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GL: One way that you have been working to develop context is by establishing Mediawork Pamphlets, a new book series for the MIT Press. You’re pairing writers with designers to create what you’ve called ‘zines for grownups. The first title is Brenda Laurel's Utopian Entrepreneur, designed by Denise Gonzales Crisp. Is Laurel saying that access to venture capital is the latest human right? PL: Not at all, the focus is less on how to get funding than what you should do after you've got it. Brenda's trying to carve out a space within capitalism for social aspirations that go beyond personal ambitions. She's proposing the term culture work as a description of the socially positive activities that take place in the huge chasm between the autonomous artist and the anonymous corporate hierarch. GL: As I remember, Laurel was involved in more than her fair share of beautiful failures, but maybe that's the utopian side, making the book an obligatory dotcom statement about the right to bankruptcy. In what sense do you see that new media artists' involvement in tech venture has changed? Isn't the well-praised synergy between "industry and the arts" a bad New Age dream? PL: Utopian Entrepreneur wrests the language of commerce away from business people, who tend to write that turgid, self-promotional prose that we associate with "management manuals" like Who Moved My Cheese?. She discusses culture work as an antidote to precisely the fuzzy thinking that allowed us to imagine that there was so much surplus in the "new economy" that industry and the arts would become the same thing. This bad dream, as you call it, manifested itself in lots of different forms during the 1990s. Within the technology boom it was indeed New Agey, but in the art world, it had a distinctly Romantic flavor. A "beauty camp" -- led by Las Vegas-based critic and curator Dave Hickey -- began to demand that artists should embrace entertainment, and turn away from the mandarin complexities of conceptualism and theory. GL: I feel that new media discourse is really at the crossroad
now. The tech-driven downturn will force the emerging forces within
new media culture to come up with sustainable models, beyond all
the ups and downs of the IT-industry. What can we mine from the
past decade of thinking about these issues to move forward? Are
there aspects of 'techno realism' that we should embrace? What elements
of the Wired's cowboy philosophy should be defended? PL: It's almost an exercise in mid-90s nostalgia to discuss "techno realism" -- I can barely remember who went to what conference in which city to sign what document to decry what excess. As a movement, it offered neither the adrenaline rush of the machine fabulists or the humanistic reassurance of the neo-Luddites. Techno-realism was simply inert. Talking about the Wired cowboys after the dotbust moves us from trivia to forensics. Rather than pick through the corpse, I'll focus on one positive impact the magazine had: Wired’s founders looked at the media sphere and decided that none of the magazines they were(n't) reading featured the people they were interested in, so they set out to create their own celebrities. They established an alternate world in which roboticists, game developers, and even Extropians were the "commodities" that drove the magazine. GL: What about the libertarian dotcom philosophy? Is it still intact after the bubble has burst? PL: Techno-libertarianism was never intellectually robust enough to merit being called a philosophy, it is more of an attitude. As long as there are successful loudmouths who believe that they owe nothing to the infrastructures by and through which they develop and market their products, we'll have libertarians bloviating on talk radio. In 1994, Kim Stanley Robinson wrote Green Mars, the middle volume of his magnificent Mars trilogy, and offered a pointed description of libertarians as "minimalists [who] want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged… anarchists who want police protection from their slaves." GL: What do media theorists in recession do? PL: I see the big tent metaphor dissolving. In flush times, there's always the possibility that money alone will paper over fundamental differences. So artists and intellectuals did a kind of dance to get money from chip makers and design consultancies, and industrialists kept hoping that an "aesthetic dividend" would accrue to their bottom line if they let artists hang around. The big tent is fun while it lasts (I'll admit to more than own share of junketeering), but when the circus moves on it encourages people to relinquish their fantasies of mutability and omnipotence. By this, I mean the way in which during the boom people began to believe the hype that the computer allows everyone to become everything. Under this digital alchemy, only those fools who don't "get it" discuss limits. GL: Do you see any counter-cyclical activities spurring up? PL: The most important social movement of our time -- the protest against globalization – is precisely an attempt to come to grips with limits while at the same time encouraging hope for the future. The culture in general seems to be more aware of the need to support infrastructures of all kinds. For close on three decades, people were promised that privatization could solve all their ills, but many of those ills still exist and new ones have emerged. I was impressed by a recent proposal by Rana Dasgupta out of the Indian Sarai new media institute. To develop a public domain audit for various countries, a counterpoint to the obsession rankings of GDPs and GNPs. We need precisely this kind of alternative categorization of "the good" in order to move beyond the myopia of markets. GL: Can we talk about the preoccupation of new media theory with "the" future? One thing I've noticed about your writing is that it tends to be encapsulated within existing reality. Is there such a thing as "Californian dreaming" which would take us to yet unknown places? Is it out of context to talk about and prototype media-driven utopias? Would dreaming be the opposite of nostalgia? Is there only an intensification of the present possible, and desirable? PL: I don't think I'm preoccupied with the future. I know I'm an enemy of nostalgia, and I'm pretty sure I'm victim of an obsession with the present. My first "User" column for art/text magazine was called "Permanent Present," and concerns the way in which – for all the hype – our visual culture is not that much different than it was in the mid-80s, after the advent of the Mac' s GUI and the impact of Blade Runner's retro-deco aesthetic. I happen to loathe the idea of "futurism" as a discipline, and find myself much more interested in explicating "now" rather than the "next." I prefer to encounter other people's fantasies of mutable environments and interactive nanotech in science fiction rather than science-fictionalized discourse. I tend to keep my daydreams to myself. GL: With Kodwo Eshun you are saying: everything still needs to be done. What is the role of the critic in all of this? PL: I approach criticism as a way to elucidate that which I admire about art rather than simply trying to fit it into a preconceived straightjacket. I'd like to think that I've been able to explore that ferocious pluralism I mentioned earlier which so characterizes our era. This is disconcerting to those who pine for the certainties of movements, schools, or avant-gardes that marched in lockstep, one after the other. These days, you're on your own, it's up to the individual user to craft his or her own frameworks. Part of the job of the critic is to offer models for this process.
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