Gentrification2.0

http://www.webmashup.com/cgi-bin/jump.cgi?ID=170just found this list of 'mash up' websites and immediately wowed myself senseless to 'Locale - the random dayout generator'.

it isnt just the diceman 2.0 it is also an example of regen-gentrification as social network technology. locale belongs to the growing set of 'tools' for everything aimed at affluent urbanites - ie tools for what was formerly left to 'unstructured' subjectivity, habitus and contingency. instant solutions to lack of time and (acquired?) ignorance of place. as promised by the art group Proboscis' tender 'bodystorming' of pensioners and unprotected kids, culling the sedimented affective history of an area and uploading it to Orange mobile, the unoccupied territory of 'psychogeography' is now rendered acephalous, a lobotomised (lobo-) psycho-geo.

these tools have the immediate effect of making plain what was always already going on anyway. if the colonisation of anywhere was always a networked affair, now it takes place 'at a distance', that is, brought into ruthless closeup by such technologies, we effectively have the process without experiencing it ourselves. outsourcing of the protocols of rapine by making them absolutely explicit, Locale obviously does a great job of uprooting us from our former 'umwelt'. once again, the technological process of enclosure is predicated on and reproduces dispossession - even for the (new) possessors of the ground. Like a subcutaneous injection of Iain Sinclair, obviating the need to plough through the shamanic convolutions of the prose, Locale could easily be reconfigured to include a list of 'places where women were raped and murdered', 'plague pits', 'mentalist graffiti' etc etc whereupon it would presumably rejoin the 'xxxx' style 'avantgarde'. too late however, since it is the form of the data(de)based rendering transparent performed by all these 'apps' that rules the content, all one can do is gesture toward it through brief pangs of parody before the inevitability - and utility - of it sets in. these tools only bend toward what the city is already coming to, in fact the tool and the territory have a blatant affinity. when the southbank is entirely populated by tourists (and the subset of tourists who live in the city), Locale works in synergy with the (denegated) 'street'.

Locale's mashing-up of other sites/softwares, eg the 'my village' type sites,  is quite striking. it confirm the extent to which web 2.0 is the online cognate of regen-gentrification, and plays its part in the neoliberal restructuring of time and space. generating 'experiences' for people who don't have time to have them, the sites immediately and incessantly beg the question why one shouldn't just offload the whole chore of actually 'having the experience' altogether, a 'MyLife' which would, as zizek and baudrillard observed long ago of video recorders etc, watch it happen for you.

deleuze observes the rise of films about people watching their lives transpire in his 'cinema 2'., rather than action we have filmed reactions, films of spectatorship, 'the time image', films about a latency, about nothing taking place (a la 'blow up', a film whose locations iain sinclair stalked in 'lights out for the territory', itinerary of a virtual london. interestingly, the photographer david hemmings rehearses the gentrification of the following 30 years, starting the film in a south london dosshouse, then buying up antique utilitarian objects which, like reoccupied industrial warehouses, are dislocated and rendered objet d'arts).

with web 2.0 we get youtube plus Locale = cinema2.0, the 'no-time image' in which the expropriation of experience announced by films like 'blow up' (or dario argento's slasher pix for that matter) is consumated by the socialisation of what was, in the late 60s/early 70s a relatively select (non)experience. what the avant garde discovered (and savoured) in the abduction of the real is massified with the internet and web.20 so that the whole social process becomes a vast baudrillardian 'conspiracy' to preempt events. as the frieze art fair put it in their self-congratulatory and no doubt pre-written summary of their achievement, frieze 2006 was once again 'the art event of the year'. no wonder baudrillard didnt show up. like the gulf war(s) the precession of art, and of the city, by its seamless networking is a mass-murder of possibility whose detectives are its culprits, oedipal sleuths infecting what they see with the plague they carry.

contra-sherry turkel, writing about web2.0 society in the new scientist, however, the answer is not to untether ourselves from the technology, or avoid the likes of Locale and seek out dark corners not yet mapped, but rather to come up with stories and 'activities' that assume all of this and express a new (more absolutely non-)experience from it. if we could just get out of experience altogether, beyond its minimal insistence as the experience of looking at web2.0 websites...

Maybe jg ballard is the ideal subject of Locale - a man who (cf Time Out mag 2 weeks ago) happily dismisses the entirety of residual victorian london and its increasingly bijoutified gentrification zones only to endorse the 'real integrity' of Sheperd's Bush which offers a list of alternative 'day out' options including eastern european brothels and small electricians. Here actually existing subjects engaged in work - pace Marx - have replaced location altogether as the subject of the city. place is nothing, praxis is everything. in the tabula rasa created by Locale (etc) the disenchanted space of agency opens up, london must disappear.

those engaged in effecting this disappearance include not only Bombardier and other vast corporate devourers of the city but also the people setting up residents associations to do something about the sell off of resources and housing which more than materialises the psychic dispossessions of Locale, MyVillage et al. by assuming the loss of place which Locale dissimulates as its immediate availability, these people's activity creates, constitutes, a brand new city which is not a heritage reenactment but the spectre of a future event.