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2.

It All Began

So Innocently

On my first visit to America in 1982 I found myself in Los Angeles, and of course I didn’t pass up the chance to visit Universal Studios. The photograph of Clark Gable dates from this time; Clark in an open white shirt, a black curl falling on his sweaty forehead, a blazing orange fire in the background, and in his arms, my lithe body. Actually the body belongs to Vivien Leigh, but the head is definitely mine.

The pleasure was one I repeated on a visit to St. Petersburg, where in front of the Winter Palace, poking my head through a painted mural, I appeared in a photograph as Napoleon. Since then the idea has made its way into computer programs and on to the Internet. For Valentine’s Day 2009, ScanCafe.com offered a bit of free fun: people could send in a photo of themselves with their partner and would be sent one back with a minor intervention. Instead of their partner, Barrack Obama was now in the photo.

Who knows, maybe this innocent fairground attraction, having one’s picture taken with a painted mural, was the embryo of karaoke culture. The invention of the camera satisfied our desire to immortalize ourselves the way we actually are, but a painted mural, this hokey technological innovation, offered a better option: Why wouldn’t we be someone else for a moment? We could have our photos taken with our idols (me and Clark Gable!), take someone’s place (hey, I gave Vivien Leigh the shove!), fabricate the personal history we leave to our grandchildren (that’s me kids, with Clark Gable!), enter a fictional world (hey, there I am in Gone With the Wind!), reshape oneself (ahh, look at my slender waist!), travel through time, or change one’s class, race, or sex (hey, there I’m a man, Napoleon!). All in all, it gave us the chance to intervene in reality, in which we are held back by our first names and last names, not to mention our genes, class, race, sex, religion, and ideology. The experience of having one’s photo taken with a painted mural was not only a bit of fun (which we knew), it was also transformative (which back then we didn’t know).

But a lot of other things had to happen for the Pandora’s box of our repressed desires to open. God had to die, so that our interventions in his work would go unpunished. The Time of the Great Inventions had to come to pass. Communism had to be born, and humanity, or least a part of it, had to be reset and convinced that the happiness of the collective would bring happiness to the individual. Freud had to appear, and humanity, or at least a part of it, had to be reset and convinced that the happiness of the individual would bring happiness to the collective. Modernism, radio, television, consumerism, the computer, mass media culture, postmodernism, feminism, postcolonialism, the mobile phone, the Internet, all had to step out into the light.

The Internet is the final, most explosive powder keg strewn on the eternal flame of our fantasies. The Internet is the cornerstone of both the new democratic revolution and the computer user’s evolution into a free man, a man forever transformed (Never again a slave!), eyes fixed ahead on the screen (a “window to the world”), whose hands self-confidently control an emancipatory mouse: a proletarian-man, an amateur-man, a man finally worthy of the name.

The Internet has not only democratized but also internationalized the consciousness of its users. As if in one of Mao Zedong’s nightmarish dreams, the Internet is a field on which a thousand flowers really bloom. What has happened to society in the intervening time is, however, difficult to say. It’s entirely possible that in the democratic deluge of realizing individual desires society has dissolved and fragmented into millions of little pieces, into millions of virtual communities, or fandoms, held together by various obsessions—from Gobelin embroidery to the protection of earth worms. Having absolutely nothing in common, Gobelin enthusiasts and those worried about earth worms are two virtual communities that will never communicate. In this respect, sticking to our primitive karaoke metaphor, the Internet can be understood as mega-karaoke, a place with millions of microphones, and millions of people rushing to grab the mic and sing their version of someone else’s song. Whose song? That’s not important: amnesia is, it seems, a by-product of the information revolution. What is important is that we all sing.

There is little dispute that the Internet is a revolution, and as they say, every revolution occurs in the name of an enlightened idea. In his book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Culture Is Killing our Culture, Andrew Keen claims that “the noble abstraction behind the digital revolution is that of the noble amateur.” As Keen maintains, in this case the amateur has raised a revolution against “the dictatorship of expertise.” Keen uses T. H. Huxley’s infinite monkey theorem as an example; it holds that if an infinite number of monkeys sat down at an infinite number of typewriters, sooner or later one of the monkeys would come up with a masterpiece to rival Shakespeare. On the Internet “amateur monkeys” create “an endless digital forest of mediocracy.” The forest is growing rampantly, and Keen predicts that by 2010 there will be five hundred million blogs “collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture.” Keen assails the notorious fact that Wikipedia is the work of amateurs, of anonymous contributors, the end result being that “it’s the blind leading the blind—infinite monkeys provide infinite information for infinite readers, perpetuating the cycle of misinformation and ignorance.” Things being as such, no one can be called to account, and what’s more, attempts by experts to intervene and assist amateurs usually end in failure. The Internet is a battleground for power, and the “children” (often literally children) are in the control room, “hackers” of one kind or another, their identities fluid and slippery. There is a famous New Yorker cartoon in which a dog, sitting up at a computer, explains to another dog that, “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” This thesis, suggesting the existence of a global conspiracy of nameless amateurs, is one Keen supports.

Amateurs, Keen claims, devastate systems that are based on expertise and destroy the institutions of author and authorship, information (newspapers are slowly disappearing, blogs are taking over), education (Wikipedia, the work of anonymous amateurs, has replaced encyclopedias, the work of experts), and art and culture (amateurs create their own culture based on borrowing, expropriation, appropriation, intervention, recycling, and remaking; they are simultaneously the creators and consumers of this culture).

Alan Kirby, an Oxford professor of literature, maintains that this new culture is in need of its own “ism,” and as a provisional term suggests “pseudo-modernism.” “This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterizes the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance—the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved,’ engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free; you are the text: the text is superseded.”[1]

The exact nature of the revolution that has occurred is difficult to put one’s finger on, because the revolution happened yesterday. Our lives are too fast and we don’t have time to look back at what happened yesterday. Our biographies are little more than a history of stuff we bought and threw out, most of it stuff that helps “power” us through a little faster: typewriters, answering machines, fax machines, scanners, desktop computers, printers, laptops, mobile phones, video players, CDs, DVDs, cameras, iPods, iPhones, microwave ovens, televisions, CD players . . . We’re barely able to catch our breath and get a handle on all this stuff, when just around the corner there’s something new, the Kindle for example. One thing is certain. From the very outset the Internet has been accompanied by revolutionary rhetoric, from McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker’s Manifesto (which follows the form and language of The Communist Manifesto) to the widely accepted term “the digital revolution.”

In 2006, Business magazine compiled a list of the fifty most important people in the financial world. YOU topped the list: “You—or rather, the collaborative intelligence of tens of millions of people, the networked you—continually create and filter new forms of content, anointing the useful, the relevant, and the amusing and rejecting the rest . . . In every case, you’ve become an integral part of the action as a member of the aggregated, interactive, self-organizing, auto-entertaining audience.”[2] Interestingly, the same year YOU also won TIME magazine’s person of the year: “Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.”

This aggressive YOU reminded me of Soviet posters, the most well-known of which shows a soldier pointing at passersby, accusingly demanding: Ty zapisalsja dobrovolcem? (Have you registered as a volunteer?) The YOU from the poster belongs to a completely different time, and a completely different political, ideological, and cultural context, and at first glance it would seem that my association is inappropriate. But maybe it isn’t?!

[1]Alan Kirby, “The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond” (Philosophy Now, November/December 2006). Available at: http://www.philosophynow.org/issue58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond

[2]Ibid., Keen.