Re: <nettime> footnotes to geert lovink

[ed phillips <ed@cronos.net>]

Bifo,

Thanks for posting this. I like the offhand summary format and the disclaimer. The
timing of this lecture seems a little off though based on your summary.

Many of us are just as rueful as we were in 96 about the promises of the internet
even as it has eaten away at the facades of life outside the market driven need to
sell something of yourself in order to wangle a meal. 

The recession story is so old hat though. Shouldn't it be something like "oh no!
here comes another boom." It sure feels that way in the Bay Area right now. It
feels like 96 again, on the cusp of another boom, although perhaps this will be
more of a jobless boom, or geeks only boom. Stupid money is flying around again.
We do here nonsense about how people are being more careful with the money and the
Indian team is de riguer, but the total amount of money is that much greater, and
the Indians cannot ramp up fast enough it seems to take all the business.

It's not just Web 2.0 or virtualization or open source or this or that yadda yadda
but rather the sum total of all the "need" for new technology, to reinvent, to
seek out markets or make them. To reinvest all that virtual money that the markets
have made for trivial things like search engines. 

With each succeeding boom/bust the contradictions seem to be getting that much
starker. We are like clement greenbergs little non representational painters,
trying to find a place to... Except this time the game is that much further along.
We are "hunted back to the medium itself" where the medium is thought rather than
paint. Trying to find some room to think at all, let alone critique, is work.

May you live in interesting times. May your job reqs and your cv look like a
machine-only readable list of acronyms.

The markets have moved on.




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