Isaiah Berlin knew how to separate the foxes from the hedgehogs in the intellectual arena. He borrowed from the Greek poet Archilochos the obscure dictum that a fox knows many things, while a hedgehog only one major thing. Hedgehogs – putting aside for a moment any zoological objections – are reductionists in search of coherence, while foxes are nomadic gatherers and pluralists. Hedgehogs like Hegel undertake historical philosophy; foxes like Montaigne write essays.

Isaiah Berlin’s essays were lying on Geert Lovink’s desk as I interviewed the Internet theorist at the Berlin Business College, where was working on his new book. Now the book is out, and who could be surprised to find out that it reads like the working diary of a fox?

With »Zero Comments« Lovink adds a further chapter to his »studies into critical internet culture,« as he calls his routine rambles through the »Internet criticism« scene, in the formation of which in the late 1980s he played a vital role. Already in »Dark Fiber,« published in 2001, Lovink offered a collage of mailing list discussions and a scattering of published interventions, travel notes, reports on his reading and theory fragments gathered over a period of ten years. Here he came up with the style that he would continue to develop in »My First Recession« (2003) and now in »Zero Comments.« As a participating observer, the »Net squatter turned institute founder«¹ searches among the noise of the lists and conferences for the »crystals of Internet critique« (Lovink), which he then offers up to a grateful audience in academia, the art scene and the general public.

Looking back from the standpoint of his last book, it becomes evident what kind of shifts in the political and technological context have taken place over the last ten years, for example versus the founding of Next5Minutes and nettime. The discourse mix made up of tactical use of media, »Economy of Friendship« and participatory radio theory that plunged the young medium into a messianic light has long since evolved into a business model. Behind the backs of the virtual intellectuals, in other words outside the paths taken by their clicks, the Internet has become an everyday medium used by more than a billion people, who fill it with content for free. The success of the major social networks, such as Facebook, YouTube and Blogspot, has almost in passing eroded two of the major pillars of the great Internet narrative: instead of aiming at an ambitious DIY aesthetic, users are happy with Wordpress’ 5-minute installation, choosing between elaborate or minimal, two or three columns, and then launching their own blog; it is usually written in their native language, with much less than one third of online publications appearing today in English, despite the continuing digital divide. So much for a lingua franca. That these kinds of transformations have consequences for the theory and practice of critical Internet culture is the key message of »Zero Comments,« addressed especially to geeks.

Lovink thinks it’s time to crawl out of the niches of the Internet subculture. This also goes for present-day media and Net art, which comes across just as badly in »Zero Comments« as it does everywhere else these days. According to Lovink, it is uncritical, mechanistic and isolated in its interminable beta studies. While media art was still tinkering away at »holy, baroque 3D installations,« the average user and his needs, secular and mobile, surged on past it, equipped with Web 2.0, mobile phone and iPod. What remains of it? Lovink advises media art to give up its label, to leave festivals like transmediale and Ars Electronica behind and to search out strong local partners instead, in which it can get involved as critical »material consciousness.« Media art had its day as transitory genre. Under the pen of the radical pragmatist Lovink it becomes a propaedeutic in the pitfalls of the digital object.

»Zero Comments« is also dedicated to the connection between development cooperation and digital culture: a long working report reconstructs the concrete problems experienced with Sarai.net in Delhi, the extremely successful favorite of many Net critics. Another report then takes up the 2005 World Summit of the Information Society as basis for a critique of NGOs from a »movement perspective.« Here, as is conspicuously often the case in Lovink’s new book, questions of organization of cultural workers and representation of their interests in their present-day precarious position are up for debate. Especially because Lovink can by no means be suspected of Leninism, it can be taken as a sign when he calls for a revision of long-fashionable tactical media theory, replacing its ephemeral alliances with Ned Rossiter’s theory of »organized networks,«² which forms the closing chapter of »Zero Comments.« At issue here is nothing less than the question of how network structures are to be conceived of if they are to support post-representational, post-identity-based societies. Lovink makes it clear that this is not only a problem with regard to the theory of democracy, but also an aesthetic challenge, when he goes into the possibilities for charting and illustrating social complexity, advocating a »distributed aesthetics.«

Although Geert Lovink’s thoughts on these questions remain (or must remain) vague, he shakes all the more vigorously the foundations of the techno-libertarian Internet myth. Demasking the »ideology of the free« without falling back into the logic of the Gutenberg economy is the concrete task at hand here for a critique of critique like the one Lovink attempts, because »The Internet ideology blinds us to the price we actually pay when we, overjoyed, become part of the gift-giving economy of the ›free‹.« Economic models first have to be developed that would allow »ambitious amateurs« to live from their work on the Web. But how to go about this? Socialize Google? Copyright collectives for YouTube? For now, it remains the secret of the Internet theorist. Because his essays open up the problems and then stop short just as the virulent memes have been summarized and the right questions asked. »Zero Comment« is no exception. That’s the way it is with foxes.

P.S. Incidentally, »Zero Comments« is ostensibly about blogs, its main subject according to the title. Lovink describes their authors as »digital nihilists,« radical pluralists who have lost faith in the media and are helping to write the story of the downfall of the broadcast media with their micro-heroic chronicles. The discussion on this is of course taking place on the Net.³

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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