Re: nettime: push wired?

[mercedes@techno.de (mercedes)]

Dear Geert,

>I do not agree with Foucault about the status of critique. He
>might be right, but the effects of his phrases about the End of
>Critique have prevented many of our generation in making rough,
>dirty, daily analyses of the powers-to-be (and making mistakes).

I do partly agree with what you wrote here. But isn^t it like this: More
than Foucault stopped any critique he got caught from right positions, who
tried to hold his writings against the left thinking like: Here, look, your
fight is over! It is over in a different sense for me, because i think we
have to go over to new strategies, which does not mean stop analyses, but
work further on it and hold an own modell against it. Like nettime maybe
normally is. In fact Foucault never told anywhere anybody to stop thinking,
but he created new modells in showing that critique has always to change to
be still critique.

>I need mirrors, fixed
>objects, texts I can analyze, in order to better understand the
>rapid developments.

Of course there are still these traditional tools of analyses, but they
changed the direction, didn^t they? It is not about criticizing anything
and that^s it, but about using it as a mirror, like you said, in order to
devellop own strategies.
I did get very radical about this, which means in detail: I do not care
about the mistakes of the "other", but prefer to take up all the evil (gee,
my words), annoying things and learn from them. Take the good things away
from them, steal them over to my own concepts. (That^s what YT in Snowcrash
does, kind of) Putting up a border between us in terms of where are their
mistakes equals why are they bad would prevent me from learning.
I personally criticize in that negative way when i do not understand what
and why something is going on. Like as time to think.


>Wired is not an endangered species or some minority that cannot
>defend itself so easily.

I never thought Wired as a victim, nor did i want to defend them, just to
hold open this possibility to look at them and take their knowledge and
tricks away. To much negative critique can just close that door, i think.

>But Wired is small, Ken Wark is right about that. Even the whole
>media business is nothing compared to other industries. But it's
>our branch. And Wired is my magazine. I haven't missed one issue
>and I am the last one to look down on it, or dismiss it because
>of it's bad quality. Both Mondo 2000 and Mediamatic almost seized
>to exist (as regular publications). And we have not been able yet
>to come up with a critical alternative to Wired. That's why they
>have the field to themselves, still.

There may be the point really. As Mark Stahlmann wrote:
>The answer to your question is that we don't know the answer.  The
>Toffler/Kelly world has been working on their view of post-industrialism
>for 40+ years.  The post-modernist philosophers have also been building
>their houses for just as long (or longer depending on when you start
>counting).

The reason, why Wired is so big, might be quite obvious. Clever combination
of new and more important than ever technology wrapped up in a little bit
of culture, spiced and mildered by a little bit of journalistic approach to
get it smooth. And the right time, where people want to know these things.

Wonder if we not better start an analyses on the package of information.
Style of writing is the context of information, in the net as well as here
in our magazine. (i am working for a musicmagazine called Soundlab -
electronic aspects of life -> http://www.techno.de/soundlab).
As soon as we get more pages, we want to integrate net..., yeah, what,
...culture, this word again?. Don^t know yet.

Have fun, cu perhaps somtimes, if you stopp by in Berlin, would be nice.

Mercedes Bunz



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