INTRO

The often praised non-linearity of the web, its rhizomatic structure
that makes it possible to literally move through texts, images, lists,
references, etc. is the experience of a collaged world that invites you
with every new hyperlink, button or address that you stumble over to
explore another fragment of what you dealt with on your interface one
second before - go this way, read that, join our discussion, why don't
you add something here? Its seductive powers have had a big effect on
me since I went online and played a role in my decision to start writing
some months ago.

Roland Barthes' idea of the "broken text" which has become a classic
metaphor for describing this surfing on fragments of the digital world
seems to make sense: you CAN look at what meets your eyes and ears
during such a trip as the experience of a text which is not structured
in a linear way. But for me there is a stronger resemblance to
free-association, often within options suggested by others in their
texts or on their sites - and when I feel that I want to go beyond that,
I jump out of that context and, for example, use a search engine I trust
- and probably return later to where I started.

But what has NOT changed in this new combination of an instrument and a
territory is nowhere more obvious than with those who publish texts in
it: The world can be complex and to construct an argument sometimes
takes at least three sentences in a linear row, one building on the
previous one - otherwise don't even bother.

OUTRO

That's what went through my mind after having read Pit Schultz's
contribution to this newsletter two weeks ago [see Pit Schultz, "<a
href="/cgi-local/query.cgi?action=grab_object&kt=kt0880">net.gain</a>," RHIZOME
CONTENTBASE, 10.6.97]. The density of buzzwords displayed is high, the
attitude is somewhere between condescension and announcement, and naivety
strikes even before the first sentence makes no sense at all: This is the
attitude of someone who does not risk error - he can not because he is
trapped in his idea of intellectuality of only raising questions that are
never really answered. Therefore all remarks are done in a subjunctive
mode.

The assumption that art is always a kind of prostitution is an attempt
to simplify what becomes to complicated to handle. Talking about money:
Since when are artists the only ones with a clear idea of what their
income depends on? No matter what they earn they know: Someone else is
profiting more from their work. That is not an art-world-specific
experience. It's a compromise most of us have to deal with. A minimum
of material security for a five-day-week of handing yourself (your time
and your energy) over. And in the last fifteen years this compromise
has been manipulated so much that it has become often absurd to still
use the term. For quite a lot of people. For others, the options
(education, money, the ability to chose what to do and and what to
avoid) multipled. And, confusing enough, some experience both at the
same time. To reduce this situation to a whorehouse-metaphor is an
expression of a desperate wish for clear circumstances and very clearly
a black and white scheme - an old binarism!

A club needs money like my Mac from '94 needs a reload of its
internet-software from time to time – without it it just wouldn't work
in this world. And money does not work, in a stock exchange like Wall
Street it is used in a pool of more money constantly flowing in to make
bets on the future. This is a principle which is not necessarily
transferable one-to-one to the aesthetic field, but when the "political
orientation" has been so completely corrupted by economical forces one
can not expect the aesthetical field to be left so absolutely
untouchable, so: pure.

The metapher of the club is no coincidence in this case. Clubs are
based on exclusivity and exclusion, the viewpoint is: us who are on the
inside. And there is always someone with selective powers performing
that you have to pass on your way in. Confronted with this obsession
with do's and don'ts combined with Freudian-lapses, like switches from
"I" to "we," I declare: the hipness-police sucks definitely more than
boring mainstream-dance-music here and there, produced with machines
made possible by venture capital gone berserk!

I could have ignored all this as it is necessary to ignore most of what
bothers me to not go insane every single day (this is not an argument in
favor of repression - find out, what is the most significant in your
life and try to change that!) but the sad thing is that a nationalist
point is made - even though taken back again…but only halfheartedly.
It's the idea of the driving force behind the "terror of economy" being
linked to one specific territory (Wall Street in NY in the U.S.) which
is put in opposition to a very different zone (clubland in Berlin in
Germany), in which independent spirits (without money from the European
Union, without cultural grants) create, for example, really really good
dance music (Techno). This is the underlying assumption here (more than
one time). But if you want to make a statement on post-modern economy
"you just can't do that on stage anymore" (Frank Zappa) - THAT being the
usage of national stereotypes. Making them sound like facts - without
irony, without distance - always manoeuvers those who you talk about
into a corner of what others consider to be their national character and
there they are STUCK, no matter of what age or structure the medium is
by which you deliver this message.