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These days I write from Providence, Rhode Island, safe in the warm bosom of an "alternative" arts space, perhaps the last one left in the world, (but it too shall be co-opted, and perhaps already has been) called the AS220. It – and the spirit that drives the place – is exactly what has me in Providence, Rhode Island. As a friend from the Bay Area pointed out, "You’ve given up on start-up companies and moved to a start-up city." Right now, I am watching a really bad Big-Black wannabe band called The Punklets, a would-be rebel band straight from the garages of suburbia who see punk rock as a ticket out of boredom in much the same way that the rest of our sorry-ass generation (myself included) once saw html and .cgi protocols as a way out of the no-futurism of the early ‘90s recession with its café jobs and no-future arts gigs.
We’re a sad, mercurial bunch, this Generation X – whether we’re writing songs or screenplays or biz-plans, feasting from the trough of the Geffen Corporation or Hollywood or Wall Street, the message is still the same: "Get me the hell OUT of the nine-to-five oblivion so I can have something approaching freedom in my life." For every kid banking the phuture on a biz-plan, you find a kid who just wants OUT of the hypocrisy of a monetary and capital system that is patently (and proveably) unreal, not to mention destructive and boring. Forget Brian Arthur and Alan Greenspan; we know for a fact that capitalism is only a vehicle – like communism, anarchism, and socialism – designed to pull us out of a global economic situation that is entirely fictitious, yet becomes real each time we are forced to pay the rent. Some of us go back to our corporate jobs and pray for the market to crash because we know now as we knew then that the New Economy is just as much a farce as the old one was – and despite our stock options and our $60k+ a year jobs, we’re still nanoseconds away from global recession, and we sold whatever community we could once call our own to the hucksters at pennies on the dollar. While Netscape Communications Corporation makes a billion dollars selling nothing more than air and a brand-name, we’re still struggling to live and wondering why no one ever took The Baffler seriously.
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And
way back in the day, I recall being a breathless young raver-techno-hippie,
racing around San Francisco with a whistle around my neck blasting
the alarm for Ecstacy-enhanced consciousness, eschewing the plodding
steps to social change offered by Adam Cornford and Bob Black
over at Processed World at the Epi-Center in favor of the
urbane promises of freedom offered by the breezy pomo thinkers
over at Mondo 2000, embracing the thrill-a-minute ride
of lifestyle anarchism like any 21-year-old who wanted change
RIGHT NOW. I was gulping down great draughts full of Leary-style
futurism via FTP at well.com and echonyc, pondering the *meaning*
of the Internet, convinced it was going to change *everything.*
And I recall finding myself in a room full of veteran socialists
at the New College, proclaiming that the Internet was going to
"Change the World," and hearing them blandly reply:
"Only for your race and class." I didn’t really
understand those words for years and years.
