theory

Continuing a run of posts on digital theorist Geert Lovink, his post Underground Networks in the Age of Web 2.0 merits a read. I disagree with parts of this statement, however:

The actual use of Web 2.0 is what counts here, not how op-eds and columnists frame the topics of the day. What we think is ‘happening’ is an outcome of the reconfiguration of the social, in favor of informal spheres, a media ecology in which we constantly check what’s going on. The erosion of official media will only make it harder to define what a true ‘underground’ looks like. Hiding in the abandoned normalcy is, and always has been an option, but with the decline of Pop, it is becoming less and less sexy to survive in suburbia. Mashups and reappropriation techniques have exhausted themselves. The ruins of the industrial age have been recolonized and turned into valuable real estate. Squatting empty office spaces, symbols of the post-industrial era, has yet to take off—and may never happen because of harsh legal and surveillance regimes. Nothing is left behind. Abandoned space itself has become scarce—except the desert.

It's unclear where the line is drawn in this paragraph between urban space as a metaphor and actual urban space. In any case, mashups and reappropriation techniques haven't exhausted themselves, even if Lovink is bored with them. In fact it's interesting that they continue below the level of copyright cop surveillance. Discussing cell phone activists knowing when to turn off their phones, Lovink talks about the "seventh sense one has to develop to locate the present surveillance video cameras." It may be that the remixer/masher/datamosher has developed the same radar for avoiding copyright harassment (which often disguises political motives).

Peter Ludlow, writing in The Nation:

WikiLeaks is not the one-off creation of a solitary genius; it is the product of decades of collaborative work by people engaged in applying computer hacking to political causes, in particular, to the principle that information-hoarding is evil—and, as Stewart Brand said in 1984, "Information wants to be free." Today there is a broad spectrum of people engaged in this cause, so that were Assange to be eliminated today, WikiLeaks would doubtless continue, and even if WikiLeaks were somehow to be eliminated, new sites would emerge to replace it.

"Doubtless" is a fudge word, possibly because strong differing opinions are out there. Geert Lovink, in his Ten Theses on Wikileaks, says:

Wikileaks is a typical SPO (Single Person Organization). This means that initiative-taking, decision making, and the execution process is largely centralized in the hands of one single person. Much like small and medium-size businesses the founder cannot be voted out and unlike many collectives leadership is not rotating.

Lovink also says this about Wikileaks, reminding us of the type of mentality a certain academic-style essay recently, oddly tried to pair with late-'90s "relational aesthetics":

Wikileaks is also an organization deeply shaped by 1980s hacker culture combined with the political values of techno-libertarianism which emerged in the 1990s. The fact that Wikileaks has been founded, and is still to a large extent run by hard core geeks, forms an essential frame of reference to understand its values and moves. This, unfortunately, comes together with a good dose of the somewhat less savory aspects of hacker culture. Not that idealism, the desire to contribute to making the world a better place, could be denied to Wikileaks, quite on the contrary. But this idealism is paired with a preference for conspiracies, an elitist attitude and a cult of secrecy (never mind condescending manners) which is not conducive to collaboration with like minded people and groups – reduced to the position of simple consumers of Wikileaks outcomes.

Writing about Lost's first season, Alan N. Shapiro noted:

After the plane crash... Dr. Jack Shephard is instantaneously transported into a situation of proximity and solidarity with a motley collection of his struggling fellow human beings. It is a golden opportunity for deep bonds to form. Yet Jack's initial predicament of not being able to attend to his own wound while working frantically to save the lives of others is a brilliant metaphorical commentary on the present-day hyper-modern translation of Heidegger's "constant activity." In globalized media and corporate culture, Crash and Catastrophe are the only ways for interruptions of the continuous drone of organized and institutionalized mere busyness to take place.

Shapiro saw Lost in '04 as the "Crash Out of Globalization and into the World." Six years later the series has ended and revealed itself as globalization's "bardo state" (a term from the Tibetan Book of the Dead): parallel universes bleeding into parallel universes before ultimate rebirth as... what? Beyond the pure white light we don't know. After the initial hint that the series would take us "out of globalization" and into a world free of "organized busyness," it turned out to be the world we know in a high speed blender. A million cliff-hangers later, it became apparent that crash and catastrophe were not going to interrupt the continuous drone of our daily lives but would in fact be part of its fabric.

Critics may sneer but Lost ultimately shines with the same mind-warping, black hole sun radiation as Philip K. Dick's Ubik and Cronenberg's Videodrome. The same writers ho-humming that the show was turning into a standard good vs evil parable were caught short by the naked Buddhism of the final episode. Usually "it's all a dream" is a cheat, but it can also work. Dick's Ubik is no less compelling for learning that most of the characters are deceased, living on in cryo-sleep, and influenced by the stronger thought patterns of the adjacent dead as well as people communicating with them from another time continuum.

The character of Eloise Hawking could be Lost's Glen Runciter (a living person in Ubik), just as Jack is its Joe Chip (dead guy). She plays with elaborate charts in a special room, mingling the occult and quantum physics, to observe and communicate with the dead's preserved selves in the tesseract field (A. A. Attanasio's idea of the recoverable pattern of energy that survives the death of the individual, spreading out through space), somehow focused by the Island's pockets of electromagnetic energy. Meanwhile the dead act out the dramas of the bardo state, a continuous rehash of their lives in the fast paced, time-contracting world that we, by implication, still inhabit. In one of the final states (so the Book of the Dead has it), the deceased are consumed with visions of bodies intertwined in lovemaking, and in the final Lost episode "soulmates" come together. When they are "ready" (which serial murderer Ben Linus is not) they move on to the next state.

"Long live the New Flesh," says James Woods in Videodrome, before taking his own life. Cronenberg doesn't show us what happens next, either.

Update: I had the title of Shapiro's text wrong - fixed now - minor corrections have been made to the paragraph where I mentioned it.

Couple of highlights from this interview with Alan N. Shapiro, in connection with an upcoming Geert Lovink-organized conference on the topic of Wikipedia:

[L]ike a lot of people, I think that Wikipedia could be improved. Community consensus about what constitutes legitimate-established knowledge is important, but so are the original insights of the individual scholar who has worked more deeply and insightfully on a particular subject than anyone else. A more sophisticated model for balancing these two contributory streams needs to be developed. This won't be easy. Right now consensus is tending to suppress the understanding of the really advanced scholar. Many Wikipedia articles are reproducing accepted clichés. This is related also to the tendency to make a fetish of information as opposed to knowledge. What is mere information and what is real knowledge? To get beyond the clichés, we need something like a renewed Marxist ideology critique. Gustave Flaubert did this very well about 140 years ago in his "Dictionary of Accepted Ideas." We don't need to compile a new "Dictionary of Accepted Ideas," because Wikipedia, considering one major element of its complex cultural constellation, already is such a dictionary.

And:

I have never understood why unpaid work of any kind, from housework to programming, could be regarded by anyone as utopian. Money is a reality, it's based on a rational system, albeit an economic system that needs to be radically improved. Artists, creators, intellectuals, nurses, dancers, activists, under-employed academics and scientists, down-and-outers, we all need to get paid. Let's focus our efforts on figuring out how to fight for our rights to prosperity, not accept poverty. Live long and prosper, Spock said. To voluntarily work without pay is a system of self-exploitation and self-surveillance. I love the book The Simulation of Surveillance by William Bogard. We need to go beyond Foucault-, Orwell-, and Huxley-inspired models of how contemporary quasi-totalitarian systems of social control work. Individual freedom right now is in big trouble. American hyper-reality, hyper-work, hyper-consumerism, hyper-communication, and hyper-eating today strike me in so many aspects as being systems of mutual- and self-surveillance. Ask anyone in authority or performing any official job anywhere in America any question, and you will always get a no before you get a yes. The current system of ubiquitous cell phones is also a system of mutual- and self-surveillance. My friends, family, and co-workers want me to permanently account for myself. Where am I, what am I doing, and what am I thinking? And I'm asking myself the same disciplinary questions. We don't need Big Brother anymore, since we are all keeping tabs on ourselves and each other.

Shapiro has been on a roll lately, especially in Europe. I first encountered him through his theoretical essays that "read Star Trek against Star Trek" (close comparison of individual episodes against the tenets of the Star Trek Industry), which stood out from the Ctheory context where they originally appeared. Odd that he only did two essays for them--possibly because Star Trek wasn't as "cool" for academics as Blade Runner, even though it has arguably far greater impact on the culture, since it is watched and enjoyed by the engineers and techies who make all our stuff. (That is a point Shapiro explored in his book, Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance, which is gradually building a rep in both the science fiction and Baudrillard studies communities.)

Shapiro is using Wikipedia subversively: his "user page" is a bio as detailed and useful as a "front end" Wikipedia page.

Update: Corrected spelling of Ctheory (took out hyphen).

Update 2: He now has a "real" Wikipedia page.