http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/zkp/spew.txt SPEW excess and moderation on the networks Matthew Fuller I have a secret to let you into. The internet was predicted by the Berlin Dada group in a 1918 manifesto. Check this out: "The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday's crash. The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, who, with bleeding hands and hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time."1 They made one mistake however. Rather than come to resolution in the dismally heroic figure of the plasma-guzzling blister- fingered artist, the nets switch the focus to actually embodying and inducing that frenzied cataract of life - as it sucks in limbs, art and consciousness and resolves them as a rhizomatic spew of shattered intelligence. Rather then, than present a sociological disquisition on the culture of the networks it's best to treat this text as the transcripts of a sequences of road rages on the information super highway. Sequence One: A second in the life of the internet. Thousands of people across the globe are indulging in furious bouts of lobotomised libidinal typing. Islamic astrologers, office bombers and terrorist wannabes announce their glorious intentions to the world; fuckers of vacuum cleaners are exchanging tips on new models; the private security firm Group Four are checking up on UK environmental activists via their very own GreenNet account; statistics flagellants are giving it some; and, say this was a few weeks before US Intervention in Haiti, according to Time magazine, we could see amongst the leech fanciers and bridge players whiling away the idle hours, CIA PsyOps teams taking part in the virtual community by sending, "ominous e-mail messages to some members of Haiti's oligarchy who had personal computers."2 I certainly don't want to deny the copywriting skills of the state's crack public relations squads a chance to flower on the Internet. But, I do think it means that we can pretty much ditch the idea of the Virtual Community. Rather than particularly wishing to dwell on notions of community as the pre-eminent model of a networked socius I want to look at wider dynamics of information movement and the intersection of what is in the abstract an open system, with manners of speech, cultural poise and economics that mitigate against it being such. It might even be possible that the totalising metaphor of the 'community' and the false warmth from its hearth both masks a wider and more radical conflagration and fails in it's supposed task of providing people with the tools to negotiate the increasing subsumption of the networks with the imaginary, and the attenuating dynamics, of the market The internet constitutes a bifurcation in information dynamics. As an event it is exemplarily complex and cannot be reduced to the sum of the factors that make it possible. A politics of the networks therefore, will of necessity be just as seething with what George Bataille called, 'those linked series of deceptions, exploitations and manias that give a temporal order to the apparent unreason of history'3 On with the road rage. money as money as information as money as culture as money as money At the time of the Enclosures in Britain when common lands where expropriated by a newly emerging type of elite in order to develop what would become agribusiness and the cash crop economy, one of the slogans that could be heard in the many riots, acts of sabotage and demonstrations that occurred in opposition to this process was, "the thief is hanged who steals the goose from the common, but not he who steals the common from the goose". Whilst the enclosures initiated the basic device of 'original accumulation'4 and provided a population dislocated from any source of economic self-production they have not been a once and for all process. The restructuring forced since the seventies by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund result in massive scale action replays of this eternally returning technique. The internet at present is in some ways similar to the stage which the mobile phone economy was at some years ago. When it was exploding as a retail opportunity not much thought was, for instance, given to the possibility of criminals cashing in. Now that the economy is beginning to 'mature' features such as hardware and signal security, variations in tariffs, and so on are used both as specific inducements to the consumer, and as a way of maintaining territory and consolidating ground by the various competing or allied companies. The loopholes they wipe out are, not suprisingly, often the kind of places where the most interesting thing happen. If, as Bruce Sterling notes, in talking about Prague, it's a common dream for skilled people to be able to do 'Western work at a western salary from a rent fixed'5 east European domicile it's also already the case that low-paid women in South London for instance are being hooked up to telephones to provide an array of grunts, whispers and saucy chatter to callers from the US. The internet might well be seen as another way of farming out this kind of labour to areas with cheaper more pliable workforces rather than bringing in better wages. Even skilled work such as, "Software research and design is now being done by local computer specialists in India, Russia and Poland."6 Given the general movement of economies it's unlikely that we'll see the internet - of necessity - instigating a kinder, gentler kind of money for people at the bottom of the fiscal gravity well. The basic problem with actual existing, or any postulated idealisations of markets, and monetary systems in general, is that they tend to hook up all activity as the motor to drive profit. Any remaining 'non-productive areas of energy expenditure'7 are liable to annexation and subordination to the discipline of 'doing something useful'. At the same time, money remains dependent on other types of energy distribution that are often beyond it, and which at other times it silently parasites. From the production of new babies to the rest of the vast majority of 'womens' work' - which is hardly even graced with a name; and from free, usually criminalised, raves to, again usually criminalised graffiti writing, the dynamics of money are often highly peripheral to - but wholly dependent on - a multitude of these almost invisible subsidies. Both the tactics of everyday life and the conscious refusal of the mass consensual hallucination that is money mean that reducing anything to pure utility can only ever be a botch-job. Nevertheless, as for instance the financial markets' feeding frenzy over the floatation of Netscape indicates, the techniques that turn urban working class areas into mazes of churches and off-licences, are currently being stripped down and retooled for the potential enclosure of the nets. The world of virtual real estate however is infinitely expandable. The menus stretch for miles. What is excluded from these hysterically clean operations no longer matters. Ideas become luxury goods. Cybersex is realised: as a rationed, straight down the line monitored service of the facilitative delivery of health club sensualism. Non-productive areas of energy expenditure are expunged, marginalised or conversely, used as attractive bait And, what is most effective about the rhythm of enclosure, the making productive of the internet, is that it just makes things punishingly dull. Proprietary culture remakes cyberspace in its own image as a 'non-place'8, filled with efficient productive function after efficient productive function. Consider this chirpy claim from Peter Cochrane, head of advanced applications and technologies at British Telecommunications laboratories: "My mission statement is to boldly go and be first technologically, managerially and operationally. I have instituted electronic working throughout my department, and I now communicate in a semimathematical form with my people. My e- mail replies might go something like 'A=OK, Go. P' or 'B+C=No, don't think it's a good idea, let's talk. P' or 'D=Wow, I agree. P".9 Whilst this might originally come on like the blissful gibberish of the sainted or the mad - people who speak in binhex - Cochrane's language is that of the damaged corporate speedfreak: transit lounge semaphore; ideograms so specific that they refer only to the act of misapprehending them; jargon as munitions designed to have a specific and instrumental cretinising effect on the brain. Not waving but drowning. Compare this to the exuberance of inventive typographical, syntactical and phonetic styling found in many BBSs... It is the non-speech of featureless New Towns, as vacant as the arbitrarily designated 'meeting points' that you find in larger train stations. It is what passes for conversation in the tract housing for the virtual community, in the kennels of Nicholas Negroponte's augmented yuppies. Capitalist Stakhanovite. However, money too senses the promise of delirium, the promise of excess as a mechanism for reinstating 'the order of things'10 Consider this promo blurb for a forthcoming on-line shopping service laid out like a magical palace: "Join us on a voyage of discovery. _Conjuring the splendour of ages past and incorporating the technological wizardry of tomorrow's world to create a shopping destination without peer. Our journey is well advanced and has led to new worlds of shopping which inspire desires... ((In Casual Collections, discover everything for your weekend wardrobe. In Spirit, experience the leading edge of club and street fashion. In Kids' Universe, ingenuous dreams take shape.)) Chance upon exclusive features such as Home Office, Men's Designer Room, Garden and Terrace, Ladies' Outerwear, a truly unrivalled Ladies' Shoe Department as well as the first phase of Furniture World, with many more to follow. By using our up to the minute data-tracking services we aim to exceed your expectations of a truly personalised service. By knowing more about you, our merchandise and the services which we offer we are able to provide you with friendly, informal help and advice - making shopping with us always enjoyable, enlightening and unique. Log-on now and experience a complete shopping environment on a voyage of change, of innovation and exclusivity. It is a journey which as a Gold Account Member you will find particularly rewarding. You will be suprised. You will be inspired_"11 statistical analysis of zombie migration through the internet Relentlessly inspiring, the matrix of insipid desire demands you to Be Yourself, give good data-set, be rewarded_ and in the process poses a fundamental problem to the dizzied shopper. "How can man find himself - or regain himself - seeing that the action to which the search commits him in one way or another is precisely what estranges him from himself?"12 Nevertheless, for culture as text fans the internet is still top thesis fodder. Providing a way out of the problem posed by the struggle for existence at the forefront of contemporary elegance, the World Wide Web has attracted hordes of the kind of people who live for the opportunity to make your leaving a message on their answering machine a really satisfying Quality Experience. Free Speech for the Dumb results in a putrescent cornucopia of niche hegemonies and inbreed monomanias.Here, the economy of accumulation becomes feverishly voluntaristic. Added value downgrades into clique maintenance. Enter the world of cosy mailing lists and on-line conferences whose existence seems to be largely that of manufacturing an ethnographer's fantasy of indigenous life: a closed world 'about which everything there is to now about is already known' whose group narratives are constantly reaffirmed with knee-jerk exactitude from participants all round the world. I remember joining one mailing list on a subject about which I was particularly excited and being amazed at how soon I was effectively rendered speechless by the glib back-slapping of the largely US audience of liberal academics. And here I use the word audience advisedly, for the purpose of people coming together as the list, was it seemed, neither for the purposes of interpretation or of developing knowledge but of the shared recognition of an already understood and common mythology. Predictably enough, the object of contemplation for this beta- blocked agora was something that lividly cried out for colonisation because of the sheer resistant challenge it presents to the discourse of dickwits. Where do you want to go today? As a variation on this tendency I think we can also look forward to the happy day when certain internet sites become, in effect, venerable institutions. Usually by default, or out of sheer bloody minded longevity. Additionally we can expect to see historic revival zones on the net recreating and restoring the precious collective heritage of the Virtual Community. Wait for an entire and scrupulously accurate reproduction of Arpanet, endless reruns of the first few weeks of Minitel Rose, the once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience being a segment of the Robert Morris worm. Historical moments - where one is immersed and spat out like a pin-ball - belched from one past into another. The market, with its hypertrophied imaginary of efficiency and productivity, is not alone in the stupidisation of the nets. no header Throughout this text I have been ripping off tracks from George Bataille's theories of a general economy: dynamics of energy circulation in which the movement and expenditure of wealth are brought to the fore. Whilst I have described two particular tendencies that are closing down the fecundity and vitality of the nets there will not come a point when we are "left with only critique as a weapon".13 As Bataille points out, "domination is never total, and in a deep sense it is only a comedy: It never deceives more than partly, while in the propitious darkness a new truth turns stormy."14 In other words; we need to carry on being funky, stupid, intruging and generous. The electronic world is by no means fully established, and itself induces this stormy fluidity through invention. It is the sheer prodigality of the nets which autoproduces itself as a dehegemonising mechanism if nothing else. Within the context of a ravenously globalising system, in which information is both prime currency and prime commodity, the nets as a dynamic in which information is consumated, becomes useless, and dissipates are extremely seductive and threatening in a way that reiterates the ceaseless prodigality of the sun. The Superabundance of the nets provokes consumation or dissipation - inducing the withdrawal of energy from the discipline of productive or 'meaningful' consumption. Word bombs explode, ripple down your spine, across the screen and down the wires into a labile pandaemonium. Local intelligence is amplified into a global exuberance of energy. "In the Universe as a whole, energy is available without limit, but on the human scale which is ours, we are lead to take into account the quantity of energy we have at our disposal"15 The nets are a way of at the same time expanding this human scale to an unknowable level of amplification, and simultaneously invading the human scale with something that drastically reconfigures it into a new plane of consistency. Down come the borders. On the nets, being - culture - is grasped in the ambiguity of being accomplished, something modified by transformations resulting from successive influences. In an era of state I.D. cards, DNA databases, and increasing demands to Be Yourself and behave, multiple identities become an absolute necessity - if only for avoiding paying taxes. As has been widely noted, the nets provide a fertile playground for disruptive experiment, getting out of the sadistic loop of control. Things are flipping out of the order of things. What emerges though, as this fucked up potlach of libidinal typing, is not some salmon leap out of our skins into a sublime, transcendental realm of white formica and global communion but something far messier and more interesting, whose sticky contents horrify, bore, and seduce us. This is the Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds as a multitude of ridiculous, drastically contaminated apostates spewing monsters from their modems. © Matthew Fuller 1995 1Berlin Dada Manifesto 1918, cited in Hans Richter, dada, art and anti-art, trans. David Britt, Thames and Hudson, London, 1978 2 Mark Thompson, Plotting a War Game, Time International, Vol. 146, No. 9, August 21, 1995 3 George Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume One, Trans. Robert Hurley, Zone Books, New York 1991, page 73 4 Midnight Notes Collective, Introduction to the New Enclosures, Midnight Notes 10, Autumn 1990 5 Bruce Sterling, Triumph of the Plastic People, Wired 3.01, January 1995 6 Michael Lind, To Have and to Have Not, Harper's Magazine, June 1995 7 George Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume One, Trans. Robert Hurley, Zone Books, New York 1991 8 Marc Aug , Non-places, introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, trans. John Howe, Verso, London, 1995 9 Peter Cochrane in 'All Wired Up and Raring to Go', New Scientist No. 1989, 5th August 1995 10 George Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume One, Trans. Robert Hurley, Zone Books, New York 1991 11 Adapted from Selfridges brochure, autumn 1995 12 George Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume One, Trans. Robert Hurley, Zone Books, New York 1991 p 131 13 Critical Art Ensemble, Nomadic Power and Cultural Resistance, in the Electronic Disturbance, Semiotext(e) / Autonomedia, New York 1994 14 George Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume One, Trans. Robert Hurley, Zone Books, New York 1991 p 133 15 George Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume Two, Trans. Robert Hurley, Zone Books, New York 1993, p. 187 --- # 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