Living in the Media I. Dutch squatters once proclaimed, "You can't live in tanks." But you can live in the media. Some people take the abolition of public and private a little too literally. Why should the abandoned carriers of the imaginary not be transformed into living rooms? Take the Victoria Theater on Amsterdam's Sloterkade canal, a monumental building in late Jugendstil style which stood empty for years. Two weeks before it was finally squatted, the public function of the building had been jeopardized for good when local hooligans in search of a hangout for those boring evenings set the screen on fire by way of an experiment. The day of the squat, the fire brigade paid the new residents a visit to congratulate them with their little palace, thinking the building's new function might contain the fire hazard. The enormous auditorium was so impressive that for the first few months, the ten squatters decided to camp out on the empty stage, where the loudspeakers still worked. The red plush foyer became a late-night bar almost by itself. The Pakistani who had last managed the building had taken the projectors but left the backup units, so that the atmospheric lighting could be turned on immediately. As movie theaters by nature have no windows, the residents' biological rhythms went totally haywire. They would wake up to find the shops already closed, which led to alternative shopping behavior as they learnt to take the shop window rather than the front door. To get through the long nights without light shows, people fell back on such primary vital functions as sex, drugs, booze and rock 'n' roll. It was not until months later that the whole company moved to the upstairs offices, where the administrative records of seventy years of cultural industry were still stored in crates. A kitchen was built after rumors spread concerning a case of scurvy. The squat had been occupied in early autumn, and the squatters couldn't get the heat on because the gas company refused to provide service. The concerts they managed to organize never really got going because everyone was standing freezing around the hot-air blower under the balcony. Only the neighbors burned up with rage owing to the racket that lasted deep into the night. The remarkable phenomenon occurred that every house hunter who hung out at the Victoria for more than three weeks became incommunicado to well-meaning outsiders. The Victoria's warriors even lost contact with the central monad of the neighborhood squatters' group. Groups constantly moved in and out over the years, each taking the same inevitable route from responsibility to a raging standstill. It took survivors years to make the switch back to civilian life in the inhabited world. The intensity of the squatters' involvement in the permanent performance of the building's phantoms left them profoundly amazed, a state of mind which spanned the whole spectrum from myth to taboo. You cannot live in theaters, and those who transgress this rule will pay the price. II. A second group has discovered communication itself as its living quarters. Certain radiomakers and hackers end up in a studio or workshop and never leave again. Their work schedule is so much at sixes and sevens that they pass beyond the critical stage where a distinction between leisure and working for the cause can still be made. Their presence on the air or the network assumes such scopes that even others accept the fact that they are in permanent transmission. From then on, every coworker is merely one of their guests. Distinctions between the few personal belongings and the equipment can no longer be made. Only the mattress and a few clothes point to the secondary residential function of the space. The work space is transformed into a cozy salon stuffed with found and donated electronics. Some discarded machines are beyond repair, while others, divested of their casings, are fully operational. The black-box myth of the media is shattered and technology stands unscrewed, in all its naked pride. Immune to user stress, this personal relationship with hardwares takes its time to explore the matrix in every detail for nights on end. Visitors are treated by the data doctors to an extensive tour of those parts of the jumbled collection that enjoy their current attention. A prolonged stay in media space eases the burden of everyday time schedules. There is no more question of expensive broadcasting or programming time; each minute is priceless in its possibilities. Because every encounter is a personal broadcast for the studio residents, they can always put on a brilliant show, even without transmitting equipment. Always on the air, they are open to every guest on their live show. This distinguishes the armchair mediatists from their Japanese fellow-otakus, who seek the loneliness of the electronic monad to play their games with the others. What they have in common is that to both, classical reality is a black box, cast in eternal darkness. III. We have been living in the media for years now. Delocalization or detemporalization is a natural state of mind for large sections of the world population. Earthly wiring and stratospheric irradiation have created an infrastructure in which anything can happen anywhere and anyone can be present at any moment. The telecitizens of the global state are all in the same boat together, and they had better face up to it. We all row with the media we have. The Cold-War ideal of the open society & its enemies finds its logical sequel in the telemonad of the smart building, where twenty-first-century cave dwellers sit staring at their electronic interiors. In emulation of the barricaded squat, the home regains the allure of the medieval castle. Buried in electronic security, people think they can keep junkies, refugees, Eastern Europeans, child molestors, art thieves, intruders, rapists and other representatives of deviant behavior out the door. The paranoid fear of robbery finds it counterpart in the fear to miss out on global events. People connect to every available channel, from the astral to the local. Fluctuations in the dollar rate are as absorbing as the length of the reported traffic jam. One reads at least four daily papers, a stack of newsmagazines with all the favorite contributors and every appropriate trade journal, from Cosmopolitan to Semiotext(e). In short, those who have taken up residence in the media no longer know what is going on outside. As long as the media fail to eliminate earth's biological time differences and synchronize every watch, the human remainder will keep muddling on with its private day and night rhythms. Designer drugs somewhat accelerate information processing. The new trend towards natural stimulation of the synapses of the human main processor serves no other purpose than to step up the speed of the internal clock so as to keep up with the frequency of visual alternations. To the data user, a stay in the media is an unequaled show. But to the nomadic mind that dwells outside the media strongholds, the media buzz is synonymous with total inertia. From this point of view, the info carriers' metapassengers are blind because they see too much, deaf because they hear too much, handicapped by their excessive mileage. From this perspective, the monads are sick to the bone, while, to those inside, the nomads are the criminal virus carriers par excellence, and urgently need to be dragged through the DNA mills. In this class struggle between teleworkers and the dataless, the latter will deploy matter itself in their offensive against digital omnipotence. As far as the opponents of data are concerned, there is little reason to fall back on the modern adage of light, air and elasticity. They would rather reach out to a stranger in town and strike up a conversation. They join the Babel-like confusion with abandon. Teleworkers who have not yet been discharged into the data sewers of the free flow of information will be dismissed, after which nothing will prevent the condemned media monads from being squatted. Leftover data will disappear through the hole in the ozone layer and dissolve into interstellar dark matter. ??