<nettime> Men in Denim - & bug report

[richard@imaginaryfutures.net]

Hiya,

Check out this Stalinist-style hatchet job on me and all my works:

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[Mute-social] Out Now on Metamute

Men in Denim
By Iain A. Boal

The computer, it has been argued, inspired a wave of post-war 'imaginary
futures', from ecstatic fantasies of time and space travel to fears of
mankind's extinction. Yet, prior technological developments were
similarly animated by fantasies and anxieties about the transformation
of human capacities. Here Iain Boal brings three critical histories of
modernity's futuramas firmly back down to earth

http://www.metamute.org/en/Men-in-Denim

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Since I do love to tease, I couldn't resist sending in this bug report:

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Re: [Mute-social] Men in Denim

Hiya,

In his haste to denounce my social democratic sins, Iain Boal has made
a couple of hilarious - and revealing - mistakes in his recent Mute
article.

Pit Schultz and myself wrote 'The Digital Artisans Manifesto' as a
pro-situ provocation for the 1997 nettime conference in Ljubljana,
Slovenia. Our ruse was bigging up the workers in new media companies
in the same over-the-top style as the boosters of dotcom
entrepreneurs. Since then, many people have told me that something
like our imaginary EDAN should be set up, but, apart from Iain Boal,
no one has thought that it was for real!

I may be guilty of many crimes, but I'm definately not one of the 'men
in denim'. In Alex's wonderful artwork dissected and reproduced in the
Boal article, I'm wearing a 3/4 length black mod-style suit from Adam
Shener in Portobello Road. Look at the portrait and the cut of the
cloth clearly shows that it's not made from denim.

This ideological police action also claims that I advocate positions
which I criticise and support things which I oppose. Like his analysis
of my portrait, Iain Boal prefers fantasising about my writings rather
than bothering to read what I've written...

Richard
http://www.imaginaryfutures.net
http://www.classwargames.net


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