7
by unexpected eddies and surges of energy, coagulations of light, secret tunnels,
surprises.
The Net and the Web
THE NEXT FACTOR CONTRIBUTING to the TAZ is so vast and ambiguous that it needs
a section unto itself.
We've spoken of the Net, which can be defined as the totality of all information and
communication transfer. Some of these transfers are privileged and limited to various
elites, which gives the Net a hierarchic aspect. Other transactions are open to all--so the
Net has a horizontal or non-hierarchic aspect as well. Military and Intelligence data are
restricted, as are banking and currency information and the like. But for the most part the
telephone, the postal system, public data banks, etc. are accessible to everyone and
anyone. Thus within the Net there has begun to emerge a shadowy sort of counter-Net,
which we will call the Web (as if the Net were a fishing-net and the Web were spider-
webs woven through the interstices and broken sections of the Net). Generally we'll use
the term Web to refer to the alternate horizontal open structure of info- exchange, the
non-hierarchic network, and reserve the term counter-Net to indicate clandestine illegal
and rebellious use of the Web, including actual data-piracy and other forms of leeching
off the Net itself. Net, Web, and counter-Net are all parts of the same whole pattern-
complex--they blur into each other at innumerable points. The terms are not meant to
define areas but to suggest tendencies.
(Digression: Before you condemn the Web or counter-Net for its "parasitism," which can
never
be a truly revolutionary force, ask yourself what "production" consists of in the Age
of Simulation. What is the "productive class"? Perhaps you'll be forced to admit that
these terms seem to have lost their meaning. In any case the answers to such questions
are so complex that the TAZ tends to ignore them altogether and simply picks up what it
can use. "Culture is our Nature"-- and we are the thieving magpies, or the
hunter/gatherers of the world of CommTech.)
The present forms of the unofficial Web are, one must suppose, still rather primitive: the
marginal zine network, the BBS networks, pirated software, hacking,
phone- phreaking,
some influence in print and radio, almost none in the other big media--no TV stations, no
satellites, no fiber- optics, no cable, etc., etc. However the Net itself presents a pattern of
changing/evolving relations between subjects ("users") and objects ("data"). The nature
of these relations has been exhaustively explored, from McLuhan to Virilio. It would take
pages and pages to "prove" what by now "everyone knows." Rather than rehash it all, I
am interested in asking how these evolving relations suggest modes of implementation
for the TAZ.
The TAZ has a temporary but actual location in time and a temporary but actual location
in space. But clearly it must also have "location"
in the Web, and this location is of a
different sort, not actual but virtual, not immediate but instantaneous. The Web not only
provides logistical support for the TAZ, it also helps to bring it into being; crudely
speaking one might say that the TAZ "exists" in information- space as well as in the "real
world." The Web can compact a great deal of time, as data, into an infinitesimal "space."
We have noted that the TAZ, because it is temporary, must necessarily lack some of the
advantages of a freedom which experiences duration and a more-or-less fixed locale. But
the Web can provide a kind of substitute for some of this duration and locale--it can
8
inform the TAZ, from its inception, with vast amounts of compacted time and space which
have been "subtilized" as data.
At this moment in the evolution of the Web, and considering our demands for the "face-
to-face" and the sensual, we must consider the Web primarily as a support system,
capable of carrying information from one TAZ to another, of defending the TAZ,
rendering it "invisible" or giving it teeth, as the situation might demand. But more than
that: If the TAZ is a nomad camp, then the Web helps provide the epics, songs,
genealogies and legends of the tribe; it provides the secret caravan routes and raiding
trails which make up the flowlines of tribal economy; it even contains some of the very
roads they will follow, some of the very dreams they will experience as signs and
portents.
The Web does not depend for its existence on any computer technology. Word-of-mouth,
mail, the marginal zine network, "phone trees," and the like already suffice to construct
an information webwork. The key is not the brand or level of tech involved, but the
openness and horizontality of the structure. Nevertheless, the whole concept of the Net
implies the use of computers. In the SciFi imagination the Net is headed for the condition
of Cyberspace (as in Tron or Neuromancer) and the pseudo-telepathy of "virtual reality."
As a Cyberpunk fan I can't help but envision "reality hacking" playing a major role in the
creation of TAZs. Like Gibson and Sterling I am assuming that the official Net will never
succeed in shutting down the Web or the counter-Net--that data-piracy, unauthorized
transmissions and the free flow of information can never be frozen. (In fact, as I
understand it, chaos theory predicts that any universal Control-system is impossible.)
However, leaving aside all mere speculation about the future, we must face a very
serious question about the Web and the tech it involves. The TAZ
desires above all to
avoid mediation, to experience its existence as immediate. The very essence of the affair
is "breast-to-breast" as the sufis say, or face-to-face. But, BUT: the very essence of the
Web is mediation. Machines here are our ambassadors--the flesh is irrelevant except as
a terminal, with all the sinister connotations of the term.
The TAZ may perhaps best find its own space by wrapping its head around two
seemingly contradictory attitudes toward Hi- Tech and its apotheosis the Net: (1) what we
might call the Fifth Estate/Neo-Paleolithic Post-Situ Ultra-Green position, which
construes itself as a luddite argument against mediation and against the Net; and (2) the
Cyberpunk utopianists, futuro-libertarians, Reality Hackers and their allies who see the
Net as a step forward in evolution, and who assume that any possible ill effects of
mediation can be overcome--at least, once we've liberated the means of production.
The TAZ agrees with the hackers because it wants to come into being--in part--through
the Net, even through the mediation of the Net. But it also agrees with the greens
because it retains intense awareness of itself as body and feels only revulsion for
CyberGnosis, the attempt to transcend the body through instantaneity and simulation.
The TAZ tends to view the Tech/anti-Tech dichotomy as misleading, like most
dichotomies, in which apparent opposites turn out to be falsifications or even
hallucinations caused by semantics. This is a way of saying that the TAZ wants to live in
this world, not in the idea of another world, some visionary world born of false unification
(all green OR all metal) which can only be more pie in the sky by-&-by (or as Alice put it,
"Jam yesterday or jam tomorrow, but never jam today").
The TAZ is "utopian" in the sense that it envisions an intensification of everyday life, or as
the Surrealists might have said, life's penetration by the Marvelous. But it cannot be
utopian in the actual meaning of the word, nowhere, or NoPlace Place. The TAZ is