<nettime> The US-Mexico Border

["Paul D. Miller" <anansi1@mail.earthlink.net>]

Hi Coco - no I didn't make it to the event, but I made sure to have 
it covered when I was editor at large of Artbyte (although, ha ha, 
Mark Dery stole the idea and copied my concept....), and this year I 
also helped promote it on-line because of other obligations on my 
time and energy in the "real" world - as a matter of fact, this year 
I threw a bash at Burning Man celebrating Buckminster Fuller's ideas 
on ecology and architecture(do we always have to only do what's 
expected of our ethnic groups?) ..... No I don't speak Spanish but, 
again, it's a progressive situation, and in this day and age, the 
borderhack concept represents something that I think could and should 
be a place to find linkages between cultures rather than 
hairsplitting over ideological differences..... I'm all for the 
notion of art in action, and considering at the moment that President 
Fox is in the U.S. to promote his coca-cola brand remix of Mexico in 
the face of the inertia caused by the Institutional Revolutionary 
Party (what a paradoxical name... worthy of Huxley or Orwell, or for 
that matter Jose Donoso or Augusto Boal...), I think that the moment 
was opportune to try this kind of thing out. I did, however, loan use 
of my music for elements of the borderhack website... and I have a 
pretty big following on-line, and I hope that the music helped bring 
people to the site.... anyway, it's always my first impulse to 
applaud new energy and to try to figure out ways to dynamically place 
what's happening in a context that creates bridges between scenes and 
cultures.... thus the support - even though I'm African American and 
distant from that particular border situation...

	In the U.S., as with the internet, the borders amongst 
race/class/social hierarchy aren't as clear cut as a basic 
geographical situation like the U.S. Mexico Border (I remember that 
when I posted on my views of Mark Dery, Pit Schultz wrote me to say I 
was middle class and I asked him "do all black people have to be from 
the ghetto?" and never heard a response....) but anyway, that's a 
different border... his silence, like many of the bland old left 
oriented folks that are simply rhetoricians of some kind of 
neo-romantic notion of avoiding any kind of dialog about the reality 
of how technology impacts the way we think about identity and 
techno-science, spoke much much more about the kind of emptiness of 
the old left... but I don't want to get caught up in this kind of 
dialog between two folks who I respect alot like you and Fran... I 
just think "hey, why not check out the situation and see what kind of 
linkages can be built." To quote Manuel Delanda, a philosopher of 
technology who happens to be Mexican, "human history is a narrative 
of contingencies, not necessities, of missed opportunities to follow 
different routes of development, not of a unilinear succession of 
ways to convert energy, matter, and information into cultural 
products..." The idea for me, here and now, is to bring new energy to 
the mix, and to figure out ways to open the culture I live in... on 
this topic, there's a great new book about "connection theory" from 
Steven Johnson called "Emergence" that I think you might be into. For 
folks like Pit Schultz, I guess I'm not from what KRS-1 called 
"ghettoes of the mind." To me, most boundaries are imaginary. It's 
all about the mix... what next? A borderhack Israel and Palesine 
might be interesting.... That's a mix I'd like to check out.... but 
again, hey, maybe we need the palestinian equivalent of what Fran's 
up to... that'd be pretty wild...

okay,
peace as always,
Paul






>Paul,
>  There has been the best, most politically complex dialogue on nettime-latino
>in ages  about borderhack2, which you may not know about because it has been
>in Spanish. My comments are in response to that debate and to zillions of
>emails from confused Europeans about the border. I stand by my critiques of
>the bullshit pseudotheorizing that dominates nettime, cyberculture and the
>appropriation of the US-Mexico border as a hip site for net.nurds, and more
>that critique will be in my next book. Old timers like me at least have a
>memory which can be useful in moments when the young and restless are putting
>their feet in their mouths. Fran doesn't need to be defended, really,
>especially if you weren't even at the event this year or last.
>Peace,
>Coco



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Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Subliminal Kid Inc.

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