a lot to think about here. i guess for me "real" is a problematic word as well,
when I think of it in the authoritarian sense. It's a bad term and is stuck in
all of the problems of enlightenment thinking and beyond. Yet, I like to use
the term, because the idea of the "real" still holds a special place in media
culture and i think that there desperately needs to be a distinction between
simulated worlds and the things they refer to. Living things cannot live in
simulated worlds (biologically speaking) yet somehow many humans are choosing
to act as if they can. of course, this really gets at the futurist perspective
that, frankly, many of my students find really alluring (therefore my venting
here). i've had quite a few people tell me that if they could they love to be a
brain in a jar. i think this kind of detachment from what i called the basic
conditions of existence is pretty insane if we think of it in the context of
what's happening ecologically in
the world. every life system on earth is currently in decline and withdrawing
into a fantasy of uploaded consciousness is about as appealing to me as trying
to find another planet to live on because we've resigned to thinking that's
there's no hope for this one. i'm still optimistic - optimistic about nothing
maybe - but i have to be to keep sane. alienation is another problematic word,
but i see some use for it. i generally see the word in a marxist way, in terms
of being disconnected from the product of one's labor and the political, social
and economic exploitation that comes with it. i think of many technologies in
the same way that the situationists looked at modernist architecture, as
something that promotes alienation from social life - though often in the guise
of promoting the social. again, this doesn't mean that i'm a fundamentalist and
don't realize that one can have one hell of a successful party in one of le
corbusier's "factories for
living in." in other words the structure doesn't necessarily dictate content,
but there is also a content of structure itself that's worth looking at. of
course in marx's day there wasn't the ecological catastrophe that is happening
today, so i think it's worth updating the word alienation to include the
disconnect from what i refer to as the "basic conditions of life." it may be
naive but i think if people had a some basic concepts about how interdependent
human life is with the life of other species then we might think about our
actions a little more. ... just ranting here. thanks for the thoughtful note.
like i said - a lot to think about. i agree, that everything (if this in fact
what you are saying) is culturally constructed and in this context it's pretty
absurd to use words like "real" and "nature" but at the same time i see some
real value to those concepts.
btw. what you said about untouched wilderness reminds me of this proposal Hans
Haacke did for a public art project to occupy the grounds surrounding (i think
it was) a government building. his proposal was to create a "no man's land"
where the art piece would designate the land surrounding this building as
protected from any sort of human intervention. whatever grew, whatever happened
there would be left without interruption and occupation by humans. i always
thought that was a great idea, but unfortunately a rejected one. i have a copy
of the proposal though - published in this old exhibition catalog.
anyway... best wishes.
mark
Hi - I didn't take this personally and apologies if I responded so
strongly. I'm not sure I know what "real" life is - I don't find "being
online" (the title of one of my books) any more alienating than the
physical world. This is a long complex discussion, entering into
everything from disability to addiction. Certainly what happens online has
repercussions offline - I'm not sure a distinction can be made.
The basic conditions of existence seem also problematic to me; I think the
body is always already inscribed, "cultured," and for that matter -
without hopefully appearing ridiculous - I find that culture is not only
trans-species, but all the way down, at least to protista. In a very real
sense, the virtual online world is an extension of that, and the political
or cultural economy of the online world is fundamentally entangled with
the offline.
I love the idea of a wilderness untouched, without the presence of humans,
a recuperating wilderness, the closing of national parks so that they
might recover the kinds of disturbances that have occurred for centuries -
think of the megafauna that disappeared millennia ago for example. But I
also recognize this isn't going to happen; ecology becomes a combination
of idealism, heuristics, and adjustments, and might just fail as a result.
Further, one might add that any natural area, again, is already inscribed
- territorialized - among species, humans or not.
So this is all tricky and entangled for me.
I'd like to take down SL too of course, if it could immediately recuper-
ate. I don't think that people's usages of the space necessarily imply
enslavement or corporate pawnship - more usually, one or another sort of
extension of daily life. And for me, it's a relatively harmless one - you
rent land, but you also rent an apartment; you buy goods both real and
virtual etc. The danger I think is the far more corrosive effect of spam,
malware, and the like - I fear corporations, but I fear gangsterism even
more, especially gangsterism knocking at my inbox, harddrive, and mbr.
Sorry for meandering here - Alan
On Thu, 8 Oct 2009, mark cooley wrote:
> Alan,? I knew this would happen. I was following up with (in a more
> abstract sense) two less recognized points that I thought Marc's piece
> touched on (I thought). 1. The new attention economy. 2. The threat of
> post-human ideology on real life - the question being how much stuff
> that happens online makes any positive difference in the real world -
> and by "real" I mean one that is not alienated from our very conditions
> of existence (I'm talking about basic ecology of course). ?I was not
> attacking your practice and not attempting to say that one can't take an
> adversarial position while "working for the man." I know very well that
> it's possible (though I'd like to see you take down SL entirely). Sorry
> if I seemed to be attacking your practice specifically. That's why I
> renamed the thread to take Marc's comments in another direction than a
> response to your original call for help. My bad. - mark
>
>
>
> Oy yoy yoy, in spite of you telling me what I do in SL is labor, it isn't
> if anything it's challenging the structure and at times in fact close to
> bringing down the sim because of particle streams.?
>
Or another way to look at it, it's a lot less labor and a lot more
thinking than any other art- form; I work physically harder at
music-making (where I'm feeding the
> corporate club-owners) or typing theory (where I'm feeding no one).
> I also don't get a sense that you're talking about anything other than a
> distant corp - you might want to look at the internal structure of SL
> farms for example.
>
> - Alan
>
>
> On Wed, 7 Oct 2009, mark cooley wrote:
>
>>
I'm with you Marc. Also though, there should be some recognition here
of attention capital. when we're participating in so-called social
networking sites we're in fact providing labor for the corporations
that own the platforms. Simply, it goes like this - some influential
economists and "thinkers" in the 70's were sitting around thinking
about the evils of leisure time - if they could just get people to
think of work as leisure then everything would be great - what they
came up with is an idea that if people could be convinced that they
were in fact serving themselves and a "community" while doing labor
then they could get a whole lot of people doing their labor for them at
no cost. Web 2.0 is little more than the fulfillment of this dream. In
the case of SL they're actually getting people to pay them for doing
their labor. Imagine going back to the mid 20th century and telling an
industrialist that in the future they wouldn't have to build a factory,
>>
in fact they wouldn't even have to supply the machinery for their
workers, and their workers wouldn't understand themselves as such at
all - they'd be happy to make your products (content) for you because
they'd feel like somehow they're serving themselves. They'd see
themselves as "socializing" with "friends" rather than doing what
they're doing 9 times out of 10, sitting alone in front of the computer
indulging in their most exhibitionistic fantasies for an audience
that's too busy indulging in their own egos to care.
>>
>>
I think we need more people willing to step out into the real world. It
needs some attention. There are many intelligent minds stuck in the
factory who could do some good out (t)here.
>>
>>
>>> mmm,
>>>
>>> I'm not asking for A mono-cultural and isolated thing here, more of a
>>> conscious effort by people to support each other, artists or whatever
>>> those communities may be. I feel that sharing and supporting others is
>>> an honourable thing to do - not for any religious reasons or official
>>> ideology, but because as an individual who respects others (humans), I
>>> want a better world to live in, therefor I must do something of value
>>> and not just care about my own singular entity. I have made the decision
>>> to bypass the 'heroic' stance of genius in order to seek a life beyond
>>> such distractions which really is more about childish fantasies and
>>> top-down control - in so many different ways in our cultures. I know it
>>> sounds corny, but I still believe in things like love and respect, and
>>> other equally silly things - I know some adhere to a post-human agenda
>>> and this is their choice, which is more about nihilism for the self and
>>> ignore others and their very 'real' contextual situations. I am not
>>> asking people to be like me, but I am asking for people to protect their
>>> cultures before it is taken away from them.
>>>
>>> Also,
>>>
>>>> for that matter the fibers this stuff goes out on - it's all
>>>> corporate. How we situate ourselves, how we fight abuse, those
>>>> are integral to this, but I don't feel withdrawal - which is
>>>> only an inauthentic withdrawal (in the Sartrean sense) - is any
>>>> sort of answer.
>>>
>>> It may all be corporate, but humans are not necessarily corporate
>>> drones, unfortunately many of us are engineered and (de)educated to be,
>>> and this is one of important points here - if we all fall into a fait
>>> accompli, absolutist or even such an emperical state of being of
>>> accepting what we are fed, then the battle will be lost, perhaps it is
>>> already...
>>>
>>> I really do not agree that SL is grass roots, although I do agree that
>>> it is populist which is not always a negative factor, such a thing can
>>> change things in our world and make brilliant things happen. SL, is
>>> centralist, successfully exploiting a digitally networked Internet
>>> culture, like google has. It may have been once, not sure though. One
>>> really cannot call it grass roots in respect of its reasons, function
>>> and purpose.
>>>
>>> But of course, all that is being discussed here is different reasons for
>>> our existence, ways of being - it all melds together somehow.
>>>
>>> wishing you well.
>>>
>>> marc
>>
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