Embody the future - Voiceover - online activism - Brief Article

Afterimage, July-August, 2002 by Geert Lovink

Has power shifted to cyberspace, as the Critical Art Ensemble once claimed? Not so if we look at the countless street marches around the world. The Seattle movement against corporate globalization appears to have gained momentum--both on the street and on the Net. But can we really speak of a synergy between street protests and online hacktivism? No. But what both have in common is their conceptual stage--both real and virtual protests are in danger of getting stuck at the level of "demo design."

At first glance, reconciling the virtual and the real seems to be an attractive rhetorical act. Radical pragmatists like me have often emphasized the embodiment of online networks in real-life society, proving the inadequacy of the real versus virtual contradiction. Net activism, like the Internet itself, is always hybrid, a blend of the old and new, haunted by geography, gender, race and other political instances. There is no pure disembodied zone of global communication, as the 90s cyber-mythology claimed. However, such a critical position tends not to raise worrisome questions. Equations such as street plus cyberspace, art in science and techno-culture are all interesting interdisciplinary approaches, which have proved to have little effect beyond the symbolic level of dialogue and discourse. The fact is that established disciplines are in a defensive mode. The "new" movements and media are not yet mature enough to question the powers to be and lack sufficient leverage at the negotiating table. The claim t o "embody the future" in a conservative climate is becoming a weak and empty gesture.

On the other hand, the call of activists and artists to return to "real life" does not provide us with a solution to how alternative new media models can be lifted to the level of mass (pop) culture. Yes, street demonstrations raise solidarity levels and lift us up from the daily solitude of communicating through largely one-way media interfaces. Despite September II and its right-wing political fallout, social movements worldwide are gaining importance and visibility. We should however ask the question of what could come after the "demo version" of both new media developments and social movements. This isn't the heady 60s or 70s. The "conceptual" emphasis has hit the hard wall of demo design as Peter Lunenfeld described it in his book Snap to Grid. The question then becomes how to jump beyond the prototype? What comes after the masses have besieged yet another summit of CEOs and their politicians? How long can a movement stay virtual? Or to put it in technical terms, what comes after demo design, after the c ountless Powerpoint presentations and Flash animations? The feel-good factor of being an open, ever-growing crowd will sooner or later wear out when demo fatigue sets in.

There is an endless stream of inspiring new utopias, proposed software and interfaces, all nicely presented and full of imagination. However, many of them lack patient supporters who are going to do further research and implementation. Rather than making up yet another concept it is time to ask the question of how software, interfaces and alternative standards can be installed in society. It may no longer be sufficient to "wear" a successful subversive attitude. Even the good memes can die along the way. Ideas may take the shape of a virus, but society may hit back with even more successful immunization programs: appropriation, repression and neglect. What we face is a scalability crisis. Most movements and initiatives find themselves in a trap. The strategy of becoming "minor" is no longer a positive choice but the default option. It is no big deal to create auto-poetic systems, but is there an exit built in? Designing a successful cultural virus and getting millions of hits on your Web-log will not bring yo u beyond the level of short lived "spectacle." Culture jammers are no longer outlaws, but should be seen as sophisticated experts in communication guerilla tactics.

Instead of arguing for "reconciliation" between the real and virtual I would call for a rigorous involvement and implementation of social movements into technology. Instead of taking a cyber-punk derived "the future is now" position, a lot could be gained from a radical re-assessment of the techno revolutions of the last 10-15 years. For instance, if artists and activists can learn anything from the dot-com rise and subsequent fall it might be the importance of marketing. The attention economy of the dot-com eyeballs proved worthless. Dot-coms invested their entire venture capital in (old media) advertisements. Their belief that media-generated attention would automatically draw users to their sites and turn them into customers did not work. The same could be said of many activist sites.

* GEERT LOVINK is a Dutch media theorist and Internet critic, based in Sydney, Australia. He is co-founder of numerous Internet projects, amongst the community server The Digital City and the nettime mailinglist. In 2002 The MIT Press will publish Dark Fiber, his collected essays on Internet culture, and Uncanny Network, interviews with media theorists and artists.