This is the first time in over a decade that we can't see many of you at
Transmediale this year, so join our assembly in a moo.
---
Uneasy Social: The Telekommunisten Assembly @transmediale
Baruch Gottlieb
We all know easy social. You say hello, someone says hello back. But
then the uneasiness begins. And that's the way it should be. The bigger
the society, the more heterogenous, the more fraught with inequality,
injustice, grudges, prejudice, or when you're lucky, preferences. The
complex structure of large societies force us to get to know strangers,
to help each other through the hard stuff, its not easy, but its worth
it.
When the Internet went mainstream, there was an moment called Eternal
September. Until then, the internet was the domain mostly of people with
privilege, many of which had technical interest or commitments in how
the Internet worked. Of course they were civil to each other, like
colleagues at a big factory. And this big polyphonous civility led many
to extrapolate that the Internet could bring about a new era of human
exchange, radically cutting across all the ills and trauma that had
accompanied humanity to this apotheosis.
But there already were indications for concern that things may not work
out so smoothly. Every September, a new coterie of university students
would get access to the Internet through their institutions. This
increasingly diverse student body would instantly engage in all manner
of experimental, irreverent behaviour, and, every September, those who
had seen it all, and learned how to get along online had to instruct the
newcomers how to avoid conflict and strife so that all could benefit
from the network together. Then came commercial providers and the
floodgates opened. The small town became a bustling megalopolis
overnight and it was impossible to imagine anything like netiquette as
such ever again. And rightly so. The Internet came to resemble more
truly the societies which had spawned it, with all its injustice, hate,
hope, striving and strife.
The general purpose internet wasn’t ever going to be the emancipatory
environemnt it was advertised to be. How could it be? As Andrew Feenberg
states in his “10 Paradoxes of technology”
https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/paradoxes.pdf the way technologies have
developed should not be seen as producing the best possible outcomes,
such that the technologies we have around us today are the manifest
destiny of technological progress. No, at every stage, the radically
emancipatory potential of technologies is constrained by social
imperatives. And in our age the top imperative comes from the top, from
the investor class who rules the production chains.
When the satisfactory deployment of any new technology is always
proportional to how much investment is attracted, its obvious that new
technologies will only be implemented in ways which suit the interests
of the investor classes, which are to make as much money in as short a
time as possible, by enclosing and extracting maximum value from users.
This drive to the bottom, producing platforms which maximise
sensationalism, conflict and contraversy while at the same time spying
on and manipulating their users behaviour, fulfil this short-term profit
imperative best, producing a world of fly-by-night, maximally
exploitative commercial entities which rile us up, burn us out, and
leave us and our real social construction in the dust. On one hand the
Internet offered “easy social” interaction, because anyone could make an
account on a commercial platform and begin to engage, on the other hand
this engagement was itself part of the profit model of the platform and
so was subject to the priorities of the platform’s investors.
In the 1930s in Germany, when the new technology of radio emerged, it
was taken up by the many trained electronics engineers in the populace.
An unprecedented new media form sprung up and became immensely popular:
“Arbeiterfunk”. Within months, dozens of independent workers radio
stations had begiun exploring all that a networked medium could perform
in their community. The programming was eclectic and creative, new forms
of worker’s opera, education, news and debate began to emerge. Of course
all this was far too threatening for the powers that be and within 6
months, the Arbeiterfunk movement was crushed by the imposition of
“license fees” for the operation of radios and extremely heavy penalties
for contravening the censorious broadcast laws, invoked, of course, in
the interest of public safety.
Today, as the American and European empires falter, we see a new
looming crackdown on popular communcation space. It starts with enemies
of decency, but soon enough it is likely to spread to assign all manner
of dissent as being threats to public safety. Easy social media will not
help us contend with the coming challenges. We need uneasy social,
social engagement where your experience expands and improves the more
you share, learn and exchange with other people. In uneasy social,
soci-ability combines social and ability, you develop real relationships
with people who help you and you help get the most out of the platform.
Unlike easy social where the platform extracts a hefty price for the
ease of interaction and the narrow freedoms of indifference and
dissociation, in uneasy social, the platform provides the minimum viable
infrastructure for the robust social construction which can only emerge
in community togeher. In uneasy social, everything you can do on the
platform is made by someone you know, so you can ask how it works.
Contributing to the social construction means getting to know others as
co-creators and comrades.
For transmediale, telekommunisten retrieves uneasy social technology
from the dawn of the Internet age in the form of a MOO. A MOO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOO is a pre-cloud and pre-web fully
programmable social environment, first developed in the 90s, where the
environment can be infinitely expanded as desired by the users. In
this work of uneasily socialist contemporary networked artwork,
valencies of social interaction are radically emancipated, all manner of
new modes of social being can not only be designed, they can be
co-designed, experienced and lived together. Uneasy social builds real
social bonds because these serve purposes, there is a real economy of
friendship in the network, because everyone’s satisfaction depends on
everyone else.
Easy social merely means the hard part is being hidden from view, but we
all know this hiding comes at a price! Real social is uneasy, cringe at
times, but we bear with it because of the perks. Come rediscover the
benefits of uneasy social at the Telekommunisten Assembly! Local
networked media art hosted on a little board beneath a love seat in
Prenzlauer Berg! MOO programming sessions every month!
The Telekommunisten Assembly: https://asym.me/assembly/
or join us by telnet
assembly.asym.me port 7777
need help? just ask in the MOO or join our discord!
https://discord.gg/tZymcq4XTW
--
Dmytri Kleiner
@dmytri
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