Kwinter's recommendation of off-line resistance may seem futile. I have likened it to the "enclave strategy" attempted in Viet Nam.
But from his perspective there is a reversal. While he might seem to be retreating to a closed defensive position and letting the speeding world pass him by, Kwinter would claim that given the low percentage of the world's population actually "wired," plus the growing resistance to modernization (let alone postmodernization), he is standing where the people are, and (for he is the one who introduces the word "enclave" into the discussion):
The entire Internet universe might itself be . . . a wholesale secession of a unified social class from a public sphere to a protected enclave. (VC 100)True enough, and for a long time to come. Still, there is an overtone in Kwinter's article of the need to retreat to the monasteries in order to have true culture survive the reign of the barbarians. I want to urge resistance on line as well, an active resistance that can be staged on the nets, in the creation of shared objects and places.
Are an enclave strategy and hypertext as resistance mutually contradictory? Mutually reinforcing? Or irrelevant to one another?