History of TechnoSurrealism

= # The <nowiki>TechnoSurrealist</nowiki> Manifesto =

by [http://deoxy.org/news/view/feed/rusirius R.U. Sirius]

~~"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

bore you repeating the old arguments about how the net--and - and mediated

communications culture itself--puts - puts intellectual property, the nation

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

say it once more, straight out: [Deoxy:index/Intellectual_Improperty The whole situation around information as property isn't resolvable.] We need a social system that doesn't require

property isn't resolvable. We need a social system that doesn't require

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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