As Walrus writer Alistair Brown described in “How The North Was Won“, North American pop culture has been obsessed with the Western film in the past year.

Getting all doe-eyed about the West, looking west, The Great Gatsby’s green light—aka Manifest Destiny—is certainly what the US needs right now. A life, liberty and pursuit of happiness infusion. The unstoppable, fated, continual growing greatness of America is getting hard to believe in. With 900,000 homes in foreclosure, an abhorrent war, the American dollar reduced to par with the Canadian dollar, and race and gender dominating the presidential battle—destiny is getting all unmanifested and unAmerican.

The internets, like Western film, can help remind us how America ought to be talking to itself about itself. A sort of reinvigoration of Turner’s Frontier thesis: the untamed, infinite internets or “cyberspace imaginary” are there now waiting to be colonized by new great men. We wait for the next John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington to fight on the electronic frontiers for freedom (EFF) and potentiate its’ randomness by infusing it with capital-generating technologies like the Declaration of Independence and slavery.

These new great men (Calanis? Kevin Rose? Zuckerberg?) and their magic visions (Mahalo, Digg, Facebook) can, along with the HBO John Adams, God of Filmaking Paul Anderson and the elusive pimpernelly Cohen brothers remind us that, while America is suffering at the hands of a few bad men (Bush, Cheney, Warren Spector) the truth of the United States is infinite, expansive, impregnable, man-made glory.

Equally useful to the anthropologists and cultural studies academics as a new land to speak for and imbue with meaning while remaining free of annoying race and class inquisitions, cyberspace holds promise for centuries more manifest destiny for everyone! Get a dot com if you are an MBA and a dot net if you are a scuppie or scholar. The West and manifest no longer has to end at California and Mexico but can continue on forever and ever…

Except that, of course, cyberspace doesn’t exist. Oh, and because of silly history and bothersome complex economic theory, slavery and genocide underpin America’s access to so-called cyberspace. We just behold it as our historical inheritance created it in our colonial imaginations: as an empty land, a frontier, to take over and profit from. A shiny, shiny, new resource.

But is it so new? Culture constantly changes, but change is not synonymous with progressive growth or verdant newness. How different are the internets from other cultural productions? Is it really generating new potential for communication and freedom? Or just further inoculation against any actual violent cultural change? What does holding cultural production to these kind of expectations or hopes do to conceptions of social change?

Fortunately the internets are neither cyberspace nor not cyberspace. For each person with access to the tools and time to develop them they are, like radio and television before, part of our identities and repertoire—useful for social interactions.

Right now for me the internets are, without question, for watching live, free and happy Kristin Davis perform fellatio on a leaked video.

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Posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 11:12 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.