Re: The New Media: A query

["Jose G. Perez" <jg_perez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I keep saying to myself 'The Emperor's got no clothes' every time one of
> the enthusiasts for the New begin their spiel.  However is there anything
> in it?  Could a new art form emerge from the computer industries?  What
> about the possibilities of interactivity?  Is the CD rom a defunct
> technology as some have claimed?   Apart from Heartfield's book is there
> anything else that I should be reading?

I would recommend two things to read, or rather look at, keeping in mind the
bourgeois mindset of their authors. I recommend them because I think they're
getting to something far deeper than they realize.

One, the most important, is the cluetrain manifesto. www.cluetrain.org is
the site.

The other is the Pathfinder Museum (This Pathfinder is not the US SWP's
publishing house but the Time-Warner pre-mega-portal that, with typical
cluelessness, adopted the name someone else was ALREADY doing business under
in the same/related fields [publishing] for their own.
Happily, no one in the general public was confused, at least so far as it
can be determined, as the Time Warner "corporate-org-chart-as-web-strategy"
www.pathfinder.com portal was an even bigger fiasco for Time-Warner Fuehrer
Jerry Levin than his multi-hundred-million-dollar toilet flush "full service
network" in Orlando.

It goes without saying, or it SHOULD, that Jack Barnes and the other SWP
leaders never had a clue either, not even such an obvious maneuver as to,
how shall I say this politely, suggest to Time Warner that they might want
to BUY the "Pathfinder" name in the publishing field rather than let a jury
decide who used it first and therefore had the rights to it.

The cluetrain manifesto is much deeper. From the opening salutation "People
of Earth" (NOT, and note this well, "People of THE Earth") and the first of
their 95 theses ("Markets are conversations") you can sense the incredible,
uncontrollable contradiction between what the "new wine" of the dialogue the
Internet makes possible (in a novel, more direct and transparent way --
"conversations") and the old bottles the authors are trying to pour this
rich elixir into ("markets are...").

The dead armadillo in the middle of the road that with yellow stripes
through it that decorates the  manifesto is Time Warner's Pathfinder
(qepd/rip, and piss on its grave while doing a [needless to say]
Republican --but not Bushite-- jig).

No matter how many gizillions of dollars AOL/TIME/Warner Bros/Turner flush
down the Internet and broadband commode, it's all the same if it has to be
approved by top management, vetted by lawyers, analyzed and corrected by
responsible editors, and so on. There's only one way out of such a digestive
system and that's the back orifice, and --having carefully analyzed
consistency and chemical composition-- the inescapable conclusion is that
everything that comes from there is shit. These guys have the Midas touch in
reverse, as clear an indication as one could want that their social order
has outlived its usefulness.

*      *       *

Cluetrain has half a clue, but --as they might put it-- they refuse to take
delivery on the other half.

They have the insight that "markets" are conversations, i.e., social
relations. Yet they insist on the necessity of the reification & alienation
involved in commodity relations (really, I exaggerate: they do not INSIST on
its necessity, they are UNABLE to imagine anything BEYOND it).

Yet it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination, once you've realized that,
in reality, market(commodity) relations are NOT relations between people and
things, but rather are relations between people MEDIATED by things, to take
the NEXT step and say, let's cut out the middleman: Let It (the
relationships between people) BE. LET IT BE,  entirely UNMEDIATED by things.
Kill the commodity forms (i.e., commercial merchandise available only in
exchange for fetishistically printed slips of paper), let these things be
only what they are naturally, not (economic) Values (which are exclusively a
social construct) but simply useful (or totally useless but nevertheless
delightfully wonderful) things, which people provide for each other in a
free exchange, i.e. an exchange freed from ALL measurement and equivalence.

==In other words, if the question: "how many 'The Old Man and the Sea' does
it take to make one 'Starry Night'?" even MAKES SENSE to you, it is time you
started to realize that you --and your society-- are quite literally stark
raving mad.==

[This, by the way, is not entirely unrelated to the "sex worker" discussion
going on in this list, which I'll happily admit I've mostly not read, and
NOT out of a lack of interest in the underlying issue of commodity
relations.

[But the idea that in the communist future sexual favors should be, or NOT
be, considered a "legitimate" type of "work" shows how even our imaginations
are miserable slaves to commodity forms. For the "work" category is strictly
one belonging to class societies, and if we are unable to overcome it, at
LEAST in theory, THEN capitalism, clearly, is the highest form of society
human beings can and should aspire to. I ABSTRACT in this from the "woman
(or girl) as fuck-toy" implicit in the "sex work as work"  theses to point
out its significance for the human race as a whole. If {at least some} women
are condemned to whoredom, then we all are.]

*    *    *

On Cluetrain:

Cluetrain is damning testimony to how FAR the productive forces and the
inherent --nay, transparent-- possibilities of what people COULD DO with
this technology, have outstripped the straitjacket of bourgeois commodity
forms (peer-to-peer technologies, in other words, Napster & knock-offs, are
another).

The REASON information wants to be free (and especially,  "free" of
commodity forms, freed from being a commodity) AT BOTTOM has got nothing to
do with Pentiums or TCP/IP protocols, however. The REASON is that,
fundamentally, all we are is "bags-of-mostly-water" --as one of the script
writers of the original Star Trek series had some alien species express it-
PLUS whatever is symbolically/metaphorically/spiritually/philosophically
spoken of as a "soul."

The DIFFERENCE between us and the bags of water kids usedto sell me at the
Mercado Oriental in Managua for five cords is, as far as I can tell,
EXCLUSIVELY "information" or as Time-Warner and other aberrations of human
and legal society would have it, "intellectual property."

We are no more than "bags-of-mostly-water" + "information" and as long as
information is NOT free, as long as there is "intellectual property" WE TOO
shall remain "property," i.e., slaves, trained moneys no matter how
expensive or fine our silk costumes may be.

Cluetrain is the anguished cry of the Madison Avenue huckster who used to be
a human being and discovers that without her/his human voice, her/his human
soul, s/he cannot SELL. It is the ultimate expression of the
commercialization of commodities, of their REALIZATION as "Values" ...  I
sell therefore I am.

Willy never sank so low in Death of a Salesman, which is why cluetrain is
the ultimate expression of the huckster's art ... and therefore ALSO its
negation.

Apologies for the extremely abstract & convoluted nature of this post &
especially the last part. But it seems to me we need to begin to come to
grips with some of these issues in the same kind of way that Marx did
generations ago in the early and mid-1840s. I do NOT believe these questions
are unique to US; they are rather the SAME questions many of us (of a
certain age) grappled with long ago, refreshed by the sweep of electrons
across a CRT.

José

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary MacLennan" <g.maclennan@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, September 23, 2000 4:18 AM
Subject: The New Media: A query


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