Technotopia

A Media Genealogy of Net Cultures

Clemens Apprich, Aileen Derieg

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786603159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Many technologies and practices that define the Internet today date back to the 1990s – such as user-generated content, participatory platforms and social media. Indeed, many early ideas about the future of the Internet have been implemented, albeit without fulfilling the envisioned political utopias. By tracing back the technotopian vision, Clemens Apprich develops a media genealogical perspecive that helps us to better understand how digital networks have transformed over the last 30 years and therefore to think beyond the current state of our socio-technical reality. This highly original book informs our understanding of new forms of media and social practices, such that have become part of our everyday culture. Apprich revisits a critical time when the Internet was not yet an everyday reality, but when its potential was already understood and fiercely debated. The historical context of net cultures provides the basis from which the author critically engages with current debates about the weal and woe of the Internet and challenges today’s predominant network model.

Chapter 1

Introducing Technotopia

‘The utopian dimension of new technology lies not before us, but rather behind us, in the dreams and ideals of the past.’1

Today we live in an ‘epoch of space’ and, as Foucault explains in a lecture, delivered at the Parisian Cercle d’études architecturale in 1967, this epoch is an ‘epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.’2 Intensified through the dissemination of digital technologies and, consequently, an overlay of a global data space upon local physical places, the network has become the determining morphology of this epoch. By privileging space over time, a new complexity emerged, which can be read as the most recent push for modernisation. In this situation, the metaphor of the network is employed to tackle what Fredric Jameson identified as postmodern confusion; a state of affairs, caused by a fundamental transformation of our social interaction, political agency and economic organisation.3 Not only is the idea of the network considered to bring some clarity into the postmodern world, but it also resonates with the socio-economic shift of our time. As Wendy Chun recently suggested, ‘Networks have been central to the emergence, management and imaginary of neoliberalism, in particular to its narrative of individuals collectively dissolving society.’4 The dissolution of the social involves the imagination of neo-liberal networks, which, from now on, are supposed to adapt individuals to the new conditions of global capital. Hence, the rise of a network society can be seen as the expression of late capitalism.5

The book at hand follows this analysis by considering socio-technical networks as a part of our cultural imagination. In so doing, it is not so much interested in (re)discovering the origins of these networks in the military-industrial complex of Silicon Valley, but rather considers critical net cultures of the 1990s, associated with media-cultural initiatives such as the Critical Art Ensemble, nettime, Telepolis, Public Netbase, and Ljudmila, as precursors for new forms of media and social practices, which have become part of our everyday culture. In opposition to the then prominent concept of cyberspace as a virtual space, the artistic, cultural and hacktivist practices of critical net cultures sought to implement digital technologies within existing physical spaces. In retrospect, the proliferation of so-called social media has precisely proven this approach to be right: it is not the parallel universe of a virtual reality but rather the net as a web of socio-technical relations which has gained significance today. Yet, paradoxically, while the discourse around the Internet has exploded, the critical knowledge of these early experiments seems to have been forgotten. It is therefore important to recollect this forgotten future of the 1990s and to make it productive for the current debates about the impact of digital networks on our everyday lives.6

In our digital culture, the idea of a homogeneous information space is not sufficient anymore to describe the increasingly complex network sphere. As our machines are constantly connected to a global data space, it becomes more and more difficult to separate our online life from our offline life. This is the reality of a networked world, augmented with electronics, software and sensors. However, the Internet is not only a technological, but a cultural and social phenomenon as well. While the technological infrastructure is needed to establish a network on a global basis, the Internet would be no more than a loosely connected network of computers without the cultural horizon of a common meaning. Using early net cultures as a starting point allows me to take account of both the material and imaginary aspects as interdependent and to trace some of the hidden presumptions when it comes to digital networks. In particular, the antagonistic idea that the Internet is either a space of emancipation or manipulation, of freedom or control, is deeply rooted in our cultural imagination, namely the assumption that (positive or negative) social change can be derived from technology. In order to avoid such a technicistic reduction, I suggest that technology should be understood in terms of neither a utopian nor dystopian world view, but rather of what Foucault in the above-mentioned lecture called a ‘heterotopia’. Heterotopias are ‘counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’.7 I will argue in the following pages that digital space itself constitutes such a counter site, a technotopia which represents and infiltrates reality.

EXPERIMENTAL PLAYGROUNDS

In the 1990s, numerous publications discussed a possible crisis of the city, entailing a critical assessment of the city in the age of global networking.8 Urban space, in most of the authors’ view, was no longer defined as locally tangible place, but rather by a global ‘space of flows’.9 This implied an overcoding of the city with information networks and, consequently, the superimposition of a multitude of data streams over the material architecture of the city. However, the built environment did not disappear, but the transformation of material infrastructures – from transportation and communication systems all the way to energy supplies – became irreversibly dependent on digital information networks.10 In this sense, shift towards spatially distributed processes radically transformed the way urban space was imagined. The so-called ‘mirror worlds’11 enabled an informational representation of cities, in order to have better control over their increasingly complex reality. With electronic networks, digital maps, or the use of online systems in city administration, the digital replication of urban processes became a second reality.12 Hence, at the turn of the millennium, the city metaphor established a new symbolic order and constituted – at least for a short period of time – the core idiom in electronic space. Not only had the city become a data space because of the mass distribution of network technologies, but the data space, generated by these technologies, was represented as a city.

By making use of the city metaphor as an organisational regime, the attempt was made to manage and control the data flood caused by digital networks. Here, the wish of gathering and structuring information within the city walls referred to the old idea of an ideal space of knowledge. The urban vision of the 1990s, exemplarily represented by digital cities (along with Amsterdam and Berlin, also Vienna and others), introduced a unique perspective, which proves to be helpful to unravel some of the ongoing controversy about the dangers, but also possibilities of data networks. By retracing this technotopia back to the early stage of network building, the main objective of the present book is to define net-cultural projects of the 1990s as experimental playgrounds for new forms of knowledge that are fundamental to the emergence of today’s network dispositif. They not only provided metaphors needed to translate and implement technological developments, but also anticipated the modes of perception that were soon to become part of our everyday life. In this sense, the topos of digital cities is both a commonplace to describe our networked space and the actual site where it remains possible to experience and thus discuss the utopian and aesthetic moments of that space.

While in the early days of the Internet the city came into the net in order to structure the newly formed data space, today the net comes into the city, in order to provide the necessary data to govern it. A current example for this may be found in much-debated smart cities.13 Rio de Janeiro, for instance, in preparation for the FIFA World Championship 2014 and the Olympics 2016, witnessed the launch of a city-wide sensor network, implemented to coordinate and control urban life from a futuristic command centre.14 Along with communication, energy and transportation administration, the goal was to pacify so-called problem districts using ubiquitous computer technologies. This sort of optimisation follows the cyber-utopian dream of automatised surveillance and control systems. And in addition to state regulation, it is private enterprises that decide how technological networks are implemented and used. In relation to current media practice, this leads to a rather paradoxical situation: on the one hand, digital technologies have become more accessible and easy-to-use than ever before; on the other hand, access to the data generated by these technologies is largely controlled by a few companies. This specific form of a digital panoptism insidiously affects the user by employing new techniques of data mining and marketing research, while its centre remains closely guarded, and therefore, unreachable to the user. The danger of these closed systems of state agencies and Internet companies is that they do not allow alternative models to even come up, so that an open digital ecosystem is already nipped in the bud.15

Hence, it is essential to look back to the early days of network building – when the terms of ‘possible futures’ were still under negotiation – if we want to understand one of the most recent transformations in our digital culture. With my book, I revisit this critical time when the Internet was not yet an everyday reality, but when its potential was already understood and fiercely debated. The historical context of early net cultures provides us with a basis to critically engage with the current discussions about the weal and woe of the Internet, and, finally, allows us to shed light on the question of how the discourse about technology yields an epistemological model for the economic, political and social disposition of our time. This book, precisely because it is critical towards any deterministic understanding of technology, is interested in the materiality of media, in order to point to the following questions: What are the social, political and economic effects visible not only in the ephemeral practices of digital media, but also in its underlying structures? How do technological infrastructures shape culture, economics and politics in specific locales? Why did the heterogeneous and meandering net cultures of the 1990s turn into the concrete form of a network society and a new mode of governing based on digital networks?

Approaching these questions requires a genealogical investigation, which enables us to understand historical processes not as a linear sequence of events, but as a permanent confrontation of forces. In this sense, the invention of a worldwide computer network was not a singular act, as the still dominant narrative of the military origin of the Internet suggests. Rather the emergence of the Internet is better explained by a constant innovation and the combination of heterogeneous and opposing forces, from technical developments (e.g. TCP/IP versus OSI-standard), to institutional frameworks (e.g. ARPANET, NSFnet, minitel) to social and individual interests (e.g. Usenet, Hackerculture and the first Bulletin Board Systems).16 Genealogy, formulated here in line with Michel Foucault’s considerations, is not solely a matter of making an implicit knowledge visible, but rather of uncovering the processes of emergence and negotiation, the search for the dispersed descents that constitute the own present.17 This book thus seeks out concrete scenes and local situations, actual topoi, which were situated in the net cultures of the 1990s and enabled the emergence of today’s network society.

MEDIA GENEALOGY

The present work considers the history of networking from a media-genealogical perspective. By drawing a line from the early days of network building to today’s networked reality, it b...