http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/zkp/spew.txt

SPEW
excess and moderation on the networks

Matthew Fuller




I have a secret to let you into. The internet was predicted by 
the Berlin Dada group in a 1918 manifesto. Check this out:

        "The highest art will be that which in its conscious content 
presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has 
been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is 
forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday's crash. The 
best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour 
snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract 
of life, who, with bleeding hands and hearts, hold fast to the 
intelligence of their time."1

They made one mistake however. Rather than come to resolution in 
the dismally heroic figure of the plasma-guzzling blister-
fingered artist, the nets switch the focus to actually embodying 
and inducing that frenzied cataract of life - as it sucks in 
limbs, art and consciousness and resolves them as a rhizomatic 
spew of shattered intelligence.

Rather then, than present a sociological disquisition on the 
culture of the networks it's best to treat this text as the 
transcripts of a sequences of road rages on the information 
super highway.

Sequence One:
A second in the life of the internet. Thousands of people across 
the globe are indulging in furious bouts of lobotomised 
libidinal typing. Islamic astrologers, office bombers and 
terrorist wannabes announce their glorious intentions to the 
world; fuckers of vacuum cleaners are exchanging tips on new 
models; the private security firm Group Four are checking up on 
UK environmental activists via their very own GreenNet account; 
statistics flagellants are giving it some; and, say this was a 
few weeks before US Intervention in Haiti, according to Time 
magazine, we could see amongst the leech fanciers and bridge 
players whiling away the idle hours, CIA PsyOps teams taking 
part in the virtual community by sending, "ominous e-mail 
messages to some members of Haiti's oligarchy who had personal 
computers."2

I certainly don't want to deny the copywriting skills of the 
state's crack public relations squads a chance to flower on the 
Internet. But, I do think it means that we can pretty much ditch 
the idea of the Virtual Community.

Rather than particularly wishing to dwell on notions of 
community as the pre-eminent model of a networked socius I want 
to look at wider dynamics of information movement and the 
intersection of what is in the abstract an open system, with 
manners of speech, cultural poise and economics that mitigate 
against it being such. It might even be possible that the 
totalising metaphor of the 'community' and the false warmth from 
its hearth both masks a wider and more radical conflagration and 
fails in it's supposed task of providing people with the tools 
to negotiate the increasing subsumption of the networks with the 
imaginary, and the attenuating dynamics, of the market

The internet constitutes a bifurcation in information dynamics. 
As an event it is exemplarily complex and cannot be reduced to 
the sum of the factors that make it possible. A politics of the 
networks therefore, will of necessity be just as seething with 
what George Bataille called, 'those linked series of deceptions, 
exploitations and manias that give a temporal order to the 
apparent unreason of history'3 On with the road rage.

money as money as information as money as culture as money as 
money
At the time of the Enclosures in Britain when common lands where 
expropriated by a newly emerging type of elite in order to 
develop what would become agribusiness and the cash crop 
economy, one of the slogans that could be heard in the many 
riots, acts of sabotage and demonstrations that occurred in 
opposition to this process was, "the thief is hanged who steals 
the goose from the common, but not he who steals the common from 
the goose". Whilst the enclosures initiated the basic device of 
'original accumulation'4 and provided a population dislocated 
from any source of economic self-production they have not been a 
once and for all process. The restructuring forced since the 
seventies by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund 
result in massive scale action replays of this eternally 
returning technique.
        The internet at present is in some ways similar to the stage 
which the mobile phone economy was at some years ago. When it 
was exploding as a retail opportunity not much thought was, for 
instance, given to the possibility of criminals cashing in. Now 
that the economy is beginning to 'mature' features such as 
hardware and signal security, variations in tariffs, and so on 
are used both as specific inducements to the consumer, and as a 
way of maintaining territory and consolidating ground by the 
various competing or allied companies. The loopholes they wipe 
out are, not suprisingly, often the kind of places where the 
most interesting thing happen.
        If, as Bruce Sterling notes, in talking about Prague, it's a 
common dream for skilled people to be able to do 'Western work 
at a western salary from a rent fixed'5 east European domicile 
it's also already the case that low-paid women in South London 
for instance are being hooked up to telephones to provide an 
array of grunts, whispers and saucy chatter to callers from the 
US. The internet might well be seen as another way of farming 
out this kind of labour to areas with cheaper more pliable 
workforces rather than bringing in better wages. Even skilled 
work such as, "Software research and design is now being done by 
local computer specialists in India, Russia and Poland."6 Given 
the general movement of economies it's unlikely that we'll see 
the internet - of necessity - instigating a kinder, gentler kind 
of money for people at the bottom of the fiscal gravity well.
        The basic problem with actual existing, or any postulated 
idealisations of markets, and monetary systems in general, is 
that they tend to hook up all activity as the motor to drive 
profit. Any remaining 'non-productive areas of energy 
expenditure'7 are liable to annexation and subordination to the 
discipline of 'doing something useful'. At the same time, money 
remains dependent on other types of energy distribution that are 
often beyond it, and which at other times it silently parasites. 
From the production of new babies to the rest of the vast 
majority of 'womens' work' - which is hardly even graced with a 
name; and from free, usually criminalised, raves to, again 
usually criminalised graffiti writing, the dynamics of money are 
often highly peripheral to - but wholly dependent on - a 
multitude of these almost invisible subsidies.
        Both the tactics of everyday life and the conscious refusal 
of the mass consensual hallucination that is money mean that 
reducing anything to pure utility can only ever be a botch-job. 
Nevertheless, as for instance the financial markets' feeding 
frenzy over the floatation of Netscape indicates, the techniques 
that turn urban working class areas into mazes of churches and 
off-licences, are currently being stripped down and retooled for 
the potential enclosure of the nets.
        The world of virtual real estate however is infinitely 
expandable. The menus stretch for miles. What is excluded from 
these hysterically clean operations no longer matters. Ideas 
become luxury goods. Cybersex is realised: as a rationed, 
straight down the line monitored service of the facilitative 
delivery of health club sensualism. Non-productive areas of 
energy expenditure are expunged, marginalised or conversely, 
used as attractive bait
        And, what is most effective about the rhythm of enclosure, 
the making productive of the internet, is that it just makes 
things punishingly dull. Proprietary culture remakes cyberspace 
in its own image as a 'non-place'8, 
filled with efficient productive function after efficient 
productive function.
        Consider this chirpy claim from Peter Cochrane, head of 
advanced applications and technologies at British 
Telecommunications laboratories:
"My mission statement is to boldly go and be first 
technologically, managerially and operationally. I have 
instituted electronic working throughout my department, and I 
now communicate in a semimathematical form with my people. My e-
mail replies might go something like 'A=OK, Go. P' or 'B+C=No, 
don't think it's a good idea, let's talk. P' or 'D=Wow, I agree. 
P".9
        Whilst this might originally come on like the blissful 
gibberish of the sainted or the mad - people who speak in binhex 
- Cochrane's language is that of the damaged corporate 
speedfreak: transit lounge semaphore; ideograms so specific that 
they refer only to the act of misapprehending them; jargon as 
munitions designed to have a specific and instrumental 
cretinising effect on the brain. Not waving but drowning. 
Compare this to the exuberance of inventive typographical, 
syntactical and phonetic styling found in many BBSs...
        It is the non-speech of featureless New Towns, as vacant as 
the arbitrarily designated 'meeting points' that you find in 
larger train stations. It is what passes for conversation in the 
tract housing for the virtual community, in the kennels of 
Nicholas Negroponte's augmented yuppies. Capitalist 
Stakhanovite.
        However, money too senses the promise of delirium, the 
promise of excess as a mechanism for reinstating 'the order of 
things'10 Consider this promo blurb for a forthcoming on-line 
shopping service laid out like a magical palace:
        "Join us on a voyage of discovery. _Conjuring the splendour 
of ages past and incorporating the technological wizardry of 
tomorrow's world to create a shopping destination without peer. 
Our journey is well advanced and has led to new worlds of 
shopping which inspire desires...
        ((In Casual Collections, discover everything for your weekend 
wardrobe. In Spirit, experience the leading edge of club and 
street fashion. In Kids' Universe, ingenuous dreams take 
shape.))
        Chance upon exclusive features such as Home Office, Men's 
Designer Room, Garden and Terrace, Ladies' Outerwear, a truly 
unrivalled Ladies' Shoe Department as well as the first phase of 
Furniture World, with many more to follow.
        By using our up to the minute data-tracking services we aim 
to exceed your expectations of a truly personalised service. By 
knowing more about you, our merchandise and the services which 
we offer we are able to provide you with friendly, informal help 
and advice - making shopping with us always enjoyable, 
enlightening and unique.
        Log-on now and experience a complete shopping environment on 
a voyage of change, of innovation and exclusivity. It is a 
journey which as a Gold Account Member you will find 
particularly rewarding.
        You will be suprised. You will be inspired_"11

statistical analysis of zombie migration through the internet 

Relentlessly inspiring, the matrix of insipid desire demands you 
to Be Yourself, give good data-set, be rewarded_ and in the 
process poses a fundamental problem to the dizzied shopper. "How 
can man find himself - or regain himself - seeing that the 
action to which the search commits him in one way or another is 
precisely what estranges him from himself?"12
        Nevertheless, for culture as text fans the internet is still 
top thesis fodder. Providing a way out of the problem posed by 
the struggle for existence at the forefront of contemporary 
elegance, the World Wide Web has attracted hordes of the kind of 
people who live for the opportunity to make your leaving a 
message on their answering machine a really satisfying Quality 
Experience. Free Speech for the Dumb results in a putrescent 
cornucopia of niche hegemonies and inbreed monomanias.Here, the 
economy of accumulation becomes feverishly voluntaristic. Added 
value downgrades into clique maintenance. Enter the world of 
cosy mailing lists and on-line conferences whose existence seems 
to be largely that of manufacturing an ethnographer's fantasy of 
indigenous life: a closed world 'about which everything there is 
to now about is already known' whose group narratives are 
constantly reaffirmed with knee-jerk exactitude from 
participants all round the world.
        I remember joining one mailing list on a subject about which 
I was particularly excited and being amazed at how soon I was 
effectively rendered speechless by the glib back-slapping of the 
largely US audience of liberal academics. And here I use the 
word audience advisedly, for the purpose of people coming 
together as the list, was it seemed, neither for the purposes of 
interpretation or of developing knowledge but of the shared 
recognition of an already understood and common mythology. 
Predictably enough, the object of contemplation for this beta-
blocked agora was something that lividly cried out for 
colonisation because of the sheer resistant challenge it 
presents to the discourse of dickwits.


Where do you want to go today?

        As a variation on this tendency I think we can also look 
forward to the happy day when certain internet sites become, in 
effect, venerable institutions. Usually by default, or out of 
sheer bloody minded longevity.
        Additionally we can expect to see historic revival zones on 
the net recreating and restoring the precious collective 
heritage of the Virtual Community. Wait for an entire and 
scrupulously accurate reproduction of Arpanet, endless reruns of 
the first few weeks of Minitel Rose, the once-in-a-lifetime 
chance to experience being a segment of the Robert Morris worm. 
Historical moments - where one is immersed and spat out like a 
pin-ball - belched from one past into another. The market, with 
its hypertrophied imaginary of efficiency and productivity, is 
not alone in the stupidisation of the nets.

no header

Throughout this text I have been ripping off tracks from George 
Bataille's theories of a general economy: dynamics of energy 
circulation in which the movement and expenditure of wealth are 
brought to the fore. Whilst I have described two particular 
tendencies that are closing down the fecundity and vitality of 
the nets there will not come a point when we are "left with only 
critique as a weapon".13 As Bataille points out, "domination is 
never total, and in a deep sense it is only a comedy: It never 
deceives more than partly, while in the propitious darkness a 
new truth turns stormy."14 In other words; we need to carry on 
being funky, stupid, intruging and generous. 
        The electronic world is by no means fully established, and 
itself induces this stormy fluidity through invention. It is the 
sheer prodigality of the nets which autoproduces itself as a 
dehegemonising mechanism if nothing else. Within the context of 
a ravenously globalising system, in which information is both 
prime currency and prime commodity, the nets as a dynamic in 
which information is consumated, becomes useless, and dissipates 
are extremely seductive and threatening in a way that reiterates 
the ceaseless prodigality of the sun.
        The Superabundance of the nets provokes consumation or 
dissipation - inducing the withdrawal of energy from the 
discipline of productive or 'meaningful' consumption. Word bombs 
explode, ripple down your spine, across the screen and down the 
wires into a labile pandaemonium. Local intelligence is 
amplified into a global exuberance of energy.

        "In the Universe as a whole, energy is available without 
limit, but on the human scale which is ours, we are lead to take 
into account the quantity of energy we have at our disposal"15 
The nets are a way of at the same time expanding this human 
scale to an unknowable level of amplification, and 
simultaneously invading the human scale with something that 
drastically reconfigures it into a new plane of consistency. 
Down come the borders.
        On the nets, being - culture - is grasped in the ambiguity of 
being accomplished, something modified by transformations 
resulting from successive influences. In an era of state I.D. 
cards, DNA databases, and increasing demands to Be Yourself and 
behave, multiple identities become an absolute necessity - if 
only for avoiding paying taxes. As has been widely noted, the 
nets provide a fertile playground for disruptive experiment, 
getting out of the sadistic loop of control. Things are flipping 
out of the order of things.
        What emerges though, as this fucked up potlach of libidinal 
typing, is not some salmon leap out of our skins into a sublime, 
transcendental realm of white formica and global communion but 
something far messier and more interesting, whose sticky 
contents horrify, bore, and seduce us. This is the Invisible 
Insurrection of a Million Minds as a multitude of ridiculous,
drastically contaminated apostates spewing monsters from their 
modems.


© Matthew Fuller 1995


1Berlin Dada Manifesto 1918, cited in Hans Richter, dada, art 
and anti-art, trans. David Britt, Thames and Hudson, London, 
1978
2 Mark Thompson, Plotting a War Game, Time International, Vol. 
146, No. 9, August 21, 1995
3 George Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume One, Trans. Robert 
Hurley, Zone Books, New York 1991, page 73
4 Midnight Notes Collective, Introduction to the New Enclosures, 
Midnight Notes 10, Autumn 1990
5 Bruce Sterling, Triumph of the Plastic People, Wired 3.01, 
January 1995
6 Michael Lind, To Have and to Have Not, Harper's Magazine, June 
1995
7 George Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume One, Trans. Robert 
Hurley, Zone Books, New York 1991
8 Marc Aug , Non-places, introduction to an anthropology of 
supermodernity, trans. John Howe, Verso, London, 1995
9 Peter Cochrane in 'All Wired Up and Raring to Go', New 
Scientist No. 1989, 5th August 1995
10 George Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume One, Trans. 
Robert Hurley, Zone Books, New York 1991
11 Adapted from Selfridges brochure, autumn 1995
12 George Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume One, Trans. 
Robert Hurley, Zone Books, New York 1991 p 131
13 Critical Art Ensemble, Nomadic Power and Cultural Resistance, 
in the Electronic Disturbance, Semiotext(e) / Autonomedia, New 
York 1994
14 George Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume One, Trans. 
Robert Hurley, Zone Books, New York 1991 p 133
15 George Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume Two, Trans. 
Robert Hurley, Zone Books, New York 1993, p. 187


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