tb on Thu, 8 May 1997 14:53:01 +0200 (MET DST) |
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<nettime> poli/para2 |
2. Tectonic Technology The room is dark. Fingers reach for the switch. Pupils redilate and adjust to the luminescence. The phone trills. Fingers arrest the receiver. The larynx oscillates with the vocal transmissions of thought responding to the coppery, and increasingly glass, echo. The above responses are so embedded that examples unconstrained by the presence of stimulus, response, and technology are difficult to furnish; phone and electric grids do not even seem to be connected to the proliferation of the computer. These devices have survived, unlike the marginal, esoteric, and forgotten communication accoutrements of the past--that with only a minor flutter could have been as prolific as the estimated 77 million PCs currently in use (Sassen, 96)--recently compiled into a list of dead media by the prescient science fiction writer Bruce Sterling. Media fossils, curled and mineralized, broken and forgotten, are sequestered within the list's lengthy tribute to civilizations' inventions: culminating in a lattice of plastics that refuses to decay in the tectonic movement of the planet's cataclysmic exoskeleton. >From this strata of artefacts, the most radical change to the phone's design has been its development as a both a fax and a mobile device. But telematics has experienced radical changes in its technological capacity to transmit data, buried in the ground, wandering the surface, suspended in the sky. The shape of this network defies dimensions, decorated with whirling data reservoirs, the concatenated abstraction of the very artefacts' existence. The coupling of the phone network's infrastructure with the processing power of computers, whereby the phone is subsumed and appropriated by the computer, has only enhanced the dominance of data glyphs and their representation. Though the bounty of transmission merely codes for ASCII character sets, the graphics of the net's innumerable pages attempt to replace the bodily details of personal conversation. Striving to create a data taxonomy might just succeed in classifying the gesture, emphasis, tone, and voice lacking from data networks. However, lurking behind the applications of HTML and Java, archaic telnet continues to provide connections free of the limits of mail programs and graphic browsers, though requiring UNIX protocol for smooth operation. Reliable telnet continues to supply corporations and governments with paranoia, as the archetypal hacker lurks within its mode of infiltrating data nodes. Once the technological protocol of new technologies has been mastered, their use is accented by the ergonomics of design: they are expected to reflect a proud space in the private domain, if not radiate with the mellifluousness of their power. Manufacturers hope that such an appropriately useful and resilient technology will sink into the realm of popular consciousness to be execrated and re-animated time and time again. Or so at least, runs the conception of the net among its hardware promoters eager to convince potential consumers of the merits and relevance of video, sound, text, camera, and prosthetic gadgetry essential for the full enjoyment of the treasure trove of networked media: equivalent to and no more complex than a CD-player or a television, thus its popularity. And therefore, inherently good, simple, efficient, irresistible, and consumable. However, this simplification signals ignorance if not an absolute dictation of the net's properties, as if the net were a game show prize case enhanced by CFC-cleaned image and text and smiled over by pearly-white and dictatorial matron as conceived by puerile macho. Paranoia has become pronoia, interceding and arresting the grime of the world before it can ever accumulate. The notion of menstruation has been scrubbed from the net's thighs as well as her lust-endowed audience, woman and man alike, captured by the spell of bodily perfection rather than the fluids of sexual intercourse. According to this clean vision, anything should be censored if not prosecuted that does not resemble the sentimentally restored and re-animated glory days of 1950s America where all children, and conceivably even adults, knew nothing of the delicate pleasures of perversity. Indeed, as pointed out earlier, this brief decade functioned as the fulcrum of the century, assembling media, technology, and resultant capitalist ideology into an irrevocable, unbetrayable entity only allowing access for those pure in mind and blood. This sterile vision inherently damages the qualities of the net known to its more opportunistic users: it essentially erases the net's fertile domains of contact, dissent, otherness, sabotage, and solidarity to a position of irrelevancy. Concentrated into one statement, the net is characterized by its potential for misrepresentation, though this misrepresentation maintains its essence as the projections of the unrestrained alterego as account identities are shrouded in abbreviation. From this reference point, the net crystallizes repressed entities and personalities, though indulging Freud's theories, perhaps predetermined by the candid films of his frolicking in his garden reliant on the technology of his monocle and pipe, summons up a world of guilt that is equally as inappropriate for the net as censors' claims to cultural authority. The compression of time and space due to the efficiency, immediacy, instantaneity and universality of the net suggests a change in the perception of its inhabitants whereby any object not assuming these characteristics is discarded. However, the patterns of physical behavior as this virtual space is territorialized, constructed, consolidated, and commodified are analogous to changes in the physical world due to our species' exponential capacity (and thus war is far more inevitable than peace) to breed not only individuals but also technological objects endowed with the anatomy of the neuter. But by projecting sexuality on its artifacts, the exquisite corpse can be re-animated (Ballard, 90). Indeed, concentrated kernels of chaos of a variety of natures transgress and distil on the net. This chaos seed even collectivizes under correct conditions, seemingly a suspension, a lattice, a lifeline to pass through the gaps, gorges, fissures of electronic space to the refuges of temporary autonomous zones (Bey, 84). These zones of autonomy, shrouded in digital space under domes of data and protocol, can neither be derived nor integrated, their convex and concave surfaces congealing, distorting, vanishing, folding. They are neither matter nor energy, but rather a plasma of massless presence, even existing as a mere vector, the abstraction of movement. In passing through this precarious realm from one zone to another, pockets and pits well up to offer a spontaneous distortion if not concentration of the net's potential as a reservoir of potentially enlightening data, organic rhizomatic networks, nurtured by careful custodianship, or equally reckless code, and suddenly revealed from the smoke and mirrors of the network. (Deleuze and Guattari, 87). If the net is compounded into the essential and rudimentary features of the anthropogenic domain, i.e., the automatic technologies of the past, then higher consciousness becomes no more than an indecypherable delusion. Or more reverentially in terms of the analytical verse of Marshall McLuhan: the extensions of humankind, the prostheses of the mind, the adjustment of the sensual registers to an aesthetic fabricated to satisfy and provide fluidless orgasms. And continuing with the panegyric, the simple anatomic function provided to the cerebellum by the brain's moisturizing exodermis is adjusted _ad infinitum_ by the brain's attempt to fashion a completely dehumanizing comfort for its host: the automatic body beyond the coverings of the flesh. If the body has been so completely separated from the mind within this realm, then the cyborg may indeed be among us, a creature of mythical distinction, capable of cheating death with transfer into another vessel--chemical, mechanical, spiritual, or digital--and thus being, behaving, existing, changing: an eternal essence that has manifested itself through culture from its origins crouched over a percussive antler and cores of gypsum. In retrospect, this lineage that wears the mask of normality in actuality maintains the stilted mannerisms of the automaton and must be examined and blasphemed. (Morse, 94). Analogously, crouching over the keyboard in search of the spark's of data that allow for essential mental heat and oriented to the filtering of figures, languages, texts, and images collected into archives of personal Bourdieu-ian network capital, the fingers have been made to resemble catheters, an eye poised on each fingertip and registering the press of correct and incorrect keys. The mind enters the screen, glazed onto the surface. Humankind's distilled essence is supposed to function here, the utopia and elevation of enlightenment beyond the gravitational restrictions of the planet, re-censused as a non- existent space with no physical, matter-endowed population. As a consequence manual labor has been reduced to a tiny domain of movement, the few square centimeters of the input device whether sewing rolls of textile or leaves of data. And the provisions of the neo-mediaeval service industry, celebrated by states and corporations alike as the remedy to unemployment, demands the same dexterity to ring up the next purchase at the cash register. Without consequence, the tidiness of the economic discipline, in refining its definitions, bundles and considers this shift the division of labor, whereby that labor is located in the unindustrialized, undeveloped, and exploited conditions of the third world, tantamount to the fourth world (Carnoy, 93) Not surprisingly, the manifestations of this fourth world have leaked into the industrialized markets and their capitols only to be exacerbated by dogma. Questions automatically arise about the repercussions of such a confinement of movement, especially when considered in light of the mind's adaption to the appalling, whereby all channels of Epicurean perversity are available at personal discretion. Does this have an effect on our ability to caress our raunchy objects of tranvesticism, hermaphrodism, or homosexuality? Yes, the private moments of gushing detail over sexual organs and flesh now has been replaced by the archetype of work, creating a post sexual body. But is the body exhausted or excited by the contact? If left to its unrestrained capacity, then there is no guarantee of orgasm from technology and its fleshy screened adornment. Under the direction of the command economies of the transnational corporations maintains its advantage by turning to the cerebral, having practiced the circumcision, emasculation, vasectomy and hysterectomy of our minds, the loci of sexual sensation reigned in by castrated minds. Such desiccating formulae openly stress the suppression of euphoria: of partaking in the liquidity of the body, its infections and leakages, or suturing together a new sex with the digital stitches of the network. The body and its respective gender, almost diffuse, carefully taken into suspension by the facelessness and anonymity of the net. The utopia in no way resembles the promise of silicon mind interfaces and the inflated satisfaction of amble bosom and porno-scale cock, but rather it is still being adapted, rationalized, and adopted in a brutish aesthetic. Matching its abundance is its alienness, the medium's static, plastic platform irregularly hewn while the images and text derived from its mechanisms reflect this discomfort and alienness. Nonetheless, network technology seems to be the infallible miracle of the moment, offering salvation appropriated from religious didacticism to approve its own acts with biblical certitude. More appropriately in context of two of the century's most vociferous and ideological dictators, Stalin and Hitler, the tyrant's resemblance to the clown is unnerving, a reminder that the fascism of the past still exists, mutated into the distraction of our struggle, but invisible and outweighed by considerations of survival (F. Morton, 89). However, blasphemous data fools still have the power to transgress power relationships. Enlightened to this reality, troops of digital dandies and strumpets wait for the manifestation of the panoptic messiah, fishing among the data reservoir in the hopes of pulling an artefact of her/his existence from the cherished and holy water. They react to the finest pulse and twitch and thus collect the travesties of humanity. However, when a carcigenous fish or messiah is really reeled in from the reservoir of data, the game continues with the actors still astutely aware of their mischievousness. With the tumor biopsied and among the scales in the kitchen sink, the gaping head--resembling their own straining of data stored for the famine in fatty syqests--floats in a steaming bowl to the applause of the audience and to the winks of the performers. In contrast to the actual input device, the net excites its correspondents into a state of august ferociousness, the hostility and territorialism of instinctual essences. Emergent from the great drama and fantasy of virtual presence, divorced of the body and encouraged by its absence, vacarious realms populated by clans of proponents--raw, sore, festering capitalists, infant seducers, anxious brides, foul ideologists, shady miscegationists, ethnic cleansers, rampant child predators, fascistic emotionalists, disco shamans, starchy clerks, nuclear families, virile polygamists--struggle for habitats that match their profiles. In short, the whole gamut of special interests, and certainly commidifiable interests, dedicates itself to the pursuit of diversion. Nonetheless, the escapism is rapidly being tainted and must reconciliate itself with the fact the net is not Mecca in any shape or form. --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@icf.de