Technology is not some automatic radicalizer. If anything, given that
rapid and frequent introduction of new technologies drives our current
market/capital hell; using technology as the justification for being
"radical" seems completely absurd. If you want radical writing, radical
form, such writing can be captured without the Internet in every case,
perhaps with pencil and paper or even with a flipbook of stapled paper.
Perhaps the speed of production will be compromised if the pieces are
put in a book instead of on the Internet, but speed to delivery should
not be essential to a discussion of innovating radical forms….Today
algorithms and processes are as essential to control and surveillance as
barbed wire and cameras, or perhaps even more so. In hindsight this
comes as no surprise. We can completely predict the behavior of any
algorithm and because they are so predictable they can be efficiently
utilized for highly complex methods of control….Users can find new
ways of tumbling into some body of literature, perhaps never to escape.
But we become ensnared, thus mirroring the industrial foundations of the
Internet. As long as the linkages become the driving mechanism of poetic
innovation, poetic innovation is not radical. It offers no resistance.

Humans are being divided and conquered and separated and surveilled,
and, ultimately, controlled by a remote minority. The remoteness itself
seems to drive a certain amount of lack of regard for those being
dominated in our culture, or it at least facilitates the lack of care
and consideration for humanity that appears to be essential to
authoritarianism. The mission of radicalism today, in 2001, is how to
bring together people while confounding the mechanisms of authority.

The Technology of Text

Text has always been removed from the user. It has always been somewhat
more remote than spoken language. Text is a technology. It is a
sometimes disjoint tool for attempting to represent speech. Text also
provides language users with a storage device. Stone is the first hard
drive. (Poetry is the precursor to this first static storage device, as
poetic devices act as mnemonic tools.) Because of the disjoint nature of
text, because of its apparent separation from the world, and because it
is a "lossy" signal, the user seems always required to invent at least
some part of the meaning of the text. That moment of invention is an act
of creation. It's not just out-of-the-blue creation…. The moments of
creation that occur in a user's head are limited and predictable because
the term has parameters of meaning. The parameters of meaning are the
possibilities of meaning. Meanings can be parameterized in the text, by
the text, and they can also be bounded by what the user has learned
about the term.

The Disjoint Basis of The Military-Industrial Internet

The empty signifier and radical disjunction, in a sense, are fundamental
properties of the Internet. The Internet born from DARPA (Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency), the central research and development
arm of the US Department of Defense. DARPA is perhaps the very core of
world military industrial domination. The very nature of the Internet is
rooted in wide-area distribution effective for constant surveillance and
rapid deployment of divide-and conquer strategies through distributed
communications. The Internet's origins have lead to more commonly
understood features of the Internet landscape: behavior monitoring
leading to marketing strategies such as personalization, wide
distribution of content for constant presence and the possibility of
"ensnaring" the audience's attention (which generates more data for
behavior control). All of this happens on an individual level to divide
people into individuals with their custom web environments and conquer
their wallets and their minds one at a time. The most crucial datum
about modeling one individual's behavior is HOW THEY LINK. That is, how
does one choice lead to another for each individual? How people make
connections is perhaps the easiest aspect of a person's behavior that
can be recorded using the Internet.

Radicalism and the Freeing of Language: Revealing Parameterization as
Means to Control Language & Minds

The parameterization of meaning in the moment of the reader's invention
of the meaning is what I call the control of language. (For now let's
avoid the pejorative sense of "control.") The parameters act as a sort
of fence that restrict a reader's moment of
creation/interpretation/understanding; the parameters give that creation
a predictable shape. Controlling the parameters of language is
transitively the control of language readers. Text can act to control
people and people who control the parameters of text can control people.

Let's think of parameterization in terms of the Internet and hyperlinks.
A hyperlink, the specific form of Internet interactivity, is exactly a
mode of parameterization. Quite literally. Hypertext linking is a mode
of predefining and reducing the number of possibilities for meaning in a
reader's mind. Such an effort, though they may help to guide users to
make certain points, deliver instruction or knowledge, etc., controls
the set of creative cognitive possibilities. It also leaves the moment
of creation in many cases (think of interactive poetries where a click
"generates" or selects a preformed new phrase from a database of
collected phrases, albeit by chance) almost completely to machines. The
spirit is pushed out of the user and its ghost appears in the machine.

Text is understood in a complex where the user interacts with the text
and invents a meaning. (What the real relationship is between text and
image is not really my concern here.) What meanings are created are
boundless but are bounded by previous expectation and intratextual cues.
Hyperlinks are a form of a parameter, a form of a limit of the reader's
creative moment, and transitively a tool of language control. Control of
language necessarily implies control of language users. Poetry often
works as an opposing force to the standard parameters, opening up the
reader's ability to more freely select the meanings of terms and ideas,
spawning previously unimagined associations and moving the reader toward
uses of text other than as a device for control.

The Bandied Promises of Internet Radicalism in the 1990s

Many people once believed they could define the "hot new medium." In the
early to mid-1990s (and even today) many people did not understand that
the medium was already well entrenched, and primarily a medium for the
distribution of text and its surveillance. Much of it boiled down to
plain old text and other pieces of data that are easily broken up into
small pieces. For example, the physics community was already familiar
with SGML and so HTML was very much the same thing, albeit easier. The
World Wide Web (WWW) was born in the cradle of physicists. They used the
Internet to distribute their papers and also watch and see who read
what, actions very much in accordance with the potential of the
Internet.

The particular promises that the Internet would become some sort of
egalitarian or liberalized utopia for literature were naive, and did not
analyze the possibilities for expression in light of the potentiality of
the Internet. The potentiality of a thing is crucial; the acorn becomes
the tree, but not the squirrel; the potentiality of the acorn is the
tree. The Internet never promised some sort of non-hierarchical literary
experience, though it seemed for some odd reason to be the very central
hope for such a possibility. Its birth in DARPA underscores what sort of
potential the Internet has. As a medium the WWW specifically promised a
quick way to share documents, images, etc., (emphasis on speed and wide
distribution) and it offered a way to easily surveil not only the
distributions of the documents but some aspects of their usage. The
promises that the literary community believed as a whole was bound to
mislead people, as there was only one rational basis for the belief that
the Internet would provide something radical: the hyperlink. However,
since the hyperlink was the very essence of the WWW, it promised only
the rapid and wide distribution of information.

Internet Examples of Contemporary Radicalism

The "radical form" of Proximate.org (Proximate: prox I
mate/me-ism/proxy-mate - machine as a lover - http://proximate.org) in
many ways is really a fake radicalism, since the code-stuff is
extraneous, a joke on the viewer. (E.g.,
http://proximate.org/01d3c0d3.htm). Proximate.org also treats a
side-effect of the Internet: personalization and the way the Internet
tries to suck a person in. With Proximate.org, the creator tried to
illustrate the silliness of that side-effect as a consequence of
language through the use of confrontational second-person language and
also by shifting around the person-position of the viewer by changing
the uses of personal pronouns. Proximate also tries to illustrate that
there are more direct ways to "get personal," hence all of the faces (a
pun on interface). It seems the radical underpinning of proximate was to
push people away from text and machines and towards more vital and
proximal interfaces such as person-to-person interactions. As the site's
slogan reads, "Getting close is what we're all about!"

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