[-empyre-] Sean Cubitt on Participatory Art: New Media and the Archival Trace

[Renate Ferro]

In addition to our featured weekly guests of the month, we have 
invited an additional group of participants to send us their thoughts 
on "Participatory Art: New Media and the Archival Trace."  We will be 
pacing the posting of these contributions throughout the month in 
keeping with the pulse of the list.  We hope that these additional 
thoughts will provide an interesting texture to the threads in 
development.  We hope that you'll enjoy this experiment.

We are happy to to present Sean Cubitt's thoughts on the archival 
trace in participatory net culture.

From: Sean Cubitt <scubitt at unimelb.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Invitation to Join "Participatory Art: Digital Traces,":
  -empyre-in June



RIP World Wide Web 1993-2001

Until the dot.com crash of 2001, the web was one of the longest-lived
Temporary Autonomous Zones our generation ever knew. Capital failed to
understand. Not until the years after 2001 did it begin to build business
models based in the Web rather than imported from magazine publishing and
the broadcast industry.

Marx had established the principles in the famous Fragment on Machines in
Grundrisse: the social intellect / general intellect is manifest in two
processes. In one, the skill developed over generrations in making things is
ossified into machinery and turned to purposes of exploitation. In the
second, the ways workers organise themselves in factoriesso they can get
longer breaks or leave earlier are systematised by Capital. But as Virno
argues in Grammar of the Multitude, this innovative power to make new
systems is no longer a side benefit of emplying workers: it is written into
our contracts.

The risk capital always runs is that the endless revolutions in the means of
production (machinery, organisation) constantly run ahead of capital's
ability to assimilate them. This is what happened when the Web turned the
internet into a mass medium. Capital had no idea how to respond, and the
result was a fantastic flowering of creativity, of new kinds of cultural
practice, new types of service, now modes of organisation, among which
perhaps the Battle of Seattle can stand as a decent monument.

Now of course with Web 2.0, capital has finally managed to catch up and turn
that innovatory impetus into a profit-making enterprise, although t damn
near blew itself up in the inflationary vapourware moment of the early
2000s.

What is left of the revolutionary Web is marked by nostalgia, as people have
been suggesting on nettime lately. But that is no reason to give up fighting
for a piece of it; or to build alternatives inside the belly of the whale.
Nor is it a reason not to pursue alternatives to the monetarised Web, in
particular FLOSS and P2P. The mysterious, fluid, granular "we" can no more
afford to give up the struggle for the Web than we can afford to give up
struggling to find new alternatives to it.

There are huge risks involved: the slow but certain approach of IPv6 might
flag the splintting of the Web into two, and if two why not many more. I
find that thought frightening. Other scenarios involve freeing more radio
spectrum from the dominance of TV signals, making wireless the new terrain,
probably a more hopeful variant. But for now we have to admit the battle of
the internet is over and capital won. The question is how do we operate now:
Tactically? Strategically? And how do we minimise or at least delay the
assimlation of whatever we invent into the reproduction of capital?

(and to preempt the discussion, a) call it biopower if you prefer and b) the
market is neither inevitable nor beneficial: the sixty years since Bretton
Woods have failed abjectly to provide even survival levels for the majority
of the woprld's population

Sean


Sean Cubitt is Director of the Program in Media and Communications at 
the University of Melbourne and Editor-in-Chief  of the Leonardo Book 
Series. He is the author of EcoMedia, The Cinema Effect, Simulation 
and Social Theory, Digital Aesthetics, Videogaphy: Video Media as Art 
and Culture, and Timeshift: On Video Culture.




-- 
Renate Ferro and Tim Murray
Managing Co-Moderators, -empyre- a soft-skinned-space
Department of Art/ Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
Cornell University