http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/zkp/fasthist.txt From: mtribe@contrib.de Date: October 95 **************************** fast history ***************************** It's seven o'clock and I'm officially finished with today's flexible shift as web designer here at Wildpark, Germany's "trend-oriented online consulting agency and content platform." Ouch. When I took this job a few weeks ago I thought it would be interesting to learn about the commercialization of the internet by participating in it. But after my interview, when it was pretty clear I had the job, I felt like I had just made a deal with the Devil down at the crossroads. Today I worked on three projects: BVP (the German Recording Industry Association, GEMA (the German "Society" for Musical Performance and Duplication Rights), and PIAS/Freibank, which is kind of like a record label. I copied addresses into tables, lightened up a scanned image of a CD for use as a second-tier background texture (behind the fascinating text of BVP's corporate statement) and searched through the server for PIAS' files so I could copy them back to my home directory and find a way to "pep them up" (aufpeppen). It's very warm in the office today. We have to keep the windows closed to keep the light out so we can see our monitors. It's a warm, sunny, breezy day outside, but in here it's rather clammy. You'd think they'd have air conditioning. But this is Germany. Air conditioning is less common than ISDN. Instead, there is a limitless supply of bottled mineral water and coffee to keep us well-irrigated and perky. It occurs to me that this is a real post-industrial job. I take information, enrich it (pep it up) and put it on the net so anybody can get it--for free. But is it really free? Wildpark gets paid by companies like GEMA (which itself has no product: they just sell rights to entertainment) to put their image in cyberspace. I guess it's free like billboards are free. In exchange for every sign, we pay out another chunk of space. Instead of trees or houses or water or sky, we see an ad for Swedish Vodka. Instead of sombody's homepage, or a list of new independant videos out of Iceland, or whatever, we see GEMA. One little problem with this job is nobody understands what I do. At least here in Germany. There's tech-heads, which are few and tend to keep to themselves, and then there's everybody else. What do you do? I design Web sites. ("Ich mache World Wide Web design.") Trying to explain what the World Wide Web is to somebody who has never heard of the Internet is almost as difficult as trying to explain what post-conceptual art is to somebody who's never been to a contemporary art museum. Both require a lot of background knowledge. I'd like to think that this is because they're both new, non-traditional fields, not because they are produced by and for what one might call a "rarefied techno-elite." But I'm afraid that the two factors may be more than coincidental. As history continues to accelerate with the clock speed of a CPU (it used to run at 20 mhz, now it runs at 110), the grey zone between present and future is becoming the most valuable real estate. That's why I get to work on a PowerMac. And it's also why Wildpark exists: to make the cyberspace land-grab profitable for concentrated capital. So next time somebody asks me what I do, maybe I should just tell them that I make billboards for the information superhighway. ************************************************************************ Yours, Mark Tribe --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de