Re: <nettime> Public Offering digest [dery, sondheim]

[Nmherman {AT} aol.com]

In a message dated 5/21/2001 7:57:56 AM Central Daylight Time, 
nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net writes:

> I'm not calling for a Stalinist purge of our Inner ePoets, for Chrissakes; 
> I'm simply asking for a little context. Be polemical. Be passionate. But 
> if you believe your thoughts matter, don't cloak them in the intellectual 
> equivalent of a cloud of squid ink; make them transparent to me.

I was reading about Jonathan Swift because no one I talk to around the way 
even really knows who he was.  He said he wrote his satire "not to distract, 
but vex"; he needed to be opaque and to frustrate the reader.  It's a simple 
statement in a way, that what must be said cannot be said clearly if the 
minds of the people are no longer clear enough.  Bandwidth, VR, none of that 
matters if what you want is to get people to think in a new way.  

Clearly the enormous issues we contemplate when we read nettime cannot be 
solved only by technical or logical planning.  I think it's quite pertinent 
to remind ourselves of the inflicted degradation of capability that our 
hierarchies of art have made possible.  That's why artists usually don't like 
to be understood right away, or even be called artists.

Max Herman
The Genius 2000 Network
http://www.geocities.com/genius-2000/Launch.html

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