Tag: Tactical Media

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The Ends Against the Middle

To point out changes in the media landscape is to recite clichés. Everything is different, and nothing has changed.

Those two forces are flipping our media environment inside out. On one end, broadcasting became narrowcasting, and has now become microcasting. Advertisers and politicians are able to send ever-more targeted messages to smaller and smaller groups, moving from the broadcast model of one-to-many to something ever-closer to one-to-one. This shift has allowed an entity to tell one person one thing and then next person something possibly contradictory and gain the support of both in the process. Incidentally, that is how criminals communicate. They tell one group (their cronies) one thing and another group (law enforcement) the opposite.

This is also known as lying.

Computer hackers and vandals maintain communication channels in a similar fashion. Both want fame and recognition in one context and anonymity in the other. Often adopting gang-like names and attitudes, hackers rarely do a job without leaving behind their signature.

Where taking credit is key inside the hacker community, outside it anonymity is essential. One cannot boast without proof of the hack, and bragging is one of the only rewards for such exploits. Credit and credibility are inextricably intertwined.

As much as an artist’s reputation relies on signing their work, the freedom to perform computer crimes relies on that information staying inside the community. No one outside can find out. The contextual difference here is the difference that matters.

On the other end of the same spectrum, we’re seeing the mass exposure of bad things done in contexts assumed secret. From sexual assaults and police brutality to government collusion and illegal surveillance, communication technology available to everyone has boosted whistle-blowing possibilities. Following Matt Blaze, Neal Stephenson (2012) states “it’s best in the long run, for all concerned, if vulnerabilities are exposed in public” (p. 27). We have been able to pull evil deeds out of hiding and put them in contexts of accountability. As Geert Lovink told me,

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.

These two factors–power using resources against people and people using them against power–help define the way we see the world now. It’s a view defined by simultaneously filtering out some things and filling in others. It’s a view defined by global connections and mobile screens. It’s a view defined by the tail chasing its own dog.

References:

Christopher, Roy. (2007). Geert Lovink: Tracking Critical Net Culture. In R. Christopher (Ed.), Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes. Seattle, WA: Well-Red Bear.

Stephenson, Neal (2012). Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing. New York: William Morrow.

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Apologies to my dudes in Antipop Consortium for the title.

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Rita Raley: Tactical Humanities

A professor in English with appointments in Film and Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Rita Raley studies all sorts of things that culminate in interesting intersections. She centers her study of tactical media, a designation Geert Lovink called a “deliberately slippery term,” on disturbance. Her book on the subject, Tactical Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), illustrates not only the ways in which media participate in events but also her own nuanced thinking about and through that participation. She and her colleagues have also been busy dissecting Mark Z. Danielewski’s 27-volume novel-in-progress (five of which are currently available), The Familiar, of which Matthew Kirschenbaum calls Raley, “perhaps his best current reader.”

Roy Christopher: What would you say is your area of work?

Rita Raley: Quite broadly, I would say new media (aesthetics and politics), contemporary literature, and what we might call the machinic and geopolitical dimensions of language in the present – by which I mean investigations of the transformations that have occurred in our reading and writing practices in tandem with the development and widespread adoption of computational platforms for everyday communicative use. Concretely, this last has led me to think about machine reading, writing, and translation – alongside of electronic literature, code poetics, global English, and networked forms of expression from spam to picture languages. At the moment I am grouping these forms and practices together under the rubric of the post-alphabetic.

RC: I haven’t read Danielewski since House of Leaves. How would you convince fans of that book to invest in the lengthy journey that he has only just begun with The Familiar?

RR: Life is short, our attention spans are shorter, and the perfect antidote to the sense that the world is slipping from our grasp is deep immersion in a serial narrative that prods us to be self-conscious about historical and planetary time on the one hand and our lived experience in the moment on the other. It rewards deep reading, as Danielewski’s texts always do, and there are ample pleasures to be found in the decoding of the text’s many puzzles and in the following of its lines of reference and inquiry out to other texts and bodies of knowledge, from AI to physics. But its pleasures are not only cerebral: it is at core – I want to say underneath its shimmering surface, which has been meticulously designed and crafted from cover to cover, but what I really mean is at its heart – a fantastic story. What might seem in volume 1 to be a set of stories (told in different genres, voices, and fonts) starts to converge over the course of the first season (volumes 1-5), and it’s clear that everything is moving toward a spectacular convergence that is either going to be apocalyptically destructive or truly regenerative and probably a bit of both. There are many things to say, and many things have been said, about what Danielewski does with and for codex as a medium and all of that pertains to The Familiar as well. What differentiates the project from House of Leaves and Only Revolutions – and I say this with the awareness that they are situated in a shared (or parallel) diegetic world – is the scale. That its planned run is 27 volumes makes this seem obvious perhaps but there is something different in the orientation. House of Leaves and Only Revolutions seem to me to turn in on themselves, opening up and mining abyssal structures or systems by which they then seem to be absorbed. The Familiar rather gestures out and beyond: Its span is Alpha to Omega, and it wants not to plunge us into the trapdoor beneath our feet but to show us the stars.

RC: Is there a such thing anymore as Humanities that are not Digital?

RR: No.

But to answer that more seriously, I would say all knowledge work in the 21st-century university has been transformed (How could it not be?), but computational media are just part of the story. Paradigmatic changes in scholarly methods and practices are evident across the disciplines, and they are all in part attributable to the development of new tools, platforms, and techniques, but understanding the significance of all of this requires some consideration of the evolution of the idea of the university: what is its function and purpose, now; what are its products; which constituencies does it serve; why should institutional culture be defined by vision statements, agenda setting, and entrepreneurial activity. So, indeed, there has been what is often termed a “turn” to quantification, visualization, and making as both the means and end of knowledge production, but this shift is by no means particular to the humanities alone.

To be even more serious, I think that at least some humanities scholars should continue to think about, and with, that which is not-digital – not in the sense of what has been left behind but rather in the sense of what cannot be captured. The accelerations that we seem collectively to sense – in AI research, climate change, and tribal realignments – are in fact real, and we need to put our minds to reimagining a world that is not only inhabitable but worth preserving. How can, and should, we live in common, with each other and with nonhuman things? For these questions the humanities need not only engineering but also the environmental and social sciences.

RC: I want to go back to your work on tactical media. How broadly do you define the concept?

RR: I remain agnostic about what is or what is not “properly” tactical media. If it seems like a nail, use the hammer. If it works – if it gets the job done, whatever the job – great. The only way to guard against the inertia, apathy, and depression that often results from defeat is to act, but at some level we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes a meaningful action. My own view is that now, in 2017, sharing ideas about the future and a common purpose are more important than sharing a definition.

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Cultural Scripts: Now or Narrow

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece about the death of the mainstream in which I quote my friend Mark Wieman describing the long tail as longer and fatter than ever. In that same piece I state, “…what happens when we don’t share any of it anymore? Narrowcasting and narrowcatching, as each of us burrows further down into our own interests, we have less of them in common as a whole. The mainstream has become less of a stream and more of a mist.” As this creeping fragmentation continues, companies struggle to unify a market large enough to capitalize on.

Adam Haynes: Nike 6.0
[One world, one market. Illustration by Adam Hayes for Nike 6.0.]
Attempts to unify this splintering are nothing new. In the 1990s, events like the X-Games and Gravity Games and websites like Hardcloud.com and Pie.com tried to gather long-tail markets that were too small by themselves into viable mass markets. It happened with the recording artists of the time like Sheryl Crow, Alanis Morissette, Counting Crows, and Dave Matthews Band. What was the label “alternative” if not a feeble attempt at garnering enough support for separate markets under one tenuous banner? If you can get the kids and their parents, you might have a real hit. As Mark Lewman writes, “This is teen cool and mom cool.” Then in the 2000s, sub-brands like Nike 6.0 (in which the “6.0” referred to six domains of extreme activities: BMX, skateboarding, snowboarding, wakeboarding, surfing, and motocross) tried again. Whatever the practitioners of such sports might share in attitudes or footwear, they do not normally share in an affinity for each other. We remain in our silos, refusing to cross-pollinate in any way.

The Long Tail (from Chris Anderson's site)

If marketing can’t bring us together, mass tragedy will. In his 2009 novel, Neuropath, R. Scott Bakker describes the unifying effect of news of a mass or serial murder, in this case, “The Chiropractor” (so named because he removes his victims’ spines):

In these days of broadband it was rare for anything nonpolitical to rise above the disjointed din of millions pursuing millions of different interests. The niche had become all-powerful. The Chiropractor story was a throwback in a sense, a flashback to the day when sitcoms or murders could provide people a common frame of reference, or at least something to talk about when polite questions gave out (p. 71).

Regarding recent actual events of a mass and violent nature, Mark Follman at Mother Jones writes,

When I asked threat assessment experts what might explain the recent rise in gun rampages, I heard the same two words over and over: social media. Although there is no definitive research yet, widespread anecdotal evidence suggests that the speed at which social media bombards us with memes and images exacerbates the copycat effect. As Meloy and his colleagues noted earlier this year in the journal Behavioral Sciences and the Law, “Cultural scripts are now spread globally… within seconds.”

Goddard and Wierzbicka (2004) describe cultural scripts as “common sayings and proverbs, frequent collocations, conversational routines and varieties of formulaic or semi-formulaic speech, discourse particles and interjections, and terms of address and reference—all highly ‘interactional’ aspects of language” (p. 154). Cultural scripts are the way our fragmented networks coalesce into unified interests and concerns.

The mainstream might not be much of a stream anymore. It seems now like culture is sliced and split among various niches, but in trial or tragedy that mist can condense into a wave as quickly as it needs to. Let’s just be more careful what we spray.

References:

Bakker, R. Scott. (2009). Neuropath. New York: Tor Books.

Follman, Mark. (2015, November/December). Inside the Race to Stop the Next Mass Shooter. Mother Jones.

Goddard, Cliff & Wierzbicka, Anna. (2004). Cultural scripts: What are they and what are they good for? Intercultural Pragmatics, 1(2), 153-166.

Lewman, Mark. (2001). The Coolhunter. Bend Press.

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Dispatches from Digital Dystopia

David Hoffman once summarized George Orwell’s 1984, writing that “during times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” Aaron Swartz, Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning, Adrian Lamo, Aaron Barr, and Edward Snowden have all been pawns and prisoners of information warfare. As the surveillance has expanded from mounted cameras to wireless taps, hackers have evolved from phone phreaking to secret leaking. It’s a ratcheting up of tactics and attacks on both sides. Andy Greenberg quotes Hunter S. Thompson, saying that the weird are turning pro. It’s a thought that evokes the last line of Bruce Sterling‘s The Hacker Crackdown (1991) which, after deftly chronicling the early history of computer hacker activity, investigation, and incarceration, states ominously, “It is the End of the Amateurs” (p. 301).

These quips can be applied to either side.

Sousveillance: Steve Mann
Sousveillance device via Steve Mann, 1998.

The Hacker Ethic — as popularized by Steven Levy’s Hackers (Anchor, 1984) — states that access to computers “and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works should be unlimited and total” (p. 40). Hackers seek to understand, not to undermine. And they tolerate no constraints. Tactical media, so-called to avoid the semiotic baggage of related labels, exploits the asymmetry of knowledge gained via hacking (Branwyn, 1994; Lievrouw, 2011; Lovink, 2002; Raley, 2009). In a passage that reads like recent events, purveyor of the term, Geert Lovink (2002) writes, “Tactical networks are all about an imaginary exchange of concepts outbidding and overlaying each other. Necessary illusions. What circulates are models and rumors, arguments and experiences of how to organize cultural and political activities, get projects financed, infrastructure up and running and create informal networks of trust which make living in Babylon bearable” (p. 254). Sounds like a description of the tumult behind Wikileaks and Anonymous.

This Machine Kills SecretsIn This Machine Kills Secrets (Dutton, 2012), Andy Greenberg explores the infighting and odd cooperation among those out to break and build boundaries around certain strains of information. It’s a tale of rogues gone straight, straights gone rogue, and the weird gone pro. It’s a battle over stiffly defined contexts, lines drawn and defended. He writes of the leakers, “They take an immoral act out of some special, secret culture where it seems acceptable and expose it to the world of moral human relationships, where it’s exposed as obviously horrific” (p. 311). Theirs are easy acts to defend when the extremes are so evident, but what about the more subtle contexts? As danah boyd puts it, “Privacy isn’t a binary that can be turned on or off. It’s about context, social situations, and control.” Privacy is not secrecy, but they’re so closely related that the former seems to be lost in the fight against the latter. They’re also so close as to be constantly conflated when debated.

We Are Anonymous

Following Matt Blaze, Neal Stephenson (2012) states “it’s best in the long run, for all concerned, if vulnerabilities are exposed in public” (p. 27). Informal groups of information insurgents like the crews behind Wikileaks and Anonymous keep open tabs on the powers that would be. After a cameo in This Machine Kills Secrets, Aaron Barr takes a more central role in We Are Anonymous (Little, Brown, 2012) by Parmy Olson. A high-end security consultant, Barr set out to expose Anonymous unprovoked, and quickly found himself on the wrong side of the line. Again, hackers are easy to defend when they’re on your side. Wires may be wormholes (Stephenson, 1996), but that can be dangerous when they flow both ways. Once you get locked out of all your accounts and the contents of your harddrive end up on the wrong screen, hackers aren’t your friends anymore, academic or otherwise. The recent DDoS attacks on several major torrent trackers should be raising more eyebrows on both sides.

Hackers of every kind behave as if they understand that “[p]ostmodernity is no longer a strategy or style, it is the natural condition of today’s network society” (Lovink, 2002, p. 259). In a hyper-connected world, disconnection is power. The ability to become untraceable is the ability to become invisible (Kluitenberg, 2008). We need to unite and become hackers ourselves now more than ever against what Kevin DeLuca (2007) calls “the acronyms of the apocalypse” (e.g., WTO, NAFTA, GATT, etc.; p. 47). The original Hacker Ethic isn’t enough when Shit is Fucked-Up and Bullshit (Wark, 2012). We need more of those nameless nerds, nodes in undulating networks of cyber disobedience. “Information moves, or we move to it,” writes Neal Stephenson (1996), like a hacker motto of “digital micro-politics” (Lovink, 2002, p. 254). Hackers need to appear, swarm, attack, and then disappear again into the dark fiber of the Deep Web.

Lovink (2002) continues: “The world is crazy enough. There is not much reason to opt for the illusion” (p. 259). Who was it that said Orwell was 30 years off? Tactical media is where we watch the ones watching us.

References:

Branwyn, Gareth. (1994). Introduction: Hackers: Heroes or Villains? In Knightmare, Confessions of a Super-Hacker. Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited.

DeLuca, Kevin M. (2007). A Wilderness Environmentalism Manifesto: Contesting the Infinite Self-Absorption of Humans. In, R. Sandler & P. C. Pezzullo (Eds.), Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 27-55.

Greenberg, Andy. (2012). This Machine Kills Secrets. New York: Dutton Adult.

Kluitenberg, Eric. (2008). Delusive Spaces: Essays on Culture, Media, and Technology. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

Levy, Steven. (1984). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

Lievrouw, Leah A. (2011). Alternative and Activist New Media. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Lovink, Geert. (2002). Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Olson, Parmy. (2012). We Are Anonymous. New York: Little, Brown, and Co.

Raley, Rita. (2009). Tactical Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Stephenson, Neal. (1996, December). Mother Earth, Mother Board. WIRED, 04.12.

Stephenson, Neal (2012). Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing. New York: William Morrow.

Sterling, Bruce. (1991). The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Bantam.

Wark, McKenzie. (2012). Telesthesia: Communication, Culture, & Class. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

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Defence Against Weapons of Mass Distraction

In a post called “Kill Your Email” on his guest blog on the Powell’s site, best-selling author Neil Strauss made the statement that “most of us are constantly busy but not constantly productive.” It’s a simple, but key insight. At what point does your day consist of more distractions than plans? There’s a threshold in there somewhere, and finding it is crucial not only to getting things done, but to enjoying your everyday existence. Continue reading “Defence Against Weapons of Mass Distraction”

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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.