nettime: dear nettimers, improved version

[Pit Schultz <pit@contrib.de>]

dear nettimers, 

sorry for the meaningful accidents, unfocused blather, mail
bombs, absent moderator and lack of fun. 
since my connectivity here is not the best at the moment, i ve send you
the whole packet of messages which was waiting in the buffer, it seems that
we have to go through the aesthetics of different cathartic effects, and
then continue with a clearer view. after these 'hickups' i think that the
flow becomes now a bit more balanced. but finally, you never know.

best wishes
-pit
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi, 

we do speak about nation, what is a nation? at the same
time Jefferson reinvented liberty, there were in Europe some
romantic poets fighting for the revolutionary unity of a german
nation. some generations later one had big use of their writings.
the next 'unification' was again happening like an accident, and
still there are people which need to be proud of their new 
souvereignity.

then there came cyberspace, first a fiction, then someone declared it
as real existing. the whole american mythology gets reanimated ready to
lead us to a new land of milk and honey, virtual freedom and gun fights 
without deads. but people feel the danger of networks of power driven by
the intensity of central confusions. the net is not the territory and
cybernationalism becomes just another useless apocalyptic rider into the
end of the millenium. anyone who is speculating about the technology of
the internet as bigger entity, as weltgeist or will of nature, should be
aware of certain risks of binding any political ideas to this belief. 
or at least make clear if he/she speaks more aesthetically or in a
response of guts.

let's talk about capitalism. not again? well, even like 'nation' 
it sounds a bit funny today, as there is no 'them' of a competitive
system any more which defines it by it's borders. out of the bunkers
of the info-elite comes the old news that the digital revolution eats
its children. one makes jokes about the summer of 1996 as the turning
point of the cyberspace age, and net critique becomes the 'good tone'
now. 'this month we are in the seventies of the net, next month we
reinvent reagonomics' instead one could reject professionalism, 
the technological unconsciousness works as a classical desiring 
machine, never ending betaversions are making the net to a risky
laboratory, effectiveness, superconductivity and absolute speed remain
trancendental goals. the glossy surfaces, and buzzword economy of 
'context business' are just creating higher amounts of data trash and
digital dirt below..

it may become an urgent task of mapping the shift
with little subjective textes, interviews, reports of how it happened, 
how aggregates of real/virtual became too fast or too slow to carry 
whishful thinking, how networks of distrust grew, how meme industry made
a marketing gag out of your golden future, just before our memory gets 
replaced by the official version.

the interview with D/G i forwarded is maybe a bit long for some 
of you, but it's worth to read it, i guess, put into the actual frame
of wired desire. not everything fits and it has it's length, but
it's a worthful aspect to not speak about capitalism as something 
eternal. like nation seems to become obsolete by transnational flow
of money, and resists to disappear in the heads and institutions and
wars, in the short history of the internet there was this already 
mythical 'good times' of almost-independence from commerce.
the totalitarian idea of the libertarians that in the future
any human energy is transformable into information down to nanobucks and the
finest fringes of digi-wish economy, shows a tendency which Deleuze and
Guattari describe here as the delirious terminal state of capitalism.

it's, as they both are dead now, worth to remember where their
main motors are to find, which made it possible to write such useful
handbooks for free thinking netizens and buzzword bakeries.


******************************************************************
etext gathering for ZKP2 at madrid 5cyberconf is still open until 
may 15. let's do 'reinventing nettime' for the next few weeks.

cu
-pit


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