Interval Research Corporation, "Online Communities Mini-Conference"

NET.CULTURE (SIC)
Tom Jennings <tomj@wps.com>
11 June 93

I went to a reading/slideshow at Modern Times Bookstore with my
boyfriend Josh, a reading by the author/editor of a book on historic
gay photography, from 1850's to modern times. It was fairly
interesting.  The room had rows of folding chairs, with a podium
thing towards the back (it's usually in the front where podium
things go) with the slide projector on it. We all faced the screen
in front.

Josh and I looked nothing like the audience, which was mostly in
their early 40's, white men. We quite stood out, but were quite
welcome. There was one other younger man there, who looked to me
to be of Japanese ancestry.  About half way through the show, a
young angry punk boy entered.  He stood out too. Everyone looked
at him briefly then ignored him, even though his look was just
recently a major fetish item (the look, not the reality).  (We kept
peeking because he looked like someone we know from Seattle.  Our
peeking was of course obvious to him and he/we knew it. No one else
did this. It is OK in our world to do this, but not in the mustachio'd
one.)

The slides were by well-known European and American photographers,
of both men and women. All of the photographers were men. Even the
photographs of women, including the ones of obvious lesbian interest,
were made for men (for whatever reason that makes hetero men find
two women together, erotic), because that's who's had money, access,
etc, historically. The book's narrative, read by the author, told
of the historic social context the photographers lived under. A
few of the photographs show same-sex couples dancing in an 1880's
club, with fearfully defiant looks on their faces, not surprising
given the times. Ahh, the beginnings of a (documented) gay
consciousness...

We liked the show. The Japanese-looking guy left, about 15 minutes
into the show, and of course we'll never know why.

What the show really was, of course, was a history of American/European
photography. However the author never said this, neither did the
flyers, nor the bookstore. It was just assumed to be the case.


                              - \ | / -

So I attended the Online Communities Mini-Conference at Interval
Corp., in a conference room in their building in Palo Alto. The
room was filled with rows of chairs which we sat in, and there was
a table in front with a whiteboard behind it, and a vid projector
on the ceiling pointed at it. We sat facing the front of the room.
Puzzlingly, none of the windows opened to the outside, even though
we were on the ground floor and no one could possibly suicide by
jumping out of them.

By the end of the two-day conference, about a fourth or third of
the audience at one time or another sat behind the table up front,
and told things to the rest about what they were doing, and the
world around them as they saw it, to the people sitting in the
chairs.  Questions and lively debate ensued.  We heard about how
market competition will pretty much determine what wins and what
loses, and how some of us want to push certain ideas of privacy,
anonymity, etc so that individuals don't get lost in all this
money-making.  Of course we all knew exactly what anonymity and
privacy means to all of us.  Many people agreed with this, but said
when *they* had to do some particular thing, well, compromise was
necessary or it wouldn't ship.  We heard a lot about technologies,
but mainly we talked and listened and thought about ethics, social
ramifications and suchlike about them, and how it affected people
in the US. People who, I assume, frequently take part in social
gatherings where people sit in rows of chairs facing all the same
way.

                              - \ | / -

At the 1988 North American Anarchist (Survival) Gathering, in
Toronto, about 200 people from all over the US and Canada, met for
a three day festival/conference, over the first weekend in July.
While hosted by the Toronto group who did the bulk of the work
(arranging for use of a school building, printing the lovely
handbook, arranging food, etc) much of the content of the multi-threaded
conference was done by people scattered accross the continent.

For the sessions, people sat in circles facing each other, in
chairs, in each other laps, either in the building or outside on
the grass.  People sat on windowsills.  Some people brought their
kids, and there was a prominent child-care scheme. Some people went
downtown and spawned noisy protests; it was not only American
Independence Day, but the US had just invaded somewhere I can't
remember.

                              - \ | / -

Lots of people at the Online Community Mini-Conference were bemoaning
the loss of, or decay, of American culture. This puzzles me. Which
one? Apparently the one (or one of them) that goes to technical
colleges, work in buildings with windows that don't open, and sit
on chairs facing the front of the room. One person even said
"...since we all went to college...", and no one (even me) said
anything.

We've all heard the McLuhan reductionist cliche "the medium is the
message", ie. the specific form a medium takes is an overriding
part of the meaning, but I wonder how many people have an operating
theory of what it means. The world is defined by the smallest
details of everyday life, not Big Concepts. Where and how you wake
up, your eating rituals, how you relate to people you work with.
The clothes you wear. Do you consider competition a good thing? Or
is all your work cooperative, with people who only work cooperatively?

What fits through wires today is linear text, not cooincidentally,
and that medium requires a specific sort of brainpower sitting
behind expensive connection machinery to be able to generate sensible
and sensitive responses to other peoples' same.  Writing well, in
collegiate English, is a definite advantage.

OK, so our first interfaces to computing machinery were character
symbol printers from the turn of the century, which were in turn
based upon manual electro-mechanical, serial symbol systems like
Morse and Baudot. What do we replace them with? The desk in the
front of the room that you sit in the chair behind, plus an business
office file system. Technical improvement: 1.0. Increased scope of
user base:  0.0.

                              - \ | / -

Look -- I ain't no alien. I was raised in Massachusetts, in the
60's, in a semi-rural small town. We had automobiles in the woods
as teenagers, and LSD in high school when I was 14.

The path I've taken since then is as long as anyone elses, and just
as interesting or boring. I'll spare you the details. My only point
is, *even I* find a lot of the mono-culture stuff surrounding the
industrial culture utterly opaque. It's not universal, really.
It's just as arbitrary as remembering which fork to use when and
no, I don't know. You'd certainly embarrass yourself somehow at my
house too.

It's not that suburban culture is any more particularly awful than
anything else (I'm trying to be generous), but it gets to be like
any other fundamentalism -- its members not only forget it's not
the only one, they specifically don't ask, or inform, or sometimes
don't care, or worse, don't know, that maybe someone else is just
fine right now, thank you.

For the most part, the various cultures/groups of people that I'm
a part of are thriving, and growing with self-conscious process,
except where put down by law and social convention (not to say some
of my friends would not act as oppressively if the tables were
turned, sigh).

                              - \ | / -

So why aren't there more non-suburban weirdos in industry? Is the
answer not already obvious-seeming? The social filtering to get
there from here works two ways -- not only does it keep people from
getting through the mazes (schools, jobs, and the social structures
surrounding them) but also -- who wants to live with people who
share very little of your goals and ethics, likes and dislikes?

The "but if you really wanted to get there, you could" mentality
not only ignores reality, but once again, assumes that the their
culture thing is either universal, or at least of universal appeal.
Even ignoring the path from here to there, you can't work in the
computer industry (for example) without to some degree living with
it's culture.  I know, I tried.

                              - \ | / -

There's a name for this withering process, and if you have a better,
less dogmatic sounding one I'd love to hear it: Cultural imperialism.
If you start shipping automobiles to some faraway place, no matter
how they might use or define things there, pretty soon you'll find
they start making roads and living on flat places. (Which of course
by itself is not necessarily terrible... but nothing has zero side
effects.) Likewise, if you give someone some box they find useful
and it has a key-board attached, they'll find it damn hard to use
without putting it upon something that damn well resembles a "desk".
Mediums? Messages?

                              - \ | / -

Tangentially related, having to do with what's considered some sort
of "edge" of social improvement (lots of people drag it out at this
point)  --

Something about this conversion of "cyberpunk" from a literary
concept to a cultural one has bothered me from the start.  The
confusion for me stemmed from the fact that I think the basic idea
is correct, partly the simple realization that our existence and
connection to the world around us is defined to us by it's *surface*.
The outside of things are coated in social and cultural meaning.
The particular forms of (in current cyberese fashion) dirt, graffiti,
fashion, casual use of technics laden dripping in classism, etc
are a measure of things as they are and are rapidly becoming.

Unfortunately it's just so typical of our dominant culture to absorb
(and defang in the process) anything it deems "radical" or
oppositional.  (As well as people dissatisfied with what they have
wanting something else.) It doesn't matter if "cyberpunky" stuff
gets sold in Macy's; that's not the problem. The problem is that
things are deemed to *be* the surface. The symbols get confused
with the underlying thing that defined or created the associative
link.

It was best put once in an OPTION zine interview with Diamanda
Galas; the interviewer was an very astute woman whose name I did
not record, alas. At one point in the interview, she asked Diamanda
what she thought of all the death-rock-looking kids in her audience;
ratted black hair, white faces, shredded black clothes, etc. Diamanda
started with, "They emulate what they think they are seeing". 

Hence my skepticism in calling anything connected to what people
do, except fiction, with that word "cyberpunk". It implies further
that until the word was coined, no one was doing any radical thinking
about technology that wasn't Luddite (though all too frequently
true), and that all things that do are "cyberpunky". Thanks, but
no thanks.

And, personal gripe, there certainly doesn't seem to be much "punk"
in cyberpunk. The current popular definition seems to come right
from some TV show version of "punkers" that hang out drink and rob
old ladies. Not that I give a shit about whether today's punks have
a good media image or not.  It certainly doesn't include Poly
Styrene, Pete Shelley, Wayne/Jane County, Patti Smith, etc, never
mind any of the late-model US-centric stuff. Just like the hardcore
punk in America chased off all the fags, weirdos etc in exchange
for ordinary macho dickheads like BLACK FLAG, (never mind today's
straightedge!) "cyberpunk" with all it's mirror-shades stuff once
again tries to limit the playing field to "calm, cool, bad attitude".
Gimme drag queens over close-cropped macho attitude anytime!

Oops! I seem to have gotten distracted! Bye now!