Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. There is a myth system waiting to become a political language to ground one way of looking at science and technology and challenging the informatics of domination– in order to act potently.
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” Routledge, 1991

Did I think I seen shorty get low
Ain’t the same when it’s up that close
Make it rain, I’m makin it snow
Flo Rida Featuring T-Pain “Low” Atlantic 2008

Los Angeles, CA—Utopianism ran rampant back in the “The Internet” vainglory days of MUD and Cyborg Manifestos. Heaven, said Marx, reflected the unbloomed hope of factory life: so no problem, you don’t have to work. And “utopia” was a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. It means “good place” from the Greek, just as it symbolized nowhere, a place that cannot be. It was in this good spirit of wishing for the impossible — and throw some communist or techno-providence in there, because that’s what we do — that so many sincerely believed that our race and gender wouldn’t matter. Online.

Words like cyberfeminism were thrown together with politicized abandon. Embracing the Internet was hyped by some feminists as politically akin to burning bras — only it cost more for a computer and an ISP than for some lighter fluid and a burn barrel. We were part of a new revolution! A revolution that did not sag (check that avatar pic).

Sigh.

We rarely ‘learn from history’ because it doesn’t usually ‘repeat itself’ in the same ways. But if you want to go pattern-hunting — and you do, because of your human pattern-hunting brain — that is if there are dreams of a post-revolution, you just have to wait a decade or three for either (a) a bloody post-revolutionary context, or a (b) annoying post-revolutionary context.

We got Option (b), and things are the same as they ever were. We are somewhere, not nowhere. And the old Internet ushered in a change without a difference. Turns out that race stereotypes, gender roles, and those giant cultural and material edifices that surround them were, tragically, far too indelible for even the mighty (online!) cyborg manifestos. Or any manifesto.

The Internet Erewhon shot its load, failed clichés best described in form: sound and fury signifying nothing. So we’re onto the best of what’s left, the consolation prize, the techno- without the utopia, the vaguely malleable identities (I can lie about my age) without the liberation.

Thus I give you: The Semantic Web, aka Web 3.0. All the white middle-class power consumers being led to exactly what they want as easily as it rolls off their macchiatoed tongues. Semantic Web tackles middle class culturally-specific interests and views — a big thoughtmass called ontology, if you roll in those circles — and tries to systematize and sync it up within existing Web 2.0 social networks.

Because right now, accessing your preferred worldview, the one that renders your hopes and dreams firmly material yet untouchable and decidedly un-cyber: it isn’t as fast, or convenient, or localized or graphical as it just might be. We will get there. I have no doubt that a more refined delivery system is on the way.

I have been beta testing semantic web searches.

Powerset is pleasing. They are building a semantic search architecture around Wikipedia that can ideally be extrapolated upwards to all searches in the future. I’m excited because I just powersearched a list of all the people Hulk Hogan has defeated ( I forgot that in 1988 losers Big Boss Man and Akeem were billed as the Twin Towers!) I feel familiar vectors for retrieving and compiling information shuttling around even as I write this. The possibility that connections can be more than news on a microblog, eventually be so specific and pipelined as to feel like insight - an ambitious goal that soon-to-be CEO of Reuters Devin Wenig has recently adeptly described last week — is thrilling. Intense semantic web discussion gives me bigger shivers than MSNBC’s Chris Matthews got from listening to Obama speak on Tuesday.

But the next thing you know, as Flo Rida sings, I get low low low low low low low low. I feel part of something exciting but limiting just like I did at dancehalls in the 90s. Confused. Conflicted by the creativity of dance jumbled up with sexual objectification.

The semantic web is as much about the re-entrenchment of national, race, gender and class boundaries as informational vanguardism. Protecting my privileged interests. We are translating our exclusive empire populated only by those with the privilege and cultural capital to gain or want or understand the capital-building aspects of access online. Reproducing it. A gated-up utopia, white-washed and sign’d “No Admittance Except on Business.” For hooking up or reading about how to organize your perfect office setup! You cannot get lower than the nowhere outside those gates. Nowhere is our guilty afterthought expressed by an interest in global warming or Kenya firestorms. Our connection and culpability is ours to bookmark or skim over. I am not blaming any iteration of the web because it is merely continuity. This is how things are supposed to work.

Ajax it up. Take that containerization, that television, that Fordism, that capacitor, that radio and television, that printing press and computer: take all that liberatory potential and turn it into a state-plated shoehorn to keep us where we otherwise were. Somewhere, to be sure. Not nowhere. Not ever utopia.

The web will ‘make it snow’ for only a few. But up close there are possibilities. Neoliberal Web 2.0’s Hugg and microcredit sites are not what I mean. These are pressure valves in the maintenance of the status quo. The only thing I know for sure is not a startup plan but an ache, an ache for moments free of naive never-neverlandism and the power structures that feed on it. I also want to evade that subject, that user, who pretends herself outside of power.

I don’t want laundry lists or myths or generalizable solutions.

I want something entirely low: thrill without restriction, context without confinement. A politicized way to analyze the relationships between meanings that exceeds the semantic by taking into account 1855 as much as 2008. Not Web 2.0 or 3.0 — just real low.

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Posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 2:48 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.