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| <nettime> [more on] 90s Cyberculture [scotartt, sondheim, herman, murphy] |
Re: An Early History of 90s Cyberculture [wark, scotartt, garrin]
"scotartt" <[email protected]>
Re: An Early History of 90s Cyberculture
Alan Sondheim <[email protected]>
[email protected]
Robbin Neal Murphy <[email protected]>
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From: "scotartt" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: An Early History of 90s Cyberculture [wark, scotartt, garrin]
Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1999 15:07:41 +1100
> From: Paul Garrin <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: <nettime> An Early History of 90s Cyberculture
> Date: Tue, 28 Dec 1999 01:35:21 -0500
>
> While insightful in many ways, I don't agree with your
> eulogy for counter culture.
No, well I mean yes, "counter culture" died at Altamont Speedway. Executed
by the Hell's Angels after a long illness, accompanied by the Rolling
Stones, it thoroughly keeled over and carked it with only a brief sigh of
resignation.
> Autonomy need not be "temporary", and whatever its state,
> it can not be achieved through romanticism and inaction--it
> requires work, committment, strategy and risk.
Au contraire, I disagree. Autonomy is always contingent. At any given
moment you are continually negotiating your autonomy with the forces of
nature, collective society, other individuals, Microsoft, corporations,
governments, state agents, and so on. Many of these, not just the state and
corporations, can wipe your autonomy clean at almost any instant! Autonomy
isn't an absolute, every day we all bargain away certain parts of it in
exchange for needs and goals of our own. ["Lick my xxx and I will allow you
to xxx with me."] Some more than others. And most still have little or no
choice about major-impact autonomous choices, like where to live, or even
*to* live. But to even start with the notion of an autonomous 'counter
culture' that is free of critique is to embark on a romantic exercise from
the outset. I don't percieve the counter-culture to be separate
structurally from the culture it counters. The
spectacular-commodity-economy is produced just as much by the actions of
that which is 'counter' to merely its content or its gross methods.
Autonomy is not something that once won, is achieved forevermore, and
neither is it something entirely absent from most people's lives. There is
a give-and-take between even the most enlightened individuals. But there is
no ideal state of universal 'autonomy' which is in the pot o'gold o'er the
rainbow, it's the *striving* that's important. The amount of work,
committment, strategy and risk required is completely contingent on the
situation at hand. PLAY is usually the best activity anyway. Merely seeing
any measure of reflexivity on the process as somehow being inactive is just
a way to make your own motivations and cause-and-effect invisible to
yourself.
and finally;
"You'll be absolutely free,
only if you want to be."
- Mothers of Invention.
[email protected]
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Date: Tue, 28 Dec 1999 13:52:39 -0500 (EST)
From: Alan Sondheim <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Re: An Early History of 90s Cyberculture
Early television history is fascinating; there were a lot of expirimental
standards, some electronic and some mechanical; at times the viewer would
have to buy a special kit to receive the signal. Things became standard-
ized after wwii; even then, if I remember correctly, there were widely
varying color standards - down to two, again an electronic and a color
wheel (mechanical) one. And I don't think you could have, say, in the US
an Ernie Kovacs show at any other time - it was television looking at
itself. I also remember early video art and aesthetics and the exhilera-
tion one felt at being able to actually see oneself on the tube.
Early telephone history followed a different course, also resonant with
the Net - here, in spite of doctor's offices, etc. as primary users, one
sees a number of people, large percentage women, using the phone for com-
munal purposes. And this still occurs, intensifies; if TAZ survives at
this point, it's in the remake of the email list through sites such as
topica, that create the potential for temporary communities roving the
Net.
Alan
Internet Text at http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt
Partial at http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html
Trace Projects at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm
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From: [email protected]
Date: Tue, 28 Dec 1999 11:49:58 EST
Subject: Re: An Early History of 90s Cyberculture
In a message dated 12/27/1999 11:51:18 PM Central Standard Time,
[email protected] writes:
> One might also look at the early his-
> tory of the novel; in media there's very often an early flash-point of
> self-reflexivity / conceptualism, followed by distributive (corporate,
> etc.) swamping.
I agree with this observation. Media as such, taken as technologies of
representation, are similar to methods of military and economic production.
When they are new, their concepts--their meaning and role within larger, less
determined systems--are in flux and uncertain. Television, for example,
could have been used much differently that it is today. (In Denmark in the
mid 70's, for example, there were only one or two broadcasts per week; the
main program was "Four O'Clock," a mildly entertaining Mr. Rogers-type show
for kids. The rest of the time Danish TV's showed a test pattern.)
The worst possible outcome for the internet is its potential conversion to
"enhanced TV," under which most users become acclimated to a broadcast
concept. This conversion is already well underway, driven by corporate
content (news and entertainment) and advertising revenue. As passive and
hierarchical concepts of any media become routine, all other potentials
suffer not from technological incapacity but an environment of disuse. The
damage done is not a loss of technical power but a loss of perceptual and
cognitive languages; this loss takes place mainly inside the audiences'
heads. (Hardware configurations like "WebTV," Microsoft's advertising
project with Sony as its interface and content-provider, are an example of
technological capacity moving backwards into a concept more friendly to
conventional media use.)
For these reasons, it is critical that some kind of content be produced that
takes as its raison d'etre the simple assertion of a utopian media concept.
The faster the HTML mills take over, the sooner the internet will become mere
television. The resistance need not establish, i.e. offer as product, a
perfect non-broadcast body of content--such an effort is of course impossible
except as a satiric or ironic gesture--but the idea of such content has to be
maintained. In this sense, the self-reflexive and conceptually diverse phase
of internet media can never be completed; it represents a dynamic and chaotic
stasis exactly opposed to any corporatization of the medium itself; such work
is always only a holding action. The purpose of this anti-corporate content
is merely to preserve a space for potential and transient diversity. Its
territory is that of conceptual freedom, which is to say, "utopia" or
no-place.
Incidentally, it is the incorporation of new media into narratives like the
self or the nation that implements the albeit fractured monument of
broadcast. Monotheism is another such narrative, first conceived as a means
of bonding the written text to a centralized, administrative concept of BOTH
production and reception.
No easy answers, I guess, for freedom on the networks! A thankless labor in
the service of media freedom and diversity. Yet it helps to know what we
need not expect of ourselves as "artists" on the web.
Max Herman
The Genius 2000 Project
www.geocities.com/~genius-2000
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Date: Tue, 28 Dec 1999 01:24:36 -0500 (EST)
From: Robbin Neal Murphy <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: An Early History of 90s Cyberculture
On Mon, 27 Dec 1999, Alan Sondheim wrote:
> Finally, I'm one of those 50 year olds but couldn't care less about the
> so-called old days - I do care about ageism which is rampant on the Net,
> rampant in the mills, and a fight no one really seems to care about.
As a fellow old fart though not quite THAT old I think the experience of
the old days is still important. We can sit in the hogan beating our
drumb telling tales of the Sex Pistols and CBGB and how things used to be.
That's our job now and some of the pups listen and integrate it into
whatever they're doing now. We should remember to be articulate and not
slobber. They have short attention spans.
Rob
Robbin Murphy
[email protected]
http://artnetweb.com/iola/
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