The Massachusetts Institue of Technology has been host to the leaders of innovations in many fields: Artificial Intelligence, media and communication technology, open source development, and on and on. One of its lesser known areas of bleeding-edge innovation has been pranks and hacking. Well, Institute Historian T. F. Peterson is here to set that straight with Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT. Continue reading “Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT by Institute Historian T. F. Peterson”
Cyberactivism Edited by Martha McCaughy and Michael D. Ayers
Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice illuminates many current vectors in online activism, never losing sight of the big picture. Martha McCaughy and Michael D. Ayers have assembled a stellar collection of scholarly essays. Sitting at the intersection of virtual and corporeal, theory and praxis, Cyberactivism observes the brief history, the current actions, and the future implications of online activism. Continue reading “Cyberactivism Edited by Martha McCaughy and Michael D. Ayers”
McKenzie Wark: To the Vector the Spoils
When venturing into new territory without a proper map, McKenzie Wark is the kind of guy you want to have around. His intuition in such cases provides a beacon to the next viable vantage point.
Wark’s intuition has shown up in his books, Virtual Geography (Indiana University Press, 1994), The Virtual Republic (Allen & Unwin, 1998), Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace (Pluto Press, 1999), and Dispositions (Salt Publishing, 2002), among others. Continue reading “McKenzie Wark: To the Vector the Spoils”
Geert Lovink: Tracking Critical Net Culture
With the highly regarded and well-used Nettime mailing list, Geert Lovink established himself as one of the few true leaders of sober, useful net criticism (a discourse he in effect co-founded). Now, with Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture (MIT Press, 2002) and the forthcoming Uncanny Networks: Dialogues With the Virtual Intelligentsia (MIT Press, 2003), he further expands his vision where others have fallen silent. Finally, with the end of the dot-com hand-waving, comes a voice for all of the fissures in the facade.
Lovink is one part activist, one part visionary, and two parts critical thinker. Peter Lunenfeld calls him “one of the great ones,” and Dark Fiber proves it with insight, street cred, and wit to boot.
Roy Christopher: The openness (the ability for most anyone most anywhere to participate) of the web has been one of its most touted aspects. You contend that this “openness” is being cut off by corporate interests. Could you briefly explain how you see this coming to pass?
Geert Lovink: For most corporations the user is a consumer that needs to monitored and, if possible, lured to buy something. This is a fundamentally different attitude from the user as “netizen,” which is primarily seen as a producer. A good example of this are the weblogs and other open publishing tools. This silent revolution has not been developed by commercial entities. The new architecture of the internet is treating users by default as thread. Lately I’ve noticed that one can no longer switch on a terminal of some network and open a telnet session. Firewalls simply do not allow anyone to use this basic application. I do not want to blame the demise of the open internet on corporations only. Governments all over the world are acting as willing executors of corporate interests. Everyone is paranoid these days. Remember, it is American IT companies who help the Chinese government to censor and monitor their part of the internet. Apparently, they are more then happy to do the job. This sad fact proves that Gilmore’s law, which says that the internet is treating censorship as damage and will route around it, no longer works. ISPs are storing traffic data of their users, ready to hand them over to federal investigators. This is happening all over the world. I wonder how many of us are aware of this. In the meanwhile, the official internet ideology still talks about cyber freedom, as if nothing has changed. I guess at some point these contradictions can no longer be covered up.
RC: What’s really going on with blogging and collaborative text filtering that makes these areas so conceptually vibrant? This seems to be emerging as the next major focus of the study of the evolution of web use.
GL: Weblogs are bringing the issue of open publishing and collaborative filtering to the next level. Weblogs are so much more sophisticated, compared to the relatively primitive, linear email-based, mailing-list software. There is a constant threat of information overload, these days. People don’t surf anymore. For good reasons they have high demands on the quality of computer-mediated communication. However, they do not want to hand over their online freedom. This is the background why open publishing tools such as weblogs have taken off so much. Users want to have a greater say about the information they receive and send out. Yes, they want to read carefully edited pieces and have reliable information on their screens. But at the same time, they do not want to give away the control over the medium entirely to commercial web portals. It’s a fine line and software is playing an increasingly important role in the delicate balancing act between the internet as a professional medium and an open environment where everyone has a say.
RC: You’re the first person I’ve heard make mention of the fact that the “new media” won’t always be new. Labeling seems to have quite a lot to do with the development of critical theory. With everything still on the move (even in ourpostdot-com era), net critique is still scrambling to describe and analyze its subject(s). Where should these energies be focused?
GL: In his later work, Marshall McLuhan formulated the Laws of Media. By now everyone should be aware of them. There are cyclical movements, from mythology and hype to the creation of a market, followed by a mass acceptance and the subsequent “disappearance” of the technology into everyday life. We no longer see the refrigerator and vacuum cleaner. Literally. In that sense, the computer will also become part of the household furniture, apart from the fact that PCs are anyway getting smaller and lighter. The shocking fact here is not this particular development, but the blatant refusal by so many technology gurus and corporate consultants to admit this bare fact and communicate it to their clients. The terror of being positive has to come to a hold. But despite the dot-com crash and all the corporate scandals many still believe in the saga of a never-ending boom. We thus have to continue our cultural analysis in order to understand where this collective blindness, this unwillingness to analyze movements of markets and trends in society is coming from. Obviously many have a vested interest in a bull market. But why are so many still buying into those stories? We can only explain that with the tools of mass psychology. Venture capital models can only thrive on herd mentality. In that sense, the United States business culture is everything but individual and entrepreneurial. In short, Moore’s law may work for chips, but cannot be applied to the IT sector at large. Technology has its booms and busts, as well as anything else in society. The internet cannot be located outside of society. It is subjected to certain economic laws, and we all have to be aware of them.
Net criticism is not that different from theatre criticism or film reviews. What the IT sector needs is its own class of independent critics that are willing to stand up against the powerful interests of corporations and their governments. Great examples are Cyberselfish (PublicAffairs, 2000) by Paulina Borsook and Thomas Frank’s One Market Under God (Doubleday, 2000). For me it all starts with the acceptance of negativism as a strong and creative force within society. As long as New Age is ruling over the corporate board rooms, not much will change. There is enormous need for investigative journalism outside of academia. It is not healthy to concentrate the public intellectuals within the walls of the universities. What new media need is a sophisticated vocabulary, shared by a great deal of its users. We have to accept that we are living in a techno culture. The core of today’s arts and culture is deeply technological. We can no longer afford to separate the two. That’s a very broad agenda for net criticism, I know. I purposely do not want to narrow it down to the critique of corporate power. Its agenda should be based on a broad cultural analysis, like that of Bauhaus, the Frankfurt School, and postmodernism. It is high time for the humanities to leave campus. Get technological! Build networks!
For me good critics are not outsiders but insiders. At the same time the supremacy of the engineering class has to be questioned as well. An engaged form of criticism can only happen if people are forced to debate. In order to get there we need more conflicts, more scandals, more public liability. I no longer believe in begging for interdisciplinary programs in which scientists, artists, and theorists peacefully work together. That soft approach has failed over the last decades. It simply did not happen. It should be part of a shift in IT culture to go on the attack.
RC: Can you give an overview of what you mean by “tactical media”?
GL: The tactical media was developed in Amsterdam in the “post 1989” years and is associated with the Next Five Minutes conference series. We tried to find an expression for our discontent with the existing definition of terms such as “alternative media,” “subculture,” and “underground.” They simply didn’t work anymore. For today’s media activists, the designation “alternative versus mainstream” is no longer useful. Everyone is involved in “tactical” interventions in the mainstream. This does not mean that these people have sold out. There is no long march through the institutions. That’s a romantic vision of the baby boom generation, at a time when there were still plenty of tenured jobs to be given away within the press and universities. Today everyone is more or less a freelance worker, permanently on the move. Work is a project. The whole idea that one has to “penetrate” the mainstream in order to do “good work” from inside the system is not valid anymore. But there is also a technological reason for this shift. Tactical media such as small radio stations, websites and mailing lists, record labels and ’zines are all thriving because of the enormous drop in the prices of hardware. This means that it is much easier to have your independent media infrastructure. It is no longer a political choice to remain in this or that ghetto. The so-called “antiglobalization” movement proves how broad concerns are over the environment and world trade. The backbone of these movements are sites such as www.indymedia.org. Activists these days try really hard to get beyond the lifestyle level and address a variety of social groups. This capacity is partially due to better understanding of the workings of media.
RC: In Dark Fiber, you call for a return of cybernetics. What void do you see being filled by a return to cybernetic thinking in IT culture?
GL: Cybernetics was a unique form of science. We have a lot to learn from it, despite its mythological and speculative approaches and somewhat stubborn belief system. Unlike the present IT theories, cybernetics was deeply interdisciplinary and stood in direct contact with contemporary philosophy of its time. That link was lost in the ’70s. Most engineers look down on cultural studies, postmodern thinking, gender issues, and post-colonial theories. The other way round is also true, of course. One of the great challenges of our time is the opening up of the technologists with other disciplines. Here I am not referring to spiritual levels. I am an enemy of New Age. I do not believe that the engineer has to open up and become sensitive for the “metaphysical.” I am talking about society here. It would be such a step forward if technology would see itself as part of culture. We live in a technological culture. Society is not a user that “adapts” to the great inventions. Engineering culture is itself part of the bigger picture. Historically cybernetics was aware of this. Because of World War II and the fact that many of its practitioners were refugees, there was a critical understanding of social and political issues. Yet, I am not nostalgic. There will be new sciences in the future that will overcome the fear for humanities. The common effort called “net criticism” can only be one such attempt.
CTRL [SPACE] Edited by Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel
They’re everywhere: tiny cameras, webcams, security cameras… video-capturing devices are almost as ubiquitous as the banner ads for them: “Watch anyone, anytime.” We’re all stuck somewhere between reality TV and a TV reality. Following the panopticon from an eighteenth century architectural drawing by Jeremy Bentham to the pervasive surveillance of the twenty-first century, CTRL [SPACE] is a comprehensive history of watching and being watched. Continue reading “CTRL [SPACE] Edited by Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel”
Gareth Branwyn: Media Jam
Gareth Branwyn has been media hacking for nearly three decades. His book, Jamming the Media (Chronicle Books, 1997), is the media hacker’s bible, an invaluable sourcebook of resources, how-tos and examples written with evident working-knowledge, exhaustive research, and fearless wit. He’s also the “Jargon Watch” guy at Wired, runs the tech-review site, Street Tech, and has written several other books and countless articles on the web, technology, jargon, and alternative media. Continue reading “Gareth Branwyn: Media Jam”
Stapled and Xeroxed Paper: The Power of Zines
You’re right, Roy, you’re hopeless. Hopelessly obsessed with a time in your sport that died a long time ago… — McGoo
Even after being dissed in Ride BMX (see the November/December 1995 issue) by McGoo, I still believe whole-heartedly in the power of zines. In his lengthy debunking of my DIY print media enthusiasm, McGoo enlisted the help of Andy Jenkins (an explanation of his importance in the zine world is too long to list here) saying, “If Andy’s own words don’t convince a thousand zine kids to throw away their Kinko’s cards and get on with their lives, BMX will remain locked in an era of Club Homeboy wristwraps, Army pants and Vision hipsacks forever.” Continue reading “Stapled and Xeroxed Paper: The Power of Zines”
Mark Dery: Post-Future Shock
Mark Dery synthesizes the newest fringes of our culture into a united media interrogation of postmodernity. His books and countless articles place cyberculture, posthumanism, artificial intelligence, underground music, science fiction, etc. under a shrewd lens of inquiry and he returns adept insights and new ideas.
Overlooked and underrated, Mark Dery should be added to the short list of valid modern visionaries.
Roy Christopher: Many of the subjects in your analyses of cyberculture tend to have a “pro” or “con” view of the exponential progress of technology. What’s your personal take on our current overdrive technological progress?
Mark Dery: Well, if by “overdrive” you mean the runaway speedup of techno-evolution, I think we need to learn to philosophize in a wind tunnel. We tend to mime our speed culture rather than make sense of it. The smeared graphics and train wreck typography of designers like David Carson, formerly of RayGun magazine, are one example of this mimesis; “blipcore” techno that buzzes by at heart-attack tempos is another. We live in the age of blur; to understand who we are and where we’re going as a wired society, we need to be able to sketch an exploded view of the cultural bullet train as it streaks past at full throttle. The dug-in, hunkered-down stance of cyberpundits like David Shenk, who fulminates against “life at hyper-speed” and keeps his TV in his closet, is a bunker mentality. No one’s going to stop the world so we can get off. The info-vertigo we’re suffering from, the unrelieved sense of personal disorientation and social dislocation, is going to be a fact of life from now on — deal with it. Obviously, I’m not saying that we should throw out our moral compasses just because there’s no one true magnetic north, culturally speaking, anymore. My personal take on the breathless hyperacceleration of technological change and the social upheaval it’s causing is that, rather than consign unfashionably “humanist” notions of social justice and political change to the recycle bin of history, we have to learn how to be moral animals in a world where all the old, comforting bedtime stories about God and progress and the providential hand of the free market are deforming and disintegrating as our culture, our increasingly posthuman technology, accelerates away from our nature — human psychology, which is still bounded and shaped by those evolutionary artifacts we call bodies. That’s what a lot of my writing and thinking is about.
RC: With the enthusiasm for externalization and “leaving the flesh behind” that has come along with advances in technology, do you foresee a renaissance of the “Human Factor” coming as the next wave?
MD: We have to ask what “The Human” is? That’s the vexed question. When I interviewed David Cronenberg (in my parallel-dimension life as a journalist), he professed bafflement about the very notion that we’re becoming posthuman. To him, the media’s colonization of our inner landscapes and the cyborgian offloading — into ever-smarter, increasingly lively machines — of more and more of our mental and physical functions is all too human. Humans are tool-using apes — signifying monkeys — and technology is part of us, at this late date. Even so, there’s a spontaneous recoil from the suggestion that the alien in the mirror is us. That’s the parable of the Unabomber, who inveighed against technology while hacking together nasty little pieces of exploding hardware and writing apocalyptic manifestos on a rattletrap typewriter. Where does nature (what you call the “Human Factor”) end and culture (technology) begin? The Unabomber didn’t include the typewriter in his technological demonology, which is a curious sin of omission. According to the SF novelist J.G. Ballard, the typewriter is a cyborg incubator: it encodes us, stamping the linear bias of the assembly line, and all of industrial modernity, across our imaginations. The distinction between ourselves and our tools is becoming increasingly arbitrary — more and more of a reassuring fiction — and the anxiety provoked by the blurring of this once clear-cut distinction manifests itself in the fetishizing of the “Human Factor.” The “renaissance” you’re talking about is already upon us. Mail-order catalogues from Smith & Hawken and Pottery Barn and other merchandisers of gracious living abound in “distressed” faux antiques and pseudo-Shaker furniture and ersatz Arts & Crafts housewares — mass-produced talismans of a time before mass production, when the human touch left its traces on everyday objects. To be sure, these sorts of commodities are partly about shoring up one’s social standing with icons of timeless good taste, but they’re also about the veneration of the handmade, i.e., the human touch, and of objects “humanized” by the passage of time, transformed from generic things into weathered, worn, one-of-a-kind treasures with pedigrees and personalities.
RC: What are some of the newer areas of technological advancement and the sociological ramifications thereof (that you haven’t already researched) that have sparked your interest?
MD: The new plastics that have enabled the current renaissance in industrial design, emblematized by the soft, biomorphic, translucent “blobjects” spawned by the iMac. Quantum computing. Xenotransplantation and the engineering of transgenic animals. The far fringes of comparative ethology, where researchers are exploring the no man’s land between human and animal intelligence.
RC: For those who haven’t yet read it, what can you tell our readers about your newest book, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium (Grove Press, 1999)?
MD: Like many, I feel as if contemporary America is an infernal carnival, equal parts funhouse and madhouse — a “pyrotechnic insanitarium,” to borrow a turn-of-the-century nickname for Coney Island. In The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, I wonder: Are social forces such as the yawning chasm between rich and poor tearing the fabric of American society to shreds? Or are our premonitions of cultural chaos just a toxic cocktail of turn-of-the-millennium fever and media-fueled hysteria? I find the answers in Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh ‘s visions of black helicopters and the Heaven’s Gate cultists’ fantasies of alien saviors; in Disney’s planned town, Celebration; and Nike’s dreams of global domination. Along the way, I puzzle over the popularity of blow-up dolls of Edvard Munch’s The Scream and wonder what, exactly, Jim Carrey’s talking butt is trying to tell us. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is a theme-park “dark ride” through contemporary America, a culture torn between angels and aliens, the smiley face and The Scream. Keep your hands inside the moving vehicle at all times!
RC: Who do you admire doing science right now? Who do you consider to be truly forging new paths? And who do you like that’s reporting these paths?
MD: Truth to tell, I’m not much of a disciple of science. I read social histories and cultural critiques of science; my “hard” scientific reading is strictly Homer Simpson fare — magazines like The Sciences and Smithsonian, the science page of The New York Times (despite the unabashedly pro-business flackery of Times science reporter Gina Kolata, recently exposed in an excoriating cover story in The Nation). I’m a great fan of Stephen Jay Gould, a luminous scientific mind who has the political virtue of being on the side of the angels — that is, whatever side the unreconstructed sociobiologist Richard Dawkins isn’t on. And he’s ferociously funny — a vanishingly rare trait among popularizers of science. Also, the popular science writer Timothy Ferris is always enlightening and entertaining. But my favorite writer on science and technology remains J.G. Ballard, the SF visionary and postmodern philosopher par excellence, whose ruminations on our over-lit media landscape, stalked by “the specters of sinister technologies,” are an inexhaustible mother lode of brilliant insights and mordant bon mots.
RC: Do you have any projects in the works you’d like to mention?
MD: I just signed on as editor of ArtByte, a magazine of digital culture — formerly a magazine of digital art, as its name suggests — whose roll call of contributing writers includes Bruce Sterling, Erik Davis, and other SF/cybercrit writers familiar to your readers. I’ve been charged with radically reconceptualizing the magazine as a smart, snarky meme-splice of I.D. (the American design magazine, not the British youthstyle mag), The Baffler, and the late, much-lamented Australian cyberzine, 21C, with a dash of Suck.com at its best. It will feature coverage and criticism of e-culture, targeting the terminally wired, and the incurably informed: readers who feel at home in what Alvin Toffler called “blip culture,” readers with rapacious media appetites who thrive on information overload but want to engage critically with the ever more mediated world around them. I’m frantically brainstorming a plan for global domination.
At the same time, I’m juggling several book ideas, one about the insect as cultural icon, another a social history of irony. Then, too, there’s “My Dinner With Hannibal,” the mash note to Hannibal Lecter I’ve always wanted to write — a literary dissection of the haute-couture cannibal in the age of Martha Stewart. With the return of ’80s-style greed-is-good meanness and conspicuous consumption (symbolized by the grotesque hypertrophy of the American car into the gargantuan SUV), it seems like an idea whose time has come.
John Eikenberry: Free Agent
After graduating from the University of Georgia with a master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence, John Eikenberry turned to the web to continue his career. His thesis focused on “using semantic networks for keyword analysis and document classification,” which was achieved mainly by developing independent agents. His current work is centered around a bot/agent development environment. Continue reading “John Eikenberry: Free Agent”