Re: <nettime> report_on_NNA

[Newmedia@aol.com]

Felix:

> The rebels of the net.culture of the 1990s have encountered a 
> cruel fate: they won. Alas, not on their terms. 

Then they didn't "win" -- they "lost."  If you insist on calling them 
"rebels." <g>

> Many of the themes that have been explored by the old-timers 
> are now mainstream. 

Which simply means that they were "in the air" and "going to happen anyway."

Hey Felix . . .  by 1996 most of these things were pretty obvious -- if you 
were paying attention.  That's what made nettime interesting. People were 
paying attention.

My invited keynote at MetaForum III was titled "Who are we: What are we 
becoming?"

10 years later . . . how much further along are we in answering these 
questions -- apart from being 10 years older?

Richard Barbrook wrote the seminal "The Californian Ideology" and I responded 
with the quaintly polemical "The English Ideology" -- where are we today on 
these matters?  How are the Californians doing?  How about the English?  (As 
you recall, Richard supported Tony Blair and he's still in office.)

Most importantly, if we were all so smart 10 years ago, then are we still so 
smart today?

What are the implications of Google reaching to become a $100B company?  
Retooling the world's economic infrastructure with Service Oriented Architectures? 
 Shifting to OPEN services development?  Grids with MILLIONS computers?  
China and India becoming global powerhouses *because* of these new technologies?

Where is the group that can "see" 10 years out in future . . . today?  Who's 
paying attention . . . today?

Nettime(s)?

Mark Stahlman
New York City

P.S. Much of what was being "rebelled" against in the 90's was the 
"neo-liberal" (actually eschatological) excesses of the Internet Bubble.  As you might 
recall, efforts to point out that this was a BUBBLE and that would go away -- 
all its own, without any of our help -- were not particularly well received at 
the time.  Seeing this crash-in-the-making clearly -- particularly in its 
"religious" terms -- didn't quite fit in, so like most other people, many rebels 
went flying right off the boom-bust clift without any skidmarks.  Although 
nettime was in many ways finished (for some of us anyway) after Ljubljana, the 
collapse of WIRED magazine etal really put the final kibosh on the era.  Without 
anything so simple to rebel against, why go on?


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