http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/zkp/gopaper.txt Introduction go paper by Geert Lovink + Pit Schultz "A spade is a spade is a spade." Luther Blisset Let's call it 'Theorie Direkt'. After a period of circuitous postmodern patchworks and their tendency to drains ones energy whille circulating through academic networks, the time has now come for poltical directness. The rhizome is no longer a goal of textual liberation, it is the posthuman condition of loosing oneself in hyperspace. He hi-speed of the electric word leads to a self-referential arbitrariness in search of an outside bind, originating from the will to break out of the prison of Being Digital and becoming-bastard. Only the virtual position with its disembodied external observer seems to be possible, but at the same time we feel the urgent for the production of a collective subjectivity from within the nets in order to counter their oppressive and alienating effects. For many of us 1995 was the Short Summer of the Net. While surfing the hype throughout Europe from the one symposium to the next festival, we knew that the net backlash was just around the corner. The rise of the virtual class brought both harsh commercialism and a rigid exclusion of critical elements in its wake. Something the unwired establishment supported to the tilt. The role of the old media was paradoxical. They pushed exageration to the point of a strategic takeover. Despite that fact that universal access to the nets has hardly been realized, we have already landed in the age of disappointments, cynicism and decadence for the few. Internet's Golden Age is over, before it even began. was born out of the immediatist 'Medien ZK' gatherings, a series of open, informal, international meetings centered around 'netculture and its discontents' in Spessart, Venice, Budapest and now Amsterdam. Herein, we discussed telecom policies, multiple personalities, the city metaphor, neo- vitalists, Californian Ideologies, Wired critique, tribalism in the net and elsewhere, the tragic end of net.art, the comeback of the Enemy (Telekom, Scientology, Netscape) and rumours about wandering websites. In between the meetings the mailinglist was used to select and distribute the articles which you can find here in print, the 'ZK Proceedings 95'. The transition from e-mail to essay was fairly effortless, and so we have here this mixed bag of micro-pamphlets, action protocols, almost-manifestoes, dirty excerpts, quick transcriptions, pirated interviews, scanned philosophies and last but not least, 'pure criticism'. The political claims which are not yet fit to print will find a niche in the forthcoming editions. Each text can be seen as under construction and contains enough bugs and unfinished features, so that there will always be a way to continue the project. "We are only in it for the content and we like it". Each and every participant of is a contributor-editor, following a potlatch information economy of ring exchange. Copyright is not the most urgent issue here, but the build-up of trust between the subscribers. This bond is based on the utopics of face to face contacts and mutual friendship. The quality of the texts is a product of social filtering of external material and it is editing. The goal is a non-hierarchical selection which does not end in entropic noise, but results in a self-organizing meta- stability. operates as a semi-closed mailing-list based on the principle of responsible data, and the right to trash ones another's mbox. is not an information theatre. It does not shirk the thorny issue of translation. At theroy.com every book advertises itself by its animated autors, woeing for your attention. In the current content business there is only one language, that of the market. speaks many tongues, risking that not every text won't be understand. Paramount is the goal to preserve the original contexts. This infracultural exchange should lead to a heterogenous and multi-vocal textuality which resists the editorial meta-format in favor of territorial intensity and the opportunities offered through randamness and bastardisation. Amsterdam, 15 Jan 1995 --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de