TechnoSurrealism
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TechnoSurrealism
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'EVERYONE IS A *COMPLETE* DISAPPOINTMENT!'
-John Giorno
'Your idea is crazy, but it isn't crazy enough to be true.'
-Neils Bohr
Technoculture, or cyberculture as it is called in the vulgate, has been through
four ideational stages. The purpose and intention of this document is to
announce the fifth. These ideational stages are:
1) Pure Nerdism 1976-1988
2) Technoanarchy (the MONDO 2000 epoch) 1989-1992
3) Technolibertarianism (the Wired epoch) 1993- March 12, 1998
4) Technorealism March 12 - March 19, 1998
5) TechnoSurrealism March 20, 1998 - Dec 21, 2012
1) Pure Nerdism (1976-1988)
Technoculture was truly a small subculture in these early days. Nerds had
some shared beliefs and ethics, like the much maligned 'Information wants to
be free'. Ironically, they didn't particularly care about *sharing* them. They
were not interested in getting terribly involved with politics (or girls). They
were too busy hacking to pontificate. They weren't into hype.
Then I came along
2) Technoanarchy: the MONDO 2000 epoch (1989-1992)
In this glorious epoch, my friends and I induced confused, stoned youths in
the thousands (well, maybe hundreds) to wander soul-naked and bloody
starkers raving mad into the badlands of cyberspace. It was a time of great
exuberance and imagination as we apprehended and celebrated the media
anarchy implicit in the vastness and chaos of the digital terrain.
And it was a time of great gibberish when fractal geometry and chaos theory
could be wielded to induce people to write for five cents per word. Nobody
questioned the wisdom of the technoanarchist avant-garde.
After all, we were all on smart pills.
3) Technolibertarianism: the Wired epoch (1993 - March 12, 1998)
And then, suddenly, any Republican post-industrialist corporate boomer in
possession of more imagination than the average accountant was presented
before the just-now-forming digital masses as a wild anti-government
visionary. What cable TV subscriber could resist the curious pull of such
counterintuitive statements as 'VIACOM DOESN'T SUCK?'
Who could fail to be fascinated by a libertarian magazine campaigning against
state control and excesses in copyright, while employing an expensive, pitbull
legal team to enact a campaign in defense of its trademark that threatened to
colonize the entire English language? And who could resist cyberNewt
Gingrich and the Republican revolution as they mustered whatever political
power they could; from corporate America's over-taxed tills, from her heroic
anti-drug warriors, from her poor huddled underfunded defense
establishment, in order to fight the good fight against the black teenage
mothers who so ruthlessly dominated this great (if soon to be obsolete)
nation state?
4) Technorealism (March 12-19, 1998)
It had become apparent that, after two consecutive epochs wired on
hyperbolic technobabble, the intelligencia needed to crash. So a small group
of intellectuals bent on truth and a book contract had a brilliant... er... um... at
least sobering idea: What if we were to continue the trend, and make each
digital epoch more dreary than the last? What if we were to lay claim to
digital reality itself, defining it in language so stilted, with ideas so
mind-numbingly simplistic and obvious, so soporific that a dazed
cyberpopulis, already rendered doofus from data shock, might just sign on?
And in the course of cyberevents, both great and small, we may sufficiently
impress Random House or perhaps St. Martin's Press?
THE TECHNOSURREALIST MANIFESTO
'And ever since I have had a great desire to show forbearance to scientific
musing, however unbecoming, in the final analysis, from every point of view.
Radio? Fine. Syphilis? If you like. Photography? I don't see any reason why
not. The cinema? Three cheers for darkened years. War? Gave us a good
laugh. The telephone? Hello. Youth? Charming white hair. Try to make me
say thank you: 'Thank you.' Thank you.' --Andre Breton, The Surrealist
Manifesto
Consensus reality is dead! Watch your overcoat.
FORGET TECHNOREALISM
Forget Technorealism. Realism without imagination is mere reductionism.
Realism is not a realistic response to accelerating change. As we approach
the apotheosis of the interpenetration of human lives and media, and anarchic
democratic access to the means of communication, we sense the eruption of
levels of mediated cognitive chaos that is beyond our abilities to comprehend,
predict, or define. And while tenured academics might dream of slowing this
digital demon down that it might be parsed in a spirit of Amish-like rectitude,
there is no solid ground upon which to examine the corpus of current
techno-sociopolitical reality. The whole notion of a shared consensus, some
kind of social center, is decaying at a fever clip and youths raised on the net
and the web won't even recognize the cultural and political assumptions that
are still parroted today, albeit with less and less conviction.
Attempts to reverse undesirable trends of *real* importance, like the
increasing gulf between the rich and the poor, or the fact that a nation of pod
people will tolerate corporate testing of bodily fluids without screaming
bloody revolution, are not serviced by a tepid set of rationalist principles
aimed at unseating a small, perceived techno-utopian elite whose influence is
limited and waning anyway. Pay attention to the rabble, on the streets or on
the web. Then you'll understand that the primary political polarity of our age
isn't technolibertarians vs. neo-Luddites, it's between those who believe in
everything (gray aliens, The Gnomes of Zurich and every conspiracy theory
that slithers across the net, ad infinitum) and those who believe in nothing
(unless you can tie it in to a snide quip about The Brady Bunch or Mork and
Mindy). And both sides are, implicitly, supporters of
TECHNOSURREALISM. Whether they know it or not.
THE PROBLEM OF MONEY
Digital communication is a dissipative, boundary-disrupting tool. I won't bore
you repeating the old arguments about how the net - and mediated
communications culture itself - puts intellectual property, the nation state,the
money system, even the well-defined self, into crisis.
You can read the back issues of Mondo 2000 and Wired yourselves. It
should be enough to simply remind people that just because a situational
description has grown tiresome through repetition, or has been adapted by
people whose political leanings you don't particularly like, that doesn't make
it untrue. And I apologize to all of the writers who, like myself, are struggling
within the economics of digital capitalism, but you are going to have to
struggle for an end to society being organized around economics, *not* for
greater copyright protection! (When photographers for 24 Hours in
Cyberspace took pictures of the Zapatistas, Subcomandante Insurgente
Marcos thought the pictures should belong to the photographer's *subject.*).
You can't count beans in a flood, and you shouldn't *want* to, all right?
Throughout the 20th century, starting with the Dada/Surrealists, individuals
who were too alive and imaginative to stomach *horseshit* have argued for
an end to wage slavery, This was premature in the 1930's. In the digital age,
it's absolutely *necessary.* The solid, secure, agricultural/industrial era,
production-oriented forms of labor have been displaced by automation and
dissipated by the global work force.
There has never before been a time in history where a majority of people
have been forced to hustle so pointlessly, toiling the fields of hype, poisoning
the real and conceptual environment with utterly bogus product, desperately
servicing invented needs, building massive unnecessary arsenals, clearcutting
the forests, and always demanding that their self-interests, however obsolete,
be protected, *instead* of demanding the transformation of a social system
that will make them do *anything* for money, even ask Big Brother to reach
into the privacy of individual homes to make sure nobody is copying anything
for free, which is the *only* way to carry traditions of intellectual property
into the high tech world. I'll say it once more, straight out: The whole situation
around information as property *isn't* resolvable. We need a social system
that doesn't require artists and software writers (or anybody) to make
money.
Cutting edge capitalism is now in a pure transacting economy of derivatives,
currency exchanges, options etc. with little reference to usable human wealth.
The market proves that our society can survive a relatively small number of
people conjuring vast fortunes by the manipulation of money as information.
At the highest levels, money is now an amorphous, redefinable *process.* If
we can afford the conjuring of vast sums for the small numbers, we can
manage the conjuring of small sums for the vast numbers. The same trick top
hat that produces fortunes out of mathematics (and thin air) could be
employed to end scarcity and reduce or even eliminate alienating work in the
post-industrial centers.
Is anybody with me?
Of course you are.
INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE AND SO DO I
'You must have chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.' - Nietzsche
This is the decade of the tight asshole. Intellectuals who you presumed to be
at least 50% sane will suddenly start justifying the de facto censorship of a
film based on a book by Nabokov. Seems that every time you turn around,
someone else is buying or selling a huge bale of horseshit in the name of
social responsibility. A stifling, smug centrism trickles down like day-old piss,
from that horndog in the White House to the blockhead in each of us. The
next person who bores me gets a Ketamine dart between the eyes. I've done
all I can with language. The age of technosurrealism has already exceeded
the Age of Reason and now it is over, too. Go home to your husbands,
wives and children. Reality is a stranger to us all.
R.U. Sirius is currently Editor-In-Chief of Axcess magazine, Publisher/Editor
of REVOLTING! and a correspondent for Wired News. He also guest
edited the most recent edition of 21.C magazine.
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