SPEW

[Matthew Fuller <matt@axia.demon.co.uk>]

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."

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."

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'   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'  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'  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."   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'  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' ,
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".
        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'   Consider this
promo blurb for a forthcoming on-line shopping service laid out like a
magical palace:
        "Join us on a voyage of discovery.  ŠConjuring 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 inspiredŠ"

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 rewardedŠ  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?"
        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".   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."
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"   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