The Socialist's Media "Who speaks of victory? To survive is everything." - Rainer Maria Rilke The socialist in his actually existing form - that of a government official - may have disappeared over the horizon like a shot, but as a potential figure he can look forward to an unbelievable future. Socialists were spoon-fed on programming (version 1.0 of the socialist program was out by 1830). Lacking suitable hardware, they were forced for 150 years to install their program onto society. The social question this raised caused a reaction which led to an extension of the original design and a formidable number of new applications. With each setback the socialists produced new plans, undaunted by illegal copiers like the Spartacists, revisionists, Leninists and Christian socialists. When Hitler and Stalin linked up socialism with incompatible software like nationalism and totalitarianism, the development of leftist programming stalled for quite a while. Of the many applications, only data storage and file management, for which historical socialism showed a true obsession, survived. Think of the spreadsheets with the production figures of the Five-Year plans, the intelligence services' miles of files, the Leaders' collected speeches, the endless series of forms and applications which had to be filled out at the drop of a hat. This was a social format that got entangled in paperwork, a Leviathan too big to be computerized. All the memory of the world could not have held the data overload that was heaped up in the archives. Yet the urge to program reared its head again in the 1980s in the person of Gorbachev. He discovered that contemporary social programs require a different hardware than society. Planning is now merely PR material which presents a corporate image. When the investors had Gorby's chain investigated, the marketability of the Soviet Group was finished. But with the disappearance of communism, the socialists finally got another chance to vent their programming lust in the media which do it the most justice: computer games, media banks and virtual realities. In the West, the school of life has given up learning from the past a long time ago. Historiography has been completed, from the nano- to the cosmic level. All phenomena and objects have been fitted into a chronology which runs from the first attosecond after the Big Bang, the cigar, the bathroom and bedroom, anorexia, teddy bears, the sublime, medieval cuisine and going to the beach to the image of the vagina, death and the fine nose of the nighthawk. All of history is reprocessed into information and made into news. In contemporary historiography, miscellaneous news items go hand in hand with world politics and stock market quotations; determining factors (sub- or superstructural) such as historical materialism knew them can no longer be distinguished. Ultimately, information is just information; Western historical consciousness has succumbed to an excessive avialability of the past. Information never penetrates deeper than the main memory of the democratic citizen. Everything can be forgotten, because storage is always left to others (expert systems). Until we are forced to recognize with horror that virtually all episodes of the old TV series have been burnt. Socialists have a good relationship with their own hard disks. Like the former Marxists, they learned the hard way, with mnemonics of steel. To them, history is not just one of the many possible areas to click onto, but the domain where the driving principles of recent data can be found. The socialists' relationship with the past has always been a technological connection. From birth, they were less revolutionaries or heretics than media engineers. Books, pamphlets, newspapers, proposals, manifestoes, interventions, polemic, criticism - socialism was a literary movement that believed in the word's persuasive power to maneuver the revolting hordes in the right direction. For the socialist, words, though not originating events, could still direct it because they discriminated between the chance circumstances of an uproar and the iron dynamics behind them. For the socialists, an event is not a fait divers but an omen. Because they never erase files and always have more information storage capacity, their future is not a blank space and (unlike modern Westerners) they do not have to start from scratch at each turn. The Westerner is already tired before he's even begun from all the patient digging and searching that needs to be done. For the socialist, events are embedded in a universe of old and new writing. Whether a text discussed prerequisites or end results, it always resulted in yet more text. The goal was to fabricate one massive interactive hypertext out of socialism. Everybody thoroughly read the others, reviewing them over hundreds of pages. Paper was not just a mass of dead letters, but a stimulus for written reactions. Banned authors could always be reinterpreted, after which debate was energetically thrown open, resulting in a new supply of bulk text. Independent of technological innovations and new media like photography, film and radio, the socialists constantly developed new connections, but always exclusively within their own media system. This practice makes them ideal candidates for the management and expansion of cyberspace, which also shirks parallel media and contructs rhizomes. The 1980s showed that retraining the scribes as programmers is a relatively small step. The absence of illustrations in soc.txt is no obstacle to the socialists' entry into the new pictorealm. They had been operating in a larger context than the single picture all along, since their medium had been 3-D society. As a storage specialist, the socialist has three options to preserve socialism. First, the complete text edition will be available on CD ROM. But the market is decidedly not waiting for this, especially now that the sugar daddies have left Moscow. The acidiferous textual tradition is yellowing and crumbling in the hands of desperate archivists. Only a Band Aid "Save the Archives" concert could still provide the necessary resources. Now that further writing on the socialist project is slowly taken over by historians who judge "objectively" with the academic eye of the outsider, the socialists, contrary to nature, turn destructive and destroy their archive while they can. As the ex-socialists own up to their past mistakes, others act in an attempt to prevent socialism from degenerating into information. The soc.txt is approaching dark times of nostalgia and memoirs, while the ground texts have lost their medial potency. On the socialist diskette, the tab has been moved from "write data" to "read only." Storage of the entire socialist discourse is not only impracticable but objectionable. The second option consists of scanning actually existing socialism. With the trend to shed light on every pernicious side of the twentieth century in a museological context, the crimes, lies, and complete failures of the Eastern bloc will get all the (disk) space they need. At the same time there will arise a worldwide fascination with the strange fact that for decades, hundreds of millions of people acted as though another system besides democracy and market economy was possible. The aesthetics of socialism was that between a well-defined beginning and end point it managed to develop a whole system of own products, artistic movements, fashion and design, of stunning uniformity. Theme parks and sensory spaces will be installed to make this historical phenomenon understandable: a tour past collapsing housing developments, consumer queues, barking police officers, informers, military parades, moral dissidents. Ascetic, modernist nondesign will pass through the cycle of avant-garde, hype and timeless fashions and include socialism in the '50s-'60s-punk-'80s sequence. This recycling ignores the great possibilities the socialist has in mind. The third option is that of storing and managing socialist potential. Finally the medium is at hand whereby socialism can be instituted without troublesome side effects like politics, management, environment and militarism. Socialism as a model is motivated by the realization of total leisure. The Soviet states were well underway with it. The worker's paradise knew many opportunities for getting away: you went to work to have breakfast in the people's kitchen, and then after a coffee to find some friends to have a beer with and catch a movie. Existence was of a relaxed idleness in which the dialectic of production and consumption had been transcended. The socialist work ethic can be understood as an early form of VR. In the data environment too, there is nothing to do, and the aura of the goods is missing. Pressure to perform can easily be avoided (by pretending you are working). Socialism as a VR environment is an atopia where one may act or watch without consequence. For a socialist, VR is not an archive or a museum, but a parking lot for an ideal society in a period in which the New World Order imposes the same work pressure on the entire world population. The socialists recognize that this monopoly must not be fought, but endured. They do not wait for pauperization and its subsequent class consciousness, but keep on tinkering with their virtual model, as they used to keep writing at their textual galaxy. Until VR implodes in reality. The socialists will be ready. ??