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<nettime> Panic Content - The ZKP 3 Introduction Draft (october 1996) |
[The Zentral Kommittee Proceedings number 3, zkp3, is finally on-line: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime, thanks to Walter van der Cruijssen. Now, all the five zkps are on-line. This is part of a bigger plan to further move on with the nettime reform. To celibrate this, we are posting here the draft of the introduction to the zkp3, which was written as a preparation for the metaforum 3 conf, which took in place in Budapest in early october 1996 with the theme 'content'. The text also tried to explain what nettime intended to do at the time, one year after it started as a mailinglist. Enjoy it - it remained a first draft and was never posted to the list. A smaller version appeared in zkp3 in 150 copies. - geert] ------------------------------ Panic Content The question of content is a question for substance. After a glorious postwar period where the enlightening concept of information escaped from the concepts of matter and energy, it is filling today any governing organisations of power and knowledge. That doesn't mean that information means anything more then gaining general dominance. Information has become such a slippery term, that in the center of the 'information-society', in it's global virtual cathedral also called 'the Net', one is hectically cyberizing everything: 'the body', 'life', 'work', 'sex', 'mind' to adapt to a chaosmos which is not made for humans but for 'something faster'. *Panic Content* as the counterpart of information-as-pure-essence is part of a privatized colonizing project which tries to gain land out of nothing. After building up boundaries around selections of information and access restrictions, one hopes that money flows in. Interestingly the success of the war machine Internet is partly based on pirate utopias of anti-market models like shareware, public domain, anti-copyright and a ring economy of knowledge exchange. The awaited 'War on Content' (whose information is on what server?) is a conflict which connects this experimental zone to it's real existing outside. It also sets free a dynamism which is expected to catapult us over the upcoming time-wall and which, most of all, let us forget. Forget any information we will never be able to access because it is not public or digitized. Forget about Gandmother Europe which haunted us with it's outdated canonical culturism. Forget about 'false' believes and 'wrong' memories. To execute the grand plan of escape into cyberspace a global city must be build where the systems of command, control and communication in the military, cultural and financial sector are modulating the flows of energy and matter diffundating the finest fabrics of personal and social life. It is no wonder that being confronted with such paranoid scenarios of a world panopticum, some people get obsessed with their lost innocence showing symptoms like child abuse, alien abduction and an obsession with unvisible censorship and secure intimacy. 'Content' may be a temporary fashion which exemplifies the mass psychology of the net in the nostalgic desire for something material, it's also a chance for re-building power-knowledge-structures which do not fit into the norms of the existing official quality control systems and are therefore defining zones for serious fun. ZKP3 is the third of a xeroxed a-periodical we non-professionally published on cyberconceptual conferences based on the output of the nettime carawane, a curly path through the contemporary so called critical so called international cyberdiscourse. We hope that out of this temporary publishing practise ideas will come how to continue the project, do reprints, migrate into infranets, become content, grow to a newsgroup, make new friends or intensify old friendships. Budapest is a city of old hopes and new frustrations, it may be postmodern for hundreds of years, multicultural by default, most of all it cultivates a diversity of creative disfuntionalities which sentimentally resist the principles of effectivity and profit of today. Most of all it's a place to meet with people from the east on a territory which is part of 'their own' history. It might be also a city to build up models for east-west content generators and 'round-robin' city echange networks, or at least to make plans for the evening. ---- On nettime version 0.1 (nonedited yet) Disclaiming: When it comes to the question to describe my own projects i often feel unable to do so. At the one hand i am too blind to measure the professional effectivity of a work which is far from beeing profitable yet, second i can not tell about something as my own thing which circumscribes the activities of a long list of other people and which goes back to a genealogy of predecessors, friends and neighbors you can't listen now. And third it is hard to catch and freeze a process of net discourse which moves and changes constantly and form it to something which is as static like a text. Accept it or not, this description may be fundamentally wrong. Introducing: nettime was found in June 1995 in Venice by a group of artists, theoricians, media activists and journalists. It was happening in the context of the Venice Biennale and was connected to a night-event called Club Berlin which was importing 'Techno' into the art context. While having good food and bright talks during the day, the 'cooption' of 'techno-underground' during the night became an imprinting birth experience for this project. Since then nettime remained what one can call independent and extremely cautious towards processes of converting cultural capital. This is not happening because of dogmatism but because of the will for maximum freedom, freedom money cannot buy. In Venice we also described the main lines of critical complexes on which nettime is still oriented: Urban metaphor, Infovitalism, and Net-tribalism. Since then every three months there are happening meetings where a changing nucleus of the list is planing and discussing new projects, like lately the name.space initiative by Paul Garrin, the east-west web refresh, or just art practises like a city exchange network, publishing strategies, or tasks forces against private German content police officers. Contradicting: It is funny to use a medium without trusting in it. It is even more funny to use a medium and then criticize it. Some say it is unpossible to criticize a system from within. They say you have to have a distance to it to be able to interpret it, but then they don't find an end of interpretation. There are three basic securities a net critique on the net can count on. a. it refers to itself (the net, critique) in a mode of contradiction. b. contradiction produces interest and information c. interest and information have an end. Any Marxist reading of such terms is not avoided but especially by east-european subscribers not really popular. If 'communication creates conflict' (Bunting) or 'subjectivity must get produced' (Guattari), it was never a goal of this project to dominate discourse, missionate you, or tell the pure truth. Giving Credits: In 1993 Ctheory, an academic magazine which turned into a mailinglist, run by the Krokers in Canada, was for us a new but long awaited experience. Where most Media Theory suffers from a phathos of distance from it's own object, Ctheory runs hot in a short cuircuit of Postmodern Practise. While it's academic Competitor, PMC, is mostly mirroring the rituals of an institutional apperatus, it remains a good example for cost effective grey publishing of younger and older Authors. Ctheory is still the Grandfather of nettime, and the Book 'Data Trash' of Weinstein and Kroker is still the standard work of a political economy of cyberspace. The Panic Enzyclopaedia another product out of the discourse factories in Toronto, marks the transition from a bad Love affair with Baudrillard, to a more performative pastiche project dealing with the famous German export product into Cyberculture : Angst and it's cultivation as Mass Phenomena: Panic. While Ctheory still produces on a unearthy academic height, very postmodern and a bit ornamental, it is definetly worth to subscribe to if you have a special interest in Net Critique. The third big Theory data base in the end of 1994 when we started to think about such a project is the English Server at CMC, a huge collection of magazines, papers, articles, quotes, around the field of 'cultural theoriy' run by a collective of students. It must get mentioned that all these projec are financed by the Education system. Today with a growing number of projects in the same segment of 'cyberdiscourse' it is worth to think again what nettime might be, before finding a new strategy of publishing which again remains effective for a longer period. Critizising: We began to feel the need for a european cyber-discourse with the unberaerebale lightness of reading wired magazine. Wired is still the most influentive, ideological and irational Organ of the Virtual Class. Everything which Wired wrote was for us Pure Propaganda and provoked the question for the unofficial Data. As the Prawda of the net Wired Magazine forces the emergence of dissident thought. Later it was named by Barbrook 'the Californian' Ideology, which to contradict to cannot be wrong. This is of course the simplicistic logic of the early colonized, and the situation looks much different 2 Years later. But it is still clear that the Mass pyschology of cyberspace generates issues and figures like represented by John Perry Barlow, which had a hard time after his protopathological manifesto about the Independence of Cyberspace. Still there is interestingly no competent discoursive analysis of the influence of this little Magazine on the way the world is speaking about the net. While Mondo 2000, as the better part of cyberculture dispeared by burnout and with it the last Cyberpunk, it was clear that Electronic Resistance had to get re-defined. The mid of the 90ies where as starting phase of net-migration. The same wishes and possibilities which led us move to the east after 1990, squatiing city space and realizing something which was later named TAZ, it was logical for some, to seek for the same thrill in Cyberland. But after a first euphoria, celebrated for some of us in the Golden Years of the Thing BBS, learning a lot about collaborative electric text production, after the first orgasmic contacts with the long awaitet universal Media, scepticism began to grow, even for doing art, one first needed a concept about the net and its different fields of meaning. Right now, we are speaking about potentials, about possible decisions, about vague Ideas which has not yet become concepts. Even if net critique is based on the Axiom that everyone should have the right to be not Wired, but this doesn't mean that net critique refuses to affirmate the power of a new technological standards. Of course the former networks of transport and Transmission, did not function as a historical a priori, but they were often places where new tactiques and strategies took place, if economical, military or in discourse production. Networks can easily get described as organisations of power. With a special european social memory of the possible abuse of Technological Networks of Power one is sceptically approaching any kind of new media technique. Contextualizing: "Imagine what would have happen if McLuhan had Access to the World Wide Web." It may be the initial moment of Media Theory that is is in fact unable to leave it's stand in the Gutenberg Galaxy, while it uses the knowledge about New Electric Media to try to break with its dependencies. We have a prominent example of such a media generation conflict in Germany, the very influentive work of Professor Kittler, who comes from literay theory and successfully shows how technical media is determing culture and everything else. But he insists on the priority of the hardware. His main rethoric is based on a contradictions within a culture resisting to conceptualize the influence of computers. But this is not true. I guess one of the most important Books written in the last few years on the contradictions of a Electric Media Culture is 1000 Plateauxs of Deleuze/Guattari. Here the book itself becomes already something discribed as a machine. Net theoricians like Manuel Delanda, Critical Art Ensemble or Peter Lamborn Wilson are making heavily use of concepts of this book. It was mentioned lately by Sherry Turkle that French Abstract Postmodernism has partly come to the ground through the rise of the Internet. What i want to say with all this is that it seems that the net forms a 'plane of consitency' which is hardware-independent and where concepts and action, socialty and technique, theory and practise, work and money merge toegether to form new aggregates of power-knowledge. The wish economies of the nets are different from the old democratic-despotic Broadcast media, always in danger to collabse into a terminal state of capitalism or the black wholes of fascism. Timing: The time of nettime is a social time, it is subjective and intensive, whith condensation and extractions, segmented by social events like confereences and little meetings, and text gatherings for export into the paper world. Most people still like to read a text printed on wooden paper, more then transmitted via waves of light. nettime is not the same time like geotime, or the time clocks go. Everone who programs or even sits often on a screen knows about the phenomon of beeing out of time, time on the net consists of different speeds, computers, humans, software, bandwith, the only way to see a continuity of time on the net is to see it as a asychronous network of synchronized time zones. The psychological side effect of the single user on her screen is often a 'time-bubble', if not a transcendental at least a pysiological state of mind, where absolute time of the idea, the association, a network of thought creates a time zone which notoriously desynchonizes with the one of normal life. A mailinglist might be a possiblitiy to share such a time bubble and create a colletive asynchronous time zone relativly independent from space. The Different tactiques of accelaration and slowing down, are always defining the boundaries of such a social time continuum. With the hidden layer of private e-mail it is always possible for mutual dialogues and personal reflections to detect a critical state of the list, problematic issues, common disinterest, 'general overload' - or even a person which falls into a role-game which turn out to be destructive for the whole list. Grouping: Some already called such info-enviornments group therapy. This is not right in general. It is all in all a grouping of interests, of textes, of time as a process of condensation, without having a clear center. Of course there are certain hirarchies in the nettime-network. But there are several opportunities to 'route around' it. The main principle of nettime might be a productive vagueness. A flexibility of never reaching an absolute minimum or maximum, a certain production of a social scope, which often turns out to represent the interest of the main group of active contributors. But any new document functions as a vektor which recontextualizes what was already posted. One knows that somewhere an archive stores the stream of documents, documenting the path the discourse went through different time zones, and net phases. Filtering: As a collaborative project the principle of selection is as easy as unclear, what comes in, is part of the flow, and anyone has the risk to send something 'useless' or 'noisy'. Public Dialogue is more or less the first step to an entropic decline of mailinglist. Therefore nettime is aiming on a big threshhold to reply to textes in the public, while it often happens that private mail contextualizes where someone else might have no further interests to discuss. Between Dialogue and a One-To-Many list there are different ways of Moderating a list. The goal still is the collaborative construction of a body of knowledge which is fre from the interests of a company, an institution, or even a certain editorial team. Of course nettime has certain centers, but before you might say that only two people are selecting the textes, you should look on the senders/authors adress, it becomes obvious that behind the flow of nettime stands not one editorial team but a complex network of academical, subcultural, private and professional relations which select textes in a way which makes the traditional editing team obsolete. of course it still needs persons which make selections, which even moderate or organizing publishing activities in paper-space. The text types, which we prefer to name genres are mainly articles, essays, reports, threads (discussions), reviews, poems, quotes and announcements. The relation of Quality and Quantity in nettime follows fuzzy rules. It is more the knowledge to create content and cultural capital avoiding a direct commerical use. This creates a certain dynamic which forces professional and commercial 'followers' to maybe loose their conservative and reglementatory course, and gain effectivity in the discourse, which is the aim of crititique. It is not any more the case that the academy, or a publishing house can determine which textes are wanted or even distributed. But only a few of them see the chances of the net for micropublishing. Nettime is in this wuch more simliar to the xerox networks in the former eastern blocks, especially interesting for people which can't afford to buy imported books. A certain barrier of virtual dirtyness, like typos and formatting errors, but mainly an unedited use of net-English, helps to hide the project in the technical sublime of the ascii-world. Only those who has a certain knowledge or interest will remain or hear about the group. It is not as all the logic of mass media. Nettime is trying to avoid its own promotion and advertisment, a too fast growth and too much refernces, in this way it builds up a relativly continous but semi-private flow in the exhaustive content-economy of the nets where effectiveness and presence are measured in number of users, or clicks. This is the logic of Television and Magazines. Small Media like nettime has other tasks to do then defining and controling a public-sphere. The diversity of the flow of textes represents a diversity experienced on the street, in a bar or a club. There is a certain social selection, but it never reaches the censorship which is done under the principles of creating scarcity and excluding ideas and intensity through 'professional quality control'. Nettime is existing and used because there is no other media for the same purposes available on the net Nettime brings in a simple way specialists, authors, editiors, artists of a special interest group together. Publishing: One of the main Principles of nettime is to forget about the metaphor of the magazine. The textes in nettime might be the same which appear in Magazines, but it is much more a distribution channel which may lead into magazines or out of them. What one is basically missing in a time-based discontinous flow of documents is the grouping into table of contents. The flow itself whith certain repetitions of names and themes documents an inner social logic of selection and interest, of distraction of boredom. Not one of the subscribers of nettime will ever have read all textes, but the format is already much more condensed and discoursive then the average talk-and-reply-list which forms completly different social dynamics and suffers often the effects of amplified emotions through minmal channels. Prepublishing means a policy which gives publishers the chance to get in contact with an author and buy a text. Reprublishing goves nettime the chance to ask often the same Publishers to get back a text. This is an economy of agreement which is aware of a dialectique of exploitation and exploration. Because an environment like nettime is based on no budget and hi credibility, it is always possible to try to speed up production or activities, change fields or distract with noise so that exploitation becomes more different. The extreme form of fighting against the abuse of the good will of authors and member of nettime could be the collaboration with projects in the model of pirate utopias which are situated in territories or under protocols which are hard to reach for publishers even if copyright rights might get violated. Inversive Publishing means Project like ZKP. The retransfering into the Paperworld. Only here one may make money in the near future to pay Authors, which do not loose their credibility and chance to modulate a vivid process. A world edition of ZKP may get published soon. Energizing: The copyright liberation front or the Free Content Coalition are fighting for the accesability of basic common content like Enzyclopaedias, Comics, Technotracks, Cyberculture. They might cooperate with the Polish, Chinese or Russian Mafia, but the goal is the availability of certain Information for free. Anyone who can afford it should by content or software in a official shop. In the traditional production of content not the author but the advertiser gets payed first. The inner interdependencies of advertisment and content are often neglected in the discussions around censorship. Privacy may be at first of an interest of companies which try to hide their financial data before taxes. The issue of Free Content has interestingly no Lobby group yet, even if Public Online Libraries where the most common promises of the early Superhiqway Propaganda. It is clear that social conflicts and poverty will determine who needs free content online. As long as the Archives on the net are open, it is not a false idea to build up private backups before the content castles close their doors. Building: some short notes to the city-metaphor. while ther are already several books which theorize the model of the city in relation to the net, it is obvious that the discourse of architecture is still centered around the goal of building houses or doing art, while in between one is developing representative monuments. One of the most urgent developments in the academic field should be a transdiciplinarian research group which combines the experiences of architecure in conceptualizing and designing social space with the need to build new interfaces which leave the Desktop Metaphor of the 'private Computer'. Software standards like VRML are maybe leading in the wrong direction as it is also important to rethink how space is conceptualized psychologically and pysiologically, or encoded through cultural products like music, language, gestures, fashion. Everything which i read until now about the net and the city is much to descriptive to show the need and potential for architects of the International Cities. The real existing metaphors are too depressive to talk about, Groupware like the one of IBM/Lotus is only automatizing certain distributed processed of document editing, it is interestingly extremely cautious with every use of metaphors, enforcing the abstractions of an office machine. New social interfaces will include the Theories of Social Systems, Discourse Analysis, Transaction etc etc. It is very certain that projects like Digitale Stad Amsterdam or Internationale Stadt Berlin will soon become prototypes of transdiciplinarian Research Groups which are developing a process design and the transactional Interfaces for Social Computing. The possible errors of such utopias might be overwehlming the chances for a new rise of the public sphere. It is obvious that one will need 'narrations' simliar to theme parks, where such experiments do interfere with dayly life in a controled way. Another fast expanding Market are Multiuser Games like Quake. A collaborative working environment will still be the main goal of projects like nettime. The more subscribers it gets the more possible a split of into subgroups and filter projects gets possible. --- # 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