Syndicate: <nettime> The WYSIWYG Society (MEME 3.03)

["David S. Bennahum" <davidsol@panix.com> (by way of Andreas Broeckmann)]

dear syndicalists,
David Bennahum's report about the nettime meeting in ljubljana contains
some interesting comments about the east-west situation in europe, which
is, i think, a reason to x-post this. the dissolving of borders and
barriers is one of the things that are paramount to improving the political
and cultural context within which we work.
greetings,
-a


Dear Nettimers,

What follows is a copy of the most recent issue of MEME, a newsletter I
publish.  MEME is distributed to approximately 4000 people in 53 countries,
around twice a month.  If you wish to get MEME by email, the info on how is
at the end of this message.

best,
db


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propagating through communication networks and face-to-face contact between
people.  Root of the word "memetics," a field of study which postulates
that the meme is the basic unit of cultural evolution. Examples of memes
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	MEME 3.03
	http://memex.org/meme3-03.html


	Freedom's just another word for WYSIWYG



1. NETTIME


The southernmost range of the Alps divides Slovenia from Austria.  Drive
over these mountains, from the Austrian side, and you emerge an hour later
in a flat plain which leads to the coast, and the Adriatic sea.  Along the
way, you'll pass Ljubljana, the capital city of Slovenia, which resembles a
poorer Salzburg-- a quaint, small city-- with a bit more grime and tarnish
from forty years of Socialism, testimony from Slovenia's time spent as part
of Yugoslavia.  The Slovenes are doing their best to catch up with their
richer Northern neighbors.  Slovenia is the wealthiest of the former
Yugoslav republics.  The economy has grown between 4-6% a year since 1993,
and unemployment is down to 7.3%.  A decade more of this kind of growth,
and Slovenia may well be just as small, rich, and neat as Austria.

I visited Ljubljana in late May, as a participant in the Nettime
Conference, where, over two days, people from nearly every country in
Europe came to participate (along with a handful of Americans).  Nettime is
a grass-roots organization which exists mostly in cyberspace, as a
by-invitation discussion list, and a Web site.
(http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/)  Its goal is a loose one-- what Nettimers
call "Internet criticism"-- and over several years since the creation of
Nettime in 1994-- the organization has developed as a pan-European
confederation of independent thinkers.  The sources are too vast to
summarize under one label.  Perhaps the best explanation of Nettime is that
it attempts to explore and discover ideas relating to the spread of
cyberspace, ideas which stem from a European, rather than an American,
sensibility.  The central forum is Nettime's e mail-based discussion list
with 400 participants.  The list isn't really a discussion list, but a
redistribution point for essays on the meaning of cyberspace.  Nettime
calls this process "text filtering," and this gives Nettime a thoughtful,
meaningful quality, the electronic equivalent of journal, in a state of
perpetual flux, mix-mastering threads into a conceptual jam session, with
no start or end.

Twice a year, Nettime produces printed material based on the posts which go
to the Nettime list.  These books go by the initials ZKP, as in "Zentral
Kommittee Proceedings"-- it's a joke of sorts, a riff on the old-fashioned
jargon from the days of COMECON, Politburos, and five-year plans. (As far
as I can tell, there is no central committee guiding Nettime.)  In
Ljubljana, I received a freshly printed ZKP 4, the fourth in the series,
and this issue came out on newspaper, apparently one of 10,000 copies made.
Nettime, as I noticed in Ljubljana, defies attempts by observers to
categorize.  Just when you think you've figured it out, Nettime might morph
slightly, upsetting your conceptions.

In the tradition of Dadaism, humor, deadly serious sometimes, with its
reversals and self-contradictions, keeps Nettime moving.  Motion is good,
as it is a source of growth and life, and Nettime is growing.  About 10
people join the list every week, and 120 people came to the conference;
most were from Europe-- Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Sofia, Budapest, Riga,
Moscow-- practically every European nation had a citizen in Ljubljana.
Europe and cyberspace were at the center of attention.



2. FLUX LOOPS


Europe is undergoing a period of intense self-definition, on several
levels, and cyberspace is part of that story.  The continent is struggling
to define what being European means, both practically and conceptually.  On
a practical level, 1999 is supposed to be the year of the "Euro"-- the
single-currency anchored by France and Germany.  The Euro is the
centerpiece of Economic and Monetary Union, or EMU.  EMU is the culmination
of nearly 40 years of European economic integration, and the development of
a common market.  That's one aspect of self-definition, another is the
question of West and East.  With the end of Soviet Empire, not all European
countries are equally European.  The struggle to define which countries get
"fast tracked" into the new "European common market" is the primary foreign
policy concern in most of the former Soviet satellite states.  Then there's
c-space.

Cyberspace, serving as a loopy cultural icon du-jour, is causing strange
European cultural paroxysms, similar to those the United States began
experiencing in 1995, kicked off with Senator Exon's "Communications
Decency Act," cyber-porn, and junk e-mail.  As in the USA, the heart of the
matter comes down to identity and control.  Who controls the Net?  Who
defines what goes on the Net, how it grows, and what the Net means?  When
you get enough nodes up, enough kids with modems, you gotta cultural
crisis.  Europe's reaching that point, one country at a time.

The German government has attempted to sever all Internet links between the
Dutch domain, XS4ALL.NL, and Germany.  XS4ALL.NL, a hacker-led, grass-roots
ISP and Web server, had agreed to host reproduction of Radikal, a left-wing
publication banned in Germany.  The German attempt to cut off access to the
material failed, as it quickly replicated across the Net, appearing on
approximately 50 mirrors Netwide
(http://www.firstfloor.org/~vaclav/radikal/).  A similar cultural crisis
took place in Italy, where an Italian zine, Decoder
(http://www4.iol.it/decoder), is under surveillance, and liable for
prosecution, after publishing on-line a cartoon by the English artist
Graham Harwood.  The comic strip depicts violence against children, as an
illustration for an article on violence against weaker people.  The Italian
magistrate, horrified at this revolting and obscene display of purient
material wants to send Decoder's publishers to jail.

Austria had a similar moment of Internet angst: for two hours in mid March
Austrian ISPs shut down Internet access, to protest government attempts at
holding carriers responsible for what their users may be reading or saying.
(http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/textonly/1,1035,762,00.html)  Latvia is
trying to regulate RealAudio streams as radio broadcasts, requiring a state
license.  France is disgusted with the dominance of English on the Net, and
politicians, along with "intellectuals" dally with creating a "French
Internet," whatever that means, as a way to preserve France from
Anglo-Saxon, Anglophile, English-whatever, brain-space memetic imperialism.
They were dealt a setback recently, when a French court ruled that Georgia
Tech university did not need to change an English language Web page
describing activities of its satellite operation in the city of Metz, as
the French government wanted.

C-space is redrawing the geography of Europe by loosening, on a cultural
level, national control of what people can see and read.  EMU will loosen
state control on an economic level, replacing the "dirigiste" policies of
state-sponsored employment with the supposedly natural rhythms of a free
market, and local bureaucrats with a council of ministers in Brussels as
arbiters of what's considered fair- and foul-play in the marketplace.

At the conference, Nettime mutated its interest in criticizing US-style
"cyber-libertarianism," "California Ideology" and WIRED magazine, towards a
newfound concern for their home-space.  Where once America, with its
Microsoft, Netscape, Northern California and Unix seemed an appropriate
target for focused attention, now Europe, with its bifurcated continent,
restrictions on travel based on wealth and geography, and emergent forms of
c-space censorship, has created a dynamic of its own, and serious issues
which must be addressed and debated.  It's clear now that Europe can grow,
and is growing, a Netspace of its own.  What will the rules be on that
continent?  This was the riveting, at times surreal, focus of the talks in
Ljubljana.



3. EX-EAST


During the "blitz-lectures" (15-minute presentations), group discussions of
Net-based art, and a long analysis of the Soros Foundation which looms, in
the eyes of some Nettimers, as a paradigm for post-government government,
the noun "ex-East" came up again and again as the best way to describe one
half of Europe, the half that's, by-and-large, excluded from the "ex-West"
and its economic club.  While that club is showing some signs of crisis,
with a Socialist victory in France last week, a Labour Parliament in
London, and some crafty financial shenanigans in Germany where the
Bundesbank has decided to reevaluate German gold reserves at much higher
rate (thereby lowering the government's budget deficit in line with
monetary union requirements), EMU's still the hottest club in town.  If
you're not a member, you're a loser.

The ex-East is not allowed in for now, although that's not going to last.
Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are on the "fast track" for
membership.  Slovenia is vying to jump the rails and get in behind them.
What happens to the ex-East then, if four of its members go West?  The
eerie shape of post-Cold War Europe is not one of two former halves still,
ironically, existing as present-day halves, divided by wealth, at least
it's not the halves we're accustomed to.  No, the division of the new
Europe will fall along a far older divide-- Rome and Byzantium.



4. SAILING TO BYZANTIUM.NET


When the Roman emperor, Constantine the Great, rebuilt Byzantium in AD 330,
giving it the name Constantinople, two empires emerged from what had been
one.  While Rome collapsed a century later, in the fifth century, the
Byzantine Empire survived until 1453, when Constantinople fell to the
Ottoman Turks.  Latin and the Catholic church carried the essence of old
Rome forward, loosely uniting the West with the Latin alphabet and, for
awhile, Catholicism.  Until the Protestant Reformation of Martin Luther,
much of the West-- certainly its core, Britain, Spain, France and the
German principalities-- swore spiritual allegiance to the same holy empire.
They even went on joint military operations, the Crusades, and developed
postal roads, a feudal harbinger of NATO and EMU.  In the Byzantine empire,
which subsumed the Balkans, Turkey, Romania, and today's Moldavia, Ukraine,
and bits of Russia, a new alphabet, Cyrillic (created by the Bulgarian St.
Cyril in the tenth century), emerged.  Here the religion was Orthodox, and
this, like the Catholic, eventually splintered into further forms (like
Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox).

The great divide between these two halves of the former Roman empire,
strangely, is reappearing as the geographic division of a new Europe.  The
new border falls squarely between alphabets.  Nations which use Latin
letters are welcome to join the "ex-West."  Those which use Cyrillic, the
heirs of Byzantium, are excluded.  They will ultimately come to form the
true "ex-East."  This line can be traced from the Baltic sea, where Estonia
(Latin alphabet, Protestant and Catholic), meets Russia (Cyrillic, Russian
Orthodox), southwards, subsuming Russia, Belorussia, Moldavia, Bulgaria,
Serbia, and Macedonia into one block, loosely the same territory which
Byzantium once occupied.  List the countries on the other side of the line,
ones which were once in the "East"-- Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia,
Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania-- and each is far more likely to join
the West's club than any on the other side of the line.



5. THE WYSIWYG SOCIETY


So what's this got to do with cyberspace?  In the great narrative of
history as line of progressions from one state of well-being to a higher
state of well-being, where historical epochs exist as improvements upon the
previous, the Information Age is the next great plateau, the heir of the
Industrial, Feudal, Agricultural and Neolithic Ages which preceded.
Cyberspace is the ultimate distillation of what the Information Age is
meant to be-- a home for "friction-free capitalism," the end of nation
states, and a state of being where matter is "demassified" into bits and
electrons, which form the bricks and mortar of a new world.  Behind these
allegories and analogies, however, there is a salient, distinctive aspect
to how the world is changing, and that's WYSIWYG.

What You See Is What You Get-- WYSIWYG-- it's one of the great geek
acronyms of all time, a pure piece of computer jargon which resonates with
deeper philosophical implications.  Spawned sometime around 1982, when
humans, clicking away at their Apple II and Atari microcomputers, got tired
of word-processing and not knowing what their documents would look like
once they were printed, the need for screens that could replicate the
layout of text on paper, so "what you see is what you get," became
apparent.  The first WYSIWYG (pronounced "whizzy wig") computer to hit the
big time was the Apple Macintosh in 1984.  The tag line for the Mac,
portentously enough, was "Macintosh.  Why 1984 won't be like 1984."  A
woman in silky red running shorts, a nice white tank top and sneakers, runs
into an auditorium filled with slack bald men in gray overalls, and throws
a sledgehammer into a giant screen with a man droning on about how we will
build a world of pure perfection.  The ad played once, during the Super
Bowl.  Like all great advertisements, this one stunned the public and
redefined the meaning of computers, as tools of liberation, as machines
which make things clearer, shinning light on the truth, pushing back the
darkness (or at least IBM).  WYSIWYG is the spirit of the Information Age.

EMU, and cyberspace, are held as offering a way towards a WYSIWYG Society,
by supporting social systems which are more transparent.  In other words,
in a WYSIWYG world, information about what's happening is permitted to flow
freely, as it's happening (known as "feedback").  Free markets are "free"
because, in theory, information that buyers and sellers need to set a price
which reflects the "real" value of whatever is being sold, is readily
visible.  Thus free markets are fairest of all.  Of course no market
actually reaches this pristine state of free-flowing information, but the
idea is to come close by creating structures which support transparency,
rather than opacity.  EMU is meant to do several things, and one of them,
its proponents will tell you, is to make markets freer, and more "open."
What they mean by this is more "transparent."  It's a WYSIWYG dream.
Computer networks are a big part of this vision, as they provide the medium
information flows through.  Thus cyberspace, by its very essence, is
considered a WYSIWYG kinda thing.  C-space, the theory goes, is good
because it makes the way things work more visible, be it markets, or the
spread of ideas.

In cyberspace, you can trace a virtual boundary.  It's the electronic
division between WYSIWYG and Byzantine.  "Byzantine", as in "a Byzantine
organization," is nearly antinonimous with WYSIWYG.  You could say that
UNIX, that most Byzantine of operating systems, is the opposite of
Macintosh systems.  Yet, to its devotees, UNIX gives powers that Mac users
can only dream of-- the ability to dart between nested directories in
flash, or siphon streams of data into files by "piping."  In Europe, which
is rapidly diving along the lines which once divided the ancient Roman
Empire, Byzantium may well have some assets which will put the WYSIWYG
society to shame, or at least jealous.  If you know how the system works,
it offers far more power to its devotees than a transparent system.  That's
the self-negating problem, though.  When taken to its logical end, systems
like that are called tyrannical.

In Europe, the ex-West claims it's building a WYSIWYG Society, and sees the
ex-East as sailing back to Byzantium.  It's strange, and bizarre, to see
the fatalism of these trends, as if going back to the future were the only
way forward.



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