| Pit Schultz on Fri, 22 Nov 96 02:51 MET |
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| Re: nettime: The Anarchives... The Mythology of Technology: The Internet AsUtopia |
----- Forwarded message from Mark Stahlman ----- >From radiomail.net!stahlman Wed Nov 20 18:41:21 1996 X-UIDL: afb80cf9615cffe9000ef0e2d8900de0 Date: Wed, 20 Nov 1996 09:39:05 -0800 (PST) To: [email protected] (Jesse Hirsh) (by way of [email protected] (Jesse Hirsh)) From: Mark Stahlman (via RadioMail) <[email protected]> CC: [email protected] Subject: Re: nettime: The Anarchives... The Mythology of Technology: The Internet AsUtopia Message-ID: <RM:c0d83d13.0013d929.0> Jesse: This is direct reply to you which I hope will also be forwarded to the nettime (and other) lists. You sent chills down my spine many times throughout your essay (a true "multiple") -- for a number of reasons. As you will notice from my "English Ideology" essay, I've been working on the Utopian theme and end-of-it-all theme for some time and you've beautifully captured the horrors which await us if we allow the Internet-as-global-market to become the New Media. Beautifully. You also correctly used McLuhan's aphorism in this context but you could have made it even stronger by completing the quote. "The medium is the message . . . and the audience is the content." We are the New Media. If we "choose" slavery then the way we will do it will be by participating in an enslaving medium. What you may not have known is that McLuhan thought that the apocalypse is near -- literally -- and that TV would take us there. Close but now the Internet offers much more chilling possibilities. When asked, "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" He answered, "An apocalypsist!" And, given both his extreme devotion to Catholicism (he knew in a profound manner what an apocalypse truly means) and his conviction that an evil cabal runs this world (see his letters to Ezra Pound), the only way to read McLuhan is as a scared shitless prophet-of-doom who spoke in "code" so that he wouldn't get busted. The problem is that "democracy" is the ultimate honey-trap. The utopian/corporativist (i.e. fascist) impulse *needs* online "democracy" to get a public buyin and to be able to constantly surveil the subject population. The "bizarre fusion" that Barbrook/Cameron spoke of is *both* total jack-boot and total "freedom." Both at the same time. My friend, on this planet, anarachy is totalitarianism. The further problem is that a fundamental religious basis for this totalitarianism is already emblazed in our skulls -- the insane notion that the Earth is being threatened by humanity. Not only is there no science behind fear of eco-disaster (its a religion, remember) but by placing Nature at the pinnacle of creation and by being willing to sacrifice human progress at Nature's altar, we are sealing our fate. The New Dark Age you describe will be an Eco-Fascist World State run by Jaron Lanier's "Stewards" who define the boundaries of our jailcells while we merrily embrace total surveillance of our thoughts and desires through libertarian/anarchist "democratic" participation in decorating the cellblock. We must return to the Renaissance inventions of scientific knowledge and the anti-empire nation-state or much more than Babylon will burn. Civilization will have died. Mark Stahlman New Media Associates New York City [email protected] ----- End of forwarded message from Mark Stahlman ----- -- * distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission * <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, * collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets * more info: [email protected] and "info nettime" in the msg body * URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: [email protected]