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While it’s just as much bullshit as anything else, we continue, because our public access cable shows and handmade ‘zines have all disappeared into biz-plans and game-plans for the World Wide Web and beyond. We were duped – hardcore. No, we did it on purpose, because we’re essentially selfish and cynical, and we don’t really believe that any viable change will ever actually occur. But still we continue on with the web, because there’s nothing else to do. Basic truth: we want out. We’ve tried to get out through music, and we’ve tried to get out through the Net. But while the tactics change, the song remains the same: the corporations control who we are and what we do. We love to think that the Internet makes us free, but mostly, it just chains us to the machines in ways far more effectively than the Industrial Revolution ever even thought about. If "Modern Times" were made today, Charlie Chaplin would most surely be a web programmer, another cog in the machine, his eyes glued to the screen in the dim hope that an IPO would take him out of the system forever. A revolution, I think, should change the way that people live. This one sure did. Because now, instead of making print ’zines and actually using the mail system to get the messages out, we use the Internet, an instant shot at getting heard if you’ve got the tech. Last night, an old friend wrote to me that after resigning from his last job as a website project manager, he bought a new computer and after playing with that for awhile, pulled his dusty old Yamaha keyboard out of mothballs and started writing songs again. And despite the fact that he is now playing in cafés and bars again, he lamented that he didn’t yet have any MP3s, but he sent me the lyrics of his latest song. I read them, and they were lovely, and hit reply and said, "Hey - psst - forget the MP3s. Send me a TAPE - remember those? And if you do, I’ll send you a ZINE - remember those? And maybe, if you’re lucky, I’ll send you some stickers, ones I made with a copier and some sticky paper. And maybe we’ll...start a label or something..." Photographs by Mandy Catalano of the dUdü art collective.
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The
chance for IPO glory offered a way out from our painful desires
for real, meaningful change – like Geffen Records before
them, Wall Street and its possible riches keep us busy learning
html and java, too busy and well-fed to complain. But this too
is a shell game, a ruse to keep us off the streets, confining
our voices to Stupid Internet Forwards and other such dreck, replacing
our potential to create viable alternative communities with "netizen
activism," recently ironically institutionalized by sites
such as vote.com and grassroots.com. We keep our eyes on the prize
of escape from the tyranny of workaday, forcing us to the grindstone
of working ever harder, 60-80 hours a week, chained to the maw
of transglobal capitalism, forever and ever, in hopes that we
might someday be free.
