net critique by Geert Lovink

Shanghai’s State of the Creative Arts at the Opening of the Rockbund Art Museum

The Rockbund Art Museum, situated on the Northern tip of the Shanghai Bund area, opened May 2010 in conjunction with the 2010 Shanghai World Expo (expected visitors 70 million). The museum is part of a redevelopment area and is housed in the 1932 art deco building of the Royal Asiatic Society, once location of a natural history museum. As part of larger real estate development, still under construction at the time of the opening, the museum will fit into a most exclusive part of the inner city. According to the brochure of the Rockbund Investment Corporation that also owns the new museum the “urban renaissance” at the birthplace of modern Shanghai celebrates “the glamour of heritage reborn.” The aim is “to create the most elite luxury area in Shanghai.” Rockbund will re-establish the northern tip of the Bund as a hub for arts and culture. Apartments are sold with the promise “to live in the lap of glamour.”

Shanghai is a classic example of creative industries’ marriage with real estate developers. There is no active cultural policy of the state, apart from the top-down decisions where to allocate so-called ‘creative clusters’. These areas throughout the city consist of former manufacturing facilities in order to boost the prices of these former textile buildings and create ‘cool’ neighbourhoods. It is unclear if these industries have been driven out of the metropolitan area because of rising prices or if they left because of delivery problems and low rent elsewhere. Cause and effect chains picked up speed and are impossible to distinguish. As it was explained to me, the creative clusters are mainly occupied by more or less traditional medium-size businesses. What co-workers initiatives like Xin Dan Wei do is facilitate office spaces for freelancers and small groups that just started their own firm.

I interviewed Hsiangling Lai who arrived in September 2009 from Taiwan to take up the job as the director of the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM). Director of marketing and development Shi Hantao accompanied her. Ms. Lia would like the museum to be a platform for issues in contemporary culture, a crossover approach of urban issues and visual arts that should also refer to the heritage of the original Shanghai Museum, which was located in the same building. International start curator Hou Hanru will do an exhibit, which asks the question what role a contemporary arts museum can play. Hanru will ask foreign artists to do site-specific projects. In constrast, the Shanghai Art Museum will not go beyond the milestones in art history like Picasso or Dali. How do art and life relate, Lai asks. “In Shanghai ordinary people do not visit contemporary museums that often and so far there are no plans from the municipality to build a contemporary arts museum. What they want are private developers to establish a school, an art district, theatre or museum. Galleries are seen as commercial entities that deal with Chinese contemporary arts.” Instead RAM intends to build international relationships and work with overseas curators and art exchange programs.

In conversations the curator/artist Shumin Lin, also Taiwanese, was mentioned. He was recently appointed CEO of the development of the Zendai Himalayas Centre real estate corporation. Lin, a “PhD-holding hypnotist” is known for his light boxes, video installations and holographic art. Lin is said to be “influenced by Buddhism, in particularly the concept of reincarnation and explore themes of rebirth, humanity, humility and universality.” The Himalayas Centre will include a lifestyle hotel, theatre, retail space and a modern art museum. The complex is located in front of the Shanghai New International Expo Centre, “an exclusive high-end residential area.” Before Shu-Min Lin became president of Zinnia Creative Development Co., Ltd. and Shanghai Zendai Himalayas Real Estate he was involved in the 2006 Shanghai Biennale and was on the jury of 2007 Ars Electronica competition.

In the case of RAM the board of the Rockbund still is the sole sponsor of the museum. I asked director Lin if she wasn’t worried in case of a recession or collapse of the real estate market, what was going to happen to RAM. The absence of a cultural policy by the government is greatly felt. The Mori Art Museum in Tokyo on the 53^rd floor of the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower is mentioned as a model here. A few years ago a centre with artists studios was opened in a rural area, a one-hour drive by car outside of Shanghai. After an initial success artists moved out again because it was too far away. Audiences didn’t show up. Artists are drawn to the metropolitan atmosphere, even though rents are high there. The Shanghai visual arts centre M50 is often mentioned as a successful model how galleries and studios can cluster together. The Shangart gallery, famous for its early promotion of Chinese contemporary arts in the 1990s and that has been so successfully expanding throughout Shanghai and the world, is also part of M50. Another area would be Tianzifang, a few narrow streets with “boutiques and laid- back cafés that have been drawing crowds of yuppies, fashionistas, designers and expatriates.”

RAM intends to go beyond the exhibition hall and will emphasize the role of arts education. Because of the highly competitive entry examinations there is hardly any emphasis on the ‘liberal arts’ in China. There is simply no interest. In her previous jobs working for museums in Taiwan Lai treated education as a must. The issue is not so much the level of artists. Some of the art academies in China are raising interesting new generations of visual artists. RAM likes to work with the last years’ students, the ‘young talents’, and set up a program for them in a small space outside of the museum. Once a year RAM would like to dedicate an exhibition to the ‘creative arts’, be it architecture, fashion, graphic or industrial design.

In response to the creative cluster policy Ms. Lia recommends to put more emphasis on software, and not on the hardware. People, not buildings. There should be mechanisms developed to encourage talents. Ms. Lia doesn’t see the amateurs as a threat for the visual arts. Amateurs remain within the limits of the technical; they execute and because of their lack of time to do research rarely expand their talents in the direction of the creative arts. Having said that, RAM is open for interesting projects, be it from professionals or amateurs, like a video art competition in which the museum would like to showcase young work, also through its website.

Peasant Da Vincis is the opening exhibition of the Rockbund Art Museum, curated by the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. The exhibit features dozens of ‘cultural readymades’, built by Chinese farmers. The objects on display are a mix of imaginary machines, model airplanes, mini submarines, flying saucers, wooden helicopters and mechanical robots, carefully curated by Cai Guo-Quiang who constructed a few of the objects himself. Around fifty tiny birds fly around in the space, embodying the spirit of the countryside tinkerers. The artworks are anthropological artefacts, collected on a return mission to the Chinese countryside. They lack both the playful imagination of Jean Tinguely and the post-industrial violence a la Survival Research Laboratories. The constructions and designs remain within the known shapes of the car, boat, kite, plane and robot. What’s on display is the pleasure of building, in this case, constructed by ordinary Chinese farmers. Their aesthetics of unlikely variation borders to techno-primitivism. Not so much unrealistic the machines are deeply conceptual, and this is what must have been the attraction to put them on display in the arts context: pop conceptualism. As so often with everyday objects they only become works of art because of the context created by the artist-curator, assisted by a team of exhibition builders, photographers, critics and transport workers. Cia’s Peasant Da Vincis utilizes art as a vehicle to reflect on the changes in the Chinese countryside and the gained freedom, the ‘anti gravity’ of the peasant imaginary. Bottom line: the exhibition is the artwork.

What is being played out here is possible futures for the ‘Chinese peasant’ beyond migration and poverty. What Cai Guo-Qiang has done here is a subtle play with the Shanghai 2010 World Expo “Better City, Better Life” slogan by bringing peasants ‘art works’ into the city. The larger question here is how the arts dreams up a newly constituted countryside in a prosperous China in which the promised redistribution of wealth from the cities to the peasants has, at least in part, materialized. Some hints in this direction can be found in the catalogue essay by Zhang Yiwu who talks about the “possibility of the emergence of the Chinese peasant. (..) What Cia Guo-Qiang has discovered here are self-taught peasants inventing out of their own ambition.” The peasant Da Vincis “attempt to use their strange inventions to break through the restrictions of habit and conventional wisdom, and show how free and open their minds are, how rich their inner worlds.”

A Shanghai artist I met called the exhibition “sad”. No doubt there are romantic overtones. Cai Guo-Qiang has been collecting these industrial folk objects since 2005 and clearly put a lot his own enthusiasm into the exhibition. His own installation, filling the first floor, is a room full of flying kites, held up in the air by tiny propellers. Elegant, nearly invisible pocket video projectors project the kites. The poetics of this massive modesty is caused through the hidden tech. The other Cia art piece is a purpose-build rusty screening space in the shape of an aircraft carrier, on display in the entrance hall of the neighbouring yet-to-be renovated 1930s bank building.

It is not the simplicity and hardship of the peasant life that is celebrated here. What is striking is the absence of electronic equipment and ‘new media’. What we get to see is an early industrial aesthetic, a passion for speed and its flipside: the accident (as theorized in such a sublime way by Paul Virilio). The tinkering peasant is caught in the early to mid-20th century techno imaginary. Like in so many now classic Chinese contemporary art works of Cai Guo-Qiang’s generation (b. 1957) is the use of historical ingredients to create a deeply poetic atmosphere that is immediately understood and appreciated by the viewer. A visit to the countryside in order to recharge one’s creative batteries? The problem here is not one of brutal appropriation. All contributing rural artists are properly credited. In the exhibition, the video documentation and the catalogue we can find out a lot about their personal lives and backgrounds. It is also pleasant that there were no references whathowever to Mao’s reforging of the Communist Party towards the peasants culminating in the peasant cult during the ‘cultural revolution’. However, there is no doubt a grown interest in ‘the countryside’. Perhaps we could say that China’s wild phase of urbanization and related hyper growth is coming to a close. As designer Lou Yongqi of Tektao Urban Design Consulting explained me, there is no future anymore for farmers in the Netherlands. That chapter is closed. What we have in this part of Western Europe are large-scale agricultural industries, operated by a tiny workforce. In countries like China with hundreds of millions of farmers there is still a good chance to introduce sustainable, profitable models for modern farming. Yongqi’s Design Havests project, situated on the Shanghai island Chongming is a design & innovation pilot with a remarkable global involvement to “revitalize rural villages in China by improving quality of life through the environment, communication, local business, public and domestic infrastructure. By creating links to an urban and rural network of social and economic exchange, communities are supported to foster everyday sustainability.”

Peasant Da Vincis transmits a strong sense of personal dedication of the artist-curator. There is no hint of any exploitation. Yet, what remains is a strong sense of joy mixed with melancholy. In his catalogue essay David A. Ross writes “the museum has to find ways to the expanded notion of the creative.” Peasant Da Vincis achieves this goal, but it would be a true challenge to position this project in the midst of our global, digital, networked reality, which is—and we all know this—precisely Made in China. What is our craftsmanship? How do the lightness and indifference of the digital buzz weight against the ‘longevity’ of agricultural life? Is the intensity of the real-time presence making us blind and deaf for the poetic qualities of our contemporary condition? Will the overkill of recording devices forcing us to the small towns and villages of our ancestors in order to regain the capacity to tell a story, in this case to recast the central role of the Chinese peasants into downtown Shanghai?

Why these characters are labelled Da Vinci remains unclear as they do not even pretend to be inventors. Obviously Cai Gou-Qiang admires and celebrates his hobby inventors—but that doesn’t turn them into Leonardo Da Vincis. Defying ‘basic engineering principles’ alone does not turn passionate builders into visionaries. What lacks here is exactly the futuristic element, and this is what turns the exhibit into a romantic exercise. It is homage to the Chinese peasant and their transformation, and sacrifices, to make possible the incredible urbanization (under the guidance of the neo-liberal Communist Party). It is the peasant who made the cities—and this is simple yet strong message amidst the hundreds of Shanghai skyscrapers, on this symbolic place of the Bund, in this historic year of the Shanghai World Expo.

Next posting on this blog was written during a visit to Shanghai (July 8-11, 2010) as a result of the Transit Labour Asia research platform, an Australian-European-Asian coalition of scholars, artists and cultural workers who focus on urban issues, migration and new media (arts). Their first stop was Shanghai, next ones will be Kalkota and Sydney. I visited the Rockbund Art Museum, the Xin Dan Wei co-workers space, Cultural Studies at Shanghai University, Tektao design studio and managed to do five interviews. On Friday the invited group did presentations at the local Goethe Institute where also screenings took place. A whole lot could be said about the format of such translocal work gatherings, which in the past would have had the ‘tactical media’ label, and nowadays more look like a cultural version of the BarCamp, the temporary media lab or unconference happenings. One could also put it under the larger umbrella of distributed research networks. Here you can find an explanation of the organizers how they define the platform concept. If this is the age of social networking we’d better start playing around with formats that builds on this dominant social formation. Wintercamp, organized by the Institute of Network Cultures in March 2009, was one such attempt. Here is the group photo:

I just posted an interview with me, conducted by the German artist Juliane Stiegele, here on my pages site. It’s in German and is meant for an upcoming publication on the issue of slowing down time. The book will be called Utopia Toolbox. She wrote to me: “The contributions, texts, interviews, artworks, pictures are coming from various directions: artists, philosophers, practitioners, even a clairvoyant is interviewed – as it was a habit in ancient Greece to ask the ‘Theresias’ before crucial action was taken.  It deals with design in a most wide sense: not about how to design another wonderful chair or art object for a group of chosen people, but more about how to design the space  b e t w e e n  table and chair, also of course the space between people. It is made out of relentless curiosity for the future. The book will contain a lot of questions and some answers, and some do-it-yourself-performances for an instant test-scenario. A handbook to be used effectively in everyday life. A tool of encouragement.”

Notes on the Memory of the Future Conference, Gent (B), June 25, 2010

I just got back from a long day Amsterdam-Gent-Amsterdam on the train (the ‘very fast’ Thalys (TGV) train had a delay of 55 minutes–such a joke!) where I attended an excellent one day conference curated by Stoffel Debuysere. The event examined the role of memory within a digital culture. Even though it was organized by the Belgian Archipel research project was not an academic event in the narrow sense. The wider agenda was to create a critical agenda for an ambitious new media start-ups/city library/audio-visual archive area situated next to the socialist-heroic Vooruit hall where the conference took place.  Early June 2010 Gent city officials announced the winner of the architecture for the so-called Waalse Krook area.

I closed the event with an on-stage dialogue with the Australian/US STS theorist Geoffrey Bowker. I was very excited about this because I have long been reading his work and looked forward meeting him. In his opening speech Geoffrey emphasized the role of visual language and material in the way we organize our collective memory. What we need to do is not just create databases but try to capture the aura of a place or a situation (a la Benjamin). The conclusion of his intense work on protocols and standards was that we should understand our responsibility for the very architectures of technology. This are the founding years and we are configuring the future of memory–and it better be experimental! We both urged to work in multi-disciplinary teams in which artists and designers should play a pivotal role. As Geoffrey Bowker says: this the epoch of potential memory. Digitizing cultural heritage alone will me meaningless unless develop new ways to explore them, visualize and navigate these datasets–and new vocabularies to talk about them (Geoffrey showed the multimedia scholarly online journal Vectors to illustrate this). The difference of storage and memory is crucial here. Memory gets activated by thinking, when we actively utilize information in a our own life.

I am not a fan of the ‘forgetting’ approach. I am interested in the politics and aesthetics of remembering. I recently read Delete–The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Victor Mayer-Schönberger. He was the next presenter after Bowker. The problem of discussing ‘Google’ in the context of archives and remembering, as Mayer-Schönberger was doing is that the short-term technological data organization Google-style is not done in the name of the public benefit. What is not being taken into account here is why search queries produce certain links, and why this service is for free. Never forget that Google collects data for a commercial purpose. It is not a public archive. Besides this, the Google search engine is getting more and more ‘polluted’, coming up with useless and predictable search outcomes. It is very unlikely that most Web 2.0 application that we now so frantically use, will not be around anymore in the next decade. Nothing is as fragile and temporary as large commercial databases.

We do not need to remember to forget. Regulatory regimes, market forces and History will all too soon wipe out the world’s data centres. We do not need digital abstinence to get there. It’s a banal observation that we not delete enough. An expiration date for information could be useful. It is indeed interesting to design information decay, or rusting, as Mayer-Schönberger proposes. But let’s not get attracted to the romantic politics of ‘let us remember to forget’. How we shape and organize our memory is determined by cultural politics and education. Instead of focusing on forgetting it’s much better to practice (and study) new shapes of memory.

In the German newspaper FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) of Monday June 21, 2010, I got a piece on the Italian media theorist Franco Berardi and his work on the psychopathology of information overload. Here it is, in German. Early May I met ‘Bifo’ in his hometown Bologna and soon after read two of his recently translated books in English, The Soul at Work (Semiotext(e), 2009) and Precarious Rhapsody (Minor Compositions, 2009). Soon, the extended English original is going to be published, somewhere. I will let you know where.

This week I taught a class on critical internet research at the European Graduate School, high up in the Alps in Saas-Fee. It was the third time (after 2007 and 2009), this time as an EGS professor. After Hendrik Speck, Friedrich Kittler, Bruce Sterling and Lev Manovich it was my turn. The topics we covered ranged from the ‘neurological turn in internet criticism’, the theory of real-time, media activism in the age of Web 2.0, the politics of open knowledge production (Wikipedia), the cultural logic of search to the Web and the Self. I wrapped up the class with an evening lecture for all classes on the critique of ICT for development, humanitarian aid in the work of Linda Polman, Dambisa Moyo and Renzo Martens’ Enjoy Poverty. I related this controversial film on the Western emergency aid system to the rise of mobile phone use in Africa and the fight over strategic resources such as Coltan and Tantalum in the same region of central/eastern Congo in which Martens’ film is set.

To experience the circle Italian autonomist thinkers in their own biotope is certainly a privilege. Uninomade is a network from ‘the social movements’ and organizes its meetings in different parts of the country. The topic of the Mestre meeting on May 7/8 2010 (near Venice)  was ‘digital commons’.

Special feature of this meeting was the presence of four international speakers: UK cyber-feminist theorist Sadie Plant, P2P evangelist Michael Bauwens, anti-globalization academic Nick Dyer-Witheford and me. Simultaneous translation was provided. Amongst the known Italian speakers were Tiziana Terranova (organizer of the international panel), Matteo Pasquinelli, Luca Casarini (ex Tutti Bianchi) and, featured as the last speaker, Antonio Negri. Paolo Virno and Sergio Bologna were not able to come. Their contributions were taped on video and played during the conference (attended by approx. 100 people). Events like this clearly show that Italy has taken over the role of France as the factory of Europe’s leading intellectuals. The fact that this group of thinkers is marginalized in their own country, and many were forced to study and work elsewhere has only made them stronger. In particular amongst the younger generation there is a serious attempt to develop a global or at least European perspective. It is no coincidence the related internet server is called Global Project (with most content in Italian only…though it would be no punishment for the world to learn Italian!).

It was a sensation to witness the Italians revving up each other. The (mainly) male speakers are so in love with their own rhetoric. They admire their own poetic language to such an extend that you get the feeling that its taking over. At first hand it seems as if they are reading a text, but that’s not the case. None of them was using the internet or prepared a powerpoint presentation. Needless to say it is one big feast of self-referential concepts. There are references made to studies, and sometimes even empirical works, but the general trend is rather broad and dense. What is important is to contribute to the current debates amongst Italian comrades. There are references made to what is written in the US and elsewhere in Europe but they are rarely specific. What is also absent is the realization of the actual importance of this specific Italian discourse in the world at large. There is no apparent dialogue apparent with the outside world. Conceptual hegemony within the Italian world of social movements is all that counts.

In this context digital commons is mostly discussed within the framework of the so-called second generation of autonomous work, the knowledge workers. The argument goes like this. The period of industrial decline is accompanied by outsourcing of the production of material goods. Since the mid-nineties we see a growth of immaterial goods related to the manipulation of symbols, media and code. In this age of rapid transformation and crisis, the concept of ‘commons’ is (re-)introduced. The Italian understanding of commons is one of neither state nor market, and this is where its political potential is located. Commons is post-welfare state, and post-state socialism (in the tradition of autonomous critique of  Eurocommunism and the historical compromise). For some (Negri amongst them) commons holds the promise of yet-to-come communism, whereas others shy away to make this lingo-political association. Commons can be anything, even rubbish, but in this context it is mainly used in the meaning of commonly produced knowledge (as a result of ‘ horizontal experiences’). The culture of open networks is actual realization of this idea. Networks are breaking ideological and social barriers. This leads to questions like:  how can we prevent new initiatives from privatizing the new wealth of code, concepts and social relationships that the network commons produces?

There was a moment that the networks made us believe that there was no ‘work’ anymore. But that’s gone. The liberating phase of the internet is over and it is now a medium that is tightly integrated into society. What we now have is the self-enterprise, non-typical and invisible. The confrontation of company and workers no longer happens. In his pre-recorded message Sergio Bologna spoke about the difficulties of organizing autonomous workers and their health care issues. Andrea Fumagalli mentioned the young temp workers on the fringes of the fashion industry, which are paid very little but who nonetheless continue to work because of some possible fame in the future. It is seen as a possibility to within a famous company and celebrities for very little or no money (as interns).

Paolo Virno mostly spoke about language, a topic which I could not directly connect to the digital commons debate. Language is not a tool, for instance, of thought. It is a way of life and has its own rules. Linguistic work. Speaking is not an activity that adds to other activities. It is important to understand how speaking reorganizes our activities. Why is our life so marked by the cult of creativity, Virno asked. There is creativity that applies rules and creativity that changes the rules. In the one case you apply the rules, like in chess. and in the other you invent a new game.

What stroke me was the absence of references to Creative Commons and free software/open source. With the exception of Michael Bauwens, no one talked about this. It could very well be that the spreakers and audience of this particular event had no insight knowledge of these somewhat legal and technical matters. However, it is a bit strange if you want to discuss the ‘digital commons’ not to cover these terrains. Digging a bit deeper it seemed that both CC and FLOSS is seen as ‘reformist’ projects. So be it, but why not critique them as such? Funny enough there is a certain fascination in these radical leftist circles for US techno-libertarian positions of people like Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler. This is quite odd if you take the slightly conservative, pro-capitalist agendas of these people into account. Here we clearly run into the non-technical background of many of the Italians. Vitalist in spirit it is in particular the constitution of work, and (precarious) working conditions, that matter. As Franco Berardi points at, the crucial term here is ‘composition’. Instead of such a subject-based politics we need to wait for a next generation that understands underlying technologies and is indeed willing to critique reformist agendas. It is only then that we really discussed the many faces that a term like ‘digital commons’ has in contemporary global society.

(German translation of this blog posting here on the Berliner Gazette site)

It is easy to agree with Martha Nussbaum’s latest manifesto essay Not For Profit. Yes, democracy needs the humanities. There is too much emphasis in society on economic growth–and education is not counter-balancing this tendency enough. We need more music classes, theatre, literature, foreign languages (that is, in countries like the US, Japan etc.) in primary and secondary schools.

But from a critical new media perspective I am not very charmed with the ‘liberal arts’ model. Time and again I have to make the experience that the holistic all-rounders with a broad and general background are our weakest students. How come? Why does a general upbringing makes kids so out of touch, in non-weird way? It would be great if the ‘liberal arts’ approach would be radical untimely and be despised as a breading ground for young dissents, wild talent, impossible personalities. Instead it is just irrelevant. The liberal arts approach claims that their students do not derail, drop out and become better people. This could be the case. But what they lack is a basic interest in what’s going in society. They lack passion for the politics and culture of our fucked-up techno-society. Many of them are indifferent, if not hostile, to programming and code. Respect. But what lacks here is a Project. Of course they do not want to become old-school activists. Liberal arts students cannot become ‘creative’ either because that’s too commercial. At best they are slightly counter-cultural for a while, but never in a direct confrontation with the Authorities. Martha Nussbaum is not discussing all this, of course.  Not For Profit doesn’t ask any strategic question. It is no longer enough to argue for more arts and humanities, just for the sake of it, without a program, without a soul, without a warm link to the dirty networked techno spaces that we inhabit.

The multidisciplinary approach that is celebrated here is a lie, exactly because society is not multidisciplinary. The hard sciences are not criticized or attacked. Their dominant position in terms of funding (85%)  is not questioned and its links to the corporate world not mentioned. Instead, what we hear is charming plea to give the humanities, bitte, bitte,  some air play. This is done from a position of weakness, without wit or irony.

What Martha Nussbaum proposes is arts and humanities as a compensation for the ‘cultivation of the technical’. Instead of fighting for ‘liberal arts’ as antidote I would argue to bring out, to play out, the technological in the humanities, and stop seeing them as opposites. Painting is a technique, so is dancing. Writing is. These are basic insights of media theory that are apparently not shared by everyone.

We can no longer uncritically use arts and humanities in some sort of chess games that we play against economic interests. A lot of the arts and humanities as they are being taught these days are dusty remainders of a fading bourgeois middle class that is under threat from mass culture, consumerism and globalization. Its curriculum is deeply anti-technical in an unconscious way, that is, unpronounced and uninformed, as sentiment, not as a programmatic statement. Martha Nussbaum has managed to not mention television, computerization or the internet once. But what do the humanities have to say about these developments? A lot, of course. Our culture is a digital culture. We cannot leave that out of the equation, and only blame the low profit-driven motives. We can no longer call for the imagination. The imagination has gone technical. Thoughtful citizens express themselves in ones and zeros. But this banal observation has yet to be incorporated in the philosophy a la Nussbaum.

There is an article of me in the latest issue of the Australian arts magazine Artlink. The theme of this issue is The Underground. I haven’t seen the issue yet so I can’t say what its main message is. There is a slight return of the term underground in the mainstream press. They need it. We all need it. Even if it so clearly no longer exists, it’s got to be there. In this relentless media world, there are no more shadows, or places that operate outside of the digital networks and visual culture machines like YouTube or Flickr.  We are hiding in the light. All that’s left is Style. What we need is counter culture and the idea of the informal, the temporary and the glamor of decay. The piece I wrote for Artlink doesn’t deal with the underground concept and rather deals with the strategies of media activism in the age of Web 2.0.

I certainly plan to join the Facebook exodus. I am confident a lot of  others will do so as well. It was just a matter of time, waiting for the right moment. Now it’s there: Monday May 31 and it’s called Quit Facebook Day.

I don’t think it is necessary to, again, list all the arguments against the policies of this corporation. Just read through the campaign website. Where to start? If you are in doubt, for instance read the latest entry of Nicholas Carr on his Rough Type blog.

After that I am keen to discuss alternatives like Crabgrass (developed by riseup.net), Diaspora and perhaps even Ning (as a commercial in-between stage for the addicts–kick that habbit!), and many other applications and platforms that are out there.

Social networking is a cultural logic, a skill (in certain stages)–and a menace (in this time and age). It’s going to be a good thing that social networking  will  evolve from large corporate platforms to flexible, scalable tools. This happened to blogs before as well (think of the move by many from Blogger.com and Blogspot to Wordpress). Let’s fragment the monopolies into  mille plateaux!