<nettime> 921 Aftershock - a Taiwan Travelogue

["geert lovink" <geert@xs4all.nl>]

IT-stocks spasmed at the morning of september 21, 1999 after an
earthquake hit central Taiwan. International rescue teams rushed
to the side. 25 million Taiwanese in shock. Chip production in
the 'science parks' had remained largely undamaged. Hard disk
factories had anyway already moved before, to the other side of
the Strait, to mainland China. Over 2000 people died under the
rubble. After a short whole hardware manufacturing continued to
soar again, whipping away last signs of the 97 Asian financial
crisis in Taiwan. Presidential elections are due to happen in a
few months. Two and a half months after '921', the quake zone was
no longer on the front pages, and will disappear for sure after
March. So far the news, as I got in at Chang Kaichek airport,
late november.

It was two years ago I met Ilya Lee (ilya@gptaiwan.org.tw), a
lively and gifted student in the humanities, and one of Taiwan's
Internet activists. Tokyo scholar/raver Toshiya Ueno had a
weekend trip arranged, in collaboration with cultural studies
professor Kuan-Hsing Chen  (see interview in the nettime
archive). In a backroom of a cafe, during a small meeting it was
Ilya who showed most interest, amidst gay and lesbian role
playing MUD and MOO users. At that time he was involved in a
rural area Internet project, training NGOs setting up websites.
We maintained contact ever since and managed to get him to attend
the tactical media conference Next Five Minutes, in March 1999.
There Ilya heard of the Belgrade radio B92. Immediately after
returning to Taiwan, in the first weeks of the NATO bombings, he
opened the Chinese version of the Help B92 campaign. What at
first seemed an exotic, let's say futuristic gesture, turned out
to be one of few independent web sources, in Chinese, when the
bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade fueled another
propaganda war, between Beijing and the West.

Next to Ilya, awaiting me at the airport, was art critic and
curator Manray Hsue, a fellow pragmatist and collaborator in the
Cities on the Move exhibition series. Together with a few others,
they had hastily set up the 'Aftershock' group, and were about to
establish the www.restoration.org.tw server, meant to coordinate
the communication between the numerous NGOs in the widespread
zone of destruction. A reader with translations of texts on
tactical media had been produced (mail manray@tpts1.seed.net.tw
for copies). My coming to Taiwan, planned before the catastrophe
stroke the island, spontaneously  turned into a promotion tour
for the 'Restoration' server. I found myself in the middle of a
dense 8 days tour, with seven public lectures, each time with
different topics and audiences, and meetings with activists on
the structure of Restoration. A moving and overwhelming experience
of which I will try to report here.

First stop after driving south of Taipei was Shihgang, a village
in an agricultural area which suffered substantial damage.
Abandoned, crashed highrises along the road were first sign of
what had happened. The two stories school had survived and was
now used as office and meeting place, and storage for shrines
and personal belongings. For the first time some 15 NGOs from the
quake region came together here and presented their work and
structure. Some dealt with social issues such as the rise of
unemployment, community work, while others worked on long term
environmental problems, for example a broken dam. An oral history
group had started recording personal witnesses in order to create
a collective memory, whether a website or monument. Although the
Taiwanese army had now withdrawn, civic support was still there,
from Kobe (Japan) for example, the city which got seriously hit
in 1995 (the group is called response:
www.1.meshnet.or.jp/~response/index.htm ).

Where is the money, people started wondering. Who is accountable
for decisions now being made over the architecture of schools?
Will small farmers survive,  what could be their take on
modernization, or even selling through the Internet, as has
already happened in some cases? It seemed that the NGOs, with
some having webpages, all using e-mail, were now in the process
of building up their own social and technical network. A civic
net which would allow a variety of opinions, proposals and forms
of expression, unlike the model of the National (hierarchical)
Organization. Perhaps Ilya's presentation of Restoration here in
Shihkang was going to make a difference.

Next stop Puli, the town in the mountainous center of Taiwan most
seriously hit, with 50% of housing now to be taken down, a number
which could grow to 80%. At the offices of the New Homeland
Foundation, where Ilya had been busy in previous weeks,
installing a linux network, we discussed possible
telecommunication (and media) infrastructure. Some webspace on
the popular Taiwanese Yahoo server seemed a nice offer, but the
problems here, concerning education, urban planning, work, care
for the elderly, were so big that seemed more appropriate to
think a whole different scale. A fiber-optic network for Puli,
together with community media,  did not seem to contradict first
need for housing. The tent villages in the parks were now about
to be closed, and with it was coming a growing fear of isolation
in remote metal barracks, away from the neighborhood. You cannot
live in a cable, but then, what could be a debate about the
future of Puli without a digital public domain?

Full Shot Studio (fullshot@tpts5.seed.net.tw) is one of late
eighties video activist collectives, producing documentary films
about social topics, memory and pain, ecology, Taiwan's culture
of aboriginals and other minorities. Full Shot has specialized
itself in regional video training programs. Their work was
presented at the 1999 Yamagata Festival of Documentary Film,
which produced a brochure in both English, Japanese and Chinese
(yidff@bekkoame.net.jp). One week before our arrival, the entire
Full Shot crew had moved to a temporary house/studio in Taichung,
the biggest city near the quake zone. From there 11 video workers,
in 4 teams, have started to document the process of
reconstruction - for a least one, perhaps two years. Looking at
their promo, Full Shot has a straight forward, old school
approach. This became even more apparent after the presentation
of an ambitious project of four women designers and a
photographer, called 'So Studio' who are bringing out a well
designed, four color magazine, produced for a mountain village
(so@www.abbeyroad.com.tw). Their particular interest was in
recording people's stories, printing their pictures, and
recording landslide sites, to find out what the possible impact
of the coming rainy season on the 'shaven' mountain sites will
be. A discussion broke out over the question of representation
and the need of locals for such a glossy magazine. The So Studio
group emphasized that solidarity does not imply you are becoming
a 'mister total solution'. Full Shot insisted on speaking for the
people, where as So Studio were more interested in developing
their own esthetics, with the aim to hand over the production to
the villagers as soon as possible. So's website:
http://voice.abbeyroad.com.tw

Next day we left the quake zone and drove further south, into the
mountains, to Meinung, a  town of 50.000 inhabitants, mainly
members of the Hakka minority, in an area of tobacco plantations,
mango, banana, and bin-lang, the stimulant chewing gum, sold
along the highways by so-called 'spice girls'. In 1993 a campaign
started here to rescue the Yellow Butterfly Valley, just outside
of the town. The government is intending to build a dam, which
will destroy one of the last pockets of nature, now symbolically
preserved in a park, run by environmental groups. The dam is
meant to provide water to chemical plants and steel works on the
industrialized West coast. Throughout the years the Meinung
Peoples Association has proven to be a successful social
movement, with substantial support within the local population.
The topic of the meeting that thursday night was Internet
activism.The campaign has a website for some years
(www.nsysu.edu.tw/sccid/mpa), and is  associated with various
groups and networks, worldwide, which fight against dams as well.
How can new  media be used, starting from this advanced level,
with such a motivated and experienced group of activists? The
crucial, perhaps final media campaign starts any time soon.
RTMark, etoy, mcspotlight, any suggestions? Please mail to Chang
Cheng-Yang (mpa@listserv.nsysu.edu.tw).

The second part took place in Taipei, and started with a press
conference, a meeting with representatives of twenty 'new' social
movements, of which most of made active use of e-mail,
mailinglists and websites. Taiwan, known for its computer
hardware manufacture, is hardly visible on the Internet map,
mainly because of a language problem on the Western side (namely,
not understanding Mandarin). It is needless to say that Internet
is growing at a speed rate, with e-commerce, in its US-American
form, as the dominant rhetoric. In this climate, with a relative
weak net.culture, media companies can easily dominate this new
medium. Some examples. A list called 'South', run by two editors
(yuchang@ms7.url.com.tw) has a readership of 35.000, with little
or no back channels. A business newsletter even has over 300.000
e-mail subscribers. Like in Japan, the more intimate
communication happens through (telnet) bulletin board systems.
Websites are simply too public. After having changed identity,
being able express one self anonymously, Taiwanese net.culture
suddenly awakes.

The screening of a video, full of hardcore European realities
(war, drugs, pop), Victims of Geography, is causing a healthy
dose of cultural confusion. What is this gay nihilism, fighting
for independent media without any social or political agenda?
Digital existentialism, made in Yugoland. Attention is now
shifting from contemporary media activism to convergence, mergers
of telcos and the media industry, IPOs and the e-goldrush -
global trends also happening in Taiwan. The island seems to be
more international, even compared to a few years ago. More and
more speakers, curators and artists are coming over for a visit,
and work. This weekend we attended a lecture by the French
theorist of new social movements Alain Touraine, and a mass
performance by the somewhat sad, melancholic, yet extremely
successful Peter Eisenman, who is now building a museum in
Hsinchu.

The discovery of an unused new media arts lab at the National
Arts Institute,  packed with high-tech, including video and audio
studios, without any students, hidden away amidst traditional and
classic modern arts, gives an indication of the problems and
hopefully potentials of new media. Computers are good for making
money, and shipping chunks of data from here to there, and
everywhere, but do automatically produce distributed, democratic
structure, nor arts. In the next years we will see the rise of
Internet use, and Taiwan will play a very interesting role in
this, obviously because of the overwhelming, yet not always
explicit presence of mainland China. The staged state propaganda
war between Taipei and Beijing will be fought via the Internet,
yes. And there will be cyberterrorism, or let us say infowar.
But this is all predictable. What the mainland can't produce is
an open, lively and diverse civic net culture. Taiwan is about to
develop such structures and networks, and the 921 quake is
certainly a catalyst. But networks are not build overnight. They
grow, sometimes fast, at times in unpredictable directions. And
their impact remain invisible, as this is their very nature. So
do not wonder if you forget networks on Taiwan. For a while.

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