<nettime> THE COST OF KILLER APPS

[Tom Sherman <twsherma@mailbox.syr.edu>]

THE COST OF KILLER APPS+

Everybody's killer app is still, oddly enough, e-mail...  People are
hunting and pecking in record numbers, writing and speaking in the
language-of-the-gap.  English is the filler in-between cultural
differences and diversity.  Even the machines speak English.  Machine
English is in its own way a kind of valley speak, as even the machine
voices lift the end of their phrases, making statements that sound like
questions, telegraphing that they are not through talking yet, they have
more to say...  As with all in-between languages, there is a radical,
breathless evacuation of meaning.  Nobody knows what the words mean
anymore.  We think we do, but we don't, really...  Today's English is
often completely empty.

English is the linguistic commons, like the sea, or a tract of land
jointly owned by neighbouring parties, nobody really owns it, and thus
nobody cares for it or protects it.  Think about it, the seas, the oceans,
are the wet empty space between continents.  When speaking the language of
the gap, of the commons, whether it is English, or video pouring from a
digital spigot, or the rigid, universal design protocolity of the web,
there has to be serious compromises.  Anyone who isn't interested in
compromising and speaks up in an anomalous, gritty, jagged manner, is seen
as an anarchist, as the incomprehensible and thus very scary enemy (this
is also the way creativity is viewed in conservative, traditional minds).  
Hacktivism is therefore seen as a societal ill, a form of insanity.

It's the Monoculture with a capital M versus cultural diversity, the
social descriptor for biodiversity.  These media of the commons, the
ubiquitous in-between stuff...  It's suffocating really.  [Is it just me?  
Didn't there used to be more noise?]  The all-pervasive English and
ubiquitous video and endlessly uniform web design, they are oh-so-common
and virtually free for everyone to invest in.  Except with digital telecom
you have to be able to afford access, and you are best served by driving a
big fast machine, a G4, or G5 or G6, whatever is faster and cheaper,
cheaper per memory unit, and demands for speed and scale and range
increasingly dictate more and more overall expense...faster and cheaper,
except when there are elaborate architectures of thought to convey...when
the ideas exchanged are more and more complex and elaborate in
scale...ideas best conveyed in a multi-dimensional display...

To remain optimistic, we must never underestimate the human imagination,
even though we seem to be at the end of our tethers as fewer and fewer
people seem to be able to imagine anything other than the models or
templates for creativity and invention they have been provided with or
force-fed, say by Disney or Universal or whomever.  Industrially produced
architectures of thought generate imaginative uniformity.  Universal
architectures of thought are generated by universally linked or shared
minds.  Common architectures of thought are valuable in that they create
order and allow coherent, complex thoughts to be communicated, transported
from like-mind to like-mind.  Stereotypes, after all, are useful knowledge
structures.  Do you know what I mean?


Tom Sherman


-------

+Excerpts of this text will be used in upcoming performance works by Nerve
Theory, the collaborative identity of Bernhard Loibner and Tom Sherman.  
For more information on Nerve Theory, visit the All.Quiet website:  
http://www.allquiet.org/


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