... 0.0 Utopian Promises-Net Realities / Critical Art Ensembl Pit Schultz nettime-l@desk.nl Sun, 19 Nov 1995 17:01:30 +0100 (MET) Address to Interface 3: Utopian Promises-Net Realities Critical Art Ensemble The need for net criticism certainly is a matter of overwhelming urgency. While a number of critics have approached the new world of computerized communications with a healthy amount of skepticism, their message has been lost in the noise and spectacle of corporate hype-the unstoppable tidal wave of seduction has enveloped so many in its dynamic utopian beauty that little time for careful reflection is left. Indeed, a glimpse of a possibility for a better future may be contained in the new techno-apparatus, and perhaps it is best to acknowledge these possibilities here in the beginning, since Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) has no desire to take the position of the neoluddites who believe that the techno-apparatus should be rejected outright, if not destroyed. To be sure, computerized communications offer the possibility for the enhanced storage, retrieval, and exchange of information for those who have access to the necessary hardware, software, and technical skills. In turn, this increases the possibility for greater access to vital information, faster exchange of information, enhanced distribution of information, and cross cultural artistic and critical collaborations. The potential humanitarian benefits of electronic systems are undeniable; however, CAE questions whether the electronic apparatus is being used for these purposes inthe representative case, much as we question the political policies which guide the net's development and accessibility. This is not the first time that the promise of electronic utopia has been offered. One need only look back at Brecht's critique of radio to find reason for concern when such promises are resurrected. While Brecht recognizedradio's potential for distributing information for humanitarian and cultural purposes, he was not surprised to see radio being used for the very opposite. Nor should we be surprised that his calls for a more democratic interactive medium went unheeded. During the early 1970s, there was a brief euphoric moment during the video revolution when some believed that Brecht's call for an interactive and democratic electronic medium was about to be answered. The development of homevideo equipment led to a belief that soon everyone who desired to would be able to manufacture their own television. This seemed to be a real possibility. As the cost of video equipment began to drop dramatically, and cable set-ups offered possibilities for distribution, electronic utopia seemedimmanent, and yet, the home video studio never came to be. Walls and boundaries confounding this utopian dream seemed to appear out of nowhere. Forinstance, in the US, standards for broadcast quality required postproduction equipment that no one could access or afford except capital-saturated media companies. Most cable channels remained in the control of corporate media, andthe few public access channels fell into the hands of censors who cited "community standards" as their reason for an orderly broadcast system. While production equipment did get distributed as promised, the hopes of the video utopianists were crushed at the distribution level. Corporate goals for establishing a new market for electronic hardware were met, but the means for democratic cultural production never appeared. Now that giddy euphoria is back again, arising in the wake of the personal computer revolution of the early 80s, and with the completion of a "world-wide" multi-directional distribution network. As to be expected, utopian promises from the corporate spectacle machine drown the everyday livesof bureaucrats and technocrats around the first world, and once again there seems to be a general belief-at least within technically adept populations-that this time the situation will be different. And to a degree, this situation is different. There is an electronic free zone, but from CAE's perspective, it is only a modest development at best. By far the most significant use of the electronic apparatus is to keep order, to replicate dominant pancapitalist ideology, and to develop new markets. At the risk of redundantly stating the obvious, CAE would like to recall the origins of the internet. The internet is war-tech that was designedas an analog to the US highway system (Yet another product which stemmed from the mind of the military, and which was primarily intended as a decentralized aid to mobilization). The US military wanted an apparatus that would preserve command structure in the case of nuclear attack. The answer was an electronic web capable of immediately rerouting itself if one or more links were destroyed, thus allowing surviving authorities to remain in communication witheach other and to act accordingly. With such an apparatus in place, military authority could be maintained, even through the worst of catastrophes. With such planning at the root of the internet, suspicion about its alleged anti-authoritarian characteristics must occur to anyone who takes the time to reflect on the apparatus. It should also be noted that the decentralized characteristics for which so many praise the net did not arise out of anarchist intention, but out of nomadic military strategy. Research scientists were the next group to go on-line after the military. While it would be nice to believe that their efforts on the net werebenign, one must question why they were given access to the apparatus in the first place. Science has always claimed legitimacy by announcing its "value-free" intentions to search for the truth of the material world; however, this search costs money, and hence a political economy with a direct and powerful impact on science's lofty goals of value-free research enters theequation. Do investors in scientific research offer money with no restrictionsattached? This seems quite unlikely. Some type of return on the investment is implicit in any demand from funding institutions. In the US, the typical demand is either theory or technology with military applications or applications that will strengthen economic development. The greater the results promised by science in terms of these two categories, the more generous the funding. In the US, not even scientists get something for nothing. The need for greater efficiency in research and development opened the new communication systems to academics, and with that development, a necessary degree of disorder was introduced into the apparatus. Elements of free zone information exchange began to appear. But as this system developed, other investors, most notably the corporations, demanded their slice of the electronic pie. All kinds of financial business were conducted on the net with relatively secure efficiency. As the free zone began to grow, the corporations realized that a new market mechanism was growing with it, and eventually the marketeers were released onto the net. At this point, a peculiar paradox came into being: Free market capitalism came into conflict with the conservative desire for order. It became apparent that for this new market possibility to reach its full potential, authorities would have to tolerate a degree of chaos. This was necessary to seduce the wealthier classes into using the net as site of consumption and entertainment, and second, to offer the net as an alibi for the illusion of social freedom. Although totalizing control of communications was lost, the overall cost of this development to governments and corporations was minimal, and in actuality, the cost was nothing compared to what was gained. Thus was born the most successful repressive apparatus of all time; and yet it was (and still is) successfully represented under the sign of liberation. What is even more frightening is that the corporation's best allies in maintaining the gleaming utopian surface of cyberspace are some of the very populations who should know better. Techno-utopianists have accepted the corporate hype, and are now disseminating it as the reality of the net. This regrettable alliance between the elite virtual class and new age cybernauts is structured around five key virtual promises. These are the promised social changes that seem as if they will occur at any moment, but never actually come into being. Promise One: The New Body Those of us familiar with discourse on cyberspace and virtual reality have heard this promise over and over again, and in fact there is a kernel of truth associated with it. The virtual body is a body of great potential. On this body we can reinscribe ourselves using whatever coding system we desire. We can try on new body configurations. We can experiment with immortality by going places and doing things that would be impossible in the physical world. For the virtual body, nothing is fixed and everything is possible. Indeed, this is the reason why hackers wish to become disembodied consciousnesses flowing freely through cyberspace, willing the idea of their own bodies and environments. As virtual reality improves with new generations of computer technology, perhaps this promise will come to pass in the realm of the multi-sensual; however, it is currently limited to gender reassignment on chatlines, or game boy flight simulators. What did this allegedly liberated body cost? Payment was taken in the form of a loss of individual sovereignty, not just from those who use the net, but from all people in technologically saturated societies. With the virtual body came its fascist sibling, the data body-a much more highly developed virtual form, and one that exists in complete service to the corporate and police state. The data body is the total collection of files connected to an individual. The data body has always existed in an immature form since the dawn of civilization. Authority has always kept records on its underlings. Indeed, some of the earliest records that Egyptologists have found are tax records. What brought the data body to maturity is the technological apparatus. With its immense storage capacity and its mechanisms for quickly ordering and retrieving information, no detail of social life is too insignificant to record and to scrutinize. From the moment we are born and our birth certificate goes on-line, until the day we die and our death certificate goes on-line, the trajectory of our individual lives is recorded in scrupulous detail. Education files, insurance files, tax files, communication files, consumption files, medical files, travel files, criminal files, investment files, files into infinity.... The data body has two primary functions. The first purpose serves the repressive apparatus; the second serves the marketing apparatus. The desire of authoritarian power to make the lives of its subordinates perfectly transparent achieves satisfaction through the data body. Everyone is under permanent surveillance by virtue of their necessary interaction with the marketplace. Just how detailed data body information actually may be is a matter of speculation, but we can be certain that it is more detailed than we would like it to be, or care to think. The second function of the data body is to give marketeers more accurate demographic information to design and create target populations. Since pancapitalism has long left the problem of production behind, moving from an economy of need to an economy of desire, marketeers have developed better methods to artificially create desires for products that are not needed. The data body gives them insights into consumption patterns, spending power, and "lifestyle choices" of those with surplus income. The data body helps marketeers to find you, and provide for your lifestyle. The postmodern slogan, "You don't pick the commodity; the commodity picks you" has more meaning than ever. But the most frightening thing about the data body is that it is the center of an individual's social being. It tells the members of officialdom what our cultural identities and roles are. We are powerless to contradict the data body. Its word is the law. One's organic being is no longer a determining factor, from the point of view of corporate and government bureaucracies. Data has become the center of social culture, and our organic flesh is nothing more than a counterfeit representation of original data. Promise 2: Convenience Earlier this century, the great sociologist Max Weber explained why bureaucracies work so well as a means of rationalized social organization in complex society. In comparing bureaucratic practice to his ideal-type, only one flaw appears: Humans provide the labor for these institutions. Unfortunately humans have nonrational characteristics, the most notorious of which is the expression of desire. Rather than working at optimum efficiency, organic units are likely to seek out that which gives them pleasure in ways that are contrary to the instrumental aims of the bureaucracy. All varieties of creative slacking are employed by organic units These range from work slowdowns to unnecessary chit-chat with one's fellow employees. Throughout this century policy makers and managerial classes have concerned themselves with developing a way to stop such activities in order to maximize and intensify labor output. The model for labor intensification came with the invention of the robot. So long as the robot is functional, it never strays from its task. Completely replacing humans with robots is not possible, since so far, they are only capable of simple, albeit precise, mechanical tasks. They are data driven, as opposed to the human capacity for concept recognition. The question then becomes how to make humans more like robots, or to update the discourse, more like cyborgs. At present, much of the technology necessary to accomplish this goal is available, and more is in development. However, having the technology, such as telephone headsets or wearable computers, is not enough. People must be seduced into wanting to wear them, at least until the technology evolves that can be permanently fixed to their bodies. The means of seduction? Convenience. Life will be so much easier if we only connect to the machine. As usual there is a grain of truth to this idea. I can honestly admit that my life has been made easier since I began using a computer, but only in a certain sense. As a writer, it is easier for me to finish a paper now than it was when I used pen and paper or a typewriter. The problem: Now I am able to (and therefore, must) write two papers in the time it used to take to produce one. The implied promise that I will have more free time because I use a computer is false. Labor intensification through time management is only the beginning, as there is another problem in regard to total utility. People can still separate themselves from their work stations-the true home of the modern day cyborg. The seduction continues, persuading us that we should desire to carry our electronic extensions with us all the time. The latest commercials from AT&T are the perfect representation of consumer seduction. They promise: Have you ever sent a fax....from the beach? You will." or "Have you ever received a phone call....on your wrist? You will." This commercial is most amusing. There is an image of a young man who has just finished climbing a mountain and is watching a sunset. At that moment his wife calls on his wrist phone, and he describes the magnificence of the sunset to her. Now who is kidding who. Is your wife going to call you while you are mountain climbing? Are you going to need to send a fax while lounging on the beach? The corporate intention for deploying this technology (in addition to profit) is so transparent, it's painful. The only possible rejoinder is: "Have you ever been at a work station....24 hours a day, 365 days a year? You will." Now the sweat shop can go any where you do! Another telling element in this representation is that the men in these commercials are always alone. (This is a gendered element which CAE is sure has not failed to catch the attention of feminists, although CAE is unsure as to whether it will be interpreted as sexism or a stroke of luck). In this sense, the problem is doubled: Not only is the work station always with you, but social interaction will always be fully mediated by technology. This is the perfect solution to abolish that nuisance, the subversive environment of public space. Promise 3: Community Currently in the US, there is no more popular buzz word than "community." This word is so empty of meaning that it can be used to describe almost any social manifestation. For the most part, it is used to connote sympathy with or identification with a particular social aggregate. In this sense, one hears of the gay community or the African-American community. There are even oxymorons, such as the international community. Corporate marketeers from IBM to Microsoft have been quick to capitalize on this empty sign as a means to build their commercial campaigns. Recognizing the extreme alienation that afflicts so many under the reign of pancapitalism, they offer net technology as a cure for a feeling of loss that has no referent. Through chat lines, news groups, and other digital environments, nostalgia for a golden age of sociability that never existed is replaced by a new modern day sense of community. This promise is nothing but aggravating. There is not even a grain of truth in it. If there is any reason for optimism, it is only to the extent mentioned in the beginning of this lecture; that is, the net makes possible a broader spectrum of information exchange. However, anyone with even a basic knowledge of sociology understands that information exchange in no way constitutes a community. Community is a collective of kinship networks which share a common geographic territory, a common history, and a shared value system, one usually rooted in a common religion. Typically, communities are rather homogenous, and tend to exist in the historical context of a simple division of labor. Most importantly, communities embrace nonrational components of life and of consciousness. Social action is not carried out by means of contract, but by understandings, and life is certainly not fully mediated by technology. In this sense, the connection between community and net life is unfathomable. (CAE does not want to romanticize this social form, since communities can be as repressive and/or as pathological as any society). Use of the net beyond its one necessary use (i.e., information gathering), is, from CAE's perspective, a highly developed anti-social form of interacting. That someone would want to stay in his or her home or office and reject human contact in favor of a textually mediated communication experience can only be a symptom of rising alienation, not a cure for it. Why the repressive apparatus would want this isolation to develop is very clear: If someone is on-line, he or she is off the street and out of the gene pool. In other words, they are well within the limits of control. Why the marketing apparatus would desire such a situation is equally clear: The lonelier people get, the more they will have no choice but to turn to work and to consumption as a means of seeking pleasure. In a time when public space is diminishing and being replaced by fortified institutions such as malls, theme parks, and other manifestations of forced consumption that pass themselves off as locations for social interaction, shouldn't we be looking for a sense of the social, (that is, to the extent still possible), direct and unmediated, rather than seeing these anti-public spaces replicated in an even more lonely electronic form? Promise 4: Democracy Another promise eternally repeated in discourse on cyberspace is the idea that the electronic apparatus will be the zenith of utopian democracy. Certainly, the internet does have some democratic characteristics. It provides all its cyber-citizens with the means to contact all other cyber-citizens. On the net,everyone is equal. The shining emblem of this new democracy is the World Wide Web. People can construct their own home pages, and even more people can access these sites as points of investigation. This is all well and good, but we must ask ourselves if these democratic characteristics actually constitute democracy. A platform for individual voices is not enough (especially in the Web where so many voices are lost in the clutter of data debris). Democracy isdependent on the individual's ability to act on the information received. Unfortunately, even with the net, autonomous action is still as difficult as ever. The difficulty here is threefold: First, there is the problem of locality and geographic separation. In the case of information gathering, the information is only as useful as the situation and the location of the physical body allows. For example, a gay man who lives in a place where homophobia reigns, or even worse, where homosexual practice is an illegal activity, will still be unable to openly act on his desires, regardless of the information he may gather on the net. He is still just as closeted in his everyday life practice, and is reduced to passive spectatorship in regard to the object of his desire, so long as he remains in a repressive locality. The second problem is one of institutional oppression. For example, no one can deny that the net can function as a wonderful pedagogical tool and can act as a great means for self education. Unfortunately, the net has very little legitimacy in and of itself as an educational institution. The net must be used in a physical world context under appropriate supervision for it to be awarded legitimacy. In the case of education, in order for the knowledge-value gained from the net to be socially recognized and accepted, it must be used as a tool within the context of a university or a school. These educational contexts are fortified in a manner to maintain a status-quo distribution of education. Consequently, one can acquire a great deal of knowledge from the net, but still have no education capital to be exchanged in the marketplace. In both of these cases, there must be a liberated physical environment if the net is to function as a supplement to democratic activity. The final problem is that the net functions as a disciplinary apparatus through the use of transparency. If people feel that they are under surveillance, they are less likely to act in manner that is beyond normalized activity; that is, they are less likely to express themselves freely, and to otherwise act in manner that could produce political and social changes within their environments. In this sense, the net serves the purpose of negating activity rather than encouraging it. It channels people toward orderly homogeneous activity, rather than reinforcing the acceptance of difference that democratic societies need. To be sure, there are times when transparency can be turned against itself. For example, one of the reasons that the PRI party's counteroffensive against the Zapatistas did not end in total slaughter, was the resisting party's use of the net to keep attention focused upon its members and its cause. By disallowing the secret of massacre, many lives were saved, and the resistant movement could continue. Much the same can be said about the stay of execution won for Mumia Abu Jamal. The final point here is that it must be remembered that the internet does not exist in a vacuum. It is intimately related to all kinds of social structures and historical dynamics, and hence its democratic structure cannot be realistically analyzed as if it were a closed system. Taking a step back from the insider's point of view, achieving democracy through the net seems even less likely considering the demographics of the situation. There are five and a half billion people in the world. Over a billion barely keep themselves alive from day to day. Most people don't evenhave a telephone, and hence it seems very unlikely that they will get a computer, let alone go on-line. This situation raises the question, is the net a means to democracy, or simply another way to divide the world into haves and have-nots? We also must ask ourselves, how many people consider the net really relevant in their everyday lives? While CAE believes that it is safe to assume that the number of net users will grow, it seems unlikely that it will grow to include more than those who have the necessary educational background, and/or those who are employed by bureaucratic and technocratic agencies. CAE suggests that this elite stronghold will remain so, and that most of the first world population that will become a part of the computer revolution will do so primarily as passive consumers, rather than as active participants. They will be playing computer games, watching interactive TV, and shopping in virtual malls. The stratified distribution of education will act as the guardian of the virtual border between the passive and the active user, and prevent those populations participating in multidirectional interactivity from increasing in any significant numbers. Promise 5: New Consciousness Of all the net hype, this promise is perhaps the most insidious, since it seems to have no corporate sponsor (although Microsoft has tapped the trend to some extent). The notion of the new consciousness has emerged out of new age thinking. There is a belief promoted by cyber-gurus (Timothy Leary, Jason Lanier, Roy Ascott, Richard Kriesche, Mark Pesci) that the net is the apparatus of a benign collective consciousness. It is the brain of the planet which transcends into mind through the activities of its users. It can function as a third eye or sixth sense for those who commune with this global coming together. This way of thinking is the paramount form of ethnocentrism and myopic class perception. As discussed in the last section, the third world and most of the first world citizenry are thoroughly marginalized in this divine plan. If anything, this theory replicates the imperialism of early capitalism, and recalls notions such as manifest destiny. If new consciousness is indicative of anything, it is the new age of imperialism that will be realized through information control (as opposed to the early capital model of military domination). Of the former four promises examined here, each has proven on closer inspection to be a replication of authoritarian ideology to justify and put into action greater repression and oppression. New consciousness is no exception. Even if we accept the good intentions and optimistic hopes of the new age cybernauts, how could anyone conclude that an apparatus emerging out military aggression and corporate predation could possibly function as a new form of terrestrial spiritual development? Conclusion As saddened as CAE is to say it, the greater part of the net is capitalism as usual. It is a site for repressive order, for the financial business of capital, and for excessive consumption. While a small part of the net may be used for humanistic purposes and to resist authoritarian structure, its overall function is anything but humanistic. In the same way that we would not consider an unregulated bohemian neighborhood to be representative of a city, we must also not assume that our own small free zone domains are representative of the digital empire. Nor can we trust our futures to the empty promises of a seducer that has no love in its heart. ---- anti-copyright 1995 CAE distributet by nettime not for commercial use 0.1 Re: Utopian Promises-Net Realities / Critical Art Ensembl John Perry Barlow nettime-l@desk.nl Sun, 19 Nov 1995 22:16:20 -0700 At 5:01 PM 11/19/95, Pit Schultz wrote: >The need for net criticism certainly is a matter of overwhelming urgency. Pit, Really? What do you propose we do with your criticisms and indictments? Even if we find the Net to be brimming with toxins to the future commonweal, by what means shall we prevent them? "Direct action" to control the Net toward the improvement of Humankind is no less perilous in the service of your good intentions than it would be in the service of Senator Exon's. And stopping it is not an option. It is as inevitable as evolution, running, as it does, on the same engine. A decentralized medium offers but few choices - and they are very personal ones: jack in, jack out, or jack off. In the end, as Gandhi proposed, "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." There's little else you can do. Yrs, John Perry **************************************************************** John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident Co-Founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow Barlow in Meatspace: Salt Lake City 11/19 801/582-5035 Coming soon to: Wyoming 11/20... In Memoriam, Dr. Cynthia Horner and Jerry Garcia ***************************************************************** Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future and time future contained in time past. --T.S. Elliot, Burnt Norton 1.0 No Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Thu, 14 Dec 1995 22:02:24 +0100 The Californian Ideology Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron "Not to lie about the future is impossible and one can lie about it at will" - Naum Gabo 1 As the Dam Bursts... At the end of the twentieth century, the long predicted convergence of the media, computing and telecommunications into hypermedia is finally happening. 2 Once again, capitalism's relentless drive to diversify and intensify the creative powers of human labour is on the verge of qualitatively transforming the way in which we work, play and live together. By integrating different technologies around common protocols, something is being created which is more than the sum of its parts. When the ability to produce and receive unlimited amounts of information in any form is combined with the reach of the global telephone networks, existing forms of work and leisure can be fundamentally transformed. New industries will be born and current stock market favourites will swept away. At such moments of profound social change, anyone who can offer a simple explanation of what is happening will be listened to with great interest. At this crucial juncture, a loose alliance of writers, hackers, capitalists and artists from the West Coast of the USA have succeeded in defining a heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming information age: the Californian Ideology. This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. Promoted in magazines, books, tv programmes, Web sites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich. Not surprisingly, this optimistic vision of the future has been enthusiastically embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, innovative capitalists, social activists, trendy academics, futurist bureaucrats and opportunistic politicians across the USA. As usual, Europeans have not been slow in copying the latest fad from America. While a recent EU Commission report recommends following the Californian 'free market' model for building the 'information superhighway', cutting-edge artists and academics eagerly imitate the 'post-human' philosophers of the West Coast's Extropian cult. 3 With no obvious rivals, the triumph of the Californian Ideology appears to be complete. The widespread appeal of these West Coast ideologues isn't simply the result of their infectious optimism. Above all, they are passionate advocates of what appears to be an impeccably libertarian form of politics - they want information technologies to be used to create a new 'Jeffersonian democracy' where all individuals will be able to express themselves freely within cyberspace. 4 However, by championing this seemingly admirable ideal, these techno-boosters are at the same time reproducing some of the most atavistic features of American society, especially those derived from the bitter legacy of slavery. Their utopian vision of California depends upon a wilful blindness towards the other - much less positive - features of life on the West Coast: racism, poverty and environmental degradation. 5 Ironically, in the not too distant past, the intellectuals and artists of the Bay Area were passionately concerned about these issues. Ronald Reagan v. the hippies On 15 May 1969, Governor Ronald Reagan ordered armed police to carry out a dawn raid against hippie protesters who had occupied People's Park near the Berkeley campus of the University of California. During the subsequent battle, one man was shot dead and 128 other people needed hospital treatment. 6 On that day, the 'straight' world and the counter-culture appeared to be implacably opposed. On one side of the barricades, Governor Reagan and his followers advocated unfettered private enterprise and supported the invasion of Vietnam. On the other side, the hippies championed a social revolution at home and opposed imperial expansion abroad. In the year of the raid on People's Park, it seemed that the historical choice between these two opposing visions of America's future could only be settled through violent conflict. As Jerry Rubin, one of the Yippie leaders, said at the time: 'Our search for adventure and heroism takes us outside America, to a life of self-creation and rebellion. In response, America is ready to destroy us...' 7 During in the '60s, radicals from the Bay Area pioneered the political outlook and cultural style of New Left movements across the world. Breaking with the narrow politics of the post-war era, they launched campaigns against militarism, racism, sexual discrimination, homophobia, mindless consumerism and pollution. In place of the traditional left's rigid hierarchies, they created collective and democratic structures which supposedly prefigured the libertarian society of the future. Above all, the Californian New Left combined political struggle with cultural rebellion. Unlike their parents, the hippies refused to conform to the rigid social conventions imposed on organisation men by the military, the universities, the corporations and even left-wing political parties. Instead they openly declared their rejection of the straight world through their casual dress, sexual promiscuity, loud music and recreational drugs. 8 The radical hippies were liberals in the social sense of the word. They championed universalist, rational and progressive ideals, such as democracy, tolerance, self-fulfillment and social justice. Emboldened by over twenty years of economic growth, they believed that history was on their side. In sci-fi novels, they dreamt of 'ecotopia': a future California where cars had disappeared, industrial production was ecologically viable, sexual relationships were egalitarian and daily life was lived in community groups. 9 For some hippies, this vision could only be realised by rejecting scientific progress as a false God and returning to nature. Others, in contrast, believed that technological progress would inevitably turn their libertarian principles into social fact. Crucially, influenced by the theories of Marshall McLuhan, these technophiliacs thought that the convergence of media, computing and telecommunications would inevitably create the electronic agora - a virtual place where everyone would be able to express their opinions without fear of censorship. Despite being a middle-aged English professor, McLuhan preached the radical message that the power of big business and big government would be imminently overthrown by the intrinsically empowering effects of new technology on individuals. 'Electronic media...abolish the spatial dimension... By electricity, we everywhere resume person-to-person relations as if on the smallest village scale. It is a relation in depth, and without delegation of functions or powers... Dialogue supersedes the lecture.' 10 Encouraged by McLuhan's predictions, West Coast radicals became involved in developing new information technologies for the alternative press, community radio stations, home-brew computer clubs and video collectives. These community media activists believed that they were in the forefront of the fight to build a new America. The creation of the electronic agora was the first step towards the implementation of direct democracy within all social institutions. 11 The struggle might be hard, but 'ecotopia' was almost at hand. The Rise of the 'Virtual Class' Who would have predicted that, in less than 30 years after the battle for People's Park, squares and hippies would together create the Californian Ideology? Who would have thought that such a contradictory mix of technological determinism and libertarian individualism would becoming the hybrid orthodoxy of the information age? And who would have suspected that as technology and freedom were worshipped more and more, it would become less and less possible to say anything sensible about the society in which they were applied? The Californian Ideology derives its popularity from the very ambiguity of its precepts. Over the last few decades, the pioneering work of the community media activists has been largely recuperated by the hi-tech and media industries. Although companies in these sectors can mechanise and sub-contract much of their labour needs, they remain dependent on key people who can research and create original products, from software programs and computer chips to books and tv programmes. Along with some hi-tech entrepreneurs, these skilled workers form the so-called 'virtual class': '...the techno-intelligentsia of cognitive scientists, engineers, computer scientists, video-game developers, and all the other communications specialists...' Unable to subject them to the discipline of the assembly-line or replace them by machines, managers have organised such intellectual workers through fixed-term contracts. Like the 'labour aristocracy' of the last century, core personnel in the media, computing and telecoms industries experience the rewards and insecurities of the marketplace. On the one hand, these hi-tech artisans not only tend to be well-paid, but also have considerable autonomy over their pace of work and place of employment. As a result, the cultural divide between the hippie and the organisation man has now become rather fuzzy. Yet, on the other hand, these workers are tied by the terms of their contracts and have no guarantee of continued employment. Lacking the free time of the hippies, work itself has become the main route to self-fulfillment for much of the 'virtual class'. 13 The Californian Ideology offers a way of understanding the lived reality of these hi-tech artisans. On the one hand, these core workers are a privileged part of the labour force. On the other hand, they are the heirs of the radical ideas of the community media activists. The Californian Ideology, therefore, simultaneously reflects the disciplines of market economics and the freedoms of hippie artisanship. This bizarre hybrid is only made possible through a nearly universal belief in technological determinism. Ever since the '60s, liberals - in the social sense of the word - have hoped that the new information technologies would realise their ideals. Responding to the challenge of the New Left, the New Right has resurrected an older form of liberalism: economic liberalism. In place of the collective freedom sought by the hippie radicals, they have championed the liberty of individuals within the marketplace. Yet even these conservatives couldn't resist the romance of the new information technologies. Back in the '60s, McLuhan's predictions were reinterpreted as an advertisement for new forms of media, computers and telecommunications being developed by the private sector. From the '70s onwards, Toffler, de Sola Pool and other gurus attempted to prove that the advent of hypermedia would paradoxically involve a return to the economic liberalism of the past. 14 This retro-utopia echoed the predictions of Asimov, Heinlein and other macho sci-fi novelists whose future worlds were always filled with space traders, superslick salesmen, genius scientists, pirate captains and other rugged individualists. 15 The path of technological progress didn't always lead to 'ecotopia' - it could instead lead back to the America of the Founding Fathers. Electronic Agora or Electronic Marketplace? The ambiguity of the Californian Ideology is most pronounced in its contradictory visions of the digital future. The development of hypermedia is a key component of the next stage of capitalism. As Zuboff points out, the introduction of media, computing and telecommunications technologies directly into the factory and the office is the culmination of a long process of separation of the workforce from direct involvement in production. 16 If only for competitive reasons, all major industrial economies will eventually be forced to wire up their populations to obtain the productivity gains of digital working. What is unknown is the social and cultural impact of allowing people to produce and exchange almost unlimited quantities of information on a global scale. Above all, will the advent of hypermedia will realise the utopias of either the New Left or the New Right? As a hybrid faith, the Californian Ideology happily answers this conundrum by believing in both visions at the same time - and by not criticising either of them. On the one hand, the anti-corporate purity of the New Left has been preserved by the advocates of the 'virtual community'. According to their guru, Howard Rheingold, the values of the counterDculture baby boomers are shaping the development of new information technologies. As a consequence, community activists will be able to use hypermedia to replace corporate capitalism and big government with a hi-tech 'gift economy'. Already bulletin board systems, Net real-time conferences and chat facilities rely on the voluntary exchange of information and knowledge between their participants. In Rheingold's view, the members of the 'virtual class' are still in the forefront of the struggle for social liberation. Despite the frenzied commercial and political involvement in building the 'information superhighway', the electronic agora will inevitably triumph over its corporate and bureaucratic enemies. 17 On the other hand, other West Coast ideologues have embraced the laissez faire ideology of their erstwhile conservative enemy. For example, Wired - the monthly bible of the 'virtual class' - has uncritically reproduced the views of Newt Gingrich, the extreme-right Republican leader of the House of Representatives, and the Tofflers, who are his close advisors. 18 Ignoring their policies for welfare cutbacks, the magazine is instead mesmerised by their enthusiasm for the libertarian possibilities offered by new information technologies. However, although they borrow McLuhan's technological determinism, Gingrich and the Tofflers aren't advocates of the electronic agora. On the contrary, they claim that the convergence of the media, computing and telecommunications will produce an electronic marketplace: 'In cyberspace..., market after market is being transformed by technological progress from a "natural monopoly" to one in which competition is the rule.' 19 In this version of the Californian Ideology, each member of the 'virtual class' is promised the opportunity to become a successful hi-tech entrepreneur. Information technologies, so the argument goes, empower the individual, enhance personal freedom, and radically reduce the power of the nation-state. Existing social, political and legal power structures will wither away to be replaced by unfettered interactions between autonomous individuals and their software. These restyled McLuhanites vigorously argue that big government should stay off the backs of resourceful entrepreneurs who are the only people cool and courageous enough to take risks. In place of counter-productive regulations, visionary engineers are inventing the tools needed to create a 'free market' within cyberspace, such as encryption, digital money and verification procedures. Indeed, attempts to interfere with the emergent properties of these technological and economic forces, particularly by the government, merely rebound on those who are foolish enough to defy the primary laws of nature. According to the executive editor of Wired, the 'invisible hand' of the marketplace and the blind forces of Darwinian evolution are actually one and the same thing. 20 As in Heinlein's and Asimov's sci-fi novels, the path forwards to the future seems to lead back to the past. The twenty-first century information age will be the realisation of the eighteenth century liberal ideals of Thomas Jefferson: '...the...creation of a new civilisation, founded in the eternal truths of the American Idea.' 21 The Myth of the 'Free Market' Following the victory of Gingrich's party in the 1994 legislative elections, this right-wing version of the Californian Ideology is now in the ascendant. Yet, the sacred tenets of economic liberalism are contradicted by the actual history of hypermedia. For instance, the iconic technologies of the computer and the Net could only have been invented with the aid of massive state subsidies and the enthusiastic involvement of amateurs. Private enterprise has played an important role, but only as one part of a mixed economy. For example, the first computer - the Difference Engine - was designed and built by private companies, but its development was only made possible through a British Government grant of 17,470, which was a small fortune in 1834. 22 From Colossus to EDVAC, from flight simulators to virtual reality, the development of computing has depended at key moments on public research handouts or fat contracts with public agencies. The IBM corporation only built the first programmable digital computer after it was requested to do so by the US Defense Department during the Korean War. 23 Ever since, the development of successive generations of computers has been directly or indirectly subsidised by the American defence budget. As well as state aid, the evolution of computing has also depended upon the involvement of d.i.y. culture. For instance, the personal computer was invented by amateur techies who wanted to construct their own cheap machines. The existence of a 'gift economy' amongst hobbyists was a necessary precondition for the subsequent success of products made by Apple and Microsoft. Even now, shareware programs still play a vital role in advancing software design. The history of the Internet also contradicts the tenets of the 'free market' ideologues. For the first twenty years of its existence, the Net's development was almost completely dependent on the much reviled American federal government. Whether via the US military or through the universities, large amounts of tax payers' dollars went into building the Net infrastructure and subsidising the cost of using its services. At the same time, many of the key Net programs and applications were invented either by hobbyists or by professionals working in their spare-time. For instance, the MUD program which allows real-time Net conferencing was invented by a group of students who wanted to play fantasy games over a computer network. 24 One of the weirdest things about the rightwards drift of the Californian Ideology is that the West Coast itself is a creation of the mixed economy. Government dollars were used to build the irrigation systems, highways, schools, universities and other infrastructural projects which makes the good life possible in California. On top of these public subsidies, the West Coast hi-tech industrial complex has been feasting off the fattest pork barrel in history for decades. The US government has poured billions of tax dollars into buying planes, missiles, electronics and nuclear bombs from Californian companies. For those not blinded by 'free market' dogmas, it was obvious that the Americans have 1.1 No Drazen Pantic nettime-l@desk.nl Wed, 20 Sep 1995 23:36:19 +0100 Hi everybody! As I am a new face here, let me introduce opennet.org and myself. I am a professor at the Department of Mathematics of Belgrade University, teaching probability theory. I do not need to mention that I am desperately addicted to that that vital-virtual thing, Net. opennet.org is a first domain from Belgrade fully and permanently connected to the Inet. Adrienne von Heteren from Amsterdam (now living in Belgrade) and me have literally created Inet cite. The dream about being connected started about year ego, and after a series of incredible difficulties and obstacles finally we have solved our ontological problem. Solving all kinds of problems one can face making impossible dreams come true, we were often forced to think over the essence of the being connected. opennet.org is tied to Belgrade independent radio station B92 and connected to incredible supportive xs4all in Amsterdam. In fact we are at the beginning now, but I hope that the progress will be very fast, as there are lot of open minded young people here who need to interact to similar people over the net. See you all in Amsterdam, January 18-21. Regards to All Drazen drazen {AT} openent.org 1.2 No Anonymous nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Fri Apr 20 23:17:56 2001 P: Many 'media-works' supposed to be artistic are following the very old Aristotelian principle of mimesis: the work is just imitating nature with a new technology. Here you deal with the nature without any 'naturalistic' reproduction. We experience a complex of processes that are going on and define a new dimension of communication. Could we define it as a model of digital environment? C: Yes, we are on environments where the senses of the body are connected via interfaces to dynamic architectures. Sometimes these knowbots also have the 'mimetic' potential for dynamic processes, they are representing real 'data fluids' which you can contact and transform. Mimetic not in the meaning of traditional art: mimetic potential means the agent incorporating the process. We can't use anymore the term representation because you are included now as an observer of reconstructed representations. I would like more to consider the word phenomena. P.:In your installations one feels a massive use of technology. Formally the only material one can see are computers and communication hi-tech equipment. As artists using this technology which is your critical position regarding the economical-political process which is running together with the information world? C: We are inside the technological system whose direction and speed are defined by the industry and science. Politics. and arts have to follow and it is nearly impossible to do anything without being inside. It is a confrontation which can't work if you play with the traditional ways of art. You have to be inside so that you can really see the consistency of the new technology, not only to say: "OK this is their world". This is our world and becomes bigger and bigger. We all depend on computers. I try to keep my vision free to understand what is outside and deal with both of these worlds. There are still many parts of our life which the technological system can't incorporate. Therefore I define myself an artist who can fight inside this self regulative order. Though I know everything I do could be good for the system because everything is connected but I fight and give up the respect for the big machines I am working with. P:The industrial revolution has delivered one of the biggest concern of our time: the pollution of the environment. The South Pole is an environment almost untouched by the man, where it is possible to make important observation about the environmental problem. Many scientists are able to visualize the effects of pollution, but it seems they have much more difficulties to reveal the origins. For an artist should be more important to fight the causes and not to the effects of the industrial pollution. Y: Yes, a real solution is not fighting against the effects or against the people who destroy the ecosystems. It's necessary to struggle against the thinking of the people who make these strategies, against the scientists and politicians who think they can predict reality by computing nature. It's an old artist's strategy to make politics and scientists aware about the consequences of their concepts of reality. P. What's your feeling about the time you need to produce this kind of work? C.: It always takes too long to realize a project when you work with technologies. It is a kind of paradox, not only for the technical complexity, also for the economical support. The production's process of art takes longer than you want. You can't produce ten pieces a year. This is maybe not understandable in the traditional way of art. P.:As we can speak of cyberspace, virtual space, we could think of a different notion of time. Past, future and present are existing together in your installation: the past is the work of the scientist, the present is the interaction in your installation and the future are the potential information going to be updated by the knowbots. How would you define the implicit time of this work? Y: We are familiar with the notion of cyberspace, how can we modify space, compress space, extend space. I think you can do the same with time and the way you experience it. We make a concept for the practice of vision. The time we try to realize it is the present. C: Maybe if the work succeeds when somebody gets into our installation he realizes that there is a complex of different new aesthetical and cognitive structures to deal with. We can't offer results in our work, everybody could experiment in his own way, we offer a model which is still in discussion, which offer different layers of nature concepts simultaneously: a traditional physical model with light and temperature zones, a scientific simulation with the illusion of linear references and a networked info-aesthetical model generated by knowbots. ********** I N S T A T ? H O C U T I T U R ********** Paolo Atzori Academy of Media Arts Peter-Welter-Platz 2 D-50676 Koeln Office: *49-221-20189-141 Fax: *49-221-20189-17 e-mail:Paolo {AT} khm.uni-koeln.de URL: http://www.khm.uni-koeln.de/~Paolo 2.0 ZKP - interfiction Herbert A. Meyer nettime-l@desk.nl Thu, 11 Jan 1996 00:42:26 +0100 (MEZ) ZK Proceedings 1995 >net criticism< **Essays/Statements _ .-. .--. _ .-. _ :_; .' `. : .-':_; .' `.:_; .-.,-.,-.`. .'.--. .--. : `; .-. .--.`. .'.-. .--. ,-.,-. : :: ,. : : :' '_.': ..': : : :' ..': : : :' .; :: ,. : :_;:_;:_; :_;`.__.':_; :_; :_;`.__.':_; :_;`.__.':_;:_; ASCII-documentation pt I ----------------------------------------------------------- pre 0.1 ----------------------------------------------------------- TRANSLATED MESSAGE: *Preface: interfiction - perspectives and myths of counter- public in data-nets The global data-network is on everyone's lips. Initiatives that plan and promote the further extension of the nets in the big style originate in politics and economy. Goal of this engangement is an efficiency-oriented and economy- centered utilization of the new structures of communication. The capacity of these projects is already proven within a wide range of areas and especially curious people are working with it yet. However, one can also judge this development skeptically. Traveling on the data-highway and the visit of virtual department stores doesn't differ from the everyday purchase and from newspaper-reading particularly. interfiction lays attention on the question how these multi-functional communication-structures can be used in an innovative and unconventional type and manner. interfiction would like to introduce these new possibilities from another perspective and sets the main focus on the discussion about counter-public net- utilization. Counter-public has turned itself into the myth. The idea that a critical contact with media leads inevitably to a transformation of the society is obsolete. However, the data-nets offer a new occasion to use this myth constructively. Net-projects try, fascinated of the potentials of the net, to update the mythical dimensions of the electronic structure. Globalization, democratization and free access to information are catchwords. So it is possible within the Internet, for example, to ensure direct access to the entire data-material. As long as 'in real world' the distribution of the calculators is limited the Internet is truly not a global net. The catchword democratization has to be considered skeptically as well. It becomes more and more evident that the new technologies simply entwine itself around the old structures. So there is a new myth of 'counter-public' with an inherent ambivalent character. The world doesn't turn into a global village automatically, just as the data-networks do not inevitable render to a democratization. Nevertheless the discussion about the net-myths could engage a critical reflection on the use of data-networks. The projects who were invited to the interfiction-workshops try to enable communication and interaction on net-adequate and innovative type and manner, what means in contrast to pure efficiency-oriented projects. This is exactly the topic, that interfiction wanted to process. The two-day workshop took place at Dec the 8th and 9th 1995 to enable a detailed and intensive discussion. Following you will find the transcription of the beginning of the second workshop. sorry, only in German :-( ----------------------------------------------------------- ORIGINAL MESSAGE: *Einleitung: interfiction - Perspektiven und Mythen von Gegenoeffentlichkeit in Datennetzen Die globale Datenvernetzung ist in aller Munde. In Politik und Wirtschaft entstehen Initiativen, die den weiteren Ausbau der Netze im groszen Stil planen und foerdern. Ziel dieses Engangements ist eine effizienzorientierte und wirtschaftzentrierte Nutzung der neuen Kommunikationsstrukturen. Diese Projekte sind in vielen Bereichen bereits funktionsfaehig und werden von einem besonders neugierigen Teil der Bevoelkerung auch schon benutzt. Man kann diese Entwicklung jedoch auch skeptisch beurteilen. Das Reisen auf der Datenautobahn und der Besuch von virtuellen Warenhaeusern unterscheidet sich naemlich nicht sonderlich vom alltaeglichen Einkauf und vom Zeitungslesen. interfiction stellt sich nun die Frage, wie diese multifunktionalen Kommunikationsstrukturen auf eine innovative und unkonventionelle Art und Weise benutzt werden koennen. interfiction moechte diese neuen Moeglichkeiten aus einer anderen Perspektive vorstellen und den Schwerpunkt auf die Diskussion einer 'gegenoeffentlichen' Netznutzung legen. Gegenoeffentlichkeit ist selber zum Mythos geworden. Die Vorstellung, dasz ein kritischer Umgang mit Medien zwangslaeufig zu einer Umgestaltung der Gesellschaft fuehrt, ist veraltet. Die Datennetze bieten jedoch eine neuen Anlasz, diesen Mythos konstruktiv zu verwenden. Netzprojekte versuchen, fasziniert durch die Potentiale des Netzes, die mythischen Dimensionen der elektronischen Struktur zu aktualisieren. Schlagworte dazu sind Globalisierung, Demokratisierung und freier Zugang zu Informationen. So ist es innerhalb des Internets beispielsweise moeglich, unmittelbar auf das gesamte Datenmaterial zuzugreifen. Da in der 'realen' Welt jedoch keine globale Verbreitung von Rechnern gegeben ist, ist das Internet kein wirklich globales Netz. Das Schlagwort Demokratisierung ist aehnlich skeptisch zu betrachten. Immer wahrscheinlicher wird es, dasz die neuen Kommunikationstechnologien einfach um die alten Strukturen ranken, diesen zwar partiell neue Moeglichkeiten schaffen, wobei deren Organisation aber unbeschadet bestehen bleibt. Es gibt also einen neuen 'Mythos Gegenoeffentlichkeit' in Datennetzen, der einen grundlegend ambivalenten Charakter hat. Die Welt wird keineswegs automatisch zu einem globalen Dorf. Genausowenig wird die Datenvernetzung zu einer automatischen Demokratisierung fuehren. Die netzspezifischen Mythen werden aber fuer die von uns eingeladenen Netzprojekte zu einem Anhaltspunkt, wenn es um konkrete Umgangsweisen und Strategien in Datennetzen geht. Im Gegensatz zu einer rein effizienzorientierten Anwendung versuchen diese Projekte auf netzadaequate und innovative Art und Weise Kommunikation und Interaktion zu ermoeglichen. Dieses ist genau das Thema, das interfiction bearbeiten will. interfiction moechte ein moeglichst breites Spektrum von Initiativen vorstellen, die in den Bereichen Kunst/Kultur, Stadt, Universitaet und Journalistik arbeiten, und sowohl Internet/WWW als auch Mailbox-Systeme benutzen. Im Zentrum von interfiction stand ein zweitaegiges Seminar. Es fand am 8.12 und am 9.12. jeweils von 13.00 bis 17.00 Uhr statt. Durch die Seminarform sollte eine ausfuehrliche und intensive Auseinandersetzung ermoeglicht werden. Im folgenden nun eine Transkribierung des Beginns vom zweiten interfiction-Seminar. ----------------------------------------------------------- *Transkribierung des Beginns von Seminar 2 - Kassel, 9.12.1995 Legende / / = SprecherIn _ _ = Betonung (...) = Auslassung [ ] = Anmerkung (-> ) = Referenz [Das Seminar wird durch die Veranstalter von Uwe Hermanns, Herbert A Meyer und Gerhard Wissner eroeffnet (->URL_1). Es wird auf eine Tischvorlage hingewiesen, die 18 ethische Prinzipien beinhaltet (->URL_1). Diese wurden von Tommaso Tozzi (Strano Network, Italien) anlaesslich des Budapester Treffens Metaforum II verfasst (->URL_2). Zu Beginn wird Volker Grassmuck von den Veranstaltern darum gebeten, sein aktuelles Projekt Access for All-FAQ (->URL_3) vorzustellen.] /Volker Grassmuck/ Zum Rahmen des Projekts: Ich wuerde mir das wuenschen als einen Beitrag fuer die Internet World Expo (->URL_4) im naechsten Jahr, die von Carl Malamud und Vinton Cerf organisiert wird. Ich gehe davon aus, wenn ich mich in dem nicht voellig taeusche, dass es einen Internet-Hype geben wird im naechsten Jahr, der alles in den Schatten stellt, was wir bislang gesehen haben. Die Expo geht nach dem Modell der Weltausstellungen des 19. Jahrhunderts. Es ist also eine industrielle Leistungsschau. Nicht nur - also da sind auch durchaus sozial engagierte Projekte vertreten, aber vor allen Dingen geht es um Technologie, wenn ich das richtig verstehe. Im Rahmen der Expo wuerde ich mir das angestrebte Projekt sehr gut vorstellen koennen. Ich moechte diese access-for-all-Modelle, also Netzwerk- Entwicklung von unten, auch international praesentieren und eine grosse Oeffentlichkeit dafuer gewinnen. Und dazu sollte es folgendes geben: Zunaechst einmal einen access- for-all-File, also einen ersten Entwurf fuer einen theoretischen, politischen Argumentationsstrang: Warum access for all? Dann soll es eine Zusammenstellung von verschiedenen Projekten geben, die man unter dieses Dach fassen kann. Es geht nicht um eine neue Organisation oder sowas, sondern um die gesammelte Praesentation von Projekten, die zeigen, dass wir nicht auf die Telekom, nicht auf Burda und nicht auf Berlesconi und sonstjemanden angewiesen sind. Es geht darum, dass wir Netze selber machen koennen. Ein besonderer Schwerpunkt liegt im Hinblick auf die Gebuehrenerhoehung ab dem 1. Januar auf alternative Loesungen fuer den Local Loop, also fuer den letzten Kilometer bis zur Wohnung. Prenzlnet (->URL_5), gestern schon mehrfach angesprochen, soll ein Art Workshop- Charakter haben, wo die verschiedensten Loesungen von Lasern bis zum Babyphon und Packet-Radio und so weiter ausprobiert werden. Und am Schluss soll dabei eine Liste von Starterkits herauskommen, die Projekte irgendwo auf dem Land... also Leute, die vielleicht auch nicht in solchen Zusammenhaengen sind, aber trotzdem das an ihrem Ort machen wollen, beigehen koennen und sich sehr konkrete Informationen holen. Bis hin zu Bestellinformationen - wo kriegt man irgendwelche Lasertechnologie moeglichst billig zum Beispiel. Aber auch ueber Organisationsmodelle, Finanzierungsmodelle und so weiter muss man natuerlich nachdenken. Ebenso ueber Software, die bestimmte Gruppen entwickelt haben und die sie bereit sind, mit anderen zu teilen. Die Gemeinschaften, die da jeweils entstanden sind, sollten beschrieben werden. Das Ganze soll dann auf der Next 5 Minutes-Konferenz (->URL_6) praesentiert werden. Bis dahin ist das Projekt natuerlich noch nicht fertig. Es wird aber auch nie fertig werden, sondern es soll nur der erste Kristallisationskern sein, der eine moeglichst grosse Bandbreite von organisatorischen und technischen Modellen vorstellt. Zum Beispiel die Digitale Stad (->URL_7), die Internationale Stadt (->URL_8), das Zamir-Net in Ex- Jugoslawien (->URL_9), Bulletin-Board-Systeme (->URL_10) und so weiter. Und im Laufe des naechsten Jahres, die Expo laeuft das ganze Jahr 1996, kann das dann Werkstatt- Charakter bekommen, auch die Website. Ueber diesen FAQ-File soll nach Moeglichkeit die Diskussion weiterlaufen und es sollen weitere Projekte angeregt werden, die dann im Laufe des naechsten Jahres entstehen und damit aufgenommen werden. [Zwischenfragen zur Expo, mit der Bitte, diese genauer zu eroertern.] /Volker Grassmuck/ Also Industrieschau ist auch ein bisschen zynisch formuliert. Ganz so schlimm ist es nicht. Ist Carl Malamud ein Begriff? Der hat angefangen mit Internet-Talk-Radio, also erstmals Broadcast im Internet, dann freie Programme, Interviews mit irgendwelchen Internet-Figuren, so technische Sachen. Er ist halt ein Hacker, Techno-Hacker. Dann hat er ein Buch ueber ueber Internet-Traveller geschrieben, war in Japan, Thailand, Schweiz. Ein sehr aktiver Mensch aus der Techno-Szene. Industrie ist insofern nicht ganz richtig. Aber die Veranstalter der Expo haben Kanaele zu den ganz Grossen. Es wird eine T3-Backbone- Leitung entstehen von San Francisco nach Washington, nach Amsterdam und nach Tokio. Das Stueck innerhalb der USA und nach Japan scheint schon zu stehen. Das wird von MCI bereit gestellt, das sind keine Hacker mehr. Aber so eine Backbone-Leitung zu legen ist auch fuer Hacker nicht so ganz einfach. Und ansonsten ist die Internet-Expo total offen. Im Prinzip kann jeder dort Pavillons anmelden und events machen. Zusaetzlich soll es auch darum gehen, ausserhalb der Netze Zugangspunkte bereit zu stellen. Und dieses ist auch als Problem erkannt worden. Und da spielt durchaus auch access-for-all, also oeffentliche, kostenlos benutzbare Terminals, als Idee eine Rolle. Der Rahmen ist mir eigentlich nur wichtig, weil er fuer Oeffentlichkeit sorgen wird. Es ist ganz merkwuerdig, in Deutschland ist die Expo ueberhaupt kein Thema. In Japan, in Thailand, in den USA ist sie das Thema ueberhaupt. Alle Leute, die irgendwas mit dem Internet zu tun haben, sind wie wahnsinng dabei, Pavillions fuers naechste Jahr zu bauen. [Zwischenfragen. Es wird geklaert, dass die Expo-Pavillions virtuelle Pavillions, also Websites sind. Volker Grassmuck weist noch darauf hin, dass im Rahmen seines Projektes inhaltliche Kriterien, Unterscheidungskriterien entwickelt werden sollen, nach denen man Projekte beurteilen kann. Daraufhin bitten die Veranstalter Tilmann Baumgaertel ueber aktuelle Vorgaenge bei Compuserve zu berichten.] /Tilmann Baumgaertel/ Bei Compuserve gibt es eigentlich kein Forum, wo die Nutzer in irgendeiner Form auf das Unternehmen einwirken koennen, Fragen stellen koennen. Deswegen hat sich interessanterweise in den letzten Monaten das Hilfeforum veraendert, das eigentlich so ein Support-Forum ist, wo man technische Fragen stellen kann, zum Beispiel wie kriege ich meine User-ID, wie kann ich mein Passwort aendern und so weiter. Da ist in den letzten Monaten eine Diskussion aufgekommen, die recht grundsaetzliche Fragen stellt, wie beispielsweise: In welcher Form muessen Sysops ihre 3.0 Re: ZKP ? John Perry Barlow nettime-l@desk.nl Fri, 5 Jan 1996 21:29:39 -0700 At 11:57 PM 1/5/96, Pit Schultz wrote: >Hello John Perry, > >well i just heard that you will come to the n5m conf. and i >also heard that you are a bit pissed off, you're not the >only one and the problem is that anyone is thinking that >this will be a normal conf. I am more than a bit pissed off. Since I was going to be in the vicinity anyway, I offered to participate in the conference on several occasions, whether on a panel or taking tickets at the door. And I never got any sort of response from anyone until yesterday when Geert told me, essentially, that everyone had heard what I had to say in Budapest and at Doors last year and that he couldn't see paying my way over. (Which as I say, I had not asked for since I was going to be there anyway.) He also said I was perfectly welcome to come and sit in the audience. All of which might not be so irritating were it not for the fact that you have as conference topics a number of areas such as censorship and copyright where I have a great deal more recent, non-theoretical, in the trenches, experience than those who are discussing them. Further, most of what I have read in the nettime mail-list so far consists of scathing criticism of neo-hippie American Wired culture, which is to say *my* culture, including many charges which I would have loved an opportunity to confront face to face rather than text to text. But I am not being given that opportunity except as a member of the audience or as another poster to a newsgroup. So, if what you folks really want is an opportunity to slander us in the privacy of our own circular academic viewpoints, I'll make no further effort to engage you personally in debate. Yrs, John Perry **************************************************************** John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident Co-Founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow Message Service: 800/634-3542 Barlow in Meatspace Today: Pinedale, Wyoming Coming soon to: San Francisco 1/8-9, Pinedale 1/10-17, Amsterdam 1/18-19, Budapest 1/20-23, Palm Springs 1/24-26, Minneapolis 1/27-28, Chicago 1/29, New York 1/29-31, Davos, Switzerland 2/1-4 In Memoriam, Dr. Cynthia Horner and Jerry Garcia ***************************************************************** "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression: this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." --Article 19, U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights 3.1 Re: ZKP ? Pit Schultz nettime-l@desk.nl Tue, 9 Jan 96 01:32 MET Hello John Perry, >>more than pissed off well it took a while, again.. first: i cannot say much to the n5m organisation but that it is just singular and very chaotic. you, as a worldwide net authority, could use the chance to enter this indended taz as everybody else (not persona non grata but maybe incognito) and just discuss and have fun like the rest of us. >>scathing criticism of neo-hippie American Wired culture, which is to say >>*my* culture, i have a certain respect on what was invented 1968/69 like Unix and Internet, anti-autoritarian movement, sex-pol, drug cultura and business, and sure, rock music but well it's a little clumsy today and therefore people work on 'interfaces' or 'gateways' like to the past (Jefferson) or to the right wing hardcore liberals (News Ginrich and PFF) or just to embed it in a diffuse, flexible and cynical ideology production like Wired Magazine (out of control) The biology metaphor and naturalisation of Cyberspace which seems to become one of the consesus over there, comes together with 1. formations of biotechnolgical power(an own thread, but also a question of copyright and the info-war-paradism) and a new pax americana, spread out with the standards of the Internetisation of the world, and the reactivation of American Myths which are bound to their own historical lies. >copyright A property model based on territorial myth or natural right is always based on the mythification of blood, and a tendency to repeat a violent history. I see also the central question of information property which leads in my view to the question of who has the right to play with the money (and control private police forces). This project seems to aim at a fusion of the sphere of the stockmarkets with the lower levels of production to a new kind of unbound circulation, the orgasmic free spirit of capitalism. (virtual class, third wave, happy few) I heavily doubt if evolution won't spit out such a monster, as we look onto ecological and political problems. I havn't been on that gaya-trip yet to see 'the future and it works' and will also resist to apocalyptic pathos. These arguments seems all a bit overheated, but i agree with you that with the electronic frontier we are facing 'new' social and geopolitical conflict lines. First, i guess, between the in- and excluded and according to it, establishing 'new' military paradigms. Simply asked: when there will fly the first cruise missiles on illegal web servers and pirate cd-rom factories?? When one will use VR/C3I controled non-lethal weapons for conflict zones? Do those conflicts has to get provoked to show the existing power structures? You should accept the emmergence of a 'net criticism' and see it as a part of your model, that information wants to live (and therefore has to kill some other information?) And it certainly it makes a difference if everything becomes perfect or something went damned wrong. (like the stock quotes of netsape, thats just madly risky) Responsible are partly you surfers of the 'third wave', it's obvious that we can't he ecstatic any more to plug in our electrical machines or cum together in a net.orgasm. There is a thin line when technology can get just another state-religion, in this moment i decide to switch my streams of desire and become heretic. nettime is more than a medium to make money with the net backlash, it's more than a jerk off sex toy for a sick mind fuck. 'we' , as a kind of european tribal and dissident collective subjectiviy, want to have the right to see cyberspace in our own way but are certainly open for a discussion and argument as long as worse conflicts are avoideable through it, and we should be all keep ourselves open to learn in times of such 'rapid changes'. Are we having fun yet? Viele Gruesse aus Berlin -pit ps: you are still invited to write something for nettime, even an anti.manifesto or doing an interview with us, can be on e-mail. maybe after n5m.. 4.0 <nettime> Portrait of the virtual intellectual Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Sun, 20 Jul 1997 16:53:20 +0200 (MET DST) Portrait of the virtual intellectual On the design of the public cybersphere By Geert Lovink Lecture at 100 days program of Documenta X Kassel, July 13, 1997 Much has been said here about the changing role of the artist, the designer and the architect (for example, from Rem Koolhaas) in the age of cybertechnologies. Clearly, aesthetical professions are undergoing profound changes. However, little has been heard in this context of the intellectual. Are intellectuals condemning themselves to manage the vanishing Gutenberg galaxy? Is the whole idea of the intellectual disappearing altogether, as Russell Jacoby's book 'The Last Intellectual' suggests? Most writers and researchers are by now familiar with the computer as a tool, but this says nothing of the theoretical concepts they may harbour around the internet, multimedia, or hypertext. It is a fashion amongst intellectuals to be sceptical about the so-called 'digital revolution' (who can take those ugly screens seriously anyway?) One perceives a silent wish that with the fading away of the cyber-crazes and net hypes, the technologies themselves will also somehow disappear. A new distinction between highbrow and lowbrow seems to be in the making. While the 'true devotees' of culture apply themselves to books, opera and painting, the grey, uncivilised classes are to be kept busy with primitive and juvenile 'new' media. The lonely crowds are lured into a state of permanent numbness, resulting in dazed and confused packs of couch potatoes sitting it out in ever lasting zapping-, clicking-, chatting- and surfing-sessions. Digitisation takes command: electronic solitude creates a Cybernetic Waste Land. Included here is a new aristocracy harbouring a deep hatred towards the on-line masses. To rephrase John Carey: "The crowd has taken possession of media which were created by civilisation for the best people". The fooling around with immature, 'beta' media stands in sharp contrast with the "sensual perception of the wholeness of the artwork". The elitist, usually government subsidised/state sanctioned and exportable forms of expressions are slipping into open warfare with vulgar and commercial cyberculture. Even to-day, very few intellectuals are prepared to take the digital media seriously. While photography, film and video are now accepted art forms, the hyper-commercial, constantly changing software landscape still lacks substantive intellectual and cultural critique. This is the case even within so called 'art and technology' circles, where many established theorists seem to suffer from techno-ennui. Into this field one can either become like a visionary salesperson or assume the role of moaning defender of established art values. "Paris, where are you, now that we need you?" Who will finally manage to initiate Paul Virilio so that he will give us a more precise, nay, a more radical, interpretation of the social impacts of the new technologies? Who will critique the neo-liberal cyberhallucinations of Pierre Levy and his 'collective intelligence'? Who will finally stop Baudrillard's tragic complaints? Paris -- once the intellectual capital of the world -- seems to have fallen prey to moralistic debates about the 'most favourite victim status' (as in the case of Bosnia). Here we are seeing most clearly what the current crisis of the intellectual is about. The production of attractive role models got us nowhere. The cultural climate has gone into the defensive mode. The growing anxiety is fluid and can take many forms: sometimes xenophobic, sometimes against the European Union, or just against the State in general. Both the emotional and the rational calls for political engagement are melting away, just like all other information. The intellectual as TV personality (for example, Bernard-Henry Levy) seems to be part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. The need for spokespeople and experts, producing opinions on a day-to-day basis has become an integral part of the current Society of the Spectacle. But the intellectual of the Media Age should not by definition be identical to the figure of the media personality. What Paris of the nineties (as an example) is showing us is the urgent need of 'media literacy': intellectuals who are aware of their real position within the rapidly expanding media landscapes. This is partly a generation problem. The generation of the sixties (known in France as "les quadras"), equipped with the Gramscian political definition of the 'organic intellectual' closely tied to the Party and social movements, is now at the height of its power. It has conquered all possible positions and marched into all possible institutions. But there is no one leading anymore. Policy implementation has replaced avantgardism. The Leninist question: SHTO DYALATSH?" (What is to be done) nowadays lacks both subject and object. The 68-generation have become parents, worried by the senseless escapism of their children. Autonomous subcultures (like the 'travellers' in the UK and Germany), though thriving, have become far less visible even when they are not reeling under severe state repression. The remaining political groups seem to have locked themselves in antagonism towards each other and lack the hedonistic, seductive aspects of the rave and drugs culture. Protests against the Euro-policies at the Amsterdam-summit of June 1997, however effective, also illustrated the current crisis in oppositional culture: marches were held both against unemployment and in favor of a jobless way of life. New issues of protest, voiced by street-ravers, soft-drugs users and art-porn enthusiasts were unable to connect with the 'traditional' forms of contestation of the established (new) order. Back to the intellectual. Take for example Eduard Said, who still sticks to the old, well known definition of the intellectual. In his 1993 Reith Lectures, 'Representations of the Intellectuals' he insisted that the intellectual is "an individual with a specific public role in society that cannot be reduced to being a faceless professional". Said warns of the dangers of specialisation and professionalism and instead favours an amateurism which is "speaking truth to power". Against specific knowledge, Said highlights general concern. The intellectual should be endowed with "a faculty for representing, embodying, and articulating a message to, as well as for, a public". Arguing against rigid sociological class definitions, which define intellectuals solely through their profession, Said turns them into moral agents, defined by their attitude". The intellectual belongs on the same side with the "weak and unrepresented". This requires a "constant alertness" and "steady realism". This sounds touching and noble, and Said is right when he is stressing that the intellectual and the public are inextricably intertwined. What is missing here is an analysis of the dramatic changes of the public sphere itself. Some cultural pessimists have stated that the public itself has already vanished altogether. The daily reality is that the so-called public domain in the urban realm (for example, streets, squares and parks) is under permanent surveillance and control. More and more of it being privatised. This holds not only true in real, but also in 'virtual', electronic space. The essay 'Electronic Civil Disobedience', from American group Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) states that, as far as power is concerned, the streets are dead capital. Even though the brick monuments of power still stand, the agency that maintains dominance is neither visible nor stable. According to CAE, the only groups that will successfully confront this new form of power are "those that locate the arena of contestation in cyberspace". The methods of civil disobedience, like picket lines, demonstrations and petitions are largely ineffective and empty rituals. With neither spite nor disdain towards the remaining traditional attempts to question the current world system of global capitalism, it should be stated, in public, and as clearly as possible, that "contemporary activism has had very little impact on military and corporate policy". The same could be said of the intellectual that is still living in the paper world. The days of Foucault's discursive power are over. The system without alternative does not need the magical power of words anymore in order to rule. It is this sense that we are actually witnessing the much-vaunted 'End of Ideology'. The realm of 'ideas' as such is not dangerous or subversive anymore. Ideology has migrated into other spheres. It morphed itself into software, e-cash, and data. Rationality successfully besieged religions and all other metaphysical expressions and turned them into pure, cold functionalities. The return of fundamentalisms, nationalisms, regionalisms, etc. is not a serious threat to the New World Order. Benjamin Barber's endless variations on the dialectics between 'McWorld' and 'Jihad' are only expressing temporary, and very marginal, conflicts. These conflicts may be bloody and affect the lives of millions of people, but the current catastrophe zones don't make any impact on the Capitalist Condition. A Black Monday on Wall Street might. The war in Bosnia has not disrupted Western economies, though it proved nearly fatal to Bosnia. This time for sure Sarajevo won't throw us into a world war again. That's it. Alain Finkelkraut's 'Ode to the Croatian State', Bernard-Henry Levy's use of the Siege of Sarajevo as a stage for his media appearances, or Peter Handke's late and profoundly touristic discovery of the Serbian countryside all marked the end of the intellectual as a public figure with any significant impact. The cynical competition for the 'most favourite victim status' amongst the different ethnic groups made all known methods of outrage and engagement irrelevant overnight. Unlike the days of the Vietnam War, it has become more and more difficult to choose sides. This again is drawing us deeper into a status of passive consumers, bored by the overkill of undistinguishable strains of infotainment. Intellectuals who are only expressing opinions, in the belief that the media-industry (particularly television) still produces common sense content which shapes public opinion, should simply desist -- they should boycott all talkshows and instead engage in fundamental research on the 'state of the media'. Samuel Huntington, with his 'clash of civilisations', overstresses the role of culture within today's global capitalism. This reflects, in my opinion, wishful thinking about the return of the old style intellectual (or priest) who will have the last say in entire societies. Their will to power is of a highly resentful nature. These conservatives are defending a model of the West which no longer exists. The 'clashes' they are predicting might in fact take place in some decades, when, for example, China will have reached the level of the Western economic powers. Within the current situation, we can only interpret these scenarios as a collective, deeply nostalgic re-hash of ideological, cold war-like conflicts that will not come back. In fact, the intellectual as opinion leader is slowly losing ground. What we see is the rise of the VI, the Virtual Intellectual. These knowledge workers are thoroughly familiar with the 'virtual condition'. They have also come to terms with the declining power of book culture and the public sphere as we have known it. Before we try to outline the shape and task of this upcoming social category, it might be useful to make a distinction between what I call 'Theory Fiction', and the description of a new sociological phenomena. In 'Theory Fiction' terms, the virtual intellectual might very well be an 'Unidentified Theoretical Object', a UTO, like the ones we described in Adilkno's Media Archive. We could then compare the VI with categories such as the data dandy, or the human body as 'wetware'. Just as the cyberpunk, or the Generation X slacker, or the computer-nerd, the VI might even leave the realm of literature or theory and enter popular culture in order to vanish again after a while. The power of the VI is a potential one: s/he might turn up as a virtual creature, but could as well remain elusive and never leave the conceptual, beta stage. We need to examine the context of the emerging VI -- the relationship between the computer-literate intellectual and the hard- and software industry. Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein did so in their remarkable description of the 'virtual class' in their book 'Data Trash' (1994). This emerging class, with its own 'Wired' ideology, might also have its own 'organic' intellectuals. However our VI is more than just a spokesperson for the new media industry and the battalions of 'digital artisans' infeodated to it. The playful, ironic, and imaginary categories and the critical socio-political analysis of new class formations are two different ways of theory production. In my lecture 'From Speculative Media Theory towards Net Criticism' I contextualized both by putting them in a personal, and at the same time historical, perspective. Here I just want to point out that the virtual intellectual has elements of both: a will to design, to construct the public part of cyberspace, to be 'radically modern', combined with the ability to reflect and criticise the (new) media from all possible perspectives. In both cases it is important to overcome the widespread resentments, cynicism and elitism such a position attracts on the one hand, and over-hyped salestalk on the other. This implies that all forms of technological determinism should be condemned. What is it that makes this type of intellectual 'virtual'? Like all earlier professions that are now migrating into cyberspace, these new figures will be constituted through their specific mixture of local and global cultures, digitised and non-digitised source material, real and screen-only experiences. The VI is conscious of the limitations of today's texts, without at the same time becoming a servant of the 'empire of images'. Since s/he has been educated in the heritage of the text, the VI now will now be confronted by the problem of the visualisation of ideas. Text-only systems can no longer be auto-poetic. The self-referential tendency of all singular media needs to be corrected and expanded with crosslinks to imagery, audio files and hyper-links -- all embedded in on-line databases. Virtual here also means open, ever changing, in constant contact with other e-writers (and readers), no longer focussed on the closed, hermetic Magnus Opus that defined the 'Age of the Author'. So, on the whole, we may state that the nature of virtual intellectual a technical one. Unlike its predecessors, s/he is no longer defined through the relation to the political sphere in a classical sense. The 'public sphere' itself will more and more be a product of technical media and lead a true virtual life of its own, no longer connected to places like the coffeehouse, the salon, the boulevard or even the more abstract realm of the newspaper and television discourse. The global capitalist "(wo)man of e-letters" is part of the on-line masses, but does not feel a need to speak on behalf of the internet or some virtual community. The VI also lacks any sentimental drive to represent unprivileged off-line groups. The goal of the democratisation of the media should be the elimination of all forms of mediated representation. We now have the possibility to let people speak for themselves, even if they have little or no bandwidth. Public access to a variety of communication tools and the world-wide support of independent, tactical media might ultimately make the political intellectual redundant. Thus, the virtual intellectual should be located in the sphere of the negative. Even in the pragmatic work of programming, designing interfaces or the planning of network architecture, the negative should be our starting point. The main threat to a critical praxis nowadays comes from the positive, 'humanistic' intentions, or what Calin Dan the 'dictatorship of good will'. Intellectuals might not so easily commit 'treason' again (Julian Benda, 'The Treason of the Intellectuals' , 1927) and might not again be attracted so easily by totalitarian ideologies. But will they be able to resist the current free-market way of thinking, Ignacio Ramonet's now famous "One Idea System"? The majority of the knowledge workers are no longer employees of the State, nor are they be members of the Party. Today's danger is lying in the growing sector of the NGOs and their anti-intellectual pragmatism in the name of the Good, locked in a unholy alliance with the real-time mass media. Our answer to this will be a gay data nihilism, joyous forms of negativism: resisting all reductive and essentialist strategies, connecting all streams of data from either side of the old and new media, in both real and virtual spaces. Media freedom in this context means leaving the whole media question behind us. It means mixing and sampling the local and the global while flying through our own, selfmade and hybrid data landscapes. And they, just as we, will always remain under construction. (edited by Patrice Riemens and Linda Wallace) --- 5.0 <nettime> Last exit to net-criticism? Frank Hartmann nettime-l@desk.nl Wed, 23 Jul 1997 08:08:00 +0200 Re: <nettime> Geert Lovink's portrait of the Virtual Intellectual Geert, with his (as always exiting) piece on the virtual intellectual, gave us a a sum up of the ideas and essays he (and Pit) prepublished on nettime and recently got printed here and there, whenever a critical voice was needed by some clueless publisher. A summons for net-criticism, an interim report on net-criticism, adnotes to net-criticism, net-criticism as a work-in-progress for true. It makes me wonder where net-criticism really takes place and what its agenda really is, aside from stressful conference tourism. But now net-criticism finally arrived at its terminal, the definition of its true actor, the "virtual intellectual". It certainly highlights a situation, especially when relating to the aesthetic and moral wholeness some elitist intellectuals (the classic mediators) are anxious to save. And at the same time this text seems to unwillingly fall back into the old quarrel over the best position within the field - a very common manifestation of the classic intellectual. Critique seems to have lost its object, while stressing the descriptive qualities of what is going on beyond the old intellectual task of managing the Gutenberg-galaxy. Is this truly the end of critique? Information negation as the true core of post-enlightenment: its claim is to lead us out of Gate's software cave, and into the authentic light and warmth of "joyous negativism" of gay data nihilism. Now this sounds to me a lot like alternatively living that gesture of "data dandyism" formerly criticized by the ADILKNO-crew. Economy, history, ideology and ideas seem no longer to exist for the net-intellectual. It is another aesthetisation of the intellectual, thus not so far from the position just overcome, or simply just another strategy to survive in the swamp of the post-massmedia discourse. I also take it not as a coincidence that after the introduction of the term "virtual intellectual", the grey eminence of net-critique, Arthur Kroker, is presented once more like the hare out of the magician's hat. Another observation. The quest for "theory fiction" strongly reminds me of Richard Rorty's attempt to save philosophy by "edifying discourse", and even more of Umberto Eco, who first published his "Apocalittici e integrati" in 1964 as a critique of the dualistic cultural critique. Eco not only recommended the intellectual to immerse in mass culture and media, he also did a nice job in producing a theory fiction which made it to the bestsellers-list. So: d'accord with the general problem Geert presents, but with the reservation that coining another term (like the virtual intellectual) does not lead the way out of this logic of decline fostered by so many traditional intellectuals. Wasn't it Vilém Flusser who, for the intellectual of the future, imagined a conceptual suicide of sorts, as the disintegration of objects and their subjects already became an everday experience against which our culture holds up so many fictitious belief systems (much underestimated in this context: one of his last writings with the programmatic title "Vom Subjekt zum Projekt"). The job is not finished yet. ~Frank Hartmann --- 6.0 nettime: whishful thinking Pit Schultz nettime-l@desk.nl Sun, 21 Apr 96 16:40 MDT Dear Nettimers, time to say something. first, sorry for all the inconveniences and boredom, sorry also for not having changed the situation when it became 'unfocused'. appologizes for the hyper-national mail bombs, i think it was all worth of it. in parts a meaningful accident, in other parts product of a crisis in the electronic wish economy, and well, the list is *open* now, ready for your thoughtful contributions, and also for all kinds of notes from a material world. please do not forget that nettime is not a service, it is not a text tv, it is no boat, ad i am not it's director. instead you define what it is. it's nothing but the sum of our trials. mapping the shift what has happened? a turnover, a transformation, the escape from virtuality, the web as a bad love affair, new networks of distrust, net art as feudalistic rescue zone, the massified boredom of techno-lust, the breakdown of electronic imagination, net critique as the official version, the disability of virtual capitalism to reach the zero-degree of superconductive desire and the absolute speed of light age, all kinds of spies vs spies, false priests, dying travelling salemen, the sellout of potlatsch, a ghost city after digital gold rush? but it's one thing to make lists of keywords, another to find a subjective voice again, which maps the shift from different perspectives. that's what i hope we can do on nettime for the next weeks. * let's take a look into the current prawda of the net. did you recognize something? web-whipeout, dissing the beehive thinkers, netizen against republicains info-economy, sucksters on usesless webcults, a new lo-tech mailinglist. there never occured such an obvious transformation in the central organ of net discourse. so does net critique won and becomes the official version of networked truth now? ** somehow 'in bytecity we solve our problems in our own way'. A killer-meme including the ever possible seed for 'cyberfascism' was detected by several ideological alarm systems anywhere in the world wide west. It was a very calm shift, a subterrenean battle, down in the bunkers of the info-elite one dicided to do some sacrifices. the digital revolution eats its children. In many talks i had it became clear, that it's no time to unify but to report from the borders of the net and be aware of the different modes of virtual violence to become human again. *** an extremely subjective answer: from the virtual position of an archaic net god, from the snowy heights of the old world, cyberzarathustra spoke to us, already on the other side, he appeared as an all-american avatar and one could do a breath-taking morph through the multiple mythical subjectivations of the poet, pioneer, priest, cowboy, indian, general, president, hippy, father, son, entrepreneur, prophet, pilgrim, angel, alien, to learn a simple lecture of initiation: the new world is splitted in two halves again, were the 'new' one declares itself independent from the 'old' one we have to leave. our half, the virtual, the new, the rich, the highly technified, the bodyhatred and dematerialized, the one with the new marketplaces, and secret knowledge, immune against earthy powers, a civilisation of split mind, in the name of nature and everything which is bigger than real, this 'better part' is ours now, bound to the idea of a virtual america. And you say you didn't believe in it? Any of these concepts cuts a black whole in the wish economy of cyberspace, if we connect them together to a new mind territory, we get something completly monstrous. **** terms to forget: the net is not the territory and other truthful lies, "the net" as metaphysical entity which constitutes real power, a number of metaphor mismatch errors net=life=nature=global_brain=weltgeist=mythical_power, computer science as esotheric secret knowledge, the wholy pathos and grandiosity of 'the net' (as ersatz-religion), the wishful thinking of an economic explosion (golden future), the will to push the repeat history button (golden past), the taboo of a disfunctional and unhealthy internet, the obsession to walk in the footsteps of the founder fathers, the obsession to find the eternal woodstock which is hiding in internet+unix (born in 1969), taking the newest Cyberacid driving along the road to nihil, the expectation of new and improved humankind through harder selection, the unavoidable apocalyptic turnover, the clean aesthetics of cyberwar, the doom-day of the net, the male obsession with artifical life, the digital void of the american soul, the wholy mission of bringing virtual freedom to the manking, the obsession with 'innocence' and it's abuse, disgusting flesh, the hate of the own body, mortality, body-fluids, splitted wired desire and it's way to a useful 'mythical external force', information=money, privatisation and cyber-slavery, corporate meta-nations.. an incomplete list of a collective thinking which is hopefully part of the past. ***** what do you want to do today? -opening up new genres, adding some examples, practising with little text forms -implicit net critique, reports from the borders of the net, 2-culture-dialogue -the technological subconsciousness, compile, compress, decode, decipher -the end of the future hype, unlikely futures, imaginary websites, good ideas -the etext gathering is still open for Madrid 5cyberconf ZKP2 200p. until May 15 -- 7.0 nettime: Nettimism? No thank you! Igor Markovic nettime-l@desk.nl Fri, 14 Mar 1997 23:15:39 +0100 No more ideologies - keep cyberspace clean! With the growth of importance and influence of the nettime (list, circle of people and concepts etc.) people who lived at least a part of their lives in socialism - but not only them - can recognise emerging of some nteresting processes. I have in mind selfunderstaindable leadership of dominant idea, ideology, viewpoint. Since the time of the First International and famous Haag congress discussion about leadership and/or problems of representation of other voices is present, particularly in the "left" whatever one could consider into that term. And nettime is "left". There is no doubt about it. Some recent highlights, at the first look not connected with the topic, warn that there is place for being worried. Set is prepared and only from the actors itself (there is no director in this play!) depend the end. At the final discussion on Next5Minutes Conference it was kind a lot of discussion about "being neo-marxist" and how to fight "bad" ideologies on the Net, and some reflection were available in several following discussions, including some postings to this list. Recent private discussion I had with Geert Lovink about meanings of the term "net criticism", and how it should be recognised and used along with Toshiya Ueno's visit to Zagreb start alarm in my head. It happened before. It also start innocent, it was in good purpose, but it finished into Holocaust. I will dare to try to compare period just before the Soviet revolution and present position of nettime. It's very important to stress that ideologically those two things have very little in common. Only important similarity is at the field of organisation. At the Congress Bolsheviks have very few representative, but they have some of the most eminent individuals of the time, and they somehow manage to turn some sindycalists, anarchists, and Tkachevist on their side, get majority, proclaim marxism-lenism as a favourite ideology and the rest is history. (Lately, during the Spanish civil war it was shown that people do not need some specific leaders who will explain them meanings of life.) What, in my humble opinion happens at the field of net criticism, and around nettime (it work for some other emerging groups, circles or lists) is something with similar characteristics. First, there is some kind of felling of being something special - it is more then obvious in the discussions, at the conferences and in different articles and papers around. Non-academism could also be a form of elitism. It's nothing bad in being aware of personal values, but it easily could be turned into pejorative elitism. Usually there is no discussion (on-line) with the people from "outside", who do not share enthusiasm for the nettime idea, which is mainly their fault, but it is not good for the idea, which can grow and develop only in constant discussion, re-thinking, and if it is necessary flaming. It happened to the Marxism in Eastern Europe: no real enemies, no controversies, just Marx-Engels: Werke. Excellent point in resistance to possible autoghetoisation were stopping the moderation of the list, unfortunately discussion is still focus only to some specific "inside" points, without broader audience. But possibility exist! It's on the people to use it. The bigger problem, however, could be (and it already is) insisting on common platform (particularly neo-marxist!) and sharing ideologies of resistance/ progress or whatever. It was strange before, and it is even stranger today to insist on wide spread organisations against the Others - no matter how "bad" they are. Why is it necessary to insist on some new -ism, on one and ultimate theoretical explanation which will take care and explain to the "common" people how and way they should resist to MegaGodzila, Californian ideology, or McDonalds? History show that it is irrelevant was it done on purpose or not - people in and around nettime have no such ambitions, but danger remains! After all, who saw the Stalin shadow behind Marx in 19th century? Insisting on common aims, or thousands of other phrases like that will produce the Thinkers, the Philosophers, the Politicians who will have prepared answers to problems, and who will then became the Leaders - it doesn't matter do they want to be Leaders or not! They will be installed - from the "common people!" as Leaders, and sooner or later they will have to accept such label, or leave the real life and live quiet life in country house with a gazebo. Danger is double. First there is no person who can guarantee for itself that such privilege position wouldn't change it at least a bit. Power change people, and in this case ultimate power to be interpreter of what is going on, and how to deal with it, it may finished in the catastrophe. On Stalin's dead Ionescu wrote - very correctly - that it's not the Stalin who was real monster - but all those small Stalins in kolhozes, factories, schools... Secondly, nettime put together some of the biggest minds at the field of the social implications of the new media, lot of people would like to be part of it, and in minds of people with modest capacity (myself for example) it look like club in the Ivy League. Those people produce a lot of new ideas, which knowledge hungry "ordinary people" just grab and try to digest. Look just what happened with post-modern and Baudrillard! It is necessary for thinkers and theoreticians to permanent fight against such tendencies, and on the other hand they can not do that all the time, they are just human beings. I have no right answer how to fight those processes - if I describe them correctly in the first place, and it would be very dangerous if anyone will came with the final solution, but recognition of the problem and discussion about it sounds like a good starting point. Cause, if I have to choose - and it might happen - between Negropontean or Californian or whatever global state and nettimean or rhizomean or netizenshipean or whatever avanguarde of the working class, I have to choose the first one. Not because I like it, but for the simple fact that Soviet revolution failed with the Kronstadt, not with the Berlin wall. Igor Markovic Intelectual cooperative Bastard -- 8.0 nettime: re: Nettimism? No thank you! Frank Hartmann (by way of pit {AT} contrib.de (Pit Schultz)) nettime-l@desk.nl Mon, 17 Mar 1997 07:51:33 +0100 BASTARD answers to Igor Markovic's "No more ideologies - keep cyberspace clean!" Never mind the "cold war myths". The scholarly answer one might give to Markovic's logorrhea is important, but as toothless as a retired academic. Markovic tries to be impressive by speaking out of a specific historical situation, in the name of "people who lived at least a part of their lives in socialism". This should give his claims the necessary touch of real-life experience. Thus he shouts: no more ideologies! No more leaders! No more Holocaust! He wants to alarm us and share panic, in order to hide the hollowness in his criticism of nettime, which in all its simplicity follows the well known path of anti-intellectual resentment. The idea of the possible end of ideology is an ideological idea par excellence. Therefore, we do not even need to consult the referring theory (e.g. Althusser), but recognize the recent developments in the post-Socialist Eastern Europe as a demonstration for the fact that we are far from living in a "post-ideological society". If we really want to reflect upon the experience of "people who lived at least a part of their lives in socialism", we should not dream about nettime as a kind of a meta-ideological discussion space. We should rather ask: how did the change in Eastern Europe affect the traditional concept of "Ideologiekritik", and how did this change compel us to approach the prerequisits for the function of ideological structures in a new way - in the context of new media theory & practice. For this aim the metaphor of the primal Bolshevik situation is inappropriate. This reference much more reveals Markovic's frustrated paranoia than sharpening the perception of the historical situation we live in and of the aims a project like nettime might have in it. There is a quite neglectable danger of nettime giving birth to a new Stalin or Hitler. But the real danger is those ignorant people, who try to impose their compensatory paranoia to the discussion as a whole. All dualistic choices are delusive, be it between left and right, or Negroponte and Lovink, or WIRED and NETTIME - the bandwidth simply is higher than that. We do not have to identify ourselves with sides, be it the Californian vs. any other kind of ideology - there are no polls, we are not up to votes. This is also not about the question if net-critique is a proper neo/post-marxism of sorts, but rather about an awareness of what really matters. The quest for a "clean" cyberspace, free of any ideology, is closer to some "final solution" than Markovic himself might think (a connection impressively revealed by Polish/British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in his study 'Modernity and Ambivalence'). His wish for cleanliness thoroughly contradicts the idea of the intellectual cooperative he signs for, Bastard, a term coined to express the hybrid energy of new media. Keep cyberspace clean? Let us stay a little bit more realistic here. As Markovic himself put it - "recognition of the problem and discussion about it sounds like a good starting point". Boris Buden & Frank Hartmann buden {AT} ping.at , hartmann {AT} ping.at BASTARD http://pubwww.srce.hr/arkzin/bastard/bastard.htm -- 9.0 nettime: push media Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Sun, 2 Mar 1997 21:31:08 +0100 (MET) A Push Media Critique On the rebirth strategies of Wired magazine By Geert Lovink The March 1997 issue of Wired (5.03) has an unusual cover. No digirati this time. Just a big blue hand on a red background, designed like a warning signal, saying 'PUSH!'. It tries to hold us. Or is it pushing us something into our face? The slogan says: 'We interrupt this magazine for a special bulletin -' The breaking news is about 'the radical future of media beyond the Web.' The article is written by 'the editors of Wired'. Will they declare a state of emergency for cyberspace? Why should Wired have to interrupt itself? It is not CNN. Just because of some new audio and video software that is hitting the market? Is the 'shock of the new' indeed so overwhelming that it forced the editors to write a common statement about the rise of so-called 'push media'? There must be something else going on. Wired seems to be in crisis and needs to reinvent itself. Due to the commercialization of the net, big publishing houses, cable giants, telecoms and software companies have moved in, and are now pushing the web into the direction of old-style broadcasting technologies. Wired calls this the 'Revenge of TV' (with a ?). But this is only the logical consequence of its own strategy. For years, Wired has been reporting euphorically about the coming symbiosis of TV and the Net as the ultimate killer app. At this moment, webbrowers are being surrounded by other applications. The WaitWaitWait is about to lose its hegemonic position. The static, book-based idea of 'web pages' will be taken over by much more dynamic audio and video. If the net has to become a mass medium, then it has to merge with the film, tv, cable etc. industry. And if the market says so, it has to happen. That is what the ideology of the free market says. So sit down and watch the next paradigm shift going by on your screen. Still, we can read a certain discontent, even betrayal in this odd document. We have to wake up from the dream called Web. Suddenly, HTML is described as the language of an 'archive medium. Archive as in stacks of old books in a library.' That's different from what we have heard before. 'The Web is a wonderful library, but a library nonetheless.' This is a smash in the face of all the followers, net slaves, usefull web-idiots and other digital fellow travellers that have spoilt all their energy and devotion into... building a library. This was not what they promised us. Wired's own destiny is closely connected to the rise (and fall?) of the World Wide Web. This magazin (founded in 92) is not about the old internet, nor does it deal with hackers issues. It eventually became big because of the commercial interest in the WWW (and multi-media). 'Kiss your browser goodbye' could therefore easily be read as an indication that Wired itself 'is about to croak', or at least needs to go through a tough phase of rebirth rituals (downseizing, restructuring, sell out, take over, etc.). There are several indications for this, which are all publicly known. The German edition was cancelled, than it failed (twice) to go to Wall Street. Now, Wired TV seems to produce programs but is not (yet) able to broadcast them. The UK-edition seized to exist from March 1st. And for the first time we heard rumours about an internal fight between the techno-libertarian manegement and some critical and progressive individuals. The Wired enterprise must have been in big need for a new ideology (or 'vision') and tries to find it in the catch phrase 'push media'. But this pushing does not fit exactly within the previous ideology. Just read what George Gilder is writing about television and why it ought to decline. Economically, the web is still tiny in comparison to, for example, advertisement revenues of television. This was one of the reasons why Wired could not grow any longer. The profit of the magazine had reached its limit. The company was forced to diversify and became a small media-conglomerate. Besides the magazine, Hotwired and the book publishing division Hard Wired, there is now surprisingly also 'Wired TV'. This may sound like Lenin's dialectics: one step forward, two steps back. But only with a television division, Wired Inc. might be able to make the next quantum leap. For this it needed to go to the stockmarket. Venture capital alone was not enough to ensure the financing of all these different ventures. At least, that's what I think, I am not a Wired watcher. At this point, the Wired Story stumbles, hesitates and comes up with a curious manifesto that above all reflects the uncertainty about the future of the magazine. For net critics, it might be amusing to see how Wired is being overruled by true media capitalism. But we have to honost: these are all questions that we will all have to face, sooner of later. For example: can we preserve some of the old net values and standards, encourage technical and social innovation and public access, without falling back into the patterns of mass media and the existing culture industry? It can be ironical, to see Wired struggling. But 'Wired bashing' can only have positive results, if we use it as a mirror, not just see it as an imaginairy enemy. Even in time of trouble there is the real existing 'Desire to be Wired'. Wired wants to 'move seamlessly between media you steer (interactive) and media that steer you (passive)'. These push media 'work with existing media' and create an 'emerging universe of networked media'. We have to read between the lines here. It simply means that the Web will have to give up its ideological hegemony it had in the last three years as the 'medium to end all media.' Web is just one channel, amongst many others. 'The Web is one', as Wired puts it now. A fairly realistic point of view, but not fitting into the original net religion, the Wired visionaries has been preaching. The Web had to replace all other media, intergrate them, that was the idea, or as the 'special bulletin' still states: 'As everything get wired, media of all kinds are moving to the decentralized matrix known as the Net.' In reality, it is going the other way around. The net is moving to the centralized business known as the Broadcasting Media. 'What is about to disappear is the defining role of the old Web.' Irritated and somehow disappointed, the editors have to admit that 'the traditional forms - broadcast, print' - show few signs of vanishing.' How unfair, they should have disappeared by now. What went wrong? The fault also lies in the netizens themselves. 'The subterranean instincts of couch potatoes rise again!' In secret, many continued watching tv. The editors thought it was time to face this bitter reality. 'True, there's a little couch potatoe in all of us. The human desire to sit back and be told a completely ridiculous story is as dependable as the plot of a soap.' Unfortunately, only a few of us have been able to get away from the '45 years of addiction to passive media. Only a handful of us turn out to be up for the vigorous activity of reaching out to engage the world. Bummer.' In order not to lose its role as the Prawda of Silicon Valley, Wired must take the lead and incorporate the latest developments. But this time, their enthousiasm does not sound very exciting. 'The new networked media borrow ideas from television, but the new media landscape will look nothing like TV as we know it. And indeed, it will transform TV in the process.' What it is failing here is a clear economic analysis. Television is not just a screen or an interface. The introduction of (some sort of) interactivity is most of all a money/profit question, decided by a few companies, in an ungoing war on standards. Cybernauts, netheads, websurfers, wake up. The boredom will be over soon. 'Push media are always on, mobile, customizable'. These total media arrive automatically and 'always assume you are available.' It is begging for your attention. It will therefor be important, to know how to switch them off. The Push Manifesto is indeed warning us for possible misuse, like government regulation of networked push media and privacy violations ('it finds you rather than you finding it'). Neither old, nor new (in the sense of utopian), push media are rapidly 'closing the gaps between existing media, towards one seamless media continuum.' The totality of the 'unification' seems worry the editors. 'All we can say is, Let a thousand media types bloom. Soon.' But this presumes a deeper knowledge of both new and old realities, for example television. 'Each cycle of extend/unify notches up the ratchet of media complexity. Ontogeny recaptulates phylogeny, in interactive media as in biological media.' This must be Kevin Kelly speaking. We are getting to a conclusion. He has seen it all and stays calm, like all techno- darwinists. For Kelly it is just a stage, Wired and all of us have to go through: 'All media recapitulate the evolution of former media. So online media have evolved from smoke signals (email) to books and magazines (the Web). We are now about to arrive at television (push media).' It is touching to read how carefull and naive the Special Bulletin is trying to describe the zapping behaviour of the viewer. It is obviously a topic Wired did not write about so far. Perhaps it is time for them (and us) to get to know the 45 years old theories of mass communication, the (cultural) studies on the behaviour of the viewer, the specific history of this technology and the economic (monopolistic) forces that are dominating this branch. So, stop speculating about 'push media' and visit your library first. -- 9.1 Re: nettime: push media David Mandl nettime-l@desk.nl Mon, 3 Mar 1997 00:34:24 -0500 Excellent piece, Geert! Wired is either full of shit (the advent of push technology has completely contradicted what they've been saying all along and they're trying to lie about that), or cynical and evil (they knew this is what would happen all along but were talking like revolutionaries at the beginning just to gain market share and credibility with net libertarians). I can hardly wait for Wired to publish breathless editorials on these exciting phenomena when they happen: - The death of small ISPs and eventual control of the net by a handful of national (multinational?) providers, quite likely existing mega-corporations like AT&T and Microsoft - The final death or atrophying of Usenet, the net's oldest forum for open, many-to-many discussion, finally making the net almost completely read-only and devoid of "public space" - The increasing willingness of net-related businesses to sell users out by cooperating with the U.S. government in exchange for favors: using weak encryption, turning mail logs over to the FBI, supporting anti-privacy legislation, etc. - Increasingly frequent crackdowns on porn, "illegal" information or "libel," dissident literature, etc., on the net - The growth of sophisticated dossier-building by employers and governments, and the exchange of information between them - The invasion of every inch of the net by advertisements Will Wired support these developments? Will they claim they predicted them all along? Will they try to put their patented radical-techno-postcapitalist spin on them to make them seem somehow like cool third-wave phenomena? Stay tuned. --Dave. -- Dave Mandl dmandl {AT} panix.com davem {AT} wfmu.org http://www.wfmu.org/~davem -- 9.2 nettime: push media Tilman Baumgaertel nettime-l@desk.nl Mon, 3 Mar 1997 06:38:46 -0500 Hi! Thank you for your enlighting piece about this silly Wired cover story. I pretty much agree with your analysis, but I think you have overlooked on important detail, that makes this whole story even more questionable: that Wired magazin itself is in the business of internet-based push media. I´m not talking about the slightly obnoxious attempts of certain Wired-editors to make Nettimers participate in Chats with their cyber-buddys (the ones that eventually don´t take place, haha). I´m talking about the News-Service that Wired offers in collaboration with "Pointcast", the pioneers of "push media". Apparently the news that are published at www.wired.com/news/ are also delievered to "the comfort of your own home" via one of the "channels" of Pointcast, a programm that downloads stuff to your computer when you are not using your internet connection, and displays it as a screen saver. You have to subscribe to this service like you would subscribe to a magazine. I do not use "Pointcast" myself, but that´s what I learned from various reports in the internet press. That would make this cover story a bold attempt of "hard sell": "Wired" first creates a demand for "push media", than it is there to meet this demand with a product. If "Wired" manages to put that "push media"- meme into circulation as it did with other ideas, this "Wired News Channel" would certainly be one of the first businesses to profit from this new hype. Yours, Tilman PS: If you want to see grown men or women cry, make them install the "Castanet"-Software. So much for the state of the art of "push-media"... -- 10.0 Re: nettime: push wired? mercedes nettime-l@desk.nl Thu, 13 Mar 1997 21:16:28 +0100 (MET) Dear Geert, >I do not agree with Foucault about the status of critique. He >might be right, but the effects of his phrases about the End of >Critique have prevented many of our generation in making rough, >dirty, daily analyses of the powers-to-be (and making mistakes). I do partly agree with what you wrote here. But isn^t it like this: More than Foucault stopped any critique he got caught from right positions, who tried to hold his writings against the left thinking like: Here, look, your fight is over! It is over in a different sense for me, because i think we have to go over to new strategies, which does not mean stop analyses, but work further on it and hold an own modell against it. Like nettime maybe normally is. In fact Foucault never told anywhere anybody to stop thinking, but he created new modells in showing that critique has always to change to be still critique. >I need mirrors, fixed >objects, texts I can analyze, in order to better understand the >rapid developments. Of course there are still these traditional tools of analyses, but they changed the direction, didn^t they? It is not about criticizing anything and that^s it, but about using it as a mirror, like you said, in order to devellop own strategies. I did get very radical about this, which means in detail: I do not care about the mistakes of the "other", but prefer to take up all the evil (gee, my words), annoying things and learn from them. Take the good things away from them, steal them over to my own concepts. (That^s what YT in Snowcrash does, kind of) Putting up a border between us in terms of where are their mistakes equals why are they bad would prevent me from learning. I personally criticize in that negative way when i do not understand what and why something is going on. Like as time to think. >Wired is not an endangered species or some minority that cannot >defend itself so easily. I never thought Wired as a victim, nor did i want to defend them, just to hold open this possibility to look at them and take their knowledge and tricks away. To much negative critique can just close that door, i think. >But Wired is small, Ken Wark is right about that. Even the whole >media business is nothing compared to other industries. But it's >our branch. And Wired is my magazine. I haven't missed one issue >and I am the last one to look down on it, or dismiss it because >of it's bad quality. Both Mondo 2000 and Mediamatic almost seized >to exist (as regular publications). And we have not been able yet >to come up with a critical alternative to Wired. That's why they >have the field to themselves, still. There may be the point really. As Mark Stahlmann wrote: >The answer to your question is that we don't know the answer. The >Toffler/Kelly world has been working on their view of post-industrialism >for 40+ years. The post-modernist philosophers have also been building >their houses for just as long (or longer depending on when you start >counting). The reason, why Wired is so big, might be quite obvious. Clever combination of new and more important than ever technology wrapped up in a little bit of culture, spiced and mildered by a little bit of journalistic approach to get it smooth. And the right time, where people want to know these things. Wonder if we not better start an analyses on the package of information. Style of writing is the context of information, in the net as well as here in our magazine. (i am working for a musicmagazine called Soundlab - electronic aspects of life -> http://www.techno.de/soundlab). As soon as we get more pages, we want to integrate net..., yeah, what, ...culture, this word again?. Don^t know yet. Have fun, cu perhaps somtimes, if you stopp by in Berlin, would be nice. Mercedes Bunz 10.1 nettime: push wired? Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Wed, 12 Mar 1997 10:23:26 +0100 (MET) Dear Mercedes, my push media critique mirrored the way Wired magazine announced this latest hype, you are right about this. I tried to analyze this long editorial manifesto, which I still see as a very curious document and I linked it to related developments within the Wired corporation. I did not even know at the time about Wired News and their experiments with all the existing push media software. I do not agree with Foucault about the status of critique. He might be right, but the effects of his phrases about the End of Critique have prevented many of our generation in making rough, dirty, daily analyses of the powers-to-be (and making mistakes). The strategies of disappearance and nice and poetic indirect sayings, caught in the complicated parisian language traps, have kept us away from the capability to clearly see what is going on and intervene and finally draw conclusions and come up with new forms of organization. (Net) Critique for me is not about some old friend-foe distinction. I do not need enemies, I need mirrors, fixed objects, texts I can analyze, in order to better understand the rapid developments. All the big and small media items and hypes need a certain, underlying structure. Together we have to figure out what this is, otherwise we are only drifting in a sea of virtual signifiers. Critique is a way to understand and has got nothing to do with attack or even 'bashing'. It's a specific way of writing (limited, though) in order to set literary, political, ethical, aestetical rules and standards. This is perfectly normal in the world of film, theater and books and should also be established for the still very small culture that deals with new media. Wired is not an endangered species or some minority that cannot defend itself so easily. But I have noticed thoughout the years, that is also a group of people which is not so easy to understand. Their agenda is a very specific one and you need a lot of background information in order to understand their editorial policies and decisions. To give you some examples. Who of nettime has ever studied the writings of George Gilder and can show us how his anti-statist, conservative agenda influenced the Wired gang? My group, Adilkno, tried to characterize the cyberculture of the Westcoast, back in the spring of 1994. You can find this essay in the german Datendandy book (not available in english). Here you can see how are circling around the Wired ideology, not being able to grasp it, surrounded by high piles of books and stories about the USA in the last thirty years, which is in part also our own history. Mark Dery (ed.) came with his Flame Wars and Weinstein and Kroker with their notion of the virtual class. Only then I understood a bit more, but still, here in Holland, everyone reads Wired, but not one intellectual has yet been able to analyze this magazine. I mean it's political agenda, it's attractive sides and the way it selects the topics. People are impressed and intimidated by the big lead that still exists between the USA and Europe (appr. 3 to 5 years). And this makes the reading of Wired so exciting, also for me. It comes from the future, specially if you are surrounded by the specifics of Old and Deep Europe, like me, going back and forth between Amsterdam and the Balkans. The Wired group originates from Amsterdam and left in 1991 or 1992 for San Francisco. They were kind of friends with Mediamatic, of which I was an editor at that time, alltough I did not know them personally. From here we followed their attempts to get money, the zero issue and then their tremendous success, from the very start. It was clear to us that they neither wanted to copy the new age underground style of Mondo 2000, nor the art and theory discourse of Mediamatic. They took a kind of journalistic approach, but without the critical attitude of the investigative journalism. They had to sell something, that was their inner drive. But what? Not hard- or software. It took me a long time to find out what they were 'pushing' and it is still not clear to me all the time. But Wired is small, Ken Wark is right about that. Even the whole media business is nothing compared to other industries. But it's our branch. And Wired is my magazine. I haven't missed one issue and I am the last one to look down on it, or dismiss it because of it's bad quality. Both Mondo 2000 and Mediamatic almost seized to exist (as regular publications). And we have not been able yet to come up with a critical alternative to Wired. That's why they have the field to themselves, still. 11.0 nettime: submission to nettime lis Bruce Sterling nettime-l@desk.nl Sat, 8 Mar 1997 01:58:16 -0800 (PST) Dear nettimers: It's been very gratifying to follow the discussions of WIRED in the list. While I'm not a WIRED staffer, I am on the WIRED masthead, and I am a virtual San Franciscan thanks to seven years on the WELL. Those who aren't familiar with the WELL may find its internal practices odd. WELL was a closed bulletin board system long before it ever became a website, and its social practices have been created over literal years of internal discussion. The WELL is something like a tide pool, it's not exactly in the Net and not exactly out of it; data flows in, but has a rather hard time flowing out. I didn't make the WELL's rules, but the rules have made the community, and if you want to play, it's de rigeur to respect their standards. Every once in a while I see material on nettime which is of particular relevance to WELLbeings, and since I'm not putting this material to commercial use, I crosspost it. I've been cross- posting nettime comments on WIRED -- not all of them, just the ones I found of particular interest -- for almost a year now. I don't really see anything untoward in this practice. After all, my "Master List of Dead Media" was also posted on nettime, and it was swiftly crossposted to other lists, and sites, all over the planet. I'm still getting responses to that piece months later. I was glad to have my nonprofit Dead Media Project getting such gratifying publicity from a core demographic of net activists. Mark Stahlman's bizarre attacks on WIRED's so-called "English Ideology" have been so entertaining that it's well-nigh impossible not to quote him. Naturally when he bravely showed up on the WELL in person, he was immediately subject to rough handling by people who actually know the WIRED milieu at first- hand, and found it hard to believe that Mr Stahlman was serious. For all I know, there may be people on the nettime list who seriously believe that a popular American magazine on contemporary computer culture is a stalking-horse for a European-inspired cabal of cyber-illuminati inspired by the sinister doctrines of H.G. Wells and bent on global domination. Unfortunately, within the WELL, Mr Stahlman has found little popular support for his thesis. I can understand his distress, but I'm not in command of the WELL audience and can't stop them from making up their own minds after reading his own words. I rather imagine that people on nettime who have closely studied Mr Stahlman's assertions have had their own difficulties in this matter. Mr Stahlman's copious remarks have inspired me to write an essay. Unfortunately it's not directly relevant to his own statements, but since he's referred in nettime to my essay as "elegant back- to-back rants that have to be read to be believed," and has expressed his cordial hope that I will cross-post them to nettime, I'm ready to oblige him. Unfortunately I can't cross-post the comments of other WELLbeings, since this would be a violation of WELL You-Own-Your-Own-Words netiquette. My essay loses some valuable context by being separated from the thread of commentary by other WELLbeings such as ludlow, kk, rushkoff, markdery and neal, but I hope it will be of some use or amusement anyway. Note: on the WELL, Mr Stahlman is known as "newmedium {AT} well.com." Bruce Sterling bruces {AT} well.com (text follows) Topic 200 [wired]: Goofy Leftists Sniping at WIRED #759 of 796: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Fri Mar 7 '97 (06:28) 125 lines This is a good topic. It's forcing me to wax all magisterial and politico-philosophical. That's a dire occupational hazard for science fiction writers, but even if you're of the stature of HG Wells (probably the only science fiction writer with serious pretensions of being a Great Man), you're still not gonna get many people willing to page through all of it. Except for newmedium himself, clearly a guy of rockbound personal self-esteem whom no mere argument will ever sway, it looks like we're approaching a general consensus that his "English ideology" is silly. It is, and it always was. It scarcely seems possible to demonstrate this any better than ludlow demonstrated it. Certainly newmedium isn't the only guy in the world whose weltanschauung is dependent on gaseous, self-marginalizing verbal sleight-of-hand, and since I'm an SF writer by trade my tolerance for this kind of activity is extremely high, but it's not the same thing as a reasoned argument with historical awareness and proper citation. If one is really trying to live and make political, technical and economic decisions through this kind of empty, glittering rant, one is just plain being goofy. I have kindly and indulgent feelings towards cats like Stahlman and Rushkoff, as opposed to my thorny relationship with a guy like Mark Dery, someone I can recognize as an actual, authentic cultural critic. Dery is probably wrong about a lot of stuff and may even be kind of dangerous, but compared to him Stahlman and Rushkoff are like a couple of aluminized balloons in the same corral with a cactus. Life is funny that way. It seems to me you could make much the same assessment about HG Wells or CS Lewis and their roles in a thorny world of twentieth-century realpolitik. You might even make a similar assessment about the only 20th century science fiction writer who has actually seized power in a major government -- Newt Gingrich. I don't think Wells and Lewis were particularly influential people, even though this would be very flattering to me and mine were such to be the case. But I do want to discuss why it is that I do prefer HG Wells to CS Lewis, and what relevance this might have to the current, uhm, cyberculture situation. First, this is not a literary judgement on my part. I would not make the category error of saying that CS Lewis was a bad writer merely because I don't like his theology. I think Wells was a very good writer, better than Lewis, especially when Wells wasn't doing propaganda, but Lewis was also clearly a major writer of fantastic fiction. His fantasies are very engaging and have many stellar moments of high imaginative concentration. Lewis clearly had a gift -- that's not under contention here. The I Ching is great literature too, but if you start tossing hexagrams to govern your life-decisions because the descriptions are so charmingly evocative, well, you've got a non- literary problem. When I wonder why it is that I prefer Wells to Lewis -- two minor-league combatants in what seems to me a very old struggle -- I think fondly of one memorable battle in this culture war. It was Wells's teacher, Thomas Henry Huxley, in public debate with a guy whom I take to be one of CS Lewis's spiritual ancestors, Bishop "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce. What Huxley had on his side was a boatload of objective evidence that Charles Darwin had painstakingly scraped up and cataloged over twenty years or so of obscure but dedicated research. What Wilberforce had on his side was a glib tongue and a deep, instinctive, passionate moral revulsion at the thought that human beings were apes. Huxley won the debate through an exchange of insults. Wilberforce snidely inquired whether Huxley felt that it was his grandmother or grandfather who had been the ape. Huxley riposted (I'm paraphrasing from memory here, being several hundred miles away from my references) that he felt no shame in having an ape for an ancestor, and would prefer that to being the descendant of a man who would deliberately obscure the truth. Huxley put his finger on it there. There is something deeply shameful about obscurantist mysticism. Mysticism conjures up wonderful feelings within us that make us purportedly aware of the full, marvelous, flattering scope of our numinous humanity, but it's intellectually fraudulent. Mysticism is a retreat, a cop-out, whether it's a retreat into the gospels, the noosphere, astrology, the Tarot, the Bhagavad Gita, Aum Shinri Kyo armed yoga, Illuminatist conspiracy theory, or even some brand-new amalgam of 'shrooms and cyberspace. It's a cheat, like rising with a flourish to write your proof on the blackboard, getting off to a cracking good start, and then drawing us a large cloudy area labelled "miracles happen here." I'm not under the illusion that scientists, psychologists or any other biped in a labcoat really understands deep ontological reality or the true nature of the universe. What bugs me is the social practice of deliberately enshrining our ignorance, anthropomorphizing it as a living divine being, and giving it moral and ethical dominion over our lives and imaginations. In practice, obscurantist mysticism is like the practice of embezzlement. You can't get your budget to add up. The bookkeeping rules are too hard and pernickety, and they probably don't fit your personal situation anyway. You're too weak and anxious to directly face the paralysing prospect of genuine intellectual bankruptcy. So, to keep the business going, you just borrow a few life-giving dollars out of the secret stack of the Great Unknown. You can always put it back later, right? Pascal's Wager will win it back for you, maybe you can win it back at the track... But embezzlers always say this. They don't really reason, they rationalize. And the convenience of free money rots away their integrity and destroys their judgement. They almost always take more and more. Unfortunately, the "miracles" gambit also expands in just this way. Mystic revelation will grow to cover everything that is emotionally, politically or socially repugnant to the believer. There are always excellent reasons to declare certain things unholy, unthinkable and not subject to question. You mustn't look at this, you mustn't think that; such and such a thing is unnatural, it's blasphemous, it is the sin against the holy spirit, it what we were Not Meant to Know. And why make painful decisions about what to eat, how to dress, who to tug your forelock to? It's all divinely ordained. For all I know, there may indeed be aspects of human behavior which are so unspeakably blasphemous and horrible that, like a Lovecraft character, my mind might shatter into bicameral fragments from the awful impact of glimpsing them. But I haven't seen any yet, and not from lack of looking around. In practice, this sort of blanket mental prohibition has generally turned out to be about harmless oddities such as worshipping idols, eating pigs, anal sex, and speaking politely to black people. So I think that what newmedium was demanding earlier is the 1990s version of Soapy Sam's old question: "So: is it your grandson, or your granddaughter who's the hideous, shambling posthuman? 'Fess up!" And my Huxleyan response would be that my shameless posthuman grandchildren might have a chance to do okay, if we can honestly examine the possibilities without his eerie brand of obscurantist paranoia. Topic 200 [wired]: Goofy Leftists Sniping at WIRED #760 of 796: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Fri Mar 7 '97 (06:33) 122 lines We now (I hope you didn't think I was finished) examine the pressing topic of what kind of ideology might be suited to posthumans. I see little promise in mysticism. However. While I'm not religious, I can only concur with neal's earlier cogent remarks on atheists having no better record. Guys who get all hot and bothered about Christianity rarely fail to bring out its dismal record of antisemitism, Biblical justifications for slavery, and inquisitorial practices of the seventeenth century. But let's face it: if you're looking for the big-time practice of those evils in our own century, you can't find better candidates than revolutionary leftist atheists. The worst thing that could happen to you in the twentieth century was to have your society taken over in a leftist atheist coup. The Nazis, no great believers themselves, were more virulent maybe, but the Nazis were so frankly megalomaniacal that they could barely manage a dozen years in power. But Marxist-Leninist Stalinist Mao Zedong thought... Let the record speak. The movement's roots were in scientific socialism and the rational investigation of economics and history. Marx was the kind of roly-poly bearded swot that any of us would instantly recognize at a UNIX programmer's convention. Wells was just one among legions of period radicals with scientific utopias in their back pocket. He believed that rational political science would simply sweep away the ills and unseemly quirks of human culture, in much the way that germ theory superceded pre- scientific notions like malaria, in the brisk and proper way that sanitation eliminates cholera. But Wells was no democrat. He was too full of himself. He cherished a deep, heartfelt contempt for the feudal creeps, class snobs and rich bullies standing in the manifest road of History. Like most pre-WW1 zealot reformers, Wells had no idea of the havoc that totalizing one-size-fits-all doctrines would create when their arrogant dictates contacted human political reality. Consider the Russian Revolution. Okay? It's gone now, we can talk about it honestly. Atheist intellectuals with impeccable backgrounds in the European radical press. Started off in a horrible world war. Lights go out all over Europe. Fratricidal civil wars follow. Class liquidations. Mass starvation. Nutty doomed efforts at collective agriculture -- it's the 'scientific' way to feed the masses, it makes great sense on paper. Mass deportations, genocide of minorities (hopelessly backward, stupid, and in the way). Abandonment of all pretense of representative government (why listen to backsliders?). Abandonment of the rule of law, even their own laws and their own Constitution (too much trouble following tedious rules which will only be exploited by bourgeois parasites and "cosmopolitan" lawyers). Suspension, and then abolition of civil liberties. Armies of secret police. Pogroms against secret police by other factions of secret police. One of the most dangerous positions you could possibly have in such societies was a loyal servant of the state. And I was waxing indignant about Soapy Sam's rhetorical hijinks, so then let's talk about the intellectual crimes of Russian, atheist Marxism. Rampant forgery of historical documents. Censorship on unheard-of scales. Celebrities rendered non-persons, famous events rendered non-events. The Lysenko fraud against biological science (Huxley's favorite field). Scientists put into labor camps and still forced to do technological work behind barbed wire. A mania for classifying anything considered of any conceivable benefit to any imagined enemy, leading to strangulation of the scientific process. Writers and thinkers of all sorts and varieties browbeaten, silenced, purged. Cultural and intellectual life reduced to totalitarian parody. Party lines and personality cults exalted to unquestionable status.... it really goes on and on. That's why I really don't fancy myself a prophet of historical destiny. Yes, I'd feel really great, cocaine-high great, if I had a sudden ideological Answer to History. History, that chaotic, fractal, deeply irrational, painfully human, tragic, unpredictable-even-in-principle process. A nightmare from which the human mind loves to struggle to escape. But I *don't* have any such answer, and the penalties of believing that I have one are just too high. I'd be wrong. And I'd end up having to defend my ideology, and if I didn't, others more ruthless would. And I might be brilliant, and glib, and deeply convincing, but I'd still be wrong, because predicting history is probably eighty orders of magnitude harder than predicting the weather, a thing itself impossible, no matter what Laplace thought back in the Enlightenment. So, I'd be forced to disguise my intellectual failings with slippery rhetoric, appeals to faith, high-sounding catchphrases, and intimidation. I'd have to school myself so that appeals to objective reality no longer made a dent. Skeptics and scoffers would have to be discredited somehow -- as organized conspirators, presumably, bribed and corrupted to defy the truth. Probably they're all witting or unwitting disciples of some Satanic figure -- some Rosicrucian Machiavelli, a really obscure but nevertheless vaguely plausible guy, for instance, a bio-school dropout and tubercular journalist who became the greatest trend-spotter of his era. So what's my idea of a worldview fit for posthumans? It's not religion and it's not a modernist master-plan. I'm a postmodernist and a skeptic. These are issues too complex to regulate which cannot be planned from a flat-footed start. I kind of favor the Internet "answer" -- "run code and rough consensus." You debug it as you go along. You assume there will be bugs, and you try not to call them "features." You let the devil's advocates speak up, all of them, even the crazy ones, even the opinions you detest. You don't create systems with single points of failure. You allow diversity -- firewalls, different speeds, differences of scale, you don't bet the farm on one super- mono-culture. You never change the operating system before you back up the contents. You *make* backups. You check for viruses. You assume the system is insecure. You assume some people mean the system harm, and can never be won over, and will never, ever go away. But wait -- I seem to have more principles than I thought I did. You don't attempt to change a complex distributed system all at once. You don't trust complicated systems unless they've grown from tested simple systems. You distrust theory, you don't invest your ego in ideological declarations. You distrust results, too -- you replicate results and claims in other labs before you start howling with joy and passing out cigars. You beta-test all the vaporware, and the shinier it is, the *more* you test it. You check out what's gone before (Aryan breeding experiments, excellent case in point) lest someone justly flame you as a clueless newbie. And you never let authorities soft-soap you into deploying sanctified encryption devices too wondrous and special for mere people to understand -- no matter what kind of hats they're wearing, how eloquent they are, or what kind of brass they have. Okay, I guess I'm done now. *8-) Bruce Sterling bruces {AT} well.com -- 11.1 nettime: nettme: the tide pool with the toll booth McKenzie Wark nettime-l@desk.nl Sat, 8 Mar 1997 05:31:43 -0500 (EST) As a former wellbeing myself, i can only vouch for the accuracy of the way its been portrayed by Mssrs Sterling, Cisler etc. But one tiny point i would not like to slip by. The well may be a 'tide pool' as Bruce says, but different rules apply to the tide flowing in and the tide flowing out. The policy on the latter, in many respects a good one, is 'you own your own words'. People can't take your stuff off the well and do just whatever they please with it without asking permission, etc. But i just want to pause here and consider the implications of this for the information barter economy. And vary the metaphor a bit: the well feeds on things like nettime (in those rare moments when not feeding on itself), and yet the reciprocal bite is prohibited. Since its the well we're talking about, i feel, well, kinda well disposed towards it. So its really neither here nor there. But consider this practice on a wider scale. What kind of information economy is that? The well has a whole thread in its archive where 'you own your own words' was thrashed out, and it makes interesting reading. There has not to my knowledge been an 'other people outside the well own there words too' thread. There is a strong element of me me me me me me me me me me me me me me etc in wellspring of the well, so perhaps that's not surprising. But the wider question i want to ask is precisely: what is my responsibility to the other? For Levinas, it was to *listen* to the other. But no one listens much on the well, so perhaps one would have to start somewhere else. What do i owe to the other when i take her/his words? In what ways do acknowledge the other? etc. Behind this other, who in this case is the other people who's words i might take, stands the other of the net itself, to which perhaps one is ultimately responsible, more than to any particular individual with whom one might have a transaction. The other of the net itself stands behind the other person, but not behind me me me me me me me. Which to me is why the well never got very far on this stuff. And yes, of course anyone who wants to may cross-post this to the well, but what if i ask you not to? ______________________________________ McKenzie Wark http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/~mwark Visiting Professor, American Studies Program, New York University "We no longer have origins we have terminals" -- 11.2 Re: nettime: submission to nettime lis Gordon Cook nettime-l@desk.nl Sat, 8 Mar 1997 10:54:23 -0500 (EST) Bruce Sterling writes: For all I know, there may be people on the nettime list who seriously believe that a popular American magazine on contemporary computer culture is a stalking-horse for a European-inspired cabal of cyber-illuminati inspired by the sinister doctrines of H.G. Wells and bent on global domination. Cook: anyone who has observed Mark stahlman's commentary online over a period of some months will realize, that the above summary is a gross simplification that is also colored in such a way as to get the reader to dismiss the subject with no further thought. I don't claim to be expert in the history of ideas. however 25 years ago in my dissertation, I did explore the origins of P.Ia. Chaadaev's critique of Russian culture. Mark is doing something similar but vastly more complex -- namely trying to develop a cohesive and rather complete intellectual history of the advocates of technology during the twentieth century....not a small task but one with fascinating relationships, roots and alliances. Wired has never risen above gosh, golly gee wiz snapshots of some of the players....Big picture views of the "global economy" by the likes of korten and greider are terribly important. Big picture overviews of the intellectual roots of our current situation are just as important. I am fascinated by the tapestry that Mark is weaving. of course I am biased. I let my wired subscription lapse a year ago. *********************************************************************** The COOK Report on Internet For subsc. pricing & more than 431 Greenway Ave, Ewing, NJ 08618 USA ten megabytes of free material (609) 882-2572 (phone & fax) visit http://pobox.com/cook/ Internet: cook {AT} cookreport.com For NEW study: EVOLVING INTER- NET INFRASTRUCTURE, 222 page Handbook http://pobox.com/cook/evolving.html ************************************************************************ -- 11.3 nettime: Net.Art - the origin alexei shulgin nettime-l@desk.nl Tue, 18 Mar 1997 01:05:08 +0300 I feel it's time now to give a light on the origin of the term - "net.art". Actually, it's a readymade. In December 1995 Vuk Cosic got a message, sent via anonymous mailer. Because of incompatibility of software, the opened text appeared to be practically unreadable ascii abracadabra. The only fragment of it that made any sense looked something like: [...] J8~g#|\;Net. Art{-^s1 [...] Vuk was very much amased and exited: the net itself gave him a name for activity he was involved in! He immediately started to use this term. After few months he forwarded the mysterious message to Igor Markovic, who managed to correctly decode it. The text appeared to be pretty controversal and vague manifesto in which it's author blamed traditional art institutions in all possible sins and declared freedom of self-expression and independence for an artist on the Internet. The part of the text with above mentioned fragment so strangely converted by Vuk's software was (quotation by memory): "All this becomes possible only with emergence of the Net. Art as a notion becomes obsolete...", etc. So, the text was not so much interesting. But the term it undirectly brought to life was already in use by that time . Sorry about future net.art historians - we don't have the manifesto any more. It was lost with other precious data after tragic crash of Igor's hard disk last summer. I like this weird story very much, because it's a perfect illustration to the fact that the world we live in is much richer than all our ideas about it. Alexei -- ............................... .....moscow wwwart centre...... http://sunsite.cs.msu.su/wwwart ............................... -- 12.0 <nettime> Towards a Data Critique (for zkp5) Frank Hartmann nettime-l@desk.nl Tue, 21 Jul 1998 12:28:22 -0400 [this is one of the first texts for the zkp5/nettime bible which came in. please send us your texts, drafts and suggestions to: nettime {AT} desk.nl] TOWARDS A DATA CRITIQUE Frank Hartmann "Data is the anti-virus of meaning" --Arthur Kroker "There is no information, only transformation" --Bruno Latour The digital datasphere affects all major aspects of cultural production. Is there still a task for critique in this process, aside from cheap falsifications of the techno hype, or from simply articulating fear? What could be the task for a data-critique then, which could succeed to reveal the hidden agenda of the proclaimed 'information society'? After critique According to some commonsense view, we have already entered an era beyond enlightenment and critique: the new media reality creates a symbolic totality, an inclusive environment--a perspective from which any critical discourse seems an irresponsibility of sorts. With this new media reality, the level of theory and of its object becomes undistinguishable, and what we need therefore to grasp cyberspace is not a critique of ideology but a more systematic description of media, an analysis of its infrastructure, and an archaeology of the apparatus. This positive view now aligns intellectuals as well as activists and artists under the efforts of technology. Critique is negative indeed, and that firstly means it is all about limitations. While net-criticism as an activity indicates the limits of the Internet with all its disappointed hopes from the 60ies ideology, data-critique deals with the philosophical and social assessments of digital technology. Necessarily invoking some spirit for the enlightenment which became unpopular after the recent 'death of the subject', the aspects of data-critique are reaching beyond any single-handed notion of progress within the inclusive form of new media. Philosophers, within their academic discipline, fall short to grasp the meaning of new information and communication technology, as they keep to the beaten track of reading, interpreting and redistributing texts within their classical frame of reference. The academic community, at least the humanities, still largely depends on the gratifications of the paper medium, and that means on traditional 'print-publishing' through 'publishers'. To be media literate otherwise, they consider none of their business. There are several reasons for that ignorance. A quite profane one is 'fear of the machine', which can take on very sophisticated forms: from straight neo-luddism to a moralistic, protestant information-ecology with its apotheosis of the pen and the typewriter. These positions for one, seem to make clear - insisting on their professional identity, the so-called humanities tend to exclude any non-humanist discourse in favour of their quest for autonomous 'subjects' and their hermeneutic priviledge of 'making sense'. But there is no way in falling for a Heideggerian promise which supposes to reveal an order of things that still could go undisturbed beyond any stirring by 'media'. There is no such tranquility of being once after 'care' has crossed the river for good.(1) Global Information Economy in Different Worlds A range of sociological questions supersede the technological ones. With the new information and communication technologies [ICT], the end of this century provides the first world with a thorough and disorientating crisis concerning the role of work, education and entertainment. The reason for this is a postmodern condition at one hand, a global marketing strategy for these technologies on the other. When in 1995 the National Science Foundation's funds for the Internet backbone structure in the USA finally ran out, new sponsorship was due from somewhere. By going international and also by leaving academic boundaries behind, the providers of the 'net' found their new strategy for economic survival. An American concept was ready to become "the boom to humankind [that] would be beyond measure", pulling everybody into "an infinite crescendo of on-line interactive debugging".(2) While some 96% of the first and 99% of the rest world population is not online--the information highway has no turnoff to their house and home and maybe will never have--the electronic commerce is exploding and the emerging Virtual Class takes their advantage of the bit business, "the production, transformation, distribution, and consumption of digital information".(3) And again, what are we referring to? For the society in transition, the complex social and cultural matrix of change is not properly known; in the present discourse, cyberspace as the emerging social space is perceived merely by technological metaphors and a market-driven development of the broadband ICT infrastructure. Especially in Europe, yet not without a particular reason: the European ICT-market currently ranges at a total value of ECU 300 billion, and sees an average national per capita investment in Western Europe of approximately ECU 350.(4) While Internet access still is between 10 and 100 times more expensive in Europe than in the USA(5), the European Commission's propaganda sees Europe as the coming heartland of electronic commerce, pushed by those investments and numerous ICT-policy action plans.(6) New media and the prophecy of an information society are little more than the figleaf of a failed transition of modernity towards a more social society. Judging from various programmatic papers, the social impact of the broadband media applications are very modest. In the so-called Bangemann-report(7) people in the end only exist as the representation of solid markets under the command of an ideology of total competition within the first world(s). With this "new techno-utopia of the emerging global market capitalism" (Group of Lisbon) the sole principles of market liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation are applied.(8) In consequence, the recommendations and the proposals of the Bangemann paper seem to serve more to the benefit of the attending companies in this Expert Group themselves. The lack of proper understanding for a new information economy beyond competition also derives from an uncertainty or even a crisis of the intellectual position and the role of theory within it. The bit business does not need a media theory. The same goes for the new "Virtual Class", that social segment which--according to Arthur Kroker's observation(9)-- benefits most from the virtualization, and which defends information against any contextualization, with its goal of a total "cultural accommodation to technotopia" exterminating the social potential of the Net. Intellectual discomfort While thousands of websites blossom, most intellectuals feel instinctively uncomfortable with this process. Traditional Homo Academicus all ash and sack, has not much clue to what is going on in the flashy online world. Further to their distance, random ASCII fetishists become the new iconoclasts of the Net. Having invested in all that textualism, and having formed this distinctive usenet community, now coping with the masses again, with those impositions of the World Wide Wedge - accompanied with an unquenchable thirst for new software, new applications, more pictures, more entertainment, and more prefab interactivity? In the beginning, there was the word, then there was programming. In terms of cultural technique, the computer itself substantially changed, as well as our relationship to the machine, in a relatively short time, from numbercruncher to wordprocessor to thoughtprocessor. (10) Moving from mainframe to personal computing (PC) to net computers (NC) and now all of a sudden computers, as we painfully learned to know them, seem to vanish again. Not only they become less significant parts of an integral whole, but also widely integrated into everyday's appliances as in "intelligent" cars, household machines, shoesoles, and the like. Culture moves towards a state of ubiquitous computing, where these machines form the new environment. Amongst many other things, this indicates new forms of social integration and a new involvement in societal relations. Kant's transcendental subject seems to exist not longer in terms of common categories of sensual perception and logical thought but those of the global electronic datasphere. Which brings to mind McLuhan's phrase, that "in the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin." All mankind, one world? Should this be the heritage of the age-old philosophical dream of a universal language and a common understanding come true? The misleading term of the Global Village forgot to discuss the severe social constraints which determine life in a village. There is a possibility that the information society becomes as culturally homogeneous as any village lifestyle is. But we will never forget that we live in different worlds. The ideology of individual liberalism can be seen as a cultural movement from west to east, from north to south, a doctrine of salvation, which sells the benefits for a technocratic elite of the Virtual Class as a paradigm for the global social sphere. The electronic frontier actually is a retro-movement across the Atlantic towards Europe, which proceeded within Europe towards the East with considerable delay. The relatively homogeneous character of "Cyberspace American Style" was perceived critically from a European perspective, where the loss of cultural diversity was and still is feared. Besides demographic factors, there are several other hindrances for coping with this specific change. The problems with the new electronic boundaries between East and West are not of a mere technical but also a cultural nature. Cultural differences express themselves through different use of communication and techniques: a technical interface always also is a cultural one. Winds of change, battle on content Basically, ICT is grossly overestimated as a tool or instrument of change, especially when its brief history (with an open end) is being considered. Will technology change people, or are new technologies already the expression of change? But then, technology is always only a part of the problem. In the end, we have to ask what will determine the shape of Cyberspace: Asian hardware and American software alone? Cyberspace holds political, socio-economical and cultural issues as well, all of which are up to thorough scrutiny by social and political science--I would like to promote this as a specifically European task. As there is cyberspace, what does it mean for "us", living in a fragmented world? Needless to say, that task is a critical one. Why? It once was argued by philosophers that the bourgeois utopia of a democratic, participatory society was the "natural child" of absolutist sovereignty. The critical task of enlightenment was being performed in a time of societal crisis, and thus took on some hypocritical measure. The object of critique firstly being texts and their social implications, e.g. the Bible, enlightenment failed in its task to replace these texts with new content when its critique explicitly was extended towards politics and society as a whole. The benefits of enlightenment meant business for some. In his critique of aesthetic reason, Kant argued in train of the biblical prohibition of images for an enlightenment which is "just negative" in respect to its task: he not only carried on the age-old quest of intellectuals-- defending their cultural privileges, i.e. textual against any easier accessible cultural techniques, wanting to be the "true" mediators against any kind of "deceiving" media -- he also refused to name what this non-pictorial 'Denkungsart' should be, if simple demystification (of the "childish apparatus" provided by religion and corresponding politics to keep people as their subjects) would not do.(11) Ages before Kant, nominalism already failed to win its battle on content, which started with the intention to distinguish real content from mere metaphysical noise (flatus vocis), and true thought from ideology by ways of, let's say, a proper information economy. Now history shows that a simple purification filter--from thoughts to words, from images to texts, from texts to programs--is not the way it works. Such self-righteous critique easily becomes delusive. This happened to the bourgeois filter of content against transcendence, as the Encyclopedie necessarily failed to be the new Bible for modernity. Virtual intellectual task force Re-thinking enlightenment? Still an academic endeavour. Re-programming society? A fading socialist dream. The elements of a data critique are at hand: a task not to be left to the neo-luddites.(12) The Virtual Intellectual--a new figure discovered by Geert Lovink -- will be constituted through his/her specific mixture of local and global cultures: "The Virtual Intellectual is conscious of the limitations of today's texts, without at the same time becoming a servant of the empire of images." Critical activities, being the heritage of the textual realm, "will now be confronted by the problem of the visualisation of ideas."(13) Critique, according to Kant, concentrates on the form versus the content, on the realisation of 'negativism'. As critique always means differentiation, a data critique follows the modulations of information within a process of circulation. It works on the level of subjectivity, while this implicates some sociological sobriety, some demystification, and some diversity. Since digitalisation alone is not the issue, the question is whether there are alternatives within the pretentious information society project? Philosophically, it keeps its sceptical distance towards ontological questions concerned with 'truth', and similar traditional encumbrance. In a kindred spirit, Peirce's pragmaticism -- stating the fact that "We have no power of thinking without signs"(14) -- made clear that because sign and signified differ according to an ever changing 'interpretant', we rarely have a chance to recall qualities in communication which relate to anything beyond actual sign-use and therefore, media-practice. Thus, the irrelevance of any metaphysical 'meaning' as in 'true representation' of ideas through texts becomes a notion of enlightenment revised, for generations after the overwhelming encyclopedic project of a thesaurus with all available knowledge (as cognitive possessions), or even the notion of 'unified science' (further to d'Alembert or, more recent, Charles Morris, Otto Neurath and others who historically struggled to create a new symbolic 'unification').(15) Information on information Hypermodern communication tends to synchronise all aspects, and under these conditions to publish, means instant access to all utterance. The immediacy of media is getting scary. Thoughts are phrases made while having media presence. Simulation and speed are the two concepts which dominate media philosophy. Language is but the soft currency in an economy to increase the turnover of the information industries. After texts there are documents, after structure there is HTML, after style there is VRML. Meanings are offset in dot com. All content is but chunks of inert digital information, waiting for the copy pirates. At any common workplace, no material objects are being processed, but information. What are the resources of information work? When information becomes decontextualised, as it does, then what we need is more information on information. Any information which is not contextualised is worthless. Phil Agre imagined intelligent data as he put forward the idea of "living data" by thinking through all the relationships data participate in, "both with other data and with the circumstances in the world that it's supposed to represent".(16) Geert Lovink and Pit Schulz established the notion of a Net Criticism, introducing the fuzzy concept of something like ESCII, a European Standard Code for (critical) Information Interchange.(17) One could further elaborate on this list; elements of data critique are there. A data critique, in terms of the announced information society, is not. It may be all about creating context, and defining the conditions. About the power of techno-imagination (Einbildungskraft), as media philosopher Vilem Flusser (18) announced it. And content, what content? The Net is a part of creating and/or reinventing cultural context as form, not as content. Concentrating on the form means to keep up cultural tradition. The Nets's problem is that the social motive which made it possible is seen totally detached from the technological process, and vice versa. While deconstructing illusions, the age of enlightenment produced some illusions of their own. What is needed is not a New Enlightenment through technically enhanced individuals, as Max More suggested for the hypermodern age(19), but a renewed epistemological agnosticism of sorts, an anti-dualism set against the notion of that 'inner nature' of things which leads to any 'true' forms of representation. Why not call it a data-critique? References (1) Cf. Martin Heidegger's quote of "an ancient fable in which Dasein's interpretation of itself as 'care' has been embedded", Being and Time, Oxford ed., 1962, p.242 (2) J.R.C.L. Licklider, Robert W. Taylor: The Computer as a Communication Device, in: Science and Technology 1968 [http://www.memex.org/licklider.html] (3) William Mitchell: City of Bits. Space, Place, and the Infobahn, MIT Press 1996 (4) Source: European Information Technology Observatory [http://www.fvit-eurobit.de/def-eito.htm] (5) Estimated by hourly costs of a local telephone connection over the month; before the privatisation of the telekom with the beginning of 1998, the Austrian PTT e.g. flexed its monopolistic mucles once more by raising telephone costs for private users up to one third in Nov. 1997 (6) Martin Bangemann: "The opening of Europe's telecommunications markets is the key to the door of the Information Society", Information Society Project Newsletter, Telecoms Special Issue, Nov. 1997 [http://www.ispo.cec.be/] (7) High-Level Expert Group: "Europe and the Global Information Society. Recommendations to the European Council", Brussels 1994 [http://www.ispo.cec.be/infosoc/backg/bangeman.html] (8) Group of Lisbon: Limits to Competition. MIT Press 1996 (9) Arthur Kroker, Michael A. Weinstein: Data Trash. The theory of the virtual class. St. Martin's Press 1994 (10) Michael Heim: The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. Oxford Univ. Press 1993 (11) Immanuel Kant: Critik der Urtheilskraft [1790/1793], A124/125 (12) Thomas Pynchon: Is it O.K. to be a Luddite? The New York Times Book Review, 28. Oct. 1984 [http://www.dds.nl/~n5m/texts/pynchon.htm] (13) Geert Lovink: Portrait of the Virtual Intellectual. On the design of the public cybersphere. Lecture at the Documenta X, Kassel, July 1997 - distributed via nettime-l [http://www.desk.nl/~nettime] (14) Charles S. Peirce: Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. by Justus Buchler, Dover Publ., 1955, p.230 (15) D'Alembert, Jean LeRond: Discours Preliminaire de l'Encyclopedie [1751]. Morris, Charles W. / Neurath, Otto (et al.): International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Foundations of the Unity of Science. The University of Chicago Press [1938-39] (16) Phil Agre: Living Data [http://www.wired.com/wired/2.11/departments/agre.if.html] (17) Geert Lovink, Pit Schultz: Grundrisse einer Netzkritik [http:www.dds.nl/~n5m/texts/netzkritik.html] (18) 'Technoimagination' and 'Communicology' are Flusser's terms to complement the technological process; cf. Vilem Flusser: Kommunikologie, Mannheim 1996 (19) Max More: New Enlightenment. European Origins - American Future?, in: Telepolis [http://www.heise.de/tp/english/special/mud/6143/1.html] --- 13.0 <nettime> Net Criticism 2.0: a dialog Geert Lovink nettime-l@desk.nl Tue, 21 Jul 1998 13:37:48 +0200 (MET DST) Net Criticism 2.0 A Fast Conversation of Two Moderators with Ted Byfield and Geert Lovink [in preparation for the 'nettime bible', the upcoming book which will be released in november at the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, V2, Rotterdam] GL: So let us have an exchange about the current and possible 'net criticism' and how we think this genre should be (further) developed. Who are your masters, big examples? Is NC different from IT-business reporting, investigative journalism, essays? I wonder, for example, what you think of all these books with examples of 'successful' websites and their design. Few people question that genre and discourse. The same counts for software manuals, the dummy books etc. Well, there is (or was) a Wired critique, yes. But how to get beyond that? TB: You may remember that when phrase like 'net criticism' and 'net discourse' first cropped up, I was pretty skeptical about them. Not about the work being done under those rubrics, but about the possibility of these fields or disciplines: whether the subjects or objects were understood clearly enough to hold together as a project. At the time i drew a parallel to a distinction floating around in some newsgroups devoted to various problems of the net, between abuse *on* the net (flaming, basically) and abuse *of* the net (spam, forged cancels, etc.). We still see this ambiguity, in efforts to elaborate genres that are somehow 'native' to networks and claims that 'the net was used to organize the opposition in Indonesia.' There is that kind of confusion, which hasn't really been worked out, and then there's another kinds of confusion that stems from how quickly the medium (however you want to understand that term) has changed. So I don't think these efforts have come together clearly, but the more recent confusion may be a sign that, as you've called it, a 'Net Criticism 2.0' Is coming together. It's certainly needed. GL: I wonder if we can harass the masses to join a competition about 'net criticism 2.0' and what it should be all about. Or is this already too self-referential? the problem here is really one of positive or rather negative role models, types of text one falls in love with, mind-blowing critiques that shake the fundaments of the current Net (business)... TB: That's a question for future historians to ask, whether it was all too self-referential. As for 'harassing the masses,' who knows? This relates to another ambiguity, namely, what is the net for? Is it instrumental, a means of communication? Is it a medium, whether for art or for publishing? Is it an empty notebook, or a television, or a telephone, or an arena? It's very easy to think of a particular forum on the net as a kind of context, but what's harder to understand, I think, is the reception of that context--as something for passive edification or entertainment, or as a 'push-back channel' for finished works, or even as a testing ground for unfinished experiments? Some combinations of these possibilities are very vital, others not so vital. So the question might be what's the most vital option? But maybe *that* is too self-referential. GL: The best discourses are perhaps those which cultivate and differentiate their language and internal reference system without becoming completely obscure, a seductive game of closures and openness. The relatively closed system of the mailinglist can be a good environment to develop a rich set of ideas, before the army of recyclers like academics, journalists, and cultural mediators take over. But by and large it is an irrational process that can not be simulated or even staged. And it should have a certain radical approach. Moderate voices can only come up with sweet synthesis at the end. So the NC 2.0 Is in need of new forms of narrowness. The cyber ideology now needs new directions, enemies, targets, and positive goals also, of course. TB: I used to wonder if, as the net became a normal part of life like the telephone, the possibility of 'net critique' would somehow seem like 'phone critique'--a quaint historical wrong turn. But I don't think so: one reason net 'exploded' was the possibility it opened for circumventing the various establishments of only slightly older generations who had become quite comfortable in their professionalized forms of discomfort: enforcing suddenly stratified structures in academia, journals, galleries, activist organizations, and so on--very much at the expense of those who sought to continue critique, if not 'follow in their footsteps.' And so we saw this fast proliferation of soapboxes, networks, and so on. I don't believe the dissatisfactions and ideals that drove that move are gone, done, settled, we're all happy now, no more problems, everyone is all of a sudden moderate. So there is your potential radicalism. But what are the frustrations and goals these few years later? GL: Avital Ronell would love your 'phone critique', but anyway, the question now is if we, the users of the Net, simply accept the standard as are now being developed. No more research and development. This is also the starting point of that brilliant 'anti mac' piece that was on nettime a little while ago. It states that the Apple Mac interface has not changed for a long time and that the human-machine interface are lot likely to be revolutionized some time soon. The same can be said of Microsoft and it critics. We are in danger of getting stuck into web normalcy. This could be the point where the real existing frustration comes up. After all the sell outs, mergers, bankruptcies we can think of organizing the discontent of the more experienced users that did not get trapped into cheap cyber fascinations, through new models of trade unions, consumer organizations, and the appearance of the dissatisfied masses that are committing 'electronic civil disobedience'. TB: I wish I could say that I loved her _Telephone Book_, but no--in part because it 'anticipated' in print some of the big dead-ends that have trapped electronic media ('event' instead of continuity, melange instead of synthesis, hype instead of substance, etc., etc.). There's a danger in falling for the seductive cosmopolitanism or worldliness that the net offers: eclecticism very easily devolves into a reactionary mode, but rarely reveals itself as such because its concern for input and reception provides no basis for saying 'OK, enough for now, we know what our principles are, time to act on them.' I think this is the fascination with the free or open-source software movement: ah, this eclecticism has paid off, now we've found an ideal that's native to network. All well and good, but then these forces come out with a silly 'Open Content License.' it's like they jumped through Alice's mirror and into the wonderful world of hypertext, but they're 'back' button is grayed-out: they forget that content always was open and still is. Some freedom: so now the _Communist Manifesto_ becomes the compiled binary, and you can only distribute it under OCL, with the _Grundrisse_ 'comments' and _Das Kapital_ 'source code.' David Bennahum jokes about the 'gif economy' and 'wysiwyg society'; what I'd like to see is an 'ascii revolution.' GL: OCL is one thing, but have you seen the expensive coffee table edition of the Communist Manifesto, published for the 150th anniversary of that text? ascii is now what pulp for the newspapers used to be in the 19th century, a fundamental resource which is driving all these virtual and spacial revolutions forward. But this is not obvious! Code is rapidly becoming less and less visible. We are essentialists in that we like to believe that the elements behind the spectre is that which counts. The same can be said of certain media theories stating that war is the mother of all media technologies. That might be all be true. But the on-line masses are blinded by interfaces, funky imagery. Net Criticism cannot only have that one strategy, to constantly 'uncover' and deconstruct other people's java scripts and clever HTML... We should also understand and 'trust the masses' in their cheap admiration for the ephemeral. TB: It'll be interesting to see whether the trend toward making code visible (open source) will make it more legible. For many, no: it will be like transliterating hieroglyphs into phonetics. But literacy is a 'technology' too, and from the 11th century it went from being rare in the 'upper classes' to a basic tool for tradesmen; and that 'renaissance of literacy' brought about a 'renaissance of heresy'--people exercising literacy outside of the institutional structures that taught not just the technology but how to interpret, explain, and apply it. (And this wasn't the result of a programmatic push by a progressive intelligentsia; on the contrary, the 'intelligentsia' *fought* it.) So maybe there's a historical wisdom, a new kind of technology in this melange of barely understood code, funky graphics, ephemera--maybe somewhere in that combination that seems so disorderly is the historical force. Let's assume for a minute that the model we've been taught to trust--an intellectual vanguard that supposedly learned compassion from its excesses and respect for 'the masses'--is in fact a reactionary force trying to protect its political patrimony by imposing traditional interpretations and ideals. What could come from this incredible soup of visual and instrumental techniques? We complain and worry about how interfaces are 'stopping' people--but what if those interfaces don't matter at all? GL: That would be heaven, perhaps even the end of the NC project. Instead of an ecstasy of collective net constructivism, we might expect a return of the (cyber)cultural pessimism. In the end, all the cynical outsiders will be right. But that's unbearable. Recently I was inspired by the idea that the virtual class, venture capitalists and all these suits are not more than 'paper tigers' we should not be afraid of. We still have the ability to organize ourselves (in new ways, yes) and claim hegemony against microsoft, apple, UUNet, compaq, netscape, sun, worldcom and whoever. This had not even been tried. The lonely freelance subjects are so tamed, numbed, still captured in old stories but that will change as soon as this 20th century is over and certain traumatic events have faded away. NC 2.0 should be social science fiction and be ready once the temporary lapse of reason (over the Question of Organization) will be over. TB: OK, a compromise definition: NC 2.0 should be the atomized foundations of a future we can't imagine. But what we *do* know is that new forms of organization will get caught in the same old traps if they rely on same old analytical tools. So let's break some of those. I nominate the 'Conspiracy' as the first idiotic idea to smash: it involves everything you say--pessimism, suits, hegemony, and a lonely freelance subject captured by old stories. What is a 'Conspiracy'? An organization that's effective, hierarchical, doesn't talk, and plans to 'rule the world.' So, if someone opposes this organizational model, what values is s/he *supporting*? Ineffectiveness, a happenstance program, hype, and individuated powerlessness. Oh, and 'Conspiracies' are 'Evil.' But what does that mean, other than attributed motives? Yeah, killing people, imprisoning people, people, and exploiting people are unethical--but do we need to consider 'motives' to condemn these things? No, we can condemn them on objective grounds. So what if we ignore this motive of a 'Conspiracy'? We end up with the idealized model of a corporation: effective, responsive, organized, forward- thinking, and growing. Perfectly good ideals for many social organizations. So let's throw this idea of the 'Conspiracy' out--and throw out this fascination with 'motives' while we're at it. So that's my nominee for how to proceed with NC 2.0. What do you suggest? GL: Conspiracy theories do not honor the Enemy, they want to erase, kill, and delete. But you do really suggest that this line is dominant these days? Because there is little else? I can see similarities with the 'ascii movement' in the sense that it is all about tearing down the corporate-state masks under which a self-explanatory truth will reveal itself, without answer the urgent question of new ways to organize and gain hegemony outside of the neo-liberal project of the global market. It is prolonging a desperate form of individualism which is not even suitable for networks. So NC 2.0 could also be about making free space to design new forms of (collective) subjectivity. TB: Dominant, I don't know, but growing? Yes. We're building tools that we designed with naive, limited, or idealized assumptions, but the world produces other conditions: so maybe the tools 'break,' or maybe they do exactly what we specified but with consequences we never intended--for example, they will run amok. And they provide new metaphors for thinking about older problems, social configurations: society as agriculture, society as steam engine, society as chaos theory, society as cybernetic process. *This* is 'interface culture.' So now the neo-liberal global market likes to talk about itself as 'information flows,' 'frictionless microtransactions,' etc. There is no self-explanatory positive truth 'underneath' these metaphors, just a dialectical relation between them, on the one hand, and where we are and where we want to go, on the other. So I think we agree: NC 2.0 should be a project to articulate and create new powers, new freedoms. When you tear down a wall, you have to put the stones somewhere. So when we tear away at a dumb idea, we find we criticized ideals we need. And you say: The problem is the neo-liberal project of the global market. OK, then: Which parts of it should we tear away at, which parts should we keep, and how do we reconfigure those parts? The answers to this question will begin to give us priorities and the seeds of a plan. GL: George Soros and others have suggested that we introduce a tax on global trade of stocks and currencies. We could reduce global trade and traffic, stop the silly sale of Dutch flowers in Chile and New Zealand (for example), while at the same time fight for the right of people to freely move from one country to the other. Why this the right only of flowers and dollars? One could focus on local networks and forget the whole international English media culture for a while. And re-enter on the global stage, if necessary. Universal accessibility should not be our principle--it is just one option among many. Attacking the standardized department stores, shopping malls and hotel cultures is another strategy besides the struggles against multinationals like Shell, McDonalds, Nike etc. (this is somehow obvious); and at the same time building up truly numerous transnational networks from below, not merely to exchange but also to collaborate in a direct way, without intermediaries, free of ideology and control, eager to express anger, not afraid to organize and fight back. That is my, very private, vision of net criticism, the next generation. --- 13.1 Re: <nettime> Net Criticism 2.0: a dialog Felix Stalder nettime-l@desk.nl Fri, 24 Jul 1998 16:12:15 -0700 >TB: .... And you >say: The problem is the neo-liberal project of the >global market. OK, then: Which parts of it should we >tear away at, which parts should we keep, and how do we >reconfigure those parts? The answers to this question >will begin to give us priorities and the seeds of a >plan. Net Criticism needs clarity to cut through the maze and detect new spaces that are opened by the changing conditions created by the Net, not so much only with in the Net but in the societies and culture which are reorganized by using the technologies. The 'global market' as a catch phrase is one of the 'mazy' things that create confusion and this confusion is instrumental. It makes any critique seem impossible by presenting something that seems so big and complex that nobody knows where to begin the detailed work which any critique needs to engage in if it doesn't want to be just another layer of 'novelty'. Let's look at the parts into which the 'global economy' can be dissected: * Globalization * Globality * Globalism _Globalism_ means the neo-liberal ideology which argues that the market is a 'force of nature' which by its character is out-side the realm of the political and any political invention is to disturb or hinder the way things develop most effiecently, thus creating a situation of additional stress. Globalism is the political ideology that promotes the 'end of politics'. _Globality_ acknowledges the fact the decisive aspects of our economy, and of our culture -- just count the continents you have recently been to -- are already organized on, or at least being influenced by, a global scale. It furthermore acknowledges that this process is irreversible and that any critique needs to start from here. This is fairly obvious. _Globalization_, at last, is where the action is. These are the processes that underlie the further expansion of the scope of Globality and its systems of ordering and reproduction. Globalization, however, does not need to be a one-way street, as the dominant ideology of Globalism suggest, globalization does not mean that 'everything that is solid melts into air', that we are all to succumb under the abstract logic of a deregulated, read market-regulated, economy of behemoths. Globalization also means that previous isolated people and groups can communicate, that strategic action at key nodes can be disruptive for the whole network, that grassroots can coordinate themselves globally, in short, that the local can gain an enormeous power. When we start to separate the ideology of Globalism from the process of Globalization, which are much more diverse and culturally oriented that the neo-liberal model is able to understand, then we will find the in the falt-lines space for action and hope, something not just to criticize but to look forward to. [The distinction of the three terms is borrowed from Ulrich Beck: Was ist Globalisierung?, 1997] -----|||||---||||----|||||--------||||---- Les faits sont faits. http://www.fis.utoronto.ca/~stalder --- 14.0 <nettime> Net Crit. 2.0 alex galloway nettime-l@desk.nl Thu, 6 Aug 1998 10:20:52 -0400 (EDT) >Regarding the Net Criticism 2.0 dialog: [...] >Net Criticism 2.0 is spoken about as if it could facilitate the "design" >of something -- specifically, that it could be about "making free space >to design new forms of (collective) subjectivity." As if! An >alternative position would be to place oneself in the fray, and rather >than facilitate the design of new forms of subjectivity, the objective >would be to discover the new forms of subjectivity that are emerging - >and these not apart from, but deep within the guts of consumer society. >How is contemporary subjectivity defined today? You can bet it is not >"outside" of market culture in any sense. You have to come down off the >perch and enter into the market to understand it. Otherwise, you are >losing the ability to speak to an entire generation. jordan - you didn't get the response you wanted, did you?! ;-) i'm glad you spoke up because i'm also a little skeptical of the old school speak. here's what i heard you saying: enter in strategic ways organize and set our own prices develop critical and resistant market ideologies extend the market as a network i like this model... articulation rather than rejection. i think one of the most exciting things about new media is that it allows us, the programmers, the freedom to manufacture the core substance of our work. at rhizome (and i guess at blast too) the model is actually to produce an *organization* that facilitates cultural production. nettime, with no employees, no offices, etc., i guess would be the opposite of that--although both are successful in different ways. to the skeptics of engagement, a perfect example: rtmark. they are completely embracing both a corporate aesthetic and a corporate business model, and they're still punk rock. others like etoy, BIT and technologies to the people are also embracing the corporate aesthetic. the responsibility of Net Crit. 2.0 should be to analyse the real workings of the new media--the "logics" of computer networks, how technology produces subjects, new aesthetic forms, the structure of online communities, biometrics, collaborative filtering. i'm less interested in the back and forth arguments around economics and consumerism. alex galloway www.rhizome.org