The Data Dandy

"I do not believe in progress, but I believe in the stagnation of human 
stupidity - I admire Japanese chairs because they have not been made to 
sit upon." - Oscar Wilde

The data dandy collects information to show off and not to transmit it. 
He is well-, too-well, or even exaggeratedly well-informed. Pointed 
questions are met with unwanted answers. He always comes up with 
something different. The phenotype of the data dandy is as feared as was 
his historical predecessor, whose playground was the street and the 
salon. The elegant extravagance with which he displays the most detailed 
trivia shocks the practical media user. The data dandy makes fun of the 
gauged consumption and the measured intake of current news and amusement, 
and doesn't worry about an excess or overload of specialized knowledge. 
His carefully assembled information portfolio betrays no constructive 
motive. He goes to the greatest effort to appear as arbitrary as 
possible. One wonders: why did the data-head want to know all this stuff? 
He zaps not out of boredom, but out of unwillingness to keep abreast of 
current events and everybody else's latest worries.

The screen is the mirror at which he performs his toilet. The buttoning 
and unbuttoning of textile dandyism has found its successor in the 
channel surfing of on/off decadence. Wrapped in the finest facts and the 
most senseless gadgets, the new dandy deregulates the time economy of the 
info = money managers. He spends most of his computing time on the 
luxurious decoration of his hard disk and the creation of sophisticated 
circuits among thousands of heterogeneous software trinkets. The 
PowerBook as an ornament is the pride of many a salon digitalist. He 
derides actuality, hype and fashion; wherever he shows up, there briefly 
appears a self that is its own anchorperson. 

In the era of multimedia mass information one can no longer differentiate 
between uni- and multiformity. Neither broad overview nor clarifying 
detail can relieve the mental confusion. Against this background the data 
dandy proves what everybody knows: namely, that information may be 
omnipresent but is not readily accessible. Certain facts are very 
flattering and one must develop a fine nose for them. Unlike the data 
collector, the data dandy is concerned not with the obsession of the 
complete file, but with the accumulation of as many immaterial ornaments 
as possible. While the otaku withdraws into himself and will never cross 
the boundaries of his solitary cultivation, it is precisely the most 
extroverted newsgroups which the data dandy searches out to launch his 
unproductive contributions. What the data dandy skims off in order to 
present elsewhere would be only of secondary importance, if the 
presentation were not so indiscreet. His freakish wit distracts attention 
from the run-of-the-mill items. The ingenuity of his bon mots has a 
duration of 30 seconds, after which they disappear from the screen as 
suddenly as they came. Our data dandy is a broker in gigawares, with the 
understanding that your garbage is his makeup, and his substance your 
fluid.

The data dandy displays a disquieting kinship with the politician, who 
also forces himself upon us with empty phrases and won't go away. Now 
that the political classes in their death struggle have discovered the 
media, they refuse to let go of them, and their fanatical attempts to 
solicit support are taking on dandyish traits. The data dandy surfaces in 
the vacuum of politics which was left behind once the oppositional 
culture neutralized itself in a dialectical synthesis with the system. 
There he reveals himself as an equally lovable and false opponent, to the 
great rage of politicians who consider their young pragmatic dandyism a 
publicity tool and not necessarily a personal goal. They vent their rage 
on the journalists, experts and personalities who make up the chance cast 
on the studio floor, where who controls the direction is the only topic 
of conversation. Yet they find the data dandy hopelessly difficult, since 
he refuses to play the sporting opponent and neglects to ask politely 
critical questions. Our bon vivant enjoys all display of banality and 
takes absolutely no offense at pointless dedication.

Maliciousness would have been useful, but the flawed subversive shows 
precisely his engaging side. His charm is deadly. While the no-talent 
underground goes in search of instruments to cause the establishment 
trouble, the data dandy lets everything go stylishly haywire. There is no 
longer any social movement, opposition or undercurrent, nor can one 
suddenly appear out of nowhere; they can only sink further into the 
individual. Once empty the media remain empty forever; no statement can 
compete with that. Hackers and cyberpunks do not manifest themselves, 
simply because they do not exist and can only be conjured up as ghosts. 
Calling upon fictitious social forces is a desperate attempt at one more 
way to gauge the enemy. The same applies to the data dandy, who is taken 
for a proto-fascist and briefly appears as an illusory participant in the 
form of theoretical hooligan during the therapeutic debate about the rise 
of the extreme right.

The 'Net is to the electronic dandy what the metropolitan street was for 
the historical dandy. Rambling along the data boulevards cannot be 
prohibited and ultimately jams the entire bandwidth. The all-too 
civilized conversation during a rendez-vous turns up a few misplaced and 
objectionable data, but never results in dissidence. The point of willful 
wrong navigation and elegant joyriding through someone else's 
electro-environment is admiration, envy and confusion, and consciously 
aims at stylized incomprehension. The dandy measures the beauty of his 
virtual appearance by the moral indignation and laughter of plugged-in 
civilians. It is a natural character of the parlor aristocrat to enjoy 
the shock of the artificial. This is why he feels so at home in 
cyberspace with all its attributes. Cologne and pink stockings have been 
replaced by precious Intel; delicate data gloves and ruby-encrusted 
butterfly goggles and sensors are attached to his brows and nostrils. 
Away with the crude NASA aesthetics of cybernauts! The data dandy has 
moved well beyond the pioneer stage; the issue now is the grace of the 
medial gesture.

If the anonymous crowd in the streets was the audience of the Boulevard 
dandy, the logged-in 'Net-users are that of the data dandy. He feels 
forced to employ the other users as the anonymous mass, the amorphous 
normality to which he is the sharply outlined deviation. The data dandy 
knows he is never more than one of many crazies in the variability 
carnival of the information circus. He will thus never present himself as 
the umpteenth retro-identity or remnant of some twentieth-century 
fashion, because he can only play with the rules of the 'Net as a 
non-identity. What is exclusivity in the age of differentation? The dandy 
is not interested in ever more secret passwords to gain entry into ever 
more exclusive data salons; he needs virtual plazas to make his tragic 
appearance. Data dandyism is born of an aversion to being exiled into a 
subculture of one's own. The dandy's archenemies are camp and cult, which 
hide themselves instead of openly manifesting. On the contrary, the dandy 
repeatedly launches meaningless Temporary Common Denominators (TCDs) in 
which every subculture believes it recognizes itself. He manages thus to 
attract a remarkably large grey mass with which to stage his own 
spectacles. He creates a fake publicness and tests conventions. Some 
arbitrary examples of strong TCDs with a high vagueness coefficient are 
the anti-Gulf War demos, cyberpunk, illegal knowledge, tactical 
television and the Northwest Airlines plane crash. The data dandy surfs 
along on the waves of these Temporary Common Denominators; it's what 
makes him tick. 

On the 'Net, the only thing that appears as a mass is information itself. 
As soon as a new field of knowledge is found, it splits and branches off 
so that an infinite amount of information flows in and out. Today's new 
theme is tomorrow's 23 newsgroups. If the data dandy wishes to come 
across as a real figure, he can only do so in the form of dandy data. 
These are queer: while the heteroinformative data of straight people are 
concerned with qualification, connection and reproduction, fanning out 
and thus causing further disintegration, the dandies' homoinformative 
data are eccentric but not peculiar. Homodata associate with others and 
are lost in themselves. Like TCDs, they attract roughly similar info and 
achieve a carefree concentration within the information field, where the 
show can begin. There appears to be an encounter or confrontation with 
the System, but this contact yields no productive moment, no cause or 
effect. Dandy data are purely situational, parasites par excellence. What 
remains is legend, the fuel of all media and the hope of theory.
??