tom moody

An earlier post on the return of the dotcom era was light on specifics; some have been added in the form of links. (See also below.) And the conclusion was fortified:

Dot Com Two is happening at the same moment as austerity and widespread social misery post-financial-crash. To paper or pixel over the disparity between VC-funded haves and non-VC-funded have nots, you have Silicon Valley types claiming that "apps" will take the place of basic governmental functions to ameliorate social conditions. Naivete the first time around is now just cynicism.

What remains is the harder work of walking the reader through some of the latest mobile-and-Facebook-based ventures in search of useful life experience. This will not be pleasant so it's being put off. You can check the links yourselves: please shoot me an email if, overall, you think you think the latest dotcom boomlet represents a positive social development.

In the meantime, here is a startups guide, a NYC startups guide (if they get the page working will read it in Firefox eventually), and a post about NYC startup fun.
The New Museum is catching the fever with some kind of incubator cube farm for artistes in what is surely the last "rambling, rough-hewn" space on Bowery (hat tip Ryz). And the line about apps taking the place of governmental functions is from a craptastic New Yorker story about Bay Area whizkids (via saranrapjs): "We now expect social entrepreneurs to solve problems that government used to solve."

In the 2008 Net Aesthetics panel at the New Museum no one used the term "post-internet" (with or without hyphen). So it's amusing that in this year's so-called Post Net Aesthetics panel (which, according to Rhizome, "picks up the discussion from [its] Net Aesthetics panels of 2006 and 2008," the subject was whether the term "post-internet" had outlived its usefulness.
With all deference to Gene McHugh, who called his blog "Post Internet," the term was laughable if you ever said it aloud outside a group of seven or so recent graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (one of whom co-organized "Post Net Aesthetics"). Any use of "post-" 100 years after post-impressionism is inherently pompous, and since no "internet artist" was actually leaving the internet, it never made a bit of sense except to this SAIC-based group, who used it repeatedly and reverently (but always with a bit of "yet, is it over?").
Presumably they used "post-" in the art historical sense of "reacting to but incorporating elements of," but since "internet" isn't exactly a narrowly-defined style, it's wildly over-reaching to say you belong to a movement running counter to it. Especially since the only reaction anyone could see was the retro-direction of showing in galleries, or "material engagement" (hideous phrase), while the artist also maintained a net presence.
Thin gruel for a movement, or a panel topic.

Update: Dump chat on this general topic--

cdanger: post internet = non-screen media, gestural + spatial i/o and other sheeeit
tm: that sounds like "non-internet"
cdanger: "non-internet" [...] sounds like "internet of things" if we're going by terms other people made up
tm: "internet of things" sounds awful