tom moody

A specialty of the veteran Internet artists who dominate the Rhizome chatboards is a kind of instant dialectical materialism. Whenever a new form ("thesis") comes along, they resist and ridicule it ("antithesis"), then burn rubber to claim they were always already doing it ("synthesis").

This happened with the "8 Bit movement" and now the "surf club movement."

In the latter case, the race to the nebulous center can be seen on this discussion thread. A Rhizomer states that "discourse collapsed" with the "found object gamesmanship" of current practitioners. This statement is challenged. Soon another Rhizomer posits the existence of longstanding camps and claims the current movement has proven them both correct.

I am oversimplifying (conflating the surf clubs with Web 2.0) but that's the general drift of the discussion. Unfortunately you could never follow it because of another tendency of the veteran Rhizomers: the asynchronous verbal pile-on. This is accomplished in part by the tactic of replying to current comments with long arguments appended to earlier comments. An impossible hairball of words accumulates and all thought disappears to an outside observer. (It's also a bit like a Nature Channel show I saw where bees kill an invading Japanese hornet by smothering it with their bodies. Eventually the hornet's body temperature is raised and it cooks to death.)

But seriously, some interesting exchanges can be teased out of the hairball and I plan to post some of them with afterthoughts, in the coming weeks, prior to the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel at the New Museum. I hope to talk about my own work vis a vis Net Art 2.0 but it will be good to have some of these arguments in mind.

Per the NY Times (subscription probly. required but at least they have permalinks now):

After a years-long dispute, Microsoft and the computing and education project One Laptop Per Child said Thursday that they had reached an agreement to offer Windows on the organization’s computers.

Microsoft long resisted joining the ambitious project because its laptops used the Linux operating system, a freely distributed alternative to Windows.

The group’s small, sturdy laptops, designed for use by children in developing nations, have been hailed for their innovative design. But they are sold mainly to governments and education ministries, and initial sales were slow, partly because countries were reluctant to buy machines that did not run Windows, the dominant operating system.

Education ministries want low-cost computers to help further education, but many see familiarity with Windows-based computing as a marketable skill that can improve job prospects.

“The people who buy the machines are not the children who use them, but government officials in most cases,” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the nonprofit group. “And those people are much more comfortable with Windows.”

The initial run of child laptops will use Windows XP, as some of the protoypes exploded into small heaps of gears and fused chips upon the introduction of Windows Vista's 50 million lines of code.

To elaborate on the previous post:
Clay Shirky has a Daniel-Bell-cum-Norbert Wiener-like theory that goes something like:
Earlier societies had to deal with surpluses in the form of agriculture or industrial capacity, which were problems, just like scarcities are a problem.
Our society has a cognitive surplus, resulting from too much leisure time.
In the '50s and '60s this surplus went to watching hours of TV.
In the '00s a portion of the surplus goes to making YouTubes and photocartoons of cats, as well as political activism.

It is important, now that a potentially upsetting surplus has been identified, that we begin to quantify and apportion it so its detrimental impact to society is minimized. Cognitive surplus credits would be a system similar to "cap and trade" agreements for pollution control among companies or nations.

Example from the previous post (a small beginning): artists are limited in the number of YouTubes they can post vs. posts with substantive argument. YouTubes are taken off for high fiving other artists online.

Another example: You watch an hour of Lost and must devote an equal amount of time to helping Barack Obama in a get out the vote email campaign. Credits would be added and subtracted online in a database managed by an NGO run jointly by Microsoft and AT&T.