INTERVIEW:
Question 1
Talking about globalization and virtualization, you said that people are used by
technology and not the contrary. Does this mean that the optimistic expectations about the
great possibility of freedom deriving from technological progress will be frustrated?
Answer (Arthur Kroker)
Yes, I mean the 1990s have seen this tremendous wave of tech-hype of what we call
techno-utopianism sweep the world. It really claims that technology is equivalent to human
freedom. For myself, I always remember what Marshall McLuhan warned us against. McLuhan
always liked to say: What are you going to say to people when they insist on sticking
their head into the invisible buzz teeth of a buzz saw of technology and calling the whole
thing freedom? So I think it’s really salutary to think of technology optimistically,
as containing possibilities for freedom but also insist that it be thought of in terms of
the relationship to social justice and actual society.
(Marilouise Kroker)
I think if you don’t understand the technology, you can’t critique it and you
can’t use the technology, so I think it’s very important to become aware of the
technology. And if you do that, well, critique will always follow.
Question 2
Do you feel that teleworkers, as well, are being used by their PCs? Do you see them as
technological slaves?
Answer (Arthur Kroker)
Teleworkers? Yes, that’s for sure. Well, not technological slaves...
(Marilouise Kroker)
...very close to it because of the monitoring policy. I know of people that work at
airlines reservations, for example, who are monitored 24 hours a day during the work
cycle. Even to use a washroom and go to use a toilet or something, they’ll actually
be stopped if they spend more than two minutes away from their desk.
(Arthur Kroker)
It’s even more sinister than that. In Silicon Valley they’re developing a lot of
new eye tracking technologies. They’re used by jet fighter pilots right now to
control the screen so you don’t have to have your hands on the controls, you simply
control it with eye movement. There’s a big movement now to develop tracking
technology so that office workers will control the actions on the screen of their computer
simply by eye actions and not have to use the mouse. The problem with that is - if you
think of the tremendous stress, because there have been a lot of medical studies on the
amount of stress that teleworkers experience - well, you can imagine how stressed you are
when you’re completely, perspectively wired into the computer screen on an eight-hour
basis per day. It really is a kind of new form of wired flesh and it’s really
sinister.
(Marilouise Kroker)
At Xerox Parc recently they actually had the office of the future. And the office of the
future consists in this great big camera, because they said that if you were going to work
at home, the company would want to know where you were working and when you were working
so that you’d have to have a camera on you during your eight-hour workshift.
Question 3
So that doesn’t change very much from working directly there. Arthur, could you
introduce the trilogy: Data Trash, Spasm and Hacking the Future? What’s the
philosophy behind all this and why did you divide it into three parts?
Answer (Arthur Kroker)
We wrote individually and collectively and collaboratively three books. The first was a
book called Spasm, which deals with a digital music composer, Steve Gibson. And that was
really to understand digital technology from the perspective of art. It’s a book that
talks directly to a series of artists, either in photography or sort of crash performance
artists. It’s produced with a CD cover, which is called Spasm, as well. This book was
examining the culture and the art and the philosophy of digital technologies where
it’s a utopian possibility. If Spasm could be described as a book which is an
optimistic perspective on the digital apocalypse, Data Trash would be an apocalyptic
perspective on digital apocalypses. So it’s the flip side because Digital Trash is
really a book which says that created possibilities exist in digital technology, that
digital technology is coming to be realised today on the basis of a new convergence of
really powerful class forces, what we call the emergence on a global basis of a new
technology, what we call the virtual class. Data Trash is an examination from a very
political standpoint of the cultural politics and the political economy of the virtual
class. And the book that mediates the two is called Hacking the Future. And Hacking the
Future, which Mary Louise and I wrote together, consists for the most part of short
stories. The literary form of short stories. We just travelled around the world and
collected stories from people on terms of who is losing as a result and what the personal
consequences of the experience of these technologies are. We did a lot of work in
California. Stories like Slash and Burn where metawoman who has very beautiful auburn
hair, California style, had archangel wings tattooed on her back. When she stood up she
has long thin scars up and down her arms and legs, and we ask her what these are and she
says: Well, it’s a new practice in California that I’m into. It’s called
slash and burn. What you do you cut your arms or your legs or any flesh and then your pour
gasoline on it, and then you ignite the flames but you don’t let it burn too long
because the point is not sadomasochism, really. What you want to do is put out the flames
and then you feel, as she said, the long, slow pleasures of the healing process. And it
just struck us from that story, which has such elements of pathos and authenticity and
suffering, that in fact this was a person who had gone autistic, just simply couldn’t
feel and had gone numb perhaps out of self-protection from the technological society. And
I think that person - her name is Denise and she’s an artist by day and a dancer by
night - is really a metaphor for Western civilisation, because I think the whole culture
has gone numb from self-protection because of information overload and data overload.
Question 4
It’s seems that you are very critical of this technological development. Could this
be called pessimism or stark vision or is it just realism, from your point of view?
Answer (Arthur Kroker)
I think of myself as a realist. I think to be a realist today is to think in opposite
terms, just like the technology. The whole culture today is things held in tension and
opposites. I always think of myself as a hyper-optimist on the one hand, and at the same
time a hyper-pessimist. I’m a hyper-optimist because digital technologies contain
genuine possibilities for human emancipation and for new global forms of communication.
McLuhan wasn’t wrong when he spoke about the possibility of technology, if used in
the correct way, of giving rise to new forms of epiphany. At the same time, the actual
experience of these technologies in the hands of really powerful multinational
corporations is, in fact, they’ve reduced the technology to real forms of human
degeneration. You just have to go look at a lot of the chip factories up and down the
coast of California where they have immigrant workers, women workers for the most part,
working in really slave-like conditions. This is not technology as emancipation. So, I
would say I’m a political realist and I’m really interested not in a
techno-utopian perspective but a very traditional perspective of thinking of technology
with respect to possibilities for social justice.
Question 5
You define virtual reality as a dream of liberal fascism, and that differentiates this
kind of fascism from retrofascism. What are these two kinds of fascism?
Answer (Arthur Kroker)
I think the two dominant political tendencies in the world are both forms of fascism. One
I would call the type of fascism associated with the new form of liberalism that’s
neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is what in fact traditional fascism is, that is,
pan-capitalism. With the collapse of socialism, pan-capitalism struts the historical stage
of the world and doesn’t find its traditional historical check during the last fifty
years in socialism after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and faces, finally, it’s
double other, which is fascism. And all of these Western imperial cultures are retreating
into cultures in which there is a tremendous desire and will for purity. And it invents
different forms of things. They impose very strict disciplinary states. They impose
anti-immigration legislation so you have the bunker state and that’s as true in Italy
as it is in France and certainly in Canada and the United States; it’s a pan-global
movement. And the state itself divides into a ruling virtual class or a new technological
lead on the one hand, who really take the spoils of the game, and on the other hand the
spreading mass of surplus bodies and surplus flesh. That for me is what I would call
virtual or liberal fascism.
The other type of fascism is equally sinister and that’s the mere double in some
ways. It’s like a convergent movement. It’s retrofascism. Retrofascism is, for
example, the movement of Le Pen in France and the National Front in France, PRO in the
United States, equal movements in Canada or in Bosnia. Retrofascism is like very
traditional fascism and usually comes out of this formula. If you combine a national sense
of humiliation with economic depression, then in fact you can really aggravate and
mobilise populations to move against weakened scapegoats. The scapegoats are random almost
- immigrant groups in the United States. If you’re a single, black welfare mother,
you’re the scapegoat for all the problems of society itself. And in the country where
I come from, Canada, it’s mostly immigrant groups also have become scapegoats and
they’re accused of exacting too much from the welfare state. Well, these are
traditional forms of retrofascism.
Question 6
You assert that in the process of globalization there is the destabilisation of all kinds
of languages. So how do you think we will communicate in the future?
Answer (Arthur Kroker)
What I’ve noticed in the globalization of the media is, in fact, that there’s a
tendency to image the world but understand nothing. The French thinker Jean Baudrillard is
correct. Baudrillard says we have massive forms of communication. We have real information
overload. But at the same time in an exact and equal way, we have a big drop in human
meaning, so that we have systems of mass communication but really degeneration of human
meaning. For myself, there’s been actually a degeneration not simply in language but
also in the human perspective. And in many ways I believe our culture has already gone in
some ways deeply autistic. Perhaps for self-protection, but perhaps we’ve almost
entered into a new phase of social degeneration as well.
Question 7
If this is the situation of the information society, is it better to remain out of it or
to belong to several minorities?
Answer (Marilouise Kroker)
There are a lot of liberatory groups on the net, for example. We publish a journal called
C-Theory. We are going to have an Italian version of C-Theory very soon, which is going to
be absolutely wonderful. With an electronic journal we have met people all over the world;
the journal goes out to people in 120 countries. We get one million hits a year and we
publish articles from all over the world. They’re not just North American-based, this
is what’s so wonderful. I think as long as the Net stays user-driven and doesn’t
end up consumer-driven like a lot of the other media, it is a very positive aspect of the
technology.
Question 8
You said that computers do not have a memory because they have no political and aesthetic
judgement. What can we do with computers? How can we use computers for the best?
Answer (Arthur Kroker)
We were comparing the notion of what happens to memory in computer language as opposed to
human memory. Our point was, in fact, that people always diminish the notion of human
memory. We don’t think that’s true because we think human memory, in fact, went
hypertext a long time before software developers got the hypertext. Human memory has what
computer memory doesn’t have and that is that memory is not only simply about
gathering the facts but also about forgetting things and also about weaving the facts
between your fictional, representational remembrance of your own past. And in that way,
the very notion of computer memory, in fact, represents a real degeneration of the
possibilities of memory. That’s not to say by any means, though, that digital
technology does not contain real interesting possibilities, for example, in terms of what
we would use in creating a recombinant past and recombinant histories, where you would
actually apply to fiction the very notion of splicing and sequencing and weaving together
a future together with the past and creating new kinds of fictional unities. The media do
this all the time. And those techniques of new computer memory are what is called the
normal newscast on any television show.
Question 9
Today we realise that television has created a dominant form of consciousness and that
people seem to be controlled by a kind of television that does not make them think. Do you
think that the same will happen using computers? Or is the computer more of an interactive
media and so i a medium that people participate more in?
Answer (Arthur Kroker)
Every technology contains different possibilities. I think that if technology is left to
itself, it tends to impose its own imperatives and one of the imperatives of technology is
to prefer not to have human beings exerting their will power, it would prefer just to let
the technology develop the way that it would. But I don’t think that television
creates, necessarily, unthinking populations. It’s certainly true that it does. But a
lot of people that I know in the digital generation in fact become very conscious by
becoming smarter than TV in some ways, in being able to hold maybe 50 story-lines in their
mind at the same time, carry on conversations in which they only use TV icons - like
self-referential points - and, in fact, presenting to the challenge of TV the
counterchallenge of being faster than TV and maybe smarter than it in some ways. With new
members of what we would call the digital generation, with the computer exactly the same
thing has happened. I’ll just give you an example. My seven year-old nephew is a real
whiz. I sat down with him recently. And I was flabbergasted at his completely perspectible
speed. He did exactly what Marshall McLuhan said, he was actually lighter than an
astronaut but a heck of a lot faster than astronauts, in terms of his perspectible ability
to go through this. I just said: Slow down Zachary because I can’t keep up with you.
And you feel the tremendous acceleration and movement he had of his body. And it just
struck me at that point that a big chasm had opened up. Here was a new member of the
digital generation and that there was in fact a kind of cultural perhaps biological
difference in some ways. I have a lot of confidence in the new generation.
Question 10
I had a feeling from the show last night that you were talking about the possibility that
all this is going to turn people into mutants. Is this true? What kind of mutants?
Answer (Marilouise Kroker)
I think we’re all mutants. That’s the only way that the species will develop and
change over the years. We have talked about different types of mutations like
reconfiguration of the brain, which has certainly happened with the new digital
generation. We are the people of the third millennium. Teenagers actually have a digital
way of thinking which is very different from our mid-20th century brains which have a
post-modern perspective at the most. And then there’s generation X, but I mean the
new generation is certainly a digital generation. We also talk about issues of sexuality
and transsexuals like Toni Denise, who was a man and is now a woman. She is able to
colonise the female body, but living within the male mind.
(Arthur Kroker)
Toni Denise is a woman that we met in a bar in Tallahassee, Florida where she was doing
lip-synching, and all the machines broke down and stopped and she went on with this whole
rap. We thought she had some profound insights and played a whole audience like the
central nervous system in some ways. So we got to know her and talked to her. And it
turned out that she had surgically reconstructed her body, she says, from the nose down -
she wasn’t kidding - from the nose down to her toes, changed, transformed her male
body into a female body. But the interesting thing about her we found was that she very
intentionally retained a male mind and really had the sense of the male mind colonising in
an almost predatory way the female body. So she was interested in using male consciousness
to pick up guys and stuff like this. So for us she was a case of a kind of mutant.
I’m critical of the notion of mutants at all and I would agree with Mary Louise that
mutation is how the human species has always developed and Toni was an interesting
mutation. She’s a mutation because she’s a real gender shifter. She’s like
the first member of what we would call the third sex, sort of the last sex, neither male
nor female but something in the space in-between. And that’s pretty interesting for
us. These are healthy signs. But on the other hand, you have what I would say are more
sinister kinds of mutations happening. You go out to tech-labs like in Kenmore Square in
Boston or in Silicon Valley and there the biotech companies are actually growing a new
human species. There are companies in Boston that are developing synthetic flesh. If
you’re going to have artificial intelligence and robotic life forms in the world,
then you need to get synthetic flesh. And they literally are growing - it’s just
about ready to come to market - a kind of gleaming, new synthetic flesh. They’re also
developing new forms of recombinant eyesight, which is not human eyesight and doesn’t
have normal ocular vision but has virtual eyesight. So, they are growing in the biotech
labs a new successor species to the human species. In a book like Data Trash, the basic
theme seems to be a theme about class confrontation, but overriding that theme is the real
reflection on Nietzsche’s sense that all of technology is about a weakening of human
flesh. For us at the end of the 20th century, we don’t even live within a
technological society anymore. We live in a society which is dominated by what we call the
will to virtuality. And the world of virtuality means the extraction of the energy and of
the life form out of the human species and the potential replacement of the human species
by a new life form, by an android life form. And everyone scoffs at this and doesn’t
think it’s true, but for us this emergence of a life form or these new technological
forms like a virtual species is, in fact, a likely successor to the human species. And
that’s what makes the corporate directors of these technological multinationals
doubly sinister. Because one, they sermon your head up a virtual cross, but on the other
hand they’re like quislings to the human species. They’re very happily handing
over the history and anthropology of the human body to a new kind of telematic species
with complete mindlessness. They don’t really understand that they in the history of
life forms are a transitory class form.
Question 11
So how do we come out of all this danger? What can we base our optimism on?
Answer (Marilouise Kroker)
In order to base our optimism on anything, I think we have to think deeply about the
issues. For example, the ethical issues of biotech labs growing pigs in order to use their
organs for human beings. This is an issue that most people really should know something
about and think about the implications. As human beings, do we have the right to use
animals, animal hearts? Actually, right now what they’re using is livers and
they’re placing the liver on the outside of the body. There are individuals with
major malfunctioning livers. And eventually through the biotech they’re going to be
able to implant certain enzymes in these pigs that they grow at the biotech labs and then
they’ll be able to implant the pig liver into a human being. No one ever talks about
the pig and if the pig wants this.
(Arthur Kroker)
We have really a diminished theory of rights and that’s been accepted by almost
everyone, that if you’re not a human life form, you don’t have rights. If
you’re a tree, a stone or an animal, you simply don’t have rights. It’s a
very convenient kind of ethical blind spot in Western consciousness. So I would agree with
Mary Louise that the beginning point for resistance is in fact the very traditional
practice of thinking deeply about technology in very classical, traditional ways. It leads
you to think of the possibility and for us the reality that technology is deeply
nihilistic. Laurie Anderson talks about the speed of darkness. That for myself is deeply
evocative because technology is about the speed of darkness. It’s this kind of
curious mixture of moving at a fantastically accelerated pace but at the same time
it’s a story of slow suicide, of the slowing down of the human species into much more
primitive forms of barbarism, all within the high glitz, high-tech kind of atmosphere.
It’s curious and contradictory; it’s a story of the human condition.
Question 12
I also saw an image of a robot with a baby inside her or its belly. What did that mean?
Answer (Arthur Kroker)
For us this is a pregnant robot. It was the cover that we used on Hacking the Future. For
us this is a double story in some ways because this is a picture of a woman’s robotic
body that has a little baby in the bubble but the baby is a life form. It’s to let us
make a double reflection on this. Our reflection is why can’t robots have little
babies and why can’t robots also have genuine forms of want and reciprocity and
intimacy with respect to the human baby. We were also led to the painter’s
consciousness, because the painter was a woman who painted this picture. I said: "Why
did you not make this baby like a wonderful little android creature? It should be sort of
nice too". And she was just completely shocked. She said: "Well, I could diagram
the robot and for myself that’s all nice, but I could never touch the sacredness of
babyhood". So it’s a curious mixture of human nostalgia for the human life form
and also at the same time a real meeting point between android consciousness and human
consciousness in the form of a little baby bubble.
Question 13
In Data Trash you defined these sort of technocrats as the prophets of a new form of
civilisation but very cool virtualization. And you say that these are not going to hold
power; these are going to be put away by this revolution, just as much as a lot of other
people, the minority people. Why do you say this? Technocrats are people like in Wired
magazine or who do you mean exactly?
Answer (Arthur Kroker)
The virtual class divides into two very different groups. On the one hand, the
technocratic class consists of very old-time capitalists from the communications companies
and from a lot of other companies who get on the Internet precisely because they want to
make as much profit as possible. And it’s like a Darwinian primitive type of
capitalism on the Internet today which operates under slogans like: "Get into
cyberspace and you’re going to be crushed". Or: "It’s completely
inevitable, there’s nothing you can do about it, so simply get out of the way".
And on the other hand, that class of old-time capitalists by itself can’t evoke the
necessary forms of futuristic vision, the kind of hype that’s necessary to gain wide
popular acceptance of the Internet. They really need messianic idealists who operate with
absolute authenticity. They really believe in what they’re saying. People like
Negroponte and others who provide the kind of hype that’s necessary to get the
Internet moving. But as soon as you get the Internet moving, as soon as it’s so
seductive of an appeal that everyone... Like a woman in Britain told us recently, she said
her mother phoned up her daughter and said: "Where can I buy an Internet? I want to
get your sister an Internet for Christmas. I went into Toys’R’Us and they
didn’t have any Internets on the shelf. Where can I get an Internet?" All of
this is very strange. This Internet craziness has just completely swept the world. But as
soon as you get enough people on the Internet and enough people hooked either by literally
being consumers or if they’re not, by having a sense of being completely
impoverished, they’re missing out something important, then the politics, the hard
bill of consolidation is delivered. And that’s happening in the United States and
certainly in Western Europe right now. As Wired magazine likes to say: "The Internet
is not about messianic idealism, it’s not about tech-futurism. The Internet is a
business and businesses have to take money, and so get those 1960s kind of hippie
idealists out of the way with all their New Age sensibilities about the possibilities of
technology, and let’s get down to the business of making money, which is the business
of business". So that’s one theme that we develop, which I think is true because
since the writing of Data Trash, it’s become manifestly obvious. And even the
tech-futurists now go around in their consultants reports to business conferences and they
don’t even claim any longer that there’s any futuristic aspiration in the
Internet. They say: "Well, the Internet is about making money and about making
profits and here is the new package that I’m hyping that will help us to streamline
the population or to put the "cyberhook" into the population with a greater
range of profitability". For myself, the cynicism is so passive and so deadened in
this class, that it’s become their popular consciousness and they do not hide it.
They have absolute cynical consciousness and in fact they are triumphantly smug about it
because they really are the ruling class.
Question 14
At the end of the performance there was the idea that the double zero of the last year of
the century will send the computers back and they will go back a century and they
won’t be able to do anything. Is this a metaphor for the end of the millennium or was
it just a technological joke?
Answer (Arthur Kroker)
Well, it’s both. As computer consultants like to say, you make money out of saying
things. Peter Jaeger said in an NBC newscast : "This is big, it’s happening.
It’s inevitable and there’s nothing we can do about." A value which I
don’t believe. Because as we speak there’s probably some young computer hacker
who is solving the problem quite quickly. For us, it’s a real metaphor for our
civilisation, because what it really means is just as much as the computer goes remake and
flips back from the year 2000 to the year 1900 because it can’t recognise a
four-digit figure and represents a two-digit figure, all culture today is a remake
culture, like remake cigars and remake love and remake sex and remake images. Just remake
politics for sure. Remake everything. What Nietzsche called a cycle of eternal recurrence,
I believe, has almost a stranglehold on Western culture and nothing new is being allowed
to be created. Nothing new is being allowed to burst forth. Things are forced back into
this kind of holding pattern which for a lot of young people particularly, absolutely
suffocating. People are being denied the possibility for the creation of new human futures
in favour of a kind of remake, retread civilisation.
Question 15
If you could pretend to be in the year 2200 and just look back on this period, how would
you consider this culture? What kind of period, enlarged though, are we going through?
Answer (Marilouise Kroker)
I think that one thing is a larger gap than ever before economically within the
population. You have a real virtual class and a surplus class and there’s very few
people in-between. And as far as the Net is concerned, 40 percent of the people on the Net
are in California; only 10 percent of the people on the Net live in North America. I
don’t know about the statistics in Europe, but there’s not a lot of people yet
there’s so much tech-hype. So I think that when people look back at this era
they’re going to think :Yeah they thought that they were really tech-cool. They knew
everything that was going on but they really didn’t know much of anything.
(Arthur Kroker)
The 1990s might mark this era in which the kind of hypermodern, technological civilisation
of the West did a complete flip instantly back to medievalism and medievalism is just in
the air. It’s the notion of the bunkered communities, for example, in the United
States where people in medieval castles seek to save themselves from a really threatening
public situation. Or the great kind of vitriolic and various crusades against the new
Islamic threats or the creation of a whole disenfranchised class of technological peasants
symbolised, for example, in Britain by the new nomadic movements. They actually dress like
medieval peasants with their beautiful curled shoes and straw hats and they’re the
anarchistic nomadic caravans that go through Britain. Certainly, we saw them last summer.
I would say that we are living in an age which is simultaneously hypermodern but also
hyper-neomedieval at the same time. I think that the 1990s will also, if I look back from
the year 2200 from whatever year, I would say this is an age marked by a fantastic form of
cultural futility. There’s hubris in the air of an ancient Greek sense of real
hubris, a real belief that technical perfectibility is just around the corner and that
science and technology can finally do that which we always wanted them to do. They can
save us from our own death. They won’t save us from our own death because after all
we’re all born to face the death of one life and that’s our own. And I think
that dawning satisfaction is going to give rise to tremendously bitter forms of reaction
formation and resentment and scapegoating that will mark the politics of the beginning of
the wonderful 21st century.
Question 16
Could you tell us more about the C-Theory electronic journal?
Answer (Marilouise Kroker)
We edited a print journal for 15 years called the Canadian Journal of Political and Social
Theory, and then about four years ago we decided to go electronic because we wanted to go
beyond the boundaries of Canada and the United States. Because of the postal rates or
whatever you couldn’t really go beyond that. So we decided to begin an electronic
journal . We have it in two formats right now. It’s ASCII version with a mailing list
that goes out once a week; we do book reviews and articles and lots of interviews. And we
really try to mediate Europe with the United States. We have lots of interviews with
people like Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio and other people in Europe and so in that
way it’s excellent because it goes out to 120 countries. We also have a Website in
San Francisco that Carl Steadman, who works for Hotwired, does for us. And we’ll be
having a Website in an ASCII version in Italy and a multimedia site in Sweden. So
we’ve really loved the electronic journal because you can come into contact with so
many people on a daily basis and I think lots of times when we’ve given talks in
various countries, people feel very isolated that they are by themselves and in this way
they can communicate with one another on a regular basis and understand what’s going
on in other cultures immediately instead of waiting. We had an article on the French
election and we put it up the day after the French election. You didn’t have to wait
until it was in a print form six months later.
(Arthur Kroker)
To that I would just add that C-Theory represents the possibility of the Internet, what
the Internet actually has actually become, because I don’t think the Internet is just
a technical means of communication anymore. We are past that phase. And the Internet has
been contaminated by human life, by intellectuality. C-theory numbers among its writers
and its readers the most brilliantly advanced mnemonic engineers from Silicon Valley. A
lot of engineers out of the Silicon Valley and Cheever City engineering set, who
you’d never think would be reading theory journals and thinking about cultural
issues, in fact they turn out to have really profound questions that they want to ask.
There’s a lot of Net poets coming out of new poetry circles in San Francisco. A lot
of people in research institutes in Europe, from Karlsruhe to Sweden to Italy to Bosnia
participate as well. At the same time, it has a lot of really disenfranchised young
people, who don’t have any access to official institutions but manage to get it
through free nets or otherwise, who both write and contribute to and read C-Theory. The
readership on a daily basis is literally tens of thousands of people. And we know the
power.
A case which really proved to us what an electronic journal could do is when we went to
San Francisco and wrote a series stories called 30 days in Cybercity, stories on San
Francisco. We went there because San Francisco seemed to be the iconic centre of
technology. Some of the stories are interviews with these really wonderful mnemonic
engineers who literally live on a daily basis fifty years into the future and who are
already planning a language of digital upload and extropians of how the human species or I
should say the kind of mutant survivors of the human species are going to be able to
escape the planet Earth and begin to migrate safely to other planets in deep outer space.
And when you talk to them, these people are really wonderful because they’re
deliriously brilliant. At the same time, they have profound ecological consciousness and
they just want to save the human species. So we wrote stories like that. We also wrote
stories about the real losers, the surplus class right in the midst of this glistening
cornucopia of technology in San Francisco. We wrote one song, which was a song, but it was
really also a story called "Singing the Blues in Cybercity" about this down and
out blues band singing on the streets of San Francisco - you know, "I Left my Heart
in Georgia" - and they had such a feel of an ancient Greek lament being sung in the
gathering shadows of the city of San Francisco. Or other stories about the new forms of
nomadic communities that exist in San Francisco and in the margins of the cities and in
the wharf areas and all of these people existing at the same time, forms of nomadic,
impoverished communities who have been crushed by the sensibilities of a glistening
technoculture into silence and have no means of having their voice registered into speech.
At the same time, this is accompanied by the fantastic energy and acceleration and drive
towards the future of what Hegel called the universal homogenous state, which is, in fact,
San Francisco. What we noticed when we were in the city was also these two kinds of body
types which we talked about. On the one hand, you have this really stressed flesh of
accelerated technobodies of guys and women jumping off the ferries at 6.30 in the morning
down at Pier 39 and jumping into the city, working hard and then rushing back to the
suburbs in the evening. Or if you stay in the city, you just walk the city streets and
it’s really eerie, because almost all of the buildings have health clubs with the big
plate glass windows and the people inside are just looking at you and not speaking to each
other and just running on the running machines, just beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, like
stressed out technoflesh which has to be keep at an armoured pace. Or businessmen that
would come by, sort of inliners with cellular phones in hand barking out orders to their
employees and a sort of new inhabitants of the Cheever City, which is in San Francisco. So
we wrote these stories and put them up on a daily basis on C-Theory. I myself have written
a lot of books but I’d never had an experience like this where you put up stories and
instantly you have a wave front of reaction coming from different parts of the world and
from San Francisco as well. We had Silicon Valley engineers who would phone us up. They
said they had read some stories. This guy read this story and was really touched by
Singing the Blues in Cybercity and began crying. They really began to feel the loneliness
and the emptiness in their own lives and in lives of who was being crushed by this
juggernaut. So this reaction came from all over the world. In fact, we’re going back
next month to San Francisco and Los Angeles this time to do a second set of stories.
C-Theory really brings to you writers like Jean Baudrillard and Paul Viriglio and Bruce
Sterling and Kathy Acker, the best cyberpunk writers and science fiction writers and
literary writers and engineers and theorists. This strange intellectual community that
otherwise would never get together and get together on such an intimate basis. I feel that
the journal is building to some kind of peak experience in some ways where it begins to
touch the central nerve ends of our history which is onlining. I think it does that
because it does what something interesting should do: it brings people who really know
tech together with people who really aren’t philosophers because they’re beyond
philosophy, just think deeply, morally and culturally and ethically about the societies in
which they live. You rub those two together and you begin to get some truths or maybe
anti-truth serums begin to find their way into print.
(Marilouise Kroker)
I think that C-Theory is allowed to privilege texts, which I think is absolutely wonderful
because there are few people in the bookstores buying books. A lot of the work on the Net
is multimedia and sometimes very interesting but other times no more interesting than
going up to a bank machine. So I find that texts and works on the Net actually is very
successful.
Question 17
Would you consider your work in general and C-Theory as technological culture or
technological counterculture?
Answer (Arthur Kroker)
A very good sound engineer and composer described us as guerrilla high-tech. It sounds
pretty accurate to us. I think you would say that because it’s true. Because our work
is not only about high-tech, our work is high-tech. We always, like with Spasm, work on
the edge, frontier musical composers and people who do wonderful films like Louis Cohen
did. We did a remake of the 99-year Phone Call with him. We’re really on the edge in
terms of using digital editing, techniques and strategies we have also theorised what this
means in terms of being a metaphor, not even a metaphor, but I would say an itinerary of
the culture in which we live. And at the same time, it’s guerrilla because we are
counterculture for sure because we ask questions of justice and ethics of a techno-culture
that wants in fact to silence.
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