Presentation at the forum event of 'Code Red'
The Performance Space, Sydney, November 23, 1997
"Erkenne die Lage" (Gottfried Benn)
It is my personal commitment to combine cyber pragmatism and media
activism with pleasurable forms of European nihilism. Not the
apocalyptic, conservative culture of complaint which post modernism
has left behind, but short heroic epics on the everyday life of
the media, reporting from within the belly of the Beast, fully
aware of its own futile existence, compared to the millennial
powers to be. We aren't salespeople, trying to sell the award
winning model amongst the digital cities, some exotic Amsterdam
blend of old and new media or yet another disastrous set of ideas,
made in Europe. Instead, we are trying to exchange models, arguments
and experiences on how to organise our cultural and political
activities, finance media projects and create informal networks
of trust that will make life in this Babylon bearable.
New media is a dirty business, full of traps and seductive offers
to work for 'the other side'. There are no ways to keep your hands
clean. The computer is a deadly machine when it comes to inclusion
and exclusion. We, the workers on the conceptual forefront of
cyberculture, have to admit that we are (not yet) politically
correct and have failed so far to pass the PC-test. This is not
because these criteria are deliberately neglected, but because
the passions lie elsewhere. For the time being, the struggle is
about the definition of the terms under which the 'information
society' will become operational. The 'Short Summer of the Internet',
now rushing to its close, is about the production of cultural
and political concepts, which may, or may not, be implemented
on a much larger scale. What network architecture will be used?
Do we accept the dominant software and screen design or do we
look for alternatives? Is there still space for theory and reflection,
meaningless playing around? Is the production stress overruling
creativity? Later on we will find current concepts back as 3D-animation,
javascripts or human-machine interfaces. The terminal workers,
producing one demo after another (as Peter Lunenfeld has recently
described it) are determining future formats of the new media
which will shortly become standards, ready to be commodified.
A further growth of new media products may need a phase of consolidation
on the level of marketable products. The 'digital revolution'
could therefore soon reach its counter-revolution, the Digital
Thermidor (let us all hope that it will not turn violent against
its Wired-visionaries that once so passionately preached their
'Californian ideologies'). There is less and less reason to make
fun of the 'Dinosaur behaviour' of the apparently outdated and
'tired' multinational corporations. Restructuring programs are
in place now. The CEOs have listened carefully to the cyber-libertarian
visionaries and have drawn their own conclusions. The network
economy is well under way - and so is the 'Long Crisis'. Kevin
Kelly's saga of the 'Long Boom' (in Wired magazine) turned out
to be a hilarious mistake in the light of the current Asian (now
global) currency crisis and its simultaneous environmental disaster.
But sure he will keep on insisting that we simply have to route
around the problems. Economics are benevolent if you are on a
religious mission. As John Perry Barlow once said about the Internet,
connecting every synapse with any other synapse in the world:
"It is not a good thing or bad thing, but it is a holy thing."
And believers can ignore any crisis, as long as it not theirs.
"Holding the Negative." (Andre Simon)
The political economy of new media is not a favourite topic on
conferences that deal with art and technology. Dry economic facts
about the upcoming take-over of this emerging branch may spoil
the celebration of the Computer-Aided-Renaissance. The belief
that many small Davids can beat a few big Goliaths is still around.
The ideology of economic liberalism has entered the rational of
the creative part of the virtual class in a deep, unconscious
way. The same can be said of state officials who still hold powerful
positions in financing new media projects. But the fact is that
the gold rush is over. Prices of web-design have fallen sharply.
We can see the rise of the html-slaves, employed without contracts
or health insurance, producing code for little or no money. Small
businesses disappear, not only ISPs but also in the art and design
sector. On the macro-economic level we have witnessed an unprecedented
series of mergers in the telecommunication and media sector. This
has led, for example, to the near monopoly position of WorldCom
(which now owns 60% of the access business in the USA). Or take
the Spanish telecom giant Telefonica and its Intranet, which will
soon control the entire Spanish speaking world. We do not need
to mention Microsoft here.
This may only be the return of the suppressed, after a period
of post-modern comfort, in this case late monopoly capitalism.
The undermining of the promising small and decentralised 'many-to-many'
ideology also comes from within the IT-sector. The development
of the ultimate multi-media device, web-TV, turns out to be a
classical Trojan Horse. The much hated one-to-many television,
news and entertainment industries have now found a way to neutralise
a potential competitor. Soon the content of web and TV will be
the same. In this respect, all these push media are claiming the
available bandwidth. Older features of the Net, like the news
groups, with their democratic and decentralised logic, are dying
out and are being replaced by monitored and edited on-line magazines
and chat rooms. Internal surveillance of net-use and private e-mail
is on the rise due to the introduction of intranets of buildings,
companies and entire countries. Another alarming tendency may
be the withdrawal from the Internet of universities and research
centres that are now working with much faster and secure computer
networks. This dark picture results in the question -- What elements
of the glory days of net hype, dating back to the period of 1989-1992,
remain? Perhaps the answer is the phrase "On the Internet no one
knows you are a dog." Indeed, and no one cares: a tragic end of
the once so liberating politics of identity. What counts now are
the commercial use of avatars, the number of hits on a site ("2
million a day"), the rise of webvertisement and the final putting
into place of electronic commerce.
What form of organisation could media activism take? While some
truly discouraging stories from the economic forefront are on
the rise, it is good to keep returning to the old question:" What
is to be done?" A return of negative thinking could play an important
role in the development of strategies for media activism. There
is plenty of good will, and ruthless cynicism. What lacks is playful
negativism, a nihilism on the run, never self-satisfied. Not just
nomadic as a Lebensphilosophie, but rather tactical, an ever changing
strategy of building infrastructures and leaving them, when the
time has come, and move onwards. The explorations into the fields
of the negative not only imply hampering the evil forces of global
corporate capitalism, but also formulating a critique of the dominant
alternative formula: the Non Governmental Organisation. The NGO
is not just a model for aid organisations that have to correct
the lack of government policies. It is today's one and only option
to change society: open up an office, start fund-raising, lease
a xerox-machine, send out faxes... and there you have your customised
insurrection. "How to make the most of your rebellion." The professionalism
inside the office culture of these networked organisations is
the only model of media-related politics if we want to have a
(positive) impact, or "make a difference." (as the ads once called
it). We will soon have to reject this bureaucratic and ritualised
media model altogether, with its hierarchies, management models,
its so-called efficiency. "The Revolution will not be Organised."
These are not the words of some chaotic anarcho-punkers or eco-ravers,
calling for spontaneous revolt, right now, tonight. The crisis
of the Organisation is our 'condition humane' in this outgoing
media age. And it may as well be the starting point for a new,
open conspiracy that is ready to anticipate on the very near cyber-future.
Not anymore as a Party or Movement, nor as a network of offices
(with or without headquarter), new forms of organisation may be
highly invisible, not anymore focussed on institutionalization.
These small and informal communities easily fall apart and regroup
in order to prevent the group from being fixed to a certain identity.
"The site less visited."
Media activism nowadays is not about the expression of truth or
a higher goal. It is about the art of getting access (to buildings,
networks, resources), hacking the power and withdrawing at the
right moment. The current political and social conflicts are way
too fluid and complex to be dealt with in such one-dimension models
like propaganda, "publicity" or "edutainment." It is not sufficient
to just put your information out on a home-page, produce a video
or pamphlet etc. and then just wait until something happens. The
potential power of mass media has successfully been crippled.
Today, reproduction alone is meaningless. Most likely, tactical
data are replicating themselves as viruses. Programmed as highly
resistant, long lasting memes, the new ideas are being constructed
to weaken global capitalism in the long term. No apocalyptic or
revolutionary expectations here, despite all rumours of an upcoming
Big Crash of the financial markets. Unlike the Russian communist
world empire, 'casino capitalism' (Robert Kurz) will not just
disappear overnight. Heaps of deprivation and alienation is ahead
of us. But this should not be the reason to lay back and become
console socialists. We need organisations of our time, like the
global labour union of digital artisans, networks of travellers,
mailing list-movements, a gift economy of public content. These
are all conceptual art pieces to start with, realised on the spot,
somewhere, for no particular reason, lacking global ambition.
These models will not be envisioned by this or that Hakim Bey.
They are lived experiences, before they become myths, ready to
be mediated and transformed on their journey through time.
Media activism constantly mediates between the real and the virtual,
switches back and forth, unwilling to choose sides for the local
or the global. Tactical media are creating temporary hybrids of
old school political data and the aesthetics of new media, which
deals with interactivity and interface design (see the article
by David Garcia and me in nettime/ZKP4). As a next step, this
is being implemented on both the level of the social personal
level where our wetware bodies meet, and that of the 'non-located'
technical network architecture. Activists are developing now 'negative
software', (anti-)racism search engines, (temporary) public terminals,
free groupware, anti-aesthetic browsers against both Microsoft
and Netscape, electronic parasites that live on corporate software
and content.
Recording is not enough. Reality.net, equipped with tons of web
cams can be fortunate and collect evidence, but it can as well
add to the spreading paranoia about the surveillance by the Corporation-State.
Sometimes it may be appropriate to detect and delete camera's.
Neither eco-fundamentalist nor techno-utopian, media activists
are taking risks and acting freely. This may sometimes be in a
criminal way, if necessary (like computer hackers), thereby ignoring
legal standards (censorship, copyright). The narrow frameworks
that reformists have negotiated over time, like 'privacy' and
'freedom of expression' have to be defended and practiced openly.
These can only be guaranteed with the help of an independent,
democratic media structure, not owned or controlled by the state.
Big media corporations will be the last to defend media freedom.
It would be foolish to expect anything in this respect from Murdoch,
Bertelsmann or Time-Warner. The same can be said of the efforts
of isolated political lobbying groups which fight for better legislation...
A 'light' and independent media infrastructure is not merely expressing
diversity. It is not enough to correct the main strain media and
facilitate communities with their own channels. Being a 'difference
engine' on the level of representation may put out a lot of useful
public content, but it does not touch on the 'media question'.
What interests us most are the ideological structures which are
written into the software and architecture. But it's not enough
to subvert or pervert this powerful and still mysterious structure.
It is possible to continue the earlier approaches of freeware
and shareware within the now hyper-commercial environment of new
media. The same can be said of the efforts to develop databases
of free content, a now still marginal activity that will soon
gain importance once everyone has to pay for the content to download.
This public sphere cannot come into being in a purely global,
commercial environment and obviously also not in places where
the state has absolute control over the nation's intranet and
firewalls. It is in this 'third place', the public part of cyberspace,
that the media activism will start to flourish.
© Geert Lovink