Pit Schultz on Tue, 7 Apr 1998 21:54:53 +0200 (MET DST) |
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<nettime> media, art, economy? |
[What follows is a contribution Pit Schultz made to a debate on the Eyebeam list recently. Here it's in context and out of context. It has been minimally copy-edited for nettime. Share and enjoy. --TB] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [ <...> so let me start with a long a bit polemic intro. the second part will contain more about art, the third will try to find an answer to everything. <...>/pit] what's nettime again? Talking about nettime is not just talking about one's own work, what I thought we wanted to talk about here, is artistic practise on the net. Besides the suffix *artistic* is more limited than descriptive and reminds me of a translation error of circus performances (artistisch). The practise of nettime, in short doesn't need any praise but process, it already made its own small history and is still doing it, in its limited way without too much of a fuss and without false modesty. But of course it has predecessors like the Thing BBS, which hosted Jordan Crandall's formidable online salons. Responding to Andreas Broeckman in four steps nettime escaped from its oedipal vectors. 1. The wired ideology exhausted itself and declined intellectually with the end of the net.hype, as you can see if you still buy this magazine. 2. A modest democratization of nettime through a rotating group moderation (which is still not standard even if others already learned from it) 3. A certain continuity and 'reliable instability' through a number of long term planning and resisting ideas which step by step are tested/ implemented (first of all the nettime book). 4. A continuity, especially regarding the basis as a non-commercial project, which in many ways gives the project a higher sustainability and working economy of content. Good Times Nothing is spectacular, of course, if you aren't part of it. For some people it changed their life, the rest use it to expand their textual horizon whatever that means to them. Besides that, nettime tries to refresh a certain political agenda which got boringly conservative after 1990, and which some may call 'leftism' though it really doesn't matter. It is not a silly side effect of those lucky times (95-97 the net-years?) in which, for a short 'divine' time, the whole universe seemed to be mirrored in it. What counts for many good times is that it is important not to get addicted to these experiences of synchronicity and just work for its next appearance, not get tricked by all the shit that happens around you. Most of all one has to be careful not to get bitter or dogmatic, especially like those from scenes one tried to escape by using computer&net as a vehicle. Instead, it is good to remain small and mobile enough, to be able to jump off or mutate. Trivial, in its own way. Seeking the Kick Working knowledge: it is always a bad idea just to copy what seems to be a running system, as it is a bad idea to try to grow too much. We did not completely leave the illusions of grandeur as a privilege of the others, but we found a way to convert it into a powerful negativism. That social networks and the ensuing discourses always have an aspect of organising or centralising power is nothing new, and as long the structures are overseeable, informal and personal, one finds good ways to do small but effective changes to not grow, glow and burn out fast. On the other hand, a certain underground ethos becomes very questionable and truly rhetoric, it is an ascetic ideal which says that the most successful (near to god) are those who resist success in the real world. The 'anarchic' resistance to all models of funding and financing can only get named childish as even behind nettime was a complex, parasitical exchange and surplus economy working to provide more or less than the social minimum wage. Nothing spectacular either. The zero money ideology just mirrors the just-money ideology, meanwhile it is no big fun. But as I said the net is a medium for learning. Not that it is not allowed to be successful, but the type of success changes, while the question remains what does give you the real kick and when the risk gets too high to seriously bore other people with an obsession of efficiency, and this climate of boredom is almost as unpredictable as the weather. The Art of Shutting Up So, there is a time to speak and there is a time to shut up. If one only would know always! if you urge people to speak when they better shut up, you get the funniest results. I have the feeling that many mailinglists are suffering this effect at the moment, especially the ones based on dialogue more then discourse, especially those balancing around a certain minimal threshold, and if it is only self-advertisments and announcements. After a certain collective utopian euphoria has been over a while now - one that many still cling to - 'real life' starts to take place with regulations and monopolisations, and the economy seems to become more important once again, seemingly more powerful than any single person or piece of work in the world. We may be in a period of inflation but then nobody tells us. At least we have a status of propaganda, the 'terror of economy'. Sure, there are still other things, and we should not totalize all aspects of life especially under such a spectre like money. But if we face it, that's all about it for the most people, also artists and philosophers. Especially if you combine it with how very calmly one is sucked into a system of investment, insurance, and inequalities. Sure, instead, it seems more intelligent to decentralise the topic, connect, relate and analyse instead of putting it into scary terms like 'globalization'. Internet Good, Internet Bad The pseudo-democratic mass consume panic of internet-for-all is not at all over, adding a lot more confusion into all day online discussion as slowly a new mass medium emerges which was not planned or expected as such a few years ago. It is the sleeping colossus of the collective body of the couch potatoes of all lands, the Gammas as Bob Black calls them, which gives place to various hopes and fears. It is the a exquisite group of experts climbing around on this colossus making clever statements about what it could be. Elitists and global economic strategists like Esther Dyson try to train the wired middle class to line up along a good old common sense ideology. It is still not clear to which extreme the average AOL user will politically tend if the day of decision would come or if he will just be not able to pay his debts anymore on day x. And it is also not clear if the net will change anything if it just looks like TV to grandma. More likely again, it is the the invisible hand of the market, the big boom or any other quasi religious entity, which lets you know where your place is. Public Content Clear is that without electronic networks we would not have the social changes of today, extreme richness contra a growth of poverty and social tensions. Sooner or later it will be a fundamental question how to legitimize accumulated capital due to monopolies based on information property. The merging telco and content industry, totalizing operating systems, patents for life allow disproportional revenues, while the public sector is haunted by mismanagement, tax migration, a growing unemployment and lots of social work which has been left to be done - and gets less and less payable. Technology did not higher intelligence, while it makes organisation more efficient, it cannot replace policy making. The distribution of knowledge as a economic and political basis to allow democracy is not warranted anymore. Public education is one of the areas where the internet could play an new and not yet widely expected role, not by selling/giving away wintel machines to 'wire' the schools of america and then the planet, but to give world wide access to information, access to first class educational resources. Thousands of books, encyclopedias, and academic knowledge has to go to the public domain within a fair use policy if lifelong education should mean ever anything else then a new class war. Countless new NGOs and political campaigns, information guerilla warfare and geopolitical conflicts may arise around the question of intellectual property, which is in fact in the most cases corporate property. Public content could redefine and refresh the crisis to find an alternative to an sclerotic institutional system towards an headless corporate world pushed around by out-of-control market-forces. The third sector of the information economy could be the public domain, free software, and governments taking licenses and patents away from companies. Freelancer's Irresponsibility The scandal is that especially people who should know better, so called cyber-theoreticians and net-experts, widely fall into the arms of cheap cyber-priests, cults of temporary hipnesses, and a dollar-per- word horizon. The organic intellectuals of the internet, are the first ones feeling the urge to define better what they are and what they want to do, the kind of work, and the kind of world they are trying to describe in their textual efforts. Many of these virtual intellectuals are putting too much effort in getting their books about the net onto a market, partly a tribute to culture of code which One cannot get rid of in a few years. By spreading mediocre insights and half-thought assumptions to people who are daring to get taught what they should think about new cultural technologies these lonely cyberthinkers miss the chance to group together and get some consensus about other goals then getting better contracts with their publishers. OK, if you call it journalism, who is writing about the facts then? Workers of the Third Sector What about grouping the freelancers to get better contracts for more then a hidden agenda? and if there is not enough money for content on the net, then find ways how to lobby for it and legitimize a need for media culture within a working social contract. After a phase of too much demand, and too much productivity, exhaustion takes place anyway, ready to get the batteries of desire reloaded by the next hype. Why not a social movement this time? your work sucks anyway, if you look at it by light, this is due to the slippery context of a new technology. Within a year a highly accepted cybermanifesto becomes an obsolete pack of paper and could, like all the computer handbooks go better onto cdroms or sold as an additional OEM service with a new computer or account to your local ISP. On the other hand there are not enough online forums which are giving hints on the basis of word-of-mouth or criticising what is obviously weak, highlighting what is really worth it to read. The social quality of information is completely 'under- represented' in cyber-theory not to talk about interface-theory. Multimedia Journalism The concentration within the content markets doesn't give hope that critical investigative journalism has a big future to reach a big audience on the net. Unfortunately we speak about a truly global market where american, german, british, and australian mega-corporations centralise or at least control the framework of a global market of opinions. Would have Tony Blair got elected without his friendship with Rupert Murdoch and his Sun boulevard paper? Instead of using the net as a cheap source for better information, we continuously have to read about 'success stories' read about must-buy gadgets, and have an easy-to-read-overview about this or that possible opinion or factoid. Of course there are exceptions but there is not enough metalog about the structure of those exclusions. Due to a desperate need for identity the fresh netizen is falling into the trap of narcissistic loops of auto-reference, accumulating knowledge 'about' the net instead of connecting it to the outside. There is no job less secure then the one of cyber-expert. Too often one hears in a restaurant or from friends they want to start a cyberbusiness if they only could get the venture capital together. Hope for them that they will fail. Many did it already, but too many just lost. The paradigm of becoming your own little entrepreneur and organising your little life like a business got already a dimension which can be called totalitarian, in the same irrational sense one had to become a good communist in socialist areas and times. Learning to Be Media If you want to do understand a media in its introductory phase, maybe because you want to work with it, make art with it it is a question of how much false commands and wrong advisories one is able to accept before running away and doing it for ones own. Seemingly with the net, there is no school or university able to tell me more then I could learn by myself or by some fellows who train me 'learning by doing'. It happens that some nerds may provide more actual knowledge then a professor of computer science and the context in which this knowledge is transfered and accumulated is often highly informal, and mostly non-commercial. On the other hand the special knowledge of a nerd doesn't include other areas like social engendering, ethics, philosophy, marketing, aesthetics. Therefore one can see a growing need of transdisciplinary teamwork, a holism implied by the complexity of society in which a software, website etc. should work in the end. The alternative is often a specialisation into a niche-market, but it is very unlikely that there can come any innovation out of a bunch of specialists thinking and researching along the same linear way, extremely sensitive towards any changes of environment. One can see that with highly specialized 'hip' ezines born out of a direct marketing paradigm which do not reach the target groups which changed already towards another fan-dom. On the other hand, areas which do not have an imminent structure of knowledge are not at all immune against ideologic and visionary overdetermination. This is what the wired ideology is about, it is techno-religion more then anything else done for a type of stressed personalities extremely insecure and disturbed without a real social context and within a highly dynamic new technology to produce a lot of demand, and make a lot of old work and products obsolete. -----End of forwarded message----- --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@desk.nl