net critique by Geert Lovink

0. The internet turns out to be neither the problem nor the solution for the global recession. As an indifferent bystander it doesn’t lend itself easily as a revolutionary tool. The virtual has become the everyday. The New Deal is presented as green, not digital. The digital is a given. This low-key position presents an opportunity to rethink the Web 2.0 hype. How might we understand our political, emotional and social involvement in internet culture over the next few years?

1. News media is awash with ‘economic crisis’, indulging in its self-generated spectacle of financial meltdown. Experts are mobilised, but only to produce the drama of dissensus. Programmed disagreement is the consensus of daily news. Crisis, after all, is the condition of possibility for capitalism. Unlike the dotcom crash in 2000-2001, when the collapse of high-tech stocks fueled the global recession, the internet has so far managed to stay out of the blame game. Web 2.0 only suffers mild side effects from the odd collection of platforms and services, from Google to Wikipedia, Photobucket, Craigslist, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Habbo and so-called regional players such as Baidu and 51.com. Despite its benign existence, there still is hyper-growth wherever you look. Web 2.0 applications and platforms remain ‘new’ but show a tendency to get lost inside the boring, stressful and uncertain working life of the connected billions.

2. Social networks are technologies of entertainment and diffusion. The social reality they create is real, but as a technology of immediacy you can’t get no satisfaction. We initially love them for their distraction from the torture of now-time. Networking sites are social drugs for those in need of the Human that is located elsewhere in time or space. It is the pseudo Other that we are connecting to. Not the radical Other or some real Other. We systematically explore weakness and vagueness and are pressed to further enhance the  exhibition of the Self. ‘I might know you (but I don’t). Do you mind knowing me?’. The pleasure principle of entertainment thus diffuses social antagonisms – how does conflict manifest within the comfort zones of social networks and their tapestries of auto-customisation? The business-minded ‘trust doctrine’ has all but eliminated the open, dirty internet forums. Most Web 2.0 are echo chambers of the same old opinions and cultural patterns. As we can all witness, they are not exactly hotbeds of alternative sub-culture. What’s new are their ’social’ qualities: the network is the message. What is created here is a sense or approximation of the social. Social networks register a ‘refusal of work’. But our net-time, after all, is another kind of labour. Herein lies the perversity of social networks: however radical they may be, they will always be data-mined. They are designed to be exploited. Refusal of work becomes just another form of making a buck that you never see.

3. Social networking sites are as much fashion victims as everything else. They come and go. Their migration across space signals the enculturisation of software. While Orkut disappeared in G8 countries, it is still Big in Brazil. Is anyone still seriously investing in real estate in Second Life? What the online world needs is sustainable social relations. The moving herds that go from one server to the next merely demonstrate an impulsive grazing mentality: once the latest widgets are installed, it is time to move on. Sustainability is connected to scaleability. Here, we see lessons from the major social movements over the last 50 years. The force of accumulated social-political desires manifest, eventually, in national and global forums that permeate back into policy discourse and social practice: think March on Washington, 1963 (Black Civil Rights), Rio, 1992 (Earth Summit), Porto Alegre, 2001 (World Social Forum), Geneva and Tunis, 2003-2005 (World Summit on the Info-Society). None of these examples are exempt from critique. We note them here to signal the relationship between sustainability and scalar transformation. We are familiar with formats such as barcamps, unconferencing and have participated in DIY techno-workshops at those seasonal media arts festivals. But these are hardly instances of sustainability. Their temporality of tinkering is governed by the duration of the event. True, there is occasionally resonance back in the local hack-lab, but such practices are exclusive to techno-secret societies, not the networked masses. Social networking sites are remarkable for their capacity to scale. Their weakness is their seeming incapacity to effect political change in any substantive way. The valorisation of citizen-journalism is not the same as radical intervention, and is better understood as symptomatic of the structural logic of outsourcing media production and election campaign management.

4. From social to socialism is a small step for humankind – but a big step for the Western subject. What makes the social attractive, and socialism so old school and boring? What is the social anyway? We have to be aware that such postmodern academic language games do not deepen our our understanding of the issues, nor widen our political fantasies. We need imagination, but only if it illuminates concepts that transform concrete conditions. The resurrection of the social after its disappearance is not an appealing slogan. Some ideas have an almost direct access to our body. Others remain dead. This in particular counts for insider jargon such as rent, multitude, common, commons and communism. There’s a compulsion to self-referentiality here that’s not so different from the narcissistic default of so many blogs. What, then, are the collective concepts of the social networked masses? For now, they are engineered from the top-down by the corporate programmers, or they are outsourced to the world of widgets. Tag, Connect, Friend, Link, Share, Tweet. These are not terms that signal any form of collective intelligence, creativity or networked socialism. They are directives from the Central Software Committee. «Participation» in «social networks» will no longer work, if it ever did, as the magic recipe to transform tired and boring individuals into cool members of the mythological Collective Intelligence. If you’re not an interesting individual, your participation is not really interesting. Data clouds, after all, are clouds: they fade away. Better social networks are organized networks involving better individuals – it’s your responsibility, it’s your time. What is needed is an invention of social network software where everybody is a concept designer. Let’s kill the click and unleash a thousand million tiny tinkerers!

5. We are addicted to ghettoes, and in so doing refuse the antagonism of ‘the political’. Where is the enemy? Not on Facebook, where you can only have ‘friends’. What Web 2.0 lacks is the technique of antagonistic linkage. Instead, we are confronted with the Tyranny of Positive Energy. Life only consists of uplifting experiences. Depression is not a design principle. Wikipedia’s reliance on ‘good faith’ and its policing of protocols quite frequently make for a depressing experience in the face of an absence of singular style. There ain’t no ‘neutral point of view’. This software design principle merely reproduces the One Belief System. Formats need to be transformed if they are going to accommodate the plurality of expression of networked life. Templates function as zones of exclusion. But strangely, they also exclude the conflict of the border. The virus is the closest thing to conflict online. But viruses work in invisible ways and function as a generator of service labour for the computer nerd who comes in and cleans your computer.

6. The critique of simulation falls short here. There is nothing ‘false’ about the virtuality of social networking sites. They are about as real it gets these days. Stability accumulates for those hooked to networks. Things just keep expanding. More requests. More friends. More time for social-time. With the closure of factories comes the opening of data-mines. Privacy is so empty of curiosity that we are compelled to slap it on our Wall for all to see. If we are lucky, a Friend refurbishes it with a comment. And if you are feeling cheeky, then Throw A Sheep! You would be hard-pressed to notice any substantive change. But you will be required to do never-ending maintenance work to manage all your data feeds and updates. That’ll subtract a bit of time from your daily routine.

7. The Network will not be Revolutionized. What does this mean for Indymedia 2.0? The question of why indymedia.org failed and did not further develop into an active and open social networking site or clearly take up a position in the Web 2.0 debate is something that needs to be addressed (see nettime debate of May 2009). Have media activists already learnt enough of the Brechtian Indymedia Lehrstueck that started in the late nineties? Is global branding and branching, as in the case of Indymedia (one name, often similar design, sharing of servers, some syndication of content, etc.), still as important as it used to be? Indymedia met the challenge of scaleability in amazing ways only to discover its limits. Contamination seems key for transnational social-political networks. As do regular face-to-face meetings. Let your network connect with the concrete and adaptation and transformation will undoubtedly kick in. Then try reconnecting across networks (and other institutional and organizational forms) on the global scale. Conflict will already have multiplied and the primary condition of sustainability will be underway.

8. Web 2.0 is not for free. ‘Free as in free beer’ is not like ‘free as in freedom’. Open does not equal free. These days ‘free’ is just another word for service economies. The linux fiefdom know that all too well. We need to question naive campaigns that merely promote ‘free culture’ without questioning the underlying parasitic economy and the ‘deprofessionalization’ of cultural work. Pervasive profiling is the cost of this opening to ‘free market values’. As users and prosumers we are limited by our capacity as data producers. Our tastes and preferences, our opinions and movements are the market price to pay. At present, Facebook’s voluntary and enthusiastic auto-filing system on a mass scale represents the high point of this strategy. But we cannot succumb to the control paranoia and to the logic of fear. Let’s inject more kaos in it!  So what if you have your anti-whatever Facebook group? What does it change other than expanding your number of friends? Is deleting the radical gesture of 2009? Why not come up a more subversive and funny, anti-cyclical act? Are you also looking for rebel tactical tools?

9. Soon the Web 2.0 business model will be obsolete. It is based on the endless growth principle, pushed by the endless growth of consumerism. The business model still echoes the silly 90s dotcom model: if growth stagnates, it means the venture has failed and needs to be closed down. Seamless growth of customised advertising is the fuel of this form of capitalism, decentralized by the user-prosumer. Mental environment pollution is parallel to natural environment pollution. But our world is finished (limited). We have to start  elaborating appropriate technologies for a finite world. There is no exteriority, no other worlds (second, third, fourth worlds) where we can dump the collateral effects of insane development. We know that Progress is a bloodthirsty god that extracts a heavy human sacrifice. A good end cannot justify a bad means. On the contrary, technologies are means that have to justify the end of collective freedom. No sacrifice will be tolerated: martyrs are not welcome. Neither are heroes.

10. ‘Better a complex identity than an identity complex’. We need to promote peer-education that shifts the default culture of auto-formation to the nihilist pleasure of hacking the system. Personal exhibition on web 2.0 social networks resembles the discovery of sexuality. Anxiety over masturbation meets digital narcissism (obsessive touching up of personal profiles) and digital voyeurism (compulsive viewing of other’s profiles, their list of friends, secrets, etc.). To avoid the double trap of blind technophilia and luddite technophobia, we have to develop complex digital identities. They have to answer to individual desires and satisfy multiple needs. Open-ID are a good starting point. ‘Steal my profile’. It’s time to remix identity. Anonymity is a good alternative to the pressures of the control society, but there must be alternatives on offer. One strategy could be to make the one (’real’) identity more complex and, where possible, contradictory. But whatever your identify might be, it will always be harvested. If you must participate in the accumulation economy for those in control of the data mines, then the least you can do is Fake Your Persona.

I am high up in the Swiss Alps, in the car-free village of Saas Fee, to teach a class for three days to PhD students of the European Graduate School, invited by Wolfgang Schirmacher and Hendrik Speck (who are also teaching here). I was here for the first time in June 2007 (the public lecture then is on YouTube). Before me Bruce Sterling, Lev Manovich and Friedrich Kittler taught the same group. The impressive mountains at times look like a surreal VR 3D wallpaper surrounding. After my arrival I went out for a first hike with Henry Warwick (Toronto), a friend and copy-editor of my work, who is here in his capacity as student and technical assistant. The master classes I give are becoming more frequent: Melbourne and Perth in December, Irvine and Madrid in February. A next one is planned for Prague, late October.

The master class format is intense and different from giving a class at university or a one-off lecture. Given the relentless pace of change in internet culture, it is challange to both deal with new platforms and their specific techno-social configurations and the urge to reflect and produce untimely theory that can withstand the seductions of real-time media. In such a situation it’s tempting to withdraw into history or trying to give an overview of where we are. It’s also my ambition to showcase that critics can make future interventions without making speculative predictions. It’s essential to put ‘new media’ in their post-world war II context of military research, cybernetics and post-industrial libertarian free market belief systems.

Here at EGS I am discussing my recent research on multilingualism and global shifts in internet culture, blogging, online video (the Video Vortex project), activism in the age of Web 2.0 (after tactical media) and the fate of media theory & education and the failed synergies of media studies. These are all topics of my upcoming book that I recently started. As some of you might know, the announced booklet on Blog Theory, that I planned to write with Jodi Dean somehow fell through. Instead, I submitted my own proposal at Polity Press. The good news is that I drew up a table of content and started working on different chapters. More news on this soon.

On the event of the Montevideo/Netherlands Media Art Institute 30th anniversary, departing curator Susanne Jaschko put together a one day symposium entitled Positions in Flux. Régine Debatty at We Make Money Not Art blogged about it. Unfortunately, I was only able to attend the morning session. The event on May 8 2009 took place in Trouw Amsterdam, the followup of Club 11. From what I heard, Positions at Flux had a critical take towards the common media art discourse and asked relevant questions. It was a relief to see that the attention was, for once, not focused on history, preservation and conservation. Cultural heritage has already taken over way too much attention space–in part because this is one of the few areas where there is still plenty of funding. Sigh. Just for one day, no celebration of “medium religion” or “art meets science”. Director Heiner Holtappels opened by noticing that new media art is not easily accepted by fine art. Traditional art has become eclecticism. According to Heiner, all art is technology based. The subject of the symposium was a visible break with the video art heritage that Montevideo has been known for. Politics topics, a courageous step? “Is there a future for us?” is a question not many institutions dare to ask. In the Dutch daily De Volkskrant of that day, ex-Montevideo curator Bart Rutten (now Stedelijk Museum) took up the role of expressing the ambivalent feelings of the Dutch art establishment towards the new but no longer young art form. Whereas he praised Montevideo’s work, he himself had moved on. “You can ask yourself if Montevideo should continue to show only media art works. In this way they preserve their specialism. It was my main reason to leave.”

In Zero Comments I mapped the current challenges for new media arts. While society at large is inundated with (new) media, the art branch that deals with the digital moved itself in a ghetto. While this analysis still holds up, many in the sector openly admitted the shortcomings and are now putting in place strategies to escape the dead end street. Technology has lost its original fascination, while spreading even faster in society. Is this a reason enough to abandon the field? While experimentation with electronics and the digital might have lost its aura and the spirit of curiosity has somewhat fained, the field of new media arts at large is still growing, despite institutional setbacks here and there. What most participants shared was the feeling that, despite the intimidating institutional violence of the large players, museums will die or become a zoo if they do not deal with the Digital. Some say new media arts lacks the timeliness and the depth. Whereas ICA London closed its media lab, Laboral in the North of Spain, which opened in 2007, is now a large exhibition space, devoted to media art. Chairman Chris Keulemans emphasized that new media arts was always at it best when it criticized the media itself, with its codes and nodes. Each of the three presentations in the morning session gave a different answer to the question how relevant political work could be produced.

The Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal is known from his installation Domestic Tension, in which the artist lived in a gallery space for a month, pointed at by paint ball gun operated by web users. Shoot an Iraqi had 80 million visitors and, according to Bilal, was a “strange mix of aesthetic pain and pleasure.” What made the work so popular was the power of viral connections, in particular through chatrooms and video he put online. What happened here was a confrontation between conflict zone and comfort zone, disengagement and engagement, virtual versus physical platform — both in the case of the artwork and war in Iraq itself. Bilal concluded that the body has its own language that is not in sync with the electronic reality. Bilal made a distinction between interactive works, in which the end-states is already determined, and dynamic pieces that are open ended. A lot of the old school new media art is interactive. Increased user participated was illustrated in Bilal’s story of the ‘virtual human shield’, a group of people that gathered to protect the artist from being shot at. Dog or Iraqi was a month long online debate who gets waterboarded: a dog or an Iraqi? Bilal also briefly discussed his modded version of a 2003 US shooting game that he renamed into Virtual Jihadi. Instead of killing Sadam the user can now hunt GW Bush. This and other projects were documented in Wafaa Bilal, Shoot an Iraqi (City Light Books, San Francisco, 2008).

Former Etoy Hans Bernard of Uebermorgen.com didn’t show projects but read a text concerning the role of “European techno fine art avant garde.” I am great fan of Uebermorgen. It’s in fact becoming impossible to list all their interventions and hacks. Uebermorgen is all about “surreal outcomes”, not bound by any medium. “The transformation from digital to physical is important. The work is not pop art, it is rock art. We are not activists, we are actionists.” For a while seeking large audiences was a thrill, but that’s no longer the main motivation. There is a new strategy for each new project. Bernard did his best to prove that Uebermorgen’s intentions were neither political nor ideological. The aim should be Art, not Politics. Communication is the 9-5 job, but that not the passion. Bernard’s insistence on the non-political status didn’t convince. Uebermorgen’s claim, not to have any political agenda, refers to an ancient, rigid definition that was already problematic in the late seventies when I studied political science. Maybe in Austria politics is still associated with corrupt parties and fat, ugly politicians but elsewhere in the world people use a much broader definition of “the political”. His insistence on artistic freedom is amiable but the idea that once art becomes political it turns into politics and seizes to be art, simply doesn’t hold. His separation between the private opinion of the artist as a citizen and the Artist as a public figure is problematic for the same reasons. Bernard’s insistence  that “perception and production need to separated” sounds good–but we all know that visual arts no longer operates outside “perception management.” Autonomy, at least in the Dutch context, is the official state religion. We all anticipate aesthetic impact, even if we reject the categories of the day and undermine the dominant visual logic. Hans, there are no commissars anymore that control the ateliers. If there is any censor it’s probably the Politically Correct Self. So, if we state, “in production we need to be free,” there is no one who will stop us — but ourselves.

Knowbotic Research, teaching and working in Zurich, was the third presenter. Their translocal distributed temporary works avoid–and seek–the Political in yet another manner. Christian Huebler showcased the Blackbenz Race project between Prishtina and Zurich, a city marketing proposal that was refused because of its negative image of the proper Swiss finance capital. The broader idea was to play with the Kosovo-Albanian-Swiss people that hover in-between places. Code words are fog, smoke, blurred spaces and multiple identities. The self-built stealth boat project has a similar intention. The micro audience become actors here. Activism doesn’t need more exposure and transparency. Art doesn’t need moral outcry. The celebrity industry took over this role. Art questions and creates new spaces for reflection. What’s required are slow spaces. All three projects showed that new media art “doesn’t need to be a monade, merely celebrating itself.” (Huebler) This is the age of entering other contexts, times and spaces–assisted by production houses that have in-house knowledge about the specificity, and the Eigenartigkeit, of digital technologies.

In the evening hours of May 6 2009 five blokes of the nettime circle gathered in a Skype conference call to discuss the whereabouts of tactical media in the age of the financial meltdown. Brian Holmes, Graham Harwood, Konrad Becker, Florian Schneider and me were invited by Marko Peljhan to (remotely) discuss in front of a Ljubljana audience that attended the launch of a special issue of the Slovenian performing arts magazine Maska on tactical media. The name of the was STRATEGIES AGAINST CONTROL LOOPS — SOME PEOPLE AND MOMENTS OF TACTICAL REALITY. The issue was edited by Marko Peljhan, Mojca Puncer and Katja Praznik. The video/webcam didn’t work but the audio connections remained remarkably stable–in the 90 minutes session no one dropped out! SI/US artist Marko Peljhan was looking for synergy and convergence. We suffer from ‘undercomplexity’. According to Brian Holmes (Chicago) tactical media weren’t just about discourse but also about touch and aesthetics. “What’s on the agenda now is the deepening of tactical media.” During the 1990s there was too much emphasis on tools and practice. The “dark side of the Net” was left out. Graham Harwood (South End) remarked that there are UK activists that positively avoid the Network. There are travelers that change their surnames every week. Transsexual groups no longer publish their meeting places on the Net anymore.

In the post-89 period the Internet was about autonomy and empowerment. What should be put on the table now is the question of ownership. The Net has become inseparable from the society of control. In the past tools had no owners, but with Facebook, MySpace and Google, this has all changed. In the 90s the tools were easy to squat. Within the corporate Web 2.0 environment that’s no longer possible. Cheap and dirty appropriation of technology doesn’t make sense anymore. It therefore becomes necessary to, again, build up counter-networks in the shadows of the System. We also need to re-assess the relationships between geeks, artists and activists. Compared to the days of Hacking-in-Progress (1997), programmers are becoming absent. Their ‘conceptual hegemony’ in Web 2.0 is even more limited compared to the dotcom days and their work is getting outsourced anyway. This could also be a reason why perhaps some geeks tend to the populist right. We need to counter these dangers and get into ’strategies of invisibility’ in order to focus on larger projects (such as network architectures to overcome the Internet). The resistance needs to think long term. It is no longer interesting to ‘tactically’ create turbulence within the system. I emphasized the limits of speed politics here. In the light of Twitter, what’s the use for activists of even faster, shorter and fragmented exchanges?

We spent a considerable part of the discussion on the question how to reframe networks and Web 2.0 as military and corporate projects. What mistakes did we make in this respect? Brian Holmes: “Just-in-time networks have a military origin and also a financial and corporate history that we need to uncover.” Graham Harwood stressed the roots of networks in scientific management, going back to the computers of the early 1950s. What Web 2.0 expresses is the “financialization of the everyday life.” Self-organization of humans exists, but it’s something else. It is not to be found on the Web. If you do politics you have to think of people. We cannot talk about networking in general. And about the computer. Florian Schneider objected, saying that neither the military or the corporations invented Linux or Web 2.0. The crucial difference here is subjectivity. Konrad Becker disagreed. The army uses LSD. There are New Age battalions. We overestimate the autonomous perspective of “just doing”. In this light, what does it mean we if call for a return to the local and to “subcultures”? Small local groups operate on a modest and precise level. They are no longer so homogenizing like the megalomanic Indymedia and Pirate Bay platforms. For Graham it was important to go back to the space of art where you can explore these conditions. All agreed that reflection was necessary. But how to turn reflection into expression, Brian asked. The danger here is one of latency. Much of the networking efforts, and their alternatives, are inwards looking. We need to escape the limiting cult of self-representation here. We closed with the observation that ‘gardening’ is happening is a variety of localities, worldwide. For Marko the contradictions in a place like California are coming together in the landscape.The garden as a reintroduction of territory. It can become part of a larger movement to build cultural corridors.

I made notes at the concluding session of two-day The Future of Intellectual Property conference, organized by the Goethe Institute Brussels. The conference on Friday was attended by 150 people (mostly EU and IP professionals, I suppose). Andy Pratt, geographer and creative industries researcher at the London School of Economics opened his presentation saying “When I hear the word creative industries I reach my gun.” He asked: who is going to argue against creativity? The term creative industries causes all sort of trouble. The first item of the incoming Labour government in 1997 was to define new terms and territory. This is what they did but the concept was taken in a whole other direction. The original idea was to emphasize the contribution of creative forces to the economy. However, local definitions around the world vary to a great extend. What we need, according to Pratt, is a reality check. Just think of the license used by publishers of academic journals that force authors to sign away all their rights, forever. Or think of the precarious working conditions under which this growing ‘creative class’ has to work. These workers do not pay pensions. Imagine what consequences this will have when they retire.

In my contribution I emphasized the necessity to deconstruct the ideology of free and open that presents itself as a luring alternative to the old school IRP regimes. The Californian ideology, launched in the early 1990s is still the dominant hegemonic force. Why? Because the babyboom public intellectuals have refused to engage with the Internet because it was either too technical or too marginal for them. Most of the opinion leaders thought the Internet was merely a hype, a fashion like mini skirts that was nice at the time but bound to disappear. The deeper cultural subcurrents that drive networking and digitization therefore remain misunderstood. The natural response of the cultural elites are one of outrage against pirary, calls for policing and repression of the downloading youngsters and an (unspoken) envy towards those who did see the business opportunities. It is a sign of the times that the liberal establishment lines up with media corporations and the “moral majority” in an attempt to “civilize cyberspace”. Instead of further promoting “free culture” I called for sustainable models for independent content producers. Code words here would be micropayments inside peer-to-peer networks, cultural flat rate, citizen-to-citizen loans and gifts, and more commercial concepts such as crowdfunding and the ‘freemium’ model in which payment finally becomes a possibility with the free and open no longer the only option.

Juan Carlos De Martin of Nexa and Creative Commons Italy did not believe that “the system works.”  Neither is Internet “a free for all.” De Martin appealed not to blame the Internet for everything. Journalism is in crisis, but the Net is only one of many contributing factors. The Internet offers amazing potential for culture.  DRM is wonderful, as is data mining of user profiles. Or think of a reinvention of the public domain. Next was Joost Smiers, professor emeritus at the Utrecht School of the Arts and co-author of the upcoming “Imagine there’s no Copyright”. Copyright is a form of censorship, says Smiers, pushing aside cultural diversity. Copyright gives a lot to a few, thereby disturbing the markets, in particular when we speak about the arts. Now only a handfull of companies control the means of production and distribution. The abolition of copyright was presented as a utopia that needed further research. For Smiers Creative Commons (CC) was not a solution as it did not question the copyright system as such. CC didn’t discuss the monopolies and emphasizes solely on sharing, ignoring how artists are going to make an income. De Martin responded to this criticism pointing at the CC-Plus license that made it possible to pay the artist or intermediate. CC was an optional choice.

The discussion that followed was lively for Brussels standards of a sunny Friday afternoon. Following chairman Volker Grassmuck’s guidance each panelist briefly sketched their worst and best scenarios. All agreed that was a need for public debate. Serious discussions need to happen. Someone remarked: “Your proposal is my worst nightmare.” From a few such remarks I sensed that the proposals of this panel, ranging from modest reformist to radical, were over the top for the lawyers and representatives of the collecting societies. To put it blunt: everyone who is criticizing today’s corporate control is a Stalinist. Not because of their dogmatic marxism but because every utopian proposal, by its very nature, will end in Gulags and Holocausts. The fact that the current situation is a nightmare for millions (just think of the patenting of medicines that could save so many lives) is not taken into account here. Like many authors I never benefited from the current copyright system. Technologies such as the iPhone were fantastic. There was no need to rethink copyright. It was at this point that one could smell some very real conflicts of interests touching the surface. It was time to head back to Brussels Central, to catch the train back to Amsterdam.

Is there an exceptional way for German media theory? This was the theme of a public debate at the University of Siegen (between Cologne and Frankfurt in Germany). I was perhaps the young outside rebel on the panel, in part because of my age, my passport, being an “internet pope”, as chairman Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer described me. Participants were Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford), Friedrich Kittler (Berlin), Irmela Schneider (Cologne), Hartmut Winkler (Paderborn) and Erhard Schüttpelz (Siegen). The German word discussed here was “Sonderweg” (special way).

In his ‘impulse’ speech Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (picture above) described the German media theory that emerged in the late 1970s and early 80s as a positive developement. Gumbrecht is a German-American literature professor who worked in Siegen from 1986-89 before moving to Stanford and who played a key role in the early days of this intellectual movement. Even though we gathered in a town that is so easily described as dull and small, the research in Siegen and German media theory in general, has never been described as provincial. This was neither the case with Freiburg and Kassel. Gumbrecht emphasized the unique position that media studies had, and still has, in Germany. Gumbrecht: “What is self-evident here, is absent elsewhere. We don’t find media studies faculties in other countries. This is a fact.” As you may know, I agree with this. Ever since the late 1980s I have studied the great books that came out, made interviews, wrote reviews, participated in conferences and workshops and consider myself part of this larger context. In my last book Zero Comments I wrote a chapter on the topic. Even more of an expert is the Canadian translator of Friedrich Kittler and others, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (who couldn’t attend the discussion) and who has written on numerous occasions on the exceptional status of German media theory. Starting point of the debate was an essay (including responses) by Winthrop-Young (”On Promised and Doomed Media Nations”, Zeitschrift fuer Kulturwissenschaften, 2/2008, in German) in which he compares Canada and Germany.

According to Gumbrecht there was a general birth trauma of the humanities, ever since its emergence in the 19th century, of not being of this world. The media theory that starts to emerge from inside the German literature departments ought to be situated in this out-of-this-world context. Gumbrecht mentioned eight philosophical underpinnings of the German media theory’s special character. I will highlight some of them. There must be reference, something outside of the text, beyond hermeneutics. The exodus of the spirit out of the humanities. Desire for a reference. Then there is the substance concept. Obviously there is the deconstruction of the subject. We see special interest in history and fascination for philosophical antropology and long cultural shifts (dating 50.000-100.000 years back). Then there is a early pressure, and desire, ever since Humboldt and the way he designed the university system, to innovate. Ordinary knowledge needs to be taught in highschool or polytechnics. The university is a place for new thinking. This could explain why there is a permanent revolution inside the German universities. Ever since the post-war era there is a constant wave of reforms. This is no in itself a good thing but was a positive condition under which the 1980s media theory programs came into being. Gumbrecht closed off with the observation that the public identiy of German professor as a prophet still exists. The professor is a thinker, not an academic project administrator.

I was the first to respond. Ever since the mid 1980s German media theory has been an extraordinary source of inspiration for me because of its conceptual richness, discourse diversity, historical insight and capacity to illustrate highly abstract thinking with imaginative examples. Around 1987 I hitchhicked from Amsterdam to one of the conferences of the Kassel research group where I frist heard Kittler, Bolz, Tholen and others speak. In my short statement I expressed that speculative and critical concepts are one and the same thing and only manifest themselves in different ways according to the era. I noted that much had changed over the past 25 years. Even Germany is now firmly subjected to global neo-liberal standards of knowledge production. Germany media theory as we know is a product of the late coldwar prosperity of its welfare state. But how do things work out these days? I pointed at the tremendous opportunities for translations and international dialogue that remain unused and closed with a call to the science funding body DFG to start an ambitious translation program (not just to English) of key works in this area. The market will not do this. Worldwide publishing houses are cutting costs and risky translations are the first to go out. Translations are anyway already a firm part of the national cultural policy instruments that subsidize literature, theatre and contemporary arts as nation and city marketing tools. The fact that theory is not part of this, says more about the declining status of this discoursive branch. Compared to the 1980s theory is out of fashion in most region of the planet. This further isolates this particular subset called German media theory whose main players are about to retire.

Friedrich Kittler disagreed with me and said that all his books are available in English, Japanese and Greek. Even though everyone would agree that he’s the perfect exception to the rule, even this statement isn’t entirely true. Just visit amazon.com and you’ll find three titles of him in English, a thin result compared to the many interesting monographs Kittler wrote over the decades. What doesn’t work here anymore is the reading, interpretation and translation circles abroad that would pop up by itself 5 or 10 years after the publication of major theoretical works. Less and less students read German (out of my own experience I would say none in new media programs). Whereas the interest in media theory amongst teaching staff has remained steady, German contributions cannot be taught because of an acute lack of translations, in particular of introductory materials for undergraduate programs. The situation is even worse for the (primarily) German media archeology that, as a field, even remained more scattered.

Hartmut Winkler, who disagrees with Kittler on the ‘media a-priori’ thesis, stated: “The good thing about Kittler is that it is easy to understand and still is not boring after years of of studying his texts. This cannot be said about all authors.” As insiders already know, Kittler laments the lack of technological knowledge in the humananities and is sceptical about the wishy-washy term ‘media theory’ that has been misused to such a vast extend. Kittler: “Die Mediengeschichte ist ein Steinbruch.” It’s a treasure chest, but you’ll have to do it on your own, so Kittler, not as a part of a program or department.

Irmela Schneider, whose media ethonographic work (dealing with the USA and UK) I do not know stressed that the position inside philosophy remains problematic, and with some exceptions, is one of isolation. Media theory is simply not welcome. As many would know Cologne is a conservative city in this respect. She also said that in the USA there is always an element of the democratic potential of (new) media, which in the German media theory is not explored. Gumbrecht: “In the USA there is an emphasis on the researcher as an individual. People think Kittler is cool, stupid or difficult, but have no awareness of something like German media studies.” All seemed to agree that what makes German media theory is exactly its abstract, conceptual nature. In various postings on the Net Florian Cramer has attacked exactly that metaphysical aspect as its main weakness. From his exile in Rotterdam he wrote a long email, in English, which was posted on the blog of the Siegen event. You can find it here, and I can highly recommend it. Voices of the under 50 or 40 generation completely missed in the debate. I could have represented them, but I didn’t feel like. Mainly because the untimely, drifting, weird nature of German media theory which was exactly what I was looking for, trying to escape the flat and uninspriring Dutch and Anglo-saxon pragmatism and politically correct modes of media criticism. Postmodernism and cultural studies just didn’t do it for me. They refused to ask the Media Question. Ultimately they shied away to look the Beast straight into the eye. Media isn’t just surface and fun. It wasn’t enough to reject McLuhanism. There was, and still is, so much more to explore. There was much talk about Heidegger, that afternoon in Siegen. And that’s what software studies got ahead of its mission. What is thinking in this networked age of realtime exchange? We need to create the ‘interval’ to reflect and theorize, and German media theory, with all its shortcomings, still provides us with amazing insights that radically break into the numbness of the crazy everyday life inside the digital regime.

(Thanks to organizer Tristan Thiellmann and photographer Georg Rademacher)

Coinciding with my second visit to Brazil, Thiego Novaes translated my inaugural speech from 2005, the Principles of Notworking, that also made it into French, Dutch and Italian. Here it is. Felipe Fonseca responded to my Creative Commons report on this blog. Giselle Beiguelman sent me a link to a Flickr collection of that evening and a bit more context on the net-trends page at xing. Next morning I left for Rio, a short flight, where I met Sarita Albagli (who invited me to come to Brazil this time), Dan Schiller (whom I never met) and Yann-Moulier Boutang (Multitudes, Paris) and others for lunch. After a brief stroll through Leme I attented the keynote speech of Sandra Braman, whose policy and legal discourse on the “emerging global information regime” took an interesting turn towards bodily and culinary metaphors — no doubt because of her two months residency in Rio de Janeiro. The program of the two day conference called Information, Power and Politics that followed you can find here. It was held in an old building (404 Av. Pasteur), that houses the Mineorology Authority.

My own pesquisa dealt with the response of activist media to Web 2.0 and the necessary move we all have to make from the centralized corporate platforms to much more flexible, open environments: social networking as tools that can easily be installed. Xing is a hybrid form (while still centralized and corporate) but Crabgrass is promising initiative in this direction. Just think of the move from the blogger.com (controlled by Google) to the Wordpress floss software. Or the idiotic IPO hype around the Netscape browser in 1995 and the positive turn it took with Firefox. In terms of Twitter and the micro-blogging I argued, with Virilio, for a move towards ’slow politics’. We can’t go faster then the speed of light anyway. It is OK if Twitter further erodes the power of the global news agencies. This is essentially what I also suggest in my essay Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse. What blogging and twittering does is undermining the centralized meaning structures of the 20st Century. We could agree that this is necessary deconstruction work. However, it does not resolve the issue how to organize dissent. Going faster, talking to more people by itself will not do the job. It will neither bring ‘digital democracy’ nor strenghten militant struggles. Speed politics is useful once you’re up to speed. In order to get going you need other concepts and social practices.

The next evening I attended the launch of the Portuguese translation of Richard Barbrook’s Imaginary Futures. Richard gave an impressive lecture on the topic. It’s always good to go back to the history of cybernetics, the Cold War (and the role liberal-leftist intellectuals played in it). How dull and backward looking the free market ideology of today looks like with the promises of the 1950s and 60s! In my response I asked why there is so little known about the history of the computer and the Internet and contemplated about the rapidly growing gap between the mass practices of many 100s of millions of users and the hand full of us that theorize it.

My last evening was spend at the newly established NAVE school (see picture above), a new media college for high school kids age 15-18, packed with the latest equipment. NAVE is housed inside an old telephone switch building of Oi, the biggest telco in Brazil that sponsers the school and get first-hand feedback of the teachers and staff in all matters digital. NAVE seems to be one of the public-private partnerships that has to figure out how to renewal Brazilian education. Here you can see the competition for their interactive facade. NAVE was founded, as is still coordinated by Oi Futura, the Oi research lab/organization that is based in Flamengo, elsewhere in Rio. Besides math and Portuguese the emphasis lies on Internet skills and game design. On this ocasion I spoke about the ‘creative subcurrent’ of our Institute of Network Cultures, from A Decade in Webdesign early 2005, Rosalind Gill’s research into the working condition of webdesigners to MyCreaticity to the recent work of the Creative Labour group at Wintercamp that discussed how organize precarious labour inside the Creative Industries.

I am in Brazil for five days for a number of lectures. On Tuesday April 14 I did a duo presentation and debate with Creative Commons Brazil organizer Ronaldo Lemos. The evening at the theatre next to the PUC university in Sao Paolo was organized by locative media artist and PUC professor Giselle Beiguelman as part of a lecture series on net art, sponsored by AgenciaClick.

Ronado Lemos talked about art and technology. He observed that technology is missing in visual art exhibitions. As an example he mentioned Nicolas Bourriaud’s Alter Modernism in at Tate Britain in London. He found it astonishing that no work on display there featured or questioned technology. It was absent. This also counts for the recent Sao Paolo Art Biennial: the graffiti incident, in which street artists were prosecuted as barbarian invaders, exemplified the gap. Why are these genres excluded from the visual arts? Look at Ars Electronica and you will see that new media arts is a parallel universe. So what does the seperation between digital and visual arts mean? Ronaldo did not expect such resistance against anything digital amongst contemporary artists.

A similar tendency, so Lemos, could be witnessed in the ruling political classes that are afraid of online election campaigns. Just think of the resentment against Wikipedia. Or the way amateur scientists are marginalized and ridiculed. The sphere were these fears are written down and materialized is Law. In past decades, in Brazil, copyright law was not considered crucial. It was neither taught nor studied. This only changed in the past 5-10 years. Librarians, musicians and other professions are now discovering how copyright is limiting their work. Recently, a law was proposed concerning copyright and there is now a great controversy arising against the bill. 140.000 people signed a petition to protest against the law. The online mobilization has so far been impressive but the outcome of this protest is not yet known.

In his last part of his talk, Ronaldo Lemos confronted the ‘barbarization of the new interlockers’ with four possible strategies. What should happen whe capacity of art to represent technology are limited in such a manner?

1. Artists are going to the extreme and radically break with copyright and authorship. Here Lemos mentioned the Italian Wu Ming writers collective.

2. Artists start to work with obsolete technologies, that hardly had time to get further developed. This tendency is found in a wide range of exhibitions.

3. Artists enter the field of (hard) science, biology and physics. However, art doesn’t work on the same level as science as an equal partner.

4. Artists are opening new spaces of experimentation, looking for new forms of empowerment that are unleashed inside the digital flows. To be found in the most unexpected spaces.

I was next and talked about net activism in the age of Web 2.0 and social networking and the critique of monopoly behaviour of companies such as Google. I am certain parasite strategy of the facebooks will be overcome by turning social networking into a (free software/open source) tool. This also recently occurred to blogs that moved from centralized corporate sites such as Blogger to easy-to-use software that everyone can install and adjust. It should in fact also happen to Twitter. Over at scripting.com Dave Winer is a fierce promoter of breaking up Twitter in such a way. Twittering is a social activity that should not be monopolized by one company. Also interesting in this context is Winer’s warning that this social activity should not be seen as ‘news’ production.

The debate with Ronaldo Lemos started when I started to talk about the difficult position of (digital) artists in the Web 2.0 age. For me Creative Commons (CC) is not a utopian idea or a choice but a reality. There is no way back to the corporate control of content through intellectual property rights. This implies certain responsabilities for those who promote Creative Commons. How are artists, writers and researchers are going to make money in the Creative Commons Age? As I wrote elsewhere it is not enough for evangelists of ‘free culture’ such Joi Ito and Lawrence Lessig to connect CC to innocent youngsters that fool around with MTV or Hollywood footage or music and are punished by the Law for illegally downloading and altering corporate information that is not theirs. Instead of offering your content for free as the only available option left (”go and make your money with the t-shirts”), I suggested to develop an alternative monetary peer-to-peer economy that will secure a basic income for the growing group of creative workers.

Ronaldo Lemos, of course, defended Creative Commons saying it is voluntary. People have a choice (I disputed this). He concluded that the heroic phase of Web 2.0 is coming to an end. Everybody is uploading their own content everywhere. This process has come to a point of exhaustion. There are no more social relations to be explored–and exploited. This means that the way Web 2.0 companies and trying to make money out of free content, people’s profiles and social relations.

I’ll have to leave it here. It’s too hard for me, as someone involved in the debate, to summarize this discussion. What did strike me, to close this posting, is the remarkable unfamiliarity of many of the Creative Commons activists to have an internal strategic debate, out in the open. Artists, designers and critics should demand–and work on–alternative sources of income, together. Creative Commons has had too many ‘easy enemies’ so far. It’s time for some tough talk, amongst each other. For me and many others CC is not just an option, it’s the default. Creative Commons is killing artists and other ‘content producers’ — unless we develop viable alternative sources of income.

PS. The online video files of the event have now been uploaded to YouTube.

In Vienna I took notes at the “Creative Cities, das Versprechen der kreativen Ökonomie” event, organized by the Austrian public broadcaster ORF, curated by Armin Medosch and Ina Zwerger. It was packed. The afternoon was sold out and drew around 300 people. The conference dealt with the whereabouts of the creative industries meme and not so much with city promotion, as the title may have suggested. Funny enough it had an overall critical approach — something that was hard to imagine 3 or so years ago. Local policy people or consultancy gurus were absent. There are a number of audio files available online, in German. The flickr pictures are here. Most of the material is collected on Armin Medosch’s The Next Layer blog, who wrote three interesting introductory essays (in German) and put together a bibliography on critical creative industries research.

Richard Barbrook (London) kicked off with an introductory lecture based on his “The Class of the New” pamflet, followed by Diedrich Diedrichsen (Berlin) who gave a theoretical lecture, criticizing the very concept of ‘creativity’ from a contemporary arts perspective. I was next and spoke about the Dutch situation beyond good intentions and its critiques (such as our MyCreativity project).

I spoke (in German) about the initiatives in Rotterdam, Eindhoven and Utrecht, the housing policies of the Amsterdam city council to provide startups with cheap office space, in response to the real estate drama that made Amsterdam so unaffordable. I proposed to invent new institutional forms that deal with the “creative industries” as it scales up. How would “creative labour” campaigns, to support precarious workers, look like in theses times of economic crisis?  This all, of course, builds further on the “organized networks” concepts and the outcomes of the Wintercamp event of March 2009. Marion von Osten, who took over from Inke Arns at the very last minute, spoke about her seminal Be Creative exhibition in Zurich, back in 2003.

In conversation with Armin Medosch, Jaime Stapleton, associate research fellow at the School of Law, University of London spoke on the origin of the ‘creative industries’ term. Back in 1997, when the Blair government took over from the conservatives, a reformation of government departments became necessary. Culture and the arts were part of the Dept. of Heritage. There was a need to restructure the department and the outcome was Culture, Media and Sports. Within this newly created entity much revolved around intellectual property rights through the booming television sales of soccer plays. This is how, according to Stapleton, the IP story (measuring creative industries through IPR income) got connected to “creative industries”. Another, more obvious reference is Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ but Stapleton once mentioned this and then got interrupted. The creative industries meme itself was developed by a small group of consultants and New Labour politicians (amongst them Charles Leadbeather) that plotted how to increase the budget for the arts by giving it a more sexy name. This, in essence, still elitist approach, then got out of control (as many concepts did, in the late nineties) and developed its own dynamic, drifting away from the traditional arts sector all together, into an entrepreneurial direction.

“It is preferable not to travel with a dead man.” (quote by Henri Michaux, used in the performance between lectures).

Last but not least Maurizio Lazzarato (Paris) started his lecture (in French) with a quote by Felix Guattari about the desperate call for creativity as a sign of its disappearance. Creativity is a sign of poverty, not wealth. In the first part Lazzarato spoke about Marcel Duchamp who is seen in the West as the quintessential contemporary artist. He developed terms like ‘anart’ and ‘anartist’. Duchamp hesitated to use the term ‘creation’ or ‘creativity’. Art is about making something. For Lazzarato creative industries is an old-fashioned way to think about the economy. For Duchamp it is the viewer who produces the art work. It is the public that co-creates the work. Creative industry is, in essence, still a fordist term. Just like Godard once said, the viewers of the film should be paid to watch the film. Duchamp lived from heritage, sponsorship of rich friends, and, in part, of the sales of his art work.

Then Lazzarato started telling about the workers in the performing arts in France, currently estimated at 150.000. Recently there were strikes by the workers in this creative industries sector. The income inequalities in this sector are extreme. The outcome of these strikes were an overall worse situation in terms of contract, pensions and social securities. In the end, the artists and film/dance/theatre technicians had to become self-employed entrepreneurs. The struggle took four years and now has been, more or less, lost. The example shows how a cultural sector as a whole impoverishes. Television, on the other hand, is developing in different direction.

Sarkozy recently announced the establishment of a Council for Artistic Excellence. In this model there is an a well-paid elite and an impoverished broad base of cultural workers, intended to reverse the 1968 policies. Something similar happens on the level of universities, where Sarkozy has proposed to create a two-layer system aimed to constantly monitor the productivity of university personnel. Aim of these policies is to differentiate between productive and unproductive workers and to introduce competition and other market mechanisms. The goal of these neo-liberal policies is to control time. For the workers that Lazzarato spoke, money is time (as a reversal of the capitalistic logic time = money). It is the in-between time, the unused, lost time that are the living times, which is the main target of neo-liberal policies. What the system qualifies as ‘dead time’ is in reality the most creative time. Cognitive capitalism are systems of anti-production and not of productivity or creativity, simply because it aim to destroy time.

The closing debate focused on the local circumstances in Vienna. There were the obvious complaint that the creative industries critique is overlooking the ‘fun factor’. People have to deal with the consequences of their professional choice. Apart from a few tourists that drive along the Ring, the Segway has not been seen in Vienna. Marion von Osten expressed the Right to Continuity. We have to be able to fail, to have free time, to finish projects, to reflect and go on. For the Vienna art professor that participated in the round table creative economy is a perverse interpretation of modernist principles — and most seemed to agree with this.

From:     info@berlinergazette.de

Keine Zeit zum Surfen oder: Wie die neuen Technologien in uns eindringen

[ ] Protokoll: Geert Lovink [1], Medientheoretiker [2]
www.berlinergazette.de

Im Amsterdamer Zoo “Artis” stand ich zum ersten Mal vor einem Aquarium. Ja, dass muss so gewesen sein. Anfang der sechziger Jahre, als ich dort aufwuchs. Ich habe daran keine Erinnerungen, weiss aber, dass es stattfand. Es gibt Fotos von mir in diesem Zoo. Als Medientheoretiker muss ich gestehen, dass ich manchmal froh bin, dass die Welt der Objekte und die der Tiere gegen die Invasion der Mikrotechnologie verteidigt werden sollten. Heutzutage glaube ich nicht [mehr] an diesen totalisierende Tendenz der Medientheorie, und Theorie im Allgemeinen, ueber dies und jenes, ueber alles Aussagen zu machen. Ich hoffe, dass Theorie keine Lebenshilfe ist, keine Ersatzreligion also.

Ich mag es, praesize zu sein und konkrete Aussagen zu machen, die hinhauen. Das Aquarium sollte also alleine gelassen werden. Am besten koenne man/frau beobachten, dass das Aquarium den Wunsch nach Realitaet darstellt. Fische, die Natur gibt es, es ist noch nicht alles virtuell geworden. Aber wie banal ist solch eine Beobachtung?

Der Mythos vom Netz als Ozean passt heute immer noch. Internetsurfen passiert immer noch, aber heutzutage, 15 Jahre nach dem Anfang der Webkultur, waere es eher ein Unfall, oder sagen wir, Freizeitmoment. Was die heutige Web 2.0-Situation am besten beschreibt, ist das Motiv des sozialen Netzes. Junge Leute verlieren keine Zeit mehr ans Surfen, sondern arbeiten an ihren sozialen Verpflichtungen innerhalb von StudiVZ, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr undsoweiter.

Wasser nimmt in der kritischen Netztheorie keinen Stellenwert ein und ich denke, wir leben nicht mehr in den 80er Jahren. Die Geisteswissenschaften liefern uns, leider, keine neuen Einblicke mehr in die groesseren Gesetzmaessigkeiten. Leider hat, z.B. die Psychoanalyse, ihre beste Zeit hinter sich. Schaue doch nur Zizek an, den kluegsten Europaeer, den ich besonders schaetze, und wie wenig er sich auch nur ansatzweise, mit der Netzkultur auseinandersetzt. Was Theoretiker machen sollten ist sich erst mal engagieren. Ohne detaillierte Kenntnisse kann es doch ueberhaupt keine kritische Theorie geben? Das gilt fuer alle Gebiete, egal ob wir uebers Wasser reden, oder nicht.

Klar gaebe es da meinen eigenen Beitrag, den der Agentur Bilwet ueber Wetware, aus den wilden Jahren der Medientheorie, Anfang der 90er, aber solche generellen spekulativen Kategorien spielen derzeit doch ueberhaupt keine Rolle mehr. Auch weil damals wie heute noch die Rolle des menschlichen Koerpers in den Medienfragen ueberbewertet wurde. Leider, muss ich gestehen, weil dieser theoretische Blick besonders komplex, kreativ und wertvoll war. Problem ist aber, dass die Medienrealitaet ganz andere Themen hervorgerufen hat und eben Koerper und Medien sich eher indifferent zu einander verhalten. Also exit Wasserfrage. Es waere wichtig diese Verschiebung der Theoriefunktion mal mit Klaus Theweleit zu diskutieren

Was wir brauchen sind amoralische Detailstudien. Aber Verfluessigung, klar, die gibt es, und wird immer realer. Ich rede lieber, in der Tradition Paul Virilios, von Beschleunigung und Fragmentierung, von Mobilisierung, wie damals schon von Ernst Juenger beschrieben, und von Miniaturisierung. Verfluessigung heisst fuer mich ganz konkret: das Unsichtbarwerden, das Verschwinden vieler Technologien. Wenn wir die Technologien nicht mehr anfassen koennen, weil sie so klein geworden sind, heisst das auch, dass wir kaum mehr in der Lage sind, sie zu hacken.

Den Zusammenhang zwischen Klimakatastrophe und Internet finde ich interessant. Auf den ersten Blick gibt es erstmal keine Verbindungen. Klar ist Wasser ein Feind der Hardware und den moeglichen Einsturz der Telekom und Energieinfrastruktur ein Horrorszenario fuer alle. Ich glaube nicht, dass viele noch recht daran glauben, EDV [ich liebe diese Deutsche Abkuerzung!] waere eine Alternative fuer den kommenden Klimakollaps. Wir fliegen nicht weniger [wenigstens… noch nicht], sparen kaum Elektrizitaet und wissen Bescheid ueber die schmutzigen Geschaefte, die in Afrika mit den Chipgrundstoffen gemacht werden.

Der Komputer ist keine saubere Technologie, so viel ist klar. Vernetzung loest keine Revolutionen aus und spielt nur ganz beschraenkt eine Rolle im Hintergrund, wenn es um grosse Veraenderungen geht. Obama hat Web 2.0 klug eingesetzt aber nicht deswegen gewonnen. Worum es z.B. bei Transmediale 09 ging und sonstigen Kunstinitiativen in dieser Richtung, ist die technofixierte neue Medienkunst aus der Sackgasse zu holen. Die Technologisierung der Gesellschaft erreicht derzeit so eine Intensitaet, sie greift so tief ein in der Welt der Objekte [siehe RFID, GPS undsoweiter], dass wir die neuen Technologien nicht mehr als getrenntes Objekt wahrnehmen koennen. Sie mischen sich also mit der Finanzkrise, Oekologie, Armut und Migration.

1. geert[at]xs4all.nl
2. networkcultures.org
3. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetware
4. networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/
5. www.transcript-verlag.de/ts8…