My surrender to the blogosphere marks my escape from nihilism, apathy and general brain-fag, on board the 'postmodern' plane of immanence, in search of a generative activism in a nomo networked world.
Jon Meyer has IP on ‘nomo’ - an alternative to the clumsily tautological post-postmodern. As Meyer says, it's ‘a shortened version of Latour's “nonmodern”, it also reads like "no more" as in stop we've had enough…Its better to be paddling in the direction we want to go, rather than in the opposite direction’. Hung up on being ‘critical’ and ‘reflexive’ for far too long, I’ve (again) tired of staring at my navel. Nomo.
This is my v 3.0. ‘Quit staring at your navel’ self-affirmation v 1.0 came in 1994, when I turned my back on architecture and my art college background to become a socially-committed journalism student. Jaded along the way by the dogmas of media corporatism, I first (d)evolved into a manufactured media dissenter, then (what has been most popularly defined as) an ontological existentialist, or a poststructuralist. My v 2.0 was ridden on the mid-90s wave of the popularisation of cyberpunk hallucinations, of utopian cyber counter culture, indymedia, cyberfeminism, posthumanism and the popularisation of open source philosophies. I got high on the assumption that, 'we ha[d] it in our power to begin the world over again' (Thomas Paine, quoted in Wired, cover, 1.10, May 1995), on self-publishing and on enabling others to do the same. Generation X touting the rights of the Net Generation.
A BA and a not-quite-but-almost-finished PhD later, I shookout off cyberutopia and rerouted my criticism towards it. As Bardini suggests, I experienced the ‘slow death of cybernetic utopia as it [was] put into place, as it [was] spatialized’. Amidst the rise and fall of the dot.com bubble, into the vertigous depths of information overload, immateriality seemed incompatible with old-world metanarratives of liberation. What Manovich and Bolter & Grusin had cast in my mind, Ted Nelson re-concretised in his Keynote to the AoIR conference IR 5.0: SUSSEX: 2004: UBIQUITY?, September 2004: the net is not an immediate, neutral technology but hypermediated by various ideologies that realize its existence – primarily Microsoft. We may now be able to cast our selves to millions online via a domestic computer, but we cannot circumvent institutionalised tools, technologies and interfaces in order to do so, regardless of how attuned to open source we are. I critically romped through the terribly cyberselfish culture of high tech and rose towards the void, reverting to Voltairean language games.
When the Web 2.0 meme ascended, I was spent. I’d grown cynical of revolutionary rhetoric. As Dan Gillmor herald the blogsphere of citizen (or participatory) journalism, where ‘[f]or the first time, people at the edges of the network ha[d] the ability to create their own news entities,’ I recalled the Drudge Report and thought this really was a ‘call to action’, the next ‘shakeout’ for disaffected netizens (as Tim O’Rielly puts it) rather than the next Information Revolution. Reverting back to Bardini, this was ‘the dream's resistance... For if cyberspace is the creation of a cybernetic utopia, the paradoxical spatialization of the original prohibition, the fact remains that the initial dream can make utopia endure’. Yet for me, We Media was very much They Media.
Still, the scrutiny of Wikipedia’s factuality amused me, since I’d long valued subjectivity over objectivity. My interpretation of Bakhtin had left me with a sense that all language is internally (re)generated by a given community at the macrolevel, and the individual at the microlevel, based on both accepted and contested myths. That in 2005 Nature then suggested that ‘multiple, unpaid editors match paid [Encyclopedia Brittanica] professionals for accuracy’ was even more amusing to me. Yet, I did not contribute to this growing repository of contested popular thought. As far as music is concerned, however, I ignore the substandard quality of mp3 and peer-to-peer to my little heart’s content, joining the multitudes in what we may have thought some time back was our own secret, irreverent obliteration of industry music predators. I del.icio.usly flickr in a limited, time-restricted capacity; a little-charted node in social software networks. I’m up-to-date on the latest trends, I both critique and re-defend utopianism online, urge students to blog as a tool for individual and group conceptual development, community building and remote collaboration . Yet, having published my teaching, research and practice online since 1997, its latest variation being www.futurepresent.org, I saw no personal or public benefit to having my own blog.
Indeed, the dissolution of Gillmor’s Bayosphere epitomises the apathy that lingers in this techno-shakeout. The counter-side to grassroots blogs’ transformation of White House politics, the re-distribution of power between the music industry moguls and, ahem, Microsoft, via DRM, Murdoch’s purchase of MySpace, ‘King’ Chad and ‘King’ Steve’s inability to hide their glee at having just earned $1.65 billion from Google’s snap up of YouTube, all epitomise the re-institutionalisation of the periphery.
Recently, Jakob Nielsen re-emphasised the participation inequality inherent in collaborative networked culture. I’m in the 9 of his 90-9-1 rule: 90% of users are lurkers; 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time; 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions. If we are to listen to Pew Internet, this trend will only be exarcebated by the fact that that 90-9-1 ratio will soon be drawn from a far smaller pool of netizens. According to Pew Internet, ‘tech “refuseniks” will emerge as a cultural group characterized by their choice to live off the network. Some will do this as a benign way to limit information overload, while others will commit acts of violence and terror against technology-inspired change’. Living my 10-year-old daughter’s and my 3-year-old son’s love of the net everyday, I can’t see theirs being the counter-Net Generation yet. The future will tell.
But my choice not to blog has actually been based on just not having anything to say that could feature in any significant way in this counter-counter-counter x 
hyperreality. As Baudrillard says,
Every movement distancing us from a point also brings us closer to that same point. This is true with respect to time as well. Every noticeable movement of history brings us imperceptibly closer to its antipode, indeed to its point of departure. This is the end of linearity. Viewed from this perspective, the future no longer exists. And if there is no future, neither is there an end anymore….What we have to deal with is a paradoxical process of reversion, a reversal of effect with respect to modernity which, having reached its speculative limit and extrapolated all its virtual developments, disintegrates into its rudimentary components through a catastrophic process of recurrence and turbulence'.
‘[T]he eternity of suspended thought...But thought suspended, what remains for us to know, poor Cartesian animals that we are, poor thinking machines?'
I wasn’t entirely inactive throughout the last decade, but each minor form of activism seemed impotent. I became marginally involved in Schnews in 2002-2003, breaking from general apathy to take part in the anti-Iraq-war protests in London and Brighton prior to the invasion of Iraq in October and November 2002. I took part again in the post invasion protest in London in February 2003. After the biggest series of demonstrations, on 15 February 2003, New York Times writer Patrick Tyler claimed that they showed that there were two superpowers on the planet, the United States and worldwide public opinion. Dominique Reynié ascertains that between the 3 January and 12 April 2003, 36 million people took part in almost 3,000 protests against the Iraq war around the world (cited in Callinicos, Socialist Worker Online, 19 March 2005). That constitutes a relatively short time-span in a series of protests that have lasted until April 2006. The Socialist Worker is wrong: anti-war protests don’t make a difference.
I consoled myself in the anti-humanist position that humanity is one diddly event in spacetime. That our technologies have pushed the species way beyond its use-by date. Nomo. No big whoop.
Still from Chidren of Men 2006
Courtesy: The Islington Gazette
But ‘as well as to weakness and exhaustion’, does the postmodern ‘appeal to too much strength, to superabundant vitality, to the ennui of idleness’ (Jack London). This ennui culminated recently when I took my cinema seat to watch ‘Children of Men’ The narrative envisages an infertile world one generation from now. Britain, the last ‘civilised’ stronghold, is falling into the hands of anarchic proto-activists and a fascistic state intolerant of the refugees sprawling inside its borders. To stay and watch the film in its entirety was to very consciously choose not to avoid the reality I’ve long avoided in my travels through hyperreality. I was the worst kind of cinema buddy: I cried for the entirety of the film; I cried afterwards; and the next day. This may be an intermix of P D James, Sexton and Cuarón’s vision of 2027, but for me it’s the future present; the evolving materialisation of an Orwellian dystopia. To loosen the mood, I opted for amnesia once more. A temporary one. I brought my son and daughter into this world in full-consciousness of all the above, but under the pretext that life is for living. I say pretext, because I then forgot to live it. My anti-humanism, indeed any theoretical perspective to which I’ve ever given credence, self-destructs when I share life with my children. I want for them a life of happiness and longevity.
So in my v 3.0 I’ve come out of the other side and chosen the protean. Like Haraway, I can no longer be simply oppositional, '[r]ather I am...implicated, knowing, ignorant, worried and hopeful’. I’m reseeking a generative vision.
I want to begin a metadiscussion of the actuality of activism in networked media as well as generate my own activism online. I’ll seek to brush off the potential irrelevance of my intermediation; I do so in the knowledge of my own hypocrisy and my contempt for the more sanctimonious factions of activism. Though I’m not precluding that the way forward is not the ‘refusenik's’.
I've also submitted this post to the CEMP Interactive Media Community, where it's received a series of comments and influenced Mike Molesworth to expand the discussion about Online Activism to the CEMP Interactive Media Community Forum, where it has curiously evolved into a discussion about p2p.
