Incorrect Media "Conceivably, the departing train will carry only a few passengers - just the ones who made it in time. But perhaps most of them prefer to miss it, because they find the railway station more pleasant, more comfortable, more intimate than the journey." - Ernst Jünger Incorrect media are found to have defected to the enemy. They prescribe set courses, forcing our protracted stay on a single channel. They're nondemocratic in that they prohibit independent rambles through the mediascape. They demand absolute reception. People who get on halfway down the line are quickly rejected, often resulting in a grudge held for life. Incorrect media ignore the immediate availability that characterizes accessible society, giving rise to suspicion concerning the intentions that preceded reproduction. But no positive response is forthcoming. Incorrect media refuse to discuss the discomfort they cause; they're masters of concealment when it comes to hidden agendas. Behind these media lurks a world which is continually copied through the successive stages of the technological era, but is never brought to light. There exists a terrible suspicion that these media not only contain but have long since analyzed technological consciousness, while the innocent observer is still trying to come to terms with it. Contemporary media are always on. So, by definition, the program has been running for a long time before we come in. We are visitors in a world that will keep transmitting with or without us. Loyal media keep resetting, explaining their function and usage every half hour. But with incorrect media, the point of entry - our possible point of initiation - is nowhere to be found. If we'd understood what they were about, their complexity might have been acceptable. If we begin at their moment of conception, with much study, we might still grasp their deeper knowledge. But we are so far in arrears and have so little time, there can be no question of catching up. The walls that have been erected can only hide the secrets of some evil genius. But the subject behind this medium demonstrates no tyrannical urge to control the democratic media. It guards a spiritual treasure, and refuses to share it with us. Then why does it share our reproductive impulses? Is it the agent of extramedial forces, a sorcerer perhaps? Whatever caused this work to appear in the first place? The modern phenomenon of the introductory chapter cannot come to grips with incorrect media. This is where all education fails. Incorrect media annoy us because they appear either too soon or too late. Too small to offer an alternative, they're too big to be ignored. They force themselves on us like some mysterious oeuvre or magnum opus. Their potential is enormous, but never finds room to unfold. Their works remain miserably limited to a circle of adept initiates. They contain possible solutions or events that never took place or may offer relief tomorrow. They're manuals to the wrong universe. Incorrect media carefully distinguish between themselves and transmitters of the wrong information. The latter rest assured of their animated interaction with the medial environment. Once they make their dubious statement, communication can commence. The miscue fuels public discourse. Misguided content is not an attack on those who think differently; it is an application for membership in the media sphere. Prior to coming out as renegades, the incorrect could still speak freely in the cozy premedial climate. Generation after generation, on street corners, in coffeehouses and in pubs, the disaffected have vented their unpopular views on religion, revolution and race. But once they enter the media, all fuses blow. Collaboration in the age of technological reproduction: Let the shit hit the fan, the microphones are wide open. For a moment, a lack of opinions seems averted, as the nation turns to face the question of media collaboration. Now the opinion leaders and their info brokers face the task of swiftly eliminating the threat of all those personal opinions by making them the subject of public debate. Attempts to establish communication with the impervious incorrect media commonly use the trick of pointing out the dubious statements they contain. This is based on the presumption that all writers and artists are collaborators, except those who haven't had the chance yet. The further we are removed from the twentieth century, the more obvious it becomes that the era has known nothing but traitors. Those who did nothing should have gotten involved; the ones who did should have shut up. Refugees should have stayed put; the people who stayed home should have scrammed. Artists should have explored the nature of technology; technologists should have left art well alone. Communists should have manipulated sexual desire; Fascists should have looked towards the other. Democrats should have woken up; the rich should have looked beyond their class interests. The colonies should have been liberated sooner so blacks would have stayed in their homelands. The Reformed, Catholics, and Protestants shouldn't have bitched, since they all turned Christian Democrat anyway. Instead of allowing its non-normative abuse, science should have founded a world government of experts to solve problems, of which the century saw plenty. The ones who caused them were given free play, while the little rational intellect that remained sat morosely aside. What on earth did those twentieth-century folks do with all the energy and resources they wasted? Incorrect media are never of this age. Untimeliness is their central feature. Attempts to extract anything from them might prove fatal. It's when the makers of incorrect media try to put their ideas into practice that things really get out of hand. The art of incorrect thinking is to ignore any invitations by the Zeitgeist. It takes a lot of alertness and flexibility to be consistently off the mark. Means to this end are polemical silence or radical naiveté, undeterring perseverance on one's own set course (even if it intersects with modernity), ruthless negativism or willful amnesia, thinking modernity through to its most radical conclusions, carefree escapism into history or a touristic self-image, an alienating view of personal screw-ups or an anthropological approach to local rituals, regular contact with extraterrestrials, spurious use of philosophies and women's magazines, mixing up lines of incompatible thought, and incoming phone calls - you always get called. Incorrect media are never springboards; they are ladders ascending to black holes. They painfully transcend their condition of being always in the right. Up there, the view of the moral landscape fascinates. All is seen, and none of it is of any use. This experience is what incorrect media are all about. ??