Re: <nettime> Notes on the Politics of Software Culture

[John Hopkins <jhopkins@uiah.fi>]

>This is great openning for discussion for both N5M and AE
>participants who deal with this topic as thay share some
>commonalities but tend to take further more political (N5M) or economical
>...snip
>websites...avoiding to dig deeper into the messy and fuzzy work of geeks
>and nerds who lack sence of selfpromotion.
>
>Few projects like CCC¥s "Blinkenlights" manage to get the idea of creative
>use of IT across, but still somehow miss on being a subject of new media
>theorists/critics.
>
>How can this situation be changed or inverted? Can computer/media art
>community stop being self-referential and emerge itself in the already
>established IT community/media platforms, rather than being ecstatic
>(with years of delay) with phenomenas like open source, p2p, wirelles?

Hej Zeljko

There are always, thank god, significant activities that don't make 
the (Mac)spotLight -- don't forget that by actual choice, or by the 
simple human idiosyncracy of individuals who don't run along with the 
highly socialized trends of the culture spectacle (of which all the 
organs you mentioned are really collected -- some more conscious than 
others) -- there are many people who will never surface in the PR 
realm.  Like one of the concepts around the TAZ, avoid that surficial 
social visibility (because the western culture is fundamentally 
obsessed with surfaces and objects (materialism) -- being in its 
view, under observation, literally, will CHANGE THE OUTCOME OF THAT 
WHICH IS OBSERVED!)  Basic quantum. Why not create movements 
(experiments) on the premise that they run without that intervention, 
so, out of that Sight.  With only the lively participants engaged 
with each other.

Always, the most humane-ly productive critical engagement occurs at 
the granular level of human-to-human, regardless of the surrounding 
social flow (festival or at home in a bar or at academic conference 
or bunkered down in the squat).

Many of the 'trends' that are happening 'now' like wi-fi, etc are 
re-deployments of the rising Surveillance Society anyway.  Capturing 
the surfaces that it is so attracted to -- meanwhile, lives go on, 
deeper than that surface view can ever deconvolve.

Maybe it's better to not invert an old, tired equation, but to simply 
make a new descriptive system, a new way.

Cheers
John
-- 
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tech-no-mad : hypnostatic
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email: <jhopkins@uiah.fi>

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