Geert Lovink (2002), Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Critical Art Ensemble (2002), Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media, New York: Autonomedia.


Network criticism:
[add to Barabasi on networks]

Geert Lovink's criticism should be read against the backdrop of the increasing corporatisation of the internet - the relative closure of the openness of the internet. Despite the decline of liberties and potentialities - what he calls the 'post-euphoric period' (2002: 2) - he retains hope in the resistant power of net activism, file exchange within peer to peer networks, and the free software movement. This potential is exemplified by the title of his book 'Dark Fiber' describing the optical fibre infrastructure that lies in place but unused (2002: 376). His work resists the temptation to draw historical analogies with radio or other media (as Lev Manovich does with cinema) but instead examines the dynamics of how ideas transform social networks, institutions and structures.
Given the reach of the internet, his 'net criticism' on the nettime mail list and elsewhere, is still a relatively rare intervention in this field that lacks deep criticality - more concerned with surface; futuristic hype and technological determinism or utopianism (exemplified by Wired magazine). Lovink sees this as a serious lack and laments the uneven relationship between the cultural and technological fields: wherein science and technology is keen to gain 'cultural capital' but in a context where culture is generally regarded as 'bad science' (quoting Marvin Minsky, 2002: 5). The recent fashion for the 'creative industries' merely proves the point.   

In the light of this, he calls this 'speculative media theory' (2002: 22) in recognition of the problem with the term 'media' on the one hand, and to register the fluidity needed to address the speed of change in this area. He engages with these issues from the position of what he calls 'radical media pragmatism' in recognition of the ambiguities at work that underlie media theory applied to the internet. For instance:
'Now the time has come for sophisticated forms of negative media pragmatism: living paradoxes rooted in messy praxis, unswervingly friendly to the virtual open spaces that are being closed everywhere.' (Lovink, 2002: 226)

Recognising the conditions at work, the strategy advocated is 'tactical media' that draws together media activism and radical pragmatism. The approach borrows from Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) which explores popular and radical uses of mass culture (CAE, 2002: 4). The term is variously defined but emerges from a group of media activists in Rome in 1996 whose motto is as follows: 'World war III will be a guerrilla information war, with no division between military and civilian participation.' (quoted in Lovink, 2002: 273) Lovink's understanding is an insider's view and informed by the tactical network itself, the 'Next 5 Minutes' festival (which began in 1993) and collaborative writings (for instance: 'The ABC of Tactical Media', 1997, with David Garcia; and 'New Rules for the New Actonomy', 2001, with Florian Schneider). In 'New Rules for the New Actonomy', the political field is represented as a fractured and chaotic space that requires new forms of tactical action accordingly. Lovink and Schneider explain that: 'The new actonomy involves a rigorous application of networking methods. It's diversity challenges the development of non-hierarchical, decentralized and deterritorialized applets and applications' (2001). They further explain that, when no other choice is possible 'sabotage can be seen as a sort of anticipated reverse engineering of the open source idea' in disputed unfavourable property rights. 

Clearly building upon the 'independent media' and 'alternative media' traditions, tactical media describe campaigns rooted in localised dissent - not resistance as such - but 'temporary connections between old and new, practice and theory, alternative and mainstream. And then later to disconnect them again.' (2002: 256) It is a hybrid practice that lies somewhere between creative experimentation and an engagement with social change, shifting identifications, temporary alliances and strategic affinities according to the requirements of the context - liberated from 'leftist dogmatism and ghetto group psychology, their new shapes take viral forms' (Lovink, 2002: 259). For Critical Art Ensemble, this is a way of avoiding the dense arcane style of the Frankfurt School (2002: 27) it is also a way of asserting difference from avant-garde practices for 'electronic civil disobedience' (2002: 13). Lovink also explains this form as a 'temporary hybrids of old school political data and the aesthetics of new media'; for instance, producing anti-aesthetic software and other 'hackivist' strategies (2002: 262; an example might be 'Floodnet' software developed in 1998 by the Electronic Disturbance Theatre, allowing for 'virtual sit-ins' in the spirit of direct action). Critical Art Ensemble call this 'recombinant theater' in contradistinction from political theatre that simply takes place in public space to dubious effect. To them, street theatre involves: 'performances that invent ephemeral, autonomous situations from which temporary public relationships emerge that can make possible critical dialogue on a given issue' (2002: 96). It might be called tactical theatre, and might be extended to the Net . Lovink continues the description: 'tactical media are never perfect, always in becoming, performative and pragmatic, involved in a continual process of questioning...'. (2002: 264) Critical Art Ensemble would add 'participation, process, pedagogy, and experimentation are the key components for further recombination' (2002: 97). Lovink sees tactical media as a strategy of survival not a choice as such; it is the techno-cultural condition that generates infinite possibilities (2002: 272).   

[see also Hakim Bey]


Intellectual:

There seems to be an adverse correlation between the rise of the media and the demise of the intellectual, somewhat in parallel to the demise of the public sphere. Lovink charts this crisis of the intellectual, tracing Gramsci's idea of the 'organic intellectual interfacing with ordinary people to the contemporary distrust of the concept of the intelligentsia in the post-political era. Lovink thinks the Leninist question 'what is to be done?' now lacks both subject and object (2002: 33). In the knowledge economy, the intellectual has become a faceless professional, and sadly lacks a public role in society. Accordingly, the suggestion is that the link between the intellectual and the public might be forged in virtual space - the 'virtual intellectual' (2002: 30). This might be wishful thinking, but expresses the potential for a new kind of collective engagement with ideas in keeping with a re-engagement with the internet as public sphere (located in the sphere of the negative as Lovink put it). Rejecting the 'free-market way of thinking' the virtual intellectual is more of a 'free-floating' knowledge worker (a less aloof term) who engages with other workers and is 'always under construction' (2002: 38-9).