or another, their identities fluid and slippery. There is a famous New Yorker cartoon in which a dog, sitting up at a computer, explains to another dog that, “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” This thesis, suggesting the existence of a global conspiracy of nameless amateurs, is one Keen supports.
Amateurs, Keen claims, devastate systems that are based on expertise and destroy the institutions of author and authorship, information (newspapers are slowly disappearing, blogs are taking over), education (Wikipedia, the work of anonymous amateurs, has replaced encyclopedias, the work of experts), and art and culture (amateurs create their own culture based on borrowing, expropriation, appropriation, intervention, recycling, and remaking; they are simultaneously the creators and consumers of this culture).
Alan Kirby, an Oxford professor of literature, maintains that this new culture is in need of its own “ism,” and as a provisional term suggests “pseudo-modernism.” “This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterizes the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance—the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved,’ engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free; you are the text: the text is superseded.”[1]
The exact nature of the revolution that has occurred is difficult to put one’s finger on, because the revolution happened yesterday. Our lives are too fast and we don’t have time to look back at what happened yesterday. Our biographies are little more than a history of stuff we bought and threw out, most of it stuff that helps “power” us through a little faster: typewriters, answering machines, fax machines, scanners, desktop computers, printers, laptops, mobile phones, video players, CDs, DVDs, cameras, iPods, iPhones, microwave ovens, televisions, CD players . . . We’re barely able to catch our breath and get a handle on all this stuff, when just around the corner there’s something new, the Kindle for example. One thing is certain. From the very outset the Internet has been accompanied by revolutionary rhetoric, from McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker’s Manifesto (which follows the form and language of The Communist Manifesto) to the widely accepted term “the digital revolution.”
In 2006, Business magazine compiled a list of the fifty most important people in the financial world. YOU topped the list: “You—or rather, the collaborative intelligence of tens of millions of people, the networked you—continually create and filter new forms of content, anointing the useful, the relevant, and the amusing and rejecting the rest . . . In every case, you’ve become an integral part of the action as a member of the aggregated, interactive, self-organizing, auto-entertaining audience.”[2] Interestingly, the same year YOU also won TIME magazine’s person of the year: “Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.”
This aggressive YOU reminded me of Soviet posters, the most well-known of which shows a soldier pointing at passersby, accusingly demanding: Ty zapisalsja dobrovolcem? (Have you registered as a volunteer?) The YOU from the poster belongs to a completely different time, and a completely different political, ideological, and cultural context, and at first glance it would seem that my association is inappropriate. But maybe it isn’t?!
[1]Alan Kirby, “The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond” (Philosophy Now, November/December 2006). Available at: http://www.philosophynow.org/issue58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond
[2]Ibid., Keen.
3.
Karaoke Is a
Communist Invention!
It Certainly Is!
In the Soviet Union there were postcards that were about the size of a 7” single, and they had recordings impressed on them that one could actually play. One of these postcards turned up in my mail. I put the postcard on the record player and heard a friend’s voice quietly singing away, wishing me all the best from the city he was visiting, Odessa I think. This quirky technological possibility actually existed; the voice of whoever bought the postcard could be recorded on it. This was the first time I ever heard karaoke, and it was in a time when karaoke, officially a Japanese invention, didn’t even exist.
In the seventies and eighties many Yugoslavs would go abroad to buy whatever they couldn’t get in Yugoslavia, or whatever was cheaper abroad. In Trieste, they bought fashionable clothes, jeans, and coffee; in Graz, or in Austrian shopping centers just over the border, they bought food; in Istanbul, fur coats and leather jackets. Eastern European countries weren’t popular shopping destinations. Most of the Yugoslavs who went to the Soviet Union worked for Yugoslav construction firms. They brought home beautiful wooden chess sets, cameras, movie cameras, musical instruments (violins, accordions, trumpets, saxophones), sheet music, classical music records, and easels, canvas, and paint. Particularly sought after were these little wooden chests with oil paints and brushes that you could wear on your shoulders like a pack. Everything was dirt-cheap.
The first time I went to Moscow in the mid-eighties I also bought a little paint set. The amateur painter sitting on a stool at an easel was part and parcel of the Russian Soviet landscape, apparent confirmation of Marx’s utopian vision that under communism people would throw off the chains of exploitation, enjoy their work, and dedicate their free time to the things they loved. A creek and patches of greenery, a chapel in the snow, a snow-laden hill, a frozen lake or lilac in bloom—these scenes were unthinkable without one compulsory detail: the amateur painter capturing them all at his easel.
In the Moscow of the mid-eighties, they thought of me as a “Westerner.” An elegant coat and soft leather boots rising up above the knee from Trieste, Shetland wool sweaters and a cashmere one from London, a good quality Yugoslav overcoat (in Russian a dublyonka), a passport and hard currency (which got me into “Beryozka,” where I bought a fox-skin cap for myself, and Stolichnaya vodka and copies of The Master and Margarita for friends); all of these passed as irrefutable evidence of my “Westernness.” My Russian friends and acquaintances were what we might call fashion “incompatible,” but unlike me, they all had hobbies. Most of them played an instrument, most often the guitar. At evening gatherings they’d take turns playing Okudzhava and Vysotsky chansons, or their own chansons in the style of Okudzhava and Vysotsky. Most wrote poetry or dabbled in painting, and I didn’t know anyone who couldn’t take a decent photo. To me, a “Westerner,” this whole world of artistic amateurism was on the one hand quite delightful, but rather old-fashioned on the other. The truth is, there were all sorts in the underground Russian arts scene of the mid-eighties: amateurs without ambition, amateurs with ambition, swindlers, art lovers, informants, alcoholics, foreigners, political junkies, dissidents, losers, and not least, those who were sniffing around and hoping to be offered membership in the official state artistic organizations, which granted one “freelance” status.[1] There were also those such as Ilya Kabakov, who but a few years later would become darlings of the international art world.
The world of Soviet artistic amateurism seemed old-fashioned to me because by the mid-eighties the Yugoslav culture of amateurism (ham radio operators, choirs, community theatre, film clubs, amateur painters) was on the wane. Yugoslavs had passports and travelled. American films were in the cinemas, everyone had a TV, and these TVs showed popular American shows. Local cultural centers were slowly abandoned, “workers’ universities” offering adult education began to close, and
