Re: <nettime> Re: NOTHING WORSE

["Saul Albert" <saul.albert@virgin.net>]

I'm not sure that Lacan is so important here. Getting back to <NOTHING
WORSE>, I don't think the problem is rooted in the language to mediascape to
information soup formula. Surely the problem is as Chomsky puts it, who
the media serves. Isolation, silence, need, loneliness all easily
engineered when you're staring through a screen manufactured by, driven by,
sold by, fetishised by corporate interests whose aims are quite blatantly to
control the "communications industry". That (self applied) title alone
reveals the imperatives: to control human communications.

No wonder poor old Tom Sherman feels lonely:

"One morning I was destroyed by the sound of silence.  For all practical
purposes, my in-box was empty.  I sat motionless in front of my screen."

My immediate response was to e-mail him quick with my phone number....tom!
don't worry mate, you're brill, your web site rocks... I thought I'd better
go and have a look at allquiet.org to see what his wonderful
information was...

As it turns out it starts with this fiendishly unpleasant javascript
butchery of a multi-coloured fade that takes over your system for at least 2
minutes and (in my case at least) results in a crash.

So, I shouldn't wonder he lacks for hits. I would be lonely too if I opened
the door to my guests and pied them in the face or lit sparklers and waved
them in front of their eyes or something,  (not to mention cause their
computer to crash and lose a couple of hours work *aaaaaaahhhhh*.)

So, I'd say the symbolic_order, while being very interesting, only creates a
stoppage, a horrible blank hiccup in experience where human communication
seems to fade away into background fuzz, when it comes shrink-wrapped in
your *free* software bundle along with your new computer.

Buy a laptop and take your website to the pub with you, just get rid of that
multi-coloured fade or you'll be cleaning puke out of the keyboard.

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