Alley daze

ArtForum, Dec, 1996 by Andrew Ross

The explosion of multimedia features - real audio, shockwave, downloadable video clips, animated GIF files - on the graphic-intensive World Wide Web is responsible not only for the numerous traffic jams plaguing the superhighway this year but also for the rapid ascendancy of the Internet itself. After all, it was the Web that brought the shopping malls, the advertisers, the financial real estate, indeed the entire world of commercial agents in hot pursuit of good addresses from which to promote and shop their wares. Once the barbarians were on the Web, there was no looking back. While distasteful to Net purists, the new commercial presence had little difficulty, initially at least, in fitting in with the open architectural milieu of Net culture. Nothing in the religion of Net libertarianism seemed at odds with the laissez-faire ideals of the corporations. Except when it came to paying for stuff. A free market and freedom of speech are one thing, free products and shareware ethics are another. That little contradiction could be deferred when Wall Street was boosting Netscape and other Internet public offerings through the roof and venture capitalists were funding start-ups right, left, and center, but now industry pundits wonder whether profits can really be generated and sustained from a medium whose users have always taken "freedom of information" at its literal meaning - i.e., no billing, please! None of the business models - banner-based advertising, subscription, pay per use, metered bits, digital cash, microtransactions, consumer branding - used to sustain content-oriented Web sites seem to be working. While this could be viewed as a victory for the resident anarchist philosophy of the Net, it does not augur well for those who are willing to equate industry with the possibility of job creation.

Nothing better illustrates the laissez-faire ideals of the Net than this year's fight against the Communications Decency Act's ban on online indecency and offensive speech, overturned in the courts after intensive activity by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other lobby groups from the Internet community (as well as the ACLU and a number of gay/lesbian civil-rights groups). If you were a Netizen in good standing, you would have received a barrage of E-mail postings about this life-or-death crusade for free speech. By contrast, the fact that Congress threw the welfare state down the toilet this year barely registered online at all. So fierce is the Internet doctrine of untrammeled individualism that it translates into a general phobia about any government activities, and not just those directly affecting the new media. This is unfortunate because it means that the overriding commercial principle in the Web-oriented sector will be the free pursuit of profit rather than the publicly assisted creation of decent paying jobs. Like all other sectors of the economy, Internet industries have been penetrated by the low-wage revolution, from the janitors who service Silicon Valley to the graphic designers who service Silicon Alley. There are jobs in cyberspace, but they don't pay that much. No less than in the arts and education, creative work there is undercompensated because of the invisible wages that come in the form of psychological rewards for personally satisfying work. At a time when no one is immune to the plague of low-wage labor, it's important that artists, educators, writers, and designers see this informal arrangement for what it is - and speak out against the exploitation of the prestige of cultural work to keep down wages in a market where labor supply will always outstrip demand.

Take the case of Silicon Alley, the first new culture industry, nay the first new urban industry, to emerge in New York in well over a generation. Breathlessly heralded in the city's media organs as a superrush of adrenalin to the urban economy and culture alike, the Alley is customarily described as running in a thin strip from 23rd Street almost down to Wall Street itself, and as populated by creative East Coast hipsters (as opposed to Palo Alto techies and Bay Area self-styled supergeeks). The much-lionized emergence of the new media has also drawn on the human resources and skills of the downtown art world, creating some accomplished new art sites like ada 'web (http://adaweb.com) and Artnetweb (adding to older, invaluable art-world resources like Echo and The Thing and newer ones like Rhizome). Its webzines like Word (http://word.com), Feed (http://www.feedmag.com), Urban Desires (http://desires.com), and Slim (http://www.stim.com) already form an independent sector of original-content publishing, distinct in feel and opinion from industry-lifestyle-oriented Hot Wired and Microsoft's power-oriented Slate. No one yet believes that Web journalism, art, and multimedia performance have matured - the scene is often likened to early TV, when radio shows were reissued in new formats - but there is much that is promising and much more to look forward to.