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= # The <nowiki>TechnoSurrealist</nowiki> Manifesto = |
~~"EVERYONE IS A COMPLETE DISAPPOINTMENT!"--John Giorno~~,, |
~~"Your idea is crazy, but it isn't crazy enough to be true."--Neils Bohr~~ |
++Technoculture, or cyberculture as it is called in the vulgate, has been through four ideational stages. The purpose and intention of this document is to announce the fifth. These ideational stages are:++ |
<toc> |
== # Pure Nerdism (1976-1988) == |
;;Technoculture was truly a small subculture in these early days. Nerds had |
some shared beliefs and ethics, like the much maligned "Information wants to |
be free." Ironically, they didn't particularly care about sharing them. |
They were not interested in getting terribly involved with politics (or |
girls). They were too busy hacking to pontificate. They weren't into hype. |
;;''Then I came along.'' |
== # Technoanarchy: the MONDO 2000 epoch (1989-1992) == |
;;In this glorious epoch, my friends and I induced confused, stoned youths in |
the thousands (well, maybe hundreds) to wander soul-naked and bloody |
starkers raving mad into the badlands of cyberspace. It was a time of great |
exuberance and imagination as we apprehended and celebrated the media |
anarchy implicit in the vastness and chaos of the digital terrain. And it |
was a time of great gibberish when fractal geometry and chaos theory could |
be wielded to induce people to write for five cents per word. Nobody |
questioned the wisdom of the technoanarchist avant-garde. |
;;''After all, we were all on smart pills.'' |
== # <no>Technolibertarianism:</no> the Wired epoch (1993 - March 12, 1998) == |
;;And then, suddenly, any Republican post-industrialist corporate boomer in |
possession of more imagination than the average accountant was presented |
before the just-now-forming digital masses as a wild anti-government |
visionary. What cable TV subscriber could resist the curious pull of such |
counterintuitive statements as "VIACOM DOESN'T SUCK"? Who could fail to be |
fascinated by a libertarian magazine campaigning against state control and |
excesses in copyright, while employing an expensive, pitbull legal team to |
enact a campaign in defense of its trademark that threatened to colonize the |
entire English language? And who could resist cyberNewt Gingrich and the |
Republican revolution as they mustered whatever political power they could; |
from corporate America's over-taxed tills, from her heroic anti-drug |
warriors, from her poor huddled underfunded defense establishment, in order |
to fight the good fight against the black teenage mothers who so |
ruthlessly dominated this great (if soon to be obsolete) nation state? |
== # Technorealism (March 12-19, 1998) == |
;;It had become apparent that, after two consecutive epochs wired on |
hyperbolic technobabble, the intelligencia, needed to crash. So a small |
group of intellectuals bent on truth and a book contract had a brilliant... |
er... um... at least sobering idea: What if we were to continue the trend, |
and make each digital epoch more dreary than the last? What if we were to |
lay claim to digital reality itself, defining it in language so stilted, |
with ideas so mind-numbingly simplistic and obvious, so soporific that a |
dazed cyberpopulis, already rendered doofus from data shock, might just sign |
on? And in the course of cyberevents, both great and small, we may |
sufficiently impress Random House or perhaps St. Martin's Press? |
== # TechnoSurrealism March 20, 1998 - Dec 21, 2012 == |
=== * The <no>TechnoSurrealist</no> Manifesto === |
:"And ever since I have had a great desire to show forbearance to scientific musing, however unbecoming, in the final analysis, from every point of view. Radio? Fine. Syphilis? If you like. Photography? I don't see any reason why not. The cinema? Three cheers for darkened years. War? Gave us a good laugh. The telephone? Hello. Youth? Charming white hair. Try to make me say thank you: Thank you. Thank you."--~~Andre Breton, ''The Surrealist Manifesto''~~ |
''++Consensus reality is dead! Watch your overcoat.++'' |
=== * Forget Technorealism === |
;;Forget Technorealism. Realism without imagination is mere reductionism. |
Realism is not a realistic response to accelerating change. As we |
approach the apotheosis of the interpenetration of human lives and media, |
and anarchic democratic access to the means of communication, we sense the |
eruption of levels of mediated [Deoxy:cognitivechaos.htm cognitive chaos] that is beyond our |
abilities to comprehend, predict, or define. And while tenured academics |
might dream of slowing this digital demon down that it might be parsed in |
a spirit of Amish-like rectitude, there is no solid ground upon which to |
examine the corpus of current techno-sociopolitical reality. The whole |
notion of a shared consensus, some kind of social center, is decaying at a |
fever clip and youths raised on the net and the web won't even recognize |
the cultural and political assumptions that are still parroted today, |
albeit with less and less conviction |
;;Attempts to reverse undesirable trends of real importance, like [Deoxy:korten_index.htm the |
increasing gulf between the rich and the poor], or the fact that [Deoxy:pdfa/ a nation |
of pod people will tolerate corporate testing of bodily fluids without |
screaming bloody revolution], are not serviced by a tepid set of |
rationalist principles aimed at unseating a small, perceived |
techno-utopian elite whose influence is limited and waning anyway. Pay |
attention to the rabble, on the streets or on the web. Then you'll |
understand that the primary political polarity of our age isn't |
technolibertarians vs. neo-Luddites, it's between those who believe in |
everything (gray aliens, The Gnomes of Zurich and every conspiracy theory |
that slithers across the net, ad infinitum) and those who believe in |
nothing (unless you can tie it in to a snide quip about The Brady Bunch or |
Mork and Mindy). And both sides are, implicitly, supporters of |
TECHNOSURREALISM. Whether they know it or not. |
=== * The Problem of Money === |
;;Digital communication is a dissipative, boundary-disrupting tool. I won't |
state, the money system, even the well-defined self, into crisis. You can |
read the back issues of Mondo 2000 and Wired yourselves. It should be enough |
to simply remind people that just because a situational description has |
grown tiresome through repetition, or has been adapted by people whose |
political leanings you don't particularly like, that doesn't make it untrue. |
And I apologize to all of the writers who, like myself, are struggling |
within the economics of digital capitalism, but you are going to have to |
struggle for an end to society being organized around economics, not for |
greater copyright protection! (When photographers for ''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Hours_in_Cyberspace 24 Hours in |
Cyberspace]'' took pictures of the Zapatistas, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos |
thought the pictures should belong to the photographer's subject.). You |
can't count beans in a flood, and you shouldn't want to, all right? |
;;Throughout the 20th century, starting with the <no>Dada/Surrealists</no>, |
individuals who were too alive and imaginative to stomach horseshit have |
argued for an end to [Deoxy:tcrime.htm#work wage slavery], This was premature in the 1930's. In |
the digital age, it's absolutely necessary. The solid, secure, |
agricultural/industrial era, production-oriented forms of labor have been |
displaced by automation and dissipated by the global work force. <b>There |
has never before been a time in history where a majority of people have |
been forced to hustle so pointlessly, toiling the fields of hype, |
poisoning the real and conceptual environment with utterly bogus product, |
desperately servicing invented needs, building massive unnecessary |
arsenals, clearcutting the forests, and always demanding that their |
self-interests, however obsolete, be protected, instead of demanding the |
transformation of a social system that will make them do anything for |
money, even ask Big Brother to reach into the privacy of individual homes |
to make sure nobody is copying anything for free, which is the only way to |
carry traditions of intellectual property into the high tech world.</b> I'll |
artists and software writers (or anybody) to make money. |
==== * Is anybody with me? ==== |
;;''Of course you are.'' |
==== * Information Wants to be Free and so do I ==== |
~~"You must have chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star."--Nietzsche~~ |
;;This is the decade of the tight asshole. Intellectuals who you presumed |
to be at least 50% sane will suddenly start justifying the de facto |
censorship of a film based on a [http://www.nabokov.com/books.html book by Nabokov]. Seems that every time |
you turn around, someone else is buying or selling a huge bale of |
horseshit in the name of social responsibility. A stifling, smug centrism |
trickles down like day-old piss, from that horndog in the White House to |
the blockhead in each of us. The next person who bores me gets a [Wikipedia:Ketamine Ketamine] |
dart between the eyes. I've done all I can with language. The age of |
technosurrealism has already exceeded the Age of Reason and now it is |
over, too. Go home to your husbands, wives and children. [Deoxy:news/view/ODD Reality is a |
stranger to us all.] |
;;R.U. Sirius |
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