Re: <nettime> Analog to Digital Dj mixes coded language...

[Dan Sheetz <dan@goodfoodpro.com>]

The comparison between digital networks and the toilet networks seems
quite apt (some people refer to broadband connectivity as "big pipes").  
Some claim that the greatest invention in the history of humankind is the
organized sewage system.  Think of how badly Europe must have smelled in
the middle ages.  People just opened the window and dumped their chamber
pots out the window.  The horror!  If you've ever been in New York City on
garbage day, you know how stinky it can be with all the garbage piled up
on the curbs.  Imagine this as human waste.  Ouch.  I think it's safe to
say that modern urban life could not exist without flushable toilets.

The global network that we've built in the past 20 years or so may have an
equally profound effect on what it's like to be a human on Earth.  100
years down the road, people with money may say "can you imagine... no
network. They just put stuff in boxes and sent it around the world!  The
horror!". Then again, people in "developing" nations might still be saying
"finally, a flushable toilet!".

Here's hoping that the future we are forging now will spread more evenly
than Gibson's.  Our ability to foster an equitable distribution of
resources is about 5 centuries behind our digital technology.  So much so,
in fact, that people are learning to look at the structure of network
technology, with it's packets and nodes and redundancy schemes, as a model
for new economic structures.  What phase of development are we in where
the only thing that shows us the way to justice is the shape of our own
artifice?

Anyways, toilets were a big deal.  The digital network is a big deal.  
The toilet taught us nothing about sharing.  Hopefully the network will.

Dan Sheetz


> From: tripDixon && <trw34x@hotmail.com>
> Reply-To: tripDixon && <trw34x@hotmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 10:20:24 -0500
> To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
> Subject: Re: <nettime> Analog to Digital Dj mixes coded language...
> 
> pDmakadjstsk:
> 
> nice one. I think the toilet network is actually an appropriate metaphor for
> a discussion between comprension of network systems, especially analogue
> versus digital::: most of us seem to just piss ideas out into the internet
> network in a method of textual and image-based expulsion::: ((even if there
> are others who constantly hold on to the idea of pre-conceived
> expression))::

[...]




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