Saturday
Dec132008
Leaving the Twentieth Century
Saturday, December 13, 2008 at 10:11PM
Friday 05 October, 2001
By Ashley Crawford
Douglas Rushkoff's 1994 best-seller, Media Virus, was one
of the first in-depth studies of popular culture in the Internet age. Rushkoff is professor of media culture at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program and an advisor to the United Nations Commission on World Culture. His latest book, BULL, has now been published online as Exit Strategy. It is, he claims, the Internet's first Open Source novel.
What inspired you to develop Bull into an open source novel?
DR: I think I was watching one of those cable TV business channels, and it struck me that the investors of NASDAQ were about to perpetrate a huge fraud on the public: they were going to claim that the Internet could somehow fuel an entire global economy. And all sorts of sick ideas like Web site 'stickiness' and e-commerce architecture developed, and really fit in with my sense of how the Internet would be used to promote a market sensibility above all else.
The problem I was facing was wanting to show that we get 'over' this obsession with profit and individualism, but I didn't want to paint a picture of that post-market reality. Really, the book is about waking up from the dream we've hypnotized ourselves to believe. I didn't want to conjure another dream for people to fall into. Books are a potentially coercive medium, and I wanted to resist the temptation to get people envisioning my own vision. So, I figured I was better off intimating what the future will look like, through the footnotes.
The idea is that the whole book is discovered by anthropologists 200 years in the future. They annotate the book with explanations of our world and behaviours, for an audience that has clearly evolved past such lunacy. Readers can infer what the future might be like by looking at what the annotator feels the need to explain - profit, capitalism, condoms, Windows - and what s/he doesn't. But I had such a terrific time imagining the present from the perspective of the future, I thought other people should have this experience, too. It was while I was writing the book that the dot.com bubble burst. So I realized that people would need to vent a bit. It was no longer about me telling them how badly they were screwing up - how they were being fooled. They knew it, now. So I thought they should be let in on the game. That's when I decided to do the book on the Web, for free.
The cool part is that because I'm releasing the book online, readers can add their own footnotes to the text, or even footnotes to the footnotes. I don't want to be the only one imagining what the future is like. I also want to engage the reader in the process of thinking about our own time from a very different perspective. It might help people more than simply watching me imagine things. It's meant to be an 'open source' novel, native to the interactive space, where obsolete notions like my 'authorship' are put into question. Then, we'll take the 100 footnotes that have generated the most conversation, and include those in electronic and print versions of the book.
This makes the reader a collaborator. Were you nervous about the Net community more or less taking over your baby?
DR: That's the beauty of it, eh? If I get a little nervous, it means it's good. Push to the edge. If it's not dangerous, why do it? This hasn't really been done before - at least not in this way. Honestly, I think the user contributions will be more important, ultimately, than the novel itself. I'm hoping it becomes like the Talmud, with commentaries on commentaries and so on. I like the idea of my novel just being a starting place. A trigger, rather than an end in itself. It's the little bit of dust that a raindrop needs to form, and nothing more.
Authorship is such an illusion, anyway. It's ego. I'm not really afraid of my readers' abilities, though. I'm hoping for them. I expect to see how much smarter people are than me. How much better and more creative their ideas are. I expect to prove that a group collaborating on a concept will always do better than an individual owning it. I expect to be surprised.
The cynic could read Exit Strategy as being no more than a very clever marketing ploy to sell hard-copy books. Has that been suggested?
DR: Only by journalists supposing that other people will think this way. If someone thinks that giving away a book online for free (instead of taking the fat traditional publishing advance) is some kind of marketing ploy, then they very badly need to read this book. That kind of cynicism is precisely what needs to be exorcised through good satire.
Many readers will love the way Microsoft has become ancient history in the novel. What are your favourite responses so far in terms of footnotes and feedback?
DR: I have really been surprised and engaged by the wrong footnotes - the places where the anthropologists misinterpret what something was. After seeing how much meat we eat, and how cruel we are to animals, one anthropologist assumed that a gooseneck lamp is made from the neck of a goose. I like these footnotes in particular: "17.4 in reply to 17.1 'business card?' This item of social collateral was well on its way to becoming extinct at this point. It consisted of a small piece of heavy paper on which would be mechanically printed a series of identification codes for communicating with the presenter. As personal and professional space began to collide, the number of unique communication channels that business professionals had at their disposal began to rise exponentially. The cards were a fixed size however, but the information density began to increase. Information presented on a typical card included name, title, the name of a business, a series of different phone numbers based on the different devices in use, electronic text addressing information, and even coordinates of physical location. It is useful to note that the very act of physical exchange was of primary importance (hence 'social' collateral despite the business usage). Often, a fashion accessory to contain and dispense these cards would be utilized. An individual's status could be assessed by the ease, dexterity, grace, and speed with which they could retrieve the container, remove a card, and proffer it. The irony was that after the initial exchange, the recipient of a card would often not maintain possession of it, for the management of that amount of information wasn't conducive to their already paper-intensive professional lives." And "12.2 in reply to 12.1: 'I got a tremendous urge to fuck with this guy.' This phrase has baffled scholars for some time. At first glance, given the argot of the time, it would seem Jamie is interested in making amorous advances on this individual, and their ensuing conversation can be seen in the context of an elaborate mating ritual (also Alec's anger can be interpreted as thinly veiled jealousy). Yet, while the person he is talking to is male, later in the text (see the last line of this chapter), we are shown Jamie fantasizing about having sex with a woman. At this time, there was still considerable societal baggage associated with freely maintaining intimate relations with both sexes. When these ambivalent situations are encountered in literature of the time, it is often fodder enough for entire volumes, and it seems odd that the issue doesn't surface again, even in Jamie's internal monologue. It has been speculated that Jamie's blase air around these matters marks him as a harbinger of future common-sense attitudes toward sexual choice, hence his adoption by some groups as a 'prophet of pan-sexuality'."
The novel's plot, including a conspiracy to launch an online program that hypnotizes Web users and makes them passionate consumers and investors, is classic Net paranoia. Is this a warning? Do you think the Net is going that way?
DR: Well, I wrote it because so many of my friends were dedicating themselves to using the Net as a coercive technology rather than a communication medium. I witnessed it dozens of times. So many of my very best and most creative friends have abandoned their writing, hacking, or creative careers to work for investment bankers. And then, it's like they're lost. Their brain stops working in an interesting way, they no longer question anything.
In this sense, the book is really just an allegory of the story of Joseph from the Bible. He's the dreamer who sells out and becomes the right-hand man of the Pharaoh. And then he builds pyramids. And he invites all his brothers down into Egypt to help, and they all become slaves. The idea is that people who build pyramids - whether out of stone or investments - are slaves. And this slavery can be induced through interface, of course. Media is the place we influence one another - and we can do this fairly or unfairly, through communication or through coercion. Millions of dollars are being spent on what is called "captology" - this is the science of how to direct and force certain human behaviors through interface. It made sense to me that if a culture dedicates its technologies to increasing the bottom line at the expense of everything else, we will see self-mutating programs that evolve to increase their effectiveness at steering human thought and activity. It's not the technology that's to blame, at all, though. It's the way technology can be used to energize the corporate agenda.
Media commentator and novelist: do the two roles segue or do they clash?
DR: Honestly, I don't really see the difference. My non-fiction is quite novel, and my novels are social commentary. It's just different ways of saying the same things - making the same impacts. My work is almost always about waking people up. It's why this novel has the participatory distancing devices. It's why my non-fiction uses so much narrative. I aim to give people perspective on what we're all going through. Perspective can break the trance.
Do you think there is a real future for online books? It sort of flopped for Stephen King.
DR: Stephen King flopped because he saw the online space as a distribution platform. Things will work here that are native to the interactive space. It's not a place to distribute a book. That's not what I'm doing. It's a place to create interactive narrative experiments. King failed because he was basically inaugurating a business plan, not a genre. There's a terrific future for online narrative experiences. I wouldn't call them books, though.
By Ashley Crawford
Douglas Rushkoff's 1994 best-seller, Media Virus, was one
of the first in-depth studies of popular culture in the Internet age. Rushkoff is professor of media culture at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program and an advisor to the United Nations Commission on World Culture. His latest book, BULL, has now been published online as Exit Strategy. It is, he claims, the Internet's first Open Source novel.What inspired you to develop Bull into an open source novel?
DR: I think I was watching one of those cable TV business channels, and it struck me that the investors of NASDAQ were about to perpetrate a huge fraud on the public: they were going to claim that the Internet could somehow fuel an entire global economy. And all sorts of sick ideas like Web site 'stickiness' and e-commerce architecture developed, and really fit in with my sense of how the Internet would be used to promote a market sensibility above all else.
The problem I was facing was wanting to show that we get 'over' this obsession with profit and individualism, but I didn't want to paint a picture of that post-market reality. Really, the book is about waking up from the dream we've hypnotized ourselves to believe. I didn't want to conjure another dream for people to fall into. Books are a potentially coercive medium, and I wanted to resist the temptation to get people envisioning my own vision. So, I figured I was better off intimating what the future will look like, through the footnotes.
The idea is that the whole book is discovered by anthropologists 200 years in the future. They annotate the book with explanations of our world and behaviours, for an audience that has clearly evolved past such lunacy. Readers can infer what the future might be like by looking at what the annotator feels the need to explain - profit, capitalism, condoms, Windows - and what s/he doesn't. But I had such a terrific time imagining the present from the perspective of the future, I thought other people should have this experience, too. It was while I was writing the book that the dot.com bubble burst. So I realized that people would need to vent a bit. It was no longer about me telling them how badly they were screwing up - how they were being fooled. They knew it, now. So I thought they should be let in on the game. That's when I decided to do the book on the Web, for free.
The cool part is that because I'm releasing the book online, readers can add their own footnotes to the text, or even footnotes to the footnotes. I don't want to be the only one imagining what the future is like. I also want to engage the reader in the process of thinking about our own time from a very different perspective. It might help people more than simply watching me imagine things. It's meant to be an 'open source' novel, native to the interactive space, where obsolete notions like my 'authorship' are put into question. Then, we'll take the 100 footnotes that have generated the most conversation, and include those in electronic and print versions of the book.
This makes the reader a collaborator. Were you nervous about the Net community more or less taking over your baby?
DR: That's the beauty of it, eh? If I get a little nervous, it means it's good. Push to the edge. If it's not dangerous, why do it? This hasn't really been done before - at least not in this way. Honestly, I think the user contributions will be more important, ultimately, than the novel itself. I'm hoping it becomes like the Talmud, with commentaries on commentaries and so on. I like the idea of my novel just being a starting place. A trigger, rather than an end in itself. It's the little bit of dust that a raindrop needs to form, and nothing more.
Authorship is such an illusion, anyway. It's ego. I'm not really afraid of my readers' abilities, though. I'm hoping for them. I expect to see how much smarter people are than me. How much better and more creative their ideas are. I expect to prove that a group collaborating on a concept will always do better than an individual owning it. I expect to be surprised.
The cynic could read Exit Strategy as being no more than a very clever marketing ploy to sell hard-copy books. Has that been suggested?
DR: Only by journalists supposing that other people will think this way. If someone thinks that giving away a book online for free (instead of taking the fat traditional publishing advance) is some kind of marketing ploy, then they very badly need to read this book. That kind of cynicism is precisely what needs to be exorcised through good satire.
Many readers will love the way Microsoft has become ancient history in the novel. What are your favourite responses so far in terms of footnotes and feedback?
DR: I have really been surprised and engaged by the wrong footnotes - the places where the anthropologists misinterpret what something was. After seeing how much meat we eat, and how cruel we are to animals, one anthropologist assumed that a gooseneck lamp is made from the neck of a goose. I like these footnotes in particular: "17.4 in reply to 17.1 'business card?' This item of social collateral was well on its way to becoming extinct at this point. It consisted of a small piece of heavy paper on which would be mechanically printed a series of identification codes for communicating with the presenter. As personal and professional space began to collide, the number of unique communication channels that business professionals had at their disposal began to rise exponentially. The cards were a fixed size however, but the information density began to increase. Information presented on a typical card included name, title, the name of a business, a series of different phone numbers based on the different devices in use, electronic text addressing information, and even coordinates of physical location. It is useful to note that the very act of physical exchange was of primary importance (hence 'social' collateral despite the business usage). Often, a fashion accessory to contain and dispense these cards would be utilized. An individual's status could be assessed by the ease, dexterity, grace, and speed with which they could retrieve the container, remove a card, and proffer it. The irony was that after the initial exchange, the recipient of a card would often not maintain possession of it, for the management of that amount of information wasn't conducive to their already paper-intensive professional lives." And "12.2 in reply to 12.1: 'I got a tremendous urge to fuck with this guy.' This phrase has baffled scholars for some time. At first glance, given the argot of the time, it would seem Jamie is interested in making amorous advances on this individual, and their ensuing conversation can be seen in the context of an elaborate mating ritual (also Alec's anger can be interpreted as thinly veiled jealousy). Yet, while the person he is talking to is male, later in the text (see the last line of this chapter), we are shown Jamie fantasizing about having sex with a woman. At this time, there was still considerable societal baggage associated with freely maintaining intimate relations with both sexes. When these ambivalent situations are encountered in literature of the time, it is often fodder enough for entire volumes, and it seems odd that the issue doesn't surface again, even in Jamie's internal monologue. It has been speculated that Jamie's blase air around these matters marks him as a harbinger of future common-sense attitudes toward sexual choice, hence his adoption by some groups as a 'prophet of pan-sexuality'."
The novel's plot, including a conspiracy to launch an online program that hypnotizes Web users and makes them passionate consumers and investors, is classic Net paranoia. Is this a warning? Do you think the Net is going that way?
DR: Well, I wrote it because so many of my friends were dedicating themselves to using the Net as a coercive technology rather than a communication medium. I witnessed it dozens of times. So many of my very best and most creative friends have abandoned their writing, hacking, or creative careers to work for investment bankers. And then, it's like they're lost. Their brain stops working in an interesting way, they no longer question anything.
In this sense, the book is really just an allegory of the story of Joseph from the Bible. He's the dreamer who sells out and becomes the right-hand man of the Pharaoh. And then he builds pyramids. And he invites all his brothers down into Egypt to help, and they all become slaves. The idea is that people who build pyramids - whether out of stone or investments - are slaves. And this slavery can be induced through interface, of course. Media is the place we influence one another - and we can do this fairly or unfairly, through communication or through coercion. Millions of dollars are being spent on what is called "captology" - this is the science of how to direct and force certain human behaviors through interface. It made sense to me that if a culture dedicates its technologies to increasing the bottom line at the expense of everything else, we will see self-mutating programs that evolve to increase their effectiveness at steering human thought and activity. It's not the technology that's to blame, at all, though. It's the way technology can be used to energize the corporate agenda.
Media commentator and novelist: do the two roles segue or do they clash?
DR: Honestly, I don't really see the difference. My non-fiction is quite novel, and my novels are social commentary. It's just different ways of saying the same things - making the same impacts. My work is almost always about waking people up. It's why this novel has the participatory distancing devices. It's why my non-fiction uses so much narrative. I aim to give people perspective on what we're all going through. Perspective can break the trance.
Do you think there is a real future for online books? It sort of flopped for Stephen King.
DR: Stephen King flopped because he saw the online space as a distribution platform. Things will work here that are native to the interactive space. It's not a place to distribute a book. That's not what I'm doing. It's a place to create interactive narrative experiments. King failed because he was basically inaugurating a business plan, not a genre. There's a terrific future for online narrative experiences. I wouldn't call them books, though.
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