[P2P-F] <nettime> cyberpunk is dead

Thu Apr 7 16:30:05 CEST 2011

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 7:52 PM, Dante-Gabryell Monson <
dante.monson at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: <el at riseup.net>
> Date: Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 11:36 PM
> Subject: <nettime> cyberpunk is dead
> To: nettime <nettime-l at kein.org>
>
>
>
> notes on the development of the so-called social web and the role of
> cyberpunks inside this process
>
> http://el.blogsport.de/2011/03/28/cyberpunk-is-dead/
>
> The weakness of cyberpunk was its virtuality, being a complex of
> imagery mostly used by writers in fiction, by bloggers in egomany and
> by journalists in, well, „journalism“. What was missing, is a
> cyberpunk realism, in the sense of an aesthetics that relates to and
> occupies something else than the realms of literature. From this
> viewpoint, real existing cyberpunk was the adaption of cyberpunk as a
> shiny static representation for what was left of the dynamic of
> electronic pioneers, the early computer hackers, and their process of
> dissolving their avant-guard status in time and into mass. Comparable
> to the punks that were the mass reproduction of the avantgarde
> activists before them. The name of this historic forerunner of punk
> referred to here, was the Situationist International, a 1950s and 60s
> avantgarde group (Read their texts and Greil Marcus‘ history book).
> Just like the situationists worked at the fissure between literature
> and street, the early real-existing cyberpunks worked at the fissure
> of literature and cyberspace. The cyberpunk literature served its
> purpose to provide aesthetic naratives some time ago, and in the
> ensuing process the real-existing groups that were trying to adapt
> these clichés turned into clichés for others to adapt to. A virtual
> movement.
>
> What constitutes the weakness of the aesthetic force, results in the
> weakness as a material force: Cyberpunk made its way on the market of
> despiritualized ideas, as the shopping good for the masses. Ever tried
> to squat something in Secondlife, like offline punks would do?
> Technically impossible. In the process to solve this dilemma,
> cyberpunk had to give up integral parts to be able to work on social
> topics without a realism and therefore without a political strategy.
> Which led to a certain aligning with the social and economical facts
> in the process of trying to gain a social impact through the cyberpunk
> models. Wondering why Wikileaks doesn‘t have a wiki anymore? Because
> cypherpunk (with ph in this case, refering to those fractions of
> cyberpunk that focuse on encryption) was either mass movement or
> political tactics of an avant-guard. In deciding to focus on political
> manouvres, an open publishing model is not fitting anymore. Contrary
> to this, CHAN-culture (imageboards, fast communication channels) and
> the ANON-meme (crowd orientated cyber actions) try different ways in
> waging real mass-based cyberwars, they reach this point by being more
> punk again, punk as in: deviant subculture that parents are afraid of.
>
> Still inside this historic #fail of cyberpunk, there were hacker
> groups and cyberpunk collectives not only representing the literary
> images of cyberpunk, but trying to do cyberpunk realism. In the sense
> of picking up the punk culture and porting it to the cyberspace.
> Working with images and text in the new media, taking it back to the
> roots of post-war pre-punk movements, creating free tools, cultural
> gifts and mixed artworks, like all the minds from Guy Debord (and many
> before), to John Lyndon, to Allen Ginsberg, to Wau Holland, had shown
> the way. But working with punk attitude in the 90s and the Zeros
> proofs to be a delicate business. Now we can see the last phase of
> cyberpunk, the virus has spread, it has dissolved into one of its more
> justified aims: the dissolution in non-elitist mass approaches. If you
> search today for crazy netpunks, doing the mix with images, ideas and
> slogans, fighting cyberwars against scientology and other creepy
> institutions, you don‘t come to the avantgarde collectives, you go the
> chans.
>
> These collectives had been reaching out to you, flooding you with
> texts, movies, songs, images, a vast wave of media. Working all the
> time under fake identities to give away anticommodities of a little
> countercultureindustry. With that fulfilling the idealist idea of the
> free and useful citizens. Only through the nature of these efforts
> being collective and collaborative, this theater of autonomy could be
> kept running, serving as a good example to all little self-managed
> projects out there that with a little circle of friends you can reach
> everything you can imagine. Nothing else though. So when the
> participants got tired of the shooting in the dark acceleration these
> collective products had taken, all the releases, all the
> administration, all the fuzz, it went down the spiral of
> individualization: moving to a aggregation of solo blogs, then moving
> on to the short notes of twitter, a medium only to well fitting for
> the self-advertisement. After the autonomous text production of the
> last two decades, we face a shift to short notes and images. The DIY
> music scene remains a bit unaffected by this, since the hope to become
> a money earning musician is still a more powerful cultureindustrial
> meme than the one of a writer actually getting paid. The recent
> shifting from myspace to facebook shows although, that
> everyone-is-an-artist wasn‘t a powerful enough idea. It had to be
> self-representation, mini-blogging, star-cult, focus on images and
> other spectacular media instead of text: The hyperindividualist
> self-representation platform of facebook suited the masses best.
>
> For large parts, this big network is filled with representations of
> static faces. Faces, that are amongst our most subliminal ways of
> communicating, become our fastest and most plain way of making a
> statement. Update profile picture, comment, like, like back, update
> again. The collectivization of communication (lat. communicare = do
> sth. together) failed, in fact this means the failure of mass art.
> Todays market of representations means that we exchange images that
> are valued by statements without consequence, statements whose only
> value is the one of attention, something we have learned from the
> advertising process, which has become the key process of culture. This
> cultural praxis fails to find a history of the human faces. The faces
> tried to break the boundaries of word and image, they were processes
> of conscious creation of speaking images for the feelings that words
> fail to describe. The times of boredom that everyone wanders now,
> through images that don‘t form related stories anymore, are a result
> of loosing our dream of creating non-static post-representative
> playful expressions. To associate the fragile idea of friendship still
> with the formalized and online media based networks of „friends“ is
> the dramatic deception that covers this loss. It was the fragile
> nature of friendship itself that was lost, that what made
> communication between friends comfortable. The need to be near to
> others and to be free on ones own at the same time, was dissolved into
> the mode of being present to each other only through distance. The
> tools of social media cover up the failure of the social itself.
> Giving up the idea of the possibility of social relations in which one
> can give each other the comfort of being together and granting all
> freedom the same time, is a failure whose results may be not so easy
> to cover. This is not a judgment about the idea of mass communication
> per se, but about the idea and modes of social media networks.
>
> Coming back to the crews for once: the game of creating a strong
> collective representation that immediately represents itself was
> programmed to fail in a society that only uses representations to mark
> the value of exchangeability. The punk image of a cybergang that
> somehow evades the mainstream norms and holds up the, now
> conservative, ideas of elite and underground was the joke that had to
> choke itself. It was working with the idea of an everchanging
> collective project that would remain the same all the time in order to
> avoid to spoil the fans. This planned contradiction of the ultimate
> hype was not scandalous anymore when the whole web turned to the
> noncontradictive targeted creation of hypes. What these groups had
> caricatured since decades was only about to become the online model of
> creating static ideas that represent dynamic change. The cybergangs
> were constructed never to end, because as a project, a channel, it was
> not aiming for something and therefore it couldn‘t fail. Other media
> collectives of today, opposed to this, want to start because they
> realize that pictured dynamics has to be the key feature of a
> successful industrial media product.
>
> So from this learning process we gain the perspective of boringness.
> Being a progressive participant of cyberspace today is not about being
> elite and surfing the most underground hubs. It’s about surfing on the
> top of it all, on the big normal junkyard of human creation and
> picking up the inspirations together. It’s also about reading a book
> again, following an author’s thought through 400 pages instead of 140
> letters. And also in the same sense: doing a website again, a static
> thing that waits for hundreds to come by, just like a book in the
> library, instead of giving daily updates to attract some other
> thousands that need their daily fix of info. Some books still are more
> actual than the daily news reports (when these were still existing,
> now the news must be updated all the time). And maybe the lost dreams
> in these books need an actualisation through a website, instead of
> just a quotation in the fast streams of actualities. It’s about
> refusing the entertainment, it’s about finding enlightment in thought
> processes themselves and not in what forms they have been given for
> representation. It’s about picking up something dead and giving it
> life instead of living the perpetual death of the bubble of statements.
>
> The non-conformism of today is a real challenge: To deal with
> something beyond the instantaneous satisfaction of a pseudodynamic
> static image. The progressive illustrations, thoughts, projects and
> processes will need you to stumble over them, to search for them, to
> look closely or even stare at them (not like you stared at the TV
> since 50 years ago, at youtube since 5 years ago). It needs you to
> stop worrying about the central hub, website or plattform that you
> feel like home in. It needs you to stop worrying about any rss-feeds
> that you only used to feed your identity out of angst in this process
> of identification, representation and individualisation. Not to learn
> even more exiting ways of being alone – you can easily find those in
> the entertainment industry – but to pick up again the idea of
> communication. Surf around, take off from time to time and play with
> what and whom you might find.
>
>
>
>
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>

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