Khazar DANM202 Reading-Bell On Cybercultures

!!High-Level Overview

Subcultural work is style based, circulated thru micromedia which is in turn enhanced and accelerated by the web. Subcultural micromedia uses bricolage, or the re-purposing of the dominant cultures symbols for its own purpose and to undermine the dominant culture. All subcultures, fandoms, hackers, are in danger of being co-opted by the dominant culture. The web is integral to modern subcultures. By its very decentralized, content neutral architecture it promotes its adoption as a micromedia. And by the sheer volume of data, we are forced into a kind of subculture of each our own. To some, such as MUDders, it's as integral and important as RL. "The aim has been to think through subcultural uses of cyberspace, in order to catch a glimpse of the range of activities that occur there."

Detailed Overview

Intro

Exploring "subcultural" or "countercultural" uses of cyberspace, he uncomfortably divide's subcultures into two camps:

• Those that use cyberspace to advance their project
• Those that signal an expressive relationship to tech. through subcultural activities

Subcultural Work

• Sub doesn't mean substandard.
• Not just groups with common interests that stand in opposition but also do some kind of relevant cultural work.
• Style-based. Codified thru dress, attitude & lifestyle. Circulated thru micromedia: music, fanzines, flyers, etc (websites, blogs, discussion groups, MUDDs)
• Goes into Punk ("we stare at you too, man")
• DEFINITION: Bricolage: "the resignification of a patchwork of symbols, given new meaning in new contexts" in book, "Something made or put together using whatever materials happen to be available: “Even the decor is a bricolage, a mix of this and that” in dictionary.
• Reference to Music biz and Punk's relationship makes me think of the 1977 Sex Pistol's Great Rock and Roll Swindle
• Subcultures react to mainstream misrepresentation through micromedia products, have been for centuries. McKay calls it "DIY culture."
• Contends that counter-cultural activity "is itself becoming increasingly decentralized and web-like"
• In addition to subculture - which is style based, are "new social movements". Like subc. they operate oppositionally. Both make use of bricolage.
• Closing thoughts include Neo-Luddites as part of part II cyberc. "signaling an expressive relationship to technology"

Fan Cultures

• Invokes XFiles, Xena, Blake's 7 ( a BBC sciFi series), and focuses on Trekkies.
• Points out parallels between Nerds, Geeks, Hackers and Trekkies
• Use of Brickolage in homoerotic fiction, filks songs. what 's called "Subcultural Capital"
• KEY POINT: "Cyberspace enables fan culture to car on doing what they've always done, only more so" and that "Cyberspace...has transformed the ways that fan culture works"
• Discusses online "male-ing", that "men communicate for status and women communicate to maintain relationships" (Gilligan "In a Different Voice"). But also points out the ironic "Star Fleet Ladies Auxiliary and Embroidery/Baking Society"
• KEY POINT: "It seems as though the web has mainstreamed fandom...the fan as an average web user. On the internet, it seems as though everyone is a fan" – But i contend that there is nothing new about mainstreaming fandom. "Fan Clubs" have been around since the Mickey Mouse Fan Club in the early 60's at least, probably since Rudolph Valentino – there were lots of fan magazines even then. He seems to contend that this co-opting is a new phenomenon, which it is clearly not. Why else would Rock Hudson's gayness have been kept such a successful secret .
• Mentions XFiles, but fails to point out that XFiles was written with fan based conspiracy theorists in mind.

Conspiracy Cultures and Fringe Benefits

• Disinformation web site
• Cyberspace has enlarged the number of participants in consp. cult, broadened topics, accel. propagation.
• "The Web is by its nature a kind of conspiracy-machine" – this is a good conclusion about the influence of the web's architecture on it's content.
• The XFiles. "Like fan culture, cons. cult. has been both enlarged and reshaped by its encounter with cyberspace"
• Cyberspace turns us all into conspiracists – (perhaps embodied in the popularity of the Davinci Code)
• Bell refers to "memes" as a contagious idea that spreads across cyberspace, but memes predate the web in Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene.
• KEY POINT: "Once something is documented in cyberspace...it is then quickly circulated...building up a protective coating of 'truth' by little more than dense cross-posting and citation."
• The worrisome Far Right Internet: pushes those who argue against any on-line censorship (like the ACLU can in its choice of cases).
• It is only natural that extremists would take to the internet with its broad access and lack of censorship, but KEY POINT: it might in fact be the best place to challenge them. The concept of challenging them restates the role of cyberspace as a new public sphere. He suggests that this openness might be the cost of keeping cyberspace open for public debate, I say it is the cost.
• KEY POINT: In re-stating the obvious he says online political subcultures are "almost mirroring the logic of ARPANET as a network resistant to strategic strike, these groups have no 'command center' that can be attacked or infiltrated." A good comment on architecture influencing content again.

Technologic Subcultures

• MUDders
• Multi User Domains/Dungeons
• Favored as research fodder
• Stereotyped as dismissive of RL, but that's a disservice since it's a site to negotiate social and technological relations, and a space of creativity and community.
• Turkle contends they are fantasy worlds which are "harmonious and homogeneous middle-class" communities. I'm not so sure about that, though they may be middle class by the process of economic exclusion from online presence.
• Reference agian to the online rape controversy.
• KEY POINT: Muds are a "complex cybercultural social experiment that has evolved (and is still evolving) its own 'subculture.'"
• Dismisses the text based method of MUDs as disallowing stylization associated with subcultural work – however, it think it's inherent in the use of text itself and in the way things are described.

Cyberpunks

• Exemplified by Gibson and subculturally documented by Mondo2000.
• Gibson's bricolage is technofuturism and recycled pasts that are "creolized" to produce new hybrid subcultures.
• DEFINITION: Creolized: Creolization is a process through which a simplified contact language becomes a fully developed native language, that is, a pidgin language becomes a creole language. The first process is referred to as pidginization, the second is creolization, notions used in contact-linguistics.
• Cyberpunk subculture endorses "technophilic cyborgian bodies" which "rewire identification, producing subcultural and KEY CONCEPT: quasi-ethnic collectives." It "amalgamates in often baffling ways the rational and the irrational, the new and the old, the mind and the body, by integrating the hyper-efficient structures of hihg technology with the anarchy of street subcultures."
• Goes on about Mondo2000, which no longer has an online presence. quotes Sobchack "Its raison d'etre is the techno-erotic celebration of a reality to be found on the far side of the computer and in the 'neural nets' of a 'liberated', disembodied, computerized yet sensate consciousness." – She goes on to criticize them as 'New Age Mutant Ninja Hackers' who are involved in 'interactive autism' or withdrawal from RL. They look "toward downloading their consciousness into the computer" contemptuously referring to the body as 'meat' and 'wetware.'
• Bell thinks we can "read the Mondo 200 New Edge subculture as primarily on of aesthetic modification, of adopting a cyberpunk style." Adherent's "construct their own versions of Gibsonian tribaliism in similarly 'cool fits' of technophilic stylization."
• References Extropians as an even more profound example of technophilic body issues.

Hackers

• Points out public perception vs. community assertions as having social and cultural value. Reminds me of last week's New Yorker article on Generalizing of Pit Bulls.
• The media mediated view of hackers masks "a whole spectrum off activities and a dense network of subcultural work"

• Generations

  1. MIT aficonados in the 50's
  2. Hobbiests bringing computers to the masses
  3. Gaming architects
  4. Accessing other peoples data, viruses
  5. Microserfs, corporately co-opted hackers

• The Rules

  1. All information must be free
  2. Mistrust Authority – promote decentralisation
  3. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not degrees etc
  4. You can create are and beauty on a computer
  5. Computers can change your life for the better

• The Motivations

  1. Feelings of addiction
  2. The urge of curiosity
  3. Boredom with the educational system
  4. Enjoyment of feelings of power
  5. Peer recognition
  6. Political Acts

• Andrew Ross suggests several ways to defend against demonization, the most interesting two are

  1. Hacking is an important form of watchdog counter response to the state
  2. Hacking is essential to maintaining front of cultural resistance against a technofascist future.

• Ross call on us to expand our perception of hacking as a countercultural practice to subvert the technologies around us. KEY POINT: He argues that "cultural critics to should work more like hackers – that any technnoscepticism or cybercritique must be founded on a 'hacker knowledge'."

Neo-Luddites

• The Luddites.
• Discusses the Unibomber's manifesto, ironically published on the web.
• References Kirkpatric Sale who stages computer smash-ins, and Scott Savage's Center for Plain Living, who refuses to recognize daylight savings time.
• "As a model of nostalgic, anti-technological neo-ruralism, Neo-Luddism enacts its own bricolage of fringe beliefs, linking it to conspiratorial subcultures"
• References "Time of the Technoculture" by Robins and Webster. They reframe a more traditional Luddism with the parodic: "We hate technology and we have mastered it – the ultimate cyber-punk horror story: the enemy within." They offer a model for thinking critically about cybertech that resist the easy slide into unthinking technophobia.

SUMMARY

• "The aim has been to think through subcultural uses of cyberspace, in order to catch a glimpse of the range of activities that occur there."
• Reiterates KEY POINT: the sheer volume of data encourages subculturing by forcing us to decide what to look at.