The Fatal Attraction of Reality

"Don't want, don't want, don't want to be part of your world." - David 
Bowie

"Move those cameras! Out of the way! Sit down! Get out of the way!" On 
the balcony of the "Stadsschouwburg," Amsterdam's city theatre, a lively 
Surinam band was staging a colorful show in anticipation of Nelson 
Mandela's arrival, who was going to deliver a speech to the 15,000 
Amsterdam citizens who had gathered there. But the musicians remained 
invisible behind the row of (white) press cameras in front of them, much 
to the crowd's annoyance. When word spread around that the "King of 
Africa" had entered the building, the media gathered around the 
microphone at the center of the balcony. The crowd, realizing that they 
were about to miss out on this sight as well, started to chant. 
Catchphrases like "Move your cameras!" spontaneously turned into the 
angry slogan of "TV get lost!," a variation of the traditional slogan, 
"Riot police get lost!," suddenly equating the image hunters with state 
troopers. In a crowd that had been dismissed as meaningless décor or 
consumers for a decade, the years of vague antimedial discomfort now 
turned into an awareness that the media agents have taken over the role 
of the peacekeepers in robbing the mass of its event.

Increasingly, the media have declared themselves the real event, forcing 
themselves ever further into the picture with all their technological 
prostheses. To the press, the actual mass gathered on the square in front 
of the theatre had become just as imaginary as the viewers at home, and 
equally uninteresting. The "masses of the people" feared that all they 
would get to see were the backs of some media guys, although they knew 
that Mandela had come to meet them, and that the happening was not 
intended as some open-air press conference. The journalists, sensing that 
the first brick was about to hit their portable hi-tech, swiftly 
retracted from this 1,5-meter demediatized zone. 

Then his exiled royalty appeared in the press-free zone, patiently 
observing those who had gathered to see him. Noticing that there stood 
more thousands of cheering people down the sides of the balcony, he 
pushed his way through the cameras to greet them as well. In contrast 
with all the pop musicians, soccer teams, queens and politicians who use 
the crowd as just another PR tool, Mandela, instead of making a dash for 
the mike, took his time to meet the mass. Even he himself brushed the 
media aside to make room for the event. There was a sudden hush as 
Mandela, contrary to expectations, did not deliver a speech but had the 
simple nerve to give a full explanation of current ANC activities, 
without succumbing to sloganeering. The curious experience shared by 
those present was that of a mass being brought to discharge without any 
incendiary ranting and raving. The crowd turned out capable of more than 
just ecstasy or boredom; it could simply and quietly contemplate what was 
being said. After half an hour, Mandela concluded his address by saying: 
"We respect you, we thank you and above all, we love you" - something the 
media have yet to come up with.

The media anticipate a battle of life and death in the coming age of 
digital interfaces. The bit's 0/1 principle turns out to have a yes/no 
analogy. Two breathtaking scenarios impose themselves on us: if we say 
yes to the media, we emigrate to cyberspace, abandoning our physical 
hardware and inscribing our consciousness into software. If the answer is 
no, then we take the "exit to reality," with media ending up either as 
household goods or as museum art, along with vacuum cleaners and country 
wickerwork.

Although the extent and frequency of antimedial incidents daily 
increases, they are carefully kept out of or not recognized as such by 
the press. Not one Dutch paper reported the abovementioned assault on 
consumer-hostile media behavior. Still, there are already signs of an 
international "anti-media movement." Its motto is that in order to meet 
someone you must first disrupt a few connections. Today, the habit of 
wrecking a telephone booth, short-circuiting a cable TV socket, pouring 
concrete over an ATM, removing video cameras from intersections or 
cutting up street cables at random before tucking in no longer raises 
anyone's eyebrows. So far, this shared savoir-vivre, inspired by 
do-it-yourself-help and out for simple pleasures, has not yet exceeded 
the stage of local disturbances. But when the uplinks to the global 
village are cut short en masse, we may safely assume that many more 
earthlings will put their media-free time to other uses. 

For years on end, viewers used to enjoy their TV sedation, but in the end 
even that became a bore. The argument in favor of responsibly programmed 
educational television only deters them even further. Recent research has 
shown that viewing rates are "dropping dramatically." Even the remaining 
TV-set owners deny ever using them. "The hesitation to admit to the habit 
produces an answer similar to that given by alcoholics: 'Drinking, me?!'; 
'Those few shows, that's not watching.'" 

The mediatist caste moves about exclusively within permanent topicality, 
because it considers it its social duty to avert the danger of a sudden 
return of history. To accomplish this, it strips every event of its 
causes and effects in a production of unrelated and inconsequential 
items. It realizes that if the masses regain their capability to act, the 
media will be the first to suffer the consequences. Once, the media were 
an exceptional case. The impressiveness of live images of the moon 
landing lay in the fact that no one had ever seen anything like it 
before: the whole world was switched on to the fascination of leaving 
earth at home. It seemed a fulfillment of the promise that we can leave 
the unbearable weight of being behind and finally enter the technological 
universe, where we can whiz from one spot to another in a condition of 
zero gravity.

Two decades later, viewers began to realize what all this really means. 
By turning everything into information, the media can level all incidents 
to the same images (all of the Dutch media compared Mandela's address to 
public celebrations of the national soccer team). Because media are 
omnipresent, space has lost its substance, to be filled up with images 
from an inpeculiar elsewhere. The place viewed has no other context than 
that of the item that follows it. The medial outlook has become 
coincidental with the touristic experience of "here today, somewhere else 
tomorrow." There is no need for confrontations with the others, when all 
you have to do is check out their accompanying info. "Why talk to one 
another when we're communicating so well?" The others have become 
obstacles or objects which possibly reveal interesting characteristics. 
If not, all you have to do is to walk on.

At present, reality is the exception. The fact that it should thus 
exercise a dangerous attraction is not altogether unfamiliar to the media 
workers. They identify it in psychological terms as the romantic feelings 
they themselves have had on occassion, or dismiss the call for reality as 
nostalgia or fear of technology. No doubt, the assault on media will be 
misrepresented as vandalistic and undemocratic actions, and indifference 
as an alarming development that needs to be reversed through information 
services. Still, the aversion to TV is no more than an expression of the 
general human need for an outside in which to experience something 
personal. Reality is seen as the realm of the unpredictable, which no 
longer coincides with the technological miracle. The antimedial 
movement's moral values (respect, gratitude, love?) may prevent it from 
taking its resentment to the point of a final destruction of media. The 
media just have to cool down a bit. The movement might give the 
information channels their own place within the machinery of everyday 
life, then stop arguing about the whole affair.

Now that the media find themselves cornered, they come up with the answer 
to suck up their users into the screen once and for all: Cyberspace, the 
"medium to end all media." Rumors about the "new space" that roams 
through the actually existing global village have charged current 
investigations with huge expectations and unlimited possibilities. The 
cyberspace saga has already been written down by Gibson & Sterling; video 
kids nervously guard the gates of their arcades; the military are 
diligently experimenting with the total interface between body and 
machine. Old hippies don data suits and gloves to realize their Oriental 
dream of unrestricted journeys through the universal consciousness 
without the traditional withdrawal symptoms. Finally, there are the media 
artists who try to use their aesthetic morality to keep cyberspace empty, 
to prevent it from being filled up with nothing but banalities. So far, 
the early works of these pioneers do not tell us whether cyberspace will 
remain a private experience, or rather become the virtual vehicle for 
hypercommunication between global citizens in the near future. The 
synonym of this public space under construction is "Cybermedia."

In cybermedia, the distance between subject and object which caused the 
old media so much trouble is all but eliminated. It was about time we put 
an end to all those reflections and criticisms regarding the ego's place 
in the world, all that bitching about a presumed reality that doesn't fit 
in with the general picture. The puritanical small-mindedness which 
strives for a sharp distinction between human and virtual reality is 
banned to the prehistory of political metaphysics by the cyberspace 
scouts. They replace this old-fashioned need to draw a line by a 
democratic view of reality: If you don't like what you see, why not 
simply reset your cybergoggles? 

The twentieth-century media have not lived up to their promise of the 
global village as a resort of maximum mobility. The predicted uprooting 
of the entire world population by an advancing mediatization was seen as 
a part of the inevitable process of human progress. Finally, the 
construction of a worldwide infrastructure for all would place every 
region on history's conveyor belt towards an affluent and convenient 
life. To this day, technological progress consists of the construction of 
a set of ideologically neutral networks and facilities: from cable 
television, freeways and (air)ports to sanitation and the mobilization of 
labor, resources, commodities, and information. These transregional 
structures are thought to hover like a cloud above traditional customs 
and nationalities. The idea of media was that the transcendence of local 
identities would automatically lead to their disappearance or (if not) at 
least render them uninteresting from a global perspective, compared to 
infrastructural developments. In this scheme, the region functions as a 
supplier of cultural resources for a variegated media package. Regions 
that cannot or will not play the game end up on a list of no go zones 
doomed to cry in vain in an information wilderness.

But the media have never internationalized; on the contrary, they turned 
out to be a means of consolidating local relations. With universal 
communication, everybody can stay put. Not everyone has mastered the 
touristic experience of the personal lifestyle and environment. Ever more 
parts of the world (Mesopotamia, the Balkan, Central Asia) are starting 
to act as a nuisance to the project of transnationalization. Old media 
such as religions stubbornly stick to their own absolute values and try 
to cause a stir among the Family of Man. The religious still refuse to 
believe that we inhabit one world (perhaps they've missed the moonlanding 
coverage?). But they will learn in time, the day they discover that the 
rest of the world couldn't care less about their local nuclear wars. We 
don't need your fucking catastrophes.

Cybermedia are the terminus of the idea of global networks. They aim at 
completion of the infrastructural, on the urgent principle that there 
will be "one system or none at all." Their dream is to accommodate all 
medial spaces in the House of Cyberspace. The idea is that until now, 
humanity has wasted its time lobbying in little rooms, but now there's a 
chance to get the general picture and connect the lot. From now on, we 
will be able to hop effortlessly from every radio program, movie, data 
bank, archive and library to every conceivable private conversation, 
tele-conference and teleshop, no matter where.

The nagging on of past realities which have frustrated the project of 
modernity for a century is cut short by replacing them once and for all 
by a new principle of reality. In cybermedia, all formats of language, 
time, territory, identity (sex, race, lifestyle), environment, health and 
age have been converted into the universal 0/1 code. To log in means to 
be a little bit of something everywhere. The ancient desire to leave the 
mortal body behind is combined with the equally ancient pursuit of a 
masterless, communicative society of pure human beings. World peace is 
realized on a level of abstraction where to play war games only causes 
one to lag behind. Historically, cyberspace may still be retraced to war 
as the father of all things, but in actual practice the fatal 
transmission of genetic material has ruined our Father even in terms of 
technological genealogy. Similarly, SDI, scheduled to be a Cold War 
highlight, caused its sudden end instead, much to the dismay of the 
military-industrial complex. 

The threats encroaching upon the cybermedia's Empire of Freedom are 
legion. On the one hand, there are the pigheaded dissidents and their 
collective attempt to impose their own format on all the data flows 
within the global infrastructural empire. They see the disappearance of 
space-time differences as a chance to impose their will directly on the 
users. On the other hand, there emerge sinister figures who break the 
common consensus and out of their own loneliness by running amok in 
cyberspace. With their electronic creeses, they blindly slash away at 
passersby. But there exist internal threats as well. As Gibson pointed 
out, corporations are creating new barriers to guard their data 
buildings, and might well take over all of cyberspace. A form of 
exclusivism which undermines democratic intentions and invites to acts of 
resistance in the name of total accessibility. Moreover, the 
electrosphere can quickly silt up with self-duplicating data trash, 
defunct environments, drifting noise, virtual billboards along data 
flows, and spontaneous crashes through overload or insufficient computing 
capacity. Cyberspace allows for repressive or therapeutic applications as 
well, which infringe upon the faith in the non-normativeness of 
communication. 

People ask us: "Is there any perspective in cybermedia?" Artistic and 
non-specialist journals put up a smoke screen to make the introduction of 
cyberware as attractive as possible. Those laypersons who don't give up 
beforehand never get much further than the question of technology, while 
the more advanced get caught up in the question of ethics. They 
anticipate a broad public debate on the safety of the new media and the 
redundancy schemes of the old. Consciousness must not be allowed to be 
harmed by the latest psychedelics. Meanwhile, NGOs such as "Save the TV" 
demand guarantees regarding the preservation of detached media. Sceptics 
claim that, like Star Wars, cyberspace may be technically possible, but 
that in practice it will never get beyond the stage of simulation. Its 
introduction on a global scale as TV or telephone would require such 
enormous investments in hard-, soft- and wetware as to withdraw all 
productive power from the area of civil consumption. They predict that 
cyberspace will never exceed the level of private consciousness and will 
end up as a hyperindividual, out-of-body fairground attraction, similar 
to the orgone box, dream machine or megabrain. The neo-materialists point 
to the limits of communication. They claim that we have nothing left to 
say to, nor wish to meet one another - not even in cyberspace. The Other 
can easily be consumed without necessarily getting in touch with it. 
Media may convey something, but they radiate nothing. Real contact is 
made with a nice chunk of steel or concrete, without the need for input 
or exchange that is inherent to cybermedia. Finally, the visionaries 
issue ukases predicting that the whole cyberproject will end up as one of 
the ruins of postindustrial presumption. They do not mean this in a 
derogatory sense. To them, the failure of the quantumchip is a challenge 
to the artist to use the defunct electronics to bring the aesthetics of 
ruin up to date.

In an attempt to hush this interpretative onslaught, the 
cyberphilosophers fall back on a figure of thinking which has been quite 
a hit for centuries now: the Hegelian construct of "reconciliation." The 
contradiction between the virtual (formerly Spirit or the Imaginary) and 
reality (as the Absolute Principle) is reconciled by the ringing 
advertising slogan of "virtual reality." But the promotion capacity of 
this logo may not be all it seems to be. Among the antimedial in 
particular, there is great resentment of the whole marketing idea. They 
see cyberspace simply as an actual increase of the available media, and 
reject its critics as noise that naturally accompanies the introduction 
of a new product. Their confidence that cyberspace simply consists of all 
the former media together renders them indifferent to the promise of a 
new, mythical space. They might have settled for a fully animated image 
package, as this would at least remove the cameras from the public 
highway. But cybermedia must be more than just a 3-D video game; their 
lust for images will continue to drive them out of the studios to feed on 
extramural street-scene material. 

The charm of cybermedia lies in their naive approach to the world. They 
presume that artificial fascination suffices to extinguish reality. The 
world is removed ever further from the personal terminal. Reality is not 
in the least bothered by this. It knows the all too human craving for the 
illusory, and that all it must do is wait for this, too, to blow over. 
The question, however, is whether the antimedial movement will prove 
capable of the same kind of patience.
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