Limos and Shopping Carts

(Part 2)

Taxless, fresh from a multimillion dollar Initial Public Offering (an IPO or selling of shares in your company, described in Gordon Young's highly critical piece on Wired Mgazine's failed shareraising attempt as the "kinder, gentler junk bonds of the late nineties" in the San Francisco Chronicle of 10 July 1996), fired with the zeal of the new media and its high media profile, they would ignore the billions of dollars the government had invested in their education, the semi conductor and computing industry, and the gestation of the net as a government-supported communications network.

As Paulina Borsook puts it in Cyberselfish in the July/August 1996 Mother Jones magazine:

"These are the inheritors of the greatest government subsidy of technology and expansion in technical education the planet has ever seen; and, like the ungrateful adolescent offspring of immigrants who made it in the new country, they take for granted the richness of the environment in which they have flourished, and resent the hell out of the constraints that bind them. They haven't a clue what their existence would be like without the bounty showered upon them".

The arch Libertarian and highly paid corporate apologist, sorry, public relations dude, Doug Rushkoff puts it his/their way: that the corporation is the ideal replacement model for "academic institution and insulated government-funded agencies" where they "live and die by how accurately they target their goods and services". The enemy seen in Ruskoff's rose coloured crystal ball is the promoters of: "the fear of business online, spread mostly by non-profit institutions and academic elites". I, for one, can barely wait for Rushkoff's cultural revolution.

But in between the cracks of the yellow brick superhighway youth culture moves, sprouting a profusion of sartorial confusion with pierced and patterned flesh, sporting multicoloured castaway clothes and hair, and bristling with lashings of protective attitude. The Last of the Lost Tribes look, already fresher and yet far older than anything the fashion industry style machines could ever imagine. Lost Tribes, after all, understand the Outside, the Wilderness, the Street; spending more time down and out there than the Silicon Fortress dwellers or superwealthy recluses back in the hills of Sonoma. They won't - can't - buy the approved packages: voting, careers, family values. They can see the options staring them in the face ("you're only two paychecks from the street" goes the adage).

Is that all there is? Could be. But within any system, eddies of countercultural resistance swirl. And for a future like this staying at the edge of the Microsoft/Wired/Netscape vortex might have unforeseen benefits of maybe not going so quickly down the plughole of history.

Wayne Gregori runs San Francisco's coffee shop BBS and internet network, sfnet.com, connecting nearly 2,000 people, with 1,000 regulars, mainly through simple black and white screen coinop terminals in 30 coffee shops around town. Others phone in from home to the popular chat rooms, games and other services on Sfnet. He considers himself "unemployable" by the likes of Microsoft and says he is having a ball operating the system with his long time partner Jill.

Gregori lives and works at the margins of the net hype sloshing around the cybercapitalists - large firms who started as community-aware organisations only to be ultimately corrupted by the power and wealth of the new media, in the end believing their own morally corrosive and ruggedly individualistic rhetoric. Now the corporate buzzword is "community" as one by one the activists and ahistorical Rushkoffian screenagers are drawn to the glittering center all the while mixing up the latest hypestorm of "engagement" and "interactive multimedia", terms now allied with corporate top-down approaches.

Tom Jenning's Fidonet and The Little Garden (tlg.com), Bruce Kaitz's (Rockport shoes founder) the Well service provider (www.well.com) and Louis Rosetto's Wired Magazine, all speak the privileged speak of the new Libertarian language of community and social empowerment through corporate success. As former cyberhippies, their on-the-surface support for community has ended up as a community-corporate value-add commodity with the community giving its soul and the corporation making the money.

In the same breath: Jennings dismantles Fidonet (the Australian link was disconnected in early 1996 and Jennings won't discuss it) and goes for the main game, the buyout; the Well, the original hippie hang and hideout is sucked inexorably into the same gurgling hole of relentless corporate expansion and remoteness; and Rosetto's Wired features Newt Gingrich on a cover and lead story (in three years only three women have made the cover) and will soon try to inflate his community-building efforts to nearly half a billion dollars worth of share market hokey-pokey.

< Index

Part 3 >

TechTonic is a production of 3V © 1995-2002