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Friday, March 03, 2006 |
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William S Burroughs and New Media Pessimism |
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Just re-read William S Burroughs 1970 new media manifesto about the tape recorder, language, and the potential for using this new media to interact with the physical world.
A few things: The tape recorder was a handy playback device that could interact with the world around you in an immediate way. As Burroughs points out, if you play a tape of bullets being fired in the right situation, you can cause real bullets to be fired. You can also use the tape recorders to interact in real space, you can play back recordings and spliced audio on the subway.
But I'm having a hard time coming up with any ideas about how we might use the newer, much more broad tech of the internet in as direct a way. Plasma screen mirrors in Palestine and Chicago connected via internet 2? Flash mobs might be the most direct way we impact realspace with the internet.
But I think the internet might be asking us to think harder. We have this limited approach for public net.art, which is the ecstasy with which we realize the internet is a remote control with global reach. It seems like that's the relationship we have with the web, when we use it in real space. We use it to produce signs in cities we've never been to, or to impact the lighting of a gallery in another country. Remote controls, though, are kind of a disappointing use of tech.
Secondly, on the pessimism front, I am kind of struck by the way the web fits into Burroughs' expectations of tech. Word is a virus, he says. And technology is the science of developing better weaponry, or:
There are no games where everybody wins. That's what games are all about, winning and losing ... The Versailles Treaty ... Hitler dances the Occupation Jig ... War criminals hang at Nuremberg ...It is a rule of this game that there can be no final victory since this mean the end of the war game. Yet every player must believe in final victory and strive for it with all his power. Faced by the nightmare of final defeat he has no alternative. So all technologies with escalating efficiency produce more and more total weapons until we have the atom bomb which could end the game by destroying all players. Now mock up a miracle. The so stupid players decide to save the game. They sit down around a big table and draw up a plan for the immediate deactivation and eventual destruction of all atomic weapons. Why stop there? Conventional bombs are unnecessarily destructive if nobody has them hein?
The interesting thing is, the web was born out of the need to defend ourselves from atomic annihilation. So in a sense, it's a weapon more powerful than the nuclear bombs, using the paper beats scissors model. The net survives the atom bomb, so the net is the stronger weapon. Just like having an atom bomb in every home, we all have the web in our hands, and we're capable of using it either way: aggression, or not.
Right now, we're immersed in the transition from one to many media to many to many media. But now, we're still in a one to many medium. It's just that instead of three networks and five newspapers, we're looking at a half billion bloggers broadcasting their one way ideas to echo chambers of agreeing opinions. It's a mandatory stage of the transformation, the point in anarchy where the pent up frustrations of the previous regime gives way to a kind of "freedom sickness" involving violence, theft, rape, and war (freedom with no regard for personal responsibility, which usually rushes in a new regime). The problem is that this regime that has fallen- the gods of old testament media- have molded a generation of users who demand to be gods, who demand the power of the network not to network but to broadcast.
That's the weapon element- the game that Burroughs was talking about, the game where every player believes in final victory and strives for it with all his power. The web is more powerful than the nuclear bomb because it is a weapon that changes consciousness, as Burroughs points out, which "puts the whole war game into question." The problem is, it exists on a simultaneous plane with the war gamers.
What to do, then?
Posted by
Eryk @
8:25 PM
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