<nettime> everything that sinks must converge digest [MWP - porculus - MWP]

["nettime's_opinion_contraption" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

Subject: Re: <nettime> how to defeat activism From: MWP 
<mpalmer@jps.net> Subject: Re: <nettime> how to defeat 
activism From: "porculus" <porculus@wanadoo.fr> Subject: 
hacker (non)culture From: MWP <mpalmer@jps.net>

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Date: Thu, 01 Aug 2002 10:37:22 -0700
From: MWP <mpalmer@jps.net>
Subject: Re: <nettime> how to defeat activism

Francis H writes: >>Any vocation can sound petty if you decide to
describe in completely inaccurate terms.<<

Have any of you ever tried hacking instead of simply gushing about it's
subversive qualities blah blah blah? Believe me, if you do you will be
numbed into boredom within minutes. It is not rewarding work except for
those who get a perverse thrill out of playing the role of deux ex
machina in other people's lives.

No, I disagree with FH's view entirely. Or at least with the part of it
that suggests I am describing hacking in completely inaccurate terms.
And the analogy several people are making to daubing paint at random on
a canvas etc. is completely absurd. Hackers literally do enter strings
of code at random in the hopes of cracking somebody's password etc. It's
like searching for a needle in a haystack much of the time, and it is
hideously dull and tedious work that bears absolutely no relationship to
the intensive creativity of an artist's task. If you want an analogy
that works, compare it to the codebreakers of WWII, only instead of
fighting the Nazis, hackers (those with a smattering of political
consciousness, at least) are going after Capital, and often for far less
noble reasons. I am sorry, but I refuse to see hacking as a pursuit we
should be putting on the same pedestal (or higher, in one person's view)
as artistic creation. It just ain't so!

mp

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From: "porculus" <porculus@wanadoo.fr>
Subject: Re: <nettime> how to defeat activism

> "Solzhenitsyn describes at length the aversion that Lenin otherwise had to
> anything joyful in life, especially to the festivities of Carnival. It
> seems to be just this heaviness, this rigid exclusion of all that is
> uncontrollable (...) that lies at the heart of both the bourgeouis and
> Marxist-Leninist world-modeling and that, in the end, made for the failure
> of the planned revolution as we know it."(10)

itz wellknown for nkvd carnival iz a priest teleguided unpined grenade in
proletarian panz, beside if revolutionary humor really exist (well you must
have some imagination for finding it as all theologian must have for finding
some humor in all reveled religion & solzhenitsyn) in marx hoho so what with
lenin ..the link iz rather funny to find with robespierre and danton, tah !
i bet all on danton. humor is az sex, itz an hight miztic lost deperdizion,
itz the definitive human joule effect, humor ist ein grosse energetic eater,
really in my opinion i see only some heavily serious foucaldian wilhelm lili
marlen creature with leather right and left wings that could have probably
some good rear wheeldrive for succeded in the promotion of the prow, and
first of all you must verify, there is the basis of your conscience of
classe you could have or your own or you are just a lumpen proletariat
without any classe and any good panz bref une sans culotte, et alors marchez
devant.. bien sur je vous suivrais partout, n'ayant aucune dignité moi même.
vive la revolution

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Date: Fri, 02 Aug 2002 13:47:47 -0700
From: MWP <mpalmer@jps.net>
Subject: hacker (non)culture

FH: << Most art is useless, self-indulgent crap. >>

Agree and disagree. All art is useless, at least all good art. And only
bad art is self-indulgent. Crap, like beauty, is in the eye of the
beholder, and one man's beholding is another man's befolding. If
eveybody in the world liked a work of art without exception (like, say
the Mona Lisa), it would cease to be art and become more akin to a
fetish object or icon. What makes something art is that it continues to
raise questions as to its value.

(More to follow, as soon as I can hack into my brain cells and crack the
code that facilitates the process of deep thought. . .

mp

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