RE: [-empyre-] opening statement from boat-people.org

["Brett Stalbaum" <stalbaum@ucsd.edu>]

I feel a bit apprehensive about this post, but that is normally a good
sign so I will cry/hype between clicking and releasing.

Sam-de-silva's critique of the art world politics of tactical media-
"tactical media gets you invited to conferences around world", "tactical
media gets you guest lecturer spots", " tactical media helps sell books"
- is true enough - of course those are systems that are implicated in
public culture and so on... but I'm not going there now. The work of
activist/artists is embedded in two worlds, the former of the pairing
where the really important work is performed and the later (the
artworld), a very different embedding and one that has always left me
feeling a little ambivalent re activist work I have been involved in.

Earlier this year I dropped out of the Yale CyberCrime conference... a
decision which frankly I still feel horrible and conflicted about. I am
looking back now at my squirming letter to Eddan Katz. It was half
apology/half me trying to figure out what happened since my country
decided that the best response to a terrible terrorist act was to fully
embrace (and more recently coming to celebrate) the terrible death
embrace that we were already to some degree involved in before 9/11. I
still feel that tactical media is in a morass not of its own making, and
I am still trying to see around the corner, but can't. It is better said
probably in the boat-people opening post:

"The boat-people crew rack our collective brains for ways to talk 
back to the miasma of mendacity characterising public life here in 
australia; how to be antidotes to amnesia, how to illuminate the 
lies & what they obscure, how to mobilise wit, passion & creativity 
to undermine the empires' rule over us... and everything we come 
up with is gestural, symbolic, frail at best.  It blows away."

I did not say it any better below... The question seems to me today to
be "How do activists disrupt two lovers (the western militarist right
wing and the Islamist militarist right wing), who are so mutually
committed and supportive of one another?"


-----Original Message-----
From: Brett Stalbaum [mailto:stalbaum@ucsd.edu]
Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2004 2:56 PM
To: 'Eddan Katz'
Cc: 'bnoveck@nyls.edu'
Subject: RE: Yale Cybercrime Conference
 
Dear Eddan,
 
I have been hard at work on the formulation of a paper that I feel
confident would function as a positive and sufficiently critical
contribution to the Cybercrime and digital Law Enforcement conference,
both in terms of the Hactivism panel and the conference at large.
However enthused I am about the conference, what I am discovering about
the state of my current expertise is that it is out of date. Though I
was intimately involved in theory and practice of hacktivism between
1998 and 2000, my research and production as an artist during the past
three years has been on a significantly different trajectory. In my
attempts to reconnect with the relevant current issues - particularly
the post 911 legal context, and examine how artists might evaluate
tactical and strategic opportunities for constructive political
engagement in that context, I am finding that I have nothing of
significance to offer. At best, I could characterize early hacktivism as
a brief moment of hope inspired in part by a somewhat utopian surge of
interest by artists in the internet as a specific medium (roughly 1995
to 2000, sometimes identified as the net art movement in new media arts
discourses), and remain silent about the present situation. Not terribly
exciting, nor a particularly interesting contribution to a conference of
such significance.
 
I characterize the hacktivist environment now as one muddled both by
post-911 paranoia and the mostly non-political exploits of
script-kiddies and virus writers, which in combination have resulted in
a mutually self-supporting context of criminalization, and the
maintenance of an alternatively libertarian fringed
cyberpunk/hacker/phreaker identity complex often used by script-kiddies
in their identity play. (Not to mention the
wrestle-for-the-most-radical-activist identity complex, often used by
activists/artists in their identity play.) In a domain contextualized by
this mutually self-supporting monster of cybercops and post-Gibson
identity play, the natural result is that anyone who might be interested
in exploring alternatives to meaning generation using the internet as a
public-space in any way beyond communications based issue advocacy or
interactive contexts for facilitating communication, (such as in
art-conceptual, aesthetic, provocative or activist strategies dealing
with lower level network protocols and recognition that the internet is
a social environment connecting machines to machines and data to data as
much as people to people), is working in a completely chilling domain
today in which neither radical transparency (Electronic Disturbance
Theater) or electronic anonymity can now successfully function as either
tactical or strategic models for political gain. The window, at least
from an artist/hacktivist perspective is closed for now. The system can
be provoked and disturbed, but only in a manner that is dull and counter
productive (because it either assists in an ecology of hardening the
system technically or encourages criminalization of experimental forms
of speech). 2K4 is not 1998. Perhaps conditions will change in the
future, but in the mean time I have nothing interesting to add to
hacktivism.
 
I think of artists as people who have the cultural mandate to play with
systems in order to emerge new models (or functions of systems that were
unintended by their designers) that may be politically useful for the
broader and more equitable distribution of knowledge, power, experience
and (in my own somewhat naïve, idealistic American way), the rights
guaranteed by our Constitution. I think that this holds true even if the
models and techniques happen to be only of ephemeral or tactical value -
of which hacktivism may be an example. As an artist, I don't have new
ideas at this time as specifically go to hacktivism in light of the
dramatic shift in history (both 911 and script-kiddies), and as such I
am uncertain if I am able to bring to the table anything of significance
to your conference. I'm simply playing with systems in different ways
now. !--clip a little bit of practical business --
  



-----Original Message-----
From: empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
[mailto:empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of sam-de-silva
Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 2004 11:49 PM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] opening statement from boat-people.org

hi also,

i too am honoured to be invited :-) though i am not sure what
contribution i 
can make here.

maybe the following:

* tactical media is the cry/hype that occurs between the clicking and 
releasing of a mouse click

* tactical media gets you invited to conferences around world

* tactical media gets you guest lecturer spots 

* tactical media helps your career path

* tactical media helps sell books

* clap for tactical media. cluck for activism. clop for boredom.

see ya, sam :-)

ps. i started up and continue to run the myspinach server (which is very
very 
different to the spinach7 magazine) ... click for background: 
http://www.myspinach.org/sam/spinhistory.html