Down the street there used to be a bar called Dorothy's. A real Chicago
dive, it was run forever by a Greek guy known as Gus. Home to
down-and-outs and shambling drunks, the place would be seized by
wild-eyed hilarity on Saturday nights or during football games. I used
to stop by to pick up a beer and chat with Gus, but I never actually sat
down in there. I was too busy with things like nettime.
For us, Saturday night was the tech-boom, free software, globalization,
war, empire. It was trends, events, technologies, social movements,
economies, meltdowns, revolutions and the ways you can interpret them,
via art, algorithms, philosophical concepts, social sciences, straw
polls, news items or just plain keyboard improvisation. Apparently all
of us somehow cared what the other, known or unknown, might have to say
about it, because we were willing to rant, argue, research, compose,
deleriate, flame on, get embarassed, make up, sulk, forget it, go back
to it, and so on for about two decades. Sometimes we were wild-eyed,
other times dull and predictable. Surely more than a few owe a lot to
this obscure activity. Personally, that is how I became a writer.
That is also how many of us "wasted" a lot of time. You can't exactly
capitalize on weeks of reading, websearching, analysis, and back-channel
discussions that finally amount to an ascii post on an antiquated
majordomo listserve. No professional credit accrues to the public
amateur. Instead you either become an isolated crank, or mutate into a
reticulated transsubjectivity - or more likely, some combination of the
two. I cannot count the number of people on at least three continents
that I first met on nettime, before finding the actual bar, cafe,
conference hall, hack lab, protest march or living room where we could
meet in the flesh. Sometimes the meetings led to vast quixotic projects,
such as the Technopolitics odessey that Armin Medosch and I got into, or
they became private sinkholes of uncalculable energy, like learning
Linux without a command-line clue. As I became more of a crank (moving
to Chicago and whatnot) the meetings became rarer yet even more
important, arbitrary, one-off, lasting friendship, strange misconnect,
whatever. I guess the Holy Grail of this whole thing was the idea that a
certain missing cybernetic loop might actually open up a viable way to
inhabit the twenty-first century.
About a year ago (or maybe it's already been two) Gus decided to hang it
up and move back to his village on a Greek island. The bar was taken
over by a nephew, just as the neighborhood began to gentrify. Now a
hipster set with jobs in the Loop packs away ten-dollar beers and
samples craft whiskies, while the shambling drunks are reduced to
panhandling at the door. Sign of the times. What capitalism calls
propserity are the boring moments without any revolution.
Ted and Felix - our collective Gus - are apparently ready to hang it in,
with or without the Greek island. Perhaps they have other things to do,
or they're just plain burnt out at a low moment (maybe even an unplumbed
depth) of recent history. They haven't capitalized on this thing, but
they wasted even more time than the rest of us, so we all owe them the
unrepayable, which I hope can occasionally translate into something more
concrete here and there, in terms of hospitality and/or collaboration.
Anyway, the April Fool moment is wierdly existential. Since I am still
not really interested in sitting down at what used to be Dorothy's, the
question arises, what I am gonna do for a corner bar? How am I gonna
meet y'all in the future?
As gray hair and the rest of it sets in, we can certainly imagine
ourselves as shambling email drunks sitting at the doorway to the
newest, glitziest social media, hoping for the toss of a virtual dime.
However, human life is a lot longer and richer than the cycles of
technological innovation, and in reality we are a multigenerational
interpretative community of unusual breadth, sobriety, madness and
unexplored potential. Has nettime really become nottime? Who in the hell
has a Greek island to go to? Don't we need to set up something cheaper,
more trustworthy, less dreadfully privatized, and more open to
philosophical, artistic, literary and technical complexity than the
current versions of like-button interactive community? Otherwise, where
we gonna get wild-eyed and hilarious when the rollercoaster of social
change gets rolling again? Because it will, sooner than you think.
Hoping for an answer to this question, Brian
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