« "Kerry concedes" | Main | Traditional Non-Traditional »

Relic: Hohocon Talk

This is kind of funny... a relic, really: a talk I gave at Hohocon, the hacker convention, almost ten years ago... I also linke to somebody's review, which says my talk didn't really have a point...

HO HO

jonl, FringeWare, Inc. TAZmediacrat, at HoHoCon (1/1/95)

I've been thinking about how commercialism on the internet and net activism are related, and the best way to get into that is by looking at World Wide Web. How many here have home pages on the web? (many hands) How many pay someone to create and maintain yer home page? (no hands, only grimaces and weird cackles....)

Well, SRI futurist Tom Mandel was saying the other day that, in his opinion, there's no competition within the World Wide Web, that there aren't enough folks sufficiently browseworthy to `get it.' Ha! What an underestimation. At FringeWare we're set up to do commercial home pages, and we've been watching what other folks are doing. We've seen some weird developments -- like the folks in Austin who want to charge over $300 a month to handle a home page. And then there's the development of online magazines. HotWired, f'rinstance...operated by Wired magazine, tightly controlled, supported by sponsors whose home pages are included in the browse. HotWired's onto something important: if you're gonna charge an arm or two to carry what amounts to advertising, or webvertising, you have to produce evidence that somebody, or many bodies, are going to look at the site, and you have to figure out how to attract `em to the home page, and produce some kinds of statistics to show that they're really looking. The way to pull traffic to home pages is by having compelling content, and of course HotWired's got the content. This is sorta like television, where the ads carry the content, and we all know how well that's worked out.

Except with television the ads are right in yer face, whereas on a web server, they're pretty easy to skip, unless you force the browser to look at them. And of course, if you do this, if you're coercive, you're (hopefully) gonna rub the libertarian instincts of the net community raw; you're gonna find that you don't have the same kind of passive consumeroid that television's created. (If this proves untrue, please don't tell me, let me live with my illusions about digital community....)

(Guilty admission: since poetry don't feed the bulldog, FringeWare, Inc., who're capitalists, after all, will try to attract you to our site with lotsa sound and fury...and we're gonna sell space for what is really, however else it might look, ADVERTISING. But we won't shove it down yer modem, and that's a promise.)

Political digression of sorts: All this WEB activity is going to make the Internet HOT, highly visible, very crowded. Browsers will take more and more bandwidth, though I'm told we can always create more...cyberspace may be finite, but not so limited as physpace, which only allows one reality per plane and one plane per existential yuk, etc.

However, there's this other cultural thing, old thinking an all. Have you noticed that some folks want to tell you just how to butter yer toast? As more folks come online they're going to be like `civilized' settlers on the electronic frontier -- and the computer underground is going to be like the Indian nation. (Many rousing yuks of laughter) You know how well the settlers and the Indians got along...

In the online world, your freedoms are as easily yanked as depriving you of access to the technology, to those electronic spaces, however hidden, where you do your more or less (often less) private thing. You may be content to live in yer own enclaves, yer temporary autonomous zones hidden from the AOLtobahn, but beware, freedom and privacy require diligent defense, something the Indians understood too late.

`Til now, nobody's cared much what you were doing online, on the electronic frontier, but with the settlers arriving, the sheriff and the cavalry may not be far behind, whatever that might imply. It could mean that they simply want to keep your space and theirs discretely separate, but then again, it could mean that they'd want to restrict yer freedoms because they don't like the sound of...computer underground! oh shit! is that like the Internet porno online rape of the innocent mind of christian bubbahood kinda thang? Consider the Carnegie Mellon flap, the one about alt.sex -- how long had they been carrying those threads? Why are they just now taking issue? It's the settlers, man, they're forming a circle with their virtual wagons....

Austinite Jim Hornfischer wrote a piece for Omni magazine (Continuum, 1/95) where he used some comments I made to support his contention that hackers are apolitical and won't organize. (laughter) That might be true in a sense, but I don't think it's absolutely true, because when you get that somebody's working schemes that aren't in your best interests, that would ultimately deprive you of your freedom just `cause somebody's moral fine- tuning differs from your own, you're just liable to organize. And if you're somebody like Steve Jackson, following all the rules but busted anyway over somebody's paranoid cyberpunk fantasy, then you're just liable to organize (and, perhaps, create something like EFF-Austin).

And what I really said or tried to say to Jim Hornfischer was that hackers aren't really into organizing around party lines, because with the global telecommunications revolution, the information superhighway or infobahn or whatever hype label you want to put on it, the party line thing is archaic, anyway. Political parties were formed to hold support together from issue to issue, so the power brokers would have the votes or voices they needed to push their agenda along... but who needs political parties when you can build support overnight, ad hoc, by putting the word online? You get immediate natural constituencies, polarization, debate, flames, and eventually, some sort of resolution, often before the clueless politicians even catch on that there's an issue! And this can mean that you don't have to toss yer heart and mind to Republicrats or to some political action scamittee or to anybody else. You can choose your battles not according to somebody's bullshit dogma, but according to yer own thinking and perception.

So back to commercialism (from the fringe perspective, at least). FringeWare set out to build a kind of street market in cyberspace where we'd sell our wares, but we'd also be part of the community. We think that's the right way to do commerce...what E.F. Schumacher called "economics as if people mattered." So we built our street market, and as commercial development within the vast interconnected Matrix of online systems proceeds, we see developers moving in from outside the community, making it their own, and rebuilding the thoroughfares to carry Heavy Traffic.

Well, we're not buying no virtual earth-moving machines. What we're doing is hanging in, staying plugged into the community we know, which is free and loose, a neotribal diversity of folks who respect each other's freedom to create new spaces within a digital universe where the imagination rules and reality is infinitely malleable.

And we tune into the Immediasts and other folks who turn media on its ear, and look for clever ways to expose for what it is the heavy-handed brainwash-driven capitalism that would gladly trash yer freedom to THINK openly and creatively while telling you how great it is to live in a free world. How can you be free when somebody's pumped yer brain full of hype? We're capitalists, yes, but we're noncoercive capitalists. Just a few freaks on the virtual street, selling our wares from a stand on the corner....

The End!

jon posted this at 5:50 PM
Share on Facebook| email to a friend

 Subscribe to RSS feed for Weblogsky