Radical Net Cultures

Table of Contents

Radical Net Cultures 1

Net-Infrastructure 1

Mute in Conversation with Nettime (Pit Schultz) (Digital Publishing Feature) 1

The Amsterdam Agenda – fostering emergent practice in Europe's media culture 5

Tactical Media/Hacktivism 10

The ABC of Tactical Media 10

Netzkultur in Europa: Zwischen Medienaktivismus, Ravebewegung und neuer Philosophie 12

Net-Politics 16

Unleashing the Collective Phantom (Resistance to Networked Individualism) 16

CYBERFEMINISM SPCL - With a little help from our (new) friends? 23

Alternative Netzwerke 27

Vor und nach Facebook 27

InfoEnclosure 2.0 29

Net-Infrastructure

Mute in Conversation with Nettime (Pit Schultz) (Digital Publishing Feature)

By Pauline van Mourik Broekman, 10 January 1997

(Featured in Mute Vol 1, No. 7)

Article URL - http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/mute-conversation-nettime-pit-schultz-digital-publishing-feature

Pauline van Mourik Broekman: Could you tell me something about how nettime was started, and how it has developed since then?

Pit Schultz: Nettime started as a 3-day-meeting in a small theatre in Venice during the Biennale 95. A meeting of Media-activists, theoreticians, artists, journalists from different European countries. (Heath Bunting, Geert Lovink, Diana McCarty, Vuk Cosic, David Garcia, Nils Roeller, Tomasso Tozzi, Paul Garrin, and many more.) We developed the main lines of a Net-critique along the topics of virtual urbanism, globalisation/tribalisation, the life metaphor. Also, it became obvious that it was necessary to define a different cultural (net)politics than the one Wired Magazine represented in Europe. It was a private and intensive event, and in a way, it defined the 'style' that we critique and discuss issues on nettime. Nettime is somehow modelled on the table of the meeting, it was covered with texts, magazines, books, whatever we had to offer the group. It was the start of our 'gift economy' with exchanges of information. Today the list has nearly 300 subscribers, it's growing constantly with around 10 subscribers a week. We do no PR and the list is semiclosed, which means new subscriptions must be approved.

PvMB: Were you intensely involved with computers?

PS: My first computer was an Atari2600 TV-game, then a ZX81, C64, Amiga1000, I switched to Mac when I began with DTP in the Botschaft group after '90, used Dos/Linux for Internet, and ended up with a DX66 under Win95, mainly to run Eudora, in an Intranet. So these machines document certain phases in my life, but they don't determine them. I also studied computer science for a couple of years, but it was not what I expected, which was a more conceptual approach that reflected the development of software on a much broader, maybe cultural, level.

PvMB: ...and net culture

PS: I was involved with The Thing bbs network from 92-94, the high time of ascii and text based internet like MUDs and MOOs, before the Web. At the same time I was working with the group Botschaft. There were also some exhibitions of low media art, a communication performance in the TV tower in Berlin, meetings, long term projects in the public sphere like an installation with Daniel Pflumm in a subway tunnel, a collaboration with the group 'handshake' which later became Internationale Stadt, or Chaos Computer Club which Botschaft shared office space with. After a Bilwet event we organised, I started to work with Geert Lovink, which was a truly new phase of work.

PvMB: ...as an artist

PS: Yes and no. I got a stipendium and did exhibitions, but always had problems accepting art as a 'closed system', and I have to emphasise here that nettime is a group project, it is not a 'piece of individual art,' but a medium formed by a collective subjectivity, a sum of individuals. I'm moderating it and it has its aesthetic aspects. But you don't have to call me an artist for this.

PvMB: ...before you started the list and how do you think that has affected how nettime was set up?

PS: Well, you can call it a continuation of my art practise. But, it functions without naming it art. In '94 I tried to begin with projects on the Web, especially the Orgasmotron Project (a database of recorded brain waves of human Orgasms) which reflected the early euphoric times of 'first contact.' With Botschaft e.V. in 93-'4, we did the Museum fuer Zukunft, a group project and database of future scenarios, ideas, and views, but during these projects it became clear that I needed a deeper understanding of the collaborative, theoretical, and discursive aspects of cyberspace to continue. During this time I also gave up doing installations in defined art spaces. Generally, after a euphoric entry phase I got extremely bored and disappointed with what was and is happening in the art field. My main interest remains what Andreas Broeckman calls 'machinic aesthetics', a field between the social, political, and cultural economy of the so called 'new media'. So I was happy to meet Geert, and through Venice and a list of other meetings, a group of people with shared interests that we're trying to bring together on the nettime list.

PvMB: It seems that nettime has gravitated more towards net-political and -philosophical discussion than that directly to do with 'art'. What role do you (and Geert Lovink?), as (a) moderator(s), have with regard to that?

PS: Art today, especially media art, is a problematic field. When I listen to music, it may happen that I don't like it, but it comes through the radio. That's how art appears to me. You can switch it off, but there is still a lot of music around. So much about art. With the moderation: it is also a contradictory role. The less the moderator appears the better the channel flows. It is, of course, this power-through-absence thing, but we hope that we handle it carefully and in a responsible way, with the continuous group process in mind. Power flows through networks, and you cannot switch it off. From different sides, Geert and I have an interest in working with the dynamic of the aesthetic contra the political field. There are many fault lines and frontiers. One of them seems to become the art system which still has some kind of Alleinherrschaftsanspruch in the symbolic cultural field. This changes through new media and even if new media will not make the term 'Art' obsolete, there is something about the paradox between media and art or media art that I find deeply problematic. Both have components of totalatarian systems of representation. There is the chance that new media creates channels to redirect the flow of power. That's what nettime is made for. An experimental place for (re)mixes, something I missed for a very long time. Never perfect and always 'in becoming,' but not explicit, not descriptive but performative, and pragmatic.

Both Geert and I have our own reasons to distance ourselves from today's 'art discourse'. You can name nettime a political project in terms of the real effects we try to trigger, in terms of conflicting debates reflecting and criticising economic and social implications of the 'digital revolution'. It is a philosophical channel in terms of describing a certain 'condition', while accessing and applying the traditional knowledge including the 'postmodern' stuff. It is an aesthetic process in many aspects, while developing a collaborative writing space, experimenting with modes and styles of 'computer mediated communication'. Finally, we have the luxury of silence and don't advertise, so we don't need big investments into labels and surface, it gets spread by word of mouth, and the footer 'cultural politics of the nets' can mean many things. It's about clouds. There is this 'field of virtuality or potentiality,' multiple contexts and personas, interests and intensities which, like the social aspect, the time aspect, the knowledge and news aspect, make nettime something which modulates a flow of heterogeneous subjective objects, something with an existential aesthetic of living with nettime, (including the group, events, projects which grow here) a collective and singular info-environment which exists without the need to be named art.

PvMB: At the discussion at DEAF96, I think you described nettime as a 'dirty' ascii channel; how 'dirty' or unmoderated is it?

PS: Dirtyness is a concept here, especially for the digital realm, which produces its own clean dirtyness, take the sound of digital distortion of a CD compared to analogue distortion of Vinyl. Take all kinds of digital effects imitating the analogue dirtyness, which means in the end, a higher resolution, a recursive, deeper, infinite structure. I used the concept because of its many aspects. It means here to affirm the noise aspect, but only to generate a more complex pattern out of it. It does not mean 'anything goes', or a self-sufficient ethic of productivity. It is slackerish in a way, slows down, speeds up, doesn't care at certain places, just to come back to the ones which are tactically more effective.... there is a whole empirical science behind it, how to bring the nettime ship through dark waters... how to compress and expand, how to follow the lines of noise/pattern instead of absence/presence... (In fact I pushed the big red button of the moderator mode only once, after a period of technical errors and a following unfocused dialogue.)

The phenomenon is, and I think this is not such a rare thing, that a group of people, in a repetitive, communicative environment, begin to filter a field of possible 'communication acts' in a certain way, quasi machinic. You don't have to be professional or especially skilled in the beginning. The production of 'information' along the borderline of noise means to constantly refine a social context, maybe an artificial one, what some call immanent, I mean with rules which are self-evident, and are interdependent in a dynamic way. The list-software sends a kind of basic netiquette to the new users but this affects only some formal factors. One is that we decided to avoid dialogues, without forbidding them. Nettime is not a list of dialogues of quote and requote, but more of a discursive flow of text, of different types, differentialising, contextualising each other. On the net it is called 'collaborative filtering' or earlier, it was 'social filtering'.

Dirtyness means here many things, first of all the absence of purity, you always have mixtures, 'agencements' ... but this becomes too trivially 'postmodern'. The constant commentary, forming a socially defined body of knowledge, and of course, a field where power is generated out of undifferentiated forces, which includes the position of the moderators, or other very active participants, for defining where the scope of the flow tends to go. But actually, anyone can post whatever she likes. This risk, which often leads to a situation of overflow and re-orientation, is also the productive freedom of nettime. Another is the limited set of signs, like the Euro-English or net-pigeon, using English as a non-native speaker or the reduced character set of ascii, or the minimal features of the perl-scripts which run the mailinglist. Finally, for the authors, there is always a multiple aspect of why to write, and for the readers, why to read nettime. You definitely have to filter, I guess nobody, including me, reads every mail from start to finish. The sender has the chance to actively select texts she finds on the net and forward them. The author can pre-or republish texts, send pre-versions, test certain ideas, or sample others. On the material side, there are the Printouts of ZKP, readers which come out in small numbers during conferences. The process of inscription combined with a filtering process functions a bit like a news-ticker, if you want to find a comparison in the publishing world.

PvMB: Two other pertinent issues that came up at the DEAF discussion were those to do with size and finance. If online journals or lists are akin to creators of community, for example, where discussion can be catalytic due to the small size of the group and many of the contributors also knowing each other 'in real life', does their effectivity decrease beyond a certain size (I think Geert mentioned a couple of hundred). Although nettime is still a 'closed' mailing list, its subscriber base has grown; have you adapted your methodology?

PS: As you can see, nettime is still going well. It seems there is a self-regulation process on the side of the contributors. There is the growth, which is around 10 new subscribers per week, mostly on a word of mouth basis, which leads to a certain social consistency. Then, in the way texts get selected/produced and find their way to the list. The 'group' is circumscribing a network of real life relationships, a network of shared interests, and a network of contextualising documents. This happens in relation to the 'outside', to the 'wideness' of the net, and to the 'deepness' of the local places where people work and live. Every document represents a vector through time in a social context, a discursive environment with many levels of reference, but a relatively concrete and simple surface: ascii-text. The complexity and aesthetics which come out of the simple practical rules of a mailinglist are complex and dynamic enough to not feel the urge to experiment with multithread, hypertextual, multimedia environments, even if we think about certain extensions you find in common with infranet or groupware solutions in the corporate world. It says: never touch a running system. I think the next level will evolve through a certain economic pressure, certain cases where texts reappear somewhere without permission, or other cases where the unwritten norms are subverted by other 'content machines' running on other principles, but sharing similar fields of issues. There is a need to use the chance and experiment with new horizontal networks of producers, to respect the collaborative editorial work of a user community and most of all, to think about financial models in terms of a sustainable quality of discussion, which includes the 'currency' of trust and credibility.

PvMB: And then regarding finance. This obviously has enormous effects on how things can run. Nettime is a 'no budget' operation; what are the advantages and disadvantages of this and how do you manage to keep going?

PS: First I have to say that your question already has certain implications. It may seem natural to put anything you do into an economic model and ask, what do I get for it? what do I pay for it? But it cannot even be said that such an exchange economy runs effectively with money. There is clearly a drive to profit from new media, and, of course, money must be there, for a basic funding, but the goal of nettime is not financial profit. One easily comes to this point with a defensive position, or a dogmatic one, fighting against the all too present, not to say, totalitarian system of a world wide integrated capitalism. Even after Marx, there are social fights, and especially within the new media, you have to face, like in the art world, certain problems, which often mean, make money fast, but bad work; work, but don't get good money. There is a certain kind of luxury today, which is somehow overcoded by 'slackerdom' which is contrary to the work ethic of the yuppie or the political activist. It is a pragmatic level, we do not have to talk about just economics, but we have to develop a working model, a constant fight with risks of exploitation, burn-out, sell-out.

Finally we would have to change nettime from its microeconomical, very basic structure if we would force its commercialisation. To make it clear, especially for mailinglists, but also many other sites with hi content, that it is not at all clear how to finance them for the long term. The time of the hype might be over soon, and then you have to face a shake out of centralisation that we already know from the history of radio and TV. On the other hand, I do not believe in the concept of autonomy. It leads to a sad double life, it might be that you live by state grants, or that you have to do a stupid job during the day. Between, there are many shades of grey, and among them is the possibility of alternative online economies which may once reintroduce less-alienated semiotics into the circulation of capitalism.

PvMB: You've talked about the importance of editors being sensitive to the exchange economies of the nets; these many economies intertwine, they are not separate are they? Highly commercial and competitive ones share technologies, content and 'participants' (for want of a better word) with ones that are more clearly like the potlach economy you refer to. In practice, what has your experience been of keeping nettime independent within this situation?

PS: These economies intertwine, but not without friction. From the view of the poor, there is the need to disrespect certain economic barriers, for example, licenses and copyright. That's what is happening in many Eastern countries. The new markets are not functioning like they promised to, at least not for all. There are still many chances to use new technology as a tool to reach more independence, but it also gets used in the other way, for a huge 'Darwinist' shakeout. And as one can see with Microsoft, it is not at all the best who survive. So I strongly resist any logic of preaffirming the situation. Potlatch is only a circumscription of a kind of exchange economy which is pretty common, as soon as you have the privilege to do so. I am sure that we will face models which are based on a certain local exclusion of money economy. Any family, community, or friendship is based on such models. Finally, you need the friction, the potential of mixed economies, for a vivid and creative market, at least from what I understand about markets.

PvMB: This links with one of the ongoing discussions on nettime, the one to do with libertarianism or neoliberalism and social justice. It has, over time, involved posting extensive 'dialogues' on the role of Wired, the demonisation of the State and been presented as an attempt to start generating a productive, European contribution to the development of ideas on techno-cultural political organisation for the future. Is this right and how do you feel it is going?

PS: You can describe it like that. But I don't like to make predictions here. One thing nettime does is critique, this means it reflects and constructs the present. Of course there are strategies, and part of a strategy is that one should not talk too much about it. The important task is not to give up against the homogenising, centralising, and alienating networks of a global integrated capitalism, to use these very ethical-political techniques as 'cultural' ones. To push against what is forced on us as 'economic factors' in favour of a necessary quality.

The Amsterdam Agenda – fostering emergent practice in Europe's media culture

(2001)

Article URL - http://www.e-c-b.net/ecb/about/articles/992927295

This document is the first result of the conference 'From Practice to Policy: Towards a European Media Culture' (P2P) held in October 1997 in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The conference was held under the auspices of the Council of Europe and with the support of the Netherlands Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCenW), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cities of Rotterdam and Amsterdam. The conference is part of the programme of the Project Group for New Technologies: Cultural Cooperation and Communication of the Culture Committee of the Council of Europe.

The P2P Conference brought together expert practitioners in media culture from 22 organisations in 12 European countries. Their work exemplifies what 'good practice' in media culture can be, in a variety of fields: art, design, music, video, cultural theory, virtual reality and the Internet. Organisations at the conference work in a variety of innovative ways and on a variety of operational scales.

This Agenda identifies several themes which are of shared pragmatic interest to these communities. It is not a statement of high principle with which all artists - or policy makers in government and industry - are asked to agree. It is from future discussion of these themes, among all parties, that a media culture for Europe will emerge. This document is one part of that process.

1. What media cultural practice has to offer

- Innovation

- Education

- Social quality

2. Media culture and the challenges of an information society

3. From practice to policy

4. ... and from policy to practical actions

5. Z Summary and next steps

1. What media cultural practice has to offer

Media cultural practice is thriving in many places all over Europe, but neither its existence nor its cultural and economic significance is well-known to policy makers dealing with the development of an information society. Yet media culture can make a tremendous contribution to this project.

The artistic and cultural practice emerging in relation to new technologies is, by its very nature, diverse, independent, interdisciplinary. It comprises both production and research. Its practitioners develop creative ways to use new information and communication technologies (ICT). Media culture is fostering new ways of working and new thinking on social and political issues. Media culture develops new approaches to education and organises a wide variety of cultural programmes which reflect and celebrate cultural diversity. Media culture constantly devises new and flexible organisational structures and responds rapidly to the needs of diverse client groups and users.

Media culture is already a significant aspect of the information society in three respects:

1.1 Innovation

- Artists are often advanced users of new technologies; their feedback can be valuable to developers of hardware and software.

- The involvement of users in the design and creative process is a natural aspect of media culture.

- Interdisciplinarity, which is a goal of industry and education, already exists in media culture; it routinely spans art and science. Cooperation between artists, designers, musicians, scientists, programmers, software developers and many others, is part of its everyday practice.

- Media culture constantly fosters new ways of thinking about technology, its applications and its consequences. Artists, who are by nature critical, ask important questions. Above all, in relation to ICT, they ask "what is this stuff for?".

- Important research related to ICT takes place outside of industrial and academic laboratories. Artists, designers and independent researchers in media culture regularly develop innovative interface designs, databases, Virtual Reality technologies, groupware and many other applications.

- Media culture promotes and creates media access points for both experts and beginners. These environments enable production, education and communication through various media, such as radio, video, tv, multimedia and the Internet. Face-to-face contact in public events is an important part of this dynamic.

- Media culture contributes to the construction and transformation of new partly virtual public spaces, in which ICT is used to enhance social contact and enliven otherwise dead areas of the city.

1.2 Education

- The problem of education in and for an information society is not one of tools or equipment; the real challenge is to develop new content, ideas and processes. Media culture contains many radical new ways of thinking about the meaning and purpose of 'learning'.

- Media culture fosters new ways of learning. A lot of media culture activity takes place in informal learning environments such as museums, science centres and local communities. It will never be easy to change formal education (schools, colleges, universities) - but media culture can have a beneficial impact from the outside.

1.3 Social quality

- Media artists do not agree among themselves on their interpretation of ethical and political issues, but they do share a strong conviction that such issues are important.

- Media culture is, by its nature, critical of purely commercial agendas for new technology. This simple act of asking social and political questions enriches the debate about the purpose and meaning of innovation.

- Because so much of media culture exists on the margins of society, issues such as free access to networks are an everyday priority - not just a political slogan.

- Most media cultural organisations regularly work with local, national and international partner organisations. This cooperation is rarely formalised; it is mostly project-oriented and functions through extensive, informal networks of friendship and trust between larger and many smaller organisations. This patchwork of cultural identities and mentalities is the reality, and very often the great benefit, of European culture - meaning the whole continent, not just the Europe of the EU.

- Cultural diversity also means involvement with youth culture, popular culture, marginal cultures and grassroots activities; these are involved daily in the most innovative and creative fields of new technologies.

- Media culture helps create opportunities for public and community participation by providing skills, tools and environments which enable individuals and groups from marginalised communities to make contact, publish information and make their voices heard.

The actual practice and daily experience of independent media organisations are interesting expressions of Europe's diverse political, social and economic contexts. Policy makers and funding bodies are urged to visit media cultural institutions and familiarise themselves with the work that is being done in this field.

2. Media culture and the challenges of an information society

New technologies have always had a significant impact on society - often in unexpected ways. The media cultural community fosters critical discussions about the social and political consequences of technological change. Particular concerns are:

- The danger that the agendas for the Information Society are purely commercial.

- The danger of homogenisation and the Disneyification of European culture.

- The danger that culture may be understood only in terms of entertainment.

- The need to understand the fundamental transformation of the public domain through privatisation.

- The need to protect democratic control and cultural diversity.

- The challenges of privacy, cryptography and copyright - which are cultural as much as legal issues.

European media culture contests the idea that the Information Society entails an ever tighter convergence of global players. A better vision, certainly in Europe, is freedom for individuals and small groups to operate in an open media environment alongside the large, commercially oriented companies. Diversity exists, enthusiasm exists, and technical and political opportunities also exist. The potential is there, but it has to be exploited.

Media culture accepts the fact of continuous technological and cultural change. It recognises the dangers, but also sees the opportunities that the new technologies are offering, and seeks to pursue these opportunities through a creative use of these technologies.

3. From practice to policy

The Amsterdam conference has identified a number of practical ways in which media culture is already playing an important role in the emerging information society. However, better interaction with policy makers and processes is needed.

In relation to industry and economic policy, media artists have a lot to offer in the form of new interaction paradigms, new forms of collaboration and new insights. A productive relationship in which art can maintain its autonomy, and in which art and industry can learn and mutually benefit from each other's achievements and talents, is desirable for both parties. Many media artists believe industrial partners should not only provide technical knowledge and money, but also contribute to the content of the project. Public support can act as a catalyst for private sector involvement. Media culture is at its most productive when it can work at the intersection between art and industry, without being fully integrated into either of the two fields.

In relation to education policy, cooperation between media culture and education can have two goals: educating people to be competent and critical in their use of ICT, and development of methods to enhance formal and informal education through the use of multimedia/ICT. Beside formal education in new media that academic institutions and media art academies now offer, numerous opportunities for informal education are offered by independent organisations. Many artists and practitioners in new media combine a high degree of skill and expertise, with an awareness of the potentials and dangers of the new media. Cooperation and the exchange of knowledge and skills between the independent art and cultural sector on the one side, and the educational sector on the other, can be broadened and deepened by such means as professional exchange programmes, and multi-party projects which bring practitioners and education (and students) together.

4. ...and from policy to practical actions

There are a variety of practical ways to support and enhance the work of media cultural institutions:

- Recognise media culture as a relevant field of cultural activity.

- Recognise interdisciplinarity and develop funding structures that support this way of working.

- Support the availability of non-proprietory software for publicly funded projects.

- Make free access to public media an objective of cultural policies.

- Support free bandwidth on the networks (comparable to the Open Channels on the TV cable networks).

- Support networks of specialised institutions in preference to large-scale, centralised 'multimedia centres'.

- Establish small and medium-size centres for interdisciplinary research.

- Make small-scale and short-term project funding available.

- Provide for long-term structural support.

- Develop incentives for industry to co-operate in cultural projects.

- Provide opportunities for open-ended creative experimentation which may have no short term market application.

- Foster investment not only in technical infrastructure, or in traditional 'content', but also in media projects that create access and participation.

- Above all, prioritise investment in people. Machines are important, but the people who can work with them are more so - and they have to live! It is currently much easier to get funding for a newer, faster computer, or for its building, or for the electricity and network lines on which it will run, than for the programmer, artist or system operator who is supposed to use it.

Other action points:

- Information distribution in several European languages about and through the new media is necessary for the other objectives within this agenda to be effective. Critical on-line journals (e.g. Nettime) and mailing lists (e.g. Syndicate, V2_East) and critical magazines (e.g. Mute) are important in the overall development of new media culture, and should be an area of development.

- The lack of clear points of entry into EU funded programmes limits the ability of many media practitioners to participate, and consequently constrains the programmes themselves. The administrative effort to meet all the requirements of such applications is a further disincentive for small organisations. The research, expert knowledge, lobbying, administration and communication necessary for participating in EU/EC programmes is beyond their financial means. Even medium-size organisations that have successfully tendered, experience the process as a major drain on their resources. Cash-flow problems, and the necessity to prefinance large parts of ambitious projects, further exacerbate the situation. Strategies to alleviate these problems should be a priority.

5. Summary and next steps

The P2P conference concluded that policy makers in government and industry can work profitably together with media culture on the basis of an exchange of benefits. This relationship entails a view of media policy that includes explicit provisions for independent media practice, and which reflects the dynamic field within which media culture is operating. Future policy should support interdisciplinary modes of cooperation, possibly through the creation of interdepartmental funds (between culture, education, science, economics, foreign affairs, etc.). Policy makers can also encourage informal cooperation structures among media cultural institutions for mutual support and concerted actions. The Dutch Virtual Platform is a successful example of this already in place. Above all, it is hoped that this document justifies including a cultural dimension in discussions about technological development policy. These social and cultural dimensions can be the basis of shared trust, value and quality in relations between art and industry.

Tactical Media/Hacktivism

The ABC of Tactical Media

By David Garcia and Geert Lovink

Article URL - http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00096.html

(This manifest was written for the upcoming opening of the web site of the Tactical Media Network, hosted by the Waag, the Society for Old and New Media: http://www.waag.org/tmn). It will contain the archive of the web site and on-line journal of Next Five Minutes 2, a database of addresses, the archive of VPRO TVs "Worldreceiver" program and a new "broadcast site" with samples of new work, made by tactical media groups from all over the world. Contact: roos {AT} waag.org).

Tactical Media are what happens when the cheap 'do it yourself' media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture. Tactical media do not just report events, as they are never impartial they always participate and it is this that more than anything separates them from mainstream media.

A distinctive tactical ethic and aesthetic that has emerged, which is culturally influential from MTV through to recent video work made by artists. It began as a quick and dirty aesthetic although it is just another style it (at least in its camcorder form) has come to symbolize a verite for the 90's.

Tactical media are media of crisis, criticism and opposition. This is both the source their power, ("anger is an energy" : John Lydon), and also their limitation. their typical heroes are; the activist, Nomadic media warriors, the pranxter, the hacker,the street rapper, the camcorder kamikaze, they are the happy negatives, always in search of an enemy. But once the enemy has been named and vanquished it is the tactical practitioner whose turn it is to fall into crisis. Then (despite their achievements) its easy to mock them, with catch phrases of the right, "politically correct" "Victim culture" etc. More theoretically the identity politics, media critiques and theories of representation, that became the foundation of much western tactical media are themselves in crisis. These ways of thinking are widely seen as, carping and repressive remnants of an outmoded humanism.

To believe that issues of representation are now irrelevant is to believe that the very real life chances of groups and individuals are not still crucially affected by the available images circulating in any given society. And the fact that we no longer see the mass media as the sole and centralized source of our self definitions might make these issues more slippery but that does not make them redundant.

Tactical media a qualified form of humanism. A useful antidote to both, what Peter Lamborn Wilson described, as "the unopposed rule of money over human beings". But also as an antidote to newly emerging forms of technocratic scientism which under the banner of post-humanism tend to restrict discussions of human use and social reception.

What makes Our Media Tactical? In 'The Practice of Every Day Life' De Certueau analyzed popular culture not as a 'domain of texts or artifacts but rather as a set of practices or operations performed on textual or text like structures'. He shifted the emphasis from representations in their own right to the 'uses' of representations. In other words how do we as consumers use the texts and artifacts that surround us. And the answer, he suggested, was 'tactically'. That is in far more creative and rebellious ways than had previously been imagined. He described the process of consumption as a set of tactics by which the weak make use of the strong. He characterized the rebellious user (a term he preferred to consumer) as tactical and the presumptuous producer (in which he included authors, educators, curators and revolutionaries) as strategic. Setting up this dichotomy allowed him to produce a vocabulary of tactics rich and complex enough to amount to a distinctive and recognizable aesthetic. An existential aesthetic. An aesthetic of Poaching, tricking, reading, speaking, strolling, shopping, desiring. Clever tricks, the hunter's cunning, maneuvers, polymorphic situations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike.

Awareness of this tactical/strategic dichotomy helped us to name a class of producers of who seem uniquely aware of the value of these temporary reversals in the flow of power. And rather than resisting these rebellions do everything in their power to amplify them. And indeed make the creation of spaces, channels and platforms for these reversals central to their practice. We dubbed their (our) work tactical media.

Tactical Media are never perfect, always in becoming, performative and pragmatic, involved in a continual process of questioning the premises of the channels they work with. This requires the confidence that the content can survive intact as it travels from interface to interface. But we must never forget that hybrid media has its opposite its nemesis, the Medialen Gesamtkunstwerk. The final program for the electronic Bauhaus.

Of course it is much safer to stick to the classic rituals of the underground and alternative scene. Bu tactical media are based on a principal of flexible response, of working with different coalitions, being able to move between the different entities in the vast media landscape without betraying their original motivations. Tactical Media may be hedonistic, or zealously euphoric. Even fashion hypes have their uses. But it is above all mobility that most characterizes the tactical practitioner. The desire and capability to combine or jump from one media to another creating a continuous supply of mutants and hybrids. To cross boarders, connecting and re-wiring a variety of disciplines and always taking full advantage of the free spaces in the media that are continually appearing because of the pace of technological change and regulatory uncertainty.

Although tactical media include alternative media, we are not restricted to that category. In fact we introduced the term tactical to disrupt and take us beyond the rigid dichotomies that have restricted thinking in this area, for so long, dichotomies such as amateur Vs professional, alternative Vs mainstream. Even private Vs public.

Our hybrid forms are always provisional. What counts are the temporary connections you are able to make. Here and now, Not some vaporware promised for the future. But what we can do on the spot with the media we have access to. Here in Amsterdam we have access to local TV, digital cities and fortresses of new and old media. In other places they might have theater, street demonstrations, experimental film, literature, photography.

Tactical media's mobility connects it to a wider movement of migrant culture. Espousedby the proponents of what Nie Ascherson described as the stimulating pseudo science of Nomadism. 'The human race say its exponants are entering a new epoch of movement and migration. The subjects of history once the settled farmers and citizens, have become the migrants,the refugees the gastarbeiters, the asylum seekers, the urban homeless.'

An exemplery example of the tactical can be seen in the work of the Polish artist Krzystof Wodiczko who 'perceives how the hordes of the displaced that now occupy the public space of cities squares, parks or railway station concourses which were once designed by a triumphant middle class to celebrate the conquest of its new political rights and economic liberties. Wodiczko thinks that these occupied spaces form new agoras. which should be used for statements. 'The artist', he says, 'needs to learn how to operate as a nomadic sophist in a migrant polis.'

Like other migrant media tactitions Wodiczko has studied the techniques by which the weak become stronger than the opressors by scatering , by becoming centreless, by moving fast across the physical or media and virtual landscapes. 'The hunted mustdiscover the ways become the hunter.'

But capital is also radically deterritorialized. This is why we like being based in a building like De Waag, an old fortress in the center of Amsterdam. We happily accept the paradox of centers of tactical media. As well as castles in the air, we need fortresses of bricks and mortar, to resist a world of unconstrained nomadic capital. Spaces to plan not just improvise and the possibility of capitalizing on acquired advantages, has always been the preserve of 'strategic' media. As flexible media tacticians, who are not afraid of power, we are happy to adopt this approach ourselves.

Every few years we do a Next 5 Minutes conference on tactical media from around the world. Finally we have a base (De Waag) from which we hope to consolidate and build for the longer term. We see this building as a place to plan regular events and meetings, including coming The Next 5 Minutes. We see the coming The Next 5 Minutes (in january 1999), and discussions leading up to it, as part of a movement to create an antidote to what Peter Lamborn Wilson described, as 'the unopposed rule of money over human beings.

Netzkultur in Europa: Zwischen Medienaktivismus, Ravebewegung und neuer Philosophie

Interview mit Katja Diefenbach

Article URL - http://berlinergazette.de/netzkultur-deutschland-katja-diefenbach/

Clemens Apprich: In Deutschland gab es zu Beginn der 1990er Jahre eine sehr aktive Netzkulturszene, die sich aus unterschiedlichen Strömungen zusammensetzte. Wie kam es dazu?

Katja Diefenbach: Ich denke, man muss diese Entwicklung in einem größeren Zusammenhang rekonstruieren: Ende der 1980er Jahre haben sich manche Infoläden im Umfeld der autonomen Szene die Frage gestellt, inwieweit man die neuen Technologien für einen besseren Informationsaustausch nutzen könne. Damit veränderte sich die Art und Weise, wie in diesen Zusammenhängen über Medien nachgedacht wurde. Lange Zeit war die Diskussion in der radikalen Linken durch die Frankfurter Schule und deren kritische Auseinandersetzung mit technologischer Herrschaft, instrumenteller Vernunft und Kulturindustrie bestimmt. In den 1980er Jahren nahm die Rezeption poststrukturalistischer Philosophie zu, vor allem von Foucault, Deleuze und Guattari. In der sich allmählich bildenden Netzkulturszene fand eine subversionstheoretische Aneignung der nietzscheanischen und bejahenden Elemente des Poststrukturalismus statt. Auf subkultureller Ebene kamen die Techno-und Ravebewegung hinzu, und mit ihr auch ein bestimmter Einfluss von Drogen, Musik und der Clubkultur der frühen 1990er Jahre.

Gerade in Berlin haben sich diese unterschiedlichen Stränge überlagert, was sich auch an personellen Überschneidungen zeigte: So gehörte etwa Pit Schultz zu den Leuten, die die nettime-Mailingliste mit aufbauten, gleichzeitig aber auch an der Internationalen Stadt beteiligt waren und zum Umfeld des Clubs WMF zählten. Die Netzszene in Berlin, München und anderen Städten ging also aus der Begegnung oder dem Aufeinandertreffen von politischen, theoretischen und subkulturellen Elementen hervor: Eine radikale politische Haltung verband sich mit der Drogen-und Ausgehkultur der frühen Techno-und Clubszene, einer subversionstheoretischen Lesart von Deleuze und Guattari und einer Leidenschaft für das Netz, die neuen Medien und die Radiopiraterie.

Worin bestehen hierin Parallelen zu anderen europäischen Ländern?

Katja Diefenbach: In den Niederlanden gab es eine ganz ähnliche Entwicklung wie in Deutschland. Dort kam die Hausbesetzer-Szene mit Radio-und Netz-AktivistInnen sowie der Techno-und Gabber-Szene zusammen. Die Next5Minutes-Konferenzen, die von diesem Umfeld organisiert wurden, machten den Begriff der „tactical media“ stark, das heißt die Vorstellung eines subversiven, aktivistischen und interventionistischen Gebrauchs von Medien, der die Bedingungen der Situation, in der sie eingesetzt werden, ausdrückt, eine Taktik ohne Strategie sozusagen, ein reines Mittel. Aber auch Italien spielte früh eine besondere Rolle in der europäischen Netzkultur, weil dort bereits in den 1970er Jahren eine linksradikale Radioszene existierte. Die Autonomia Operaia wurde nicht nur von lokalen Fabrikkomitees, sozialen Kollektiven und Zeitschriften, sondern auch von freien Radiostationen wie Radio Onda Rossa in Rom, Radio Sherwood in Padua und Radio Alice in Bologna zusammengehalten.

Es ging um eine doppelte Strategie: Zum einen experimentierten die Radios damit, dass die Medien von den Leuten, die sie rezipieren, in Gebrauch genommen werden. Das heißt, sie praktizierten eine Universalisierung des Zugangs bei gleichzeitiger Singularisierung des Ausdrucks. Zum anderen ging es darum, Medien in einem nicht-repräsentativen Modus einzusetzen, also diejenigen zu Wort kommen zu lassen, die an den Aktionen in den Stadtvierteln, an den Unis oder in den Fabriken beteiligt sind und nicht ihre StellvertreterInnen. In dieser Tradition standen dann auch die ersten Netzinitiativen, die sich Anfang der 1990er Jahren im Umfeld der centri sociali bildeten. Ein anderer wichtiger Impuls kam von der freien Medienszene in Ost-und Südosteuropa, vor allem in Jugoslawien, wo die Netz-, Zine-und Radioszene eine wichtige Rolle während des Krieges spielte: Sowohl am klassischen Pol der Gegeninformation – man denke nur an Radio B92 –, als auch am eher postklassischen Pol des subversiven, taktischen Mediengebrauchs.

Im Gegensatz zur damals dominanten Vorstellung eines virtuellen Parallelraumes ging es den radikalen Netzkulturen vor allem um die Möglichkeit, in bestehende Prozesse einzugreifen. Welcher politische, aber auch theoretische Raum wurde damit eröffnet?

Katja Diefenbach: Der politische und theoretische Raum, der durch die Netzszene eröffnet wurde, war in einer spezifischen Weise ambivalent. Im Mittelpunkt standen vor allem subversionstheoretische Ansätze: Viele NetzaktivistInnen haben gedacht, sie wären durch ihren Mediengebrauch schneller, schlauer, wirksamer und gleichzeitig unsichtbarer als ihr hegemoniales Gegenüber, sprich Regierungen und Konzerne. Das war sozusagen das Spiegelstadium der Netzszene, ihre erste imaginäre Identifizierung, und daraus hat sich das Phantasma einer widerständigen Avantgarde gebildet. Auf theoretischer Ebene gab es großes Interesse an den Ideen der maschinischen Verkettung und des Rhizoms, die Deleuze und Guattari im Anti-Ödipus und in Tausend Plateaus entwickelt hatten. Das Problem dieser Rezeption bestand aber darin, eine an Bejahung und Begehren ausgerichtete a-subjektive Theorie des Politischen auf die Medienstruktur zu übertragen.

Das Netz selbst und seine vielheitliche, horizontale Struktur wurde als Rhizom identifiziert, was zu einer Auseinandersetzung über Technikdeterminismus und Technikoptimismus führte. Der Mehrheit dieser Szene entging die Ambivalenz des theoretischen und politischen Raums, den sie eröffnet hatte. Das heißt, die Mechanismen, aufgrund derer subversive Affirmation in normative Affirmation umschlagen kann, wurden vernachlässigt. Die Diskussionen über den Mainstream der Minderheiten und den Kommunismus des Kapitals, die die gesamten 1990er Jahre durchzogen, stellten auch eine Reaktion auf die Eindimensionalität einer zu einfach argumentierenden, subversionstheoretischen Netzdebatte dar. Die Kritik daran richtete sich allerdings nicht gegen die Haltung der Subversion oder die Eleganz spontanen Dissidentseins an sich, sondern gegen die auffällige Blindheit gegenüber der Naht, an der Subversion und biopolitischer Kapitalismus miteinander vernäht sind.

Allerdings wurde innerhalb der Netzszene auch schon früh diskutiert, wie man das rein subversive Moment überwinden und eine politische Position beziehen kann.

Katja Diefenbach: Ja, diese Diskussionen hat es gegeben. In ihnen ging es darum, dass jede Form von Politik sich schließlich reterritorialisieren muss. Reiner Exzess, reine Überschreitung oder Singularisierung sind ethische Erfahrungen. Das Politische besteht darin, diese Erfahrungen für alle potentiell zugänglich zu machen, und deshalb alle Formen von Ausbeutung und Ausschluss, die die Menschen von den Möglichkeiten eines Lebens trennen, zu bekämpfen. Politik erfordert also, auf eine mittlere Geschwindigkeit zurückzukommen. Ihr Paradox besteht darin, dass die Organisationsanforderungen des Politischen den Möglichkeiten, sich in extremer Weise zu singularisieren und sein Leben zu verschwenden, entgegenstehen. Die Netzszene hingegen scheiterte an dem gegenüberliegenden Paradox, nämlich dass subversive Singularisierung und Freiheitsoptionen dem kapitalistischen Akkumulationsregime genauso zugrunde liegen wie der Ausschluss von ihnen. Mit anderen Worten, die Konzentration auf die deterritorialisierende Tendenz des Kapitalismus ließ viele AktivistInnen blind werden gegenüber den Mechanismen, mit denen diese Tendenz in das System zurückgebunden wird.

Die populären Subversionsfiguren der Netzszene – Hacker und Medienguerillero – waren ja gleichzeitig diejenigen, die von Industrie und Behörden als BeraterInnen und ProgrammiererInnen übernommen wurden. Diese Auseinandersetzung ist heute in den Hintergrund getreten. Inzwischen hat sich auf der einen Seite die Gleichzeitigkeit von Subversionsanspruch und Anpassungsleistung weitgehend durchgesetzt – eine Art dissidenter Biedermeier scheint zum Normalfall geworden zu sein –, auf der anderen Seite müssen Firmen und Behörden kaum mehr auf dissidente oder minoritäre Gruppen zurückgreifen, weil das Wissen im Umgang mit den Neuen Technologien relativ breit vergesellschaftet worden ist.

Welche Implikationen hatte dieser Transformationsprozess deiner Meinung nach?

Katja Diefenbach: Heute ist dieser Normalisierungsprozess weitgehend abgeschlossen, und junge ProgrammiererInnen oder DesignerInnen sehen sich wohl kaum in dem ideologischen Konflikt zwischen Dissidenz und persönlichem Erfolg, den es damals gab. Auf der Ebene der Universitäten zeigt sich ebenfalls, dass die Jahre des Hypes vorbei sind. Boomten in den 1990er Jahren die Medientheorie-Studiengänge, sind sie heute ein Angebot unter anderen kulturwissenschaftlichen Fächern. Damit liegt der Blick frei auf die enorme Rolle, die die Computertechnologien in der Umstrukturierung der industriellen Produktion, der Finanzmärkte und der Konsumtion gespielt haben, Themen, die in der Netzdebatte nicht so sehr im Vordergrund standen.

Inwieweit ist die damalige Situation und das in ihr generierte Wissen heute noch relevant?

Katja Diefenbach: Vielleicht geht es darum, zwei Elemente, über die wir bereits gesprochen zu haben, festzuhalten: Zum einen die analytische Aufmerksamkeit für die mehrwertige Zusammensetzung von Situationen, zum anderen die politische und ethische Aufmerksamkeit, diese Mehrwertigkeit weder moralisch noch strategisch aufzulösen. Kurz gesagt heißt das, dass man weder existentiale Dissidenz entwertet, noch Politik auf die Bestimmung des „schwächsten Glieds“ einer Situation reduziert. Der vorschnelle subversionstheoretische Primat, der in der Netzdiskussion der Deterritorialisierungsbewegung beigemessen wurde, übersprang eine der wichtigsten methodologischen Einsichten des Poststrukturalismus: Gesellschaftliche Situationen, die per se mehrwertige, also aus verschiedenen Mechanismen zusammengesetzte Situationen sind, können niemals allein durch ihre aktuellste Tendenz – wie das Internet oder die immaterielle Arbeit – begriffen werden, sondern nur aufgrund der Spezifität, in der sich ihre unterschiedlichen Mechanismen zusammenfügen und in ihren Wirkungen gegenseitig verschieben.

Könnte man in diesem Zusammenhang also von einer „Geschichte des Scheiterns“ sprechen? Was ließe sich daraus lernen?

Katja Diefenbach: Ja, es gibt zwei Formen, in denen der Netzaktivismus gescheitert ist, und die zweite Form stellt auch heute noch eine offene Frage dar. Auf der einen Seite gab es ein Scheitern am eigenen Erfolg: Die hacktivistischen, subversions-und schwarmtheoretischen Praktiken und Narrative der Netzszene waren offen für eine Vereinnahmung durch das kapitalistische System. Als der Hype dann wirklich einsetzte, wurden die radikalen gesellschaftskritischen Ansätze verdrängt und viele Netzinitiativen haben sich in alternative, von den neuen Technologien getragene Wirtschaftsformen verwandelt. Auf der anderen Seite lässt sich das Scheitern aus einer zweiten Perspektive betrachten, nämlich dem der Gewichtung von Praktiken und Theorien: Die poststrukturalistischen und operaistischen Denk-und Handlungsmodelle, die den Netzaktivismus beeinflussten, wurden zu sehr auf die Technologie selbst abgebildet. Man muss sehen, dass die Hypothese einer minoritären Politik, die Deleuze und Guattari in Tausend Plateaus verhandeln, eine Reaktion auf die repräsentativen und autoritären Modelle der Politik in der Tradition der internationalen kommunistischen Bewegung darstellt.

Dieser Hypothese ist aber selber ein Kurzschluss eingeschrieben: Sie schwankt zwischen der Vorstellung, dass der Prozess des Werdens ohne jede Vermittlung radikale und anomale Widerstände ausdrückt, und der Forderung, die transversalen Verbindungen, die in diesem Prozess geschlossen werden, zu organisieren. Ich denke, dass die Distanz zwischen Werden und Organisation, Singularisierung und Stabilisierung nicht aufgelöst werden kann, sondern dass der politische Aktivismus vor der Frage steht, seine eigenen Wirkungen, seien sie disziplinierender und autoritärer Art, seien sie verteilender und auflösender Art, immer wieder unterbrechen muss. Das heißt, das Politische kann niemals auf ein Theorem und einen Praxistypus reduziert werden. Bezogen auf den Netzaktivismus bedeutet das, dass der Primat der Subversion und der Deterritorialisierung für eine politische Denk-und Handlungsstrategie nicht ausreichend war.

Warum war dieser Diskurs so reduktiv und konnte dann einfach kippen?

Katja Diefenbach: Zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt bekam man den Eindruck, dass das, worum da gestritten wurde, sich in der Asymmetrie der Kräfte selbst entschied. Am Anfang haben sich bestimmte Kräfteverhältnisse zugunsten des Netzaktivismus verdichtet, weil er die neuen technologischen Potenzen in Gebrauch nahm, weil er dissident war, weil er schick war, und so für viele akademische, künstlerische und alternativökonomische Szenen anschlussfähig wurde; es gab also eine ganz eigene „heiße“ Situation Anfang der 1990er Jahre, die aus der Begegnung zwischen undogmatischer Linker, Theorieszene und Clubkultur hervorging, in der sich der Drang, neue Politik-, Denk-und Lebensformen zu erfinden, mit der Nutzung des Netzes verband. Das Thema, die Instanz und die Materialität der digitalen Medien waren vielleicht einfach nur das, was am Neuesten und daher am Sichtbarsten war, der Attraktor, um den sich dieses neue Kräfteverhältnis für kurze Zeit organisierte. Letztlich sind aber die subversiven Versprechen, die im Zusammenhang mit den neuen Technologien ausgegeben wurden, zerbrochen, während sich das Netzwerkmodell als Herrschaftsmodell durchsetzen konnte.

Net-Politics

Unleashing the Collective Phantom (Resistance to Networked Individualism)

By Brian Holmes, 10 May 2002

(Featured in Mute Vol 1, No. 24 – Beach or Border?)

Article URL - http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/unleashing-collective-phantom-resistance-to-networked-individualism

Image: Jordan Crandall, Drive, 2000. Installation view, Neue Gallerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz

Today’s ‘self-managed’ or sociological type has been shaped overwhelmingly by the impact of ‘60s counter-culture. Jettisoning the disciplinary schemas of modernity, capitalist production models – of goods and subjects – have taken on board the anti-authoritarian demands of the flower power generation. But, argues Brian Holmes, our newfound flexibility, mobility and interactivity is both repressive and liberatory by turns. It is able to create both the extreme individualisation of cybernetic market research and the anti-individualism of the multiple name – two polarities which define and open a new space of struggle.

The classical function of the stock market is to provide resources for industrial development, through a speculative game that pays off later in the ‘real economy’. But history is cunning, and the result of the dotcom boom may have been to free up vast amounts of private money for the development of a virtual public realm, where people can confront the major corporations on their home turf – that is to say, in transnational space. Huge amounts of infrastructure were installed throughout the world in the period from 1995 to 2000; now the oversupply crisis is accounted a disaster. An alternative history turns that equation upside-down. The speculators of the late 20th century asked: ‘Is there any limit to the profit we can make off the internet?’ Today a wilder speculation has arisen: ‘Can we really make the networks useless for corporate capitalism?’

Unlike most people, I don’t think the answer is primarily legal, or even technological. Instead it is cultural and artistic. It has everything to do with subjective capacities for resistance, and a history of resistance might suggest a different question: ‘Can the expanding virtual class finally escape the domination of the flexible personality?’

PARADIGM SHIFT From Taylor and Ford to Stalin and De Gaulle, the adversary of the radical Left in the 20th century was rationalising authority. Whether on the factory floor or in the military ranks that gave the orders, regimentation and the hierarchical pyramid supplied the images of authoritarian oppression. The difference between East and West was slim in that respect. The army muster and the assembly line set the pace of life on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The first to analyse this situation was the Frankfurt School.

The originality of the Frankfurt School was to combine Marx and Freud, to explore the industrial economy’s masochistic libido. But to do so was not just to go beyond the pleasure principle. What the Frankfurt School studied from the 1930s onward was a new form of political-economic command that stretched its social fingers deeply into the psyche. The liquidation of nineteenth century bourgeois individualism and the emergence of a central-planning state, along with a totally mobilised factory society, were pursued on the subjective level by what they called the authoritarian personality. They understood this fascistic character structure as a ‘new anthropological type.’ Its traits were rigid conventionalism, submission, opposition to everything subjective, stereotypy, an exaggerated concern with sexual scandal, emphasis on power, and the projection of unconscious impulses.

The Frankfurt School writers perfected their analysis of the authoritarian regimes in the 1940s and ‘50s, while living in exile in the USA. There they saw Prussian parade ground discipline transforming into the softer coercions of behaviourist psychology and the culture industry. We know the new forms of revolt that arose in the 1960s against those standardising forces: everything from Reichean group sex, burning draft cards and dollar bills, to Provo events, situationist drifting and LSD. What Marcuse called ‘outbreaks of mass surrealism’. On a deeper level there was an assertion of subjectivity, of identity, of sexuality, the personal as the political. A poetics of resistance helped bring the decline of regimentation, welfare state bureaucracies, mass-consumption models and factory discipline. But are we even aware how that decline helped shape today’s political-economic system?

In response to the troubles of the 1960s and ‘70s, a new paradigm has arisen in the developed countries in the past twenty years, with a specific production regime, consumer ideology and social control mechanism, all integrated into a geopolitical order. For almost twenty years this development remained largely unconscious, unnameable. During that time, vanguard movements were obsolete, intellectuals were useless, artists were clowns, there was no alternative. Now the cracks are opening up everywhere. People are realising that the New World Order is not just oppressive at its edges, in the so-called developing countries. At the very heart of casual freelance culture, replete with PCs, mobile phones and general nomadism, the technology of control is continuously recreated. Winning the economic game today brings a high reward. You get to be the inventor of the flexible personality.

CULTURE/IDEOLOGY New paradigms are adopted because they work. Only in retrospect can we see them becoming modes of control. Flexibility was an extremely positive idea in California in the 1970s when the culture of microelectronics was invented. It was the polar opposite of the rigid 1950s: openness to others, embodied experience, self-expression, improvisation, refusal of hierarchies and discipline. These were the utopian days of Bucky Fuller, Gregory Bateson and the Whole Earth Catalog: no-one would have dreamt that An Ecology of Mind could become a management tool. But the looser, more creative lifestyle did not just mean the emergence of a whole new range of products, useful for stimulating consumption. In California, and ultimately in much of the developed world, the new culture seemed to promise a way out of the social conflicts that had stalled the Fordist industrial regimes.

Consider the way things looked to the Trilateral Commission in their 1975 report on The Crisis of Democracy. Not only were Third World countries using the powers of national liberation to demand higher prices for their resources while the US lost its war in Indochina. Not only were the capital returns plunging while wildcat strikes multiplied and the big ecological standoffs began. But worst of all, the huge postwar investments into socialised education, conceived to meet the knowledge needs of the techno-economy, were backfiring and producing resistance to capitalism and bureaucracy, alternative values, demands for further benefits and socialisations. These new claims on the welfare state had to be added to the traditional demands of the working class; and then the crisis began. The Trilateral countries were becoming ‘ungovernable,’ there was an ‘excess of democracy’. The kind of systemic critique that the Frankfurt School had pioneered reached its height in the mid-1970s. From that point on, the authoritarian system had to start learning from the enemy within.

The transformation took a decade. The golden age of neo-management began in the mid-1980s, while unionised workers were replaced with robots and unskilled labour was sought overseas. Corporate operations and financial flows expanded outside nations, where regulation and redistribution were deemed excessive. The triple challenge for the managers was to keep tabs on a distant work force, to open up global marketing and distribution, and above all, to create a culture – or an ideology – that would entice significant amounts of younger people to run this new machine. The key word was ‘flexibility’. The flexible system had to accept and divert the demands for autonomy, self-expression and meaning, it had to turn those very demands into a new mode of control. The magical answer turned out to be a communications device, a language-and-image transmitter: the networked personal computer. Now the computer was going to set you free.

Freedom has always been the great neoliberal watchword, from Hayek and the Chicago economists to the right-wing libertarians and the Cato Institute. Why not throw in the artists’ and the drop-outs’ dreams, roving desire, semiotic proliferation, Deleuzo-Guattarian schizophrenic visions, multi-culti creativity? After all, the innovations were coming from there. The networked computer promised to place a whole new alchemy of cooperative production in the same kinds of global channels that were already working for the finance economy. Research and invention could happen directly within the circuits of production and distribution.

The laptop computer freed up individuals for physical and psychic mobility, and it could also be used as an instrument of control over distant labour. It miniaturised access to the remaining bureaucracy, while opening private channels into entertainment, media and the realms of ‘fictitious’ capital – the speculative economy that feeds off the dismantling of the public sphere. Best of all, it recoded every kind of cultural production as commodities, multimedia. Here was a mode of development that might solve or at least gloss over the full set of problems inherited from the 1960s, particularly the struggles around the welfare state. Small wonder that the governments and the corporations started actively promoting a myth of flexibility. The emerging ‘virtual class’ – including cultural producers, digital artisans, prosumers, what are now called ‘immaterial labourers’ – stumbled more or less blindly into it.

GUIDANCE SYSTEMS How does the culture/ideology work? War is popular these days, so let’s take the military point of view. The weapon of choice during the Cold War was the ICBM: a huge, never-used giant, endlessly deconstructed by the critiques of phallo-logo-centrism. The New World Order takes off with a smaller, more practical device: the cruise missile. This kind of weapon gets constantly used, not just on the battlefield. Since the heyday of Star Wars – both the Strategic Defence Initiative and the Lucas movie – the military-entertainment complex has become part of everyday experience.

‘It seems that retailers will go to any length to capture customers,’ reads a 1997 article called ‘Star Wars turns on to Shoppers’ (quoted by Sze Tsung Leong in The Harvard Guide to Shopping). ‘Witness Safeway, which has recently used an artificial intelligence system from IBM called AIDA (artificial intelligence data architecture) – which was initially developed to detect and identify Russian missiles in space, but is now used... to analyse information on buying patterns with details of purchase from loyalty cards.’ When consumer desire is ‘turned on’ and encouraged to proliferate, the ultimate control fantasy becomes that of tracking the flexible personality.

‘Mass marketing, for all intents and purposes, is dead,’ writes business guru Art Weinstein, in Market Segmentation. ‘Precision target marketing... has taken over. By focusing on ever smaller yet profitable market segments, stronger company-customer relationships transpire. With technological products, users can practically invent markets for companies – customers become customisers.’ When feedback devices are built directly into the distribution circuits, the sources of desire are directly available to corporate monitoring. So you can help perfect your own internal guidance system.

Until recently, such trends seemed comfortably ambiguous – just the irritating price for increased freedoms. But with security-fever rising after September 11, everything starts to look different. The incitement to perform, to find creative ways of deploying the new equipment, reveals its hidden face, the fear of the excluded other, the imperative to ruthlessly extend and perfect the system. And the system really is threatened, not only by suicidal terrorism, but by the collapse of the ‘new economy,’ the growing protests against neoliberal globalisation, the revolution against the IMF in Argentina... The perfect solution is total mobilisation, the shift to a wartime footing. September 11 was a chance just waiting to be taken – the chance to consolidate the new paradigm on every level.

Jordan Crandall, Drive, 2000. Installation view, Neue Gallerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz

The American artist Jordan Crandall has made the military compulsions of the networked system visible. His work began with the heritage of the 1970s: experimentation, cooperation, networked performance, adjustment to the presence of others in virtual space. But in 1998, he hired a freelance military contractor to help him develop movement-predicting software, whose algorithms show up as eerie green tracery around bodies in a video image. The following exhibitions, Drive and Heat-Seeking, were fully-fledged explorations of the psychosexual relations of seeing and being seen, through the new technologies in both their civilian and military uses.

Crandall recently published an article called ‘Fingering the Trigger’ on the Nettime mailing list, which recounts the CIA’s use of an unmanned, camera-and-missile-equipped Predator drone to fire upon a suspicious Afghani man who, it turns out, was probably just scavenging for metal. ‘We align eye, viewfinder, and target in an act of aiming,’ Crandall writes. ‘But we are aimed at, we are constituted in other acts of looking. These are analysis and control systems in which the body is situated... It sees us as a nexus of data, materiality, and behaviour, and uses a language of tracking, profiling, identifying, positioning and targeting... Within the circuitous visualisation networks that arise, one never knows which “side” one is truly on, as seer switches to that which is seen; as targeter switches to that which is targeted.’ Crandall thinks a new sexuality lodges in the body-machine-image complex – hence the image of the soldier-man ‘fingering the trigger.’

This work helps us see what the easy money and pluralism of the Clinton years kept hidden: the outlines of a social pathology. It has an authoritarian cast – like everything that involves the military – but it does not produce unthinking, stereotyped behaviour of the kind we associate with fascism. What Crandall describes is an extremely intelligent process that, precisely by individualising – tracking, identifying, eliciting desire, channelling vision and expression – succeeds in binding the mobilised individual to a social whole. The new fascism discovers a complex, dynamic order for subjective difference, perspectival analysis, jouissance, even schizophrenic ecstasy. It integrates networked individualism.

GHOST IN THE MACHINE Arthur Kroker had an inkling of these things. Almost a decade ago he and Weinstein wrote about the ‘liberal fascism’ of the ‘virtual class’: a technological elite, driven by possessive individualism, whose interests lay with the financial establishment, the military state and the big corporations. But like all neo-situationists in Baudrillard’s wake, Kroker is obsessed by ‘the recline of the West’ and the hypnotic power of the digitised image: ‘The virtual class is populated by would-be astronauts who never made it to the moon,’ reads a passage from Data Trash. ‘They do not easily accept criticism of this new Apollo project for the body telematic.’

No doubt that was true in 1994, when the text was written. But the virtual realm has expanded vastly since then, and with it, the space for critique. One major effort has been to describe the new mode of domination. Another is to create a poetics of resistance: virtual class relations, alongside the embodied ones that never disappeared.

AAA For Sale

Consider the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (AAA), founded in 1995 with a five-year mission to establish a planetary network to end the monopoly of corporations, governments and the military over travel in space. The AAA is a kind of multiple name, a freely invented identity. Forget about the moon, ‘Reclaim the Stars’ they said on 18 June 1999, during the Carnival against Capital. The idea was not to create an art group, but a social movement – a collective phantom acting on a global scale. ‘Unlike a multiple name that is restricted to art practices, a collective phantom operates within the wider context of popular culture, and is used as a tool for class war,’ says an astronaut of the South London AAA, in a text called ‘Resisting Zombie Culture.’

One aspect of the project was infrastructural mapping, identifying the satellite hardware that links up the world communications network. But another was what Konrad Becker calls ‘e-scape’: ‘Cracking the doors of the future means mastering multidimensional maps to open new exits and ports in hyperspace; it requires passports allowing voyages beyond normative global reality toward parallel cultures and invisible nations; supply depots for nomads on the roads taken by the revolutionary practice of aimless flight.’ Ricardo Balli gives a further idea of what the galactic phantom might do: ‘We are not interested in going into space to be a vanguard of the coming revolution: the AAA means to institute a science fiction of the present that can above all be an instrument of conflictuality and radical antagonism.’ (Both quotes are from Quitter la gravité [http://www.lyber-eclat.net])

What does it all mean? The ideas sound fantastic, but the stakes are real: imagining a political subject within the virtual class, and therefore, within the economy of cultural production and intellectual property that had paralysed the poetics of resistance. Consider Luther Blissett, an obscure Jamaican football player traded from Britain to Italy, who fell short of stardom but became a proliferating signature, a multiple name, the ‘author’ of a book called Mind Invaders: How to Fuck the Media. Between tales of Ray Johnson and mail art, Blissett takes time out for some political-aesthetic theory: ‘I could just say the multiple name is a shield against the established power’s attempt to identify and individualise the enemy, a weapon in the hands of what Marx ironically called “the worst half” of society. In Spartacus by Stanley Kubrick, all the slaves defeated and captured by Crassus declare themselves to be Spartacus, like all the Zapatistas are Marcos and I am all we Luther Blissetts. But I won’t just say that, because the collective name has a fundamental valence too, insofar as it aims to construct an open myth, elastic and redefinable in a network....’

Ya Basta principles in practice

The ‘open myth’ of Luther Blissett is a game with personal identity, like the three-cornered football played by the AAA: a way to change the social rules so a group can start moving simultaneously in several directions. This ‘fundamental valence’ lies at the prehistory of the counter-globalisation movement. Just think of the way names like Ya Basta, Reclaim the Streets, or Kein Mensch ist Illegal have spread across the world’s social networks. One can see these names, not as categories or identifiers, but as catalysts, departure points, like the white overalls (tute bianche) worn initially in north-eastern Italy: ‘The Tute Bianche are not a movement, they are an instrument conceived within a larger movement (the Social Centres) and placed at the disposal of a still larger movement (the global movement),’ writes Wu Ming, in the French journal Multitudes. This ‘instrument’ was invented in 1994, when the Northern League mayor of Milan, Formentini, ordered the eviction of a squatted centre and declared, ‘From now on, squatters will be nothing more than ghosts wandering about in the city!’ But then the white ghosts showed up in droves at the next demonstration, and a new possibility for collective action emerged: ‘Everyone is free to wear a tuta biacha, as long as they respect the “style”, even if they transform its modes of expression: pragmatic refusal of the violence/non-violence dichotomy; reference to zapatismo; break with the 20th-century experience; embrace of the symbolic terrain of confrontation.’

Yet a strange thing happened, explains Wu Ming in another text: ‘Some rhetorically opposed the white overall and the blue overall, and the former was used as a metaphor for post-Fordist labour – flexible, “precarious”, temporary workers whom the bosses prevent from enjoying their rights and being represented by the unions.’ [www.wumingfoundation.com]. Between politics, class uncertainty and sheer word play, the Tute Bianche got into full swing. The technique of ‘protected direct action’ – allowing ludicrously padded protesters to face blows from the police – was a way to invade, not just the media screens, but above all the minds of hundreds of thousands of other people. They converged in Genoa in July 2001, to open a real political debate in a country stifled by a neofascist consensus.

Another example of the effects created by a confusion of identities is the Yes Men, in their cameo or ‘chameleo’ appearances as representatives of the World Trade Organisation. Here we’re talking about two artists, whose names aren’t hard to discover, but which makes the uncertainty over language no less interesting. To say ‘yes’ to neoliberal ideology can be devastatingly satirical, as when the self-elected WTO representative ‘Hank Hardy Unruh’ displayed the logical fiction of the Employee Visualisation Appendage, a telematic worker-surveillance device in the shape of a yard-long golden phallus. But what kind of satire is at work when Kein Mensch ist Illegal takes the neoliberal ideology seriously, and declares all the world’s borders open, for everybody? (See Florian Schneider in this issue.) Like the fire-coloured masks worn by thousands in Quebec City, today’s networked protests have two faces: the laughter of open communication, or the violence of a gagged mouth behind a chain-link fence. Both faces are the truth of the contemporary political confrontation.

VOICE AND EXIT No doubt millions of the world’s ‘flexible’ workers remain largely gagged – mute – with no voice and no hope of escaping. But as use of the internet has increased, and as people have seized its communicational power for both organisation and subversion, a metamorphosis has invaded the ‘transnational public sphere,’ which formerly was only open to the corporations. The global e-scape remains virtual, but in the sense of Deleuze: virtuality as latency, as unmanifest reality, potential flight-lines waiting to be taken.

The virtual class in this sense, or the immaterial labourers – I’ve always preferred to say networkers – cannot stand in for the rest of the world’s population. There is no universal subject, not even ‘the individual.’ But an active indistinction of identity has begun to spread, like a new departure point. In a recent text, Paolo Virno locates the universal in pre-individual aesthetic and linguistic experience, in the impersonality of perception and circulating language. The chaotic dissension of public space then becomes the landscape, not of defensive individualism, but of evolving paths to individuation: ‘Far from regressing,’ writes Virno, ‘singularity is refined and reaches its peak in acting together, in the plurality of voices, in short, in the public sphere’ (Multitudes #7).

The kinds of conflict that began in the universities in the 1960s have crossed over into the global knowledge-space, whose nature as a public domain in now intensely at issue. If the new voices and political confrontations should ultimately point to an exit from the flexible personality, and from liberal fascism, then there will have been no waste in the speculations of the late 1990s – whatever the multiple names of the investors.

RTmark: Andy is proud as a dictator CEO on cocaine.

Brian Holmes is an art critic, activist and cultural theorist, author of the forthcoming book of essays, Hieroglyphs of the Future: Art and Politics in a Networked Era Association of Autonomous Astronauts [http://www.uncarved.demon.co.uk/aaa.html][http://aaa.t0.or.at/][http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/7535/AAA1.htm][http://www.deepdisc.com/aaa/]

The Yes Men[http://www.theyesmen.org/]

Kein Mensch ist Illegal[http://www.contrast.org/borders/kein/]

Ya Basta[http://www.yabasta.it/]

Luther Blissett [http://www.lutherblissett.net/]

CYBERFEMINISM SPCL - With a little help from our (new) friends?

By Caroline Bassett, 10 September 1997

(Featured in Mute Vol 1, No. 8 – Cyberfeminism)

Article URL - http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/cyberfeminism-spcl-little-help-our-new-friends

Sadie Plant's writings have been instrumental in defining many of cyberfeminism's foundational concepts. Here, Caroline Bassett takes one of her recent essays, On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations, as the point of departure for a critical look at feminism's most recent progeny while Josephine Berry reports from the conference Wired Women where some of cyberfeminism's more popular figurations were placed under the microscope.

What is cyberfeminism? Sadie Plant claims it is an absolutely post-human insurrection - the revolt of an emergent system which includes women and computers, against the world view and material reality of a patriarchy which still seeks to subdue them. This is an alliance of 'the goods' against their masters, an alliance of woman and machines. It is a revolt of the chattels.

It also claims to be a revolt on a certain - rather grand - scale. At the opening to On the Matrix:Cyberfeminist Simulations, Plant says that cyberfeminism - and/or the complex systems and virtual worlds upon which it is based - have the capacity to undermine the "world view and material reality of two thousand years of patriarchal control." Later in the same article she suggests this is already happening. "Tomorrow came" - we are, she says, already downloaded.

Cutting across the absolute certainty of this rhetoric of transformation though, is a surprising admission of uncertainty. Plant freely admits that she is talking about an "irresponsible feminism", more than that, she wonders if what she is talking of "is a feminism at all."

This uncertainty opens up certain questions about cyberfeminism. Crucially this one; does it amount to a politics, or a technology? Is Plant talking about a possible feminist response to computerisation? Or is she rather documenting/predicting a technologically-determined alteration in the condition of woman. An alteration which woman should embrace because it is a change in their favour, but which they can do very little about.

Two themes in particular emerge as keys to unraveling the claims of cyberfeminism. First, it is useful to consider how Plant locates cyberfeminism within debates around the subject. And, second, the arguments Plant makes around the nature of self-organising machines.

PLANT + IRIGARY = ONE + ZERO

Cyberfeminism is only a new twist in a long love/hate affair between modern feminisms and technologies. From Mary Shelley's Franken-stein onwards, feminism has found in technology an edge point. It is regarded as desirable, treacherous, despised, but always as revealing of the condition of women, and as implicated in it.

In this sense cyberfeminism is part of the feminist tradition. But it also repudiates it. Plant's cyberfeminism emerges, in fact, out of what she understands as the failures of earlier feminism - more broadly out of the failure of the Enlightenment. She doesn't want a re-enchantment of the world.

Cyberfeminism, then, begins at the point when humanism is abandoned. Plant's analysis focuses on the French philosopher Luce Irigaray's contention that for women a sense of identity is impossible to achieve since women cannot escape the 'specular economy' of the male. An economy in which, through the controlling phallus and eye (the member and the gaze) woman is always comprehended as 'deficient'. Woman is always "the sex which is not one", the sex which always lacks the equipment to have one.

Given this analysis, the goals of earlier feminisms, those which have demanded for woman her place as the also-subject of history, her share of human domination over nature, are the wrong goals. Pursuing the "masculine dream of self control, self-identification, self-knowledge, and self-determination" as Plant puts it, will always be futile, since "any theory of the subject will always have been appropriated by the masculine" (Irigaray).

The only possible politics for the sex which is not one, and can never be one, is a politics which takes as its starting point the destruction of the subject.

The question then is how this work of destruction might be carried out. Irigaray's answers have always been tentative. Plant is not so diffident. She has an answer. And it is, of course, self-organising technology; the femaleness of the new species. Which is not a species but an emergence. And one dangerous to men.

Plant's contention is that self-organising technology; "a dispersed and distributed emergence composed of links between women, between women and computers, computers and communications links, connections and connectionist nets" can perform Irigaray's work of destruction (which is the grounds of possibility for new works of assembly), because it provides space for woman to assemble herself - with a little help from her (new) friends. Cut loose from patriarchy, woman is now "turned on with the machines".(Do we want this?)

Man meanwhile, despite his Cartesian disdain for being 'earthed' is also enmeshed in cybernetic space, becoming simply a 'cyborg component of a self organizing process beyond his perception or control'. From where Plant begins - with the necessity for destruction, infiltration, and corruption - there is some joy to be had in finding Man caught in the nets he spread precisely to consolidate his own position. (Perhaps we do want this.)

ESSENTIAL FEMALE MACHINES

This turn of events depends, of course, not only on a particular analysis of the position of woman. It also requires a particular understanding of technology. And here, I think cyberfeminism falters.While Eco-feminism holds technology as hostile to woman precisely because it understands that technological 'advances' represent a further encroachment by 'man' upon 'nature' and 'woman', cyberfeminism, by contrast, asserts that complex systems and virtuality work the opposite way around.

How so? For cyberfeminism, the new nature of new machines might be encapsulated in the notion of self-organisation; As Plant puts it "tools mutate into complex machines which begin to think and act for themselves". These machines, being emergent, do not have origins to be faithful to. They twist beyond the specular economy. And the particular twist they take is towards the 'female'. Computers do not represent an encroachment of logic, but its confusion. Crucially then, the valence of technology has changed.

BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SAY COMPUTERS ARE FEMALE?

Three claims Plant makes for technology 'as female' are these:

One. Like woman, computers are simulators, having no fixed identity, but rather performing as. Both are therefore, using Irigaray's formulation, 'not one' but always multiple, being both nothing (zero) and everything/everywhere at once. The nature of the computer and the nature of women converge.

Two. A second way in which the female is invoked is via a return - to weaving, understood in On the Matrix, as an authentic 'feminine craft' (certified female by Freud). Weaving, undeniably processual, comes to symbolise elements of technology which cannot be explained in terms of domination and control (i.e. of man putting nature on the carpet). Plant suggests this technology, always technically demanding, has sewn its cross-stitches into the new:

"[f]emale programmers were to find connections between knitting, patchwork, and software engineering and find weaving secreted into the pixellated windows which open on to cyberspace."Weaving is invoked as a celebration of that which is/always has been female about a certain kind of technology. Plant's alliance between 'the goods' - females and female technologies, suddenly looks remarkably similar to the old 'cobwebs against bombs' tactics of the weaving women of Greenham Common.

Three. Finally, Plant claims that only those at 'odds' with the masculine can access the plane of the new machines. If new technology is not masculine, it is because some of its inventors were not either. She invokes Alan Turing, the inventor of the Turing machine, the forerunner to the modern computer, who was forced to take oestrogen as 'therapy' after being convicted of homosexuality by the British courts. Turing's brain she says, "newly engineered and feminised", produced the Turing machine.

As a matter of fact, it didn't. Turing invented his machine before he was prosecuted and certainly before his 'therapy' took hold (at least according to Alan Hodges' biography). But the factual error is less significant perhaps, than the rather brutal essentialism evident here (Is a hormone really all it takes to 'be' a woman?)

Cyberfeminism claims to ride the new edge of technology, but it also rides a very old edge of feminism. Plant is essentially essentialist; there is little in her account which suggests ways in which the category of the female might itself be subject to mutation.

THE WHEN QUESTION

In another way too, cyberfeminism's conception of emergent/self organising technology is to be questioned. Technology changed, says Plant, but can this be said to be equally true of computers, neural networks, telecoms networks, nano-technology (the latter of which could very easily read as an attempt at absolute, molecule by molecule control of nature), biotechnologies, AI?

On the Matrix glances across an array of technologies, each one produced as 'proof' of "the change", each one never precisely described. As a rhetorical strategy, blinding with science (or in this case technology) has surely been (over)done. In addition, there is always a tension between contention and tense; "tomorrow came", says Plant, but she admits that many of these technologies are still under development.

There is a problem then with cyberfeminism's understanding of technology. Plant's assertions about the long list of technologies she invokes are, often, simply assertions.

More than that, they might be understood to reduce technology in so far as they characterise it as 'female'. Surely it will never be enough to understand emergent technology 'as feminine', just as other technologies can never be understood purely and simply 'as masculine'? This, paradoxically, is to deny the complexity of technology.

This conflict, between gender essentialism and technological transformation, is a faultine that runs through cyberfeminism. It means that although cyberfeminism understands that everything has changed, in the end, it also suggests very little has changed. Despite the rhetoric, cyberfeminism is not ambitious enough.

CONCLUSION

To return, finally, to the question of a feminism. Following the threads of Plant's arguments through On the Matrix, it becomes clear, I think, that Plant never provides a definitive answer to the question: "technology or politics?" There is always, in her work, a slippage - from what might be effected through a politics practised by women, to what will be effected by virtue of virtual (and complex) systems.

This slippage is the point for Plant who courts and develops ambiguity in her writing, consistently confusing and refusing distinctions between woman - who is "turned on by the machines", and self-organising machines themselves.

Woman and machines, gathered under the same unvarying sign (the sign of the female - the always multiple zero set against the One - a non binary opposition) are, as Plant sees it, elements of the same networks. In this proliferating confusion, distinctions about who or what is doing what to whom - distinctions that is, about what might amount to 'doing politics' and what might amount to celebrating a technology, might seem difficult to draw. More than that; they might even seem irrelevant. "As technology changes, woman changes", says Plant. Shouldn't that be enough for us?

I don't think it is. Because it lets cyberfeminism off the hook. It makes certain claims to being an active, radical form of politics; one adapted to post-humanism. But it also comes close to suggesting that the position of woman is simply intrinsic to a certain form of technology.

In the moments, in which cyberfeminism relies not on humans (women) but on the emerging force of machines, which she presumes are 'female', Plant seems to me to deliver us less to a politics than an eschatology; a hope and desire for future things. In this way, despite the sound and fury, of cyberfeminism's (effective) rhetoric, and despite the power and precision of its destructive moment (the destruction of the desire for a re-tooled Enlightenment), it often comes close to a politics of quietism.

Sadie Plant, On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations In Cultures of Internet, (ed) Rob Shields (Sage, 1996)

Caroline Bassett is a freelance technology journalist, columnist for MacUser, and a doctoral student researching hypermedia at Sussex University.

Alternative Netzwerke

Vor und nach Facebook

Von Felix Stalder

Article URL - http://www.freitag.de/autoren/der-freitag/vor-und-nach-facebook

Das Versprechen der Partizipation ist problematisch geworden. Mit unserer Teilnahme füttern wir heute die neue Maschine. Mit dem Gefällt-mir-Button teilen wir Facebook mit, was wir mögen, damit es uns noch rigider in seine Profitmaschine eingliedern kann. Was nun? Partizipation grundsätzlich abzulehen ist keine Alternative. Wir sollten versuchen, sie neu zu denken. Dabei hilft ein Blick zurück auf die Anfange der Netzkultur.

Zu Beginn der neunziger Jahre war das Internet für die meisten eine große Leerstelle, die förmlich darauf wartete, gefüllt zu werden. Es gab kaum vorgegebene Strukturen und kaum dominante Akteure. Alle waren aufgefordert, selbst Hand anzulegen. Diese Arbeit am Virtuellen war notwendigerweise ein kollektiver Prozess, in dem die Arbeitsteilung relativ schwach ausgeprägt war. Es war die große Zeit des Do-it-yourself.

Experimentierend entstand eine Welt, die zu erschaffen für all jene eine Notwendigkeit war, die sich durch die Leere und Offenheit angezogen fühlten. Fast alle frühen Netzkulturprojekte – The WELL (1985) an der US-amerikanischen Westküste, das transatlantische The Thing (1991) oder die mehrheitlich europäische Mailingliste nettime (1995) – waren auf Partizipation angelegt. Wobei Partizipation nicht nur die Beisteuerung von „Inhalten“ in vordefinierten Formaten meinte, sondern immer auch die gleichzeitige Entwicklung von Regeln und den Aufbau der Infrastruktur mit einschloss. Partizipation hieß Teilhabe am Projekt als ganzem. Sozusagen Do-it-yourself ohne Anleitung. Es ging darum, in einem kollektiven Prozess gleichzeitig die Richtungen, Regeln und die ermöglichenden Infrastrukturen des eigenen Handelns zu bestimmen. Dabei war überhaupt nicht vorgegeben, wie die Dinge auszusehen hatten. Man agierte in einer radikalen Offenheit. Die Alternativen, die gated communities von AOL oder Compuserve, waren aus der Sicht der entstehenden Netzkultur Gefängnisse für Ahnungslose.

Diese Selbstdefinitionen auf vielen Ebenen kann man als die ersten Versuche begreifen, eine many-to-many-Kommunikation auf einer zivilgesellschaftlichen Ebene zu realisieren und zugleich über diese neuen Formen nachzudenken. Mailinglisten, Webforen, kollaborative Plattformen wurden entwickelt und die kommunikativen Grundregeln, die Netiquette, etabliert. Auf dem Höhepunkt der Euphorie für eine Kultur der Offenheit und Partizipation erschien im Oktober 1995 der Request For Comments: 1855 (RFC). Die Netiquette enthielt die Faustregel der Toleranz: „Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive“, also etwa: Sei zurückhaltend, in dem was du verschickst und offen, in dem, was du empfängst.

Massenmedium werden

Solche requests for comments waren von Anfang an ein probates Mittel, um neue Standards in einer offenen Weise zu entwickeln; der erste Standard wurde schon 1969 über das Arpanet veröffentlicht. Angelehnt wurde das Verfahren an die akademische peer-review (also daran, dass ein unabhängiger Gutachter eine wissenschaftliche Publikation beurteilt). Hier ging es darum, die Parameter zukünftigen Handelns, die technischen Standards, festzulegen. Wie vieles in der frühen Internetkultur war dieses Verfahren gleichzeitig utopisch und pragmatisch.

David D. Clark, einer der führenden Entwickler des Internet in den 1980er Jahren, brachte das Ethos dieser technischen Gemeinschaft auf die legendäre Formel: „We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.“ Mit anderen Worten: Diejenigen, die machen, bestimmen auch. Dafür muss es dann auch funktionieren, aber im technischen Bereich gibt es für das Funktionieren relativ klare Kriterien. Wer gute Lösungen einbrachte, konnte die weitere Entwicklung direkt bestimmen, getragen von einer gleichberechtigten Gemeinschaft. Höhepunkte einer Kultur, wie sie der RFC zum Ausdruck brachte, enthalten indessen immer schon die Elemente ihres Niedergangs. So wurde die Formulierung der Regeln nicht nur notwendig, weil immer mehr neue Nutzer einströmten, die wenig von den Sitten und Gebräuchen im Netz wussten, sondern auch, weil die internen Spannungen größer wurden – das Internet begann zum Massenmedium zu werden. Die Kommerzialisierung kündigte sich bereits an, wurde aber noch als soziales Problem gesehen, das mit sozialen Mitteln einzudämmen wäre.

Die zweite Hälfte der 1990er Jahre war dann geprägt durch eine Verschiebung von Communities hin zu Businessmodellen, die mit dem rasanten Wachstum ihrer Werte an der Börse zunehmend in den Vordergrund traten. Der Höhenflug währte nicht lange. 2001 gingen viele unsinnige E-Commerce Startups pleite, und es schien, als würde sich die Kommerzialisierung verlangsamen. Bekanntlich kam es anders. Der Boom hatte bewirkt, dass das Internet endgültig zum Massenmedium geworden war und die Infrastruktur bereitstand. Jetzt ging es darum, neue Ansätze zu finden und diese gewinnbringend zu nutzen. Dazu wurden die Kernkonzepte der ersten InternetGeneration – Kommunikation, Partizipation, Offenheit für Neues, wenn es denn nur funktioniert (permanent beta) – massentauglich gemacht. Mit Web 2.0 wurde ein Label entworfen, das in kurzer Zeit die Kommerzialisierung der sozialen Sphäre in bis dahin unbekannte Ausmaße vorantreiben sollte. Partizipation oder, wie es nun unpolitisch hieß, user generated content, stand immer noch im Mittelpunkt, sie wurde gar zum modus operandi einer sich neu formierenden Kulturindustrie. Während die alte Kulturindustrie, insbesondere die Musiklabels und Verlage, immer stärker unter Druck kamen, legten die neuen Plattformen ein ungeheures Wachstum hin.

Der Preis für die Massentauglichkeit war hoch, er lag in der subtilen Unterordnung der sozialen Vernetzung unter die kommerziellen Strategien der Plattformanbieter, die zunehmend als Motoren der Innovation auftraten. Do-it-yourself wurde vom Warten auf die nächste coole App abgelöst. Vernetzung musste nun immer zwei Zielen zugleich dienen. Zum einen sollte sie die sozialen Bedürfnisse der Nutzer befriedigen, zum anderen die Sammlung von Daten und deren kommerzielle Ausbeutung unterstützen. Diente es dem ersten Ziel nicht, floppte das Angebot, diente es dem zweiten nicht, wurde es gar nicht erst entwickelt. Man konnte nun nicht mehr unterscheiden zwischen genuinen Bedürfnissen der Nutzer und solchen, die von den Plattformanbietern zuallererst geschaffen werden. Wer konnte etwa vor wenigen Jahren ahnen, dass die nackte Anzahl von Freunden eine zentrale Kategorie der öffentlichen Selbstdarstellung sein würde? Wo schlägt das Grundbedürfnis nach Sozialität um in einen neuen Imperativ der Vernetzung, vorangetrieben vom Datenhunger der neuen Kulturindustrie? „Partizipation ist das neue Spektakel“, stellte Diedrich Diederichsen bereits 2008 fest, aber diese Art der Partizipation ist das genaue Gegenteil von Teilhabe und dient der Verschleierung der neuen Macht-und Ausbeutungsverhältnisse.

Herrschaftswissen

Durch die Horizontalität auf der Nutzerseite der Infrastruktur wird verschleiert, dass gleichzeitig neue, hochgradig vertikale Machtzentren entstehen – an denen nicht nur der Wert der gemeinsam produzierten Arbeit abgeschöpft werden kann, sondern auch neue Kontrollpunkte angeführt werden. An diesen Punkten fällt Wissen um die Zusammensetzung der Gesellschaft in Echtzeit an. Herrschaftswissen, mit dem man mehr oder weniger unbemerkt in gesellschaftliche Prozesse eingegreifen kann, sei das mit kommerziellen oder politischen Motiven.

Die Spannungen zwischen den Dynamiken der horizontalen Vernetzung und der vertikalen Kontrolle werden immer deutlicher. Zwischen der Partizipation als Teilhabe und deren spektakulärer Simulation, die aus der strikten Trennung zwischen Inhalten und Plattformen entstanden ist, hat sich ein Graben geöffnet. Für politische Aktivisten ist es inzwischen ein Risiko, Facebook zu nutzen, nicht nur, weil Staatssicherheitsorgane routinemäßig die Daten auswerten, sondern weil gezielt Accounts gesperrt und Seiten gelöscht werden.

Die Erfahrung der ersten Web-Generation, dass man auch Infrastrukturen selber machen kann und muss, wird neu formuliert. Das zentrale Stichwort lautet Mesh-Netzwerke. Anstatt auf eine zentrale und zentralisierte Infrastruktur zu vertrauen, die Vernetzung organisiert, anstatt also auf Facebook oder Twitter zu vertrauen, wird eine neue Generation von Plattformen entwickelt, die auf dem Prinzip der Maschen (engl.: mesh) beruht. Eine gemeinsame Infrastruktur soll durch die Vernetzung vieler einzelner lokaler Netze entstehen, die Daten untereinander weiterreichen. Damit entfällt der zentrale Kontrollpunkt, und das emanzipatorische Potenzial der Horizontalität großer Gruppen wird befreit von seiner kommerziell verengten und überwachungstechnisch optimierten gegenwärtigen Fassung.

Die Ideen der Partizipation als Teilhabe werden gerade neu formuliert. Ob und wie das gelingen wird, ist völlig offen, aber die Zukunft von einst wird eben gerade wieder entdeckt.

Dieser Text ist eine gekürzte und überarbeitete Fassung eines Beitrags aus: Vergessene Zukunft. Radikale Netzkulturen in Europa. Clemens Apprich, Felix Stalder (Hg.), Transcript Verlag 2012, 348 S., 32,80

InfoEnclosure 2.0

By Dmytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick, 29 January 2007

(Featured in Mute Vol 2, No. 4 − Web 2.0 Man's Best Friendster)

Article URL - http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/infoenclosure-2.0

The hype surrounding Web 2.0’s ability to democratise content production obscures its centralisation of ownership and the means of sharing. Dmytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick expose Web 2.0 as a venture capitalist’s paradise where investors pocket the value produced by unpaid users, ride on the technical innovations of the free software movement and kill off the decentralising potential of peer-to-peer production.

Wikipedia says that ‘Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a supposed second generation of internet-based services – such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies – that emphasise online collaboration and sharing among users.’

The use of the word ‘supposed’ is noteworthy. As probably the largest collaboratively authored work in history, and one of the current darlings of the internet community, Wikipedia ought to know. Unlike most of the members of the Web 2.0 generation, Wikipedia is controlled by a non-profit foundation, earns income only by donation and releases its content under the copyleft GNU Free Documentation License. It is telling that Wikipedia goes on to say ‘[Web 2.0] has become a popular (though ill-defined and often criticised) buzzword among certain technical and marketing communities.’

The free software community has tended to be suspicious, if not outright dismissive, of the Web 2.0 moniker. Tim Berners-Lee dismissed the term saying ‘Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means.’ He goes on to note that ‘it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0.’

In reality there is neither a Web 1.0 nor a Web 2.0, there is an ongoing development of online applications that cannot be cleanly divided.

In trying to define what Web 2.0 is, it is safe to say that most of the important developments have been aimed at enabling the community to create, modify, and share content in a way that was previously only available to centralised organisations which bought expensive software packages, paid staff to handle the technical aspects of the site, and paid staff to create content which generally was published only on that organisation’s site.

A Web 2.0 company fundamentally changes the mode of production of internet content. Web applications and services have become cheaper and easier to implement, and by allowing the end users access to these applications, a company can effectively outsource the creation and the organisation of their content to the end users themselves. Instead of the traditional model of a content provider publishing their own content and the end user consuming it, the new model allows the company’s site to act as the centralised portal between the users who are both creators and consumers.

For the user, access to these applications empowers them to create and publish content that previously would have required them to purchase desktop software and possess a greater technological skill set. For example, two of the primary means of text-based content production in Web 2.0 are blogs and wikis which allow the user to create and publish content directly from their browser without any real need for knowledge of markup language, file transfer or syndication protocols, and all without the need to purchase any software.

The use of the web application to replace desktop software is even more significant for the user when it comes to content that is not merely textual. Not only can web pages be created and edited in the browser without puchasing html editing software, photographs can be uploaded and manipulated online through the browser without the need for expensive desktop image manipulation applications. A video shot on a consumer camcorder can be submitted to a video hosting site, uploaded, encoded, embedded into an HTML page, published, tagged, and syndicated across the web all through the user’s browser.

In Paul Graham’s article on Web 2.0 he breaks down the different roles of the community/user into more specific roles, those being the Professional, the Amateur, and the User (more specifically, the end user). The roles of the Professional and the User were, according to Graham, well understood in Web 1.0, but the Amateur didn’t have a very well defined place. As Graham describes it in ‘What Business Can Learn From Open Source’, the Amateur just loves to work, with no concern for compensation or ownership of that work; in development, the Amateur contributes to open source software whereas the Professional gets paid for their proprietary work.

Graham’s characterisation of the ‘Amateur’ reminds one of If I Ran The Circus by Dr. Suess, where young Morris McGurk says of the staff of his imaginary Circus McGurkus:

My workers love work. They say, ‘Work us! Please work us!We’ll work and we’ll work up so many surprisesYou’d never see half if you had forty eyses!’

And while ‘Web 2.0’ may mean nothing to Tim Berners-Lee, who sees recent innovations as no more than the continued development of the web, to venture capitalists, who like Morris McGurk daydream of tireless workers producing endless content and not demanding a pay cheque for it, it sounds stupendous. And indeed, from YouTube to Flickr to Wikipedia, you’d truly never see half if you had forty eyses.

Tim Berners-Lee is correct. There is nothing from a technical or user point of view in Web 2.0 which does not have its roots in, and is not a natural development from, Web 1.0. The technology associated with the Web 2.0 banner was possible and in some cases readily available before, but the hype surrounding this usage has certainly affected the growth of Web 2.0 internet sites.

The internet (which is more than the web, actually) has always been about sharing between users. In fact, Usenet, a distributed messaging system, has been operating since 1979! Since long before even Web 1.0, Usenet has been hosting discussions, ‘amateur’ journalism, and enabling photo and file sharing. Like the internet, it is a distributed system not owned or controlled by anyone. It is this quality, a lack of central ownership and control, that differentiate services such as Usenet from Web 2.0.

If Web 2.0 means anything at all, its meaning lies in the rationale of venture capital. Web 2.0 represents the return of investment in internet startups. After the dotcom bust (the real end of Web 1.0) those wooing investment dollars needed a new rationale for investing in online ventures. ‘Build it and they will come’, the dominant attitude of the ’90s dotcom boom, along with the delusional ‘new economy’, was no longer attractive after so many online ventures failed. Building infrastructure and financing real capitalisation was no longer what investors were looking for. Capturing value created by others, however, proved to be a more attractive proposition.

Web 2.0 is Internet Investment Boom 2.0. Web 2.0 is a business model, it means private capture of community-created value. No one denies that the techology of sites like YouTube, for instance, is trivial. This is more than evidenced by the large number of identical services such as DailyMotion. The real value of YouTube is not created by the developers of the site, but rather it is created by the people who upload videos to the site. Yet, when YouTube was bought for over a billion dollars worth of Google stock, how much of this stock was acquired by those that made all these videos? Zero. Zilch. Nada. Great deal if you are an owner of a Web 2.0 company.

The value produced by users of Web 2.0 services such as YouTube is captured by capitalist investors. In some cases, the actual content they contribute winds up the property of site owners. Private appropriation of community created value is a betrayal of the promise of sharing technology and free cooperation.

Unlike Web 1.0, where investors often financed expensive capital acquisition, software development and content creation, a Web 2.0 investor mainly needs to finance hype-generation, marketing and buzz. The infrastructure is widely available for cheap, the content is free and cost of the software, at least that much of it that is not also free, is negligible. Basically, by providing some bandwidth and disk space, you are able to become a successful internet site if you can market yourself effectively.

The principal success of a Web 2.0 company comes from its relationship to the community, more specifically, the ability of the company to ‘harness collective intelligence’, as O’Reilly puts it. Web 1.0 companies were too monolithic and unilateral in their approach to content. Success stories of the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 were based on the ability for a company to remain monolithic in its brand of content, or better yet, its outright ownership of that content, while opening up the method of that content’s creation to the community. Yahoo! Created a portal to community content while it remained the centralised location to find that content. EBay allows the community to sell its goods while owning the marketplace for those goods. Amazon, selling the same products as many other sites, succeeded by allowing the community to participate in the ‘flow’ around their products.

Because the capitalists who invest in Web 2.0 startups do not often fund early capitalisation, their behaviour is markedly more parasitic as well. They often arrive late in the game when value creation already has good momentum, swoop in to take ownership and use their financial power to promote the service, often within the context of a hegemonic network of major, well financed partners. This means that companies that are not acquired by venture capital end up cash starved and squeezed out of the club.

In all these cases, the value of the internet site is created not by the paid staff of the company that runs it, but by the users who use it. With all of the emphasis on community created content and sharing, it’s easy to overlook the other side of the Web 2.0 experience: ownership of all this content and ability to monetise its value. To the user, this doesn’t come up that often, it’s only part of the fine print in their MySpace Terms of Service agreement, or it’s the Flickr.com in the url of their photos. It doesn’t usually seem like an issue to the community, it’s a small price to pay for the use of these wonderful applications and for the impressive effect on search engine results when one queries one’s own name. Since most users do not have access to alternative means to produce and publish their own content, they are attracted to sites like MySpace and Flickr.

Meanwhile, the corporate world was pushing a whole different idea of the Information Superhighway, producing monolithic, centralised ‘online services’ like CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL. What separated these from the internet is that these were centralised systems that all users connect directly to, while the internet is a peer-to-peer network, every device with a public internet address can communicate directly to any other device. This is what makes peer-to-peer technology possible, this is also what makes independent internet service providers possible.

It should be added that many open source projects can be cited as the key innovations in the development of Web 2.0: free software like Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Python, etc. are the backbone of Web 2.0, and the web itself. But there is a fundamental flaw with all of these projects in terms of what O’Reilly refers to as the Core Competencies of Web 2.0 Companies, namely control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them – the harnessing of the collective intelligence they attract. Allowing the community to contribute openly and to utilise that contribution within the context of a proprietary system where the proprietor owns the content is a characteristic of a successful Web 2.0 company. Allowing the community to own what it creates, though, is not. Thus, to be successful and create profits for investors, a Web 2.0 company needs to create mechanisms for sharing and collaboration that are centrally controlled. The lack of central control possessed by Usenet and other peer controlled technologies is the fundamental flaw. They only benefit their users, they do not benefit absentee investors, as they are not ‘owned’.

Thus, because Web 2.0 is funded by Capitalism 2006, Usenet is mostly forgotten. While everybody uses Digg and Flickr, and YouTube is worth a billion dollars, PeerCast, an innovative peer-to-peer live video streaming network that has been in existence for several years longer than YouTube, is virtually unknown.

From a technological stand point, distributed and peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies are far more efficient than Web 2.0 systems. Making better use of network resources by using the computers and network connections of users, P2P avoids creating bottlenecks created by centralised systems and allows content to be published with less infrastructure, often no more than a computer and a consumer internet connection. P2P systems do not require the massive data centres of sites such as YouTube. The lack of central infrastructure also comes with a lack of central control, meaning that censorship, often a problem with privately-owned ‘communities’ that frequently bend to private and public pressure groups and enforce limitations on the the kinds of content they allow. Also, the lack of large central cross-referencing databases of user information has a strong advantage in terms of privacy.

From this perspective, it can be said that Web 2.0 is capitalism’s preemptive attack against P2P systems. Despite their many disadvantages in comparison to these, Web 2.0 is more attractive to investors, and thus has more money to fund and promote centralised solutions. The end result of this is that capitalist investment flowed into centralised solutions making them easy and cheap or free for non-technical information producers to adopt. Thus, this ease of access compared to the more technically challenging and expensive undertaking of owning your own means of information production created a ‘landless’ information proletariat ready to provide alienated content-creating labour for the the new info-landlords of Web 2.0.

It is often said that the internet took the corporate world by surprise, coming as it did out of publicly funded university and military research. It was promoted by way of a cottage industry of small independent internet service providers who were able to squeeze a buck out of providing access to the state-built and financed network.

The internet seemed anathema to the capitalist imagination. Web 1.0, the original dotcom boom, was characterised by a rush to own the infrastructure, to consolidate the independent internet service providers. While money was thrown around quite randomly as investors struggled to understand what this medium would actually be used for, the overall mission was largely successful. If you had an internet account in 1996 it was likely provided by some small local company. Ten years later, while some of the smaller companies have survived most people get their internet access from gigantic telecommunications corporations. The mission of Internet Investment Boom 1.0 was to destroy the independent service provider and put large, well financed, corporations back in the driving seat.

The mission of Web 2.0 is to destroy the P2P aspect of the internet. To make you, your computer, and your internet connection dependent on connecting to a centralised service that controls your ability to communicate. Web 2.0 is the ruin of free, peer-to-peer systems and the return of monolithic ‘online services’. A telling detail here is that most home or office internet connections in the ’90s, modem and ISDN connections, were synchronous – equal in their ability to send and receive data. By design, your connection enabled you to be equally a producer and a consumer of information. On the other hand, modern DSL and cable-modem connections are asynchronous, allowing you to download information quickly, but upload slowly. Not to mention the fact that many user agreements for internet service forbid you to run servers on your consumer circuit, and may cut off your service if you do.

Capitalism, rooted in the idea of earning income by way of idle share ownership, requires centralised control, without which peer producers have no reason to share their income with outside shareholders. Capitalism, therefore, is incompatible with free P2P networks, and thus, so long as the financing of internet development comes from private shareholders looking to capture value by owning internet resources, the network will only become more restricted and centralised.

It should be noted that even in the case of commons-based peer production, so long as the commons and membership in the peer group is limited, and inputs such as food for the producers and the computers that they use are acquired from outside the commons-based peer group, then the peer producers themselves may be complicit in the exploitative capturing of this labour value. Thus in order to really address the unjust capture of alienated labour value, access to the commons and membership in the peer group must be extended as far as possible toward the inclusion of a total system of goods and services. Only when all productive goods are available from commons-based producers can all producers retain the value of the product of their labour.

And while the information commons may have the possibility of playing a role in moving society toward more inclusive modes of production, any real hope for a genuine, community enriching, next generation of internet-based services is not rooted in creating privately owned, centralised resources, but rather in creating cooperative, P2P and commons-based systems, owned by everybody and nobody. Although small and obscure by today’s standards, with it’s focus on peer-to-peer applications such as Usenet and email, the early internet was very much a common, shared resource. Along with the commercialisation of the internet and the emergence of capitalist financing comes the enclosure of this information commons, translating public wealth into private profit. Thus Web 2.0 is not to be thought of as a second-generation of either the technical or social development of the internet, but rather as the second wave of capitalist enclosure of the Information Commons.

Virtually all of the most used internet resources could be replaced by P2P alternatives. Google could be replaced by a P2P search system, where every browser and every webserver were active nodes in the search process; Flickr and YouTube could also be replaced by PeerCast and eDonkey type applications, which allow users to use their own computers and internet connections to collaboratively share their pictures and videos. However, developing internet resources requires the application of wealth, and so long as the source of this wealth is finance capital, the great peer-to-peer potential of the internet will remain unrealised.

Dmytri Kleiner is an anarchist hacker and a co-founder of Telekommunisten, a worker-owned technology company specialising in telephone systems. Dmytri is a USSR-born Canadian, currently living in Berlin with his wife Franziska and his daughter Henriette.

Brian Wyrick is an artist, film maker and web developer working in Berlin and Chicago. He also co-founded Group 312 Films, a Chicago-based film group, and posts updates regarding his projects and adventures at http://www.pseudoscope.com .