Post Internet

Can one be bad at the Internet?

Can one use the Internet in such a way that it is objectively-speaking bad?

Well, yes, and no.

On the one hand, yes, I’m personally bad at the Internet because I don’t know every trick to get free music.

I’m also bad at the Internet because I don’t know *that much* about how the Internet works or its history or coding languages.

In a very real way, I’m bad at that stuff.

So, yes, one can be bad at the Internet.

I’m certainly bad at the Internet.

But, on the other hand, so is everyone else.

If you’re good at understanding the legal frame of the Internet, you may not be good at understanding the cultural memes of the Internet – you may be bad at it.

If you’ve developed an elegant mathematical model of the Internet which accounts for every node, you may not understand the current security threats posed by hackers.

And so on.

In fact, we’re all pretty wildly bad at using the Internet.

Perhaps that’s why we cluster in circles, spinning our wheels amongst the same voices in a fit of future shock – it’s a way to deal with the troubling fact of the human brain’s limitations that the Internet makes obvious.

So, the problem is not whether one can be good or bad at using the Internet.

The question is badly stated.

Perhaps we can say “does one use the Internet with intention?”

From Synners (1991) by Pat Cadigan:

Rosa laughed a little. ‘You’re approaching my threshold for that kinda talk. I’m a hacker, not a philosopher.’

Fez turned to look at her. ‘Good choice of word, threshold. The way we all kept adding to the nets did exactly that, passed a threshold. It got to the point where the net should have collapsed in chaos, but it didn’t. Or rather, it did, but the collapse was not a collapse in the conventional sense. Because the net kept accommodating the demands we put on it – that was its purpose, after all, to accommodate data. When it reached the point where it was burdened to the limit, it had two choices – crash, or accommodate. It did both.

‘Going over the brink of catastrophe was the first stage. The second was recovery – since it was programmed to accommodate, it did. But the only way it could accommodate was to exceed the limit. Institute a new limit, and when that was reached, go over the brink of catastrophe again, recover and institute a new limit beyond that. And so forth.’

‘Ad infinitum,’ Sam said, expressionlessly. ‘Like a fractal growing from the bottom up instead of the top down. Triggered by catastrophe.’

‘It didn’t get a break while all this was going on, of course,’ Fez continued. ‘The information never stopped coming in, which made for quite a lot of turbulence. But chaos is just another kind of order, and so we have another kind of net now than the one we started out with. We woke it up.’

This blog is dedicated to artists who use new media technologies but are not new media artists.

They are contemporary artists accounting for the effects of the Internet on the human brain and culture at large.

They are addicted to the same thing that brought Albrecht Dürer, Pablo Picasso, Eva Hesse, Hélio Oiticica, and Ai Weiwei inside.

Distributed media has brought the world to me and brought me into a world.

On the one hand, the world is at hand: I am able to view the films of Abbas Kiarostami, the artwork of Cyprien Gaillard, the writing of Walter Benjamin; the world and its history are present to me in a way that is unprecedented in the history of human culture.

On the other hand, I have never been more deeply sequestered in the confines of one particular worldview and so utterly unable to empathize – to really know – another person’s pain. I am in la la land.

But was I ever out of it?

Everything is always already filtered through endless degrees of interpretation and simulation.

Indeed, the only truly essential thing is that there is no other truly essential thing.

This is what the Internet tells me.

Google search rankings, for example, are obviously not the truly essential meaning of a term; rather what Google shows me is that there never was a truly essential meaning of a term – through its endless lists, it illustrates that that’s always the case.

But is it the case?

In the essay “Other Criteria,” the art critic and historian Leo Steinberg talks about the way that Rauschenberg “let the world in again.” He continues, “Not the world of the Renaissance man who looked for his weather clues out of the window; but the world of men who turn knobs to hear a taped message, ‘precipitation probability ten percent tonight,’ electronically transmitted from some windowless booth. Rauschenberg’s picture plane is for the consciousness immersed in the brain of the city.”

According to Steinberg, the “profoundest symbolic gesture” of letting “the world in again,” occurred when Rauschenberg took his bed (a surface for laying things upon) – and turned it vertical, thus, bringing his flatbed “picture plane” into what he describes as “the vertical posture of ‘art.’”

Post Internet art brings the network into the vertical posture of art.