Media-Space! Opening Speech
by Peter Lamborn Wilson
Speech at Public Netbase Media-Space! Opening
28th of February, 1997
Up till a few years ago-no, up till last year, well, up till ten minutes ago-there was a very religious feeling surrounding the Internet. I call it the mumbo-jumbo factor, a kind of magical aura that surrounds any new technology. There is an old saying that any technology that you don't understand is like magic. In other words, how many people could fix that television if it broke? Maybe there are actually a few people here who could do that. But, by and large, it is magic. The Internet is so new, the computer itself is so new that it has this kind of magic aura, a halo around it. Out of that feeling, there came certain expectations that were almost messianic: the feeling that the Internet was going to save us, that the Internet was out of control (that's the title of a very popular book). Because it was out of control, that no government could control it, just by existing it was going to be a factor for liberation. Over the last few of years, there were a number of conferences and a number of publications and quite a lot of thinking along these lines.
It turns out that that there were two different kinds of people who had these expectations. One is what we call in America "extropians," people who think that the machine is the next stage of evolution, and that the intelligent machine will somehow replace human intelligence. This is science fiction. It might be; one never likes to make predictions about technology. Maybe someday there will be artificial intelligence. But there certainly isn't any now. In fact, the question is whether there is any un-artificial intelligence.
The other type of person who talked about the Net as freedom basically had an antigovernment line. The idea was that the Internet could not be controlled by government. It was somehow going to create this wonderful anarchy in the world just by existing, just because of the strange horizontal network aspect where there is no control center for the Internet.
When you come to think of it, all communications systems are out of control in this way, including language. Language itself, after all, is the original communications technology, and language is out of control. Governments try to control language, especially in the 20th century, but they find finally that language is out of control. There are always poets, there are always people who use language in creative ways. I don't mean people who write poetry as uneven lines on the page. I mean poets in the ancient Greek sense of the word: creative people.
The idea that the Internet would free us from government actually meant that it would give us to capital. In other words, if government can't control the Net, then it should be free as a space for money to circulate freely. In this sense, the Internet is really just a mirror of capitalism, or capitalism if you want to use the old term. I don't like to like to say capitalism because I don't think it is an ideology anymore. In the 20th century...I think the 20th century is over, it ended in 1989 or perhaps in 1991... the 20th century was the century of government. The 21st century began with the collapse of communism in the USSR and the idea that now there is only one true force in the world, and that force is capital. It may look very different in Europe, I should really only speak about America. In America, the perception is that capital itself is free, is liberated. It no longer has to deal with communism or with any aspect of the social movement. All the arrangements, the deals that were made between capital and various other forces in the world are finished. In America, for example, there was a deal made with the working class in about 1950 or 1948. The deal was basically: we will lift you up, we will make sure that you live well, we will recognize the unions, and the price of this is that you will not become communist. Or religion, for example, was brought into the crusade against godless communism, so a deal was arranged between capital and religion.
