NET.CULTURE (SIC) Tom Jennings 11 June 93 I went to a reading/slideshow at Modern Times Bookstore with my boyfriend Josh, a reading by the author/editor of a book on historic gay photography, from 1850's to modern times. It was fairly interesting. The room had rows of folding chairs, with a podium thing towards the back (it's usually in the front where podium things go) with the slide projector on it. We all faced the screen in front. Josh and I looked nothing like the audience, which was mostly in their early 40's, white men. We quite stood out, but were quite welcome. There was one other younger man there, who looked to me to be of Japanese ancestry. About half way through the show, a young angry punk boy entered. He stood out too. Everyone looked at him briefly then ignored him, even though his look was just recently a major fetish item (the look, not the reality). (We kept peeking because he looked like someone we know from Seattle. Our peeking was of course obvious to him and he/we knew it. No one else did this. It is OK in our world to do this, but not in the mustachio'd one.) The slides were by well-known European and American photographers, of both men and women. All of the photographers were men. Even the photographs of women, including the ones of obvious lesbian interest, were made for men (for whatever reason that makes hetero men find two women together, erotic), because that's who's had money, access, etc, historically. The book's narrative, read by the author, told of the historic social context the photographers lived under. A few of the photographs show same-sex couples dancing in an 1880's club, with fearfully defiant looks on their faces, not surprising given the times. Ahh, the beginnings of a (documented) gay consciousness... We liked the show. The Japanese-looking guy left, about 15 minutes into the show, and of course we'll never know why. What the show really was, of course, was a history of American/European photography. However the author never said this, neither did the flyers, nor the bookstore. It was just assumed to be the case. - \ | / - So I attended the Online Communities Mini-Conference at Interval Corp., in a conference room in their building in Palo Alto. The room was filled with rows of chairs which we sat in, and there was a table in front with a whiteboard behind it, and a vid projector on the ceiling pointed at it. We sat facing the front of the room. Puzzlingly, none of the windows opened to the outside, even though we were on the ground floor and no one could possibly suicide by jumping out of them. By the end of the two-day conference, about a fourth or third of the audience at one time or another sat behind the table up front, and told things to the rest about what they were doing, and the world around them as they saw it, to the people sitting in the chairs. Questions and lively debate ensued. We heard about how market competition will pretty much determine what wins and what loses, and how some of us want to push certain ideas of privacy, anonymity, etc so that individuals don't get lost in all this money-making. Of course we all knew exactly what anonymity and privacy means to all of us. Many people agreed with this, but said when *they* had to do some particular thing, well, compromise was necessary or it wouldn't ship. We heard a lot about technologies, but mainly we talked and listened and thought about ethics, social ramifications and suchlike about them, and how it affected people in the US. People who, I assume, frequently take part in social gatherings where people sit in rows of chairs facing all the same way. - \ | / - At the 1988 North American Anarchist (Survival) Gathering, in Toronto, about 200 people from all over the US and Canada, met for a three day festival/conference, over the first weekend in July. While hosted by the Toronto group who did the bulk of the work (arranging for use of a school building, printing the lovely handbook, arranging food, etc) much of the content of the multi-threaded conference was done by people scattered accross the continent. For the sessions, people sat in circles facing each other, in chairs, in each other laps, either in the building or outside on the grass. People sat on windowsills. Some people brought their kids, and there was a prominent child-care scheme. Some people went downtown and spawned noisy protests; it was not only American Independence Day, but the US had just invaded somewhere I can't remember. - \ | / - Lots of people at the Online Community Mini-Conference were bemoaning the loss of, or decay, of American culture. This puzzles me. Which one? Apparently the one (or one of them) that goes to technical colleges, work in buildings with windows that don't open, and sit on chairs facing the front of the room. One person even said "...since we all went to college...", and no one (even me) said anything. We've all heard the McLuhan reductionist cliche "the medium is the message", ie. the specific form a medium takes is an overriding part of the meaning, but I wonder how many people have an operating theory of what it means. The world is defined by the smallest details of everyday life, not Big Concepts. Where and how you wake up, your eating rituals, how you relate to people you work with. The clothes you wear. Do you consider competition a good thing? Or is all your work cooperative, with people who only work cooperatively? What fits through wires today is linear text, not cooincidentally, and that medium requires a specific sort of brainpower sitting behind expensive connection machinery to be able to generate sensible and sensitive responses to other peoples' same. Writing well, in collegiate English, is a definite advantage. OK, so our first interfaces to computing machinery were character symbol printers from the turn of the century, which were in turn based upon manual electro-mechanical, serial symbol systems like Morse and Baudot. What do we replace them with? The desk in the front of the room that you sit in the chair behind, plus an business office file system. Technical improvement: 1.0. Increased scope of user base: 0.0. - \ | / - Look -- I ain't no alien. I was raised in Massachusetts, in the 60's, in a semi-rural small town. We had automobiles in the woods as teenagers, and LSD in high school when I was 14. The path I've taken since then is as long as anyone elses, and just as interesting or boring. I'll spare you the details. My only point is, *even I* find a lot of the mono-culture stuff surrounding the industrial culture utterly opaque. It's not universal, really. It's just as arbitrary as remembering which fork to use when and no, I don't know. You'd certainly embarrass yourself somehow at my house too. It's not that suburban culture is any more particularly awful than anything else (I'm trying to be generous), but it gets to be like any other fundamentalism -- its members not only forget it's not the only one, they specifically don't ask, or inform, or sometimes don't care, or worse, don't know, that maybe someone else is just fine right now, thank you. For the most part, the various cultures/groups of people that I'm a part of are thriving, and growing with self-conscious process, except where put down by law and social convention (not to say some of my friends would not act as oppressively if the tables were turned, sigh). - \ | / - So why aren't there more non-suburban weirdos in industry? Is the answer not already obvious-seeming? The social filtering to get there from here works two ways -- not only does it keep people from getting through the mazes (schools, jobs, and the social structures surrounding them) but also -- who wants to live with people who share very little of your goals and ethics, likes and dislikes? The "but if you really wanted to get there, you could" mentality not only ignores reality, but once again, assumes that the their culture thing is either universal, or at least of universal appeal. Even ignoring the path from here to there, you can't work in the computer industry (for example) without to some degree living with it's culture. I know, I tried. - \ | / - There's a name for this withering process, and if you have a better, less dogmatic sounding one I'd love to hear it: Cultural imperialism. If you start shipping automobiles to some faraway place, no matter how they might use or define things there, pretty soon you'll find they start making roads and living on flat places. (Which of course by itself is not necessarily terrible... but nothing has zero side effects.) Likewise, if you give someone some box they find useful and it has a key-board attached, they'll find it damn hard to use without putting it upon something that damn well resembles a "desk". Mediums? Messages? - \ | / - Tangentially related, having to do with what's considered some sort of "edge" of social improvement (lots of people drag it out at this point) -- Something about this conversion of "cyberpunk" from a literary concept to a cultural one has bothered me from the start. The confusion for me stemmed from the fact that I think the basic idea is correct, partly the simple realization that our existence and connection to the world around us is defined to us by it's *surface*. The outside of things are coated in social and cultural meaning. The particular forms of (in current cyberese fashion) dirt, graffiti, fashion, casual use of technics laden dripping in classism, etc are a measure of things as they are and are rapidly becoming. Unfortunately it's just so typical of our dominant culture to absorb (and defang in the process) anything it deems "radical" or oppositional. (As well as people dissatisfied with what they have wanting something else.) It doesn't matter if "cyberpunky" stuff gets sold in Macy's; that's not the problem. The problem is that things are deemed to *be* the surface. The symbols get confused with the underlying thing that defined or created the associative link. It was best put once in an OPTION zine interview with Diamanda Galas; the interviewer was an very astute woman whose name I did not record, alas. At one point in the interview, she asked Diamanda what she thought of all the death-rock-looking kids in her audience; ratted black hair, white faces, shredded black clothes, etc. Diamanda started with, "They emulate what they think they are seeing". Hence my skepticism in calling anything connected to what people do, except fiction, with that word "cyberpunk". It implies further that until the word was coined, no one was doing any radical thinking about technology that wasn't Luddite (though all too frequently true), and that all things that do are "cyberpunky". Thanks, but no thanks. And, personal gripe, there certainly doesn't seem to be much "punk" in cyberpunk. The current popular definition seems to come right from some TV show version of "punkers" that hang out drink and rob old ladies. Not that I give a shit about whether today's punks have a good media image or not. It certainly doesn't include Poly Styrene, Pete Shelley, Wayne/Jane County, Patti Smith, etc, never mind any of the late-model US-centric stuff. Just like the hardcore punk in America chased off all the fags, weirdos etc in exchange for ordinary macho dickheads like BLACK FLAG, (never mind today's straightedge!) "cyberpunk" with all it's mirror-shades stuff once again tries to limit the playing field to "calm, cool, bad attitude". Gimme drag queens over close-cropped macho attitude anytime! Oops! I seem to have gotten distracted! Bye now!