re-construct the loss in much too easy a way. In our experience, here in Amsterdam, the digital public sphere is a long term project, with thousands of people involved. In part, our work is invisible, and contains many random elements. Activists, by nature, are hasty. They want to get things done. Yet protection and restructuring of the public sphere is not a simple problem to solve. So let us come up with many models and examine which ones work, and which don't. That's hacktivism for me. http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html http://www.backspace.org/iod http://oss.jodi.org http://sunsite.cs.msu.su/wwwart/refresh.htm http://thing.desk.nl/bilwet/Cracking/contents.html 8.1 Re: <nettime> Hacking Activism John Hopkins nettime-l@desk.nl Sun, 21 Feb 1999 17:08:35 +0200 Following are some laborous observations to Geert and Alex's conversation: >GL: The open source movement is clearly an interesting area but what ...snip... >(and so has nettime). The question is this: How do we turn all these >abstract issues, which are debated in a very closed circle and only >understood by a hand full of technicians, into a large topic, understood >by the millions, so to speak. Minor decisions in the realm of technical >standards taken today will have enormous effects on society later on. We >are all aware of that. So, much will depend on our political skills, >imagination and willingness to make coalitions, if we want to succeed. Well, I am a bit astonished that your dialogue passed by any reflection on the question, and instead focused on a continuation of the rhetoric in the closed circle of nettime posters. Sometimes you guys get my adrenaline going, I love it, thanks! Thus, I can't pass by that consequently (in the context of nettime ) rhetorical question with some basic observations. Some are rooted in Newtonian/mechanistic arguments, but hear me out, I can't speak in the metaphors that are often used in this forum. Interfacing with "the public" (i.e., everybody NOT on nettime), one will see both the answer and a distinctive perspective on the question. And I am neither proposing nor am interested in audiences of millions, but rather individuals, interacted with one-by-one, or at most in small groups. Firstly, please, please let go of the MASS issue -- I think any "movement" that wants to deal with masses has, by the nature of the Beast, to coagulate its own mass in order to affect the direction, effectively ruling out a networked environment or form. Maybe it is too obvious to answer the question with the word "education" especially given the horrific state of institutionalized learning in the world. But the sharing of knowledge, experience, and life energy on an individual basis, the lowest common denominator, has the greatest potential to transform life. next5minutes, I hope, will see some open discussions on this issue. If we are not generous about sharing our personal energies especially in the one-to-one sphere of action, there will be no change in the Other, much less, the Self! It might be that perhaps the side-stepping illustrates the weakness of this <nettime> listserv -- that it HAS gotten away from personal dialogue and problem solving. >than liberate a larger public? (I realize this sentiment is probably not >very popular with the Dutch/German tactical media community.) New >technologies seem, finally, to be able to give us this TAZ option as a >widespread reality for the first time. Look at our own projects--nettime >and rhizome--I think that communities of this nature are virtually >unprecedented. And, hey, that may be enough for me. unprecedented? are you sure? Of course, SPECIFICALLY, in the sense of the detail of mediation techniques, the protocol, but is that important to dwell upon? I think it is more important to look at the human results -- are these communities unprecedented in their individual human effects? >Let's move to the issue of translating traditional leftist strategies >into the tactical media framework. A new method is critical. We've >experienced bottom-up political movements for some time now. But, what >about *distributed* bottom-up strategies? This is the machinic model, >where there is no coalition, there is no core, yet there is a "movement." >Is electronic activism like the FloodNet too rooted in old school leftist >politics? The real question here is: How do we make the network into a >medium for action and resistance? Well, a truely distributed network is distinguished from other forms of mass society in the fact that it has a distributed inertia -- it cannot be expected to have a concentrated mass that can be moved (given a torque loci) as a means to im-press the surrounding cultural/social matrix. The distribution of inertia requires that a net, whether it is organized through modern telecommunicative technologies or otherwise, be activated by intra-nodal exchanges of energy, nothing amounting to a directed social vector but more a series of trans-local point-source flare-ups of energy. This energy pulsing is at the same time reactive and proactive, revolutionary and transformatory. It is agent and carrier, self and Other, co-mingled. What about getting rid of the "up" in bottom-up? Why go up? As soon as one starts climbing, ascending above the direct personal interactive, the resistance becomes illusory and reactive (rigid and resistive) to a Cervantes' windmill. better to stay on the bottom and work with the dialogue as the primary tool. Resistivity invites reification or at least polarity, where intra-nodal flexing redirects opposing energies into positive channels opening lives and possibilities. >GL: You are touching here on the question of organization. It presupposes >common interests (or even "objectives," Marxists would say) and a basic >set of common ethics. Today this sense of commonality has been blurred by >the "culture wars"--in a good way, I would say. But the celebration of >differences, chaos and complexity has prompted us to pose again the >question of organization. Permanent deconstructions and cynical >criticisms have turned many of the intellectuals, artists and activists >into enlightened but powerless outsiders. Perhaps the blurring comes from the use of the wrong optics to view the issue -- the rhetorical tools of the intellectual class have been used to build mazes that take us away from principled/fundamental understandings -- understandings that chart trajectories of personal convergence and action. The weakness of rhetorical tools seems to be embedded in the instances when they are used outside of immediate dialogic situations and instead are used for propagandistic purposes. I have stated before that a critical measure of the efficacy of a text/language-based exchange is how closely or spontaneously actions (like behavioral shifts) spring up as a result. -- That is, if we are TRUELY expecting that topics discussed here are to be translated to REAL social transformations! If the only response in more rhetoric, it is a signal that we are moving AWAY from active principles rather than towards them. In the context of nettime, I was reflecting this morning on why I always have a funny feeling when I make that rare effort to post. I never have any reaction/response from the prolific posters which leads me to 1) consider that my ideas are not interesting to them or 2) they are not interested in getting anything but silent nods of approval to their postings. Of course, there is the third possibility that what I write doesn't make sense, but I can come to my own defense and say that many ideas and observations have evolved in the very dynamic and social environment of learning situations involving many tens of dialogues with other individuals... hmmmm. No one is an outsider if they retain the soul-full will to speak and listen with an Other, allowing the limitless possibilities of exchange to resonate and evolve in the confluence. Insiders talk to many, and listen only to themselves. >These days, one could say that new forms of organization are formed along >technical lines. For example, majordomo mailing-list software is creating >specific social structures (while excluding others). The internet has the >tendency to strengthen both global and local connections, but seems to >neglect the nation or state level. This will backfire sooner or later. Why will this backfire? if people are interacting through an organically formed communications system, outside of total infrastructure breakdown/takeover/intervention, where is the real loss in neglecting geopolitical nation/state considerations? If it is the ONLY medium through which people are communicating, then I would suggest they get a "Real Life," no kidding! On the other hand, if you consider Language itself as a form of technological mediation, then it is quite clear that what you say is absolutely correct -- organizations ARE formed along lines of technological specification. Forming organizations with other criteria requires negotiation, translation -- and they must have individuals with a foot in either domain! Interesting! see you two folks in Amsterdam! kiitos John ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ John Hopkins, Tech-no-mad artist and educator back in Helsinki at the National Academy for a week... neo-scenes occupation: http://students.llaky.fi/~hopkins/nso/ travelog: http://members.iex.net/~hopkins/travel/recent.html web space: http://members.iex.net/~hopkins/ email: <hopkins {AT} iex.net> Mobile (when I am in Finland) +358 (0)40 711 5612 CONTACT INFO (Feb 18 - 28, 1999): Fx: +358 (0)9 680 33260 Messages: +358 (0)9 680 3320 9.0 <nettime> The XYZ of net activism luther blissett nettime-l@desk.nl Wed, 3 Mar 1999 17:03:03 +0100 (MET) [orig to n5m3-debates-l {AT} waag.org] - THE XYZ OF NET ACTIVISM - by Luther Blissett It's time to create the pop stars of activism, the idoru of communication guerrilla, it's time to threaten and charm the masses by the ghosts coming from the net, to play the myth against the myth, to be more nihilist than infoteinment! - etoy - _0_ Luther Blissett and the net.activism _1_ EDT and LB: two models of mediatic simulation _2_ The pop turn _3_ Pop interfaces for the masses: a political idoru _4_ Hybridisation 5 The revolution of '99 0. < LUTHER BLISSETT AND THE NET.ACTIVISM > In this contribution I want to introduce Luther Blissett Project into net activism debate. For those who don't know about it: Luther Blissett is a pop myth, a collective "open" pop star, which name is the same one of a Watford soccer player. But virtual LB has a computer-made face. LB is a multiple name: whoever can become LB and use his/her name for whatever purpose. Who uses the name increases and takes part of a collective fame. In Italy, where small groups promoted this project, multiple name strategy triggered a chain reaction. By means of multiuse name a mass myth was built and used for political campaigns. The concepts underlying LB [multi-use name, open pop star, political avatar] can be a powerful tool to build a mass movement, as well as to spread in a popular way the net.culture and the net.criticism of inner circles like Nettime or N5M, ejecting the networks out of the Net. For more details about LB: -> http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Rampart/6812/ramp.html 1. < EDT AND LB: TWO MODELS OF MEDIATIC SIMULATION > In the current debate about net activism a leading question is the "simulation" vs "real action" opposition. I think it has become a vicious and rhetoric question. Lovink & Garcia, in "the ABC & DEF of tactical media" are too patient with those who are skeptist about importance of "mediatic representation" issues. On the contrary, I'm going to point out the most radical thesis and strategies expressed about simulation: in my view, Electronic Disturbance Theater and LB/a.f.r.i.k.a gruppe. -> http://www.nyu.edu/project/wray/wwwhack.html -> http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/199809/msg00044.html Both of them think activism and counter information must learn to simulate on the mass media stage, i.e. in the infoteinment. But these projects are completely different. Electronic Disturbance Theater is the name of a *group* of actvists. They use the "net strike" to protest istitutions and mass media about political questions. EDT's "actors" don't hide their names. On the other side, LB is just a name, a mark adopted by thousands of peoplewho often don't know or communicate each other. LB is not a group or amovement but a collective pop star. All the activists have the same name,all the activists *are* the same multiple pop star. LB usually don't protestestablishment directly. S/he works inside mass media producing fake news,urban legends, trying to "short-circuite" spectacle's inner contradictions.LB's name is used for artistic works, political deeds, phranks, etc. LB havegot no world wide fame like EDT, but s/he could get it.- Electronic Disturbance TheaterThe main question against EDT is: which is the risk of threatening andprovoking media by simulations? How to control feedbacks and bakcklashes?How to avoid being coopted or starting moral panic? According to StefanWray, activists must become aware that politics is a teather and must learnto play: "we are manipulating the media sphere, we are creating hype, we arecultural jamming, we are simulating threats and action [...] we are actors!this is political theater! a glorification and tranformation of the fakeinto the real, at least in people's mind". How to present activism on thestage? With an image and a name that work on the media. It's deal withbuilding simulacra: "How do we invent an international cyberspacial army?First by naming".EDT's simulacrum is very simple: it presents itself as a protest againstistitutions, media, corporations. It can be defined as a first levelsimulacrum, since it challenges the System in a direct way. Mediaticeffectiveness is given by simulated threat: "Floodnet's power lies in thesimulated threat." The aim is to draw attention to particular issue, toattract some degree of media coverage by engaging in actions that areunusual. The question for EDT is to have made up a negative, destructivesimulacrum. Media system coopts these antagonistic simulacra, it demonizeand criminalize them, it uses them to starting states of emergency, moralpanic. The "state" plays the same game of fear. That happens when yuo playat the "first level" of mass media game. - Luther BlissettIf EDT targets a direct fight, LB wants to raise the challenge at an upperlogic level. As a.f.r.i.k.a gruppe wrote: "Guerrilla communication doesn't focus on arguments and facts like most leaflets, brochures, slogans or banners. In it's own way, it inhabits a militant political position, it is direct action in the space of social communication. But different from other militant positions (stone meets shop window), it doesn't aim to destroy the codes and signs of power and control, but to distort and disfigure their meanings as a means of counteracting the omnipotent prattling of power." Baudrillard quoting Wilden: "Each element of contestation or subversion of a system have to be of an upper logic kind." Contrary to EDT's pratice: "Communication guerrillas do not intend to occupy, interrupt or destroy the dominant channels of communication, but to detourn and subvert the messages transported." This means not to play as innocent actors but to imitate spectacle and its deceptions: "Against a symbolic order of western capitalist societies which is built around discourses of rationality and rational conduct, guerrilla communication relies on the powerful possibility of expressing a fundamental critique through the non-verbal, paradoxical, mythical" Indeed, non rational strategy is very rational: becoming spectacle, becoming myth, to use infoteinment weapons against itself. Traditional simple counter information doesn't work anymore. LB wants to bring the struggle in the realm of pop culture, to build "intelligent" simulacra, to spread out fake news, using irony to withdraw at the right moment. According to Critical Art Ensemble the enemy is invisible, the power has become a nomadic electronic flow. If it's easy to understand this, it's more difficult to understand how mass media system coopted, neutralize or demonize subversive forces. The net has made democratic simulating and faking information. But where is the myth in mass communication, today? 2. < THE POP TURN > Roland Barthes, "Mythologies", 1957: "It is to be strongly established, from the beginning, that the myth is a communication system, is message." The myth is what is beyond the Spectacle, the back of media landscape. The myth unifies what is opposite in spectacle and overcodes any subversive meaning and deed. society infowar, emergencies SPECTACLE -> state VS. subcutural movements establishment counter culture, activism | | |_______________________| | v MYTH Barthes: "To destroy the myth from inside was then extremely difficult. The same move to get rid of it falls at once a prey to the myth: the myth can always, in the end, signify the resistance made to it." The title of 'read me!' intro is: "nothing is spectacular if you aren't part of it". I don't know if it is a quote and where it comes from [Debord..? it's pure Debord's philosophy!], but it's quite rhetoric, politically correct, puritanic. We should say: nothing is spectacular if you *are* part of it! Activism have to u-turn: let's call it 'pop' turn. Barthes: "The best weapon against the myth is to mythicize itself, is to produce an artificial myth: and this reconstituted myth will be a real mythology". - Net hype. For example, Net hype is a myth that activism must parasite and overcode. As A.f.r.i.k.a gruppe writes: "Increasing attempts to police the net, to establish state and corporate control will, paradoxically, increase its attractivity as a field of operation of communication guerrillas: Possibly, even those of us who until now not even own a PC will get Wired then. Fakes and false rumours inside and outside the Net may help to counteract commodification and state control - after all, the internet is an ideal area for producing rumours and fakes." "Communication Guerrillas are fascinated by possibilities offered by the internet also in a quite diferent sense: Beyond its reality, THE NET is an urban myth, and perhaps the strongest and most vital of all. Social discourse conceives THE NET as the location where the people, the pleasures, the sex and the crimes of tomorrow already take place. Go Internet, learn the Future! Fears and desires are projected onto THE NET: this is the mythical place where we can see the future of our society." Mass media stage is inglobing the net step by step. The Spectacle is hybridizing itself with the net. Collective imaginery is penetrating the cyberspace. Activist have to attack and parasite the collective imaginery fed by the net. Mass media imaginery are becoming more and more interactive, "democratic". Old Left's theories about media manipolation are obsolete. 3. < POP INTERFACES FOR THE MASSES: A POLITICAL IDORU > 'Pop Turn' means that activists have become less boring and speak the language of the masses. Like all interfaces, it's a compromise. Some puritanic activist, some anarchist or eco-raver will disagree. But the only way to face infoteinment is to become more nihilist than it. The 'pop' turn is not only a strategic choice, it's also a way to build an access to the masses. - Pop avatar. Pop culture is like induistic pantheon where gods and semigods fight nonstop. It deals with making up really pop simulacrum, controlling them, drawing them back when they begin to produce unwanted reactions. Activism have to construct virtual pop stars, collective avatars conducted from the net to act in the infoteinment, as LB o the idoru Kioko Date. By the metaphor of "mass avatar" I mean to explain open pop star model to net users and net actvists who don't know about multiple name. The avatar metaphor can be transposed very easily from the net to the traditional media and used in the media activism. With "mass avatar" I mean a virtual idol to play on media stage and not a simulated identity in a one-to-one communication on the net. Anthropomorphic features make public identify itself with it. As well as Ballard and Gibson know, in media society the Icon is the direct way to access to people's nervous system. Franco Berardi aka Bifo defined LB as 'The Antichrist of information'. This definition explains the LB purpose to join counter-information and autonomous pop mithology. - Gateway to the media. Hacktivists have to organize gateways between the net and the "traditional" media. This net-media gateways should be an interface to feed and to control news media spread out. It deals with contacting and cooperating with on-line staff of TV and newspapers, with making up idiot-friendly interfaces for journalists. Electronic Disturbance Theater experience demonstrates it: without making the NY Times front page on October 31, 1998, EDT would have got only a merely on-line existence. 4. < HYBRIDISATION > - Pop modules. Hybridisation is not about just connecting the virtual and the "street". We risk to remain rhetoric and predictable on both the fronts. We have to hybridize and to contaminate the forms of pop culture to create pop modules for activism. Net scene is a tank of odd and useful ideas. Think of a mediatic subversive use of the most iconoclast net art works, before they could be coopted by Nike or Adidas! Pop module can be defined as a multi-platform program that can work on different social environments and political frameworks, on both old and new media. An example is LB, which name appeared many times on italian media, signed books, novels, performances, shows, counter information campaigns, hoaxes, urban legends. Multiple name is a really hybrid module, as it works on both old and new media, on both the street and the net. - Composing theories... We don't need the western philosophy easy astractions and oppositions that go on with grassroots criticism: simulation vs. real action, alternative vs. mainstream, pop vs. avant-garde, molar vs. molecular, "take to the street" vs. "the streets are dead". A theory [or strategy] is not to set up against another, but they are to be composed together on the same level. "Compositionism" is a deleuzian method suggested by authors as Bifo. Look at the beast of spectacle and its movements. It is infiltrating the net, rooting in the new forms without give up the old one. Capital infiltrates any interstitials. The net is not oppose to mass media, hypertext cannot destroy spectacle, but new hybrid forms grow up. Spectacle branches in the hypertextual net, it becomes more shifty. It is already hybrid, let's learn from it. - ... and integrating activism. In the same way activism has not to give up old strategies but to integrate them, to connect each other. Convergence of media involves convergence of strategies and "activisms". We have to cease to make theories. We simply have to connect a strategy to another, a thing to another. Hybridisation have to integrated different kinds of activism. After hacker we have to integrate net artists and designers into activism. I mean an euphoric, subversive, iconoclast, prankish activism! If net artists began to design pop interfaces and strategies for activism, they surely would be more spured, inspired and useful. But we don't need to be a "rhizome": rhizome myth has brought damage. Deleuze & Guattari also asked: "How can we distinguish between subversive schizophrenia and capitalistic schizophrenia?". Capitalism is schizo and rhizomatic too. We need to integrate and to be integrated. 5. < THE REVOLUTION OF '99 > The net-media-art activism scene is fragmented in a lot of groups, close sub-networks, alternative culture ghettos, avant-garden loners, hyper-egos. Let's have a look at jodi's map: -> http://www.jodi.org/map I don't know in which way it is organized, but it's an effective bird's-eye view of "our" network. This scene can go overground only through interconnection of each group of artists, activists, writers, theorists, designers, journalists, moderators, organizers, etc. This network could become a mediatic icon!, the next [western] sub-cultural movement, after punk, techno, cyberpunk, etc. We have to find a quite pop and stupid name: "the revolution of '99"? Next scheme is not so obvious, it also means to be an interface for "theory": - it's a bit stupid and too general but clear. - is it too "hegemonic"? don't mind names such as 'nettime', just for example. - where is simulation and where real action? [select courier or a non variable font!] the "Spectacle" c-theory media hype nettime MASS MEDIA CRITICISM \ | \ | the "streets" gateway | syndicate / \ | nettime / INFORMATION _ _ _ _ WIDE AREA _ _ _ _ _ LOCAL NETWORKS NETWORKS NETWORKS / \ tao.ca / \ ecn.org / \ / \ LB / \ ZapNet mass avatars / \ McLibel net.art POP _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ACTIVISM INTERFACE \ / \ / \ / ACTION! MASS - - - POP CULTURE MEDIA mainstream/underground --- Luther Blissett <pasquine {AT} dsc.unibo.it> Ghost-department of Semiotics, Bologna University, Italy ;-> --- 10.0 <nettime> the language of tactical media joanne richardson nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 3 Jul 2002 15:56:54 +0200 (MEST) Greetings, An earlier version of this text was first circulated on the Next 5 Minutes 4 editorial mailing list. Current version rewritten for a feature on tactical media of the magazine Balkon, due to appear in conjunction with the Cluj, Romania co-edition of N5M4 in September. The Language of Tactical Media ..... Joanne Richardson "World War III will be a guerilla information war, with no division between military and civilian participation." -- motto of Tactical Media Crew, borrowed from Marshall McLuhan The future is a series of small steps leading away from the wreckage of the past, sometimes its actors walk face forward, blind to the history played out behind their backs, other times, they walk backwards, seeing only the unfulfilled destiny of a vanished time. The promise of the tactical media of the future - the end of the spectacular media circus as everyone begins to lay their hands on cheap ‘do it yourself' media technologies made possible by new forms of production and distribution - was inspired by a distinction between tactics and strategies made by Michel de Certeau in 1974. Strategies, which belong to states, economic power, and scientific rationality are formed around a clear sense of boundary, a separation between the proper place of the self and an outside defined as an enemy. Tactics insinuate themselves into the other's place without the privilege of separation; they are not a frontal assault on an external power, but makeshift, temporary infiltrations from the inside through actions of thefts, hijacks, tricks and pranks. But for de Certeau, the distinction was almost entirely focused on the power of reading (the consumption of signs) to transform submission into subversion. The most memorable example of tactics in The Practice of Everyday Life is the indigenous Indians who under Spanish colonization appear to be submissive but really "often made of the rituals, representations, and laws imposed on them something quite different from what their conquerors had in mind; they subverted them not by rejecting or altering them, but by using them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept." The apparently submissive kneel, bow down, put their hands together in prayer, but they don't believe the words; when they mouth them they secretly mean something that was not intended by the original producers. The strength of their ‘resistance' is in their silent interpretations of these rituals, not in their transformation. Maybe the most interesting thing about the theory of tactical media is the extent to which it abandons rather than pays homage to de Certeau, making tactics not a silent production by reading signs without changing them, but outlining the way in which active production can become tactical in contrast to strategic, mainstream media. The examples of tactical media have almost become canonical by now: billboard pirating by Adbusters, plagiarized websites by the Italian hackers, 0100101110101101.org, RTMark's mock websites for G.W. Bush and the World Trade Organization, and (as theYes Men) their impersonations of WTO representatives to deliver messages that don't challenge the WTO's position but over-identify with it to the point of absurdity. In contrast to mainstream media, tactical interventions don't occupy a stable ideological place from which they put forward counter-arguments; they speak in tongues, offering temporary revelations. But while shifting the emphasis from the consumption of signs to an active form of media production, the theory of tactical media seems to have lost some of the original contours of de Certeau's distinction. The tactical media universe as mapped by David Garcia and Geert Lovink in ‘The ABC of Tactical Media' also included ‘alternative' media, although its logic seems quite different. Grassroots initiatives which are focused on building a community around other values than the mainstream, do occupy an ideological place that is marked as different; they don't infiltrate the mainstream in order to pirate or detourn it, as RTMark might infiltrate the media image of the WTO. And especially in the recent transformation of alternative media into the global Indymedia network, the separation between Indymedias' alternative voice and the mainstream enemy is quite evident. Indymedia critique the pretensions of mass media to be a true, genuine, democratic form of representation; it opposes the false media shell with counter-statements made from a counter-perspective – a perspective that is not questioned because it is assumed as natural. My Italian friends who work with Indymedia showed me a video they co-produced about the anti-globalization demonstrations in Prague and asked what I thought. I replied that it was a good piece of propaganda, but as propaganda it never examined its own position. In this video you see a lot of activists who came to Prague from America, UK, Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, etc; occasionally you even get ossified Leninist bullshit from members of communist parties. What you really don't get is any reflection of the local Czech context – many locals denounced what they saw as attempt to playact a revolution by foreigners who invoked slogans from an ideology the Czechs themselves considered long obsolete. The confrontation of these different perspectives is absent from the video, since it is meant to promote Indymedia's own anarcho-communist position, raised to the level of a universal truth. And in this sense it was as strategic and dogmatic as mainstream media; it was only the content of its message that differed. De Certeau was a child of his time, maybe as a former Jesuit he was more timid and better behaved than his siblings, but he played with the same conceptual toys. In its historical moment tactics was an important idea that sought to define a way of subverting the information spectacle that would avoid using the same tools (strategies) against its opponent. Tactics recycled the Situationist idea of detournement: taking over the images and words from the mass spectacle, but putting them through an unexpected detour, using them in a way they were not originally intended by combining them in surprising combinations, heretical juxtapositions. The Lettrists kidnapped a priest, and, dressed in his gown, gave a sermon at the Notre Dame on the death of god; the SI altered the soundtracks of karate and porn films to reflect the struggle against bureaucracy; even striking workers during May '68 stole the media image of James Bond with a gun for a poster announcing themselves as the new specter haunting the world. These were neither art nor political speech; their disruptive power was that they did not use the familiar, straightforward language of politics. Their wit and lack of directness was a measure of their success; the danger always lurking in the background was that this new mode of production through theft and infiltration of public spaces, including the media, could ultimately be used to deliver the same kind of blunt, inflexible propaganda as the media spectacle. As a practice, detournement reflected a contradiction between the recognition that fighting on the same terrain as the enemy is a seductive but inevitable trap, and the desire to occupy the buildings of power under a new name. This contradiction crystallized in the hijacking metaphor: detourne was a verb commonly used to describe the hijacking of a plane. The SI played upon this connotation, announcing their own productions as hijackings – of films, of politics, of quotidian desires. The terrorist as a symbolic equivalent of the subversion of power was never far in the background of associations. And in an almost straight line stretching across the precipice of history, aesthetic terrorism continues to be invoked as an honorific title. Etoy advertise themselves as ‘digital terrorism'; in an interview, Mark Dery called CAE a ‘philosophical terrorist cell' and made comparisons to the Red Brigades; RTMark is often congratulated for its brand of ‘media terrorism.' Now it could be lamented that an unfortunate metaphor is being applied to practices that are very different – but in what sense is the affinity only a matter of metaphor? Terrorism is a way that the weak, lacking the strength in numbers and political influence, can try to make use of the strong by infiltrating their places of power, in the hope that the temporary seizure of a key building, an airplane, or a politician might shift the balance of things and bring power to the bargaining table. Ever since terrorism abandoned the tradition of tyrannicide and became a form of propaganda of the deed, it operated through a hijack of the media. Letters to the press, communiqués: 5 minutes under the opaque illumination of the media spotlight. The terrorist use of media hijacks is the point where tactical media and strategy meet – it may be a surprise infiltration rather than a direct attack, but an infiltration with a clear sense of separation between its own position and that of the enemy, an infiltration that ultimately mirrors the political organization, juridical system and mode of expression of the power it opposes. The Red Brigades' hierarchy of brigades, columns, national branches, and an executive committee was a double of the centralist organization of the state; the Weather Underground's counter-institution of ‘proletarian' justice mimicked the obscenity of the law in reverse: "We now find the government guilty and sentence it to death on the streets." And today's fundamentalist terrorism is a mirror of the network society of a stateless, global capitalism. Western educated bin Laden militants don't belong to any specific country; they travel the globe from Bosnia to Paris and New York, use the internet and cellular phones, and have access to communication networks even in a desert cave. Asking how media can be used tactically today implies a recognition of the contradictory history in which the idea was born – the moment of crisis when new social forces rendered old categories obsolete, and Marxism began to reveal itself as a bankrupt system in which capitalism found not its abolition but its supreme fulfillment. But alongside new ideas and the search for a new language, lingered old modes of organization dating back to the Jacobin terror, and the mythic image of the armed, militant hero. Tactics sought to express a new way that the weak could fight against power by using different tools - but in the old language of military engagement. Before de Certeau, the distinction between tactics and strategy was invoked by Clausewitz in 1812. Tactics is the manner of conducting each separate combat; strategy is the means of combining individual combats to attain the general objective of the war. Tactics is the deployment of individual parts, strategy, the overview of the whole. This is a very different distinction from de Certeau's opposition between modes of combat; de Certeau's tactics is actually closer to what Clausewitz called strategem – a concealed, indirect movement which doesn't actually deceive but provokes the enemy to commit errors of understanding. This is analogous to what Sun Tzu termed a ‘war of maneuver' – an artifice of diversion undertaken by weak forces against a large, well-organized opponent, an unexpected move that entices the enemy, leading him to make mistakes, and eventually self-destruct. Whether direct or concealed, offensive or defensive, using the strength of numbers or the artifice of diversion, both strategy and tactics belong to the art of warfare and have the same objectives: conquering the armed power of the enemy, taking possession of his goods and other sources of strength, and gaining public opinion by destroying the enemy's credibility. And perhaps this is the limitation of a media theory based on a distinction between tactics and strategies - ultimately both are a form of war against an enemy power. The tactics of media hacks may differ from the strategy of independent, alternative media in their formal aspects, but what seems common to both is their self-definition through an act of opposition. A fake GWBush page cannot exist without the authentic one, which it parodies. Indymedia cannot exist without global capital, whose abuses it chronicles, or without mainstream media, whose falsifications it denounces. The mainstream spectacle also needs an embodiment of opposition to the universal values of democracy, enlightened humanitarianism, and the right to consume without restraint. And after the collapse of the other of ‘Eastern Europe,' the image of the terrorist is now the perfect media fantasy, the face against which it can define its own values in reverse. This reflection was occasioned by my editorial participation in the 4th Next 5 Minutes Festival; it's an attempt to think about its content, which proposes an investigation of the meaning of tactical media in the wake of September 11, and its decentralized organizational structure, which will transform it into a series of dispersed but linked events, each focused on different local issues. If as David Garcia admits, the idea of tactical media grew out of a specifically Amsterdam context (or perhaps in a wider sense, the liberal democratic context of the countries of advanced capitalism), it is commendable that N5M4 is attempting to transcend its origins and include initiatives that were previously left out of what seemed to be a primarily ‘western' idea of tactical media. The editorial team for N5M4 includes media tacticians like CAE, members of the Indymedia network, media centers in post-socialist countries which provide infrastructural support and access and education to local producers, and European organizations which provide ICT assistance to groups in Mali, Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Jamaica, and Bolivia. Under the expanded cover concept of tactical media are included what appear to be both tactical and strategic media, as well phenomena that differ from both insofar as they are not forms of warfare - initiatives to provide infrastructure, improved access, means of communication and exchange to people who for economic and political reasons are lacking these means. These modes of production and exchange are not primarily constituted by being directed against an enemy; the content is not determined in advance through a preconceived opposition, but left to be shaped by its producers. Now to my mind, labeling all these diverse practices forms of ‘tactical media' risks missing precisely their differences and making the term meaningless. This loss of signification seems to correspond, in inverse proportion, to the recent inflation of ‘tactical media' as a cool label on the market of ideas. Instead of analyzing concretely what is inherent in different forms of media production and the ideologies they shelter and preserve, the term papers over their contradictions. Tactical media is good, progressive, alternative, etc. There is no need to ask questions, its truth already appears self-evident. After making some extremely arrogant, offensive films of Maoist propaganda during the early 1970s, Godard became embarrassed. And started making films that had nothing to say. Here & Elsewhere – we went to Palestine a few years ago, Godard says. To make a film about the coming revolution. But who is this we, here? Why did we go there, elsewhere? And why don't here and elsewhere ever really meet? What do we mean when we use this strange word ‘revolution'? It is only when he was old that Godard learned how to ask questions, stumbling around like a foreigner in a language and a history he did not possess. Here & Elsewhere, which came out in the same year as de Certeau's book, occupies no fixed position, moves towards no preconceived destination, and takes nothing for granted, not even its own voice. In an era dominated by a politics of the message (statements, declarations of war, communiqués, demands in the form of new five year plans), it searches for a politics of the question. The idea of tactical media is the harbinger of a question both necessary and timely: how is it possible to make media otherwise, media that expresses its solidarity with the humiliated thoughts and incomprehensible desires of those who seem doomed to silence, media that does not mirror the strategic power of the mainstream by lapsing into a self-certain propaganda identical to itself and blind to its own history. But the language of tactical media simultaneously imprisons the idea of a different type of media production inside a theory of warfare, as a media of opposition, defined in relation to its enemy. While it is necessary to continue asking the question and experimenting with models of media production that work in situations of crisis and adversity, it is also important to know when to change terrain. As wars rage around us - wars that rationalize the trafficking in merchandise under the shadow of sublime principles, wars against terrorism, wars against drugs, wars of information against information - maybe what we need least is to advertise our practice as an extension of one or another principle of warfare. When asked to take sides, for or against, siding with one army or the other, sometimes the only real answer is not to play the game. This refusal should not be confused with an exodus, a silent passivity, or a patient resignation. It is the vigilance of continuing to think, beyond the obvious - of a third, a fourth, or fifth alternative to the apocalyptic or utopian sense of the media. 10.1 Re: <nettime> the language of tactical media McKenzie Wark nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 03 Jul 2002 17:16:33 -0400 [from] Tactical Media and Tactical Knowledge McKenzie Wark Geert Lovink and David Garcia speak of a tactical media that might free itself from the dialectic of being an alternative or an opposition, which merely reproduces the sterile sense of a Wedom versus a Theydom in the media sphere. They claim that the "identity politics, media critiques and theories of representation" that were the foundation of oppositional media practices "are themselves in crisis." They propose instead an "existential aesthetic" based on the temporary "creation of spaces, channels and platforms". Lovink and Garcia's seminal text on tactical media doesn't entirely succeed in extracting itself from the oppositional language of Wedom versus Theydom, but it points towards an alterative strategy to the negation that paradoxically unites Osama Bin Laden, George W Bush and the writers of The Nation as purveyors, not of the same world view, but of world views constructed the same way. It is a question of combining tactical media with a tactical knowledge, of using the extensive vector of the media in combination with the intensive vector of the scholarly archive. In a nominally democratic country, one acts as part of a public sphere in the sense Alexander Kluge give to the term. A public sphere — a matrix of accessible vectors — acts as a point of exchange between private experience and public life; between intimate, incommunicable experience and collective perception. Public networks are arenas where the struggle to communicate takes place. Two aspects of this concept are relevant here. For Kluge, writing in post war Germany, the problem revolves around the historic failure in 1933 of the public sphere to prevent the rise of fascism. "Since 1933 we have been waging a war that has not stopped. It is always the same theme — the noncorrelation of intimacy and public life — and the same question: how can I communicate strong emotions to build a common life?" For Kluge, the public sphere is a fundamentally problematic domain, caught between the complexities of the social and the increasing separation of private life. One has to ask: for whom does Kluge imagine he speaks? Perhaps there are other experiences of the relation between the time of intimate experience and the time of the public sphere, buried out there in popular culture. Perhaps it is only intellectuals who feel so estranged from the time of information in the era of telesthesia. After all, the mode of address adopted by most popular media doesn't speak to a highly cultured intellectual like Kluge — or even a provincial one like me. We were trained in slower ways of handling information, and have a repertoire of quite different stories with which to filter present events. How could we claim to know what goes on out there in the other interzones, in quite other spaces where different flows from different vectors meet quite other memories and experiences of everyday life? After all, we intellectuals keep finding more than enough differences amongst ourselves. A tactical knowledge of media may have among its merits the fact that it takes these other interzones seriously. It tries to theorize the frictions between Kluge's intimate experience and the network of vectors, or it actually tries to collect and interpret accounts of such experiences. It is necessary to at least attempt to maintain a self-critical relation to the codes and practices of the interzone specific to intellectual media experiences. After all, 'our' training, 'our' prejudices in relation to the vector might be part of the problem. Nothing exempts 'our' institutions and interests from the war of the vector, the struggle to control the trajectories of information. With the spread of the vector into the private realm, a window opens that might be used to create a line along which the communication of intimate experience and collective feeling might take place, in those eventful moments when their separation collapses. The protocols of tactical media are not given in advance. As Gilles Deleuze says: "Experiment, never interpret." What is at stake is not the recreation of the public grounds for a universal reason, but finding the tactical resources for a far more differentiated and diverse struggle to communicate, that simple thing so hard to achieve. The maintenance of democracy requires a practice within the public networks for responding to events that it was never quite designed to handle. Virilio asks whether democracy is still possible in this era of what he calls 'chronopolitics'. Perhaps democracy succumbs to 'dromocracy' — the power of the people ploughed under by the power to technological speed. Well perhaps, but the only way to forestall such pessimism is to experiment with tactics for knowing and acting in the face of events. One has to experiment with relatively freely available conceptual tools and practices and base a democratic knowledge on them. This may involve moving beyond the techniques and procedures of the academy. In Antonio Gramsci's terms, the academic intellectual risks becoming merely a traditional intellectual, one of many layers of cultural sediment, deposited and passed over by the engine capital and the trajectory of the vector, caught up in a temporality that is not even dialectically resistant, but is merely residual. One has to make organic connections with the leading media and cultural practices of the day. Nevertheless, the historic memory and living tissue of scholarship stores resources that are useful and vital. In studying an event like September 11, a tactical knowledge can build on the best of two existing critical approaches. To the schools that concentrate on the structural power of transnational capital flows and military coercion it adds a close attention to the power of transgressive media vectors and the specific features of the events they generate. To the schools that study the space of the media text in the context of periodic struggles for influence with the national-popular discourse it adds an international dimension and a closer attention to the changing technical means that produce information flows. The event is a phenomena a little too slippery for either of these approaches. Hence the need to examine it in a new light, as the chance encounter of the local conjuncture with the global vector — on the operating table. The chance encounter of Osama Bin Laden with CNN, like the meeting of the umbrella with the sewing machine, has a surreal, 'surgical' logic specific to it. It is not entirely reducible to the long term temporalities of capital or military power and lies in the spaces between national-popular discourses. Writing the vector is not really something that can be practices with the tools of the Herbert Schiller school of political economy or the Stuart Hall school of cultural studies, alone, although a tactical knowledge might owes something to both. A tactical intellectual practice that uses the moment of the event to cross the divide between infrastructural and superstructural time. The event is not reducible to the methods of the 'areas specialists'. When studying events from the point of view of the site at which the originate, they always remain the province of specialists who deal with that particular turf. Events often generate valuable responses from area specialists, but these usually focus on the economic, political or cultural factors at work in the area the specialists know first hand. They do not often analyze the vectoral trajectories via which the rest of the world views the event. A tactical knowledge borrows from area studies without being caught within its territorial prerogatives. In an age when transnational media flows are running across all those academic specialties, perhaps it is time to construct a discourse that follows the flow of information (and power) across both the geographic and conceptual borders of discourse. Perhaps it is time to start experimenting, as Kluge has done, with modes of disseminating critical information in the vector field. Perhaps it is time to examine intellectual practices of storing, retrieving and circulating knowledge. Without wishing to return to the practice of the 'general intellectual', it may be worth considering whether the development of the vector calls for new ways for playing the role of the tactical intellectual. The tactical intellectual would combine the practices of tactical media and tactical scholarship, while being careful not to fall into the temporality of either journalism or the academy, but rather remain alert to the moments in which such distinct times are brought into crisis by the time of the event. ___________________________________________________ http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html ... we no longer have roots, we have aerials ... ___________________________________________________ 10.2 Re: <nettime> the language of tactical media Michael Benson nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 4 Jul 2002 17:34:22 +0200 Joanne: Reading your text on tactical media reminds me of the experience of seeing a group of Ljubljana skinheads aggressively singing the words to the Slovenian national anthem the other day. One would think that the effect would be nationalistic, which is what they intended, but the lyrics kept on tripping them up -- only they themselves didn't know it. (The words call for equality and peace among nations) So in the skinhead's case, there was a kind of inadvertent monkeywrenching or Adbuster-style action, but one where the subversion which crept into the mix was there to begin with: it was only the context of the racist nationalists singing it that gave it a nice reversal only apparent to an outside observer. And so what was meant to be menacing was actually funny, its racist/nationalist delivery subverted not by its subtext but by its text. It was the song that detourned the singers. In your case, what was meant to read as incisive analysis, couched in a hard-edged, dispassionate variant of the academese everyone's familiar with, is a kind of fog concealing exactly what you inaccurately accuse Godard of: it has "nothing to say" -- beyond its citations. If there's any kind of revelation in this post it's in your uneasy fascination with Godard's film about the Palestinian cause. (Right -- the same one I got to refamiliarize myself with because you lent me a tape of it when you were in Ljubljana. For the record.) "Here & Elsewhere" doesn't have nothing to say -- rather it's the only film document I know of that accurately conveys the complexity of the Palestinian/Israeli disaster, for which there are exactly no easy answers, and maybe no answers at all. But when I accuse you of having nothing to say it's also not quite right, because there's something fascinating about the coexistence of your ambivalent observations about his film with your other observations, all of which lead to a conclusion in which fellow travelers are advised to drop the metaphors of warfare, something (we're told) that's not a cop-out but instead shows "the vigilance of continuing to think, beyond the obvious..." Are we beyond the obvious here? Didn't "Here & Elsewhere" already signpost an alternative to what you call the apocalyptic vs. utopian "sense" of the media, 30 years ago? Isn't that, more than approximately, the very voice of Godard's film I detect, rising like a stale but at least believable truth in your conclusion? I detect "nothing to say" in your post beyond what you inherited from those you'd accuse of the same. Regards, MB 10.3 Re: <nettime> the language of tactical media David Goldschmidt nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 4 Jul 2002 23:41:08 -0400 Michael- Clearly you profess to have an intimate understanding of JoAnne's motives, conclusions. But, IMO, you only provide me with more evidence that the inherently paranoid only see the ulterior motive. If your not paranoid then you are under the delusion that your previous interactions with her have given you the insight to critique her for now, and forever. All I can do is applaud her. I hope she ignores you, Michael. She is the author ... you are nothing but a critic. She took her time to deliver a dispassionate and eloquent arguement (with proper citations) that was very enlighening (especailly for those of us who think the anti-globalisation folks are full of shit and just looking for a fight). And you, as a simpleton, rebuff her out-of-hand. You think you're so clever with your insider information ... but you're not ... you either missed (or ignored) the big picture. As a very liberal democrat, I keep waiting for the anti-globalisation freaks to offer an alternative to the status quo ... but you never do. If they ever offered the first first idea on how to "better" govern then I would be their greatest champion ... but all I ever see is criticizism. It may not mean much ...but I would like to thank JoAnne. The perspective she presented may have been "obvious" to Michael but it was new to me. david goldschmidt 10.4 Re: <nettime> the language of tactical media Morlock Elloi nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri, 5 Jul 2002 14:13:49 -0700 (PDT) > As a very liberal democrat, I keep waiting for the anti-globalisation > freaks to offer an alternative to the status quo ... but you never do. > If they ever offered the first first idea on how to "better" govern then I > would be their greatest champion ... but all I ever see is criticizism. Norman Mailer in 1962 interview: There's something pompous about people who join peace movements, SANE, and so forth. They're the radical equivalent to working for the FBI. You see, nobody can criticize you. You're doing God's work, you're clean. How can anyone object to anybody who works for SANE or is for banning the bomb? - You're not questioning their motives, are you? I am questioning their motives. I think there's something doubtful about these people. I don't trust them. I think they're totalitarian in spirit. Now, of course I'm certainly not saying they're Communist, and they most obviously are not Fascists, but there are new kinds of totalitarians. A most numerous number since World War II. ===== end (of original message) 10.5 Re: <nettime> the language of tactical media Julian Assange nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Sat, 6 Jul 2002 14:33:26 +1000 (EST) > would be their greatest champion ... but all I ever see is criticizism. Nature is life's greatist critic. Yet through nothing more than its relentless takedowns it has created man. -- Julian Assange |If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people |together to collect wood or assign them tasks and proff {AT} iq.org |work, but rather teach them to long for the endless proff {AT} gnu.ai.mit.edu |immensity of the sea. -- Antoine de Saint Exupery 10.6 Re: <nettime> the language of tactical media joanne richardson nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Sun, 7 Jul 2002 10:21:40 +0200 (MEST) Dear Michael, Wow, it's not every day I get compared to a Slovenian skinhead aggressively singing a dispassionate anthem. I find it hard to reply since you're right: I have nothing to say, offer no original ideas or conclusions about what is to be done, and only cite a few names and ask a few questions - about some things I think are often passed over in silence. > Are we beyond the obvious here? Didn't "Here & Elsewhere" > already signpost an alternative to what you call the apocalyptic vs. > utopian "sense" of the media, 30 years ago? Well, yes, that was the reason I used the example. Your reply seems based on a misunderstanding that I'm "accusing" Godard of having nothing to say. When I said that Godard became embarrassed about his past and started making films that had "nothing to say" I was at least ironic, and at best serious. Apologies for not being obvious and straightforward enough, and at the same time too academic. The contrast was between having something to say -- in the sense of making absolutely declarative statements like the one's we're familiar with from the history of manifestoes - and telling a history by way of asking questions. So I am neither ambivalent nor uneasily fascinated by H&E, and I would agree with you that the film is one of the better examples of conveying the complexity of the Palestinian/Israeli disaster, maybe because it asks a lot of naďve questions, presents contradictory perspectives on the event, and instead of offering easy answers, leaves it up to others to draw inferences and conclusions. The contrast was also meant to suggest that it is maybe too easy to criticize something like the 'anti-globalization' movement for being merely negative and lacking any positive demands. It's not just a question of having something to say, but how you say it, how convinced you are of the correctness of your theory, who participates in it, how open it is to criticism and recognizing its contradictions, and probably a lot of other things which can't be listed in advance. Ciao, Joanne 10.7 Fwd: Re: <nettime> the language of tactical media Benjamin Geer nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 8 Jul 2002 10:02:18 +0100 On Friday 05 July 2002 10:13 pm, Morlock Elloi wrote: > [someone else] wrote: > > As a very liberal democrat, I keep waiting for the anti-globalisation > > freaks to offer an alternative to the status quo ... but you never do. > > If they ever offered the first first idea on how to "better" govern then > > I would be their greatest champion ... but all I ever see is criticizism. Michael Albert, editor of ZNet (http://www.znet.org), has what I think is a very sensible proposal called `Participatory Economics', about how regional economies could be run on the basis of participatory democracy. He's written two or three books about it: http://www.parecon.org Ben 10.8 RE: <nettime> the language of tactical media W R E Reynolds nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 8 Jul 2002 22:05:27 -0400 David Goldschmidt said: > As a very liberal democrat, I keep waiting for the anti-globalisation > freaks to offer an alternative to the status quo ... but you never do. > If they ever offered the first idea on how to "better" govern then I > would be their greatest champion ... but all I ever see is criticizism. This is simply not true and I can only suppose that you don't read much. There are so many concrete proposals for change it would be well nigh impossible to catalogue here. I would mention only a few to refute your assertions: --Joseph Stiglitz (who has been mentioned on this list numerous times) is a the former chief economist of the World Bank and in his recent book he provides a highly specific critique of how the World Bank and the IMF damages the economies of less-developed nations, primarily because it is beholden to a pro-globalized-business agenda. He offers numerous suggestions for reform of the IMF and the World Bank. --I am involved in creating an independent organization that will specifically provide certification of standards at garment factories in the developing world. It is to be funded by retailers and manufacturers, but remain independent and arms length. BTW, It was the idea of a bunch of anti-globalization freaks including myself, working with business leaders to create a workable solution to a problem that all sides in the debate generally acknowledge is real. Lastly, I would say that awareness is the most important element of real change. I certainly believe that most of today's misdirection is the direct result of ignorance. In a media saturated world, we remain uninformed; in a world supposedly governed by reason, we question surprisingly little; in our so-called democracies there is little debate, remarkably little public participation and little choice. If people simply paid more attention things would change. And if that doesn't work then lets blow things up!! Obey little, resist much (Walt Whitman) _____ W. Richard Reynolds de La Rochelle journalist / author / polemicist 10.9 Re: <nettime> the language of tactical media Benjamin Geer nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Tue, 9 Jul 2002 12:09:37 +0100 On Tuesday 09 July 2002 1:53 am, "N Jett" wrote: > Ah yes... Parecon... no longer shall we have surgeons and janitors, > instead there is just the person who takes out your trash, and your > appendix (and gets paid more for the trash because surgery is > "glamorous"). This is a misreading of parecon. You wouldn't get paid more for the trash, and glamour isn't a consideration. > His "Balanced Job Complex" idea seems like a very unfunny > joke to me. Scorn, on its own, is a very weak argument against anything. If you want to argue convincingly against balanced job complexes, you'll have to do better than that. > The whole "committees to decide absolutely everything" > concept This is a gross misrepresentation of parecon. If you have objections to parecon, and you are really interested in thinking through the issues involved, I suggest that you try reading Albert's and Hahnel's replies to their critics on www.parecon.org; it may well be that your objections are answered there. Ben 11.0 <nettime> Tactical Art in Virtual Space 1 Josephine Berry nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 13 Sep 2000 13:01:50 +0000 This chapter of my thesis has just been published in the erratic British jounal 'Inventory', in their latest Homo Ludens issue - http://www.inventory.mcmail.com/journal.htm Also, the footnotes have been lost in transit from Word to email...I've pasted them in at the end but annoyingly the numbers in the text are gone. Please mail me if you want to read this as a word document. Josie "Another Orwellian Misnomer"? Tactical Art in Virtual Space Self-conscious tactics in an unstable space In the wake of Michel Foucault's discussions of the discrete, invisible and all pervasive 'microphysics of power' at work within technocratic society, Michel de Certeau was moved to write an alternative account in which the 'network of an antidiscipline' is uncovered; a category of largely invisible, improvised and ephemeral practices which comprise 'everyday life'. This heterogeneous set of practices, de Certeau claims, exists outside discourse and has no proper name, belongs to no ideology, acts heterogeneously and by virtue of its evasiveness comprises an ongoing and pervasive resistance to an optical and panoptic regime of power. The exteriority of these practices to discourse is also, ironically enough, seen by Foucault to have characterised the advent of panoptic power , which emerged in a similarly 'mute' manner. The panopticon's articulation in discourse happened after the decentralised historical growth of a panoply of observational techniques resulted in a coherent disciplinary regime.This, argues de Certeau, is a mode of power almost necessarily in decline because it has ceased to operate at an unconscious level; it has become distinct. If the panoptic mode of power gained ascendancy in silence, de Certeau spectulates, what other silent forms of power are coming into being? In his 1984 book The Practice of Everyday Life, he asks: "If it is true that the grid of 'discipline' is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also 'miniscule' and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them, and finally, what 'ways of operating' form the counterpart on the consumer's (or 'dominee's'?) side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic order." In what was not only a riposte to Foucault's uni-directional discussion of the discrete mechanisms of panoptic power but also an analysis of the all-too visible phenotypes of technocratic rationality, de Certeau mobilises two modes of operation: strategy and tactics. The former describes force-relationships "that can be circumscribed as proper (propre)" and which are brought to bear on objects or targets distinct and external to themselves. Strategy is the mode by which legitimated power operates from within a designated field; through language, political structures of representation, the assignation of gender roles, the regulation of space, discourses of the body and so on. In short, it is the productive mode of hegemonic power. Tactics, by contrast, has no proper site, discourse or language, of its own - it "insinuates itself into the other's place" , it adorns itself in the other's garb, speaks through the other's language, and, because it has no fixed address or permanent mode, never consolidates its own achievements or preserves its conquests. Tactics comes out of the encounter with the rigid geometry of urban planning, the syntax and vocabularies of languages, the regulated flows of television, the choreography of the supermarket. In de Certeau's terms, tactics is the practice produced by 'making do' with the oppressive conditions of modernity and common people are "unrecognised producers, poets of their own affairs, trailblazers in the jungles of functionalist rationality" . It is a mode of production based in the heart of consumption, a production that feeds on the desire provoked by the commodity but which is used in the creation of an own language rather than the singular conformity to the libidinal economy of the commodity's 'promissory note'. But if Foucault and de Certeau can claim the desublimation of the panopticon, then we can also claim a similar coming to consciousness of tactics. And just as the discourse and the techniques of the disciplinary society are split, so too are the goings on of the everyday and their discursive integration into politics and aesthetics. In 1992, the term 'tactical media' was coined by the Amsterdam based organisors of the first Next5Minutes conference Geert Lovink, David Garcia and Caroline Nevejan in 1992 . This term soon found its way onto media theoretical mailinglists such as nettime , and the term gained common currency in the virtual communities, working groups and social circles in which net artists participate. By the third Next5Minutes conference on net culture in March 1999, 'tactical media' had become the organising subject, with activists, media theorists, artists and technologists debating a new context and mode of political and cultural resistance. In the post-68 political envirnoment in which the notion of a united front of resistance as questionable as its erstwhile target, imperial power, is anachronistic, the vagrant hybridity of tactics provides an important model for conceptualising and organising resistance. The structure of the Internet, which mirrors and fuels the decentralisation and hybridity of the global market economy and its geo-political correlatives, becomes an obvious and important site for resistance. In the analysis of net artist's involvement in the cultural logic of tactical media which follows, the discussion will be framed by the problematic of virtual space. Although a closer enquiry into the phantasmatic quality of space on the Net will be presented in chapter 3, for the present the discussion will hinge on the friction between the idea of real and virtual space. Although tactics, as theorised by de Certeau, are by no means limited to spatial practices, I have selected this framework partly because it is the existence of an evasive but irreducible difference between real and virutal space that gives the Net it's distinctive identity. It is within the context of a contested splitting of real and informational space that the phase shift of power pointed to by Foucault and de Certeau (the shift from disciplinary power to what Negri and Hardt have recently termed the 'biopower' of 'Empire' ) begins to emerge: a world in which power has become as deterritorialised as capital. Out of the four artworks discussed in this chapter, only Heath Bunting's X Project addresses this spatial splitting directly but, as I will argue, the ontology of virtual space and its impact on behaviour are crucial concerns and points of leverage for all the artworks considered. While some net critics argue the danger of the libertarian rhetoric of dual worlds in which cyberspace is cast as the zone of borderless and unfettered freedom , others see their disjuncture as promising a radical potential. I will be using the widely diverging theories of the spatial and environmental production of the subject offered by Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Marc Augé and Slavoj Zizek to think through 'the practice of everyday life online' which the artworks of Jodi, Etoy, Rachel Baker and Heath Bunting present. In these works, the positing of 'typical' kinds of behaviour by net artists presupposes a definition of the nature of space and place, and vice versa. It is through the exploration of everyday behaviour. which is the concern of tactical net art, that the radical potential and oppressive flattening of cyberspatiality is brought into focus. In a more limited respect, and as we have seen in chapter one, artists were drawn to the Internet because it offered them the possibility of a different kind of 'professional' practice; indeed a chance to ellude the professionalisatin of their own practice. In this sense, the Net offered them a 'tactical' space in which to evade the strategies of the art market. But if the Net seemed to offer such a tactical topology , it also imposes a new set of conditions which can be seen as belonging to strategic power within which art must operate. The establishment of technical protocols and languages such as the Domain Name System (DNS), TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, XML, CGI and so forth impose a language or architecture from 'above'. But, beyond the expansion and ellaboration of tactics and strategy along older lines, the Net participates in a broader development of mutual imitation that occurs within both dominant cultural strategy (the 'Prada Meinhoff' mode of advertising) and cultural resistance (the adoption of corporate identities ). In other words, strategy and tactics are becoming harder to distinguish or require a new set of conceptual tools with which to decode them. An important aspect of this development for the online environment is the mutability of the Internet's distributed networks and digital modalities which complicate the production/consumption binary. The ease, for example, with which a digital file can be copied, parsed, mirrored, linked to and endlessly redeployed makes it, in some senses, extraordinarily vulnerable to tactical use. However, this malleability is also harnessed by the strategic forces of power at work in the Net; we begin to lose the distinction between the 'properness' of strategy and the vagrancy of tactics. Where de Certeau describes tactical action as a slow, erosive force, the "overfow and drift over an imposed terrain, like the snowy waves of the sea slipping in among the rocks" , in the new media age tactics are operating under more mutable conditions in which strategy no longer resembles anything so static as rocks. To grasp this more concretely, we have only to consider the intensification of market research carried out within the Net - based on the increased ease with which individuals' movements and patterns of behaviour can be tracked through inventions such as 'cookies' - to get an idea of how responsive the system has become. This is not yet the technological dystopia imagined by Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein in Data Trash, where the subject has become totally assimilated into the instrumental operations of virtual reality. But, to a great extent, the user does provide the 'encrypted flesh' or behavioural data-set required by the market to continuously reinvent itself in the putative image of the user-consumer who, in turn, reflects the conditions of consumption - the series of choices on offer - in a recursive loop. Media theorists and activists David Garcia and Geert Lovink identify the shifting, mutating and transferable quality of digital data on the Net as 'media hybridity' and discuss the mobility it produces in their influential manifesto The ABC of Tactical Media written in 1997. The first passages of the manifesto synopsise the ideas set out in de Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life thereby explicitly revealing the indebtedness of the concept of 'tactical media' to his work. In their text, which was posted on community-building mailing lists such as nettime , Garcia and Lovink update de Certeau's tactics for the New Media environment, and ellucidate on the centrality of mobility and hybridity for this newly instrumentalisd 'practice of everyday life': "But it is above all mobility that most characterises the tactical practitioner. The desire and capability to combine or jump from one media to another creating a continuous supply of mutants and hybrids. To cross borders, connecting and re-wiring a variety of disciplines and always taking full advantage of the free spaces in the media that are continually appearing because of the pace of technological change and regulatory uncertainty." We should not forget that this manifesto of tactical media was written at a time in which governments were still in a state of relative confusion over how to regulate the activities taking place over the Net as well as the Net's own technical administration. Although 1996 saw the first serious piece of U.S. Interent legislation in the form of the Communications Decency Act , international governments were still in a state of confusion as to which existing laws could be stretched to deal with the network, what new legislation was required and how, if at all, it could be enforced. This was a symptom of the Net's awkward transformation from a U.S. government owned and academically administered research and communications tool, to a commercially open, privately financed space of international exchange. In the period between 1996 and 2000, a flurry of legislation has taken place regarding encryption, public surveillance of private communications, the liability of ISPs for the content stored on their servers, and a 'purely technical' body has been appointed by the U.S. government to regulate and administer the DNS system -the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). These are just some of the areas in which the Internet's once 'wild frontier' is being tamed, and strategy is extends itself legislatively and bureaucratically into this formerly disregarded zone. Returning to tactics, the marriage of the terms 'tactical' and 'media' has come to signify something more than the new terrain of everyday practice. 'Tactical media' belongs to a whole cultural turn in which what might be described as the old 'strategies' of art and politics are abandoned in favour of a parasitic, fast mutating and non-originary practice . The modernist belief in conceptual and aesthic originality or the political belief in the aggregative basis of opposition such as class and trade unions cede to a postmodern refusal of such 'essentialist' individual and collective definitions of subjectivity. Once entities such as authenticity and origniality are invalidated by contemporary thought and the belief in the plausibility of global revolution retracts into the limited struggles of the 'new social movements', the modest contingency of tactical practices come to the fore; a form of culture and politics as far beyond metaphysics as the virtualised environment (both on and off the Net) in which they unfolds. The predominance of parasitism and vagrancy in net art as such, clearly owes much to the precursive experiments of minimalist and site specific art which began in the 1960s; the threshold of the information (post-disciplinary?) age. By this I mean site specific art's location within a pre-existing network of spatial, social, economic and political relations as against the artwork's creation of a series of separate and internally constituted 'internal relations' - the zenith of modernist practics as theorised by Clement Greenberg. Although not necessarily adopting practices of the everyday, the expansion of the artwork's limit beyond its physical 'pretext' to include a self-constituting network of forces and relations is an important anticipatory development. Michael Fried discusses this new turn in 'literalist' or minimalist art thus: "There is nothing within [the beholder's] field of vision - nothing that he takes note of in any way - that, as it were, declares its irrelevance to the situation, and therefore to the experience, in question. On the contrary, for something to be perceived at all is for it to be perceived as part of that situation. Everything counts - not as part of the object, but as part of the situation in which its objecthood is established and on which that objecthood at least partly depends." This art in which 'everything counts' is a phenomenological conception of the artwork's meaning occurring in dynamic relationship between work, viewer and world. In Frederic Jameson's description of the awesome scope of a Hans Haacke artwork, the circumference of the 'situation' and the intricacy of its phenomenology extends far beyond those immediate elements which comprise the artwork's situation to encompass a global situation. This scope is also the scope of the 'situation' articulated by net art: "in the work of Hans Haacke, for example, [conceptual art] redirects the deconstruction of perceptual categories specifically onto the framing institutions themselves. Here the paralogisms of the 'work' include the museum, by drawing its space back into the material pretext and making a mental circuit through the artistic infrastructure unavoidable. Indeed, in Haacke it is not merely with museum space that we come to rest, but rather the museum itself, as an institution, opens up into its network of trustees, their affiliations with multinational corporations, and finally the global system of late capitalism proper (with all its specific representational contradictions)." Here the artwork is understood as creating a self-consciousness in the viewer which operates on their own unarticulated and/or unreflexive behaviour (looking at art in public space) and the seemingly remote and silent functionings of the world order. If we consider how the collective and largely undirected construction of Net gives the many activities which compose 'the practice of everyday life' a greater emphasis, while the emphatically global scale of the Net creates a very different scale for these activities, we can imagine how the self-reflexivity of the viewer gains a seemingly more affective quality - hence the sharp focus laid on the relationship between behaviour and global 'situation' in net art. The artwork's animation of the intersubjective relationship between the user and situation can also, in Hegelian terms, be said to have effected a shift from a quotidian use of tactics 'in themselves to a practice of tactics 'for themselves. The tactical mode has become an explicitly self-conscious way for net artists, activists and media workers to act in cyberspace, lifting the small scale countervailing practices of the everyday (the repurposing, circumventing, jamming, connecting, reversing etc. of disciplinary powers) to the level of programmatic cultural resistance. This tactical self-consciousness in net art can sometimes exceed that possessed of site specific art because its self-reflexivity invites the viewer not only to see their (physical, ideological, economic etc.) relationship to the work and the world as part of the work's circumference and vice versa, but also because it often invites them to participate in its morphology. This invitation, although not unprecedented, has an easiness based in the contiguity of the space of art and the everyday in the Net, which comprises a (relatively) unhierarchical organisation and materially homogeneous consistency of space. Art ceases to be perceived as the site at which 'the practices of everyday life' grind to a halt and a different kind of behavioral logic takes hold. Some critics have optimistically formulated this development as 'the art of involvement' and designate preceding experiments in interactive art 'open works'. In contrast to the viewer's role within 'open work', where the viewer is solicited to "fill in the blanks, to choose between possible directions, to confront the differences in their interpretationsŠ[to explore] the possibilities of an unfinished monument"," the 'art of involvement' no longer constitutes an anterior work at all but rather, "causes processes to emerge, it seeks to open up a career to autonomous lives, it invites one to grow and inhabit a world. It places us in a creative cycle, in a living environment in which we are always already co-authors." But where does such a programmatic reading leave tactics? Are tactics simply another name for the productive capacity of countless individuals which can be massified into a coherent aesthetico-political project? Are they the behaviours preyed upon by marketers in their search for the true identity of the consumer or are they that which necessarily eludes this form of systematic reincorporation? Do tactics become available to strategists when they reach the level of self-consciousness revealed in the term 'tactical media' and therefore cease to be tactical? In net art, as with the coming to self-consciousness of tactics within tactical media, it is possible to see the elevation of this everyday practice of resistance (for example la perruque - the use by factory workers of their employers' resources for their own private ends) to the order of dominant cultural strategy . If tactics no longer solely constitute ways of 'making do' under the oppressive conditions of society, but begin to attain the legitimation of artistic value or political modus operandi, do they still remain the 'antidiscipline' to the dominant order? By investigating this question, we must necessarily ask the question of how tactics themselves change in virtual space, which in turn poses questions over the nature of that space. But it is imporant to bear in mind that no matter how self-consciously net artists are adopting tactics, their mutating nature is as hard to fix down as the changeability of the material and semiotic terrain in which they unfold. A Place Made of Space De Certeau's distinction between place and space - one importantly adopted by the anthropologist of 'supermodernity' Marc Augé - will be helpful when determining the nature of the tactical mode in net art. Place, for de Certeau, describes the coexistence of things determined by their respective occupation of an exclusive location. And conversely, that location is reciprocally defined by a thing's occupation of it. In short, "the law of the 'proper' rules in the place." (This 'properness' is partly responsible for Augé's positing of 'place' as a form of resistance to the deterritorialised disorientation of supermodernity). Space, by contrast, is "composed of intersections of mobile elements" it "occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalise it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs of contractual proximities." De Certeau essentialises this difference by drawing an analogy to the difference between langue and parole. Tactics is then, nearly by defninition, a spatial mode, and one through which place is practiced and experienced. But what could be said to constitute a place on the Internet? The word 'site', which in ordinary speech would designate a precise location in space, doubles as the technical term used to indicate a particular digital file or 'information object' which is only ever viewed in the form of a reassemblage. That is to say, what we view in our browser window is the software's interpretation of a set of instructions - a string of 0s and1s. On the Internet, although things can be designated a coordinate (an IP number or URL) nothing can ever be said to occupy a unique location. But even if we accept the distinction made by de Certeau and Marc Augé regarding place and space, and even though a website no longer occupies a singular location in the manner of a physical object, it is still possible to see its equivalence to place. As with place, we know what we have to do to get there, as with place we can compare the experience of having been there with others, as with place our knowledge of it is always existential, dynamised by our passage across it, inflected with our intentions towards it, coloured by our encounters within it. But crucially, unlike place, we cannot build a sense of identity around a site on the Internet, we cannot belong to it and least of all attach foundation narratives to it. We cannot feel within it the echo of what Augé describes as 'anthropological place'. Quoting from the ethnologist Marcel Mauss, Augé discusses the part-fictional character of anthropological place in terms of the relationship of what the former terms 'average man' to the territory he inhabits. This man is born into a closed world, founded 'for once and all' and inscribed so deeply upon him that it does not have to be consciously understood. The 'total social fact' subsumes within itself any interpretation of it that its indiginous members may have: "The 'average' man resembles 'almost all men in archaic or backward societies' in the sense that, like them, he displays a vulnerability and permeability to his immediate surroundings that specifically enable him to be defined as 'total'" . As we shall see presently, the connection between environmental permeability and a particular kind of identity are important subjects for the tactical practice of net art. The level of imperviousness which characterise the 'average' user's relation to the Net is a point of investigation for these self-conscious tacticians attempting to create a more bruising encounter between the space of the Net and its subject. In order to become the producer of an idiolect (the personal/tactical mode of enunciation formed within imposed stricutures), the subject must become sensible to the particularities of their environment and confident of their ability to find their own passage through it. In 1996, the Swiss net art group cum spoof 'corporation' Etoy targeted the supposedly neutral zone of the search engine with their artwork Digital Hijack . Search engines are some of the most frequently 'visited' sites on the Net with Altavista already drawing 32 million users per day by September 98. They act as huge centres of traffic convergence in the supposedly decentralised structure of the Net, but notably - similarly to airports -cannot be described as places of gathering. Although visitors frequently return, it is not in order to find something rooted in a singular location or to meet other visitors, but rather to use a service that spatialises the rest of the Net through the production of a set of URLs. Hartmut Winkler attributes their popularity to their perceived neutrality: "Offering a service as opposed to content, they appear as neutral mediators." It is precisely because the search engine serves as a portal to elsewhere that it becomes a heavily frequented site. For this reason we can see the search engine as the quintessence of the transformation of place into space, or the predication of place on space in the Net. The fact that a site's centrality is directly related to its distributive capacity tells us a great deal about the way in which spatial practices on the Net are characterised by passage rather than settlement . Nothing could be further from the permeability of the subject to anthropological place than the indifference of the Net user to the putative neutrality of the search engine website. And it is precisely this neutrality that Etoy singled out for attack in their Digital Hijack. In tune with Winkler's criticisms, Etoy created a mechanism for alerting people to their passive acceptance of the search engine's mode of selecting and hierachising URLs. The actual method of aggregating and organising websites in accordance with the user's keyword is, in reality, anything but exhaustive or disinterested. In the early days of search engines, some companies (such as Yahoo) paid employees to categorise websites 'by hand', thus making available only a tiny proportion of the total number of websites on the Net. Of course what was made available was the final result of a series of subjective choices and corporate categorisations made by a team of coders. The subsequent automation of this process has not, however, resulted in any fundamental increase in accuracy, comprehensiveness or compatibility between the keyword and the list of URLs displayed in response . Unable to master complex linguistic issues such as syntax, and therefore unable to interpret the meaning of strings of search terms, many search algorithms will simply prioritise URLs according to the number of times the search terms are mentioned. This is just one example of how the map of the the WWW produced by the search engine is deficient and, more importantly for us, how the system is vulnerable to manipulation. Realising this point of leverage, Etoy began to analyse the top 20 sites returned by search engines in response to some of the most popular search terms such as 'porsche, penthouse, madonna, fassbinder' . Essentially, Etoy found a way to manipulate the system by updating an older practice called spamdexing. This is a simple 'hacker's' trick by which a keyword is inserted repeatedly into an HTML document to ensure that a website is featured high up in the search engine display hierarchy . Etoy used their 'Ivana bot' (probably an algorithm) to analyse the particular combination of keywords embedded in the top 20 websites returned to a keyword such as 'porsche' and then mimicked it. They then generated thousands of 'dummy trap' pages each of which contained combinations of thousands of popular keywords, thus ensuring that the pages would be returned in the top 20 category of myriad word searches. For a short period after March 1996, surfers using search engines were regularly 'hijacked' by dummy trap pages which, far from displaying information about a desirable car or popstar would harass hostages with the message: "Don't fucking move - this is a digital hijack by etoy.com". If the hostage/viewer decided to follow the links through the website, they would first discover what number hostage of the Etoy 'organisation' they were, then view an animated graphic image file (GIF) of a shaven-headed Etoy member in dark glasses and ambiguously plugged into a cable at the navel , and finally receive a blunt mission statement: "It is definitely time to blast action into the Net! Smashing the boring style of established electronic traffic channels. Welcome to the Internet Underground". Today, after the search engines succeeded in terminating Etoy's action, the statement posted on a sample site concludes: "Although officially stopped, we cannot protect you from getting hijacked. We lost control. PIRATES FIGHTING FOR A WILDER NET!" Shock and the Order of Experience in Modernity and the Net Walter Benjamin's discussion of the relationship between memory and experience is a useful text to draw on at this stage, because it provides an excellent way of thinking about the shock tactics used by Etoy, their role in the practice of place as well as a means of contrasting the space of modernity with Augé's discussion of anthropological place - a crucial way of entering a discussion on place in 'supermodernity' and on the Net. In his essay "Some Motifs in Baudelaire", Benjamin splits experience into two terms: Erlebnis and Erfahrung. By Erlebnis, Benjamin means an experience for which we are psychologically prepared, against which we have developed a protective shield to parry the impact of a stimulus. Referencing Freud, Benjamin argues that experiences absorbed in such a way can pass instantly into our conscious experience (Erlebnis) because they do not produce any traumatic effects - traumatic stimulation being understood here as the basis for (involuntary) memory, a function of the unconscious. Erfahrung, on the other hand, is the order of experience attributed to a stimulus for which we are unprepared. Our lack of anticipatory shielding means that this experience cannot immediately enter our consciousness, but instead plants a memory trace that will then be worked through retroactively, through the act of involuntary memories or dreams. Erfahrung, therefore, is the order of experience which entails a dissolution of shock through the psychological relay of revisitations; the integration of an experience into a deeper level of identity. One that cannot be casually and voluntarily recalled, and equally cannot be so easily disposed with. Benjamin understands Baudelaire's lyrical relationship to the modern metropolis as the, perhaps paradoxical, endeavour to preserve its series of shocks in the conscious act of writing poetry. And asks how "lyric poetry can have as its basis an experience for which the shock experience has become the norm." Benjamin, along with other modernist theorists of the metropolis such as Georg Simmel, makes the observation that as we grow accustomed to the battery of shocks afforded by the crush of population density, the chaos of crowds, the din and danger of traffic so too do our protective shields become more efficient and total. In the modern city, Erfahrung diminishes under the callousinig of Erlebnis. Benjamin, quoting from Baudelaire, figures this shift in the disappearance of the daydreamer's unfocused look and the advent of the prostitute's wary and shifting glance: "'Her eyes, like those of a wild animal, are fixed on the distant horizon; they have the restlessness of a wild animalŠbut sometimes also the animal's sudden tense vigilance.'" Let us then compare this condition to the permeability of the 'average man' in anthropological place. Here we can examine how collective social symbolisations work upon the irregular topography of place as an index of Erfahrung and Erlebnis. In Augé's characterisation of anthropological place (as constructed by the ethnologist Mauss) he discusses how, despite the indigenous inhabitants' knowledge of the relativity of their home territory, they confer upon it the mythical status of a singular origin. A way of naturalising the contingent. Each new occurrence, such as a birth or death, however well 'known', has to be incorporated into a discourse and thereby naturalised into the mythological syntax. In other words, the specificity of place is constantly demarcated and thereby reaffirmed through its inscription in the foundation narrative. By contrast, in de Certeau's discussion of the 'concept-city' - the modern city of enlightenment rationality and the urban planner, the city whose origins Baudelaire witnessed and the precursor of cyberspace - the specificity of place and its subjects is flattened through the imposition of the universalising, self-constituting and dehistoricising myth of rationality . A myth which excludes those stubborn particularities which cannot be assimilated into its system: "a rejection of everything that is not capable of being dealt with in this way and so constitutes the 'waste products' of a functionalist administration (abnormality, deviance, illness, death, etc.)." Occuring then at the same time as the increased violence of the modern city and its concurrent defensive psychological mechanisms is the invalidation of the specificity of places and their inhabitants, their histories and contradictions. We can view the concept-city as a utopian/dystopian fantasy existing in advance of (and at odds with) its actual construction, operating in tandem with the order of experience which Benjamin terms Erlebnis. But what is the order of 'shock' manufactured for Etoy's digital hostages? The search engine itself can certainly be seen as a kind of concept-city imposing the template of universality and rationality - through its promise of categorisation and inclusiveness - onto the specificity of the Net's myriad layers, aggregations and networks. The user's God-like view over this map of the Net involves the same fantasy of legibility that transfixes the beholder of a city from above . Perhaps in this sense, the production of the dummy trap page causes the user to tumble from their vantage point into the sticky illegibility of the Net's tangled and undecipherable networks - the tactical point of view. These self-conscious tacticians have wrested the stunned subject from the alienating universality of the spectacle and returned them to the everyday practice of the walker who "write(s) without being able to read" . Or rather, who reads a single page without knowing what else they might be able to read. But has this really shocked the viewer? Has the hoax managed to slip in under the guard of the viewer's sensory shield and produce Erfahrung in the place of Erlebnis? Or we could ask the question thus: has the viewer's divestment of the fantasy of legibility and the universalising myth of the Net's inherent rationality produced a bruising encounter with environmental specificity and in some sense converted the search engine into an actual place? This question contains within it the presumption that the 'view from above', the construction of legibility is a means by which the subject defends against the shock which is nothing other than a glitch in the symbolic tissue through which the Real is momentarily glimpsed. (I will return to this psychoanalytic line of enquiry below). But there is an incompatibility between these questions and the Net because here we are dealing with a simulacral system par excellence. Within such a system, and in particular one that operates on the principles of its digital mutability, it is harder to perceive the distinction between an actual breakdown and its simulation or the occurrence of the unexpected within a programmatic field of novelty production. Furthermore we are also dealing with a zone of naturalised hybridity. The search engine applies the logic of library categorisation to a networked computer file system which, in turn, adopts the imagery of geographical space as evidenced in words such as 'website', 'site map' and 'portal' and the browser softwares' adoption of the terms 'navigator' and 'explorer'. The ease with which these categories can be successfully combined reveals a great deal about the malleability of the Net's symbolic economy. So long as equivalences can be found between semantic systems and an appropriate representational language assigned, then their combination is permissable. This environment then is neither the originary site of the indigenous fantasy nor the concept-city with its disjuncture between rationalist myth and specificity. When Etoy engineer the shock of a dummy trap page, they may educate the viewer as to the workings of the system but they do not create any fundamentally new relationship or fantasy between the viewer and the site. In effect the dummy trap page is just a further augmentation of the constantly shifting simulatory panorama that is the the Net. In this respect the Net does not possess the metaphysics of place where things reside in an exclusive location and around which or against which systems of meaning operate. It is, rather, a differential system without, to borrow a term from Baudrillard, 'limit'. Self-conscious tactics, if they do not rupture the simulacral texture of the Web and remain instead within the play of difference, are unlikely to produce the experience of shock through which place might be felt. -^- www.yourserver.co.uk/crashmedia -^- ->- www.metamute.com -<- 12.0 <nettime> Tactical Art in Virtual Space 2 Josephine Berry nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 13 Sep 2000 13:01:28 +0000 X marks the Spot: Portals to Place When Josephine Bosma entitled her 1997 interview with Heath Bunting "Street Artist, Political Net Artist or Playful Trickster?" she linked together some of the key issues at work in Bunting's tactical use of the Net. Were the word 'or' to be replaced with 'and', dispensing with the false problem of choosing between three not incommensurate identity types, we would have a description of the artist which hits upon the crucial attribute of his art: the creation of friction between real and virtual space through the indeterminacy of play. In the same interview Bunting discusses a work that he would later title CCTV - World Wide Watch. His deadpan tone conveys very well the essence of the tactical mode; at once ironic, throw-away and serious: "At the moment I am working on a closed circuit television camera project across the Internet whereby you can watch various city centres in various countries of the world, for instance Tokyo, Dublin, LA and London. Each of these cameras is linked to a webpage and on that webpage you are encouraged to watch these street locations for various crimes. If you see anything, you can type the details into the text box, click a button and this information will be sent directly via fax to the local police station, for instance at Leicester Square. So it's somehow encouraging people to police themselves and save the police some labour, so they don't have to watch other people." In the final version of the project, Bunting confronts the viewer with a sequence of near-aerial CCTV views of 5th Avenue, New York; Broadgate, Coventry; the Marktplatz, Guetersloh, Germany and Oviedo, Spain. But the viewer's giddy sense of voyeuristic power, derived from the ability to view four city scenes simultaneously, laid out in their unconscious legibility for our scopophilic gratification, is undercut by the invitation to intervene. The viewer is confronted with the choice of converting the implicit power of the gaze into its explicit enactment (I am choosing to believe that the fax numbers are what Bunting says they are); a choice which splits the viewer's subject position between an occupation of the legible space of strategy and the tactical and partial space of everyday life. The contradictory nature of the spaces conflated in this work (both God-like and on-the-ground) - a spatial multiplicity which the Internet's networked expanse and digital mutability indifferently accommodates - becomes unbearable when the viewer's potential affectiveness looms into view. In contrast to the Digital Hijack where the hoped for moment of awakening is instantaneously neutralised by virtue of its inability to step outside the dominant simulacral economy, Bunting shocks the viewer awake with the unsettling possibility of cutting through the simulacral field of equivalences and precipitating an intervention into the particularities of place and its inhabitants. The viewer is accustomed to occupying both subject positions independently of each other; it is also usual to forego agency when occupying the God-like vantage point (perhaps a precondition of the fantasy of legibility?) and legibility when occupying the 'writerly' position of Wandersmann. In short, the shock delivered here is the shock of occupying the position of power where legibility and agency are combined. This dual position of legibility and involvement is not dissimilar to that occupied by the flâneur, as explored by Benjamin in his discussion of Baudelaire and the Paris of the Second Empire, who is at once enthralled by the crowd but aloof, whose fascination with this fleeting, polymorphous spectacle is a writerly one, whose style it is "to go botanizing on the asphalt" . But if CCTV - World Wide Watch playfully and critically insinuates the look of power, it also implies the reciprocal gaze of its subject. Next to the form which, in its generic simplicity, invites the viewer to reflexively dash off a note to the ever attentive forces of law and order, are set the words: "Improve self policing with further absented police force." This exhortation to internalise the burden of policing and thus further atomise and virtualise the forces of discipline until no external display of power remains, ironically articulates the ultimate Foucauldian dystopia; a dystopian order against which de Certeau's antidiscipline of tactics is practiced. Here the viewer, who can perhaps be cast as unconsciously assisting the spread and perfection of Foucault's 'political technologies of the body' by incorporating them seamlessly into the fabric of his/her life, is confronted not merely with those technologies but their articulated discourse. As with the conflation of spaces and gazes, CCTV also conflates the normally silent functioning of the technology with its explicit enunciation. Here we have a concise example of the self-conscious adoption of tactics which differs significantly from those tactics described by de Certeau. As already stated, de Certeau's point of departure is Foucault's analysis of the historical development of a diffuse set of disciplinary techniques (an overwhelmingly optical and panoptic mode of observational discipline) whose development he traces back to the advent of the rationalist discourses of the Enlightenment. An origin from which, Foucault argues, the technical modalities increasingly diverge: "Foucault thus distinguishes two heterogeneous systems. He outlines the advantages won by a political technology of the body over the elaboration of a body of doctrine. But he is not content merely to separate two forms of power. By following the establishment and victorious multiplication of this 'minor instrumentality,' he tries to bring to light the springs of this opaque power that has no possessor, no privileged place, no superiors or inferiors, no repressive activity or dogmatism, that is almost autonomously effective through its technological ability to distribute, classify, analyse and spatially individualise the object dealt with. (All the while, ideology babbles on!)ŠThis gallery of diagrams has the twin functions of delimiting a social stratum of practices that have no discourse and of founding a discourse on these practices." So as the techniques of power lock tight, so too does their ubiquitous hold over society grow silent. But, ponders de Certeau, once their silent history has been uncovered and their primary (panoptic) technique articulated, have they then fallen into decline? Was their successful ascendance not a consequence of their silent technical advances and lack of dogma? This questioning causes de Certeau to cast around for other 'technological practices', which lack the coherence of the panopticon, which may be scattered, heterogeneous and 'polytheist' but whose silence or existence outside dicourse endows them with the potential to "produce a fundamental diversion within the institutions of order and knowledge." And herein lies the paradox of de Certeau's undertaking, namely to articulate a practice of resistance whose very status as such, not to mention efficacy, relies on its resistance to articulation. But for de Certeau, it seems, the guarantor of their survival is their imbrication in the very heart of regulatory disciplines such as consumption. They constitute the ineradicable indexes of alternative techniques and practices which return, like the repressed, in the disciplinary regime which attempts to dispel them. A project by Bunting that seems to lie closer to this understanding of tactics, and yet perhaps exemplifies the difference of tactical media all the more, is his X Project begun in 1996. Combining his predilection for wandering about city streets and the semi-legal practice of tagging in chalk with his interest in the emergent social space of the Net , Bunting began a systematic programme of tagging the URL 'www.irational.org/x' in strategic places, primarily in London but also in other sites such as Bath, Amsterdam and Berlin (one presumes he simply tagged in the cities he happened to visit). If a passer by, on observing the URL, felt inclined to look it up on the Net they found a white page with minimal information on it. Underneath a JPEG derived from the chalked tag are the following three questions: "Where did you see this chalked? (Please include city and country)"; "Why do you think it was done?" and "Who do you think did it?" On filling out and submitting the questionnaire, a page which collates all the answers is downloaded. Today there are several hundred entries. The specific sites that the artist chose to tag were by no means random; in London Bunting primarily chose bridges (Hungerford and Waterloo) as well as international sites of significance to new media culture such as Clink St. (the site of an independent media laboratory Backspace where Bunting and Rachel Baker often worked), The Hub in Bath and De Waag in Amsterdam. It is likely that the bridges indicate the notion of crossing between zones - the central activity of X Project - and that the media centres also intimate concerted initiatives to depart local geography and enter into series of remote collaborations. By means of the chalk tag, Bunting has created a semiotic and functional portal between virtual and physical space. In contrast to Digital Hijack, X Project taps into the contingencies of wandering. Rather than manufacturing a shock for the viewer, caught unawares in the midst of their impervious passage through the regularised space of the search engine, Bunting positions his tag to be caught by the corner of the eye in the midst of an awkward climb up the steep steps of a bridge or in the nooks and crannies of back streets - a mode in which awareness of place is heightened. The chalked tag catches the walker in the midst of a tactical traversal and the project's completion relies upon the viewer's alertness and curiosity to pursue this index of virtual space in the midst of an actual place. Rather than reinforcing the sense of the homogeneous order of virtual space, Bunting hybridises physical and virtual space and creates a tear not only in the latter but also in the former . Interestingly, it is by making this incision in the self-containment of each - or rather making explicit the impossibility of such self-containment - that the contingent and self-erasing nature of wandering can be mapped, recorded and co-ordinated. This suggests the potential of a view from above that is created from below and a reversal of the power implied in this same reversal. Rather than the fantasy of legibility implying a disengagement from the everyday, here legibility is created by and for the walker, the subject of the gaze. Perhaps this text is written blind, but it promises the eventual possibility of being read. The series of correspondences which 'emerge' on the website brings into being the consciousness of the cumulative potential of individual wandering. Tactical media art is here shown to be not only the coming to self-consciousness of those silently resistant ways of operating, but also the power resident in this coming to consciousness. A recognition that precipitates an aggregation, and hence the realisation of the power which these myriad movements compose. The first in a long series of answers to the question "Why do you think it was done?" encapsulates this notion very well: "to collide the known with the emergent." Has VR really killed desire? Tactics and 'Post-Oedipal' Space Bunting's interplay of 'real' space and 'virtual space', their ability to interrupt each other, poses an interesting question to a popular formulation of Slavoy Zizek's. In a series of writings on cyberspace and the functioning of desire , Zizek proposes that virtualisation reveals the always-already virtual nature of reality - the role of the symbolic order - at the same time as bringing about a 'psychotic' suspension of the symbolic order that structures this same reality. In the beginning of his essay "Quantum Physics with Lacan" , Zizek illustrates this point by referencing Lacan's discussion of courtly love. For Lacan, courtly love is not a means of intensifying desire by creating more obstacles between its subject and object, but rather of concealing the fact that the possibility of satisfying desire per se does not exist; an impossibility that is concealed by its very prohibition. In Lacan's own formulation courtly love is: "A very refined manner of supplanting the absence of the sexual relationship by feigning that it is us who put the obstacle in its way." Desire, explains Zizek, is a short circuiting between the 'primordially lost Thing' and an empirical object which is elevated to the order of the former: "this object thus fills out the 'transcendental' void of the Thing, it becomes prohibited and thereby starts to function as the cause of desire." In cyberspace, however, (and for Zizek, it is important to remember, his definition of cyberspace hangs somewhere between its actual and projective forms in the absence of specific, concrete examples), when 'every' empirical object can be immediately obtained without the ordinary frustrations such as the need to cross physical space or the unavailability of the desired item, "the absence of the prohibition necessarily gives rise to anxiety." The question that is posed here is how desire can be sustained let alone function when its paradoxical nature - "the fact that desire is sustained by lack and therefore shuns its satisfaction, that is, the very thing for which it officially strives" - is lain bare. Zizek answers this by describing a trend in which the computer generation becomes increasingly unable to tolerate the look of desire in others, and are wont to forget about a possible sexual liason because, for example, they are too engrossed in playing computer games or interacting in chatrooms. As prohibition is lifted and desire declines, last ditch attempts to preserve the dignity of the sexual object are mounted such as PC and religious fundamentalism. But the real effect of these prohibitive discourses is a phobic reaction to 'normal' sexual enjoyment which is everywhere cast as perverted. This, argues Zizek, develops the subject as pathological Narcissus who prefers 'interaction' with the computer over sexual engagement with another. Both VR and 'interactivity' are in Zizek's terms 'Orwellian misnomers', covering up in the former the demise of the already virtual structuration of reality and in the latter the increasing isolation of the individual who no longer interacts properly with others. At the root of the individual's primordial envelopment in virtual space is "the dream of a language which no longer acts upon the subject merely through the intermediate sphere of meaning, but has direct effects in the real." Yoked to this dream of profound involvement, is the radical disengagement of the post-oedipal subject. The psychotic's relation to the symbolic (one which Zizek compares to the subject of cyberspace) is defined by externality and overproximity. On the one hand he/she is not interpellated into the symbolic order (the signifying chain is 'inert') and remains outside it, and on the other the gap between 'things' and 'words' is collapsed and he/she starts to treat words as things or things start to speak themselves. In cyberspace, the space between word and thing which sustains sense is collapsed, as is 'symbolic engagement' which operates in this space, resulting in radical disengagement: "I can pour out all my dirty dreams, precisely because my word no longer obliges me, is not 'subjectivised'." Interestingly, however, Zizek shies away from describing a total collapse of the symbolic economy in cyberspace or virtual reality (interchangeable terms it seems here). Instead, he sees the agreement between users to suspend the usual performativity of the symbolic order as analagous to the agreement between analyst and analysand in which the normal performativity of the speech is also suspended; the analysand can hurl verbal abuse at the analyst and it won't be taken personally. Likewise, in cyberspace, the participant consents to 'play the game' in which, despite words having little or no performative value, they are nonetheless bound by the symbolic pact of the 'act of faith' in which intersubjective relations in cyberspace are contained. One of the main difficulties with Zizek's analysis is his characterisation of cyberspace itself as the context in which this new order of subjecthood finds its perfect conditions. Although Zizek does not imply that the disappearance of prohibition is a consequence of cyberspace itself, he certainly sees cyberspace as producing no internal resistance to its unbridled advance. His homogeneous description of the typical cyber subject and his mode of activity betrays the limitation of Zizek's model; he seems invariably to be talking about a cliché of the anti-social, well-healed, masculine, avidly consuming and games playing computer geek. Cyberspace itself is cast as the ultimate consumption machine whose success lies in its ability to collapse the sign into the thing itself; the immateriality of the commodity. However, as we have seen above in the example of Bunting's work, although the Net entails this radical mutability that undoubtedly vehiculates Zizek's collapse of the word into the thing, or by which the word becomes the thing, and the thing thereby becomes as malleable as words, the collision of virtual and real space can and does occur revealing that the Net's consistency is far from simple. That is to say, the leakage between these two spheres reveals not only a resistance to the pyschotic collapse that Zizek himself ultimately denies through his recourse to the symbolic pact, but also the possibility of using virtual space to enunciate the practices of everyday life - practices which remain outside 'the proper' - into a shared language which might entail performativity. There are numerous mundane examples in which individuals feel obliged to be as good as the word they give via the Internet, but here we are also interested in the opportunity cyberspace gives for co-ordinating the confused multiplicity of inidividual idiolects, of converting tactics into something close to strategies. An exceptional example of this are the protests against the WTO which occurred in Seattle in late November/early December 1999 which serve as an example of this tranformative potential of cyberspace. Here a multiplicity of political ideologies and actors were coordinated via the Net into a formidably performative display of resistance against a powerful agent of globalisation. But without the entry of another spatial, symbolic and atom-based system of 'words and things', is Zizek's notion of our unimpeded access to the (albeit nonexistant) object of desire in cyberspace quite accurate? Does the erasure of distance between our desire for the object and the object itself, the immediacy of delivery which can be figured as the subsumption of space by time in computer networks, really guarantee receipt? Rachel Baker's work Dot2Dot reveals the very skillful capacity of the Net to frustrate desire. In this work, Baker takes her cue from the Net porn industry which typically lures the viewer/consumer deeper and deeper into a site with free 'thumbnail' GIFs promising the full scale image but which ultimately delivers the image either at a price or, if free, only on an illegibly small scale . Far from the theoretical end of scarcity which the Net promises and Zizek assumes has been achieved, digital scarcity is imposed in order to intensify desire and thus increase the monetary value of the digital object. In Dot2Dot Baker picks up on this Net porn technique and exaggerates its manipulations to reveal the powerful hold that (pornographic) commodity fetishism still has in the Net. The art website's homepage is a dot 2 dot drawing of a copulating man and woman against a deep blue background whose subject matter, although largely composed of dots and numbers, is not difficult to make out. As is usual with these childrens' games, certain areas of the final drawing are already filled in. In Dot2Dot, these parts are the woman's eye and hands, and the man's mouth, penis tip, and fingers. Here the peek-a-boo suggestiveness of certain pornographic images is undercut by the delineation rather than concealment of the sexually 'significant' parts. Each dot in the drawing also doubles as a link to another page on the site where a predictably salacious GIF is offered (e.g. "fist inserted fully into pussy") but only on condition that the viewer/consumer enters personal details such as their name and company details. Having submitted these, the viewer is brought straight to the irational.org homepage and the promise is never honoured. Through this frustrated libidinal circuit, Baker not only intimates how the traditional commodity's never-honoured 'promissory note' is still operative, but also how the consumer is willing to submit more and more personal data in its pursuit. The exchange of one real data body for the unkept promise of another. Baker's hoax can in some ways be compared with Etoy's Digital Hijack; as with the hijack, Baker is playing on the notional conformity of the viewer. The level of cooperation that individuals will countenance, their willingness to exchange valuable personal data on the vague promise of some form of libidinal gratification is at issue in this work. But unlike the hijack, the viewer has sought out this confrontation by keying in the work's URL, finding it through a search engine or entering it through the irational.org homepage. In most cases, we can surmise, the viewer's acquiescence is unusually self-conscious because it is given within the differently signifying context of an artwork. This might for instance result in the input of totally false information which, unlike with other commercial websites, would not effect the user's further passage in any adverse way. A more important difference, however, is that where Etoy attempts to alert viewers to the compromised nature of the search engine's 'neutrality' through hacking its system, Dot 2 Dot merely replicates the porn industry's production, manipulation and frustration of desire. Here, no radical alternative is even mooted. In contrast to Etoy who create an interruption and in so doing point to the manipulability of the status quo (an instance of Zizek's symbolic suspension?), Baker foregrounds the extra-technical limitations to digital malleability exerted by the intersection of symbolic and economic forces. If Baker and Bunting's works both point to the outside of an endlessly differential and simulacral field of play which challenge Zizek's reading of cyberspace, his primary discussion of prohibition and desire are confirmed rather than challenged by their work. The need to point to the stoppages, tears, leaks and limits to the virtual sphere is a central part of their work which can be seen as a way of of maintaining the function of desire which in turn produces action. The short circuiting mentioned above between the 'primordial Thing' and the empirical object, the construction of desire's object, can be seen at play within the construction of place where empirical objects are similarly invested and so animated. This is demonstrated by the promise of belonging that place exerts on the subject but can never wholely fulfill. I would like to propose that the pull exerted by place and by the things out of which place is composed, together with the subject's desire to consume these things in their quest for belonging or of jouissance, is essential to the practice of tactics which, as de Certeau points out, can be found at the heart of consumption. But hasn't place also been described here as ceding to space? And is it not more accurate to talk about the total disappearance of limit in the simulacral economy in which, if we follow Baudrillard's argument, the invasion of exchange value into all aspects of life becomes the locus of the radical equivalence of things; the end of the metaphysics to which place and desire belong? Is not the callousing of Erlebnis touched on above not also a sign, both on and offline, that this is becoming the case? Are we not so inured to the shocks of our environment that they too become merely differential? By turning finally to a work by Jodi - certainly not a categorically tactical net artwork in the manner of Heath Bunting - I will attempt to answer this problem through the trope of estrangement. An analysis of this work helps formulate the question: is it necessary to feel the exertion of place, with all the vicissitudes of desire that it might imply, in order to practice a tactics? Does the putative equivalence of things, the conversion of place into space, cancel the possibility of Erfahrung out of which, paradoxically place is created? Jodi's piece whose title, as is usual for them, is also its URL, http://sod.jodi.org is based on the source code of a 'shoot 'em up' style computer game called Wolfenstein. In the spirit of the 'open source' movement - based in part on the belief that 'software should be free', but more consistently on the belief that the best software is the product of a whole community's programming efforts rather than the isolated and secretive programming methods of commercial companies - the games company ID Software published the Wolfenstein source code in 1999(??) . This cult, multi-player game has subsequently become the raw material of several Jodi artworks . In Jodi's Web piece, the look of a programming shell interface has been simulated. That is to say, the viewer is confronted with the garishly coloured field of text boxes in which programmers write code, but which also recall early or lower order computer interfaces. This interface has the nostalgic quality of a once 'transparent' computing age in which the apparent legibility of the computer's operating system and file structures found its analogue in the rudimentary visual range (for example, pixel size and colour distribution). In this piece, Jodi have taken various sequences within the Wolfenstein source code and hyperlinked them together. This means that the utility of the original code has been rendered not only the obsolete object of aesthetic contemplation but has also been repurposed as a set of Internet hyperlinks. This would be analagous to using an old wagon wheel as the support for a coffee table. This repurposing of code is one example of the estrangement at work in http://sod.jodi.org; as with a shard from an absent lifeworld preserved in a museum, Jodi's autopsy of code and its transposition to the different programming environment of the WWW endows it with a ghostly quality. The lifeworld from which it has been severed clings to it as a negativity or absence making its existence in its new environment only a partial one. It is perhaps no coincidence then that, on actually reading the code, one notices that the coincidence of death - a typical subject of computer games - and the instrumental nautre of programming language begin to produce a macabre and amusing quasi poetry. For example, one sequence runs: "// Test if death sequence is done if (death sequence is done) { // change state to death player-state = DEAD } //end if death is done } // end if dying else // player must be death { // the player is dead, so clean up the mess" The lines 'change state to death' and 'player must be death' certainly resonate with the notion of the 'post-oedipal' state gestured to by Zizek which would, in its eternally deferred realisation, be premised on the passing out of the symbolic order into an unimaginable beyond; a place in which the old signifying chain has become 'inert'. Could we see the non-functionality of this code, accordingly, as equivalent to the non-performativity of words in cyberspace? Or does the importation of one programming language into another programming environment and its subsequent obsolescence provides us with another example of a 'limit'? Is this not an instance of how words and things are not commensurate in computer space, even if those things are made up of words or signs and how words or code can guarantee a certain set of operations in one environment which do not translate to another. Through its deconstruction into an object of contemplation, Wolfenstein allows itself to be read again as a commentary on its own casual instrumentalisation of death: "end if death is done". An inversion occurs which allows the normally buried linguistic underpinning of the game's interface to speak over and even against the very spectacle which they engender. This then would appear to be an example of how the mutability of the digital object and limit can be seen operating at the same time but not univocally. As with collage, the repurposed data object will always drag with it its former signifying context thus throwing into doubt the degree to which Baudrillard's radical equivalence of things can really be said to exist. The locus of exchange has not completely subsumed the loci of meaning, exchange value has not completely eclipsed use value (even in cyberspace), nor have words necessarily lost their performativity, especially if we allow that the instrumentality of programming language constitutes a new kind of performative utterance. Conclusion Even though data objects on the Net, or in virtual space, may not reside in their own exclusive locations in the same way that they do in real places, we have seen that they are nonetheless capable of being estranged. This estrangement, conversely, suggests a rightful place which here I have considered through functionality. The location of information objects, as with things in 'real' places to a degree, cannot be read simply from their co-existence with other things as de Certeau has suggested, but also through their functionality which might or might not be transplantable. In this respect, what we might term 'place' on the Internet, is much closer to a practice than an occupation, which is de Certeau's definition of space: "space is a place practiced" . Indeed virtual space, as with physical place, can only ever be experienced through practice; when the possibility of certain practices is rendered obsolete (the transference of a piece of code), the sense of being out of place draws our attention to its very existence in the computer network. The recognition of this heterogenous consistency of the Net provokes, in turn, the consideration that virtual space itself might well be another 'Orwellian misnomer'. Not only does the Net span the real space of its sprawling infrastructure and the representational space of the screen image (spatial categories hardly without precedent before the advent of the Net), but its totality is also filled with the material and symbolic limits common to real space evidenced, for example, in malfunctions. However where this space is radically different from either physical or representational space is the immense capacity of the digital to combine heterogenia and thus to create mutations; a capacity which becomes the leverage point of tactical net art and media. What makes the medium of the Net so interesting to net artists is the ease with which discrete functions (search engines, source codes, networked CCTV cameras etc.) can be repurposed and re-embedded into separate contexts or operations. Far from making these functionalities all equivalent, their availablity for hybridisation contains the possibility of a clash of new and old contexts or utilities. In this sense the tactics dispalyed in net art or tactical media differ from the tactics displayed by the walker in the city in which the environment is relatively fixed, and come closer to the tactics at work within language. As with language there are rules of syntax, but the mobility of its constituent parts is far greater than within the built environment. It is somewhere between the resistance of syntax and the hybridity and mobility of the online world that the tactics of net art are situated. In this respect, their work can be said to occur in an indeterminate stage between the recession of certain limits (here read in both a material and symbolic sense) and the creation of new ones. Without wishing to ignore the very real sense in which the Net courts the deadening quality of equivalence, the flattened experiential order of Erlebnis, it seems that an important realisation of tactical net art is the possibility for interrupting equivalence with hybridity. Not all spaces in the Net refelct the same degree of deterritorialisation, for example or effect the same non-performativity of language. But conversely, the deterritorialisation of the Net and its capacity for the endless reproduction of equivalent data has been seen to provide the basis upon which the scattered multiplicity of 'walkers' and idiolects can be formed into a totality which hints at the paradox of a heterogeneous yet coherent form of power emerging within the (now post?) disciplinary society. 13.0 Potlatch (was: Re: <nettime> Garcia/Lovink: The GHI of Tactical Media) Jim Carrico nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 20 Aug 2001 13:36:47 -0700 Hi folks - excuse my poor form in posting before properly introducing myself. I'm a web developer, among other things, based in Vancouver BC. I was in Berlin a few weeks ago, where I met Pit Schultz, who pointed me in the direction of nettime, which I've managed to remain ignorant of for all these years. Our conversation revolved around the need to establish a movement in culture which parallels the "free software" movement, in other words an aggressive "viral" initiative to establish a vibrant public domain in culture. My position is that this won't be possible without an alternative system of rewarding and sustaining creators without forcing them to rely on scarcity-based marketing. For the last few years, I've been advocating for the development of a payment system for "abundance-based" digital products, under the umbrella term "Potlatch" - http://www.potlatch.net Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck {AT} transmediale.de> wrote: >ab: Geert, in a new text called The New Actonomy which you wrote together >with Florian Schneider, you describe the new possibilities of media >activism that are emerging, but you also point to the potential dangers >that people have to be aware of. The Internet as the master medium of the >1990s has, in the last two or three years, fallen into what looks like a >depression. Some say that the party and the hype are simply over, others >that we are entering into a more realistic stage where the importance of >the Net as a medium will continue to grow, while the utopian hopes subside >in the face of all sorts of critical reality checks. These reality checks >are also closely tied to a crisis of the general belief in globalisation >and the fast-aging 'new economy'. Does this crisis create room for >tactical media practices, or does it make the life of media activists more >difficult? > >gl: It is indeed true that advanced net activism (not the adolescent >'hacktivism') is much closer to dotcom business than many would suspect. >The new actonomy is open for business, constantly searching for funds, >just as tactical media no longer fully depend on state funding. For a good >reason: there is a common interest in innovative net concepts, software, >interfaces, usage of streaming media, free software and open source etc. >This might mean that the current wave of net activism will face a setback >in a little while because it's just behind the dotcom wave. The stagnation >of bandwidth is a real concern, for example, also for activists. The same >counts for the e-cash crisis and the absence of a functioning micro >payment system. Activists, sitting on their explosive content, would >really benefit from alternative e-commerce systems, not based on credit >cards. It is of course good for social and political work on the Net that >the cyberselfish robber mentality of the dotcoms has gone. But do not >forget the flip side of this. With libertarianism losing its hegemony >there is also the danger of throwing away the baby with the tub water and >giving away the cyber freedom to corporations and the state. That should >never happen. It is also up to activists to fight against censorship, >lobby against the flood of desastrous legislations etc. The lack of a functioning system of micropayments or electronic cash is no accident. The institutions which should have been establishing standards in this area - ie. banks and governments - have shown no interest in doing so, in fact they have been downright hostile. This is disappointing, but hardly surprising, given the fact that interest payments and taxation are highly lucrative "frictions", which would tend to be eliminated by a more rational "frictionless" economy. If we want an alternative e-commerce system, not based on credit cards, we're going to have to build it ourselves. I don't think this is as far-fetched as it sounds. My basic premise is this: knowledge is not diminished as it spreads - in fact it is increased. Yet our economic system is based on scarcity, eg. the "law" of supply and demand which states that infinite supply equals zero value. The phrase "information economy" suggested opposing vectors on a collision course: the collision is happening right about now. One of two things must happen: either we make digital objects uncopyable (and hence scarce) which has been compared to "making water not wet", or we start playing around with the idea that abundant resources may be valuable, and see where that takes us. The point is, it is very difficult to prevent people from copying and sharing digital goods, and it is nearly impossible to *force* them to pay for them if they don't want to. Elementary psychology suggests that rather than using increasingly draconian enforcement, we should be dreaming up ways of making them *want to pay*. Guilt trips are unlikely to be successful, what we need is a game-like system in which there are tangible gains for participating. The potlatch was an elaborate social game in which the winners were the one's who *gave the most* - it was very competitive, even hostile at times, because one's rivals were challenged to be more generous in return. The net result was an economy of abundance, in which all wealth was constantly in circulation. Our current economic system is no less a game, it's just that it's a game that very few people can really play. It's down to the last few players now - I think maybe it's time to declare a winner, congratulate everyone on a hard fought battle, and set the pieces back up. Ha ha. Anyway, a few of us have been considering some possible solutions to this dilemma, focussed of necessity on overcoming what may be the fundamental scarcity of the modern world - a consensual hallucination called money. My contribution to the debate is the idea that digitally signed promissory notes, backed by the reputation of the issuer, could be the basis of a quick-and-dirty micropayment system. A first draft "potlatch protocol" document was posted in March at http://potlatch.net/protocol.01.html . There's a 'version 0.2' which should be posted soon. Comments are welcome. Jim Carrico http://www.potlatch.net PS - My Berlin contacts also mentioned the WOS conference in October http://www.mikro.org/Events/OS/wos2/index-e.html and that it may be a good opportunity to discuss some of these ideas. Anyone interested in a "potlatch" session? 14.0 Potlatch (was: Re: <nettime> Garcia/Lovink: The GHI of Tactical Media) richard barbrook nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Sat, 1 Sep 2001 01:10:27 -0400 Hiya, Here are some belated comments on a recent posting from Jim Carrico. The details of his interesting scheme on: <www.potlatch.net>: * The potlatch was designed to *prevent* abundance not facilitate it. Tribal societies were threatened by the accumulation of wealth by their leaders turning into fixed class divisions. The potlatch hindered this process by encouraging the giving away (or destroying) of surpluses. Being good liberals, the English colonialists were - not surprisingly - outraged by such "irrational" behaviour... * It is not universally accepted that money regulates the scarcity of *things*. This may be the academic orthodoxy, but it is debatable whether this is what is actually happening within capitalist societies (see Adam Smith and his admirers). What money could be doing is regulating the division of labour, i.e. the scarcity of *time*. While it is fun to point out that neo-classical price theory implies that cost of digital information is zero, this ideology can't explain why the labour used for making this information often does have a price. * The token system advocated by potlatch.net seems very much like another form of money to me. Could it simply be a digital form of LETS scheme? These can work where the tokens circulate within a smallish group of people, are not transferable into hard currency and can't be accumulated. Within a global information society, these limitations seem to be unenforceable. Wouldn't 'star' musicians (or programmers, writers or whatever) be paid too many tokens for them to distribute back into a parallel economy. It is much more likely that they'll want their success turned into material goods and services from the mainstream economy. Sooner or later, people would be selling tokens for dollars (or euros, yen, etc.) - and therefore turning the tokens into another form of money. * The Situationists popularised potlatch as a political concept because it showed that societies could flourish without any money (or tokens). However, social relationships inside tribes were formed between people who knew each other and were usually related. In contrast, we live in societies where most of our social relationships are with strangers who we'll never meet. Money, states, corporations and other impersonal structures have long seemed to be the only methods of regulating such connections. This is why the Situationists' potlatch metaphor was dismissed as utopian during the 1960s. Yet, from our experiences on the Net, it is being slowly realised that giving gifts can also create these impersonal relationships. As long as we're getting more back in return from others, we don't need payment from each and every person who appropriates our labour. Tokens are *not* needed to regulate a hi-tech gift economy. Free gifts can remain free! * Why does *all* information work need to be paid for? The revival of the potlatch metaphor reflects an interesting contemporary phenomenon. Like our tribal ancestors, many people are now using their surplus time in an "irrational" fashion, i.e. working for free rather than for money. As in the past, they're not being entirely unselfish. They also hope to gain respect, admiration and even things in return for their efforts. But what they're not doing is *directly* buying and selling labour time. A gift is a gift even when given away for an ulterior motive... All the best. Later, Richard ------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Richard Barbrook Hypermedia Research Centre School of Communications and Creative Industries University of Westminster Watford Road Northwick Park HARROW HA1 3TP <www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk> landline: +44 (0)20 7911 5000 x 4590 mobile: 07879-441873 ------------------------------------------------------------------- "While there is irony, we are still living in the prehistoric age. And we are not out of it yet..." - Henri Lefebvre ------------------------------------------------------------------- The HRC is involved in running regular cybersalons at the ICA in London. If you would like to be informed about forthcoming events, you can subscribe to a listserver on our website: <www.cybersalon.org>. 15.0 <nettime> subsol preview: "Notes on Sovereign Media" kadian antal nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Tue, 13 Nov 2001 10:30:42 -0800 (PST) Preview of next issue of subsol, http://subsol.c3.hu We would like to compile a selection of short texts and reflections on "sovereign media", and invite them in the form of responses to this post… Please reply to Joanne Richardson at subsol {AT} mi2.hr _______________ Notes on Sovereign Media Geert Lovink & Joanne Richardson In this age of media overproduction, information immunity is a question of life or death. Data are no longer stimuli to interest, but an inimical barrage constituting a physical threat. From exchange to effacement: communication is preying on naked existence. This condition takes the shape of the catastrophe while simultaneously embodying a promise of liberation. Sovereign media do not criticize the baroque data environments or experience them as threats, but consider them material, to use as they please. They operate beyond clean and dirty, in the garbage system ruled by chaos pur sang. Their carefree rummaging in the universal media archive is not a management strategy for jogging jammed creativity. Sovereign media refuse to be positively defined and are good for nothing. They demand no attention and constitute no enrichment of the existing media landscape. Once detached from every meaningful context, they switch over in fits and starts from one audio-video collection to the next. The autonomously multiplying connections generate a sensory space, which is relaxing as well as nerve racking. This tangle can never be exploited as a trend-sensitive genre again. All the data in the world alternately make up one lovely big amusement park and a five star survival trek in the paranoid category, where humor descends on awkward moments like an angel of salvation and lifts the program up out of the muck. >From the calculating perspective of the mainstream, media are intermediaries, conduits for communication, communicators of information. Media mediate information and carry it from A to B. They are presented as the condition of possibility for the exchange of information in its commodity form. The most useful media efface their presence; they disseminate the information in the most condensed form in the shortest possible time to the largest audience. Economy ultimately reduces itself to the economy of time--Marx said somewhere. And vice versa, time reduces itself to economy--to measurement and circulation for profit. The clock is necessary for the calculation and the organization of life under the rules of business. At the dawn of capitalism, merchants discovered the price of time as a consequence of the calculability of space. The exchange of commodities entailed movement from a point to its destination, and the time taken up by movement through space became subordinated to the money-form. Media signify mastery over time under the rule of profit. Sovereign media are instances of mastery over nothingness … free of motivation, without purpose, they let themselves go, driven by the winds of data. Sovereign media are fundamentally disinterested, they don't care about the extraction of value or a surplus of meaning, they are beyond the demand for information and the utilization principle of the network. Sovereign media lack any comprehensive idea of its customer base. They cannot comprehend the language of mass media, a language militarized by the clock, reduced to sharp words that carry blunt concepts. They do not pay attention to the attention economy. Sovereign media are self-exponential. What they communicate is something other than information. They communicate themselves, liberated from the most oppressive category around: the audience. Casting beyond "the public" is the ultimate form of media freedom. Sovereign media insulate themselves against hyperculture. They seek no connection; they disconnect. This is their point of departure--we have a liftoff. They leave the media surface and orbit the multimedia network as satellites. These do-it-yourselfers shut themselves up inside a selfbuilt monad, an "indivisible unit" of introverted technologies which, like a room without doors or windows, wishes to deny the existence of the manifest world. Sovereign media are not individual monads, rather, the world they inhabit is a monad, a parallel universe… beyond (or beside) the universe of the mainstream media and its demand for representation, reality and truth. Sovereign media have not abolished the desire for connection and communication; they communicate with each possible node within their parallel universe. But their communication act is a denial of the maxim "I am networked, therefore I am." The atmosphere inside the sealed cabin conflicts with the ideology of networking, which subordinates the process of making links and connections to a practical goal, a concrete project, the promise of a future gain. Networking is never fully in the present nor fully in-itself, it is endured for the sake of something always just out of immediate reach. Sovereign media have severed the ties to utility, the weight of time, the labor of the project, the measurement of profit. Freed from the demand for information, communication becomes gregariousness, a gracious form of sociability. It becomes what in fact it always was--a process of forging social relations that are not subject to exchange (giving something for the purpose of extracting a return). The public is freed of its obligation to show off its interest and can finally stop paying attention. The desire to connect is determined by the pleasure of communication rather than the imperative to exchange information or establish a (political) agenda. Sovereign media differ from the post '68 concept of alternative media (and its most recent metamorphosis into "Indy" media) as well as from 1990s tactical media. Alternative media work on the principle of counter propaganda and mirror the mainstream media, which they feel needs to be corrected and supplemented. Their strategic aim is a changed consciousness--making individuals aware of their behavior and opinions. These little media work with a positive variant of the cancer (or virus) model, which assumes that in the long term everyone, whether indirectly or through the big media, will become informed about the problem being broached. They presuppose a tight network stretched around and through society, so that in the end the activism of a few will unleash a chain reaction by the many. Alternative media have to appropriate Truth in order to operate. For sovereign media there is no Truth, only data which can be taken apart and reassembled in trillions of bytes. The post-68 alternative media universe took shape as a swarm of little grassroots initiatives, self-organized by the "radicals" and militants--media from below in the form of community newspapers, radio, and television, which were only locally available, but untroubled by their local constraints. This changed during the 1990s when the internet made it possible for do-it-yourself media to transcend their local boundaries, and become transnational, like their uni-directional global counterpart, the mainstream media. The Independent media of the 1990s is the globalization of the alternative media (due to the democratization of technology) and the universalizability of the principle of grassrootedness. Indy media, as the most recent legacy of the alternative media model, seek to supplant the old media universe. These counter media constitute an internal, dialectical negation, an immanent critique that can never get out from the presuppositions of the system it challenges. (We need only think of Marxism's dialectical negation of capitalism, which preserved the imperative of productivity, the utility of instrumental technology, the repressive apparatus of the State, police and standing army, as a necessary "first stage.") The mass media universe purports to be a true, genuine, democratic form of representation. Indy media critique these pretensions from the inside, wanting to expose the ideological shell behind them. But they want to preserve the rational kernel, to offer a form of media that is a true, genuine, democratic form of representation. Indy media aspire to become the dialectical supersession of mass media, and dream of a future when media itself will be transcended, insofar as media implies a separation between sender and receiver. With the democratization of information, as the receivers can become, potentially, the senders, such a separation is abolished, and information becomes a free-floating field, a pure transparency. The truth of Indy media is the post-medial universe of unmediated relationships. Indy media work by deploying counter-propaganda. They oppose the false, ideological shell of the mass media with counter-statements made from a counter-perspective. Independent media are dependent on the image of the mass media, which they seek to reverse--they need to bounce off this shell, often borrowing the same strategies. Propaganda is putting forward a position without being aware of its construction, taking it for something natural or inevitable, disarticulating the ideology it shelters and preserves. The counter media do not question the position from which they speak. It is self-evident. And like mainstream media, they are deadly serious, they fight, militantly, to defend their position. They have a mission, a supreme Cause--the revolution in ruins--and, perpetually, they wait. Caught in the web of journalistic discourse, they too calculate time. Still not actual, they invest their energy toward some future beyond that legitimates their existence. Showing off their militancy, they are often blind to internal contradictions, closed off to the possibility of criticism, and devoid of the principle of pleasure. Propaganda and reflection do not always make good friends. And pleasure can become a danger to the Cause, it can throw it off-track, it can drown its unaware victims in a sea of forgetfulness. And above all, the counter media need to remember, to measure offenses, to accuse, to seek retribution. Tactical media, by contrast, do not take themselves that seriously. They don't need to take the moral high ground and instead look for cracks in the media system. They know how to laugh, occasionally, even at themselves. Urged by their desire to form new coalitions they are capable of taking risks, even if this means they might self-destruct in the process. Clever tricks, the hunter's cunning, maneuvers, polymorphous situations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike. The tacticals are rebellious users of the mass media universe, whose messages they jam and hijack. As happy negatives, they are determined by their enemy. A fake GWBush page by RTMark cannot exist without the "authentic" one, which it parodies without reserve. Culture jammers do not exist without corporate billboards. Tactical media use what is handy, what can be improvised in the moment. They do not deploy the same strategies as the inside, they shy away from solemnity, and the claims to truthful representation. Tactical media create a system of disinformation, which implicitly questions the power and status of signs. Information becomes laughable, it is exposed as a sham. The truth is not a hardcore database full of "facts" but only appears as a brief moment of revelation, popping up out of the (collective) unconscious. Tactical media may be art, but they are not, however, "disinterested"--ultimately, they have some long-term political aim, they labor for a future cause, even though they may know how to enjoy the moment. They have given up the masses, but they seek to change the consciousness of a minority, by conducting a politics by other means, a politics that has surpassed itself and become an art form. They wage not counter-propaganda, but propaganda of the hoax. The toolbox of tactical media is sometimes borrowed from the basement of the avant-gardes, who although not "militant" in the strict political sense, made a fetish out of the metaphors warfare and terrorism. And metaphors are not always innocent. The avant-gardes began decomposing a long time ago, as the militarism concealed in their names, gestures, and mode of organization came increasingly under disrepute. But sometimes they can still be heard gasping for life, somewhere beyond the grave of history, having since metamorphosed into "communication guerrillas." Unlike the media of opposition, which are based on a radical critique of capitalist (art) production, sovereign media have alienated themselves from the entire business of media politics and the contemporary arts scene. An advanced mutual disinterest hampers any interaction. They move in parallel worlds which do not interfere with each other. No counter information or criticism of politics or art is given in order to start up a dialogue with the authorities. Sovereign media have cut all surviving imaginary ties with truth, reality and representation. They no longer concentrate on the wishes of a specific target group, as the alternative and tactical media still do. They have emancipated themselves from any potential audience, and thus they do not approach their audience as a moldable market segment, but offer it the "royal space" the other deserves. The royal Other is not a receiver of information, but a partner in a communication without purpose. Sovereign media are media without the message, the dialectic of media at a standstill. They are stalled at the intermediary step of making connections, without moving toward an aim, without the finality of exchange. Sovereign media lift up the media as an end in-itself. This should not be understood as a desire for the "purification" of the medium, a desire that has accompanied every old and new media revolution. On the day film was born, for instance, the conceptualists of purity wanted to eliminate from its realm everything that did not belong to it--narrative, representation, metaphors--and which had been imported from other media, like literature. The sovereignty of media is not a phenomenological reduction or purification of a language specific to "media as such." Sovereignty is not a conceptual project, but an aesthetic wandering. Communication ceases to be a general equivalent through which something is quantified and squeezed; it becomes an end in itself, narcissistic, ecstatic, and free. If Indy media labor to become the supersession (Aufhebung) of media into Truth, sovereign media are its total dispersion. The counter media seek to abolish the separation between sender and receiver, between medium and the message, thereby completing the internal development of media. Sovereign media inhabit a universe which is post-medial in another sense. There is no sender and receiver because there is no broadcast and no message. Sovereign media do not surpass the sender-receiver regime by bringing it to its completion, they take no interest in it, they annihilate the problem, and with it, the desire for a solution. Without being otherwise secretive about their own existence, the sovereigns remain unnoticed, since they stay in the blind spot that the bright media radiation creates in the eye. And that's the reason they need not be noticed as an avant-garde trend and expected to provide art with a new impetus. The reason sovereign media are difficult to distinguish as a separate category is because the shape in which they appear can never shine in its full lustre. The program producers don't show themselves; we see only their masks, in the formats familiar to us. Every successful experiment that can possibly be pointed to as an artistic or political statement is immediately exposed to contamination. The mixers inherently do not provoke, but infect chance passersby with corrupted banalities which present themselves in all their friendly triviality. An inextricable tangle of meaning and irony makes it impossible for the experienced media reader to make sense of this. So what are sovereign media? The form of the question might be incorrect. Sovereign media are. In the pleasure of Being Media, sure of themselves and lacking nothing, they embark on a journey to shape the data universe. November 2001, Sydney/Zagreb __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Find the one for you at Yahoo! Personals http://personals.yahoo.com 16.0 <nettime> how to defeat activism ernie yacub nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Sun, 21 Jul 2002 12:50:58 -0700 Remember the Nestle boycott?  Ever wonder what happened to it? "...activist efforts are being deliberately targeted for defeat by corporate funding, partnership and co-optation. " ernie ------- Forwarded message follows ------- 16.1 RE: <nettime> how to defeat activism Kermit Snelson nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 22 Jul 2002 20:19:19 -0700 It isn't news that protest movements are being simultaneously intimidated by violence, bribed into submission with money or perquisites, slandered in the media and infiltrated by police and intelligence agencies. It was ever thus, and so will it ever be. My favorite thought concerning this problem was Lenin's. He was once asked in the early days what he did when the Czar's secret police managed to infiltrate his organizations. He replied, "We put them to work." Not yet in command of Siberia's prison camps, "work" to Lenin then meant passing out leaflets in the street. Are successful activists themselves innocent of sharp-elbowed political tactics? Of course not, nor should they be. Violence? Seattle is famous precisely because the military tactics of the demonstrators defeated those of the police (and also of rival demonstrators.) Bribing with money and perquisites? Look how far Bono gets with the Washington and Davos crowds simply by flattering those congenitally hankering geeks with his star presence and glamour. Slandering opponents in the media? That's the raison d'ętre of most activist groups these days. Infiltrating opposing groups? If activists aren't doing much of this, they damn well should be. Political struggle is political struggle regardless of which side you're on. The winners tend to be those who grasp the facts quickly, persuade successfully and organize appropriately. On the other hand, there are those who let themselves be convinced by thick, incoherent "movement" bestsellers that facts are not something to be grasped, but invented; that the purpose of political writing is not to persuade, but to mystify; that disorganization and mob rule are not political weaknesses, but strengths; and that name-calling, body piercing and rioting comprise "cultural labor" and effective political resistance. Are we suddenly so eager to find examples of how corporate interests are turning activism into slacktivism? Why look further than the Harvard University Press? Or Duke University's Joe Camel Center for Marxist Studies? But my aim here isn't to load the thread with illustrations of how "they", even the best-selling "Marxist" superstars in tobacco-funded US universities, are undermining "our" movements. That's not to say they wouldn't be correct. It is indeed an example of the success of their tactics, and the ludicrous failure of ours, that the world's protest movement now amounts to not much more than yet another Americanized, Starbucks-style, middle-class lifestyle choice based on the consumption of aggressively marketed fad products. But I think it would be only an exercise in resentment to complain about the tactics directed against our clueless selves in a class struggle which is, after all, not only a fact of life but even a sign of health. And to speak of its potential news value, such a complaint could just as easily have appeared in 1886. What I'm arguing, instead, is that changing the world means embracing the Great Game and playing to win. This means not only that you must enter the same brotherhood as your opponents, but even that such a brotherhood of opponents is perhaps the only true one. "Napoleon died on St. Helena. Wellington was saddened." It is indeed impossible to resist without being attacked, and (worse, in the eyes of some) without becoming part of the game itself. Anybody who has ever made it onto the world's stage, whether the name was George Bush or Martin Luther King, has known that. But what is so horrifying about this? And what on Earth is so appealing about "negative critique" ideologies that glorify permanent marginalization, permanent poverty, permanent failure? That refuse to advance any positive recommendation for fear that one may actually succeed through "co-optation"? That view even being called to the negotiating table by one's opponent as a destructive act of hostility that must be refused? That in fact glorify "The Great Refusal" as an end in itself? History has occasionally given us saints, but their probability is so vanishingly small that only a few generations can boast of one. So barring that, the only real alternative to struggle, negotiation and compromise with the real world is a retreat into suicidal insanity and destruction. Having read both Hamlet and Thucydides, the only reason I claim news value for this observation is that we recently seem to have entered a period in which such an ethos of negation and inward-looking despair, previously only a sad but private personal neurosis, is again a dangerous world-historical force. Even when disguised as religious fervor (bin Laden) or as a pseudo-revolutionary mania of desire (Negri), this utterly sick but growing resentment and refusal of rough-and-tumble reality is something activists should fight, not embrace. Kermit Snelson 16.2 RE: <nettime> how to defeat activism N Jett nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Tue, 23 Jul 2002 22:33:56 +0000 >It is indeed an example of the success of their >tactics, and the ludicrous failure of ours, that the world's protest >movement now amounts to not much more than yet another Americanized, >Starbucks-style, middle-class lifestyle choice based on the consumption of >aggressively marketed fad products. Corporate media is designed to sell... process activism through it and you end up with "commodified dissent"... is that your argument? Perhaps it's an attempt at subverting pop culture? "Infiltration" as you mentioned elseware in your essay. >And what on Earth is so appealing about >"negative critique" ideologies that glorify permanent marginalization, >permanent poverty, permanent failure? That refuse to advance any positive >recommendation for fear that one may actually succeed through >"co-optation"? That view even being called to the negotiating table by >one's opponent as a destructive act of hostility that must be refused? >That in fact glorify "The Great Refusal" as an end in itself? > I think you might of answered your own question: "yet another Americanized, Starbucks-style, middle-class lifestyle choice based on the consumption of aggressively marketed fad products." But one manufactured by groups which seek to maintain a certain form of monopoly/oligopoly on the production of the "lifestyle choice". Maybe it really is all just about being "cool" and not "selling out"? 16.3 RE: <nettime> how to defeat activism Kermit Snelson nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 25 Jul 2002 14:34:19 -0700 > Corporate media is designed to sell... process activism > through it and you end up with "commodified dissent"... is > that your argument? Perhaps it's an attempt at subverting > pop culture? I think the term "commodified dissent" is a bit too mild for what I'm claiming. Under Negri and Jameson (et alia), the ideology of progressive activism has degenerated far beyond what was formerly simple, harmless "commodified dissent." In fact, it has now become the developed world's first version of a primitive Polynesian cargo cult. The first stages of this development took place in the 1960s, when Marcuse divorced radical theory from the economic concerns of working people and cast it instead around psychological "issues" of identity formation and sexual awakening. And so the tool developed by Karl Marx for the use of working people and statesmen degenerated into something that could seriously interest only confused adolescents. This well-heeled adolescent confusion did, however, create vast fortunes for record companies, rock stars, drug dealers, and even a few university professors. "Commodified dissent" was born. Some of those adolescents, as they grew older, eventually discovered that activism based on such theories wasn't accomplishing much in the world of grownups. And more importantly, it wasn't supporting them in the style to which they had grown accustomed as children. And so they founded businesses like ecotourism, which cart their customers over vast distances so they can trample and disturb the fragile things they care so much about. Like "The Body Shop", which decorates the world's swank retail districts and duty-free airport concourses with posters of picturesque poor people. Like "Ben & Jerry's", the Unilever subsidiary that allows people to express their deep concern over the rape of the Earth by eating ice cream with names like "Rainforest Crunch." And now the new chain of retail "Fair Trade" storefronts brought to you by the Global Exchange organization, the goal of which apparently is to do for the world's traditional, tourist-oriented aboriginal craft stands what Starbucks did for the world's coffee houses. And since any new industry needs a new legal framework, the university progressives have now been put to work on a jurisprudence of the marketably picturesque, granting intellectual property rights and other forms of legal personality to the native cultures, species and even scenery (which the international securities trade calls "hospitality assets") on which such businesses depend. Welcome to "commodified dissent", Phase II. The third and final stage in the cultural logic of late activism then comes to pass just as the world's free and civilized peoples are now on their way back into an age of lawless slavery to unaccountable masters. The developed world's most prestigious universities, just as the doomed Paiute Indian tribes in the USA did during the 1890s, have responded to this grim prospect by producing prophets of the Ghost Dance. Think of today's academic talk of street theater and other forms of artistic activism, of learned discourses by Félix Guattari about liberating the world through a revival of "aboriginal subjectivities," of chained-together Zerzanites at WTO meetings, of monographs from Australian universities touting the liberatory benefits of a copyrighted Dreamtime, while reading this: "In January 1889, a Paiute Indian, Wavoka, or Jack Wilson, had a revelation during a total eclipse of the sun. It was the genesis of a religious movement that would become known as the Ghost Dance. It was this dance that the Indians believed would reunite them with friends and relatives in the ghost world. As the movement spread from tribe to tribe, it soon took on proportions beyond its original intent and desperate Indians began dancing and singing the songs that would cause the world to open up and swallow all other people while the Indians and their friends would remain on this land, which would return to its beautiful and natural state. The unity and fervor that the Ghost Dance Movement inspired, however, spurred only fear and hysteria among white settlers which ultimately contributed to the events ending in the massacre at Wounded Knee." [1] Closely allied with the latter-day Ghost Dance prophets are today's "tactical media" theorists. They have invented the developed world's first version of the cargo cults that originally appeared among the doomed native cultures of Polynesia in the 1930s, spreading the gospel of a New Dispensation based on consumer electronics. And this message goes far beyond their advocacy of intellectual consumption rather than production, or their "aesthetic of poaching, tricking, reading, speaking, strolling, shopping, desiring" [2]. For that would simply be an updated version of secretly spitting into massa's meal in the kitchen before serving it to him in the dining room. No, the modern "cargo cult" of consumer electronics goes far beyond this, even to the point of forecasting that the consumer electronics revolution will create a post-human cybernetic subject that will evolve in biological symbiosis with its machines and eventually free mankind forever from all forms of physical bondage. Of course, this kind of talk delights consumer electronics manufacturers like Motorola, who have indeed recently shown themselves to be more than happy to fund such very scientific results. And thus we have reached "commodity dissent" in its highest and final form. Just as it proved to be for the American Indians and the Polynesians. The rest is silence. Kermit Snelson Notes: [1] http://msnbc.com/onair/msnbc/TimeandAgain/archive/wknee/ghost.asp?cp1=1 [2] http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00096.html 16.4 Re: <nettime> how to defeat activism David Garcia nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 29 Jul 2002 12:13:55 +0200 > I think the term "commodified dissent" is a bit too mild for what I'm > claiming. Under Negri and Jameson (et alia), the ideology of progressive > activism has degenerated far beyond what was formerly simple, harmless > "commodified dissent." In fact, it has now become the developed world's > first version of a primitive Polynesian cargo cult. > > The first stages of this development took place in the 1960s, when Marcuse > divorced radical theory from the economic concerns of working people and > cast it instead around psychological "issues" of identity formation and > sexual awakening. And so the tool developed by Karl Marx for the use of > working people and statesmen degenerated into something that could seriously > interest only confused adolescents. This well-heeled adolescent confusion > did, however, create vast fortunes for record companies, rock stars, drug > dealers, and even a few university professors. "Commodified dissent" was > born. "Man does not live by bread alone". Economic relations may be the foundation but they are not the whole building. "The tool (as Kermit describes it) developed by Karl Marx for use of working people and statesman" (deployed also, by the latter, in creating the terror and the Gulags, definitely an "adult" outcome, and no doubt to be as much regretted as Ben and Jerry's, the Body Shop and eco-tourism) was also employed by those involved in *cultural* transformation, in practice, by the likes Rodchenko, van Doesburg, El Lissitzky, and Tatlin, and in theory by Lukacs and Adorno, including Marx himself who also wrote about art. If we are looking for the origins of, what Kermit suggests is, the adolescent illusion that the psychological "issues" of identity formation" (imagination, to the Romantics) might have an important role to play in revolutionary change we have to go further back than the utopian fever of the 1960's. Further back than Marcuse and Mcluhan with their promise of the "global villages and multi-dimensional societies". Further back than the collective delirium induced by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin et al. Further back than Joseph Beuys's founding of the German Student party in 1967 and making human creativity and the principal of "everyone an artist" the basis of all he did. Further back than the Whole Earth Catalogue's first encyclopedic listings enabling access to all forms of creativity (including an embryonic hacker culture). Back in fact to Romantic movement, beginning in Germany in the second third of the eighteenth century, to Herder, Fichte, Schiller, Beethoven, Holderlin, Goethe, Schlegel, and Novalis's conception of "the imagination as the Mother of all reality". This was a revolution which began in the imagination of artists and poets beginning in Germany, spreading like wildfire across Europe and whose most tangible outcome (including both the republic and the terror) was an actual revolution in France. "Tain describes the romantic movement as a bourgeois revolt against aristocracy after 1789; "romanticism is the expression of the energy and force of the new arrivistes". In the narrative myth of the Romantics, the artist plays the central role. But with the important proviso that the spiritual freedoms and the possibilities of self creation enjoyed by artists were the rightful legacy of all human subjects. It was not Joseph Beuys in the 1960's but Novalis in the eighteenth century who first declared that "everyone was an artist". "Since then the drive of every avant garde or modern utopia has been founded on the basis that the practice of artists was to liberate a potential for art making in everyone and shared by humankind as a whole. A potential whose field was aesthetic but whose horizon was political" And yes for better or for worse the latest eruption of this impulse is the "cargo cult" called tactical media. However one of the consequences of tactical media's roots in a tech culture, is that among the many differences between this and earlier "CCs" is that the artist's iconic status as imaginative outlaw and exemplar of freedom and the imagination has been replaced by that of the hacker. 16.5 Re: <nettime> how to defeat activism wade tillett nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 29 Jul 2002 15:15:55 -0500 The ghost-dance is only the modern delusion of identity within the imploding nihilistic space of colonization. A space which colonizes and commodifies this delusion. A space which is this delusion, (i.e. Baudrillard's simulacra) the all-consuming image. We dance, as we are already ghosts. "The rest is silence." This is all true, I suppose: The spasms of the dying fish, repackaged as excitement and virtue within the experience economy. Critiques of identity and modes of consumption stem from the loss of any non-colonized space or production. The critique being the final colonization, the particulate colonization. The ideal bio-power facilitated by the self-analysis of the consumer, and finally, of the mode of living. The artist is a traitor. The artist's expeditions mark, claim, commodify, create territories for expansion. The artist runs ahead as the forests are cleared, marking the trees, explaining - these are the ones to be saved.... Commodity dissent, nothing exists outside the commodity. Identity psychology, the self is trapped in space by its form. We dance only to become ghosts. Some even say we dance, as we are already ghosts - but this is incorrect. We dance, as we are not yet ghosts. 16.6 Re: <nettime> how to defeat activism MWP nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 29 Jul 2002 13:53:28 -0700 David Garcia wrote: > > ...the artist's iconic status as imaginative outlaw and exemplar of freedom > and the imagination has been replaced by that of the hacker. You've got to be kidding! Outlaw, perhaps, but freedom and imagination? Please! These guys sit at computers and blindly type strings of random words into unforgiving blank spaces all day in anticipation of that brief moment of reward. They are glorified carnival chickens. Give me a break. Mark P 16.7 RE: <nettime> how to defeat activism Kermit Snelson nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Tue, 30 Jul 2002 12:07:34 -0700 David Garcia: > every avant garde or modern utopia has been founded on > the basis that the practice of artists was to liberate > a potential for art making in everyone and shared by > humankind as a whole. A potential whose field was aesthetic > but whose horizon was political David's appeal to a pedigree rather than an argument is not advisable. The trope that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" (Shelley, 1821) may indeed go back to the Romantics, but the opposing argument has an even more distinguished lineage, going back to Plato and perhaps even to Amenhotep. In Book 10 of the _Republic_, written in the fourth century BCE, Plato notes that the "quarrel between poetry and philosophy" was already "ancient." He then has Socrates go on about the ontologically inferior status of artistic production. So it's no surprise that when Plato finally pronounces on the controversy as to whether poets or philosophers are the natural rulers of the human polity, he decides, famously, in favor of the philosophers. It is strange to be informed that the French Revolution was brought about by poets and artists, especially German ones. If any single "hacker" can be said to have brought about that particular event, it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau with his "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" (1750). As anyone who has read that work knows, Rousseau took a rather dim view of art's effect on the body politic. In fact, his essay argues that art be controlled by an elite in order to preserve civic virtue. Nor has the home town that Rousseau was proud to call his own, Calvinist Geneva, entered history with the reputation as being a hotbed of sexual or imaginative liberation. Yet these are the thoughts that preceded the "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality" (1754) and the "Social Contract" (1762), and which finally culminated in the reign of Robespierre, the Incorruptible. My point, however, is not to correct David's history lesson. It is merely to point out that the argument over the political role of art is very old, and so important that Plato himself chose it to crown his oeuvre. And as Plato's work was largely a response to the fact that Athenian freedom and democracy were about to die, I think that we, who are roughly in the same position today, are obliged to examine the idea of "aesthetic politics" just as ruthlessly as Plato did, and to make it just as central to our analysis. Hitler was perhaps the only one of history's monsters to have started his career as an art student. His rejection by the Vienna Academy of Art in 1907 is arguably the most disastrous thing that has ever happened. (Or is David going to argue that he would have been even more powerful politically as a professional artist?) But Hitler's sensitivity to artistic issues continued, remarking later in his career that "Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know [Richard] Wagner." His organization of "Degenerate Art" exhibits are infamous, and there was more than a little German Romantic aestheticism in his 1934 agreement, with Speer, that the public buildings of the Third Reich be constructed to ensure that they would eventually make picturesque ruins. [1] Hitler later honored Wagner's former friend Friedrich Nietzsche by personally attending the funeral of the philosopher's sister in 1935. As we know, Nietzsche began (and ended) his academic publishing career by writing that "the world is only justified as an aesthetic phenomenon." Stalin was also keenly interested in artistic and aesthetic issues, inventing "socialist realism" and personally reviewing (uncharitably) Shostakovich symphonies in _Pravda_. All of this is only to argue, as Plato knew, that mixing aesthetics and politics makes a deadly cocktail. Walter Benjamin knew it, too. In 1936, he wrote that "The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life." [2] He also wrote that "All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war." Four years later, Benjamin died fleeing that war. But what say today's deep thinkers on the subject? Fredric Jameson doesn't get too far into 1991's _Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism_ before pronouncing this flip judgment on Benjamin's dictum: "He thought [the "aestheticization" of reality] meant fascism, but we know it's only fun: a prodigious exhilaration with the new order of things, a commodity rush." [3] He later elaborates: "Culturally I write as a relatively enthusiastic consumer of postmodernism, at least some parts of it: I like the architecture and a lot of the newer visual work, in particular the newer photography. The music is not bad to listen to, or the poetry bad to read ... Food and fashion have also greatly improved, as has the life world generally." [4] Defending the role of aesthetics in politics by observing simply that one man's fascism is another man's fun rings more than a bit unpleasantly in a book that also argues that Paul de Man's collaboration with the Nazis was "simply a job" [5], and that Heidegger's commitment to Hitler was "morally and aesthetically preferable to apolitical liberalism." [6] Especially since Fascism led Walter Benjamin to an early grave, while Jameson's "fun" has led Duke University' famous Marxist professor to the comfortable summit of America's academic ant hill. What of the role of "tactical media" theorists in Jameson's "commodity rush"? They are perhaps the first in history (other than Jameson, perhaps) to have claimed "shopping" as a revolutionary virtue. But they are certainly not the first to have insisted that a revolution requires a "distinctive and recognizable aesthetic." [7] Hitler certainly did as well. So did Stalin. So did the Taliban. No one will ever agree on what is more aesthetically preferable, nor on which sexual mores are truly liberating, nor on what practice is the more spiritually fulfilling. That's why making such things an integral part of politics is, as Walter Benjamin wrote and history shows, a recipe for war. Aesthetics and sexual mores should be left out of politics for the same reason that religion should be. The reason why humanity never seems to live up to this truth is that finding one's own way is hard. That personal task, not politics or revolution, is the true role of creativity, artistic expression and identity formation. But a "tactical" aesthetic of consumption, of criticism, of refusal, of opposition is the very opposite of this. It's a lot easier than finding your own way. It takes no real work at all. It's the aesthetic of a slave, a parasite, and a vandal. [8] And if you seek its monument, look around. Kermit Snelson Notes: [1] http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/CITDPress/Holtorf/7.4.html [2] Benjamin, Walter, _Illuminations_, p. 241 [3] Jameson, Fredric, _Postmodernism_, p. x [sic] [4] ibid., p. 298-9 [5] ibid., p. 257 [6] ibid., p. 257 [7] http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00096.html [8] True also of the Right's "tactical media", the USA's warblogs. 17.0 <nettime> A Reaction to Tactical Media time nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Sun, 8 Sep 2002 10:41:30 -0500 A Reaction to Tactical Media By Sfear von Clauswitz Tactics vs. Strategy History is no more behind us than we can walk through time. There is no destiny and no vanishing. Tactical media makes no promises. The spectacle and spectacular media are forms of tactical media, even more so now than in the future. Newer forms of media production and distribution: computers, cameras, the internet, etc. are not tactical. They exist as ballistics in the war of art, as does detournement and heretical juxtaposition. How these armaments are combined in conflict constitutes tactics. These tactical conflicts culminate towards strategic goals. Strategy is defined by Clauswitz as a collection of battles in a war regardless of who the actors are. Thus, strategy exists outside of nation-states and other such boundaries, just as Terrorists wage a war outside of such boundaries. As individuals become empowered with the ballistics of nations, so strategy becomes more useful for describing their activities. Individuals begin to enter the global strategic theater. Strategy is not political, and cannot be in opposition to tactics. Strategy outlines a discourse of interactions, at times political, military, or aesthetic. Tactics is no more a tool of resistance than a tool of the state. Isnt it enough to say it is a tool, and begin to explore its uses? How can we discuss the exchanges of tactics other than on a plane of strategy? Artists & Hackers While many artists and hackers use tactical media, the divorce of these battles from the strategic and logistical landscapes renders such actions less significant than similar tactics in use by national and business actors. EBN and Negativeland developed beautiful munitions (heretical juxtaposition), and both Adbusters and RTMark expand arts reach and capacity into new theaters. All of which is necessary for the expansion of art on the conceptual landscape. However, much of this work has been fueled by the political agendas and affiliations of these artists. While alliance with the activist, anarchistic, and anti-globalization syndicates has enabled these developments, it has also created linguistic partisanship that prevents arts expansion into the strategic and logistical theaters. The Study of Tactical Aesthetics As tactics, subversion of a dominant is no more valuable than submission to a dominant, outside of a specific theatrical context. In this way, both diversion and alliance, as tactics, might serve a particular end at a particular time. The super-empowered artist does in many ways resemble a Terrorist, but the association is superficial in as far as it perpetuates the political roots that modern aesthetic warfare technology was developed within. Many noble sciences have been detoured by militaries to serve very different political ends than their creators had intended. It is with this detachment from originating political bias that aesthetic warfare must be studied. Information warfare (future war) deals heavily with propaganda. Aesthetics enables propaganda. Advanced practitioners of aesthetic theory should then be adept at the creation of propaganda, whether they work for Indymedia, themselves, or the government. Propaganda neither hijacks the media, nor the deed. Deeds no longer exist separate from information media. The process of recording mediates the phenomenal and thereby defines informational theaters. Propaganda, tactics, aesthetics, and strategy-all require a recorded or informational value. Digitization is one trend that contributed to the passage of warfare from the physical to the informational landscapes, but one of many. Death of distance, identity fragmentation, mass mediation, the deconstruction of language, and copyright law all contributed threads. However, once all aspects of warfare can be translated into flows of information, a language of aesthetics reveals the way that information can be used as warfare. It is aesthetics that enables information. In this way, tactical media is a form of aesthetic information warfare. Artists are now in the best position to leverage their aesthetics to create a technology gap between art and rival conceptual frameworks. Tactical media may well be the most overt part of this larger process. Modes of Warfare Clauswitzs tactics enable both the weak and the powerful. However, by embedding class opposition into the language of military art, de Certeau destroys the usefulness of the terms describing modes of conflict outside de Certeaus specific theater. Clauswitzs strategem and Tzus war of maneuver are both useful tactics, in their time and ours. An artifice of diversion is a method of using information for tactical advantage. It is one of many tactics used by the mainstream and many others, but to limit arts investigation of warfare to one tactic, or to tactics as a dominant mode, limits arts ability to maintain viability in the conceptual landscape. The battle between the mainstream and the alternative cannot trace the full spectrum of media tactics, but even if we were to concentrate our investigation there, how could we foresee a victory or lasting resituation without considering the strategy of this particular theater? Also, the language of economics permeates our telling (and recording) of this conflict, and yet the language of logistics is missing. Perhaps this is due to de Certeaus politicizing of the modes of conflict, but then perhaps we have just not looked hard enough. The continued viability of tactical art does require global participation, but it also requires a language to describe and refine that global participation-how it is gathered and distributed, authorized and synchronized. This language is the de-politicized language of strategy. A language that must be developed separate from the paradigm and perspectives of any specific theater, most of all the theater of activists, from which the vast majority of its practitioners emerge. The preconceived opposition forms an essential context within which to discuss a particular theater. The specific economic and political intensities of a theater do form the essential difference between tactics as employed by different groups. Economic and political intensities are useful and even essential when recording the story of a battle. But while these intensities are valuable we do not seek a history of the political winners. Nor do not seek a lexicon of potential media tactics. What we seek is art, an art of war, the beautiful forms of information that can be applied to shifting theatrical contexts. We seek a way to describe the exchange of informational flows within the theater. We seek these things because it is the only way art agents will be useful actors in the quickly shifting landscapes of the future, and advanced practitioners of aesthetic informational warfare and tactical media may be the only way for art to remain a viable conceptual framework. http://www.x-chicago.com/main/article.php?articleID=179 http://www.collusion.org/Article.cfm?ID=410 18.0 <nettime> From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes geert lovink nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri, 01 Nov 2002 23:43:27 +0100 A Virtual World is Possible: From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes By Geert Lovink and Florian Schneider I. We start with the current strategy debates of the so-called "anti-globalisation movement", the biggest emerging political force for decades. In Part II we will look into strategies of critical new media culture in the post-speculative phase after dotcommania. Four phases of the global movement are becoming visible, all of which have distinct political, artistic and aesthetic qualities. 1. The 90s and tactical media activism The term 'tactical media' arose in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall as a renaissance of media activism, blending old school political work and artists' engagement with new technologies. The early nineties saw a growing awareness of gender issues, exponential growth of media industries and the increasing availability of cheap do-it-yourself equipment creating a new sense of self-awareness amongst activists, programmers, theorists, curators and artists. Media were no longer seen as merely tools for the Struggle, but experienced as virtual environments whose parameters were permanently 'under construction'. This was the golden age of tactical media, open to issues of aesthetics and experimentation with alternative forms of story telling. However, these liberating techno practices did not immediately translate into visible social movements. Rather, they symbolized the celebration of media freedom, in itself a great political goal. The media used - from video, CD-ROM, cassettes, zines and flyers to music styles such as rap and techno - varied widely, as did the content. A commonly shared feeling was that politically motivated activities, be they art or research or advocacy work, were no longer part of a politically correct ghetto and could intervene in 'pop culture' without necessarily having to compromise with the 'system.' With everything up for negotiation, new coalitions could be formed. The current movements worldwide cannot be understood outside of the diverse and often very personal for digital freedom of expression. 2. 99-01: The period of big mobilizations By the end of the nineties the post-modern 'time without movements' had come to pass. The organized discontent against neo-liberalism, global warming policies, labour exploitation and numerous other issues converged. Equipped with networks and arguments, backed up by decades of research, a hybrid movement - wrongly labelled by mainstream media as 'anti-globalisation' - gained momentum. One of the particular features of this movement lies in its apparent inability and unwillingness to answer the question that is typical of any kind of movement on the rise or any generation on the move: what's to be done? There was and there is no answer, no alternative - either strategic or tactical - to the existing world order, to the dominant mode of globalisation. And maybe this is the most important and liberating conclusion: there is no way back to the twentieth century, the protective nation state and the gruesome tragedies of the 'left.' It has been good to remember - but equally good to throw off - the past. The question 'what's to be done' should not be read as an attempt to re-introduce some form of Leninist principles. The issues of strategy, organization and democracy belong to all times. We neither want to bring back old policies through the backdoor, nor do we think that this urgent question can be dismissed by invoking crimes committed under the banner of Lenin, however justified such arguments are. When Slavoj Zizek looks in the mirror he may see Father Lenin, but that's not the case for everyone. It is possible to wake up from the nightmare of the past history of communism and (still) pose the question: what's to be done? Can a 'multitude' of interests and backgrounds ask that question, or is the only agenda that defined by the summit calendar of world leaders and the business elite? Nevertheless, the movement has been growing rapidly. At first sight it appears to use a pretty boring and very traditional medium: the mass-mobilization of tens of thousands in the streets of Seattle, hundreds of thousands in the streets of Genoa. And yet, tactical media networks played an important role in it's coming into being. From now on pluriformity of issues and identities was a given reality. Difference is here to stay and no longer needs to legitimize itself against higher authorities such as the Party, the Union or the Media. Compared to previous decades this is its biggest gain. The 'multitudes' are not a dream or some theoretical construct but a reality. If there is a strategy, it is not contradiction but complementary existence. Despite theoretical deliberations, there is no contradiction between the street and cyberspace. The one fuels the other. Protests against the WTO, neo-liberal EU policies, and party conventions are all staged in front of the gathered world press. Indymedia crops up as a parasite of the mainstream media. Instead of having to beg for attention, protests take place under the eyes of the world media during summits of politicians and business leaders, seeking direct confrontation. Alternatively, symbolic sites are chosen such as border regions (East-West Europe, USA-Mexico) or refugee detention centres (Frankfurt airport, the centralized Eurocop database in Strasbourg, the Woomera detention centre in the Australian desert). Rather than just objecting to it, the global entitlement of the movement adds to the ruling mode of globalisation a new layer of globalisation from below. 3. Confusion and resignation after 9-11 At first glance, the future of the movement is a confusing and irritating one. Old-leftist grand vistas, explaining US imperialism and its aggressive unilateralist foreign policy, provided by Chomsky, Pilger and other baby boomers are consumed with interest but no longer give the bigger picture. In a polycentric world conspiracy theories can only provide temporary comfort for the confused. No moralist condemnation of capitalism is necessary as facts and events speak for themselves. People are driven to the street by the situation, not by an analysis (neither ours nor the one from Hardt & Negri). The few remaining leftists can no longer provide the movement with an ideology, as it works perfectly without one. "We don't need your revolution." Even the social movements of the 70s and 80s, locked up in their NGO structures, have a hard time keeping up. New social formations are taking possession of the streets and media spaces, without feeling the need of representation by some higher authority, not even the heterogenous committees gathering in Porto Alegre. So far this movement has been bound in clearly defined time/space coordinates. It still takes months to mobilize multitudes and organize the logistics, from buses and planes, camping grounds and hostels, to independent media centres. This movement is anything but spontaneous (and does not even claim to be so). The people that travel hundreds or thousands of miles to attend protest rallies are driven by real concerns, not by some romantic notion of socialism. The worn-out question: "reform or revolution?" sounds more like blackmail to provoke the politically correct answer. The contradiction between selfishness and altruism is also a false one. State-sponsored corporate globalisation affects everyone. International bodies such as the WTO, the Kyoto Agreement on global warming, or the privatisation of the energy sector are no longer abstract news items, dealt with by bureaucrats and (NGO) lobbyists. This political insight has been the major quantum leap of recent times. Is this then the Last International? No. There is no way back to the nation state, to traditional concepts of liberation, the logic of transgression and transcendence, exclusion and inclusion. Struggles are no longer projected onto a distant Other that begs for our moral support and money. We have finally arrived in the post-solidarity age. As a consequence, national liberation movements have been replaced by a by a new analysis of power, which is simultaneously incredibly abstract, symbolic and virtual, whilst terribly concrete, detailed and intimate. 4. Present challenge: liquidate the regressive third period of marginal moral protest Luckily September 11 has had no immediate impact on the movement. The choice between Bush and Bin Laden was irrelevant. Both agendas were rejected as devastating fundamentalisms. The all too obvious question: "whose terror is worse?" was carefully avoided as it leads away from the pressing emergencies of everyday life: the struggle for a living wage, decent public transport, health care, water, etc. As both social democracy and really existing socialism depended heavily on the nation state a return to the 20thcentury sounds as disastrous as all the catastrophes it produced. The concept of a digital multitude is fundamentally different and based entirely on openness. Over the last few years the creative struggles of the multitudes have produced outputs on many different layers: the dialectics of open sources, open borders, open knowledge. Yet the deep penetration of the concepts of openness and freedom into the principle of struggle is by no means a compromise to the cynical and greedy neo-liberal class. Progressive movements have always dealt with a radical democratisation of the rules of access, decision-making and the sharing of gained capacities. Usually it started from an illegal or illegitimate common ground. Within the bounds of the analogue world it led to all sorts of cooperatives and self-organized enterprises, whose specific notions of justice were based on efforts to circumvent the brutal regime of the market and on different ways of dealing with the scarcity of material resources. We're not simply seeking proper equality on a digital level. We're in the midst of a process that constitutes the totality of a revolutionary being, as global as it is digital. We have to develop ways of reading the raw data of the movements and struggles and ways to make their experimental knowledge legible; to encode and decode the algorithms of its singularity, nonconformity and non-confoundability; to invent, refresh and update the narratives and images of a truly global connectivity; to open the source code of all the circulating knowledge and install a virtual world. Bringing these efforts down to the level of production challenges new forms of subjectivity, which almost necessarily leads to the conclusion that everyone is an expert. The superflux of human resources and the brilliance of everyday experience get dramatically lost in the 'academification' of radical left theory. Rather the new ethical-aesthetic paradigm lives on in the pragmatic consciousness of affective labour, in the nerdish attitude of a digital working class, in the omnipresence of migrant struggles as well as many other border-crossing experiences, in deep notions of friendship within networked environments as well as the 'real' world. II. Let's now look at strategies for Internet art & activism. Critical new media culture faces a tough climate of budget cuts in the cultural sector and a growing hostility and indifference towards new media. But hasn't power shifted to cyberspace, as Critical Art Ensemble once claimed? Not so if we look at the countless street marches around the world. The Seattle movement against corporate globalisation appears to have gained momentum - both on the street and online. But can we really speak of a synergy between street protests and online 'hacktivism'? No. But what they have in common is their (temporal) conceptual stage. Both real and virtual protests risk getting stuck at the level of a global 'demo design,' no longer grounded in actual topics and local situations. This means the movement never gets out of beta. At first glance, reconciling the virtual and the real seems to be an attractive rhetorical act. Radical pragmatists have often emphasized the embodiment of online networks in real-life society, dispensing with the real/virtual contradiction. Net activism, like the Internet itself, is always hybrid, a blend of old and new, haunted by geography, gender, race and other political factors. There is no pure disembodied zone of global communication, as the 90s cyber-mythology claimed. Equations such as street plus cyberspace, art meets science, and 'techno-culture'are all interesting interdisciplinary approaches but are proving to have little effect beyond the symbolic level of dialogue and discourse. The fact is that established disciplines are in a defensive mode. The 'new' movements and media are not yet mature enough to question and challenge the powers that be. In a conservative climate, the claim to 'embody the future' becomes a weak and empty gesture. On the other hand, the call of many artists and activists to return to "real life" does not provide us with a solution to how alternative new media models can be raised to the level of mass (pop) culture. Yes, street demonstrations raise solidarity levels and lift us up from the daily solitude of one-way media interfaces. Despite September 11 and its right-wing political fallout, social movements worldwide are gaining importance and visibility. We should, however, ask the question "what comes after the demo version" of both new media and the movements? This isn't the heady 60s. The negative, pure and modernist level of the "conceptual" has hit the hard wall of demo design as Peter Lunenfeld described it in his book 'Snap to Grid'. The question becomes: how to jump beyond the prototype? What comes after the siege of yet another summit of CEOs and their politicians? How long can a movement grow and stay 'virtual'? Or in IT terms, what comes after demo design, after the countless PowerPoint presentations, broadband trials and Flash animations? Will Linux ever break out of the geek ghetto? The feel-good factor of the open, ever growing crowd (Elias Canetti) will wear out; demo fatigue will set in. We could ask: does your Utopia version have a use-by date? Rather than making up yet another concept it is time to ask the question of how software, interfaces and alternative standards can be installed in society. Ideas may take the shape of a virus, but society can hit back with even more successful immunization programs: appropriation, repression and neglect. We face a scalability crisis. Most movements and initiatives find themselves in a trap. The strategy of becoming "minor" (Guattari) is no longer a positive choice but the default option. Designing a successful cultural virus and getting millions of hits on your weblog will not bring you beyond the level of a short-lived 'spectacle'. Culture jammers are no longer outlaws but should be seen as experts in guerrilla communication . Today's movements are in danger of getting stuck in self-satisfying protest mode. With access to the political process effectively blocked, further mediation seems the only available option. However, gaining more and more "brand value" in terms of global awareness may turn out to be like overvalued stocks: it might pay off, it might turn out to be worthless. The pride of "We have always told you so" is boosting the moral of minority multitudes, but at the same time it delegates legitimate fights to the level of official "Truth and Reconciliation Commissions" (often parliamentary or Congressional), after the damage is done. Instead of arguing for "reconciliation" between the real and virtual we call here for a rigorous synthesis of social movements with technology. Instead of taking the "the future is now" position derived from cyber-punk, a lot could be gained from a radical re-assessment of the techno revolutions of the last 10-15 years. For instance, if artists and activists can learn anything from the rise and subsequent fall of dot-com, it might be the importance of marketing. The eyeballs of the dotcom attention economy proved worthless. This is a terrain is of truly taboo knowledge. Dot-coms invested their entire venture capital in (old media) advertisement. Their belief that media-generated attention would automatically draw users in and turn them into customers was unfounded. The same could be said of activist sites. Information "forms" us. But new consciousness results less and less in measurable action. Activists are only starting to understand the impact of this paradigm. What if information merely circles around in its own parallel world? What's to be done if the street demonstration becomes part of the Spectacle? The increasing tensions and polarizations described here force us to question the limits of new media discourse. In the age of realtime global events Ezra Pound's definition of art as the antenna of the human race shows its passive, responsive nature. Art no longer initiates. One can be happy if it responds to contemporary conflicts at all and the new media arts sector is no exception. New media arts must be reconciled with its condition as a special effect of the hard and software developed years ago. Critical new media practices have been slow to respond to both the rise and fall of dotcommania. In the speculative heydays of new media culture (the early-mid 90s, before the rise of the World Wide Web), theorists and artists jumped eagerly on not yet existing and inaccessible technologies such as virtual reality. Cyberspace generated a rich collection of mythologies; issues of embodiment and identity were fiercely debated. Only five years later, while Internet stocks were going through the roof, little was left of the initial excitement in intellectual and artistic circles. Experimental techno culture missed out on the funny money. Recently there has been a steady stagnation of new media cultures, both in terms of concepts and funding. With millions of new users flocking onto the Net, the arts can no longer keep up and withdraw into their own little world of festivals, mailing lists and workshops. Whereas new media arts institutions, begging for goodwill, still portray artists as working at the forefront of technological developments, the reality is a different one. Multi-disciplinary goodwill is at an all time low. At best, the artist's new media products are 'demo design' as described by Lunenfeld. Often it does not even reach that level. New media arts, as defined by its few institutions rarely reach audiences outside of its own electronic arts subculture. The heroic fight for the establishment of a self-referential 'new media arts system' through a frantic differentiation of works, concepts and traditions, might be called a dead-end street. The acceptance of new media by leading museums and collectors will simply not happen. Why wait a few decades anyway? Why exhibit net art in white cubes? The majority of the new media organizations such as ZKM, the Ars Electronica Centre, ISEA, ICC or ACMI are hopeless in their techno innocence, being neither critical nor radically utopian in their approach. Hence, the new media arts sector, despite its steady growth, is getting increasingly isolated, incapable of addressing the issues of today's globalised world, dominated by (the war against) terror. Let's face it, technology is no longer 'new,' the markets are down and out and no one wants know about it anymore. Its little wonder the contemporary (visual) arts world is continuing its decade-old boycott of (interactive) new media works in galleries, biennales and shows like Documenta XI. A critical reassessment of the role of arts and culture within today's network society seems necessary. Let's go beyond the 'tactical' intentions of the players involved. The artist-engineer, tinkering on alternative human-machine interfaces, social software or digital aesthetics has effectively been operating in a self-imposed vacuum. Science and business have successfully ignored the creative community. Worse still, artists have been actively sidelined in the name of 'usability', pushed by a backlash movement against web design led by the IT-guru Jakob Nielsen. The revolt against usability is about to happen. Lawrence Lessig argues that Internet innovation is in danger. The younger generation is turning its back onon new media arts questions and if involved at all, operate as anti-corporate activists. After the dotcom crash the Internet has rapidly lost its imaginative attraction. File swapping and cell phones can only temporarily fill up the vacuum; the once so glamorous gadgets are becoming part of everyday life. This long-term tendency, now accelerating, seriously undermines future claims of new media. Another issue concerns generations. With video and expensive interactive installations being the domain of the '68 baby boomers, the generation of '89 has embraced the free Internet. But the Net turned out to be a trap for them. Whereas assets, positions and power remain in the hands of the ageing baby boomers, the gamble on the rise of new media did not pay off. After venture capital has melted away, there is still no sustainable revenue system in place for the Internet. The slow working educational bureaucracies have not yet grasped the new media malaise. Universities are still in the process of establishing new media departments. But that will come to a halt at some point. The fifty-something tenured chairs and vice-chancellors must feel good about their persistent sabotage. What's so new about new media anyway? Technology was hype after all, promoted by the criminals of Enron and WorldCom. It is sufficient for students to do a bit of email and web surfing, safeguarded within a filtered, controlled intranet. In the face of this rising techno-cynicism we urgently need to analyse the ideology of the greedy 90s and its techno-libertarianism. If we don't disassociate new media quickly from the previous decade, the isolation of the new media sector will sooner or later result in its death. Let's transform the new media buzz into something more interesting altogether - before others do it for us. 18.1 Re: <nettime> From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes McKenzie Wark nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Sat, 02 Nov 2002 01:26:33 -0500 Lovink and Schneider ask the right question in 'A Virtual World is Possible'. What is to be done? Unfortunately, they have not done it. Yes, there is a need for a political position outside of the dialectic of the street and cyberspace. Yes, there is a need for a new position for new media outside of the dialectic of the media market and the art market. And yes, the place to look is in deconstructing the techno-libertarian ideologies of the 90s. But what is required at this juncture is a tool with which to prise it open to discover how it worked. He was wrong about a lot of things, but Marx did enjoin us to ask what he called "the property question", and insisted that it was where the critical spirit begins and ends. And what if we ask the "property question" of the jumble of symptoms with which Lovink & Schneider confront us? The network of power starts to reveal itself more clearly. Did the new movements arise out of thin air? Or did they arise out of a new stage in the development of the commodity economy? At both the level of the tools it had at its disposal, and the range of issues it confronted, the new movement confronts a new class power. Only rarely is this class power named and identified at an abstract level. The symptoms of its (mis)rule have been charted by brave advocates and actvists. But we are all merely blind folks touching different parts of an elephant and trying to describe the totality from the detail we sense before us, in our fragment of everyday life. So let's ask the property question of all the fragments of resistance that appear to us in everyday life. Start in the underdeveloped world. How is it possible that the productive engines of commodity society find themselves shipped, by and large, out of the overdeveloped world and into the under- dveloped world? What new power makes it possible to consign the manufacturing level of production to places deprived of technical and knowledge infrastructure? A new division of labour makes it possible to cut the mere making of things off from all of their other properties. The research, design and marketing will remain, on the whole, in the over- developed world, and will be protected by a new and increasingly global regime of property, intellectual property. As for the rest, whole continents can compete for dubious honour of mere manufacturing. What makes this separation possible is at one and the same time a legal and a technical distinction. Information emerges as a separate realm, a world apart as Lovink has perceptively argued for some time. But he has not stopped to inquire is to how or why, and without first asking how or why we cannot get far with the big question,: what is to be done. So let's look closely at the way the development of a *vectoral* technology has made possible a relative separation from its materiality. Which is not to say that information is immaterial. Rather, it has an *abstract* relation to the material. It no longer matters to its integrity as information whether it is embodied in this cd-rom or that flashcard or that stack of paper. A virtual world is indeed possible, precisely because of this coming into existence of abstract information. But what is information? The product of a labor of encoding and decoding. Just as the commodity economy made manual labor abstract in the machine age, so too it has made intellectual labor abstract in the information age. But the virtual world finds itself constrained by a form of property alien to it. No longer confine to a particular materiality, information really does yearn to be free. But it is not free, it is everywhere in chains. It is forced into the constraint of a very new creation -- intellectual property. On the ruins of the commons that copyright and patent were once supposed to guarrantee arises an absolute privatisation of information as property. And so, with a whole new -- virtual -- continent to claim as its own, class power finds a new basis, and remakes that other world, the everyday world, in its image. The abstraction of information from materiality as a legal and technical possibility becomes the shape of the world. A world in which the mere embodiment of a concept in a commodity can be consigned to bidding wars between the desperate. This bifurcation affects both the agricultural and the manufacturing economies. The patents on seed stocks are of a piece with the copyrights on designer logos. Both are a means by which a new class power asserts its place in the world, based not on the ownership of land or of physical maunfacturing plant, but in the concepts and designs on which the world will be set to labour. In the overdeveloped world, one discovers symptoms of the same emerging totality. Workers in manufacturing struggle to hang on to jobs in an economy that they alone are no longer the only ones equipped to do. So called 'state monopoly capital' is a mere husk of its former self. The emerging class interest has a very different relation to the state. Meanwhile, there are the various phenomena of the 'new economy'. While the bubble may have burst, there is a risk in too low an evaluation of the significance of the media and communication revolution as an over reaction to the excessive optimism of the 90s. Just as railways and the telegraph created a boom and bust, but also created an enduring geography of economic and strategic power, so too has the latest, digital, phase in the development of the vector. One should not right off the military dimension to the new class power quite as readily as Lovink and Schneider do, either. On the one hand it is the old oil-power politics. But there is a new dimension, a new confidence in the ability to use the new vectoral military technologies as a cheap and efficient way of achieving global redistirbutions of power. The same abstraction of information from materiality that happens in technology and is sanctioned by intellectual property law is happening in military technology. The military wing of the new class interest wants a 'new' new world order to ratify its exercise. This is not your grandparents ruling class we are confronting here. It is a new entity, or a new entity in formation. Perhaps it is a new fraction of capital. Perhaps it is a new kind of ruling class altogether. Remember, there have been two, not one but two, phases to rule in the commodity econmy era. It has already passed through an agricultural and a manufacturing phase. In each case it developed out of the a distictive step in the abstraction of property law. First came the privatisation of land, and out of it a landlord class. Then came the privatisation of productive resources, a more mobile, labile kind of property, and a new ruling class -- the capitalist class proper. And perhaps, with the emergence of the new global regime of intellectual property, we witness the emergence of a new ruling class, what I would call the vectoralist class. As each ruling class is based on a more abstract form of property, and a more flexible kind of vector, than its predecessor, its mode of ruling also becomes more abstract, more intangible. Its ideologues would love to persuade us that the ruling class no longer even exists. And yet its handiwork are everywhere, in the subordination of the underdeveloped world to new regimes of slavery, to the slow motion implosion of maunfacturing economy in the overdeveloped world, to the deployment of ever faster, ever sleeker vectors along which ever more abstract flows of information shuttle, making the world over in the abstract image of the commodity. And what is to be done? One does not confront the new abstract totality with rhetorics of multiplicity alone. Rather, one looks for the abstraction at work in the world that is capable of producing such a multiplicity of everyday experiences of frustration, boredom and suffering. One asks the property question, and in asking it is lef toward a practice that constitutes the answer. This is where so-called new media art has proven to be both so useful at times, but so willing to cooperate in its own cooptation. When artists explore not just the technology, but its property dimension as well, then they create work that has the capacity to point beyond the privatisation of information that forms the basis of the power of the vectoral class. The new media art that matters is counter-vectoral. It offers itself as a tool for prising open the privatisation of information. "Information merely circles in a parallel world of its own", as Lovink and Schneider say, precisely because of the abstraction it undergoes when it becomes vectoral. The counter-vectoral reconnects information to the multiplicity by freeing it from the straightjacket of private property. Indeed, there can be no talk of 'multitude' until this aspect of its existence is properly understood. Multitudes do not exist independently of their means of communication. The freeing of that means of communication from the abstraction of the commodity form is the necessary step towards realising the counter-abstraction that is latent in the formal concept of the multitude. A virtual world -- virtual in the true sense -- is indeed possible. It is what is to be done. McKenzie Wark see also: A hacker manifesto http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html 18.2 Re: <nettime> From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes n_ik nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 4 Nov 2002 12:35:55 +1100 <McKenzie Wark wrote> >He was wrong about a lot of things, but Marx did enjoin us to ask what he >called "the property question", and insisted that it was where the >critical spirit begins and ends. And what if we ask the "property >question" of the jumble of symptoms with which Lovink & Schneider confront >us? The network of power starts to reveal itself more clearly. > >Did the new movements arise out of thin air? Or did they arise out of a >new stage in the development of the commodity economy? At both the level >of the tools it had at its disposal, and the range of issues it >confronted, the new movement confronts a new class power. Only rarely is >this class power named and identified at an abstract level. The symptoms >of its (mis)rule have been charted by brave advocates and actvists. But we >are all merely blind folks touching different parts of an elephant and >trying to describe the totality from the detail we sense before us, in our >fragment of everyday life. I think the class struggle many 'counter-globalisation' protesters are engaged in is not so much a new class struggle but an age-old one. the bulk of the actions that have taken place against the global institutions of capitalism in the last 5 or so years have taken place in the countries of the global South - Bolivia, South Africa, India, Mexico - or in countries "over the horizon", out of site of CNN - South Korea etc. There isn't a single day where a protest, blockade, occupation, etc takes place against the array of institutions, corporations and governments of the North. I would say that the overwhelming amount of protesters, activists, revolutionaries, et al around the world are engaged with an old class working through relatively new global mechanisms. The issues they have been confronted with since the beginnings of colonisation and then industrialisation are still very much the same - land, dignity, autonomy, freedom But the main point I wanted to address is the question "Did the new movements arise out of thin air? Or did they arise out of a new stage in the development of the commodity economy?". To which the short answer is they arose out of a set of catalytic 'encuentro's' organised by the Zapatistas and then by string of international actions organised through the Peoples Global Action network=8A [from http://www/agp.prg] "The sense of possibility that this uprising gave to millions of people across the globe was extraordinary. In 1996, the Zapatistas, with trepidation as they thought no-one might come, sent out an email calling for a gathering, called an "encuentro" (encounter), of international activists and intellectuals to meet in specially constructed arenas in the Chiapas jungle to discuss commontactics, problems and solutions. Six thousand people attended, and spent days talking and sharing their stories of struggle against the common enemy: capitalism. This was followed a year later by a gathering in Spain, where the idea for the construction of a more action focused network, to be named Peoples' Global Action (PGA), was hatched by a group made up of activists from ten of the largest and most innovative social movements. They included the Zapatistas, Movimento Sem Terra, (the Brazilian Landless Peasants Movement who occupy and live on large tracts of unproductive land) and the Karnataka State Farmers Union (KRRS), renowned for their "cremate Monsanto" campaign which involved burning fields of Genetically Modified crops. The group (who became the PGA convenors committee, a role that rotates every year) drafted a document outlining some of the primary objectives and organisational principles of the emerging network. It outlined a firm rejection of appeals to those in power for reforms to the present world order. A support for direct action as a means of communities reclaiming control over their lives, and an organisational philosophy based on autonomy and decentralisation. In February 1998, Peoples' Global Action was born. For the first time ever the worlds grassroots movements were beginning to talk and share experiences without the mediation of the media or Non Governmental Organisations (NGO's)." The string of actions - that arguably gave birth the current 'wave' of actions and movements of movements - started in May 1998 with an international day of action against the world bank. This was quickly followed by an 'intercontinental caravan' that traveled through Europe, and he 'J18' international day of action [you can read the reports here: http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/global/j18.htm]. The next on the list of actions was N30 - or what CNN dubbed 'Seattle' Now, I'm not just nit-picking here. Its important to remember what has come before - especially the histories of resistance. Its saddening to note that the 'counter-globalisation' movements, with their histories bound up with those of the Zapatistas - the ones who reminded us that remembering is a weapon - can be turned from an international network and a series of projects based on decentralised and confrontational actions into 'Seattle' - into a singular movement born from a city at the heart of Empire. Or at least that its mythology - one of its most potent weapons - can be so easily blunted by a TV camera, and that the faces of resistance can be so easily obscured. And I think its not just the richness of the histories that this change obscures - it is also the vastness of the alternatives that it is throwing up that is obscured. Its not true that they don't offer 'alternatives' the current order of things. From farming methods, to communal land use, to systems of regional autonomy to mixed economies and markets, new mythologies and way of interacting with each other, from new media forms, and rich systems of participatory decision making to the rediscoveries of ways of community /barrio governance - the counter-globalisation movements, while not presenting programs for change, are most definitely creating 'the new in the old'. The question as I see it is "can the strategy of the 'new in the old' work on a large enough scale?". Are the networks strong enough to fight these institutions, the corporations, and the governments of the North and win? Or will it all have to collapse before change can be made? -- + since I refuse 'reality' and since for me what is possible is already partly real, I am indeed a utopian ... a partisan 18.3 Re: <nettime> From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes McKenzie Wark nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 04 Nov 2002 13:38:26 -0500 n_ik makes the valuable point that class struggle in most of the world appears not to be about information, but to be about land. Indeed, the *first*, not the second or the third, moments of commodification is very much in progress. For many people the expropriation of their communal land rights is their direct experience of commodification, in terms of what it takes from them. However, i think this process is overlaid by two other moments of commodification: indistrialisation, or the commodification of fungible productive resources, but also vectoralisation, or the commodification of information and its means of abstraction, the vector. If one breaks it down thus, one can use this distinction as an analytic for thinking about possible alliances, and possible conflicts, between the subordinated classes in each of the three distinct circuits of commodification. It seems to me greatly clarifying to think about a complex articulation of class struggles, than to posit a 'multitude' arraigned against 'globalisation', where neither of those terms have much historical analytic specificity. One can certianly trace a very significant movement that arises out the Zapatista experience, but it might be a bit limiting to restrict one's sense of a counter history to that one strand. Or to ignore how much that movement owed to an emergent information environment, both in terms of what it contronted and what it was able to use as vector for 'counter-global' (call it what you like) formation. k 18.4 Re: <nettime> From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes Kermit Snelson nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 4 Nov 2002 13:40:35 -0800 "As the situationists concluded, the true fulfillment of art ultimately implies going beyond the boundaries of art, bringing creativity and adventure into the critique and liberation of every aspect of life; and first of all into challenging the submissive conditioning that prevents people from creating their own adventures." -- Ken Knabb [1] New media art must indeed fulfill and not simply continue to "demo" its alternative vision of human relations. Geert and Florian are right to ask "what is to be done" to bring this about. However, the passage I just quoted came to mind as I read their analysis, and I'm not sure whether it serves them better as a summary or as a rebuke. First of all, I don't see much in their post about "challenging the submissive conditioning that prevents people from creating their own adventures." I see quite the opposite, in fact; namely, an emphasis on the use of new media art as a tool for shaping mass psychology. In their own words, they are looking for a "solution to how alternative new media models can be raised to the level of mass (pop) culture." They say that the most important lesson that artists and activists might have to learn from the fall of the '90s techno-libertarian dotcommania is the "importance of marketing." They speak of a "virtual world" as something consisting of "software, interfaces and alternative standards" that must be "installed." And they strongly suggest that what's standing in way of such an "installation" is that the "new media art" discourse is now linked in the public mind with a failed, obsolete and financially ruinous business fad that "no one wants know about [...] anymore." So that means only that it's time to rebrand the product, eh? Geert and Florian propose such a rebranding in two forms. First, they say it's imperative that the new media art scene disassociate itself from the failed '90s "New Economy" techno-libertarianism by radically critiquing it. Well, Geert co-founded nettime seven years ago to do just that. Apparently with little success, if their analysis of the present state of new media art is correct. Second, they call for the abandonment of radical left theory in favor of a "new ethical-aesthetic paradigm" that "lives on in the pragmatic consciousness of affective labour" consisting of nerdiness, friendship and political action. This political action, in turn, is motivated by a very broad conception of "openness" that makes a connection, by means of considerable sophistry, between open source and open borders. Geert and Florian say that such a post-ideological, post-solidarity "digital multitude" is already a reality brought about by tactical media, and that "what is to be done" now is to bring this new social form "down to the level of production" by viewing this "multitude" as a producer of "experimental knowledge" whose "algorithms" must be encoded and decoded, all based on the core realization that "everyone is an expert." But it's simply not true that "everyone is an expert", certainly not in any case at the "level of production", and it's in this conception of the multitude where I believe Geert and Florian's argument breaks down. I have never understood how the concept of "multitude" that Negri, joined by Geert and Florian, distinguishes from the "masses" by emphasizing the former's lack of a common trait, ideology or indeed any distinguishing idea at all [2], differs from the more traditional concept of "mob". McKenzie Wark in his response seems to pick up on this problem with Geert and Florian's argument, arguing that no "digital multitude" will be able to do "what is to be done" without first achieving class consciousness based on a common understanding of its relation to the currently emerging forms of intellectual property law. Whether or not MacKenzie's own rewrite of the Communist Manifesto around IP law is the way forward, he is certainly right to insist that there's still something to the Marxist view that masses influence history only when formed by an idea. Certainly more than Geert and Florian seem willing to credit, anyway. But MacKenzie also fails to reach the heart of what's wrong with Geert and Florian's argument. Once again, I believe it lies near their idea that "everyone is an expert." To be sure, everyone is _potentially_ an expert. But no one, not even a genius, becomes an expert without the training, education and discipline necessary for creative and critical thought. Training and education involve the mastery of rules, techniques and ideas. They are what any human culture is all about. On the other hand, it is impossible to found a culture on despair, nihilism and a principled rejection of all ideas and debate, even if one chooses to call such an approach "tactical media", "radical media pragmatism" or even "art". A "new ethical-aesthetic paradigm" that consists of only consumption, shopping, Indymedia-style parasitism, electronic vandalism and other forms of "negative thinking" [3] will never do anything but provide the motor force of Empire. This is what Hardt and Negri really meant by "resistance is prior to power" [4], concealing their real purpose in this instance not with their usual obfuscation, but with clarity. Empire will be defeated not by applying the tools of mass psychology to create a "multitude," but by educating ourselves and others so that such tools may be resisted. We must cultivate our ability to propose answers, make distinctions, construct coherent arguments, refine our concepts, inform our judgments and, yes, make moral choices. Such abilities are the basis of any truly effective activism, just as they are the basis of any truly effective life. Renouncing all these things and calling that "liberating" will only ensure our slavery. There is no knowledge to be decoded in mindless action, just as there is no freedom in license. Masses are creative and free; mobs are not. Konrad Becker's recent post to nettime notwithstanding, there's a radical difference between propaganda and education. The difference is precisely that education allows one to challenge "the submissive conditioning that prevents people from creating their own adventures," as Ken Knabb writes in the passage I chose to open this post. Mass propaganda techniques based on a "fascination for authoritarian models" [5], even when wielded by well-intentioned media activists, can accomplish only the opposite. Kermit Snelson Notes: [1] Knabb, Ken; _The Relevance of Rexroth_, Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, 1990, p.73 [2] Cf. Hardt and Negri, _Empire_, p.103 [3] Lovink, Geert, _Dark Fiber_, MIT, 2002, p.22; cf. Marcuse [4] Hardt and Negri, _op.cit._, p.360 [5] Lovink, _op.cit._, p.26 18.5 A Possible World is Virtual (was: <nettime> From Tactical Media toDigital Multitudes) Gabriel Pickard nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Tue, 05 Nov 2002 10:28:37 +0100 A possible world is virtual. absolutely. _This_world_is_always_fucking_impossible. ... There's something lovely about it _ that i just can't quite place my finger on. .. speak thus - and rub your finger a'll' over. that is, compelexity. and it won't help (much) to recognize and declare it as such (don't even _try to understand). though the question may be: this? world? ok, it should be clear that a _this_world_ (in _this_ (absolute (non-multiple)) sense) does not exist. So we already have one reason why? a possible world is so utterly virtual. this is of course a question of reality and reality multiplicity and production, which presents itself asa painful and fascinating issue to a media-activist. what is often overlooked, though, is that reality != media. The term "world' even more so. I certainly do not want to criticize those who analyse and fight the evil corporate media in its malicious influence on mass realization ,but as important as this is, reality is about more than just media. media in the narrow space of communication connects information and material, virtuality and actuality. reality is nothing else but a borderline, discerning in&out, real&irreal. maybe we should get past the point of pushing around this borderline, it's all existence -anyway. much rather, i'd propose we reflect upon the everyday, unspoken implications of our "doing media| because if we realize that information is independent parallel existence, this abstractive "interface' becomes quite interesting. "doing media' and 'doing information" are two different things. now ishould say that we can hardly get around doing information, but media is still a much more alterable mass than we might think. eventhough it may seem old, i'd like to suggest that we rethink- remake- redo. if our media is discontenting, question its foundations - build a new new media -!realy /if our movement seems frustrating, poses: wastun?, why not move something else, somewhere else _and_under_another_name_. that will -andis- being done anyway. wastun?so_ what only may be tried, is both an immediate and metamediate radicalization in addition to mediate radicalism. concerning bubble&burst: now to me, as potential early representant of the generation following the gen. of 89, the whole dotcom thing had a lot to do with adolescence. with growing pains, puberty and confusion. growing up with people envying you for all the new, new developments you'll witness - and pitying you for not being able to cash in and grow in power at the beginning of the "long boom". nowadays, people don't philosophize over the future too much, they just tell you to work hard and get a good job. ;-} Maybe this can help with the analysis, seeing it all as the growing up of the 21st century. and don't let them fool you, even though it's already feeling like midlife-crisis, that's all just some youthful morosity. There's more developments around the corner the dream of the open technological future is not over yet keepitup, Gabriel. -- Gabriel Pickard what? human. http://werg.demokratica.de werGf314 18.6 Re: <nettime> From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes Are Flagan nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Tue, 05 Nov 2002 12:20:26 -0500 To have multitudes, then, we need a gathering idea for them, which quickly brings us back to the proverbial Catch 22. The first symptom of this stalemate conundrum is arguably how it is theorized here. Operatives like left and right, mass and mob, network and empire are passive placeholders for multitudes that are conveniently pushed around into pigeonholes carved by persuasive rhetoric, as if they were not already deeply conflicted "multitudes" themselves. This is of course how one traditionally arrives at a general idea about the specific, tellingly called theory from its Greek root. The first step toward the stated aims must surely be to cease this nonsense and interject on less grandiose terms. As one of the heralded beats remarked on leave from the asylum: "A star is as far as the eye can see and as close as my eye is to me." -af 18.7 Re: <nettime> From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes David Garcia nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 07 Nov 2002 07:36:41 +0100 In their article In their article Florian Schneider and Geert Lovink declare that "the new social movements (wrongly labeled anti-globalisation) are in danger of "getting stuck in self-satisfying protest mode, running the risk "of getting stuck at the level of a global 'demo design,' no longer grounded in actual topics and local situations." They then ask the key question "how to jump beyond the prototype?" The answer to their question lies above all in specificity. In being able to generalize effectively (with explanatory power) from the lived experience of involvement in *specific* campaigns. In December Gregg Bordowitz will be moderating a session in the New York Tactical Media Lab <http://n5m4.org/index.shtml?118+120+2450> His text (below) suggests ways of addressing a number of the questions raised by Geert and Florian including the function and meaning of art in relationship to politics. I hope this list finds Gregg's text as useful as I did on the recurring art question as it takes us beyond the rather fruitless obsessing about the "electronic arts sub-culture" and the demise of the dot.com era. (David Garcia) I'm Gregg Bordowitz, AIDS activist, video maker, writer and teacher. I will be facilitating the discussion at the December TML on Sunday the 15th. It will focus on HIV/AIDS media activism. Planning for that day is coming more into focus. Here are some of the ideas that I have been thinking about that could come up within the discussion. I am a long time activist who has made much work, both in video and in writing that addresses the organizing problems specific to AIDS activism. Here are some of the presumptions I make going into our discussion. Be kind, these are rough working notes. 1) The AIDS crisis is still beginning. In the US there is much fatigue around the issue of AIDS and a profound misconception that the epidemic is contained. Around the world, in Africa, South America, Eastern Europe and Asia, places where the epidemic is out of control, there are growing activist movements. A particular hot spot to look at now is South Africa. The issues that internationalist AIDS activism currently focuses upon have the potential to explode and alter a number of governing discursive and juridical regimes concerning trade, industrial production and post-industrial production. International AIDS activists are questioning and applying pressure regarding the production and distribution of generic pharmaceuticals. This is interesting to us for a number of reasons. First, I am on the AIDS drug cocktail myself and so the issue is potentially central to my survival. Second, the juridical regimes that govern international patent law are the same whether applied to pharmaceuticals, software or feature films. (The TRIPS agreement covers all this.) All of us have a stake in copyright law -- academics, media activists, software designers, people interested in digital tech of all kinds. For media activists, the issue of affective labor and the management of the production and distribution of affective labor is an area of great concern in theory and practice. 2) You can't understand the global AIDS crisis without a working theory of globalization and analyzing the global AIDS crisis is a perfect way for forming a theory of globalization. You can get to almost any issue by way of an analysis of global AIDS -- poverty, borders, modes of production, etc. 3) Think about. There are millions of people with AIDS around the world, in every corner of the planet. What would happen if every person with AIDS demanded immediate care and access to lifesaving drugs? At the Barcelona AIDS conference this passed July, Nelson Mandela encouraged every person with AIDS, no matter where they are, what circumstances of poverty they live-in, to demand immediate care. This was profound. Everyone else was talking about scaling-up -- increasing the scale of funding and infrastructure to meet the dire needs of millions. That's an important discussion to have ( unfortunately now weighed down by bureaucratic infighting and the apathy of governments). BUT, Mandela gave a revolutionary message that addressed the individual,potentially millions of individuals. This is what Hardt and Negri are talking about in the book Empire, when they are trying to figure out "how to capture the multitude as a singularity." How can one come-up with an articulation available to individual use, an open, improvisational code, if you will, that links millions around a common goal, but allows for differences of context. (Yes back to the old problem of the Internationale. The Internationale without the Internationale. Arise, ye prisoners of international trade regimes and structural inequity!) 3) Politics and art. Media activist work must adopt the imperatives of a movement as its starting point, not its end. The work of media activism is not supplemental to any cause. it is its own cause. Media activist work does not earn its guarantee of relevance or truth from protests and activist efforts. Media activism must provide its own guarantees through form. The politics in political art, are the politics that occur when the work is encountered in real time. The politics of media activism are not to be found anywhere but in the work itself. Lastly, we must talk about aesthetics. Yes, as media activists, in particular our work must address questions of form. I advocate the cross breeding of documentary procedures with poetry and the concerns of structure usually reserved for conversations about music. 18.8 Re: <nettime> From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes Brian Holmes nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 7 Nov 2002 11:09:55 +0100 Here's some thoughts about various contributions to this thread, quite a useful one for me anyway, which David Garcia has now about capped off by contributing Gregg Bordowitz's insightful and even revolutionary reflections on AIDS and globalization. While awaiting the fusion of documentary and poetry :) 1. Kermit really doesn't like the slogan "everyone is an expert": ...no one, not even a genius, becomes an expert without the training, education and discipline necessary for creative and critical thought. Training and education involve the mastery of rules, techniques and ideas.... it is impossible to found a culture on despair, nihilism and a principled rejection of all ideas and debate, even if one chooses to call such an approach "tactical media", "radical media pragmatism" or even "art". [snip] Kermit, sometimes I wonder if you do any political organizing? You know, it might be great if leftists could only associate with people who had a clear sense of self, sharply honed critical faculties, a good background knowledge of all the issues, sound moral reflexes and a sense of coherency in their actions. Trouble is, these days that list of qualities probably better describes the majority of American voters who just gave Bush a mandate for holy war. "Negative thinking" is a philosopher's word for the difficult attempt to resist a badly oriented rationality, a predatory individualism, a malevolent discipline. But the sources of effective resistance don't just come from philosophy: they also come from the fringes of alienation and anger and despair, from the insights of artistic experience, from the sudden enthusiasms of technological change, sometimes from more obscure rejections of the status quo. One of the main issues today is that the majority of the "experts" never question the holy mantra of economic growth, or the unspoken credo of racist exclusion. Somehow that expertise has to be challenged, it's urgent. What Geert and Florian are doing is not just armchair resistance, they're trying to give fairly large numbers of people a possible way into political life, which is always about debate, even when that debate takes the form of a riot or a hacker attack. Did you ever stake your own physical freedom on an issue? Do you think someone who does might also have principles? The main thing right now is not to diss everyone off and claim the high ground. I mean, I appreciate your scholarship and also that you even take the time to apply it to what we're talking about here. What's dismaying, generally, is that the minority concerned about something other than their own greed spend half their time fighting with the people on their own side. We could use some subtler criticism. 2. I really liked Nik's post in this thread, recalling the role that the PGA and all the social movements associated with it have played in putting a new critique of capitalism seriously on the table. In the absence of that history and that continuing reality there would be no social forums, just a complicit center left waiting to cave in and abandon everything. Without a few principled riots the critique would have remained so "reasonable" that it'd just be contemplative nostalgia from a bunch of well-heeled artists, old profs or has-been communists. If you have problems with armchairs and you're not totally hooked on computer screens, check out the PGA for a change. I've found those meshworks to be the best way for me personally to experience and develop the kind of global cooperativity and solidarity that's going to be a broad basis of real resistance, as the days get darker and all of this bullshit economic crisis goes on wrecking people's lives. 3. I also liked the way that MacKenzie came back in his second post and talked about three major types of resistance, against three forms of domination, over land, the means of industrial production, and abstract or symbolic property. Those are actually Karl Polanyi's three anthropological categories: land, labor and money (or the social institution of exchange). Polanyi showed how the liberal fiction of self-regulating markets destroys all three, leading to violent conflict. The complexity and diversity of resistance, based on differing relations to those three categories, is a key reality, it's one that you have to respect in order to understand why different people stand up for their different struggles. Our job as intellectuals is to at least try to bridge the gap, whenever it's possible. But I don't think the "vector" thing adds much to the argument. Way back in the mid-eighties, people had analyzed what's still unfortunately true: finance capital reigns supreme in this phase of capitalism. Before the World Wide Web, abstract dollars and deutschmarks and yens were spinning madly around the planet in electronic circuits, and doing the kind of damage they're still doing today. And they did it in the 20s too, before electronics. The great grandaddy of intellectual property, the way of controlling land and labor and even commerce at a distance, is big money, stock, financial instruments, supported as always by national and international law that favors owners over non-owners. IP is just a new twist in that very old story. Again I agree with Nik. 4. All the above suggests the critique that I personally have of the concept of "multitudes." But first of all, to say it's a synonym of mob is just ridiculous. In all the autonomist texts the multitudes arise from subjective processes of individuation, which are opposed to the consensual figure of the "people" within the normalizing framework of the nation-state. The notion of the multitudes is a demand to go beyond the current premise of representative democracy: that a virtuous, unimpeachable collective will can be derived from just counting up votes or polling opinions in frameworks that ask only for knee-jerk reactions, and not for any kind of self-elaboration or collective participation (not even the kind you go through when you take part in a big demo). Paolo Virno puts the whole mob argument to rest in his article in the French journal _Multitudes_ #7, when he says that this singularizing process is actually an intensification of political sociality: "Far from regressing, singularity is refined and reaches its peak in acting together, in the plurality of voices, in short, in the public sphere." OK, for every Virno there are lots of sloppy uses of the word, and I agree with Kermit that it's right to point them out. It's really a word that needs to be kept at the level of philosophy, at least for a while anyway. But the fundamental problem I have with multitudes is the argument that says that we're all intellectual laborers now, or even if we're not, that's the key process, the same way as Marx said that industrial labor was the key process giving rise to the proletariat in the 19th century. I think the danger there is taking your own navel for the whole orange, or worse, for the whole planet. 6.25 billion post-fordists is just not yet reality. We intellectual laborers definitely have some scores to settle with finance capital and IP, and those are important struggles, for sure. But let's try and keep our intellectual eyes open for the ways that everyone else is living too. Brian Holmes 18.9 Re: <nettime> From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes Are Flagan nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 07 Nov 2002 13:37:33 -0500 On 11/7/02 5:09, "Brian Holmes" <brian.holmes {AT} wanadoo.fr> wrote: > We > intellectual laborers definitely have some scores to settle with > finance capital and IP, and those are important struggles, for sure. > But let's try and keep our intellectual eyes open for the ways that > everyone else is living too. The first score is of course how "we" are going to get paid for "our" work as "intellectuals." Our plan of action must be to isolate certain points and make them scarce by attributing them to the select few that pose as useful authorities on worthwhile topics. Let us further form close links where we quote each other ad infinitum to create the domino effect where arguments fall real nice and everyone included in the chain reaction make perfect sense. Oh, and we will of course embrace everything and everyone in our arguments, so the process should in no way be considered exclusive or exclusionary (although some _obvious_ exceptions will me made, based upon our consensus). This is not to say that I don't hungrily read or (dis)agree with you, but not so deep down I know that theory is some bullshit corner I paint myself into and admire the view. What happened to AIDS activism (re: GB words)? If I may reinterpret some of the sentiments about gay activism put forward by Crimp in Melancholia and Moralism; it is not just the case that it died as a result of gay neo-conservatives hijacking its agenda and thereby gaining the mainstream appeal that eventually defused it. The melancholia part relates to an inward mourning of its own potential; the loss of its own future as a culture of sexual possibility. Activism, in other words, grew to the point where it lost momentum and turned on itself as a melancholic impulse directed toward its past. My metaphoric guess is that the AIDS quilt can be seen as a pivotal moment, where this particular movement reached a critical mass in the west and individuation no longer mobilized but returned to alienation and loss. The from-to implications in the subject heading of this thread may signal a similar moment for "new media." Just listen to what people are saying; the post are infused with melancholy, for what never was and what is taken away. There are reasonings for hope not impulsive calls for action. So GB's invite for documentary and poetry to fuse, following the formula for a.g. intervention through formal invention, is the proven antidote to such a lethargic moment, and it deserves a little more than an emoticon smirk, despite its predictability. It also asks for theory to examine its boundaries and to think rather than quote. To rejuvenate the grassroots, we don't necessarily have to hose the lawn with another dose of Empire. Activism moves from the specific to the general and dies. I know it scares me that some deadbeat drunk [sorry, Mr. Corso] with an asylum record can capture more insight in a few stanzas than a whole legion of decorated laureates can in a whole library. To overcome such fears is the breach of theory. "Our" work as "intellectuals" is then done. "We" can move on. -af 18.10 Re: <nettime> From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes Keith Hart nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 7 Nov 2002 16:57:04 -0500 I always pay particular attention to messages from Kermit Snelson and Brian Holmes because I like where each of them is coming from. I have pursued this sense of an affinity with each of them off the list. So when Brian takes umbrage at Kermit's last post in this thread, I feel compelled to enter the fray. Max Weber wrote two great essays called "Science as a vocation" and "Politics as a vocation". He argued that a scientist must privilege reason, but good scientists are usually ethusiasts; whereas politicians move people by passion, but their arguments are more persuasive if they are reasonable. Despite this overlap, it is hard to be both a scientist and a politician at the same time. Weber was chief organiser of German sociology, a failed Liberal MP and an adviser to the Kaiser's wartime cabinet. He was also a depressive who knew about the psychological presures of trying to unify the two sides of his personality. What I like about Kermit's messages is their intellectual clarity. It is true that there is scholarship in them, but what impresses me is their quality of reasoning. It does not seem fair to me to ask him to justify these interventions in terms of a logic of political activism. I know that the politics of Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin are long dead, unrealised. But their contributions to the ongoing human conversation about a better world still inspire us. Do I care about their skills in mobilising people to man the barrivcades? Not really. It is the quality of their thinking that is moving. Maybe that makes me an intellectual more than a political activist. But it is clear that the people who matter were motivated by both concerns. I can't imagine that Kermit would be on this list unless he cared about the political troubles of our day, whether or not he goes out into the streets to get people committed to a cause. Equally, having read and studied all of Brian's contributions to this list, I find his intellectual and political visions equally inspiring. He wants things to get better soon, but he has put in some spadework on how to think about that. Maybe there is more feeling in his posts than Kermit's. But surely there is room for all of us in this game. Why attack a blatant intellectual for saying that he sees some flaws in the arguments of Geert and Florian? I should add a footnote on Polanyi, since Brian brought him up, not for the first time. This is not just a scholastic intervention. Polanyi, in The Great Transformation (1944), said that land, labour and capital were fictitious commodities. A commodity is something produced and sold. But nature, humanity and society (money) are not produced and therefore cannot be sold. If they are, something terrible happens to the relationship between society and nature, as formulated by Aristotle when he said that man is a political animal. The self-regulating market, as an utopian idea, ijnevitably inflicts damage on nature, humanity and society. Particular classes express resistance to that general damage. What this has to do with multitudes and mobs I cant guess. I prefer English words of one syllable (expressing the idea of mobility) to Latin words of three syllables (expressing the poetry of an intellectual class). Keith Hart 18.11 Re: <nettime> From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes porculus nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri, 8 Nov 2002 14:22:33 +0100 > I always pay particular attention to messages from Kermit Snelson and > Brian Holmes because I like where each of them is coming from. I have > pursued this sense of an affinity with each of them off the list. So when > Brian takes umbrage at Kermit's last post in this thread, I feel compelled > to enter the fray. being an heavy full of multitude beer earthling and dealing rather with fold kinda deleuzian one at chin & belly for recognizing my buds at the bar i am pretty amusing by some intellectual folklorik description of some impalpable anima who are meeting around here. yes i speak about projective body you have.. cause of course presently you 'see' me..& yes and see i am rather attracting and modeling by the apolinian lightning force, then kermit & brian are rather twining in some laurel & hardy brain shape ok ok ! the world is a vast land populated by so diverse knitting dark fiber female & male parishioner. but what about yourz..i would say, dark fiber made panz free ? 19.0 <nettime> Tactical Media & Conflicting Diagrams (draft chapter) Alexander Galloway nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Sun, 12 Jan 2003 11:54:40 -0500 Nettimers--I'm preparing a book manuscript on computer protocols and how they establish control in the seemingly anarchical Internet. I'm hoping that some of you will be able to read my draft chapter below on tactical media which tries to show how there are many interesting flaws in the protocological system of control. Please point out my mistakes before i send it to my editor! :-) thanks, -ag + + + "The Internet is like the Titanic. It is an instrument which performs extraordinarily well but which contains its own catastrophe."[1] —Paul Virilio Like many interesting social movements that may manifest themselves in a variety of ways, tactical media has an orthodox definition and a more general one. The orthodoxy comes from the new tech-savvy social movements taking place in an around the Western world and associated with media luminaries such as Geert Lovink, Ricardo Dominguez (with the Electronic Disturbance Theater) and Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). Tactical media is the term given to political uses of both new and old technologies, such as the organization of virtual sit-ins, campaigns for more democratic access to the Internet, or even the creation of new software products not aimed at the commercial market. "Tactical Media are what happens when the cheap 'do it yourself' media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture," write tactical media gurus Geert Lovink and David Garcia. "Tactical media are media of crisis, criticism and opposition."[2] Thus, tactical media means the bottom-up struggle of the networks against the power centers. (And of course the networks against the power centers who have recently reinvented themselves as networks!) But there is also a more general way of thinking about tactical phenomena within the media. That is to say, there are certain tactical effects that often only leave traces of their successes to be discovered later by the ecologists of the media. This might include more than would normally fit under the orthodox definition. Case in point: computer viruses. In a very bland sense they are politically bankrupt and certainly no friend of the tactical media practitioner. But in a more general sense they speak volumes on the nature of network-based conflict. For example computer viruses are incredibly effective at identifying anti-protocological technologies. They infect proprietary systems, and propagate through the homogeneity contained within them. Show me a computer virus and I'll show you proprietary software with a market monopoly. I will not repeat here the excellent attention given to the subject by CAE, Lovink and others. Instead in this chapter I would like to examine tactical media as those phenomena that are able to exploit flaws in protocological and proprietary command and control, not to destroy technology, but to sculpt protocol and make it better suited to people's real desires. "Resistances are no longer marginal, but active in the center of a society that opens up in networks,"[3] Hardt & Negri remind us. Likewise, techno-resistance is not outside of protocol, but is at its center. Tactical media propel protocol into a state of hypertrophy, pushing it further, in better and more interesting ways.  Computer Viruses While a few articles on viruses and worms appeared in the 1970s and beginning of the ‘80s,[4] Frederick Cohen's work in the early eighties is cited as the first sustained examination of computer viruses. He approached this topic from a scientific viewpoint, measuring infection rates, classifying different types of viruses, and so on. "The record for the smallest virus is a Unix "sh" command script. In the command interpreter of Unix, you can write a virus that takes only about 8 characters. So, once you are logged into a Unix system, you can type a 8 character command, and before too long, the virus will spread. That's quite small, but it turns out that with 8 characters, the virus can't do anything but reproduce. To get a virus that does interesting damage, you need around 25 or 30 characters. If you want a virus that evolves, replicates, and does damage, you need about 4 or 5 lines."[5] Cohen first presented his ideas on computer viruses to a seminar in 1983. His paper "Computer Viruses—Theory and Experiments" was published in 1984, and his Ph.D. dissertation titled "Computer Viruses" (University of Southern California) in 1986.      Cohen defines a computer virus as "a program that can ‘infect' other programs by modifying them to include a, possibly evolved, version of itself."[6] Other experts agree: "a virus is a self-replicating code segment which must be attached to a host executable."[7] Variants in the field of malicious code include worms and Trojan Horses. A worm, like a virus, is a self-replicating program but one that requires no host to propagate. A Trojan Horse is a program which appears to be doing something useful, but also executes some piece of undesirable code hidden to the user. In the literature viruses are almost exclusively characterized as hostile or harmful. They are often referred to completely in the negative, as in "anti-virus software" or virus prevention, or as one author calls it, a "high-tech disease." They are considered nearly exclusively in the context of detection, interception, identification, and removal. Why is this the case? Viral marketing, emergent behavior, self-replicating systems—these concepts are all the rage at the turn of the millennium. Yet computer viruses gain from none of these positive associations. They are thought of as a plague used by terrorists to wreak havoc on the network. So why did computer viruses become so closely connected with the viral metaphor in biology? Why think of self-replicating programs as a "virus" and not simply a parasitic nuisance, or a proper life form? Even the father of computer virus science, Cohen, thought of them as a form of artificial life[8] and recognized the limitations of the biological analogy. "[C]onsider a biological disease that is 100% infectious, spreads whenever animals communicate, kills all infected animals instantly at a given moment, and has no detectable side effect until that moment,"[9] wrote Cohen, identifying the ultimate inaccuracy of the analogy. How did self-replicating programs become viruses? For example, if viruses had emerged a decade later in the late-1990s, it is likely that they would have a completely difference socio-cultural meaning. They would most certainly be thought of more as a distributed computing system (like SETI {AT} home) or an artificial life experiment (like Tom Ray's Tierra), or an artwork (like Mark Daggett's email worm, vcards), or as a nuisance (spam), or as a potential guerilla marketing tool (adware)—not a biological infestation. Computer viruses acquired their current discursive position because of a unique transformation that transpired in the mid-1980s around the perception of technology. In fact several phenomena, including computer hacking, acquired a distinctly negative characterization during this period of history because of the intense struggle waging behind the scenes between proprietary and protocological camps. My hypothesis is this: early on, computer viruses were identified with the AIDS epidemic. It is explicitly referenced in much of the literature on viruses, making AIDS both the primary biological metaphor and primary social anxiety informing the early discourse on computer viruses. In that early mode, the virus itself was the epidemic. Later, the discourse on viruses turns toward weaponization and hence terrorism. Here, the virus author is the epidemic. Today the moral evaluation of viruses is generally eclipsed by the search for their authors, who are prosecuted as criminals and often terrorists. The broad viral epidemic itself is less important that the criminal mind that brings it into existence (or the flaws in proprietary software that allow it to exist in the first place). Thus, by the late 1990s viruses are the visible indices of a search for evil-doers within technology, not the immaterial, anxious fear they evoked a decade earlier under the AIDS crisis. Computer viruses appeared in a moment in history where the integrity and security of bodies, both human and technological, was considered extremely important. Social anxieties surrounding both AIDS and the war on drugs testify to this. The AIDS epidemic in particular is referenced in much of the literature on viruses.[10] This makes sense because of the broad social crisis created by AIDS in the mid to late 1980s (and beyond). "In part," writes Ralf Burger, "it seems as though a hysteria is spreading among computer users which nearly equals the uncertainty over the AIDS epidemic."[11] A good example of this discursive pairing of AIDS and computer viruses is seen in the February 1, 1988 issue of Newsweek. Here an article titled "Is Your Computer Infected?," which reports on computer viruses affecting hospitals and other institutions, is paired side-by-side with a medical article on AIDS. Consider two examples of this evolving threat paradigm. The Jerusalem virus[12] was first uncovered in December 1987 at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Isreal. "It was soon found that the virus was extremely widespread, mainly in Jerusalem, but also in other parts of the country, especially in the Haifa area,"[13] wrote professor Yisrael Radai. Two students, Yuval Rakavy and Omri Mann, wrote a counter-program to seek out and delete the virus. Mystery surrounds the origins of the virus. As Frederick Cohen writes, terrorists are suspected of authoring this virusbecause  it was timed to destroy data precisely on the first Friday the 13th it encountered, which landed on May 13, 1988 and coincided with the day commemorating forty years since the existence of a Palestinian state.[14] (A subsequent outbreak also happened on Friday, January 13th 1989 in Britain.) The Edmonton Journal called it the work of a "saboteur." This same opinion was voiced by The New York Times, who reported that the Jerusalem virus "was apparently intended as a weapon of political protest."[15] Yet Radai claims that in subsequent, off-the-record correspondence, the Times reporter admitted that he was "too quick to assume too much about this virus, it's author, and its intent."[16] In the end it is of little consequence whether or not the virus was written by the PLO. What matters is that this unique viral threat was menacing enough to influence the judgment of the media (and also Cohen) to believe, and perpetuate the belief, that viruses have a unique relationship to terrorists. Words like "nightmare," "destroy," "terrorist," and "havoc" pervade the Times report. Second, consider the "AIDS Information Introductory Diskette Version 2.0" Disk. On December 11, 1989, the PC Cyborg Corporation mailed approximately 10,000[17] computer diskettes to two direct mail lists compiled from the subscribers to PC Business World and names from the World Health Organization's 1988 conference on AIDS held in Stockholm.[18] The disk carried the title "AIDS Information Introductory Diskette Version 2.0," and presents an informational questionnaire to the user and offers an assessment of the user's risk levels for AIDS based on their reported behavior. The disk also acted as a Trojan Horse containing a virus. The virus damages file names on the computer and fills the disk to capacity. The motives of the virus author are uncertain in this case, although it is thought to be a rather ineffective form of extortion as users of the disk were required to mail payment of $189 (for a limited license) or $378 (for a lifetime license) to a post office box in Panama. The virus author was eventually discovered to be an American named Joseph Popp who was extradited to Britain in February 1991 to face charges but was eventually dismissed as being psychiatrically unfit to stand trial.[19] He was later found guilty in absentia by an Italian court. Other AIDS-related incidents include the early Apple II virus "Cyberaids," the AIDS virus from 1989 which displays "Your computer now has AIDS" in large letters, followed a year later by the AIDS II virus which performs a similar infraction. So here are two threat paradigms, terrorism and AIDS, which characterize the changing discursive position of computer viruses from the 1980s to ‘90s. While the AIDS paradigm dominated in the late ‘80s, by the late ‘90s computer viruses would become weaponized and more closely resemble the terrorism paradigm. The AIDS epidemic in the 1980s had a very specific discursive diagram. With AIDS, the victims became known, but the epidemic itself was unknown. There emerged a broad, immaterial social anxiety. The biological became dangerous and dirty. All sex acts became potentially deviant acts and therefore suspect. But with terrorism there exists a difference discursive diagram. With terror the victims are rarely known. Instead knowledge is focused on the threat itself—the strike happened here, at this time, with this weapon, by this group, and so on. If AIDS is an invisible horror, then terror is an irrational horror. It confesses political demands one minute, then erases them another (while the disease has no political demands). The State attacks terror with all available manpower, while it systematically ignores AIDS. Each shows a different exploitable flaw in protocological management and control. While the shift in threat paradigms happened in the late 1980s for computer viruses, the transformation was long in coming. Consider the following three dates. In the 1960s in places like Bell Labs,[20] Xerox PARC and MIT scientists were known to play a game called Core War. In this game two self-replicating programs were released into a system. The programs battled over system resources and eventually one side came out on top. Whoever could write the best program would win. These engineers were not virus writers, nor were they terrorists or criminals. Just the opposite, they prized creativity, technical innovation and exploration. Core War was a fun way to generate such intellectual activity. The practice existed for several years unnoticed. "In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises," said Ken Thompson, co-developer of the UNIX operating system, in 1983. "One of the favorites was to write the shortest self-reproducing program."[21] The engineer A. K. Dewdney recounts an early story at, we assume, Xerox PARC about a self-duplicating program called Creeper which infested the computer system and had to be brought under control by another program designed to neutralize it, Reaper.[22] Dewdney brought to life this battle scenario using his own gaming language called Redcode. Jump ahead to 1988. At 5:01:59pm[23] on November 2 Robert Morris, a 23-year-old graduate student at Cornell University and son of a prominent computer security engineer at the National Computer Security Center (a division of the NSA), released an email worm into the ARPANET. This self-replicating program entered approximately 60,000[24] computers in the course of a few hours, infecting between 2,500 and 6,000 of them. While it is notoriously difficult to calculate such figures, some speculations put the damage caused by Morris's worm at over $10,000,000. On July 26, 1989 he was indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. After pleading innocent, in the spring of 1990 he was convicted and sentenced to three years probation, fined $10,000 and told to perform 400 hours of community service. Cornell expelled him, calling it "a juvenile act,"[25] while Morris's own dad labeled it simply "the work of a bored graduate student."[26] While the media cited Morris's worm as "the largest assault ever on the nation's computers,"[27] the program was largely considered a sort of massive blunder, a chain reaction that spiraled out of control through negligence. As Bruce Sterling reports: "Morris said that his ingenious ‘worm' program was meant to explore the Internet harmlessly, but due to bad programming, the worm replicated out of control."[28] This was a problem better solved by the geeks, not the FBI, thought many at the time. "I was scared," admitted Morris, "it seemed like the worm was going out of control."[29] Morris's peers in the scientific community considered his prosecution unnecessary. As reported in UNIX Today!, only a quarter of those polled thought Morris should go to prison, and, as the magazine testified, "most of those who said ‘Yes' to the prison question added something like, ‘only a minimum security prison—you know, like the Watergate people vacationed at.'"[30] Thus while not unnoticed, Morris's worm was characterized as a mistake not an overt, criminal act. Likewise his punishment was relatively lenient for someone convicted of such a massive infraction. Ten years later in 1999, after what was characterized as the largest Internet man hunt ever, a New Jersey resident named David Smith was prosecuted for creating Melissa, a macro virus that spreads using the Microsoft Outlook and Word programs. It reportedly infected over 100,000 computers worldwide and caused $80 million in damage (as assessed by the number of hours computer administrators took to clean up the virus). While Melissa was generally admitted to have been more of a nuisance than a real threat, Smith was treated as a hard criminal not a blundering geek. He pleaded guilty to 10 years and a $150,000 fine. With Smith, then, self-replicating programs flipped 180 degrees. The virus is now indicative of criminal wrongdoing. It has moved through it's biological phase, characterized by the associations with AIDS, and effectively been weaponized. Moreover criminal blame is identified with the virus author himself who is thought of not simply as a criminal but as a cyber-terrorist. A self-replicating program is no longer the hallmark of technical exploration, as it was in the early days, nor is it (nor was it ever) a canary in the coal mine warning of technical flaws in proprietary software, nor is it even viral; it is a weapon of mass destruction. From curious geek to cyber terrorist. [...] Conflicting Diagrams "Netwar is about the Zapatistas more than the Fidelistas, Hamas more than the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the American Christian Patriot movement more than the Ku Klux Klan, and the Asian Triads more than the Costa Nostra."[61] —John Arquilla & David Ronfeldt Throughout the years new diagrams (also called graphs or organizational designs) have appeared as solutions or threats to existing ones. Bureaucracy is a diagram. Hierarchy is one too, so is peer-to-peer. Designs come and go, useful asset managers at one historical moment, then disappearing, or perhaps fading only to reemerge later as useful again. The Cold War was synonymous with a specific military diagram—bilateral symmetry, mutual assured destruction (MAD), massiveness, might, containment, deterrence, negotiation; the war against drugs has a different diagram—multiplicity, specificity, law and criminality, personal fear, public awareness. This book is largely about one specific diagram, or organizational design, called distribution, and its approximate relationship in a larger historical transformation involving digital computers and ultimately the control mechanism called protocol.[62] In this diagramatic narrative it is possible to pick sides and describe one diagram as the protagonist and another as the antagonist. Thus the rhizome is thought to be the solution to the tree,[63] the wildcat strike the solution to the boss's control, Toyotism[64] the solution to institutional bureaucracy, and so on. Alternately, terrorism is thought to be the only real threat to state power, the homeless punk-rocker a threat to sedentary domesticity, the guerrilla a threat to the war machine, the temporary autonomous zone a threat to hegemonic culture, and so on. This type of conflict is in fact a conflict between different social structures, for the terrorist threatens not only through fear and violence, but specifically through the use of a cellular organizational structure, a distributed network of secretive combatants, rather than a centralized organizational structure employed by the police and other state institutions. Terrorism is a sign that we are in a transitional moment in history. (Could there ever be anything else?) It signals that historical actors are not in a relationship of equilibrium, but instead are grossly mismatched. It is often observed that, due largely to the original comments of networking pioneer Paul Baran, the Internet was invented to avoid certain vulnerabilities of nuclear attack. In Baran's original vision, the organizational design of the Internet involved a high degree of redundancy, such that destruction of a part of the network would not threaten the viability of the network as a whole. After World War II, strategists called for moving industrial targets outside of urban cores in a direct response to fears of nuclear attack. Peter Galison calls this dispersion the "constant vigilance against the re-creation of new centers."[65] These are the same centers that Baran derided as an "Achilles Heel"[66] and what he longed to purge from the telecommunications network. "City by city, country by country, the bomb helped drive dispersion,"[67] Galison continues, highlighting the power of the A-bomb to drive the push towards distribution in urban planning. Whereas the destruction of a fleet of Abrams tanks would certainly impinge upon Army battlefield maneuvers, the destruction of a rack of Cisco routers would do little to slow down broader network communications. Internet traffic would simply find a new route, thus circumventing the downed machines.[68] (In this way, destruction must be performed absolutely, or not at all. "The only way to stop Gnutella," comments WiredPlanet CEO Thomas Hale on the popular file sharing protocol, "is to turn off the Internet."[69] And this is shown above in our examination of protocol's high penalties levied against deviation. One is completely compatible with a protocol, or not at all.) Thus the Internet can survive attacks not because it is stronger than the opposition, but precisely because it is weaker. The Internet has a different diagram than nuclear attack; it is in a different shape. And that new shape happens to be immune to the older. All the words used to describe the World Trade Center after the attacks of September 11, 2001 revealed its design vulnerabilities vis-ŕ-vis terrorists: it was a tower, a center, an icon, a pillar, a hub. Conversely, terrorists are always described with a different vocabulary: they are cellular, networked, modular, and nimble. Groups like Al-Qaeda specifically promote a modular, distributed structure based on small autonomous groups. They write that new recruits "should not know one another," and that training sessions should be limited to "7 - 10 individuals." They describe their security strategies as "creative" and "flexible."[70] This is indicative of two conflicting diagrams. The first diagram is based on the strategic massing of power and control, while the second diagram is based on the distribution of power into small, autonomous enclaves. "The architecture of the World Trade Center owed more to the centralized layout of Versailles than the dispersed architecture of the Internet," wrote Jon Ippolito after the attacks. "New York's resilience derives from the interconnections it fosters among its vibrant and heterogeneous inhabitants. It is in decentralized structures that promote such communal networks, rather than in reinforced steel, that we will find the architecture of survival."[71] In the past the war against terrorism resembled the war in Viet Nam, or the war against drugs—conflicts between a central power and an elusive network. It did not resemble the Gulf War, or World War II, or other conflicts between states. "As an environment for military conflict," the New York Times reported, "Afghanistan is virtually impervious[72] to American power." (In addition to the stymied US attempt to route Al-Qaeda post-September 11th is the failed Soviet occupation in the years following the 1978 coup, a perfect example of grossly mismatched organizational designs.) Today being "impervious" to American power is no small feat. The category shift that defines the difference between state power and guerilla force shows that through a new diagram,guerillas, terrorists and the like can gain a foothold against their opposition. But as Ippolito points out this should be our category shift too, for anti-terror survival strategies will arise not from a renewed massing of power on the American side, but precisely from a distributed (or to use his less precise term, decentralized) diagram. Heterogeneity, distribution, communalism are all features of this new diagramatic solution. In short, the current global crisis is one between centralized, hierarchical powers and distributed, horizontal networks. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, two researchers at the RAND Corporation who have written extensively on the hierarchy-network conflict, offer a few propositions for thinking about future policy:   ˇ Hierarchies have a difficult time fighting networks. [...] ˇ It takes networks to fight networks. [...] ˇ Whoever masters the network form first and best will gain major advantages.[73]   These comments are incredibly helpful for thinking about tactical media and the roll of today's political actor. It gives subcultures reason to rethink their strategies vis-ŕ-vis the mainstream. It forces us to rethink the techniques of the terrorist. It also raises many questions, including what happens when "the powers that be" actually evolve into networked power (which is already the case in many sectors). In recent decades the primary conflict between organizational designs has been between hierarchies and networks, an asymmetrical war. However, in the future we are likely to experience a general shift downward into a new bilateral organizational conflict—networks fighting networks. "Bureaucracy lies at the root of our military weakness," wrote advocates of military reform in the mid eighties. "The bureaucratic model is inherently contradictory to the nature of war, and no military that is a bureaucracy can produce military excellence."[74] While the change to a new unbureaucratic military is on the drawing board, the future network-centric military—an unsettling notion to say the least—is still a ways away. Nevertheless networks of control have invaded our life in other ways though, in the form of the ubiquitous surveillance, biological informatization and other techniques discussed in the earlier chapter on power. The dilemma, then, is that while hierarchy and centralization are almost certainly politically tainted due to their historical association with fascism and other abuses, networks are both bad and good. Drug cartels, terror groups, black hat hacker crews and other denizens of the underworld all take advantage of networked organizational designs because they offer effective mobility and disguise. But more and more we witness the advent of networked organizational design in corporate management techniques, manufacturing supply chains, advertisement campaigns and other novelties of the ruling class, as well as all the familiar grass-roots activist groups who have long used network structures to their advantage. In a sense, networks have been vilified simply because the terrorists, pirates and anarchists made them notorious, not because of any negative quality of the organizational diagram itself. In fact, positive libratory movements have been capitalizing on network design protocols for decades if not centuries. The section on the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus is one of literature's most poignant adorations of the network diagram.   It was the goal of this chapter to illuminate a few of these networked designs and how they manifest themselves as tactical effects within the media's various network-based struggles. As the section on viruses (or the previous chapter on hackers) showed, these struggles can be lost. Or as in the case of the end-to-end design strategy of the Internet's core protocols, or cyberfeminism, or the free software movement, they can be won (won in specific places at specific times). These tactical effects are allegorical indices that point out the flaws in protocological and proprietary command and control. The goal is not to destroy technology in some neo-Luddite delusion, but to push it into a state of hypertrophy, further than it is meant to go. Then, in its injured, sore and unguarded condition, technology may be sculpted anew into something better, something in closer agreement with the real wants and desires of its users. This is the goal of tactical media. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [1] Paul Virilio, "Infowar," in Druckrey (ed.), Ars Electronica, p. 334. One assumes that the italicized "Titanic" may refer to James Cameron's 1997 film as well as the fated passenger ship, thereby offering an interesting double meaning that suggests, as others have aptly argued, that films, understood as texts like any other, contain their own undoing. [2] David Garcia and Geert Lovink, "The ABC of Tactical Media," Nettime, May 16, 1997. [3] Hardt & Negri, Empire, p. 25. [4] Ralf Burger cites two articles, "ACM Use of Virus Functions to Provide a Virtual APL Interpreter Under User Control" (1974), and John Shoch and Jon Huppas's "The Worm Programs Early Experience  with a Distributed Computation" (1982) which was first circulated in 1980 in abstract form as "Notes on the Worm' programs" (IEN 159, May 1980). See Ralf Burger, Computer Viruses (Grand Rapids: Abacus, 1988), p. 19. [5] Frederick Cohen, A Short Course on Computer Viruses (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994), p. 38. [6] Ibid., p. 2. [7] W. Timothy Polk, et al., Anti-Virus Tools and Techniques for Computer Systems (Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes Data Corporation, 1995), p, 4. [8] Indeed pioneering viral scientist Fred Cohen is the most notable exception to this rule. He recognized the existence of "benevolent viruses" that perform maintenance, facilitate networked applications, or simply live in "peaceful coexistence" with us: "I personally believe that reproducing programs are living beings in the information environment." See Frederick Cohen, A Short Course on Computer Viruses (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994), pp. 159-160, 15-21, and Frederick Cohen, It's Alive! (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994). The author Ralf Burger is also not completely pessimistic, instructing us that when "used properly, [viruses] may bring about a new generation of self-modifying computer operating systems. ... Those who wish to examine and experiment with computer viruses on an experimental level will quickly discover what fantastic programming possibilities they offer." See Ralf Burger, Computer Viruses (Grand Rapids: Abacus, 1988), p. 2. [9] Fred Cohen, "Implications of Computer Viruses and Current Methods of Defense," in Peter Denning, Ed., Computers Under Attack: Intruders, Worms, and Viruses (New York: ACM, 1990), p. 383. [10] See Philip Fites, et al., The Computer Virus Crisis (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), pp. 28, 54, 105-117, 161-2; Ralf Burger, Computer Viruses (Grand Rapids: Abacus, 1988), p. 1; Charles Cresson Wood, "The Human Immune System as an Information Systems Security Reference Model" in Lance Hoffman, ed., Rogue Programs (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990), pp. 56-57. In addition, the AIDS Info Disk, a Trojan Horse, is covered in almost every book on the history of computer viruses. [11] Burger, Computer Viruses, p. 1. [12] Also called the "Israeli" or "PLO" virus. [13] Yisrael Radai, "The Israeli PC Virus," Computers and Security 8:2, 1989, p. 112. [14] Cohen, A Short Course on Computer Viruses, p. 45. [15] "Computer Systems Under Seige, Here and Abroad," The New York Times, January 31, 1988, section 3, p. 8. [16] Cited in Radai, "The Israeli PC Virus," p. 113. [17] Frederick Cohen reports the total number between 20,000 and 30,000 diskettes. See Cohen, A Short Course on Computer Viruses, p. 50. Jan Hruska puts the number at 20,000. See Jan Hruska, Computer Viruses and Anti-Virus Warfare (New York: Ellis Horwood, 1992), p. 20. [18] Philip Fites, et al., The Computer Virus Crisis, p. 46. [19] Hruska, Computer Viruses and Anti-Virus Warfare, p. 22. [20] A. K. Dewdney identifies a game called Darwin invented by M. Douglas McIlroy, head of the Computing Techniques Research Department at Bell Labs, and a program called Worm created by John Shoch (and Jon Hupp) of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. See A. K. Dewdney, "Computer Recreations," Scientific American, March, 1984, p. 22. For more on Shoch and Hupp see "The Worm Programs," Communications of the ACM, March 1982. Many attribute the worm concept to the science fiction novel Shockwave Rider by John Brunner. [21] Ken Thompson, "Reflections on Trusting Trust," in Denning, Ed., Computers Under Attack, p. 98. [22] Dewdney, "Computer Recreations," p. 14. [23] Jon A. Rochlis and Mark W. Eichin, "With Microscope and Tweezers: The Worm from MIT's Perspective," in Peter Denning, Ed., Computers Under Attack, p. 202. The precise time comes from analyzing the computer logs at Cornell University. Others suspect that the attack originated from a remote login at a MIT computer. [24] Frederick Cohen, A Short Course on Computer Viruses (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994), p. 49. The figure of 60,000 is also used by Eugene Spafford who attributes it to the October 1988 IETF estimate for the total number of computers online at that time. See Eugene Spafford, "The Internet Worm Incident," in Hoffman, ed., Rogue Programs, p. 203. Peter Denning's numbers are different. He writes that "[o]ver an eight-hour period it invaded between 2,500 and 3,000 VAX and Sun computers." See Peter Denning, ed., Computers Under Attack: Intruders, Worms, and Viruses (New York: ACM, 1990), p. 191. This worm is generally called the RTM Worm after the initials of its author, or simply the Internet Worm. [25] From a Cornell University report cited in Ted Eisenberg, et al., "The Cornell Commission: On Morris and the Worm," in Peter Denning, ed., Computers Under Attack, p. 253. [26] Cited in The New York Times, November 5, 1988, p. A1. [27] The New York Times, November 4, 1988, p. A1. [28] Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown (New York: Bantam, 1992), pp. 88-9. [29] Cited in The New York Times, January 19, 1990, p. A19. [30] "Morris's Peers Return Verdicts: A Sampling of Opinion Concerning The Fate of the Internet Worm," in Hoffman, ed., Rogue Programs, p. 104. [...] [61] John Arquilla & David Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (Santa Monica: RAND, 2001), p. 6. A similar litany from 1996 reads: "netwar is about Hamas more than the PLO, Mexico's Zapatistas more than Cuba's Fidelistas, the Christian Identity Movement more than the Ku Klux Klan, the Asian Triads more than the Sicilian Mafia, and Chicago's Gangsta Disciples more than the Al Capone Gang" (see John Arquilla & David Ronfeldt, The Advent of Netwar [Santa Monica: RAND, 1996], p. 5). Arquilla & Ronfeldt coined the term netwar which they define as "an emerging mode of conflict (and crime) at societal levels, short of traditional military warfare, in which the protagonists use network forms of organization and related doctrines, strategies, and technologies attuned to the information age" (see Arquilla & Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars, p. 6). [62] This is not a monolithic control mechanism, of course. "The Internet is a large machine," writes Andreas Broeckmann. "This machine has its own, heterogeneous topology, it is fractured and repetitive, incomplete, expanding and contracting" ("Networked Agencies," http://www.v2.nl/~andreas/texts/1998/networkedagency-en.html). [63] This is Deleuze & Guatari's realization in A Thousand Plateaus. [64] For an interesting description of Toyotism, see Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 157-160. [65] Peter Galison, "War against the Center," Grey Room 4, Summer 2001, p. 20. [66] Baran writes: "The weakest spot in assuring a second strike capability was in the lack of reliable communications. At the time we didn't know how to build a communication system that could survive even collateral damage by enemy weapons. RAND determined through computer simulations that the AT&T Long Lines telephone system, that carried essentially all the Nation's military communications, would be cut apart by relatively minor physical damage. While essentially all of the links and the nodes of the telephone system would survive, a few critical points of this very highly centralized analog telephone system would be destroyed by collateral damage alone by missiles directed at air bases and collapse like a house of card." See Paul Baran, Electrical Engineer, an oral history conducted in 1999 by David Hochfelder, IEEE History Center, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA. [67] Galison, "War against the Center," p. 25. [68] New Yorker writer Peter Boyer reports that DARPA is in fact rethinking this opposition by designing a distributed tank, "a tank whose principle components, such as guns and sensors, are mounted on separate vehicles that would be controlled remotely by a soldier in yet another command vehicle," (see "A Different War," The New Yorker, July 1, 2002, p. 61). This is what the military calls Future Combat Systems (FCS), an initiative developed by DARPA for the US Army. It is described as "flexible" and "network-centric." I am grateful to Jason Spingarn-Koff for bring FCS to my attention. [69] Cited in Gene Kan "Gnutella" in Andy Oram, Ed. Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies (Sebastopol: O'Reilly, 2001), p. 99. [70] See The al-Qaeda Documents: Vol. 1 (Alexandria, VA: Tempest, 2002), pp. 50, 62. [71] Jon Ippolito, "Don't Blame the Internet," Washington Post, September 29, 2001, p. A27. [72] Wanting instead American invulnerability to Soviet nuclear power, in 1964 Paul Baran writes that "we can still design systems in which system destruction requires the enemy to pay the price of destroying n of n [communication] stations. If n is made sufficiently large, it can be shown that highly survivable system structures can be built—even in the thermonuclear era." See Paul Baran, On Distributed Communications: 1. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1964), p. 16. Baran's point here is that destruction of a network is an all or nothing game. One must destroy all nodes, not simply take out a few key hubs. But the opposite is not true. A network needs only to destroy a single hub within a hierarchical power to score a dramatic triumph. Thus, Baran's advice to the American military was to become network-like. And once it did the nuclear threat was no longer a catastrophic threat to communications and mobility (but remains, of course, a catastrophic threat to human life, material resources, and so on). [73] Arquilla & Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars, p. 15, emphasis removed from original. Contrast this line of thinking with that of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the nineteen sixties, whom Senator Gary Hart described as advocating "more centralized management in the Pentagon." See Gary Hart & William Lind, America Can Win (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, 1986), p. 14. Or contrast it in the current milieu with the Powell Doctrine, named after four-star general and Secretary of State Colin Powell, which states that any American military action should have the following: clearly stated objectives; an exit strategy; the ability to use overwhelming force; and that vital strategic interests must be at stake. This type of thinking is more in line with a modernist, Clausewitzian theory of military strategy, that force will be overcome by greater force, that conflict should be a goal-oriented act rather than one of continuance, that conflict is waged by state actors, and so on. [74] Gary Hart & William Lind, America Can Win (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, 1986), pp. 240, 249. 20.0 <nettime> Diminishing Freedoms david garcia nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri, 27 Jan 2006 17:22:36 -0500 Diminishing Freedoms On a visit to Brazil in 2004 I stayed with Grazilia Kunsch an important artist who is also a committed political activist. Part of her work is ?hosting? foreign visitors at her house ?Casa Grazie?. To be hosted by Grazie is a delight, not least for her wonderful breakfasts and the long discussions that are given the time to unfold throughout the morning. Like many artists who are politically active she keeps the boundaries between the two spheres deliberately blurry. But she told me how although this was once acceptable, she was finding it progressively harder to declare openly that she is an artist in activist circles. Freedom, the expressive freedom of art seems to becoming the impossible word. Why? What is at stake? Why are so many political activists moving to repudiate cultural politics and the expressive freedoms that continue to inspire and draw so many to call themselves artists? There seems to be an oppressive philistinism emerging on the radical left, raising the worrying prospect that it is not only neo- liberalism that is instrumentalising all of life. I have been troubled by these developments for some time, but I have only recently found a framework to address discuss the problem with myself in more detail and with a little more rigor. It was in the context of a review for a book on DIY Media by the London based artist activist group C6. As always Mute editors are (at least in my case) rarely passive recipients of the articles they solicit, and I was gently prodded into much more than a simple review. I don?t pretend that the resulting ruminations are in any way definitive but I hope that it triggers some discussion. Below is an extract, the full text can be found at http:// www.metamute.org/ The Split We have seen the emergence of three interconnected tendencies, since the tactical media of the 90?s. Firstly there is a widespread rejection of the homeopathic and the micro-political in favour of ambitions scaled up to global proportions coupled with a willingness to move beyond electronic and semiotic civil disobedience and to engage in direct action, to literally ?re-claim the streets?. This is almost entirely as a result of the emergence of the powerful global anti-capitalist movement which (from their perspective) have transformed tactical media into the ?Indy-media? project. But there is also a third less visible and more troubling tendency, a tendency towards internal polarisation. This polarisation is based on a deep split which has opened up between many of the activists at the core of the new political movements and the artists or theorists who, whilst continuing to see themselves as radicals, retain a belief in the importance of cultural (and information) politics? in any movement for social transformation. Although I have little more than personal experience and anecdotal evidence to go on, it seems to me, that there is a significant growth in suspicion and frequently outright hostility among activists to the presence of art and artists in ?the movement?, particularly those whose work cannot be immediately instrumentalised by the new ?soldiers of the left?. So what is it that has changed since the 90s to give rise to these tendencies? To understand we must cast our minds back to the peculiar historical conditions of that time. The early phase of tactical media re-injected a new energy into the flagging project of ?cultural politics?. It fused the radical and pragmatic info politics of the hackers with well-established critical practices based critiques of representation. The resulting tactical media were also part of (and arguably compromised by) the wider internet and communications revolution of the 90?s which, like the music of the 1960s, acted as a universal solvent not only dissolving disciplinary boundaries but also the boundaries separating long established political formations. The power some of us attributed to this new ?media politics? appeared to be born out by the role that all forms of media seemed to have played in the collapse of the Soviet Empire. It seemed as though old style armed insurrection had been superseded by digital dissent and media revolutions. It was as if the Samizdat spirit, extended and intensified by the proliferation of Do-it-yourself media had rendered the centralized statist tyrannies of the soviet empire untenable. Some of us allowed ourselves to believe that it would only be a matter of time before the same forces would challenge our own tired and tarnished oligarchies. Furthermore the speed and comparative bloodlessness of the Soviet collapse suggested that the transformations that were coming would not have to be achieved through violence or personal sacrifice. This would be the era of the painless (?win win?) revolution, in which change would occur simply through the hacker ethos of challenging the domains of forbidden knowledge. It came to be believed that power that comes only from the top down had lost its edge. As late as 1999 in his Reith lecture, Anthony Giddens could still confidently assert that ?The information monopoly upon which the Soviet system was based, had no future in an intrinsically open framework of global communications?. Giddens and other third way social theorists were part of a wider movement, which acted out the dream that the profound political differences, which had divided previous generations, had been put on hold. This was made credible through the ubiquity of one of the dominant myths of the information age, a myth shared by activists and new media entrepreneurs alike. The myth that knowledge will set you free. This founding narrative of techno-culture, visible from Ted Nelson ?Computer Lib? onwards, recycles (in intensified form), the age old proposition that knowledge and freedom are not only connected but may actually entail one another. The fact that a belief in the necessary relationship between knowledge and freedom has gone largely unquestioned is based in part on the depth of its lineage, ?ancient stoics and most modern rationalists are at one with Christian teaching on this issue. ?And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free?. As Isaiah Berlin pointed out in 1968 not only is ?. This proposition is not self evidently true, if only on empirical grounds.? It is ?one of the least plausible beliefs ever entertained by profound and influential thinkers.?1 In addition to being fallacious the accompanying rhetoric of transparency, freedom, access, participation, and even creativity, has come to constitute the ideological foundation of ?communicative capitalism?, transforming tactical media?s homeopathic micro-politics into the experimental wing of the ?creative industries? and corroborating the temporal mode of post-Fordist capital: short- termism.? 2 Neo-liberalism?s effective capture of the rhetoric of ?freedom? and ?creativity?, has re-opened an old fault-line which the first wave of tactical media did so much to bridge, the fault-line dividing artists from the political activists. The theorist and activist Brian Holmes described the origins of this dichotomy succinctly as going (at least) as far back as the cultural politics of the 1960s. He describes a split ?between the traditional working-class concern for social justice and the New Left concern for individual emancipation and full recognition and expression of particular identities" According to this account corporate foundations and think tanks of the 80s and 90?s have succeeded in inculcating market-oriented variations on earlier counter-cultural values rendering the interventions of artists (including tactical media makers) profoundly if unwittingly, de-politicising. Holmes goes on to describe (or assert, I am not quite sure which) a critique in which ?the narcisstic exploration of self, sexuality and identity become the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture. Artistic freedom and artistic license have led, in effect, to the neo-liberalization of culture.?3 The puritanical and authoritarian tone of this analysis is just a little unnerving. At the very least this tendency could lead to a crass and oppressive philistinism and might signal far worse to come. At the Senegallia meeting in 2004 for Telestreets, Franco Berardi (Bifo) made a plea to Telestreet activists (and by extension all artist/activists) not to ?embrace our miserable marginality". Increasingly this call is being answered. There are a growing number of inspiring cases which we can point to, the Yes Men?s achievement in securing global distribution in mainstream cinemas, Yomango?s high voltage contributions to the global, protest movement and Witness.org?s extensive inititiatives in which the provision of indigenous activists with DIY media with their campaigns is connected to human rights legal processes. These and many other projects are pointing to the growing willingness to strategically globalise dissent. This process in not unconnected to a growing willingness to relinquish one of the shibboleths of tactical media, the cult of ?ephemerality?. In place of the hit and run guerrilla activism the direct opposite is now required, ?duration?. It?s a time for longer- term commitments and deeper engagements with the people and organisations networked around contested issues. One of the most extraordinary examples of this kind of development is ?Women on Waves? a Dutch Foundation initiated by the Rebecca Gomperts who studied medicine at the University of Amsterdam and specialised as an abortion doctor and then went on to study visual arts at the Rietveld Academy and Sailing at the Enkhuizen Zeevaartschool (Nautical College). The most celebrated achievement of Women on Waves is the Abortion Boat, a large floating clinic that tactically exploits maritime law, anchoring the boat just outside the 12-mile zones of countries where abortion is forbidden. On the Abortion Boat women can be helped with information and with actual abortions are performed by a team of Dutch medical practitioners (including Dr Gomperts) on Dutch "territory". Thus, women are actively assisted and local organisations are supported and inspired in their struggle for the legalisation of abortion. Along with the practical intervention of the Abortion Boat, Women on Waves also uses art and design as part of their global campaign for abortion rights. For instance the "I had an Abortion" installation consisting of vests on wire coat hangers, which bear the text "I had an abortion" in all European languages. On their website <womenonwaves.org> a diary can be found of a Brazilian woman relating her experiences of wearing one of these t-shirts. The continued validity of the modes of political address pioneered by tactical media are apparent in her descriptions of how the message on these t- shirts was preferable to something that might have read like earlier forms of agit prop say ?Legalize abortion?. These t-shirts function ?not? she declares to ?make myself a target. that was not the point; it was to give all those women without a face a support. As to say, don't worry, it's all right, you?re all right. This fulfils one of the prime directives of classical tactical media, unlike traditional agit prop?it is designed to invite discourse. Women on Waves is a reminder that cultural politics in its modern sense was in large part a creation of the women?s movement. Those who question the value of a cultural politics would do well to remember that feminism also served to transform the lives and politics of many men who were taught (sometimes painfully) that they were failing to live out in their ordinary lives, the democracy they were advocating in theory. The way in which ?culture? is central to feminism?s demands and not peripheral is powerfully explored by Terry Eagleton in his valuable book After Theory which describes the centrality of ?the grammar? in which the demands are of feminism were framed. ?Value speech, image, experience and identity are here the very language of political struggle, as they are in all ethnic or sexual politics. Ways of feeling and forms of political representation are in the long run quite as crucial as child care provision or equal pay.? 3 This expanded political language was articulated not by activists and writers alone but also by many important women artists. Women artists who were critical in shifting the centre of gravity of the art world of the 60?s and 70?s from Greenburg's formalism and Rosenburg's mysticism to a new expressive and subject centred naturalism, which remains influential and important to this day. In our efforts to understand our new conditions and to change we must beware of trying to eliminate all ambiguities and impurities, above all we should not be tempted to relinquish the essential legacy of cultural politics. 1. Isaiah Berlin From Hope and fear Set Free 1968 2.Rossiter & Lovink. Dawn of the Organised Networks (2005) 2. Brian Holmes?s review THE SCANDAL OF THE WORD "CLASS" Posted on nettime A review of David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford UP, 2005) 3. Terry Eagleton. After Theory. (Penguin 2003) 4. womenonwaves.org 20.1 Re: <nettime> Diminishing Freedoms brian.holmes {AT} wanadoo.fr nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Mon, 30 Jan 2006 19:37:35 -0500 David Garcia refers directly to me, in his text about an emerging dispute between activist and artistic practices: > The theorist and activist Brian Holmes described the origins of this > dichotomy succinctly as going (at least) as far back as the cultural > politics of the 1960s. He describes a split "between the traditional > working-class concern for social justice and the New Left concern for > individual emancipation and full recognition and expression of > particular identities" According to this account corporate > foundations and think tanks of the 80s and 90s have succeeded in > inculcating market-oriented variations on earlier counter-cultural > values rendering the interventions of artists (including tactical > media makers) profoundly if unwittingly, de-politicising. Holmes goes > on to describe (or assert, I am not quite sure which) a critique in > which "the narcisstic exploration of self, sexuality and identity > become the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture. Artistic freedom and > artistic license have led, in effect, to the neo-liberalization of > culture. The puritanical and authoritarian tone of this analysis is > just a little unnerving. At the very least this tendency could lead > to a crass and oppressive philistinism and might signal far worse to > come. Garcia misquotes and misinterprets me pretty deeply, in what's otherwise a good article. See my original text, and particularly the questions I ask about culture and politics, at http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0510/msg00005.html. But it doesn't matter, it's just a mistake and the whole subject is worth going back to anyway. The sentence that Garcia can't swallow (the one about the narcissistic exploration of self, identity and sexuality) was written in fact by another David: David Harvey, in his book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. In my review of that book, I quoted a long passage where Harvey recounts the bankruptcy of New York in 1975 and how the city and its culture were subsequently reshaped in the context of financially driven globalization. I was interested in two things. First, a fresh analysis, within a specific urban framework, of the way that cultural and intellectual practices were broadly neutralized by turning them into commodities in an economy of images and signs (a process which at the same time transforms a growing mass of artists and intellectuals into the economically interested producers of those same commodities). And second, I was interested in the limits of exactly that same analysis. Things have only gotten worse since 1975, and new problems have arisen. While reading Irving Kristol's book, Neoconservatism, The Autobiography of an Idea, I was struck by the Kristol's fierce rejection of a 60s counterculture that he equated with a Nietzschean transvaluation of all values. I thought: Can I do without that counterculture, without that Nietzschean aspiration to destroy old values and recreate new ones? The answer was, I couldn't. For someone like myself, the only viable option is to pursue a radically experimental work on the self and society, expressed by signs and materials in their rupture with history. In other words, I need something like vanguard art (only I think you can call it post-vanguard art, because these practices have gone far beyond their old limits). I wanted to conclude my review on Harvey's strong analysis of the subservience of art to finance in the neoliberal economy, and at the same time, I wanted to question the Marxist reflex that would reach back to a supposedly clearer and truer world of working class culture and militantism that the new middle class media culture is said to simply obscure and distort. The problem, as Garcia shows throughout his own text, is that the contemporary cultural economy really does have a strong coopting and neutralizing capacity, which operates mainly through commercialization in the United States and mainly through selective social democratic patronage in Europe. The combined renewal of artistic and activist practices in the 90s really did require direct action, reclaiming the streets, as Garcia knows for having theorized such things while also participating in them. Now that the effectiveness of direct action has been blunted by increasing police pressure on the streets, as well as a general rise in the stakes of political conflict, we do (or at least I do) see the cultural institutions and even the commercial ones coming in to skim off the cream of tactical media representations, which aren't particularly threatening or destabilizing in the absence or decline of what they were supposed to represent. That's a real problem. I am sure plenty of activists are suspicious of me, for publishing and spouting off my mouth and participating in museum and festival debates. I'm even suspicious of me, to the point where I've deliberately gone back to translating, to make sure that I'm not tempted to write texts or do talks just for the payoff at the end. It's easy to get confused in a great big media machine that is also made (or at lest functions) to produce confusion. But what's mainly lacking, from my viewpoint, are not only audacious direct action stunts, and not only (though this is of course more important) forms of political engagement that can reach huge numbers of participants and give them an effective way to help change society. What's also missing are artworks that cut through the trendy flaky fashions, and go beyond the old modernist definitions of art for art's sake, to touch the core of the human quandry and help you transform your self and your relation to the others, at a moment when things go on getting worse and worse and worse. Garcia quotes Terry Eagleton to talk about how the women's movements totally changed politics, by making what appear as cultural issues inseparable from the economic ones. He could have drawn his examples (and probably would have, if he'd been here) from the 6th World Social Forum in Caracas, where you could see and hear and feel, in almost every talk and study session and activist planning round, that the old ways of doing politics have changed. Particularly, but not only, by the fact that women and indigenous people are participating everywhere, and often taking the most prominent roles. I did not see much cutting edge art at the social forum, certainly not in the concentrated forms that derive from the western tradition. But a strong point of the forum for me was the way that it put forth the irreducible presence of a plurality of cosmovisions. Yes, that's they say. And you could hear it, you could feel it. At one point, Maya and Qechua women completed a ceremony on stage in the context of a panel which was refusing the patenting of women's knowledge. In the Q and A that followed, one of the women said more or less this: "Our god is not up above in the sky. Our god is in the earth. It is in us. It is us." I had a kind of insight at that point, or maybe something I had learned from deconstruction finally made tangible sense to me. I realized that the whole Christian recovery and reinterpretation of Platonic idealism was inseparable from abstract, Cartesian, metaphysical, alienating representation. The spectacle society. The military surveillance grid. And I realized that what we were involved with was not that kind of representation. But there I go again talking again, spouting off. Who wants to make me feel guilty about it? While those women were performing their ritual, there was a TV cameraman crowding on the stage. It was so annoying, this guy crowding in on our intimacy. And then I remembered that this was being broadcast by the Bolivarian TV stations. The revolutionary TV stations. Like Catia TV, where I saw a fantastic montage-analysis of the way that the commercial TV channels had sought throughout the late nineties and early years of this decade to impose a reactionary reading on crucial events in the streets that have led, each time, to the continuation of the revolutionary project here in Venezuela. What you could see in action, on broadcast TV, was a critical and transformative kind of mass representation. At one point, on broadcast TV, they were showing an interview of an Italian guy from Telestreet, talking about the urgent situation in Italy where Berlusconi controls all the broadcast media. I like art. I like activism. While hanging out in Caracas, I would sift through my mail in cybercafes, like all the gringos and all the latinos. I get so many ads for high-class art and pseudo activist events put on by the European social democratic institutions. One mail said: Art's good for nothing, that's its whole necessity. The hackneyed French academic modernist version of elite vanguard art. Another mail said: If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution. The happy-go-lucky disco Dutch populist version of activist cooptation. I admit it, at times I feel impatient and even angry about all that schlock. Philistinism? Well, sometimes I also just feel very very bored. best, Brian 21.0 <nettime> Technologies of Resistance: Transgression and Solidarity in Tactical Media Miguel Afonso Caetano nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Tue, 30 May 2006 19:05:50 +0100 Dear Nettimers: I have recently finished a M.A. dissertation about Tactical Media that I've talked about here a few years ago (www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0311/msg00063.html). I'm sending you here the English version of the abstract and the table of contents. In the thesis, I make some criticisms of the concept of tactical media in terms of its current validity. Also, in the second part I cover in detail some projects of the vibrant brazilian tactical media scene: Metareciclagem (www.metareciclagem.org) - who has received an honorary mention in this year's Ars Electronica (www.aec.at/en/prix/honorary2006.asp) and the now deceased Projeto Metáfora (http://ogum.metareciclagem.org/metafora). Since Nettime's 10th aniversary meeting is happening right now in Montreal, I think it would be good to start a debate here in the list about the actual relevance of tactical media in the age of Web 2.0, which has embraced (co-opted?) much of the same DIY ethos in places like Flickr and MySpace. On the other side, we're also living in the midst of the "state of exception"/War against terrorism where every subversive activity is considered suspicious - the bioterrorism paranoia case against CAE. Judging from the brazilian example, I think that it is becoming more adequate to think about tactical media in peripheral countries like Brazil and India where there's a sense of more severe urgency in social transformation, of reappropriation of technology by the people. Best regards from Portugal, Miguel Caetano Technologies of Resistance: Transgression and Solidarity in Tactical Media Miguel Afonso Caetano Resulting from the convergence between media, technology, art and politics, tactical media are a set of cultural practices and a theoretical movement which started in Europe during the first half of the 90s, having spread to North America until the end of the millenium and, afterwards, to the rest of the world. Initially taking advantage of video camcorders but also, later, of digital technologies such as CD-ROMs and the Internet, the producer of this kind of media acknowledges himself as as a hybrid, performing simultaneously the role of an artist, activist, theorist and technician. These subversive and/or creative uses of information and communication technologies by individuals who normally don't have access to them are characterized by experimentalism, ephemerality, flexibility, irony and amateurship. Based on the distinction between tactics and strategies developed by Michel de Certeau and continued by David Garcia and Geert Lovink, this dissertation examines the way tactical media present themselves as "media of crisis, critique and opposition". By applying a theoretical analysis of some collectives, we intend to demonstrate that the protest tactics of these media production forms represent a position of permanent struggle against a concrete and explicit opponent (nation-state, supranational institution or transnational corporation). After addressing the dangers that this antagonist model of media as a weapon of resistance can lead to, we propose an alternative perspective of tactical media built on an empirical analysis of two brazilian projects, Metáfora and MetaReciclagem. Finally, we argue that these and other grassroots initiatives adapt the practices of subversion and resistance visible in the activist collectives of developed countries to the local settings of a peripheral country like Brazil. By fostering technological reappropriation for social transformation, these groups unleash the creative and communication capacities of these communities, towards their self-sustainability and autonomy. Keywords: tactical media, strategies, media activism, alternative media, hacker, free software, technological reappropriation, recycling, Brazil. 21.1 Re: <nettime> Technologies of Resistance: Transgression and Solidarity in Tactical Media Brian Holmes nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 31 May 2006 13:01:09 -0300 Miguel Afonso Caetano wrote: >I have recently finished a M.A. dissertation about Tactical Media >that I've talked about here a few years ago I'd be totally interested to read your dissertation Miguel, is it online? >I think it would be good to start a debate here in the list about the >actual relevance of tactical media in the age of Web 2.0, which has >embraced (co-opted?) much of the same DIY ethos in places like Flickr >and MySpace. On the other side, we're also living in the midst of the >"state of exception"/War against terrorism where every subversive >activity is considered suspicious - the bioterrorism paranoia case >against CAE. My feeling is that cooptation is an infinite process - part of social struggle, which demands that every dissenting or antagonistic expression be abandoned and reinvented soon after its first release into the infosphere. I also think that the expression "tactical media" was launched at a great moment of political weakness and under-the-radar diffuse experimentation from the left/anarchist side of the cultural and political spectrums - a moment coinciding with the massification of a new communicational toolkit. That those days are gone is pretty clear (the state of exception was definitely the turning point), but what's interesting is all they produced, the new possibilities. The questions of what at the time was called tactical media, and more, the forms of experimentation with communicational politics from below, are something you can only move through as it happens and leave aside as it disappears. Still, histories are fascinating when they're not confused with futures. >Judging from the brazilian example, I think that it is becoming >more adequate to think about tactical media in peripheral countries >like Brazil and India where there's a sense of more severe urgency >in social transformation, of reappropriation of technology by the >people. There's something to that. First of all, De Certeau was inspired by Brazil and wrote about it, if I'm not mistaken. Second, the massification of the Internet toolkit is still underway in Brazil and India. Third, the state and therefore, the cooptation apparatus is weak in Brazil, though as far as I can see (on short visits) it still works all too well. Actually, I think people in Brazil and India would be best off inventing new concepts to really drive home the point that things are happening - and should happen, are urgently needed - in those specific contexts. The thing that amazed me on my last trip to Sao Paulo was hearing about the PCC weekend. What does nettime think about that? A gang that has totally dominated the prison system in Sao Paulo state, that controls the drug trade in the cities of that state (including the megalopolis itself), that has built up a very sophisticated economy and a functioning leadership structure, and is able to coordinate an attack on the police using cell-phones from inside the prisons, burning 60 buses and assaulting reportedly a hundred police stations (is that true?), carrying out what friends of mine described as a "subjective occupation" of the minds and emotions of one of the largest cities in the world! Talk about tactics... It seems as though a networked criminal organization (the Primeiro Commando da Capital) is able to run rings around a state which cannot catch up to it, cannot install the kind of hi-tech protection and distributed control mechanisms that the US and other Western countries are working so deperately to perfect. This is fantastically interesting, actually hopeful in some wierd respects (if the state fails to that degree, must it not be reinvented?), but mostly just astounding, with the great danger that a kind of fascist electoral reaction will come out of it (as in the US), as well as police death-squads which, I have been told, immediately formed to exact repraisals. The whole thing is incredibly important as a phenomenon of our times, I would be curious to know what others think about it. best, BH 22.0 <nettime> 30 Years of Tactical Media Felix Stalder nettime-l@kein.org Sun, 8 Feb 2009 17:15:32 +0100 This is a short text which appears in "Public Netbase: Non Stop Future. New Practices in Art and Media" edited by the fine people at the New Media Center_kuda.org, in cooperation with World-Information Institute / t0. We recently presented this book at transmediale in Berlin. "An ultimate reference book for those who want to find out about cultural discourse and practice from the beginning of the internet explosion in the nineties to the present..." Brian Holmes http://nonstop-future.org 30 Years of Tactical Media [1] Felix Stalder Tactical media as a practice has a long history and, it seems save to predict, an even longer future. Yet its existence as a distinct concept around which something of a social movement, or more precisely, a self- aware network of people and projects would coalesce has been relatively short lived, largely confined to the internet's first decade as a mass medium (1995-2005). During that time Geert Lovink and David Garcia, two Dutch media activists/theorists at the heart of this network, defined Tactical Media, as "what happens when the cheap 'do it yourself' media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture. Tactical media do not just report events, as they are never impartial they always participate and it is this that more than anything separates them from mainstream media."[2] Like so many other things that are now common in our informational lives, the roots of tactical media lie in the cultural innovations of radical social movements that sprang up in the late 1960s. Not only did they begin to exploit technological changes enabling to self-produce media but they created entirely new ideas of what the media could be: not just conduits for more or less sophisticated state propaganda (as in Althusser's famous analysis of the ???ideological state apparatuses???[3]) or as a source of ???objective??? information provided by a professional (enlightened) elite. Rather, they reconceptualized the media as means of subjective expression, by people and for people who are not represented by the mainstream. Given the still significant technological hurdles to autonomous media production and distribution which existed deep into the 1990s, the first wave 'do-it-yourself' media thought of themselves as ???community media??? representing local social, cultural or ethnic minorities. In the US, community media centered around public access television (and radio). They were made possible by fortuitous legislation which required cable companies to provide one channel for local, non-commercial programming. This created the technological and financial basis for community activists to run a (low-budget) TV channel. Across the country, local TV stations sprung up, giving a platform to various community groups to produce programming by and for themselves. During the 1970s, video technology developed at a rapid pace, reducing the bulk and the costs of the equipment while improving the quality of the recordings and the means of post-production. In the 1980s, this peaked in the ???camcorder revolution???, referring the small, cheap video cameras/recorders that became widely available. They seemed to offer the possibilities to engage in ???counter surveillance???, i.e. the ability to document abuses of power. As the case of Rodney King showed in the early in 1990s in Los Angeles, the consequences of such ???counter surveillance could be dramatic.[4] At the same time, new satellite transmission technology made it possible to start nation-wide, rather than local distribution of content. This was spearheaded by Deep DishTV, founded in 1986. Its aim was to ???do what broadcast media cannot do for itself: identify and amplify, without alteration or limitation, the voices of the disenfranchised cultures who struggle for equal time.???[5] In the Netherlands, public cable TV enabled an lively pirate TV and radio scene which developed in parallel with the early public access Internet projects such as Digital City of Amsterdam creating a rich local culture of experimental, politicl medial. [6] In the rest of Europe, partially because of a different regulatory environment, public access TV has played less of a role, whereas community radio, or, in the UK, pirate radio, has flourished since the 1970s. Today, the public access model is still relevant and even expanding. In Vienna, for example, a new public access channel (Okto TV) opened in 2005. Yet, the TV environment has changed significantly over the last 30 years, and public access TV is threatened to become just another narrow-caster among a near infinite number of channels. By the mid 1990s, the costs of media production had further come down and the internet was beginning to offer a credible promise of an alternative distribution platform. It made possible to avoid some of limitations of broadcast media with their hardwired distinction between sender and receiver, which not even community media could overcome (even if they if they lowered the hurdles to becoming a producer oneself). A new generation of media activists began to experiment with the new possibilities of open communication networks, which were, by and large, still a promise to be realized, rather than a readily-available infrastructure. They radicalized the ideas of community media by challenging everyone to produce their own media in support of their own political struggles. This new media activism was motivated by three key insights. First, cultural theorists had been calling for a reevaluation of how individuals dealt with media products. Rather than seeing them merely as passive consumers, they were understood as tactically appropriating them.[7] New media could transform this practice from an individual to a social level. Hence the term, tactical media. Second, it became understood very clearly that all politics are, to a significant degree, mediated politics and that the long- held distinction between the ???street??? (reality) and the ???media??? (representation) could no longer be upheld. On the contrary, the media had come to infuse all of society and in order to challenge the dominant society, it was necessary develop new means of producing and distributing media. Not as a specialized task separate from the social movements, but as key activity around which social movements could coalesce. Finally, the media environment characterized by a broadcast logic of geography was being supplemented with an environment characterized a many-to-many logic of access. In such an environment, networking came naturally and some of the key networking events were the large scale social protests that tracked the international policy gatherings of the WTO (World Trade Organization), G8 and similar ???free trade??? organizations in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This inspired the creation of an international network of local media projects under the name of Indymedia which, at least initially, understood itself as the media arm of the anti-globalization movement. However, while Indymedia currently still lists close to 200 local, regional and national network nodes, it never really managed, and probably never intended, to match the full breadth of a global movement. Rather, Indymedia seems to flourish where the nodes are deeply rooted in local communities, privileging concrete local struggles over abstract, global policy. Even before Indymedia attempted to establish global alternative media network, a series of conferences were held in Amsterdam (1995 - 2003) called ???The Next Five Minutes??? (N5M)[8]. They brought together many of the early internet-based media activists and connected them with previous generation of public access TV producers and independent film makers, reconceptualizing the whole movement as Tactical Media. These new media projects were understood as tactical because they were not geared towards setting up long-term structures, but towards quick interventions that could be realized with high ingenuity and low budgets. It was practice over theory, partly as an attempt to sidestep the exhausting debates about identity and representation that had been raging for more than a decade now.[9] Such a short range approach was well suited to experimentally explore the new media environment which was rapidly emerging but was still largely unstabilized. Technology was being developed at an extremely fast pace during this hyper-growth phase of the internet, and a global civil society was just beginning to be forged. Thus, many of the Tactical Media projects where even more marginal than the community media of the previous generation, but they nevertheless played an important role in the experimentally establishing media practices adapted to the new conditions of open networks. For a few years, and mainly do to intensive networking at conferences such as N5M, Tactical Media flourished as a distinct, self- conscious practice of media activists interested technological and political innovation. However, as the technologies of the Internet began to mature, some of the inherent contradictions of the Tactical Media concept became apparent. For example, providing infrastructure for projects is a long-term rather than a tactical task that quickly overburdens loose networks. Indymedia has been here the exception to the rule, but mainly because it turned closer to community media, made by and for a relatively distinct subset of the larger anti-globalisation movement. Publicly-funded organizations active in this area, such as Amsterdam's De Waag, either lost interest, or, as in the case of Vienna's Public Netbase, had their funding cut, leaving the field to smaller, more specialized organizations. More importantly, however, was the conceptual contradictions between integrating media production into all forms of grassroots political movements as part of their tool kit, and building a particular identity around this increasingly common practice. The movement as a whole began to dissolve as increasingly people were doing tactical media without thinking about Tactical Media. In a way, Tactical Media was so successful in establishing new political practices that it could no longer serve as a distinctive approach would define a particular community. This makes the current state of affairs decidedly mixed. On the one hand, production technology has become even more accessible, both in terms of price and ease-of-use. With the advent of commercial hosting companies for blogs or videos distribution has been professionalized to a very high degree. As an effect, it has become very simple to shoot, edit and distribute rich media to audiences large and small. This is very good news, particularly for activists in developing countries. At the same time, the commercial capture of the infrastructure is creating new bottlenecks where censorship and control of media content can and does function efficiently. Thus the autonomous production of media for grassroots campaigns has been widely established as a core concern for contemporary political movements, not the least thanks to the Tactical Media pioneers of the 1990s. However, its increasing reliance on commercial infrastructure is introducing new points of failure are becoming apparent as the policing of the commercial platforms is getting more intense. Partly as a reaction to the shortcomings of tactical media and the pressures of the commercial platforms, there is a renewed interest in infrastructure among politically-minded media developers. One example is a global network of initiatives called ???bricolabs??? which describes itself as ???a distributed network for global and local development of generic infrastructures incrementally developed by communities.???[10] Bricolabs, in a way, combines the two strands of Community Media and Tactical Media, by seeking ways to network local communities to support each other in the development of alternative infrastructures for media production. How far this goal can be realized remains to be seen, but it is clear that despite the decline of Tactical Media in the narrow sense, the social practice of autonomous media production continues to be adaptive and innovative. NOTES 1. This text benefitted from feedback by Konrad Becker, David Garcia and Patrice Riemens. 2. Lovink, Geert; Garcia, David (1997): The ABC of Tactical Media. http://www.ljudmila.org/nettime/zkp4/74.htm 3. Althusser, Louis (1971). Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation), (trans. Ben Brewster) in: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Monthly Review Press http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm 4. Wikipedia: Rodney King. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_King 5. Yablonska, Linda (1993). Deep Dish TV. High Performance #61, Spring http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/1999/12/deep_dish_tv.php 6. Lovink, Geert; Riemens, Patrice (2000). Amsterdam Public Digital Culture 2000. In Telepolis, 18.08. http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/6/6972/1.html 7. Certeau, Michel de (1988). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, University of California Press 8. http://www.next5minutes.org/ 9. Wark, McKenzie (2002). Strategies for Tactical Media. In: Proceedings from the South Asian Tactical Media Lab. Nov. 14-16. Delhi. http://www.sarai.net/resources/eventproceedings/2002/tactical-media- lab/strategies.PDF 10. http://www.bricolabs.net [28.02.2008] ------------------- Public Netbase: Non Stop Future New Practices in Art and Media Publisher: Revolver - Archiv f??r aktuelle Kunst ISBN: 978-3-86588-455-8 Editors: New Media Center_kuda.org In cooperation with World-Information Institute / t0 http://nonstop-future.org Order from: www.vice-versa-vertrieb.de www.amazon.com New Media Center_kuda.org Novi Sad, Serbia http://kuda.org World-Information Institute / t0 http://world-information.org/wii --- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------------- out now: *|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008 *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 23.0 <nettime> 10 years of Indymedia zanny begg nettime-l@kein.org Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:05:39 +1100 Below is an article marking the 10th anniversary of Indymedia ( and its roots within Sydney activist scene) which was published in the most recent edition of RealTime (+on screen). To go to a link for the article: http://www.realtimearts.net/article/95/9752 Message is Medium is Message [image: Indymedia flyer] I JUST OVER 10 YEARS AGO SYDNEY MEDIA ACTIVISTS RUSHED TO FINISH A VERSION OF ACTIVE SOFTWARE WHICH WOULD ENABLE THE FIRST INDYMEDIA SITE TO GO LIVE IN TIME TO COVER THE PROTESTS AGAINST THE WORLD TRADE ORGANISATION MEETING IN NOVEMBER 1999. AS RIOTS ERUPTED IN DOWNTOWN SEATTLE, MILLIONS OF PEOPLE LOGGED INTO THE NEW SITE LAUNCHING A MEDIA NETWORK WHICH REPORTEDLY RECEIVED MORE HITS IN ITS FIRST WEEK THAN MEDIA HEAVYWEIGHTS SUCH AS CNN. “It was the heyday of globalisation, the high point of the internet boom and the last gasp of the New Economy: the WTO ministerial in Seattle was meant to celebrate the advent of a corporate millennium extending ‘free trade’ to the furthest corners of the earth. Nobody on that fall morning of Tuesday, 30 November 1999, could have predicted that by nightfall the summit would be disrupted, downtown Seattle would be paralysed by demonstrations and a full-scale police riot would have broken out…Nobody, that is, except the thousands of protesters who prepared for months to put their bodies on the line and shut down the World Trade Organization.” Brian Holmes, nettime posting November 2009. Ten years later the Indymedia network, while relatively small and fragmented in Australia, has grown to over 150 outlets around the world and has become a global phenomenon based around the simple slogan: “don’t hate the media, become the media.” A decade on it is now possible to see that Indymedia not only helped establish a global media service it also helped forge a connection between digital innovation and activism which has had a lasting impact on culture and the net. activism goes digital ABC social media producer John Jacobs, a member of the Jellyheads anarchist media collective whose warehouse was an infamous performance venue in the 90s, explains that the impetus for Indymedia grew out of attempts by people involved in Jellyheads, Critical Mass and the Reclaim the Streets activist communities to produce a hardcopy calendar to share news and events. Jacobs says that he knew he “never wanted to look at a photocopying machine again” when he met up with a physics student at Sydney University, Matthew Arnison. Arnison and Andrew Nicholson collaborated in writing the code for Active Sydney, a website which enabled people to share events, news, photos and other digital material online for the first time. Active showed its international networking potential when used to cover news of the J18 global street parties in June 1999. As Nicholson, who is now a freelance coder and a member of the Sydney based art collective You Are Here, explained, its breakthrough was that activists could share information in “near real time.” In the build up to the Seattle protests in November of that year the founders of Active made contact with media activists in America and helped create the first Indymedia site which was based on the existing Active software. Media analyst Marc Garcelon explains how Jeff Perlstein, a local member of the Seattle Independent Media Coalition, and another Seattle media activist, Sheri Herndon, became interested in using the internet to create an independent media network focused on the upcoming WTO protests. These activists wanted to utilise the archetype of “open-posting” developed in Australia: “after hooking up online with the Active network, the Seattle group around Perlstein and Herndon secured low-rent use of a downstairs floor in Seattle through the directors of the Low Income Housing Institute…For the next six weeks, the network transformed this space into the first Indymedia center, which became operational the day before protests began against the WTO Conference” (Marc Garcelon, “The ‘Indymedia’ Experiment: The Internet as Movement Facilitator Against Institutional Control”, Convergence 2006; 12). open structure According to Nicholson, the creation of Indymedia marked “the first time that a decentralised activist network used the domain name system to at once differentiate themselves locally but stay linked to a global network.” Nicholson explains that the original Indymedia site very quickly decentralised into seattle.indymedia.org, washington.indymedia.org and sydney.indymedia.org and so on: “this was the same process for Active which had always been active.org.au/sydney, active.org.au/melbourne etc…but using the same domain name system enabled the community media centers to hold together as a network.” Nicholson goes on to explain, “in 1999 it wasn’t very common for mainstream media organisations to have any of the Web 2.0 features which people now talk about such as group voting, commenting, rating, tag clouds, inter-related social networks and so on. Things which we did on our websites put pressure on non-activist website for similar features, so 10 years later everyone wants interactive elements.” For Nicholson the first Indymedia site uniquely brought together the hacker systems of communication which had developed in the early days of the BBS and the ARPAnet with an expanding counter-globalisation movement and its non-expert adherents and enthusiasts. The interactive elements which were so novel in the Indymedia site had a long history in “the smaller base of the open source community of programmers who were writing websites for other programmers and were used to using the most advanced technologies of the time to rate and improve their programs. Slashdot.org for example had a system of commenting and ratings 10 years ago. It was a very nerdy algorithmic way of moderating because you could rate people’s articles and people could rate your ratings, you could rate people’s comments and other people could rate the way you rate people’s comments in an endlessly recursive system of moderation.” Because Nicholson and Arnison had a foot in both camps—open source programming and activism—Nicholson explains “we were a bridge to bring those forms of interactivity to a broader range of activists who also had an interest in democratic forms of communication.” Indymedia’s rapid expansion was helped along by its open structure—anyone in the world could put their hand up and say that they wanted to create a local branch and they were given the domain name and someone would create a handle for them in the Active software. Nicholson describes this as a “network effect” much like the old web rings of the early days of the net where people would band together to share common interests within an autonomous and expanding web environment. [image: Indymedia flyer] I open publishing Also crucial to the success of Indymedia was the notion of open publishing, something Arnison describes as ensuring “the process of creating news is transparent to the readers....” ( http://purplebark.net/maffew/cat/openpub.html). John Jacobs likens Indymedia to a “big communal blog before blogs were even invented. The backbone of Indymedia was peer-to-peer moderation, user generated content and open publishing, something which would ripple out through the web as a whole.” The concept of open publishing has expanded throughout the web with popular sites like Wikipedia which rely on “swarm intelligence” to refine, edit and verify content. An obvious corollary opens up between the open architecture of the web and the open publishing tactics of the web activists of Indymedia. The desire to decentralise information production and distribution connects directly to the de-centralised packet-switching structure of how information flows through the web. The many-to-many information broadcasting nodes of the web form the base which supports an ideology of open content creation, editing and sharing which has become normative within activist and web culture more broadly. The cultural implications of this have been enormous, both for the raft of art projects which have used the web as their medium, experimenting with net conceptualist actions such as the electronic sit-ins of the Electronic Disturbance Theatre, but beyond the core of internet artists there has been a general trend towards interactivity and networked culture within art making even in non-technologically dependent projects, such as the artists loosely grouped under the banner of Relational Aesthetics. tactical media Tactical Media is a term developed by David Garcia and Geert Lovink in the late 90s to describe the possibilities for artistic and activist interventions into digital and web-based media. In creating this term they borrowed from Michel de Certeau’s celebrated book The Practice of Everyday Life which outlined the potential for ordinary people to tactically interact with consumer society. De Certeau drew a distinction between strategic interventions, which were the prerogative of those invested with power, and the wily, tactical interventions of the weak. In contrast to the grim absolutism of the Situationists (“consumer society has colonized social life”), de Certeau saw the possibilities for consumers, or rebellious users, as he preferred to call them, to recreate the value of consumer products by investing them with their own idiosyncratic uses and meanings. Garcia and Lovink explain, in a nettime posting, how this allowed de Certeau to produce a “vocabulary of tactics rich and complex enough to amount to a distinctive and recognizable aesthetic…[an] aesthetic of poaching, tricking, reading, speaking, strolling, shopping, desiring…” Since the mid to late 90s multiple groups, networks, lists and projects have evolved under the tactical media umbrella such as Institute for Applied Autonomy (1998), RTMark (1996), The Yes Men (1999), Next Five Minutes (1993), Carbon Defense League (CDL) (1998), Bernadette Corporation (1994), Beyond The Brain parties (1995), HAcktitude (2001) and so on. The tech savvy trickster has become a key figure within art as cultural activists use the avenues of communication opened up by digital media to play in the gaps and cracks in the armory of the powerful. digital cultural resistance Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) has contributed greatly to the discussions surrounding the possibilities of digital resistance in a networked world. For CAE the “tradition of digital cultural resistance” is indebted to a rich heritage of avant-garde art practices such as detournment, bricolage, readymades, plagiarism, appropriation and the Theater of Everyday Life. These practices stretch back to 20th-century art movements such as Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus and the Situationists, and just as much reach forward to a tech utopia of the information age. This point is also made by the founder of the online discussion list HAcktitude, Tatiana Bazzichelli, who sees the lineages of digital art/activism stemming from “situationist, multiple singularity and plagiarist projects” ( www.oekonux.org/list-en/archive/msg05812.html). As she explains “the contemporary Internet-based networking platforms have their deep roots in a series of experimental activities in the field of art and technology started in the last half of the 20th-century which have transformed the conception of art as object into art as an expanded network of relationships.” avant garde continuities What the internet allows is the rapid expansion and diversification of the impulse towards networking, collaboration and collectivism contained within earlier avant-garde art movements: thus Mail Art becomes the email list, detournment becomes sampling, the readymade becomes plagiarism, plagiarism becomes copyleft, the derive becomes Google-earth, the collage becomes the mash-up, appropriation becomes the fan-zine and so on. Rather than emaciating the avant-garde impulses of earlier art movements, as those who claim we live in a postmodern world might hypothesise, the internet age has put them on steroids, rapidly expanding the capacity of artists and art movements to experiment with networked practices which regard social relationships as a form of art. Experiments in the 80s and early 90s with neoism, culture jamming, cyber-punk, tactical media, net.art and hacktervism created a culture of digital resistance and critique which has transformed both art and networking, or, as Bazzichelli cogently argues, conflated the two. In Italy, where Bazzichelli is located, the digital underground is highly active and innovative spawning a multitude of networked cultural practices and initiatives such as 0100101110101101.org the Luter Blissart Project, the Telestreet network, FreakNet and so on. In Italy there has been a powerful combination of autonomist theory, digital resistance and political activism which has reverberated outwards to the rest of the world through the writing of Toni Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato, Franco Berardi and Paolo Virno and the actions of counter-globalisation protesters in Genoa. the internet come to life In May 2000 Naomi Klein was invited to give a paper at the Re-Imagining Politics and Society conference in New York. A central theme of this conference was providing vision and unity to the counter-globalisation movement which had emerged so spectacularly on the streets of Seattle the year before. When deliberating on her speech Klein came to the antagonistic conclusion, however, that a lack of vision or unity should be considered a strength rather than a weakness. Choosing her metaphor carefully Klein argued that while the movement had not coalesced into a single definable identity its various elements were “tightly linked to one another, much as ‘hotlinks’ connect their websites on the Internet.” She went on to explain, “This analogy is more than coincidental and is in fact key to understanding the changing nature of political organising. Although many have observed that the recent mass protests would have been impossible without the internet, what has been overlooked is how the communication technology that facilitates these campaigns is shaping the movement in its own image…What emerged on the streets of Seattle…was an activist model that mirrors the organic, decentralised, interlinked pathways of the internet—the internet come to life” (www.thenation.com/doc/20000710/klein/single). The Sydney hackers who helped launch Indymedia years ago played an important part in linking our experiences of communication and politics with the technical capacities for decentralisation embedded within the structure of the web itself. As we confront copyright, piracy, plagiarism and other issues of the digital age, the innovation of a decade ago stands as a reminder that the future of culture lies in democratising the productive capacities of the era in which we find ourselves. By Zanny Begg www.zannybegg.com <http://www.zannybegg.com/> RealTime issue #95 Feb-March 2010 pg. 29 <realtime {AT} realtimearts.net> <http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue95/9752#top> <http://www.realtimearts.net/ads/adclick.php?bannerid=146&zoneid=0&source=&dest=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.visualarts.net.au%2Fgrantsprizes%2FANZ_AA> <http://www.realtimearts.net/ads/adclick.php?bannerid=144&zoneid=0&source=&dest=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jumpmentoring.com.au> <http://www.realtimearts.net/ads/adclick.php?bannerid=145&zoneid=0&source=&dest=http%3A%2F%2Fhelpmannacademy.com.au%2Fpage.php%3Fparent%3Dnews%26key%3Dnews> <http://www.realtimearts.net/ads/adclick.php?bannerid=117&zoneid=0&source=&dest=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.liquidarchitecture.org.au%2Ffestival-2009-blog> <http://www.realtimearts.net/ads/adclick.php?bannerid=58&zoneid=1&source=&dest=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.realtimearts.net%2Fsubscriptions> -- new project: www.youarehere.me http://www.zannybegg.com/ 24.0 <nettime> The alt-right and the death of countercultur Florian Cramer nettime-l@kein.org Fri, 7 Jul 2017 08:50:20 +0200 [Olivier Jutel wrote an extensive review of Angela Nagle's new book "Kill All Normies - Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right" (Zero Books, 2017) for the Australian journal Overland: https://overland.org.au/2017/07/the-alt-right-and-the-death- of-counterculture/ It's an essay in its own right; I'm reposting it here with Olivier's kind permission. An other, less favorable review of the same book can be read here: https://medium.com/ {AT} curple.turnle/i-didnt-like-kill-all-norm ies-very-much-225c17868d78 -Florian] The alt-right and the death of counterculture By Olivier Jutel 6.Jul.17 Angela Nagle has written an indispensable book that allows both the extremely online- and meme-illiterate to grasp the IRL implications of the online culture wars. From the rise of Trump as a lulzy agent of base enjoyment and unrestrained conspiracy, to the collapse of meaning in these perilously ridiculous times, all are products of an ascendant online culture which privileges affect and transgression. Nagle navigates a sea of anime Nazis, gamers, white nationalists, masturbation abstainers and violent misogynists in mapping the contours of online reaction and fascism. What is essential and most controversial in her thesis is the symbiosis between what we can call the ‘Tumblr liberal-left’ and the alt-right. Both are products of an online cultural vanguardism that has been lauded by techno-utopians, nominally leftist academics and journalists alike. Nagle wields a forceful critique of the online left’s aestheticised resistance as both self-satisfied and lacking the dynamism to undercut the alt-right’s discourse of modern alienation, however nonsensical. This book is not an attempt at righteously slam dunking on the basement dwelling nerds of the alt-right or rehashing the excesses of campus identitarians. Instead it takes on the ideological deadlocks of the left that have been masked by the tech-fetishism of late capitalism. The title ‘Kill All Normies’ embodies the wry humour of this book, necessary to deal with the risible nature of the alt-right and the horrifying obscenity, racism and misogyny that fuels the movement. At its origin, the alt-right amounts to a lament of web 2.0 inclusivity which ruined the memes and the ‘mean internet’ safe spaces of predominately young white male misanthropes. At its core, the alt-right is the equivalent of a new convert to punk complaining that ‘modern music today is so terrible’. In Gabriella Coleman’s book on 4-Chan and the hacker collective Anonymous, she extensively profiles the archetype troll Andrew Auernheimer, aka weev. weev is a truly contemptible figure, an avowed white supremacist and supporter of Dylan Roof who during the Trump campaign dedicated himself to ‘Operation Pepe’. As with so much of the alt-right, weev is equal parts laughable and evil, claiming that his weaponisation of Pepe the Frog memes will incite the coming race war. And despite his undeniable status as an uber-troll of the alt-right, his interview with Coleman captures a pathetic grandiosity in trying to impress the fact that he ‘was in the room when the lulz was first said’. It is so jarringly stupid to think that the renewal of fascism and white supremacy would be driven by a nerdy subcultural one-upmanship but this is the genesis of the online culture wars identified by Nagle. For Nagle, the rise of the alt-right is not so much about the ideological currency of reactionary politics but the techno-enthusiastic embrace of transgression and disruption deracinated from politics. As with many discussions on the state of the left, Nagle considers the epochal moment of ’68 and the youth-led demands for individual emancipation from hierarchy. She writes, the alt-right ‘has more in common with the 1968 left’s slogan “It is forbidden to forbid!” than it does with anything most recognize as part of any traditionalist right.’ Where for fifty years conservatives have been fighting sexual liberation and ‘liberal cultural excess,’ the alt-right have formulated a style which is counter-cultural, dynamic, and thrives, at least temporarily, on its own incoherency. Embodying the best traditions of conservative hucksterism, Milo has been a key figure in providing a fascist chic and garnering mainstream media access, elevating his brand and online provocations into a reactionary culture-jamming. Nagle observes that Richard Spencer’s ‘spitting disdain about the vulgarity of the US consumer culture-loving, Big-Mac munching, Bush-voting, pick-up truck owning pro-war Republican’ could be ripped from a mid-oughts edition of AdBusters. The alt-right has latched onto the transgressive and paranoid libertarian style of culture jammers and hackers, which always sat uncomfortably on the left, and celebrates the liberation of the individual against ghastly sheeple and normie culture. In the process they have disrupted the poles of youth culture, allowing for an easy slippage between gaming, lib-hating, trolling, unbridled misogyny and fascism. As Nagle writes: ‘When we’ve reached a point where the idea of being edgy/counter-cultural/transgressive can place fascists in a position of moral superiority to regular people, we may seriously want to rethink the value of these stale and outworn countercultural ideals.’ One of the intellectual legacies of ‘68 and the new left that Nagle identifies is the shift of concern from a universalist politics of state, party, the public and economy, to cultural studies, new forms of political identity and privatised resistance. There has been a great deal of intellectual energy devoted to conceptualising political emancipation in a manner that evades the stubbornly persistent questions of party organisation and militancy. In this retreat from the collective and embrace of the new, there has been a tremendous amount of exuberance from nominally left academics, sometimes with chairs paid for by tech companies, about the radical potential of new media. Jodi Dean in her 2009 book Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, presaging Occupy Wall Street, wrote of the ‘techno-democracy fetish’ in which new forms of communication in themselves do the hard of work of ideology and organisation in our place. The reality of techno-democracy was the ‘collapse of symbolic efficiency,’ meaning an endless circular procedurialism and clarification of terms which prevented participants from making the radical ethical gamble of politics that requires an individual subsumption to a collective discipline. It was through this mix of techno-utopianism, political indeterminacy and the carnivalesque that figures like weev and the hackers of Anonymous could be turned into progressive allies by the likes of Coleman, Molly Crabapple or philosophy professor Peter Ludlow. The glaring white supremacy of weev was seen simply as trolling and lulzy transgression, while the cesspool of 4-Chan that spawned Anonymous was responsible for this ‘force for good in the world’ wielding lulz as a weapon of resistance. Anonymous have since been thoroughly eclipsed by the alt-right as the inheritors of this legacy. This appalling omission rests on a thoroughly Nietzschean tech-elitism, as Nagle writes, ‘it is certainly hard to imagine even a hint of approval being tolerated in academia if the subjects at hand were ordinary blue-collar normies of the far right like Tommy Robinson, despite his far milder views than what has characterised 4chan and trolls like weev for many years.’ This nerd solidarity and tech-elitism informs Laurie Penny’s profile of Milo devotees as ‘Lost Boys’ with anxiety disorders, as opposed to fascists politically responsible for their actions. The idea that lulzy racism and transgression is either polysemic or the corollary to a new disruptive network enabled democracy owes to a cheap Deleuzianism deployed by tech-utopians, culture jammers and autonomist Marxists alike. The Rhizome, the Multitude, the wisdom of crowds and peer-produsage all rest on an ideal of a latent affective human connectivity, that passes between bodies in cyberspace, enabling new decentralised forms of resistance and democracy. (See footnote for an extraordinary rhetorical flourish of this nature.) Nagle’s critique of this network-determinism, pervasive during Tahrir Square and the Occupy moment, does not simply touch on the failure to seize power or the tyranny of structurelessness, but the pure nihilistic potential of the network. Perhaps the black-pill trajectory of this discourse should have been clear when AdBusters described ISIS as rhizomatic and superior to the ‘Western rationalist approach.’ The failure of online connectivity to stabilise around a radical left ethic is, as Dean notes, both a product of its individuating effects, and the failure of communication itself to overcome the ideological deadlocks of the left. Affect and the lulz may create a short circuit here, but it is not the humanist teleology supposed by cyber-enthusiasts, rather a self-fecund ‘ironical in-jokey maze of meaning.’ Nagle writes, ‘every bizarre event, new identity and strange subcultural behaviour that baffles general audiences … can be understood as a response to a response to a response, each one responding angrily to the existence of the other.’ Nagle correctly identifies that this self-referential world has as its end an amoral ‘liberation of the individual and the id’, and a pathological enjoyment at the expense of an other. The role of the other in psychoanalytic terms figures prominently in the online neuroses of the Tumblr liberal-left and unrestrained malice of the alt-right. Nagle hints at this libidinal economy but is unable to devote it sufficient time in her task of drawing the battle lines of the culture wars. What the Tumblrites embody is a taxonomical politics which is driven (drive in psychoanalytic terms) by the techno-fetishist belief in pure communication and individual empowerment. It is in this way that language has become so central to politics. The clarification of terms, the bracketing of difference and the weighing of utterances from different subject positions, cis-males at the bottom, all attempt to make the banality of online life urgent and political. In a manner that mirrors the data colonisation of the social by new media companies, every difference must be celebrated, problematised and deconstructed. Thus there are hundreds of genders, Marxist universalism is misogynist, and effacement of agency requires reparations through any number of micro-payment platforms. Any slight sarcasm or scepticism about these facts is violence. The claim to truth of such politics is purely affective, as challenging political statements from a left-ethical position may elicit the refrain its not my job to do the emotional labor of explaining this to you. The political speech-act becomes about amplifying marginal voices towards an in-group consensus, and the concept that ideas be rigorously scrutinised in debate ‘seems to anguish, offend and enrage this tragically stupefied shadow of the great movements of the left.’ Nagle quite rightly castigates this as a joyless and vicious politics that does not expand the quality of left thought so much as garner converts to a woke clergy. It is also an ontologically impossible politics that cannot succeed on its own terms. In Lacanian libidinal theories of language, communication is defined by its impossibility, what Lacan calls symbolic castration, which launches us into the world of subjectivity through a gap and lack between the symbolic and the subject. The attempt of Tumblrites to produce politics through language is doomed; we are always haunted by the other ‘what did they mean?’, ‘did I deny agency?’, ‘have I internalised cis-male discourse?’. The efforts to eradicate this indeterminacy, rather than make an ethico-political commitment, can only result in a vicious and impotent lashing out. Thus we have seen what Nagle describes as a ‘culture of purging’ in these online spaces against the left, as an identitarian elite looks to translate a surfeit of virtue into a scarce social capital for online cultural gatekeepers. This extremely online politics produces a drive to self-destruction and paralysis within a nominally left identitarianism, while providing the alt-right with an obscene pathological enjoyment that defines its entire universe. While Nagle quite rightly takes pains to distinguish between alt-lights (Milo, Gavin McInnes, Mike Cernovich), the Manosphere (Roosh, Paul Elam) and the Nazi alt-right (Spencer, weev), the connective tissue is trolling as libidinal pathology. The logic of trolling corresponds precisely to what Lacan calls jouissance, that is, an enjoyment that is dependent upon another who steals it from us. Trolling is the obsession over and debasement of the other for amorphous crimes against the subculture. Thus for the alt-right, identitarians are an object of constant ridicule that should be, in the language of sexual violence, ‘triggered’ with misogynist, racist and anti-semitic memes as both a matter of enjoyment and internet justice. Yet for all of the complaints about liberal snowflakes and grievance culture, trolls are obsessed with what is served in the cafeteria of a private liberal arts college they’ve never heard of. There is an inability to enjoy while this pervasive other threatens their memes, video games, traditional marriage and even Western civilisation. This logic of jouissance as stolen by a nefarious, contradictory and overdetermined other is neatly evinced by the obsession with sexual hierarchy. Nagle’s great insight here is in understanding the alt-right’s reversion to intense misogyny as a pathological libidinal frustration and self-hatred. She writes, ‘their low-ranking status in this [sexual] hierarchy is precisely what has produced their hard-line rhetoric about asserting hierarchy in the world politically when it comes to women and non-whites’. The default insult of liberal men and Never-Trump conservatives as ‘cucks’ depicts the ‘fuck or get cucked’ logic of jouissance. If you do not have the will to embrace the ‘red pill’ truth about politics, gender and race and engage in radical transgression you can expect to have your jouissance stolen by way of immigrants, liberals, or, in the original meaning of this metaphor, miscegenation. Here we have the deadlock of jouissance, the very thing that gives the alt-right enjoyment reinforces the racial other’s virility as a direct threat to their own potency. This is Žižek’s great insight into the logic of fascism and antisemitism: the figure of the Jew in a contradictory evil – both aristocratic and slovenly, intellectual and carnal – whose enjoyment is based on stealing the people’s social jouissance. Whether through the manipulation of media and finance, or the destruction of Western civilisation, the fascist’s enemy (Jew, Feminist, Marxist, POC) lives to deny an organic order of gender and racial and religious hierarchy. The enemy’s enjoyment extends to the very control of enjoyment, as nicely evinced by the recent Daily Stormer story, that Jews are controlling the porn industry to make men masturbate to plus-size models in order to weaken the white race. The enemy is necessary for the very existence of this idea of natural order, and grows more powerful as the alt-right is confronted with the impossibility of ‘Western civilization’ or patriarchy as they conceive it. This inevitable failure requires both a violent lashing out, to cover this lack, and an obsessive conspiracy which feeds the cycle of jouissance and frustration. Even if ‘Pizzagate’, the conspiracy alleging that the Democratic Party is a vast paedophile ring, was created by 4-Chan trolls, its logic corresponds perfectly with how trolls conceptualise their enemy and their politics of enjoyment. The fact that Pizzagate is so widely believed by Republican voters and that the favourite pursuit of online Fox viewers devotees’ is now ‘triggering snowflakes’ speaks to the broader political currency of this fascist jouissance. The great threat of the alt-right identified by Nagle is that they best embody the political potential of networked affect, and that they are able to use this infrastructure to accelerate a pure fascist politics of jouissance and libidinal frustration. The prevailing tendency on much of the self-identified left has been to retreat from the kind of broad popular struggle that could be attractive to the politically curious, making ‘the left a laughing stock for a whole new generation.’ Nagle’s conclusion is harsh, and though it is always complicated unravelling various left threads, in the wake of the liberal resistance’s floundering and their continued obsession with Bernie Bros, it holds true. The alt-right meanwhile will continue to be wracked by their own self-loathing, the diminishing returns from online cultural victories, and an inevitable sectarianism. In this moment of post-ideology it is fitting, however grotesque their beliefs, that even our fascists are second rate. There will be no Steve Bannon-inspired National Socialist New Deal and the alt-right will have to be content with the wages of jouissance. Where this does threaten to verge into new radical territory is with a black pill nihilism that lauds mass shooters and the political violence of Dylan Roof, Elliot Rodgers and Jeremy Joseph Christian. Where networked politics was supposed to be liberatory, it has become a conduit for a violent acting out of this libidinal impasse, that can only grow in the absence of an IRL left militant universalism. Footnote: ‘And yet, peering through the computer, we find Anonymous in any instant to be an aggregate sack of flesh – meshed together by wires, transistors, and wi-fi signals – replete with miles of tubes pumping blood, pounds of viscera filled with vital fluids, an array of live signalling wires, propped up by a skeletal structure with muscular pistons fastened to it, and ruled from a cavernous dome holding a restless control center, the analog of these fabulously grotesque and chaotically precise systems that, if picked apart, become what we call people. Anonymous is no different from us. It simply consists of humans sitting at their glowing screens and typing, as humans are wont to at this precise moment in the long arc of the human condition. Each body taken alone provides the vector for an irreducibly unique and complex individual history – mirroring in its isolation the complexity of all social phenomenon as a whole – which can itself be reduced yet further to the order of events: mere flights of fingers and an occasional mouse gesture which register elsewhere, on a screen, as a two-dimensional text or a three-dimensional video; the song their fingers play on these keyboards ringing forth in a well-orchestrated, albeit cacophonous and often discordant, symphony; it is sung in the most base and lewd verse, atonal and unmetered, yet enthralling to many: the mythical epic of Anonymous.’ – Excerpt from page 115 of Gabriella Coleman’s Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous, Verso, 2014 24.1 Re: <nettime> The alt-right and the death of countercultur Brian Holmes nettime-l@kein.org Sat, 8 Jul 2017 03:53:32 -0500 24.2 Re: <nettime> The alt-right and the death of countercultur Jonathan Marshall nettime-l@kein.org Sat, 8 Jul 2017 10:22:58 +0000 >As Nagle writes: ‘When we’ve > reached a point where the idea of being edgy/counter-cultural/transgressive > can place fascists in a position of moral superiority to regular people, we > may seriously want to rethink the value of these stale and outworn > countercultural ideals.’ Sorry Fascists have always considered themselves to be in a position of moral superiority to ordinary people. That is part of its attraction. It allows smug violence in the name of moral superiority against weak and decadent people who are betraying the valued race or nation. jon UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F DISCLAIMER: This email message and any accompanying attachments may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, do not read, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message or attachments. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this message. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender expressly, and with authority, states them to be the views of the University of Technology Sydney. Before opening any attachments, please check them for viruses and defects. Think. Green. Do. Please consider the environment before printing this email. 24.3 Re: <nettime> The alt-right and the death of countercultur Felix Stalder nettime-l@kein.org Sat, 8 Jul 2017 23:47:05 +0200 On 2017-07-08 10:53, Brian Holmes wrote: > These lines, while pitched at Milo and the young sexy neofascists, > describe a lot of the cultural pranks we used to celebrate in the > festival circuits emanating out from Amsterdam. The big difference > is that until very recently, the world was stable and the pranks > were inconsequential. Now the ways that such nihilism feeds monsters > have become all too obvious. The style of paranoid critique that many > of us in the theory-world practiced is complicit in these devastating > outcomes, because no matter how bad things may be, it is one's > responsibility to seek for possible ameliorations of the common lot > - by which I mean something much more widely shared than the rarified > concept of "the commons." Looking back, the shortcomings of the approaches "emanating out of Amsterdam", say tactical media in particular and, but the cultural/media left more generally, seem to be twofold, in my view. First, while the intuition about the necessity to interrupt the normal flows of communication was correct and has proofed to be very powerful since, there was no idea what do in the space that would thus be opened up. We could have used the time when the system was relatively stable to think about this, but we didn't. Now, the the system is falling apart, the far right is capable of imposing an even darker version of disaster capitalism. Second, both the actions and the theories remained absolutely insular. What passes as cultural/media theory still delights in jargon and obscurantism. Or, in offering hypercritical takes that create no opening (like Florian's erudite but otherwise baffling piece on public domain). There has been very little interest in offering points of translation, that is, to think about how people who are not in the same circuit could appropriate and transform for their own use, the insights they find in the theoretical perspective one offers. For me, however, the concepts of the commons still remains useful. For one, it at least points to a new social settlement, that is, towards what might fill the void of the break-down of the old order. Second, it has a certain resonance where I stand, thus it can lead unusual alliances. And, third, it's vague enough a concept so that many different strands of thinking might come into contact under this umbrella and it does have a lot of potential to be appropriated by different actors, not the least in the context of radical urban social movements. Felix PS: This focus on the meme-culture of the alt-right makes it seems like the import of ideas/tactics always goes from left to right. It has the whiny undertones of an inventor who sees his idea commercialized by others. But that's incorrect. If you look at what happens with the "Indivisible Movement", they every clearly and openly copy tactics of the tea party movement, namely to give senators and representatives hell at town hall meetings, where the politicians face the people face-to-face. And at the moment, its seems fairly successful eroding the majority for the repeal of Obama care. -- ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |OPEN PGP: https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0C9FF2AC 24.4 Re: <nettime> The alt-right and the death of countercultur Keith Hart nettime-l@kein.org Sun, 9 Jul 2017 08:23:01 +0200 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} kein.org # {AT} nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: 24.5 Re: <nettime> The alt-right and the death of countercultur David Garcia nettime-l@kein.org Mon, 10 Jul 2017 12:20:05 +0100 Felix Stalder wrote.. > > Looking back, the shortcomings of the approaches "emanating out of > Amsterdam", say tactical media in particular and, but the cultural/media > left more generally, seem to be twofold, in my view. > > First, while the intuition about the necessity to interrupt the normal > flows of communication was correct and has proofed to be very powerful > since, there was no idea what do in the space that would thus be opened > up. We could have used the time when the system was relatively stable to > think about this, but we didn't. Now, the the system is falling apart, > the far right is capable of imposing an even darker version of disaster > capitalism. > There has been very little interest in offering points of translation, > that is, to think about how people who are not in the same circuit could > appropriate and transform for their own use, the insights they find in > the theoretical perspective one offers. I am trying to get a sense of what is really at stake in these discussions.. what the underlying continuities as well as big changes that make these questions of counter-cultures and the new autonomous zones of message boards and meme wars seem important rather than a trivial side show. The big change from the 1990s is the way internet and digital cultures (in large areas of the world) are now fully inserted into and thus inseparable from daily life. The full impact of the web 2.0 revolution and the rise of the platform era is quite simply the -mainstreaming- of digital cultures. In this context it is nonsense to see work on the political, cultural and epistemic impact of these changes as a marginal obsession of -a self-selecting group geeks.. the continued development of earlier agendas of the cypher punks around anonymity, surveillance, autonomy, and agency as a necessity for creating wider progressive change has increased not decreased in urgency. Digital cultures have become quite simply a -Total Social Fact- [Noortje Maares-Digital Sociology]. This -insertiability- of the digital cultures into all aspects of life is the foundation for both the success of these platforms and devices as well as the basis of monopolistically inclined business models that Nick Srnicek has called platform capitalism in active combination with the surveillance state. Coming to grips with this problem is more subtle than it is sometimes portrayed. The tricky point lies in understanding that what constitutes actual participation and what differentiates these cultures from all that preceded it. Participation is not as it is sometimes portrayed -the difference between -the passive audience and the active engaged participants or users-. No, a traditional audience (or public) can be as active and highly engaged as anyone else. The key point of difference is that engagement in the case of an -audience- is invisible. The engagement of an audience is invisible because it is not -traceable-. And without traceability there can be no -feedback-. No feedback means no participation. This was de Certeau’s observation long ago and why he saw consumption as invisible co-creation with an asymmetric balance of power. And observed the presence of silent invisible networks of resistance that he called tactical. It is this necessary traceability on which participation depends that has been opportunistically seized upon as the business models and the new forms of exploitation and value extraction we know as platform capitalism which when combined with state surveillance squats like a toad atop of what could still become a post capitalist culture of contribution. The -insertion- of this model of digital cultures into the everyday life accounts for both its success and also sub-cultural resistance that demands the right to anonymity and the need for unregulated spaces. It is the need for these spaces that accounts for the huge popularity of message bodes like 4chan where registration is not required and anonymity is an expedient that morphed into an ethos and then into a movement whose potential has only begun. Back in 2012 Gabriella Coleman wrote a journal article reflecting on the research she had been doing since 2008 on the formative role of 4chan's random page in the emergence of Anonymous in which she asks -how has the anarchic hate machine of (Fox News’s epithet for Anonymous) been transformed into one of the most adroit and effective political operations of recent times ? - Now in 2017 we need to invert the question and ask how did the platform that gave rise to -the most adroit and effective political operation- spawned the even more adroit and effective operation Alt.right ? And more pertinently why was this once progressive domain ceded so much to the right.. why was there not a more effective fightback. why no equally powerful alt.left? The white supremacist trolls and nazi meme warriors may have had an exaggerated belief in their own influence but though exaggerated was and remans far from negligible. Trump’s recent speech in Poland on the battle for Western Civilisation has Bannon’s Alt.right finger prints all over it. He may be less visible these days but his influence in the White House remains undimmed. Whether as Anonymous or Alt.right the unregulated autonomous zones of message boards represent the revenge of what some on the left previously dismissed as folk politics. Far from being either an impotent side show or the property any particular set of political affiliations these spaces represent a new front line in the battle for the social mind. As Florian Cramer pointed out in a recent panel that there are parallels here with Punk which although often associated in the UK and beyond with the anarchist left in Germany there was a strong constituency of neo-nazi punk. Felix Stalder wrote > import of ideas/tactics always goes from left to right. It has the > whiny undertones of an inventor who sees his idea commercialized by > others. But that's incorrect. If you look at what happens with the > "Indivisible Movement", they every clearly and openly copy tactics of > the tea party movement, Yes agreed- And one of the most important lessons is to be unafraid of power and to be willing to re-occupy traditional political parties but in new ways. Although it has not figured much in these discussions the UK Labour party’s successful campaign combined with the Momentum the organisation in support of the Corbyn agenda operating outside of the formal party structures and making fantastic use of independant media outlets. Other nettime regulars such as Richard Barbrook who were actively campaigning would be far better than I am to illuminate this picture. But from the outside the campaign seems to have taken many lessons from the US grass roindependantot’s media activism combining new forms of campaigning, Turning rallies into media events. Not cosying up to mainstream media but attacking them all appears straight out of the Trump play book of Let Corbyn be Corbyn Its easy too write off work around art, media and politics in the words of Jodie Dean -communicative capitalism’s perfect lure- a self deluding sideshow, unconnected to the disciplines of real political organising. But whatever else the Alt.right demonstrated that in politics *culture* particularly sub-cultures still matter. And that Bretitbart’s famous aphorism energetically adopted by Bannon’s meme team that: -politics is down-stream from culture- is a message that the far right learned well which some on the left overlooked as they were anxious to move on from the DIY media practices dismissed by some as -folk politics-. Again from the outside, Momentum have been stupidly misrepresented as a throw back Trotskyist entryism of the 1970s. But Corbyn himself represent a very different approach to what leadership is. Part of Corbyn’s very contemporary appeal is he appears as a reluctant leader. Uncomfortable with the trappings of power. His clear discomfort with the normal logic of power brings his approach closer to what Paolo Gerbaudo has called the “emotional choreography” of the reluctant leaders of Occupy. I remember a discussion along while back at the LSE with Paul Mason in a conversation with Manuel Castells where Mason declared would be inconceivable for any politician today could openly declare as Labour Party's Shawcross notoriously did when Labour won power in 1945 that -We are the masters now- For whatever reason people don’t want masters .. People don’t trust traditional forms of leadership anymore.. But in the same conversation they discussed the fact that major social and political change takes time to unfold it can be glacial (then sudden). Castells pointed out how -it took 20-30 years from the arrival of mass industrialisation to the point when union power and the labour movement became political institutions […] its long journey from the minds of people to the institutions of society-. I know.. I know.. we don’t have that long. ----------------------------------------------- d a v i d g a r c i a Bournemouth University d.garcia {AT} new-tactical-research.co.uk http://new-tactical-research.co.uk http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net 25.0 <nettime> 20 years of Indymedia: Where are we now ?! podinski nettime-l@kein.org Fri, 6 Sep 2019 15:42:24 +0200 hello N-time, This November INDYMEDIA – (( i )) – will be 20 years old !! April Glaser writes a good short history of the pioneering network/platform/newsfeed … for Logic Magazine ( here ). But there’s probably many more things that need to be analyzed in the history of the Internet and digital culture to understand and assess whether “Another Network Is Possible“… and where + how tactical media can unite communities tomorrow… https://logicmag.io/bodies/another-network-is-possible/ ... XLterrestrials are working on an expanded post about ALL that… http://xlterrestrials.org/plog/?p=19424 excerpt from Part 1: Where are we now ? > ( that haunting + sad final-years-Bowie tune is playing back in our heads as we write… ) This is an extremely complicated discussion, and it will take more than a short essay to sort through all the angles and dilemmas we find ourselves soaking in with the cybernetic technodystopias + technospherical spectrum +/or rectal probes of the military/corporate communication industries, now oozing ubiquitous through all the tissues and orifices of human + social organization like electro-shock + doctrines + disruption therapies to cure our inherited already-anthropocene-driven madness… by accelerating it … like: Here take this, it’s another anthropo-scenic downloading spiral into Stephen-Pinker-esque "tech-n-progress” Inc. > ... On a tangent note, it would be nice to put on some Indy-inspired type tactical media event... perhaps in the Btropolis ( Berlin ) for this anniversary date... Any ((i)) and N5Minutes veterans wanna play with us on that ? get in touch ! There is already something planned in Houston hosted by IMC folks there ( at Rice U. ?) ... but nothing in the EU territories yet, as far as we know... and WHY Btropolis? One of its IMC sites is still active, and its more radical sibling offshoot, got the crackdown + kicked off the webz 2 years ago. ( Linksunten )... And there's been heated discussions here about WHAT'S NEXT !! ... liebegreetz ! podinski 0~~~~O-----o www.xlterrestrials.org/plog 
 arts + praxis organisms o-----O~~~~~0 25.1 Re: <nettime> 20 years of Indymedia: Where are we now ?! Hoofd, I.M. (Ingrid) nettime-l@kein.org Sat, 7 Sep 2019 08:05:33 +0000 Hello ex-((i)) and ex-N5M3 folks, Just like to point out that https://www.indymedia.nl/ is still very much alive! I haven't been involved for many years now, but perhaps we could do something in Amsterdam, or barring that something in Berlin together with the Dutch ((i)) folks? I'd be happy to be involved somehow too! Cheers, Ingrid. 25.2 Re: <nettime> 20 years of Indymedia: Where are we now ?! podinski nettime-l@kein.org Tue, 10 Sep 2019 13:19:58 +0200 Hi Ingrid et al, hmm, a little shocked that so few want to discuss the indymedia platform topic... and what it means for today's struggles... but na ja, so it goes in the web flood of efficiently cubicled (un-)solidarities... On 9/7/19 10:05 AM, Hoofd, I.M. (Ingrid) wrote: Hello ex-((i)) and ex-N5M3 folks, Just like to point out that https://www.indymedia.nl/ is still very much alive! I haven't been involved for many years now, but perhaps we could do something in Amsterdam, or barring that something in Berlin together with the Dutch ((i)) folks? I'd be happy to be involved somehow too! sorry for slow reply... things have been a little overloaded... good to hear that NL ((i)) is still kicking... i believe there are several still out there providing useful public channels ( as mentioned in the article, ie. Argentina ) ! Not quite sure how to proceed with any concrete event plans for Nov.... or beyond. but happy to hear that there are some comrades out there who want to be involved... Should be a topic at Transmediale 2019 "e2e" network theme... https://2020.transmediale.de/festival-2020 but one always has to wonder just how far out of touch the arts+cult+showtime sectors are with pragmatic activism + praxis ... i will check in to see, if not already too late. my cynical 2cent bits for the day... podinski     Cheers, Ingrid. 25.3 Re: <nettime> 20 years of Indymedia: Where are we now ?! tacira nettime-l@kein.org Wed, 11 Sep 2019 05:38:06 -0700 hi pod! long time no see, hi ingrid, tatiana from abya yala :) as for a long time user and educator on free technologies for creative media production I was a bit skeptical on the article - we dont need to create one more leftist tool, but re-ocuppy with purpose and love all collective maintained tools - perhaps more influenced by intersectional poltics (I am reading Ocalan :) but the networkS are alive, dormant because NOT dispersed and very much re-creating itself all the time. free philosophy and ethics becomes just more urgent then ever! As Krenak an indigenous leader in brazil says we have been using "colored parachutes" in this fall "being able to maintain our subjectivities, our visions, our poetics about existence". we are in shock with the fire but its from the ashes that we create! here a recent ongoing work from the brazilian cyberfeminists https://midiatatica.desarquivo.org/ tactical archives from the last decade by collective perspectives. best for all! t 25.4 Re: <nettime> 20 years of Indymedia: Where are we now ?! podinski nettime-l@kein.org Wed, 11 Sep 2019 19:40:15 +0200 Hi Tati et al, a pleasure to read some news from ya... + thx for the link ! ... 25.5 Re: <nettime> 20 years of Indymedia: Where are we now ?! podinski nettime-l@kein.org Wed, 11 Sep 2019 22:07:48 +0200 Hi Matze, i tried recently to follow and catch-up on the debacle of linksunten and state censorship... and picked up the pamphlet : verboten ! zur Kriminalisierung von Indymedia linksunten via Rote Hilfe e.v. but havent yet had time to get thru it. ... re: the issue of the liberated webs and copy left... i have begun to think that another unexpected + massive fallout has occurred with all this online free content falling into... the Titan grip... and in the idealism of trying to " common-ize" and/or "dismantle capitalism" on the net, but not in the AFK world... as the majority of us still live in the realms of landlord strangleholds... protection of labor and the livelihoods of content producers and indy publishers + DIY distro merchants was not very well considered... in the eco-systems of books, media, data, small business and shop owners... and people's having to make their money to survive... pay rent.... or recoup their production budgets ( see Astra Taylor's The People's Platform )... Copyright is a completely re-openable subject... of hot debate.... which HKW is also being revisited again this year ( 100 Years Of Copyright and Part 2 : Right the Right... this Nov. ) ... but i am not so hopeful they will handle the topic radically enough, because in the end they are already looking for tech solutionism to fill in the grim situations... ie blockchain in the music industry ? but no time to get very sophisticated in that beastly and tedious topic. ... cheers, p. 25.16 Re: <nettime> 20 years of Indymedia: Where are we now ?! podinski nettime-l@kein.org Fri, 13 Sep 2019 16:18:17 +0200 Hello nettime, and Tish, thx for posting the link to the indy event in Houston ! reposting here below... because your post is not showing up in the list archives. ( perhaps because it's a reply To me, and Then cc'd to list... not sure ) will be in touch, if we get something happening in Berlin... all the best, p. 26.0 [Nettime-bold] Media without an Audien Eric Kluitenberg nettime-bold@nettime.org Thu, 19 Oct 2000 10:58:57 +0200 dear nettimers, Please note: This text is an expanded version of a talk given at the Banff Centre for the Arts Interactive Screen 0.0 workshop (August 2000), and the introduction to the <target.audience=0> panel at net.congestion - International Festival of Streaming Media, in Amsterdam, October 2000. The text will appear shortly in the third Acoustic Space issue, published by the E-lab artist organisation in Riga, Latvia. _______________________ Media without an Audience by Eric Kluitenberg Presence in the mediated environment of digital networks is probably one of the most complex phenomena of the new types of social interaction that have emerged in these environments. In the current phase of radical deployment (or penetration) of the internet, various attempts are made to come to terms with the social dynamics of networked communication spaces. It seems that traditional media theory is not able to contextualise these social dynamics, as it remains stuck on a meta-level discourse of media and power structures (Virilio), hyperreality (Baudrillard), or on a retrograde analysis of media structures deeply rooted in the functionality and structural characteristics of broadcast media (McLuhan). Attempts to come to terms with networked communication environments from the field of social theory, are generally shallow, ill informed about actual practices, and sometimes to straightforwardly biased. Psychology does not contribute in any significant way to an understanding of these social dynamics either. The rather popular idea, for instance, that the screen is a projection screen for personal pre-occupations, and that social relations that emerge through the interactions via networked media are mostly imaginary for lack of negative feedback or corrections, is deeply contentious. The idea that absence of corrective feedback stimulates the creation of fictitious relationships is an interesting one, but one that can apply equally well off-line as it can on-line. It illuminates certain patterns of human behaviour, but it does not tell us much of what makes presence in the networks specific. One of the greatest fallacies of current attempts to understand the social dynamics of networked media is the tendency to see these media as an extension of the broadcast media system. This idea has become more popular as the internet is extended with audio-visual elements. Interactive audio-visual structures, streaming media, downloadable sound and video, all contribute to the notion that the internet is the next evolution of broadcast media. But this vision applies only partially, and is driven primarily by vested interests of the media industry. It is often not reflected in how people actually use the net. The predication of the conception of media on the broadcast model based on a division of roles of the active sender <> passive receiver / audience relationship, is the greatest barrier to understanding what goes down in a networked media environment. The networked environment should primarily be seen as a social space, in which active relationships are pursued and deployed. Activities that often seem completely useless, irrational, erratic, or even autistic. The active sender and the passive audience/ receiver, seems to have been replaced by a multitude of unguided transmission that seem to lack a designated receiver. Thus the net is seen as an irrelevant, chaotic, and useless infosphere, a waste of resources, a transitory phase of development that will soon be replaced by professional standards of quality, entertainment, information, media-professionalism, and above all respect for the audience. Let me be clear, I do not believe in this vision, and I am convinced that the net will not evolve into the ultimate entertainment and information medium. Instead it seems more likely that the seemingly unstructured mess of random transmissions will prevail. Into the Soup.... The ideal of seeing the media environment as a social space has a considerable history. Already in the late twenties Bertold Brecht formulated his now famous radio theory in which he envisions radio as medium for direct two-way communication, and the media space as a connective network of decentralised nodes. ( use of cyber rhetoric deliberate here! ) This idea heralds strong resonances of early cyber-utopian discourses such as "The Virtual Community" of Howard Rheingold. J.P. Barlow, one of the other great cyber utopians talked extensively about "the great conversation", emphasising the kinship of network communication to the traditional meeting places, the street, the square, the agora, the theatre, the café.. This early utopian phase of the net is over, cyberspace turned out not to be independent. It's sovereign existence is threatened by mega fusions of the AOl/TimeWarner type, but there is one aspect where these early stories are right, and that is in pointing beyond the sender<>audience dichotomy of broadcasting. A progression of media phenomenologies beyond the broadcast dichotomy... Intimate media The first step towards a micro-politics of resistance against the broadcast hegemony was introduced with the notion of "intimate media". I was introduced myself for the first time to this concept at the second Next 5 Minutes conference on tactical media in 1996. Intimate media have a high degree of audience feedback. Typically the distance between the sender and its remote audience is enormous in broadcast media, if only because of the ratio of active senders and the overload of passive audience. Feedback mechanism are necessarily complicated and bureaucratic; the letter to the editors, phone-in time available for only a tiniest fraction of the audience. Intimate media instead are micro-media, there is a close relationship between sender and audience. Ideally the sender and the audience all know each other, while the relationship is still more than a one on one conversation (as in a telephone call). Intimate media are spontaneous media. They emerge at the grass roots level. They cut across all available media, all available technologies. Intimate media can be low-tech, they can also be high-tech. What characterises them is an attitude. Intimate media range from micro-print to pirate radio, to hacked tv, web casting, satellite amateurs, micro-fm or high-bandwidth networks. Intimate media can be organised in a professional way, though usually they are not. Most common is their appearance as amateur media - their audience reach is generally economically not viable. Intimate media are generally not a good stock option. People often do know each other personally in these media networks. A curious incident at the second Art + Communication festival in Riga (Latvia) illustrates this beautifully. All the discussion were sent out live via audio streams over the net, and a few people were even listening at the other end. During one of the breaks the stream continued and one of the artists decided to take the mobile microphone used by the presenters into the coffee room. He placed the microphone silently on a coffee table, where a lively conversation (gossip) was going on. As it turned out later, about the only person listening (in London) to this conversation at the time, was the person the conversation (i.e. the gossip) was about, and she protested via a chat channel within minutes. This type of media-intimacy is virtually unthinkable in the broadcast model. Socialised Media Media used in the context of a specified social group or in a specific regional context, are best described as "community media". Common forms of community media that belong to a geographically situated community are community-radio and -television. The use of the internet in a geographically situated community is mostly referred to as community networking. Community networking has become very popular in the US, but also has some importance in Europe. Special interest communities are usually organised around a topic, a theme, or a shared interest. They are essentially translocal in nature, hooking up local interest groups or even shattered individuals, who can be dispersed over different regions and countries. Networked communications can be highly beneficial for the process of community building and for strengthening the cohesion of such communities. It is obvious that translocal (special-interest) communities benefit most from networked communication, since it offers a low-cost and fairly effective means to stay in touch and exchange ideas. But the high degree of audience feedback, and peer to peer interaction also makes networked communication technology an invaluable tool for social interaction within a geographically situated community. Typical forms of networked communication are the newsgroups that emerged from Usenet, text-based fora where people exchange ideas and opinions about the topic of the newsgroup. MUDs & MOOs, or generically on-line multi-user environments, where people can interact directly on-line in a communications environment. MUDs and MOOs started out as text-environments and became popular as role playing environments, but they have become visual and subsequently also integrated live speech and 3D environments that can be navigated in a more visceral way than the point and click navigation of traditional web pages. Multi-user environments enhance the feeling of sharing a communications space with others. The mode of interaction has to be active, otherwise it doesn't work. Another important aspect of socialised media are the collaborative networks that have emerged as a result of these low-cost translocal communication tools. Especially e-mail has helped tremendously in this regard. Mailing lists are easy to set up and can help to distribute information evenly and effectively to a very large base of subscribers, while offering each subscriber also the opportunity to react to the sender as well as to the whole list. "Audience" feedback here is immediate, distributed and non-hierarchical. It is far removed from the letter to the editor that most likely never makes it through the editorial filters. The practices of micro media in the arts and net.casting have benefited enormously from the availability of mailing lists such as Syndicate, Xchange, nettime, Nice, and others, and have been tools to establish co-operation, a sense of community and a discourse that is more open than what any print magazine would have been able to support. Create Your Own Solutions! One of the most notable collaborative networks, still in becoming, has been the Interfund. The Interfund is "a co-operative, decentralised, non-located, virtual but real, self-support structure for small and independent initiatives in the field of culture and digital media." The Interfund proposes to become a shared resource pool, a "Bureaucracy Protection Shield", a forum for the critique of (the inefficiency of) large institutions, a pool of shared skills. Beyond that the Interfund stimulates individuals to "create your own solutions". One of the more ingenious of these self-help solutions was the self-funding scheme! This scheme addresses the nasty fact that cultural funding agencies generally want to support projects only if they are already supported by other funding bodies. The Interfund therefore came up with the idea of a micro-funding scheme where projects from within the Interfund community (which itself is an open structure) would be immediately eligible for official support by the Interfund - in an amount of either 1 or 10 US$ per project. With the official letter of acknowledgement new funding applications to local agencies could be given extra credibility. "Look, our project is already supported by the Interfund!" - "what, really?? Well in that case..." If by any chance the Interfund office is far away, or there is no time for a surface mail exchange, the entire Interfund would be down-loadable in the form of PDF files and other downloadable design-elements. Thus allowing each individual member to establish their own Interfund. All of these types of media practices still have an attachment to the functional. There is an idea that something has to be communicated - a fallacy of course. What mostly distinguishes intimate and socialised media from the broadcast model, is that the media-infrastructures here primarily act as support structures for certain intricate social figurations to emerge. There is a highly specific sub-set of these media phenomenologies, however, that seems to have emancipated itself from even those basic functional demands of use and has entered into a kind of 'phatic' state; the sovereign media. Sovereign Media or 'The Joy of Emptiness' Sovereign media are first of all media that simply exist for the sake of nothing else. Sovereign media produce signals *with* an origin / sender / author, but *without* a designated receiver. The term 'Sovereign Media' alludes to the notion of the sovereign as developed by Georges Bataille in The Accursed Share. As a media phenomenology it has first been identified by BILWET (a.k.a. ADILKNO - Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge). For Bilwet the sovereign media are a bewildering new UTO - Unidentified Theoretical Object, which they studied with great curiosity and leisurely pleasure. Let me first share some of the early Bilwet/Adilkno observations about this UTO with you: "The sovereign media are the cream of the missionary work performed in the media galaxy. They have cut all surviving imaginary ties with truth, reality and representation. They no longer concentrate on the wishes of a specific target group, as the 'inside' media still do. They have emancipated themselves from any potential audience, and thus they do not approach their audience as a mouldable market segment, but offer it the 'sovereign space' it deserves. Their goal and legitimacy lie not outside the media, but in practising (practicable) 'total decontrol'. Their apparently narcissistic behaviour bears witness to their self-confidence, which is not broadcast. The signal is there; you only have to pick it up. Sovereign media invite us to hop right onto the media bus. (...) Sovereign media insulate themselves against the hyperculture. They seek no connection; they disconnect. This is their point of departure. They leave the media surface and orbit the multimedia network as satellites. These do-it-yourselfers shut themselves up inside a self-built monad, and "invisible unit" of introverted technologies, which, like a room without doors or windows, wishes to deny the existence of the world. This act is a denial of the maxim "I am connected therefore I am." It conceals no longing for a return to nature. They do not criticise baroque data environments, or experience them as threats, but consider them material, to use as they please. They operate beyond clean and dirty, in the garbage system ruled by chaos pur sang. Their carefree rummaging in the universal media archive is not a management strategy for jogging jammed creativity. These negative media refuse to be positively defined and are good for nothing. They demand no attention and constitute no enrichment for the existing media landscape. Once detached from every meaningful context, they switch over in fits and starts from one audio-video collection to the next. The autonomously multiplying connections generate a sensory space which is relaxing as well as nerve-racking." ( from the Bilwet Media Archive ) Presence Beyond Utility In "The Accursed Share", Bataille defines the sovereign in opposition to the servile, in opposition to all activities subordinate to the demands of usefulness. The demands of usefulness, the basis of any kind of economic or productive activity, rule out the experience of sovereignty. By deriving its meaning and purpose from what it is useful for , the activity itself becomes intrinsically meaningless. The sovereign experience on the contrary is meaningful independent of its consequence. It always refers to the moment of its consumption, never beyond. "Life beyond utility is the domain of sovereignty", Bataille writes. Only when experience is no longer subordinate to the demands of use is it possible to connect to what is 'supremely' ("souverainement") important to us. Sovereign media then should be understood as media beyond use. They should not be understood as 'useless' but rather as 'without use'. The sovereign media are media that have emancipated themselves from the demands of functionality or usefulness to exist in their own right. Quality is irrelevant! Freed from the demands of usefulness, quality becomes an irrelevant criterion for these media signals. The signals exist, how they are interpreted, what the framework and the demands are that are projected upon them, is not a consideration in the process of their production. The signals can be beautiful and brilliantly clear, or amateurish and oblique. The traditional criteria of media professionalism have long been left behind in the universe of the sovereign media. One of the most beautiful examples of a supremely sovereign media practice is the net.radio.night, a global micro jam in net.audio, regularly hosted by the xchange network. Typically for a net.radio.night a call is put out on the mailing list, inviting net.casters to join on irc and listen to a live stream originating from location one. Other locations listen and pick up the stream till someone announces on the irc channel that the live stream will move from its original location to theirs. The next stream is a remix of the original, some things added, others taken away. The process starts anew and the stream moves to the next location and the next re-mix. This process can go on for hours, and very soon the origin of any specific sound is lost. What the net.radio.night imprints on the participants is a strong feeling of being in the network, where the relationship between origin and destination has been dissolved. Also the traditional audience can tune in and listen, but is no consideration in the structure of the event. A distinctive characteristic of sovereign media is their hybridity. Any medium can be combined with any medium. Sovereign media have a cross-media-platform-strategy, but this time not to reach a new audience, but simply to extend the media space. Examples are the Virtual Media Lab, an intersection of all available media [at: http://live.media.nu] in Amsterdam, combining cable television with web casting, with radio, and even at times with satellite transmissions. Another interesting cross breed are automated media such as the Frequency Clock of r a d I o q u a l i a, or Remote TV of TwenFM, allowing automatic scheduling of live streams from the internet on local radio and cable tv infrastructures. Or the project Agent Radio of the Institute of Artificial Art in Amsterdam that automatically and randomly selects sounds sources from the Internet and schedules them in the ether. All these media operate beyond the body count of viewer statistics. Private Media In the Digital City Amsterdam the personal home pages of its 'citizens' are called 'Houses'. For some years already the personal home pages on the world-wide web in general, and the success of initiatives such as GeoCities, prevail in the face of adversity, while big-budget entertainment networks such as DEN (Digital Entertainment Network), collapse even before anyone really got to know about them. The deeply respectable weekly economy magazine The Economist recently put a sad smiley on its cover, testifying to "what the Internet cannot do". Inside the issue a careful analysis is made why the Internet has such a hard time taking of as an entertainment medium, and is not living up to its promises at all. The kind of private media formations such as GeoCities, the Digital City in Amsterdam, and others, mostly do not deal with the communication of a specific message at all. They have no target-audience, and are not part of the attention economy, but still they are highly successful as private media. More than the failed attempts to establish the ultimate entertainment medium, the net has flourished as the ultimate personalisation of the media space. The endless stacks of private home pages are the icons of these truly privatised media. Their private messages, beyond anything else, simply state "I am here", but this simple message should not be discarded as a banal statement. Phatic Media In their final phase of evolution media become phatic. The term derives from linguistics. In linguistics phatic language relates to "speech used for social or emotive purposes rather than for communicating information". The typical, though admittedly somewhat stereotypical example, is the daily speech of house wives meeting every single day in the garden while hanging wash or taking care of domestic tasks. The exchanges of apparently meaningless phrases such as "how are you?", "How are your children doing in school?", etc.. communicate something beyond the semantics of the individual words. An amazing image: A test channel of a satellite tv transmitter, operated by satellite tv amateurs - an international network. One central image surrounded by smaller screens. They show what looks to most of us "nothing". A small room, an attic, a technical workshop, equipment, somebody sitting around, no apparent communication. The image is, it does not speak. One of our civilisation's most highly developed high-tech infrastructures, utilised to celebrate the joy of emptiness... This type of media appears to be completely useless within the traditional (broadcast) media scheme. It is a mistake to take this view for granted, however. There is indeed nothing banal about this media behaviour. The media sphere is treated here as a new type of environment, 'in' which people create presences, but without a desire or aim to communicate a specific message. In fact I understand this as a fundamental anthropological principle - a way of inhabiting a new environment, and one that is, after all, primarily a hostile environment for most of us. Eric Kluitenberg Amsterdam, October 2000 _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold 27.0 Strategising Tactical Media geert lovink <new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk> Sat, 22 Apr 2006 12:28:42 +0200 Ele Carpenter sent following theses: Strategising Tactical Media Immersion in tactical media tools and antics has enabled some artists and activists to work together for a while – but the fundamental differences are too great for real collaboration: activists continue to mimic the mainstream whilst artists produce unused tools. Is it possible to work towards longer-term strategic visions? What do you think is missing from the discourse and the practice that can help bridge the gap? Where is the cultural shift needed for political change coming from? Is new media the political imaginary for art? New media practice and theory charts the evolution of free communication networks and tools. The development model of open source has its roots in self-organisation; creative commons is a realization of the principle of the freedom of information. Why is it that the visual arts is only beginning to take the socio-political imaginary of self organization seriously through the model of open source? Does the ‘coolness’ of technology and the wealth of new media theory give credibility to social networks as art, that the ‘woolliness’ of socially engaged art failed? Or does new media’s ability to side step the art market, and government agendas enable it to practice what it preaches? Or to put it another way – is new media the new avant-garde that enables artists and activists to work together? And if so where is it going? -- My response would be the following: Tactical media can (and maybe should) not be looked upon outside of the realm of social struggle, movements and political issues. This is the problem discussing the problematic relationship between artists and activists as an isolated topic. Yes, it's all true what Ele writes. But it also changes in concrete situations. The problem of outdated and self-referential museums and the art world in general is, in the end, not a problem of activists and the general public but of these institutions themselves. You either care about issues and society or you don't. If you do, you engage and get involved, show solidarity. If you don't you're just yet another closed castle or boring office. Who cares? Ele is right in that concepts do not travel that easily from one context to the next. We can see grand parallels. But they may as well remain parallel universes. Zizek's latest book deals with this issue. Yes, the art world is lagging behind. So does the aesthetics of activists. Instead of claiming who is the most avantgarde, these days the discussion seems to be: who is the most behind? Only Generation Zero seems to be the perfect cool informed. Those in their early twenties, the rest can be written off. I don't mind this view. New media is ghetto, as is activism, likewise the MySpace youngsters. But do not give up hope. There are times that people break out, create unexpected alliances and coalitions and make things happen. The alchemy of this is rather mysterious. There is no recipy. Lenin had some but I am not a Leninist. One strategy would to keep on trying and utilize the tools that we all have. Ignoring the Zeitgeist is important. We have to mind less about newspapers, watch less TV and Web and perhaps do more stuff that we really find really interesting. Stop keeping up with the Cool Johnsons. Maybe you already do this. Best, Geert