Virtual Writing

"Everybody is a designer." - John Sasher

1. Designer media

To make a periodical, you need a format and a design. Then you just let 
volunteers and free-lancers fill up the columns, people who think they 
have something to say. A combination of design, marketing and 
distribution determines the magazine's success. Content doesn't matter a 
fuck. But without a content, the conceptual magazine degenerates into 
designer gloss, interesting only for professionals. The biggest danger 
for designer reviews is if the buyer takes the product for a professional 
journal. The empty look tells readers that they are completely free to 
ignore the content while enjoying the magazine. If they read it anyway, 
the word order is pure coincidence and the provocative quotes, sharp 
observations and intriguing associations are an added attraction. Design 
should be both indeterminate and distinct at the same time. If the image 
is too strong, the whole thing will be perceived as lifestyle, so that 
design turns into fashion. As a useless product, design must remain in 
the model stage to keep one step ahead of hype. It must constantly renew 
itself through software investments. When a program is understood, it can 
be thrown away.

For centuries, the book was marked for its contents. The creative monks' 
designer bibles weren't intented for reading, either. Church Latin had a 
nice typeface, but it was the pictures that made it ("Were the 
evangalists moonlighters?"). The male couple of Gutenberg and Luther put 
an end to this pleasure of text. Only in the era of designer media, in 
which words have been revalued as random ASCII, has author-related 
content become superfluous again. The status of books and the prestige of 
their authors vanish as soon as we realize that they have to make it 
within six weeks and will disappear from the shelves if they haven't in 
three months. In the book trade, a vertically stored book is a dead book. 
The ground material called "book" has fallen into the hands of the window 
dresser. As soon as the book object stops presenting itself as commodity 
and avoids the gesamtkunstwerk of the bookstores, it loses its setting 
and embarks on an unpredictable odyssey. The search for a given title 
acquires a sporting aspect, while to read the work itself requires an 
uncontemporary dedication which can only be produced from behind a 
battery of answering machines, faxes, and disconnected doorbells. Once 
the designer book discards style, subject, author, and the market, it 
acquires the brilliance of the prodigious. Design speculates on the 
existence of the unknown, which it discovers at the moment of design; it 
seeks not to exploit but to escape.

2. Accuracy through obscurity

The computer network liberates writers from their publishers. 
Unencumbered by reputation or oeuvre, the eager author can hurl one book 
after another directly onto the 'Net. Should your masterpiece be wiped 
off the newsgroups in ten days, you can park it on your personal 
homepage, FTP-site or BBS for the benefit of the virtual community. 
Writers can save their books from certain destruction on the paper 
market. The only thing that matters to the collection of connected files 
are the tags. "Weltfremdheit" or "discipline research" activate different 
search functions than "Safe writing" or "Ferdinand Kriwet." Electronic 
writers receive a daily, comprehensive literary update, and this has its 
consequences. Deconstruction software reveals what grammatical, retorical 
and educational tricks make a text bearable, in spite of its pol/cul/sex 
content. The quality of world literature is on the rise. If you can 
follow the writing activities of renowned authors, the question of how 
they do it is quickly answered. It's a dizzying thought that earlier 
generations wrote their books with ineradicable ink. This is why programs 
are being developed on demand to produce textual-critical editions even 
while writing, and send these dozens of versions hourly to the fleet of 
hard discs that record culture in atomic shelters. To give their texts 
that little extra that seperates literature from the rest, authors throw 
their personality into the struggle: the unique combination of gene 
package, cultural cross-overs, salient biographical data and education as 
used by a Camilla Paglia, Donna Tart, Elisabeth Bronfen, and Jung Chang.

The text that chooses to appear in the network instead of on the table 
strives for the greatest possible economy of the word. Reading pleasure 
used to be based on piling stylistic ornaments on top of story lines. The 
literary calculator now recognizes this as noise and an obstacle to 
communication. The electronic readers have all their texts pre-scanned, 
filtering out added value. For example, there exists a kill-file which 
destroys all sources and examples from 1989 (or 2012 for that matter), a 
quotation eraser which gets rid of everything in quotation marks, the 
command "skip interdesciplines," which erases everything expect the 
reader's specialization, "create summary," which summarizes a text 
according to the reader's wishes, and "show method," which shows 
self-referential excerpts and takes out all the exercises. "Textual 
cleansing shareware" provides access to such mega-oeuvres as that of 
Goethe, Simenon, Dilthey, Marx, Konsalik, Vestdijk, Balzac, Heidegger, 
Voltaire, D'Annunzio and Agatha Christie: The final technological 
solution to Althusser's shame at not having read the complete Hegel and 
Kant.

Human beings feel a biological urge to string words together before 
striking the first hard sentence. At the end of the day, writing that 
makes use of the selection programs preserves the three sentences that 
withstood the test. Text production the following day starts with those 
three sentences. Less radical are the help files that remove mistakes, 
prevent platitudes and point out bad journalistic habits. The selection 
program removes all sentences with constructions like "The eminent 
authority ..." or "... justly remarked ...," or the use of italics to 
prop up weak sentences. The compact text naturally has the density of a 
summary, the quality of poetry; it conceals a poor understanding of 
foreign languages, suppresses every tendency towards explanation 
formalities and replaces the snail's pace of reason with the brilliance 
of the keyword. The point is to formulate knowledge so precisely and with 
such complexity that it cannot be hacked by someone else's software. 
Writing on computers must never reach a conclusion; if it did, the train 
of thought that produced it would have to be left out. Sentences no 
longer seek a relationship with their predecessors or offspring. 
Conjunctions like "because," "thus," "since," "however" and "but" have 
been scrapped. In principle, any sentence can follow every other. The 
mystery of text is that an order of sentences does indeed exist. Text 
wants to be one step ahead of imagination and accelerates to the point of 
absurdity. It does not need the logic of machine language. One in a 
thousand texts contains something new, so that there emerge unlikely 
correspondences ("between a camera and a fish eye, what are 
Hindi-telephones?") which stimulate the fantasy. Compressed text is 
precise and obscure. It evokes a hidden world of thought which apparently 
no longer needs to be reported. The 'Nettext is becoming concrete, while 
readers arrive at a level of abstraction not usually accessible. With all 
the exit signs that have been placed throughout the text, tourism in 
abstraction is easy to endure.

3. Writing without a carrier

Traditionally, writing involved storage on clay tablets, parchment, paper 
or hard disk. Virtual writing means producing a language that only exists 
in the main memory. On-line text turns the written word into an unstable 
medium. There is no Nobel prize for the best telephone conversation. All 
of your genius or love for humanity is lost forever once you hang up. 
What the Hittites, Aztecs, Mayans and other vanished cultures talked 
about will always remain a mystery to us. The written word causes single 
events. When text becomes as ephemeral as the spoken word, it ceases to 
be evidence. It does not need to preserve or transmit any culture. 
Contextless writing does not aim to retell or transmit stories and does 
not seek to degenerate into some mythological stage. It practices a 
now-and-nevermore kind of communication and sharpens punctual 
consciousness. Language turns out capable of correctly transmitting our 
intentions when undistracted by body language or its setting. "When you 
narrow the bandwith, you focus the message."

Actually existing cyberspace is a text-based environment, not because of 
a cultural decision, but because of a technological limitation that 
people have to live with at the end of the 1900's. The transient 
computext represents the ironic reemergence of the written word, after 
the word had already been decleared dead by the new visual culture. 
Writing has succeeded in renewing itself by finding a new mass medium. 
All books can be resold anew on CD-ROM. The book store can survive, just 
as the library-cum-data bank. The melancholy warriors for the 
preservation of the written word should demand that all of humanity goes 
on-line as soon as possible. Literacy is learning to type on a keyboard. 


In the global democratic conspiracy to prevent the convergence and 
synergy of mass- and written culture, Sega and Nintendo have moved 
towards non-literary visual interfaces which require no command of 
language. "Text for some, images for all." The speed whereby the 
Internetionale spread through the early nineties reveals the strength of 
textual culture. Virtual writing is the written word's answer to designer 
media because it is not in search of material form, which is by 
definition too contemporary. The primitive nature of on-line text exceeds 
design. The ephemerality of real-time media ignores all good intentions 
of stylists and conservationists. If writing has been cornered by design 
in the paper world, it has created a new, free space in the electronic 
universe.
??