<nettime> Uneasy Social: The Telekommunisten Assembly @transmediale

[Dmytri Kleiner <dk@telekommunisten.net>]

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.

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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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