network culture

Where is alt.culture today? Author Warren Ellis concludes that our curatorial culture is just plain exhausted… This strikes me as true to a large degree, although I wonder if the best work isn't taking place off-line or in secret? Much as I suggest that AUDC is Internet-based, we don't blog about our working habits in public (why?). Rather, we talk to each other relentlessly on the phone and communicate via e-mail. Hopefully some of you will think that Blue Monday is an original and creative work, but yes, there seems to be some degree of exhaustion out there now.

On my way to Limerick, I've paused for a minute to read the new issue of the Economist which carries an article on privacy that is, well, less terrifying (although it should be) than symptomatic of Network Culture. It seems hard to believe that only a couple of decades ago, privacy was still important in culture and that giving up all one's intimate life details to overseers was the stuff of dystopian nightmares like 1984. What is incredible isn't that such monitoring is so prevalent, it's that under Network Culture we don't seem to care.

One aspect of network culture that I haven't remarked enough on is the growing preponderance of things demanding that we interact with them as if they're human. Over the last few days I've been spending an infuriating amount of time with Verizon (I have fiber-to-the-home but my Verizon-owned copper wire cables fell outside…apparently there is no way to convince Verizon to come out to fix these…more later if I don't get them fixed in the next-go-around) and their strangely, slightly sassy voice menu system.
Pigeons that blog? Forget it. We're already dealing with automata with a distinct attitude. Robert Kuttner, at the Boston Globe, reports.

Network Culture is predictated on an affluent society, but wealth is increasingly relative. As the New York Times reports, earnings that would once have been considered upper class now seem second-rate, especially if one lives in an area like Silicon Valley. The Times also has a story on Robert H. Frank's Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class. Extreme consumption by the super-rich drives us to try to buy larger houses, better toys, and bigger, more powerful cars even as the average family income has stayed stable since the 1970s.

Thus America becomes the very opposite of the society that Max Weber observed in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (not that the Irish are much different these days, as Chaos at the Crossroads suggests…and the same goes for many other countries) and we work more and save less than ever before.

A "correction" as the Fed likes to call it, or a crash of some sort, seems in the cards, both economically and ecologically. But what other consequences does this have for Network Culture? Is this the last burst of material desire prior to the full dominance of the immaterial? Or is the latter just a superstructure, unavoidably dependent on the former (this might be the argument of the Netlab's research into logistics, for example)?

One of the basic principles of Network Culture is that fiction is being replaced by reality. Recently I thoroughly enjoyed reading (albeit a couple of years late), William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and am on the list at my local bookstore to get Spook Country when it comes into the store on Monday.

In this interview at Amazon, Gibson reflects on why, in these two novels, he has abandoned writing science fiction set in the far future:

Well, I thought that writing about the world today as I perceive it would probably be more challenging, in the real sense of science fiction, than continuing just to make things up. And I found that to absolutely be the case. If I'm going to write fiction set in an imaginary future now, I'm going to need a yardstick that gives me some accurate sense of how weird things are now. 'Cause I'm going to have to go beyond that. And I think definitely over the course of these last two books--I don't think I'm done yet--I've been getting a yardstick together. But I don't know if I'll be able to do it again. I don't know if I'll be able to make up an imaginary future in the same way. In the '80s and '90s, as strange as it may seem to say this, we had such luxury of stability. Things weren't changing quite so quickly in the '80s and '90s. And when things are changing too quickly, as one of the characters in Pattern Recognition says, you don't have any place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future.

I found the link to the interview via Nicolas Nova's great blog Pasta & Vinegar where Nicolas noted the following section:

Amazon.com: How do you research? If you want to write about, say, GPS, like you do in your new book, do you actively research it and seek out experts, or do you just perceive what's out there and make it your own?

Gibson: Well, I google it and get it wrong [laughter]. Or if I'm lucky, Cory Doctorow tells me I'm wrong but gives me a good fix for it. One of the things I discovered while I was writing Pattern Recognition is that I now think that any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody's going to google everything in the text. So people--and this happened to me with Pattern Recognition--would find my footprints so to speak: well, he got this from here, and this information is on this site.

Amazon.com: You're annotated out there.

Gibson: Yeah it's sort of like there's this nebulous extended text. Everything is hyperlinked now. Some of it you actually have to type it in to get it, but it's all hyperlinked. It really changes things. I'm sure a lot of writers haven't yet realized how it changes things, but I find myself googling everything that goes into the text, and sometimes being led off in a completely different direction.

What interests me about these snippets of interview is first, how the radical present has thoroughly overcome any future we can conceive and second, how even fiction comes already hyperlinked—thoroughly inextricable from contemporary network culture. Gibson's comment suggests to me that we are at a point of singularity—not the full blown Vernor Vinge version, but still, at a point in which we cannot imagine the future. In part, this is not only because of the radical instability of the world, but I would argue, also due to our exhaustion with the modernist tradition of futurism. Given this condition, however, what about Utopia? I have to admit that I haven't cracked the new Jameson tome on this, but since many of my colleagues are advocates of reimaginging Utopia, I wonder how these two points can be resolved or if they can.

As a historian, another question arises…what will future scholars do when these links no longer exist? In researching Ulysses you could look through various records about Dublin in the early twentieth century, but the Web is unstable enough that the world Gibson describes will be gone within a couple of years. To some degree, I think this is moot in his case as—especially now that he has made the suggestion—chapter-by-chapter if not line-by-line guides to Gibson's text may well appear rapidly. But what if the author in question was less well known when his or her book was written? What then?

Back in April, The Wall Street Journal published a piece entitled The Most-Praised Generation Goes to Work. If I fondly recall my teachers always saying that my class was—collectively speaking—the worst class they had ever seen in their lives, the most-praised generation has had their egos relentlessly stroked by their Me Generation parents.

Just how this co-relates with Network Culture isn't entirely clear to me, but I'd love to hear your comments. After all, this blog is all about you.

I needed to show a new Netlab intern the maps from Banham's Los Angeles, Architecture of Four Ecologies and realized that I had left the original behind. Luckily, Google Books had a copy here, strangely however, in their quest to remove copyrighted images, Google's censors (human? algorithmic?) had gone awry and had started producing art such as this image:

Is this meticulous work the result of someone emulating Justin Jorgesen's Obscene Interiors in which amateur pornography is removed, leaving only amateur decor? (Jorgensen's project is a recapitulation of Naomi Uman's 1999 film Removed and not all that different from John Haddock's Internet Sex Photos or Laura Carton's Fictive Porn series or Jo Broughton's Empty Porn Set series...the list seems to go on endlessly…thanks to my crack team of researchers for these) Or is this a sly commentary by the Google AI (which is reputed to be feasting on all the world's books) on a future immaterial world? Or perhaps it is evidence of the state of Los Angeles architecture, (in Banham's time as today)… in which branded, signature work is an alibi for the careful removal of traces of anything but bottom-line-driven developer design from the landscape?

At nettime, Jordan Crandall posted a great salvo entitled "Showing."

An excerpt:

new cultures of self-display challenge us to rethink foundational
concepts in film and media theory and, consequently, to rethink the very
conditions of our approach.  For clearly these cultures are not
necessarily those of mastery and visual pleasure.  They do not resolve
easily to questions of perception, power, and language.  They are cultures
of showing as much as those of watching.  Instead of a reliance on
questions of spectatorship, language, and scopic power, we are challenged
to foreground issues of performance, affect, and display. 

Jordan's text is compelling to me because it raises aspects of network culture that I've underplayed in my essay to date. For if new means of self-expression are available to us, I've undertheorized just why we choose to show. Jordan's perspective, which draws on Foucauldian and psychonanalytic theories, helps get at this issue.

Via Volume's Benedict Clouette comes this quote:

<dsully> please describe web 2.0 to me in 2 sentences or less.
<jwb> you make all the content. they keep all the revenue.

from bash

A Fistful of Euros asked Gavi Eran, an expert on botnets about the recent cyber-attack on Estonia. Incredibly, although botnets (massive number of PCs infected with viruses directed to do a specific operation) were involved, a good part of the traffic was a cyber-riot, consisting of Russian citizens attacking sites manually on the suggestion of forums and blogs. For more, go to the post here.