After their conversation, Milenkov leaves. Crypto and Natalya battle for their various species to save the Earth by attacking and successfully destroying the Blisk Hive Mind with the O. He then reveals his true form, a heavily armored blisk. After defeating Milenkov, Crypto relaxes in his flying saucer while Pox appears on the video monitor, congratulating Crypto and eagerly anticipating his newly cloned body.
He has detected activity in the emergency cloning lab. He questions Crypto about it, then realizes that Crypto has cloned Natalya, and is extremely infuriated by this and begins yelling at him, just before Crypto abruptly shuts off the video monitor mid-sentence. Lying next to him, Natalya awakens briefly and favors Crypto with a smile and an invitation to wake her «in time for re-entry.
Destroy All Humans 2 Download Torrent. Just download torrent and start playing it. Plot The game is set in , 10 years after the original. She allies with Crypto in order to save both their species from Milenkov and the Blisks. She is killed at the end of the game, but Crypto reclones her.
It is revealed in Big Willy Unleashed that they had a son. In an in-game conversation, Pox reveals that her clone died about six years before the events of Path of the Furon due to human clones having a short lifetime. She is located in all the countries Crypto goes to. In a final duel with Crypto, he uses Blisk spores to transform himself into a humanoid Blisk creature, but is ultimately killed.
KGB agents' thoughts sometimes contain questions such as «Why does Agent Oranchov always shout at me? Reginald Ponsonby-Smythe — is secretly leader of the Majestic command in Albion. He helps Crypto in two missions, but then betrays him. Friday 27 August Saturday 28 August Sunday 29 August Monday 30 August Tuesday 31 August Wednesday 1 September Thursday 2 September Friday 3 September Saturday 4 September Sunday 5 September Monday 6 September Tuesday 7 September Wednesday 8 September Thursday 9 September Friday 10 September Saturday 11 September Sunday 12 September Monday 13 September Tuesday 14 September Wednesday 15 September Thursday 16 September Friday 17 September Saturday 18 September Sunday 19 September Monday 20 September Tuesday 21 September Wednesday 22 September Thursday 23 September Friday 24 September Saturday 25 September Sunday 26 September Monday 27 September Tuesday 28 September Wednesday 29 September Thursday 30 September Friday 1 October Saturday 2 October Sunday 3 October Monday 4 October Tuesday 5 October Wednesday 6 October Thursday 7 October Friday 8 October Saturday 9 October Sunday 10 October Monday 11 October Tuesday 12 October Wednesday 13 October Thursday 14 October Friday 15 October Saturday 16 October Sunday 17 October Monday 18 October Tuesday 19 October For some of the actors in this didactic play it would have been ; for others, Research into Internet Mailing Lists A good part of this book is dedicated to Internet mailing lists.
We believe in rough consensus and running code. Sydney-based Jon Marshall has written a detailed ethnographic analysis of a turbulent early list called Cybermind. By mid, flamewars had started to dominate Cybermind, and the list soon went out of control, dominated by the conflict between those in favor of unconditional free speech and those who preferred moderation in order to create space for less noisy contributions.
Cybermind continued to function through unspoken compromise, with occasional further disruptions. Ways of indicating authenticity strong language, aggression, etc. Membership declined, as did the number of on-topic posts. This event, according to Marshall, changed the nature of the ist far more than any previous crisis. This may or may not be the Anglo-Saxon tradition, in which the term community has a more neutral meaning.
Howard Rheingold, the author of Virtual Community, has answered such criticisms in a new afterword he wrote for the second edition. That said, a considerable number of virtual-community studies contain consensual New Age talk. Take, for instance, Anna Du Val Smith, writing in one of the countless mass-produced cyber-anthologies, Communities in Cyberspace.
To avoid this they must not silence the voices of their members, but give them expression. For me, nothing is as terrifying as being totalizing, so I will use the virtual community concept occasionally, since it cannot be reduced to narrow New Age visions or Third Way phantasms. What Is Critical Internet Culture?
Culture is the aspect of information technology where knowledge transfer happens. Access and training are not enough. It is only when a culture emerges that social interaction on a larger scale starts to happen.
The object of this study is neither the Internet in general nor new-media theory as such. The number and 20 theory on demand variety of mailing lists, e-groups, Usenet forums, weblogs and virtual game worlds is vast. I will not even attempt to give an overview of the thousands of topics they deal with. Cosmopolitan in nature, critical Internet culture can be positioned at the rossroads of visual art, social movements, pop culture, journalism and academic research.
Its interdisciplinary intention is to both intervene and contribute to the development of new media. It stresses the need to go beyond oppositional gestures and create a lasting independent infrastructure. Besides such countercultural characteristics, what is specific here is the desire to intervene in the early stages of technological development. Technoculture is not just a lifestyle.
The subject of critical Internet culture is the user as producer. The aim is not consumer choice. Although access-related issues are important, the demands go beyond equal dissemination of technology throughout society. It is the architecture of the networks and the underlying code which society should question, and change.
This is why a critical understanding of standards and ownership plays such a key role in this context. The intent of critical Internet culture is to shape and anticipate, as much as to reflect on, existing IT products and their inherent social relationships. Technology is not a neutral tool, and this is of course true of the Internet. Its structure is a result of particular historical settings.
But most of all, culture at large plays a key role in the making of new media, even though most technologists deny the fact.
Critical Internet culture is therefore not just about artists working with technology. There is no longer any avant- garde dream of the artist as a first user who will bring society into an aesthetic future. Instead, there is an ongoing debate about the parameters of technological culture.
Critical Internet culture is driven by the desire to address issues that ultimately affect hundreds of millions of users, and it is perfectly aware of the limited and marginal position of such non-profit cultures. My First Recession is a chronicle of a handful of social networks. It tells the story of critical Internet cultures in their first years of existence.
Neither the theory nor the practices presented here heralds a triumph of technology. These case studies reveal real boundaries, internal contradictions and conflicts that arose once the projects had surpassed the initial stage of euphoria. What happens when the party is over, when you run up against the borders of commonly used software standards and group dynamics, when the cyber-spectacle fades away and the everyday, with its dirty politics, takes command?
Chapter Overview and Biographical Elements In the following section, I will give a brief summary of each chapter along with an account of my personal involvement in each of the stories. Many of the archives I deal with here have an online component. This means they are accessible to any scholar and, if they are preserved carefully, as my first recession 21 I hope, to any future historian. Chapter One opens with three positions I selected from the fast-growing body of work being done in the field of Internet research.
What unites the studies by Manuel Castells, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Lawrence Lessig, all published in , is their post-introductory mode. The choice is personal and may or may not be representative. None of the three is asking any longer what the Internet is all about. This may sound futile but is in fact a big plus: instead of just going through well-known literature yet again, they investigate actual practice. Writing t the end of the dotcom era, these three authors all deal with the complex relationship between the Internet and society.
Whereas Hubert L. In his view, the growing use of the Net, for instance in education, could lead to a loss of reality. Law professor Lawrence Lessig, on the other hand, plays the role of the concerned liberal citizen, warning of the danger of a statesponsored corporate takeover of the Internet, which could cripple its innovative role.
I have been a dotcom watcher from early on. All the initiatives I have started have been non-profit businesses. I had a few personal experiences with the first wave of Internet commercialization — 97 , and witnessed the quickly fading catalyst role of artists, designers and content producers like myself, followed by the dotcom business hype The historical fact is that, apart from a few moments in the early-to-mids, the traditional separation between theory, academia, arts and culture on the one hand and business on the other was reproduced during the lates dotcom boom, despite the popular rhetoric of fluid boundaries.
At most, the others were watching the tech boom from a near distance. Both traditional NGOs and new global movements have so far shown little interest in the financial machinations of the managerial class. The Net cannot be reduced to a corporate environment. Over the past few years I have often been asked about my apparent obsession with dotcoms.
For me, writing about dotcom mania had little to do with a return to economic determinism. In my view, voluntary labor and giving away your code and content should be a free option, not a default one. Chapter Three describes the rise and fall of the Syndicate mailing list.
Founded in , the Syndicate network slowly built up a critical mass of subscribers. The aim of this post project was to open dialogue between new-media arts practitioners in Eastern and Western Europe.
After a number of meetings, workshops and publications in early , Syndicate found itself caught up in the controversies of the Kosovo war. The list became a lively platform for debates about ethnic cleansing and the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. But it did not survive these harsh debates. In mid, it fell apart, unable to resolve the issue of moderation.
Chapter Four concerns Xchange, an early network of non-profit streaming media initiatives. The Xchange list was established in late and has always been a pragmatic, hands-on network. In this case study I describe and analyze the collaborative projects between the audio artists and Net radio initiatives that make up the Xchange network.
Owing to the stagnation of broadband rollout and the rising uncertainties about intellectual property rights, the streaming-media sector found it difficult to reach its full potential. This also had an impact on the independent non-profit networks.
Besides sporadic posts on the list, I have made Net radio programs in collaboration with e-lab, DFM, Zina Kaye, Ralf Homann and others, doing streaming sessions wherever possible. Independent streaming media networks such as Xchange depend heavily on the availability of cheap Internet connectivity.
In this chapter, I explain how the self-image of such networks is related to the relative stagnation in bandwidth that the Internet has faced since the late s. Because models in education affect future generations of the new-media intelligentsia, and because so many theorists and artists are employed in this field, I have decided to devote a chapter to this emerging topic. What is the status of software courses and vocational training in general? It is tempting to presuppose technical skills and immediately jump to the more interesting critical and conceptual issues, but that is often unrealistic.
What is the place of theory? Thousands of educators worldwide are struggling with these issues and many more. The ideas I present here have grown over the years and are based on a decade of experience. As not much written material is available, I have chosen to conduct e-mail interviews with experienced new-media educators, all of them colleagues that I find inspiring.
Chapter Six looks at free software and open source from a cultural perspective. This is obviously a vast field, but it is of such strategic importance in my opinion that I felt the need to engage with it even though I am not a geek or programmer myself.
Because of the extent and the depth of the Oekonux discussion, which kicked off in mid, it has proven impossible for me to summarize the 7, or so posts, but I have tried to anyway. In the Conclusion, I bring together the experiences of different lists and communities and focus on the issue of moderation and how internal democracy within Internet-based networks could be shaped.
Towards the end of the chapter, I address the wider issues of internal democracy and ownership of Internet projects and discuss how software mediates between social experiences and technical possibilities. The post period is drawing to a close. Instead of providing the reader with a preliminary big picture of the post-millennial George W. Bush era, it is my intention to investigate in detail how virtual communities function, a decade after the Internet was opened to the general public.
This undertaking needs a somewhat longer timeframe. It is important to stay on-topic and not leave the scene. The age of global civil infowar, peer-to-peer networks and weblogs confronts the reader-as-user with problems and perplexities that need further investigation. There have 24 theory on demand been enough speculative philosophies. What this maturing medium needs is less religion and more scrutiny; not cynical statements or sales talk but serious engagement.
The global network society is no longer a promise but a fluid and dirty reality. Instead of proclaiming the next future, it might be more interesting to presume that we have already arrived there, and start to explore its workings.
Footnotes 1. URL: techupdate. My bandwidth is metered and it always has been. URL: www. URL: shorl. Alain Badiou, Ethics, London: Verso, , p. Source: Saul K. Padover Ed. Unlike Sandbothe, Hartmann stays close to media- related issues and does not address the philosophy community directly in a plea for more understanding of media.
Instead of distancing myself from media theory, I have chosen to politicize the field and give it another, perhaps more radical direction. Elsewhere I have listed the different, competing names in this field such as digital studies, Netzwissenschaften, hypermedia studies Lovink, Dark Fiber, p. See also the debate on the mailing list aoir www.
Studies, London: Arnold Publishers, , p. I have no hesitation in presenting this volume as part two of Dark Fiber, my collection of essays on critical Internet culture published by MIT Press in I started work on My First Recession in late , driven by the intention of doing more case studies on Internet-based social networks and continuing the research I started in the Dark Fiber chapters on the Digital City and the mailing list.
To think and to be fully alive are the same. The page flutters in the open air and so do I. I have a physical relation to writing. I touch the blank or written pages with my eyes — something I cannot do with the screen. The computer is a true prosthesis. See: www. Posted on , July 20, An updated version can be found in Lovink, Dark Fiber, pp. For instance, see www. Himanen does not mention the historical fact that many hackers had to do it to gain access to the Net before it became publicly accessible in the early s.
The first two case studies, of the Digital City community network and the mailing list, can be found in Dark Fiber. Peter Kollock and Marc A. Since all messages sent to the list must pass through a single point, e-mail lists offer their owners significant control over who can contribute to their group. List owners can personally review all requests to be added to a list, can forbid anyone from contributing to the list if they are not on the list themselves, and even censor specific messages that they do not want broadcast to the list as a whole.
Even open lists can be selectively closed or controlled by the owners when faced with disrup tion. Most e-mail lists operate as benign dictatorships sustained by the monopoly power that the list owner wields over the boundaries and content of their group. As a result, e-mail lists are often distinguished by their relatively more ordered and focused activity.
Smith, in the introduction to their reader Communities in Cyber space, London: Routledge, , p. See www. See also the work of Radhika Gajjala www. Stefan Merten has written a German text on mailing lists which includes comments by other Oekonux mem bers. Info on the list archives: www. From a private e-mail exchange, April 22, It is more interesting to look at how the term is used in a situation or among a group than it is to try and identify its characteristics.
I have described my experience with an early dotcom project, Netural Objects, which was initiated by the Society for Old and New Media in Amsterdam and others. See: Geert Lovink, Nettime, April 21, Take me away. Parallel to the scientific approaches are art-related, activist and critical discourses growing out of cultural and political contexts. In the mids, personal websurfing diaries and dotcom-business titles were hot, but these have gradually disappeared from the shelves.
Dreyfus and Lawrence Lessig. What matters is that they take positions. I have refrained from properly summarizing their books. What is missing in Internet culture, in my view, is strategic debates and polemic discussions. There are plenty of reviews available online. We all know what will happen in Negative speculation no longer needs to be concerned with events in the next decade or century. Technicians have already colonized the Long Now.
Instead, they roam freely through the ever-expanding present. The three works discussed here were all published in late — a fact that, in theory, should not be important, but is because the Internet is such a rapidly changing environment. The fact that all three are male US university professors based in California indicates that, conceptually speaking, the USA, and the West Coast in particular, is still the epicenter of the Internet, despite efforts to geographically diversify the discourse.
Then there are researchers who look at my first recession 29 the identity aspects of cyberspace, such as Howard Rheingold, Sherry Turkle and Sandy Stone.
One could also go back in time and mention the technical founding fathers, such as Internet Society boss and former WorldCom executive Vint Cerf, the late Jon Postel administrator of the top- level domain-name system , Whole Earth Catalogue publisher Stewart Brand, free-software guru Richard Stallman and Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.
Recently, Katherine Hayles, Peter Lunenfeld and Lev Manovich have become influential thinkers in cultural new-media circles; their intellectual production, like that of other media theorists, mostly deals with the underlying structures of information technology and does not address specific Internet issues.
Rather than deconstructing the founding myths and utopian promises or entering cultural studies territory, I am more interested in the recent work of authors who reflect directly on the Internet as a medium in rapid transition. Hubert L. In principle, such topics could be relevant, yet they do not address real concerns. Daily battles over network architecture must have been too mundane. Unfortunately, Dreyfus is by no means alone in this.
Global-governance models are competing with the policy interests of nation-states and the commercial agendas of transnational corporations. There are engineers, corporate gurus, telecom suits and geeks, all with different agendas and cultural backgrounds. A decade after the rise of posthumanism, the claim that cyberspace will bring about the super- and infra-human is hardly discussed anymore.
In such a post-bubble climate, a conservative backlash can easily gain popularity. Like household appliances, the Internet has become an invisible part of everyday life.
It may be a liberating relief for some that there is more to life then the Internet, but such a truism can hardly be the foundation for a philosophical investigation. It seems tempting to confuse popular-culture virtual reality motifs with the rather dull realpolitik of network architecture. So why can philosophers no longer distinguish between substance and appearance?
Paul Virilio and Slavoj Zizek, for instance, and with them countless others, have had the greatest difficulty distinguishing between literary fantasies, demo design, marketing video clips and Hollywood dreams, on the one hand, and really existing technologies, with all their imperfections and incomplete versions, on the other.
Body politics may have been significant at some point, but they cannot begin to cover the variety of all-too-real issues that the Internet as a global medium faces. Instead, it cries out for a strong coalition able to come up with a design for a digital commons, and to defend and redefine core values such as openness and access. Or was it no free speech? Is geek culture really as dazed and confused as it seems, or is there more significance to the Richard Stallman-Eric Raymond controversy?
Numerous Internet my first recession 31 critics looked into the mythological disembodiment dreams of s cyberculture. One might, therefore, expect criticism of this commonsensical approach rather than a return to the same old adolescent cyberpunk culture. Not surprisingly, Hubert Dreyfus outs himself as a cultural pessimist. Nonsense should be not just filtered but banned. It is the high task of civilized intellectuals to decide what should and should not enter the media archive.
Driven by good intentions, the media ecologists secretly dream of an authoritarian enlightenment regime in which chatting and rambling are serious offenses.
Relevance and significance have disappeared. Nothing is too trivial to be included. If the questions get too difficult, as in the case of bio-ethics or network architecture, one is to turn away from the world — and sell this gesture as a philosophically superior sign of wisdom.
In On the Internet Dreyfus confuses elements of popular cyberculture with the agenda of the creators of the Internet. He then sets out to deconstruct this presumably dominant Platonic wish to leave the body behind, without analyzing in detail the specific political, economic and cultural agenda of this tendency and its relationship to different new-media discourses.
As an analysis of the Extropian movement, On the Internet is a classic case of belated Ideologiekritik. This leaves us with the general question of how knowledge stored in books can operate in a fastchanging environment like the Internet.
Often, the object of criticism has long disappeared by the time the theoretical objections have been well thought through. The answer can only be a theory on the run. Internet-related critical knowledge is not only forced to operate in the present, it also expresses itself in a range of ways, as code, interface design, social networks and hyperlinked aphorisms, hidden in mailing-list messages, weblogs and chatrooms and sent as SMS messages. Dreyfus makes no mention of users and groups creating their own meaning and context on the Net.
He has apparently never heard of mail filters and thresholds. How about shortwave radio, or the rising mud floods on the peer-to-peer networks? With John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, Dreyfus fears the coming of the digital commons, where every citizen will have to do his or her own information filtering.
What Kierkegaard, and with him Dreyfus, really finds scary and disgusting is democratic nothingness. Instead, the elites should restrict the public sphere and direct the masses towards progress, war, socialism, globalization, or whatever is on the agenda.
The fear of the black hole of the commons is widespread and ranges from left to right. All are only too eager to respond to the equally deracinated opinions of other anonymous amateurs who post their views from nowhere. Nowhere does he actually demonstrate how widespread anonymous communication on the Net is, nor does he note what measures security officials have already taken to crack down on effective anonymity and free, unmonitored browsing if that ever existed.
As everyone should know by now, online privacy is an illusion, as is anonymity. These days, security experts are able to identify even the most intelligent hackers. Apart from that, only in rare cases, such as reporting from war zones, is anonymity really useful. Usually, the anonymity cult is a sign of boredom, exhibited as a hobby in the late hours.
Not everyone is into anonymous role-playing. Anonymity is one of the many menu options, used in specific cases, not the essence of the Net. It is not the default option, as Dreyfus presumes it is. With all the security and surveillance techniques available today, absolute anonymity is arguably getting harder and harder to maintain these days.
Anonymity may soon go my first recession 33 underground, as everyone will be obliged to show his or her Microsoft Passport before logging onto the Internet. For Dreyfus, surfing is the essence of the Net, and with it comes solitude and boredom. The undirected surfing and chatting he so despises may have happened in the early days of excitement.
But by now, users know what they are looking for and no longer get lost. Dreyfus does not distinguish between phases: the academic Internet of the s; the mythological-libertarian techno-imagination of Mondo and Wired; the massification of the medium, accompanied by the dotcom craze; the consolidation during the depression. Because of this inability to distinguish, old-fashioned essentialism gets projected onto a rapidly changing environment.
The fact is that knowledge is increasingly stored digitally and distributed via computer networks. This is not done out of a disdain for the body, to purposely prevent real-life gatherings of students with their teachers, as Dreyfus implies. The Will to Virtuality has a political agenda, aimed at the privatization and commodification of public education. Public education demands quality and accessibility, regardless of its real or virtual character.
The question Dreyfus poses is an old one: who decides what is sense and nonsense? The debate over filtering the Internet and mailing lists in particular is a central topic in his book. Managing information flows is a main concern for users — but one they do not like to trade for a loss of freedom. Internet enthusiasts point to the crucial difference between old media, based on scarcity of channels, resources and editorial space, and the Net with its infinite room for parallel conversations.
For the first time in media history, the decision over the sense-nonsense distinction has potentially moved from the medium and its editors to the individual user.
According to him, curiosity as such is dangerous. In the end, this debate is about the freedom of speech. Censorship should probably come from within the self, as voluntary self-restraint with respect to daily information intake and production.
Ever since the rise of virtual communities in the s, there have been ferocious debates about how to distinguish — and balance — noise and meaning. A wide range of self- moderation models and filtering techniques has been developed. How this well-informed and Internet-savvy Berkeley professor can ignore all this is a mystery.
On the Internet is therefore a setback in terms of Internet theory. At the same time, the book also embodies the common desire to walk away from work on the computer and take a well-deserved break.
The ethical-aesthetical position Dreyfus calls for could be developed without much effort. Like a simulator, the Net manages to capture everything but the risk.
I would analyze it rather as a challenge in the direction of a lively agonistic democracy Chantal Mouffe , filled with controversies and irreconcilable positions. The digital divide will not be bridged but will create new forms of conflict. Reality romantics, similar to their historical predecessors in the late 18th century, can point to the blind spots of the Network Society, but will not succeed in outlawing or overturning the technological nature of, for instance, knowledge production and distribution.
In this sense, Dreyfus falls into the same trap as those he criticizes. As if a pure and unmediated world ever existed. What is needed is a radical democratization of the media sphere. The material and the virtual have become one, and separating them is conceptually misleading and practically impossible. Top EDM Music. Last updated Apr 17, Listen to Rogues feat Daisy Guttridge. Jacob Lesinski. You might also like More from author.
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