nettime: Rant On/Rant Off

[Mark Stahlman (via RadioMail) <stahlman@radiomail.net>]

Folks:

Let me the first to correct myself -- sorta.  Bruce Sterling has come out
of his cave.  As a result of my poking with a sharp stick (or whatever),
the monster has emerged.  Bruce posted two elegant back-to-back rants on
GLSaW that have to be read to be believed.  I hope he x-posts them to
nettime (since he has just x-posted a lot more to GLSaW from nettime).  Not
surprisingly, however, he did not directly answer my questions.  In
fairness, he probably knows that he can't.

In these rants, Bruce identifies himself as a post-modern.  Duh.  No one
was fooled that cyberpunk was classical literature.  In my reply, I
identified that I am *not* a post-modern.  Duh.  Nobody (at least since I
said so in Budapest) has been confused that I'm dedicated to blocking the
post-modern path to the extinction of the human race.

He goes on to call me an "obscurantist" (whoops, I almost misspelled it
<g>) and I reply that he probably doesn't understand what I'm talking about
because he hasn't thought things through very clearly.  He also calls me a
"mystic" -- presumably because I understand that post-modernism is a
religion, too -- and a "paranoid" -- presumably because I'm interested in
how power actually works.  Nice work . . . for a monster.

>From the tone of all this, I suspect that he was more upset than I was. 
His comfort with name-calling is, as I suggested, the measure of his
insecurity.  He's one of those who like to "pull up a lawnchair" and that's
why he encourages the foodfights on GLSaW.  As I said, GLSaW just ain't the
real deal.

And so goes the battle.

Mark Stahlman
New Media Associates
New York City
newmedia@mcimail.com
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