Article Response: Internet

Hm. Look for my answer as a separate article to be submitted.

You didn't get any of that from the song, really. You just wrote about the song, and then about that. Which is fine, although that article got me down for about a day, until I cheered up when I realized that I completely disagreed with it. Which is fine, also.

First thing about this track is that the anti-techne attitude is very common in the riot-crowd. Cf. Sleater-Kinney's "God is a Number" for a recent example. & of course your surface reading of the song runs into a simple problem "get off the internet... get onto vinyl?" and mediation has merely changed mediums. Not to mention which your argument about how "the community of the Internet allows physical and social bonds to atrophy in favour of distanced emotional and intellectual bonds. Because the culture of the Internet then becomes one of discussion rather than action" is so.... anti the best elements of the Freakytrigger ethos. Mechanical divas, yes, but machines, no? Not to be reductionistic, but the essence of the argument is that a shift of medium creates a qualitative shift in modes of discourse and action -- whereas I would argue that modes of discourse have only made quantitative shifts since Gutenberg or so, and modes of action have made made merely surface-level shifts since 1848.

& I think that Kathleen Hannah backs me up on this one. I thing that the internet in this song stands in for a whole range of places which are not the streets, most importantly the recording studio. Note the use of time in this song -- the lockgroove is as tight as it ever gets with Le Tigre. Which we'll come back to in a bit.

She kicks it off with "it seems so 80s or early 90s to be political" which is between reductionistic and false. The 80s were, if nothing else, an era where left-politics were driven off the streets and into the recording studio. Whereas everwhere I look these days there's some article or flyer or god knows what about the "new student movement" -- which KH is certainly conversant with.

The song, self descriptively notes, "this is repetitive/but nothing has changed" which feels like a cry for the relevancy of cultural forms over political action -- sort of like "nothing will change, so come back off the internet, come to the concert" Except that KH still, in her other half, wants you on the streets. Also note the childlike quality of the vocals on "destroy the right wing" and "I'll meet you in the streets" -- a self aware recreation of naive political instinct -- KH debates whether she knows better than to hope, or knows too much to give up hope.

Smug self-satisfaction and incessant complaining are the two faces of style driven politics, but between them emerges the pleasure of deflected passion, straining at the bounds of art to define meanings which social change has yet to catch up with... and ending up only producing art after all. Trotsky once said, roughly, "Art, if it remains true to itself, cannot help but be revolutionary" which I think is pretty accurate. And I'd place Le Tigre as art. But I wouldn't get down on the internet, as medium may be message, but the internet is too vast and hazy to be a medium in the McLuhan sense, the sense in which Network Television is a different medium than Cable Access.

My reconciliation of Le Tigre with your article on Pop & Politics, which I enjoyed and agreed with (more, at least) is that you argue there that "Where political pop goes wrong is in setting itself goals." and KH, here, is less setting herself goals than mourning the disconnect between art and action.

For all of Hanna's sneering about the internet, how has anything any of her various bands done accomplished anything more than anyone trying to do anything creative on the web? Like the majority of the bloggers, Le Tigre is speaking to a small little clique that doesn't really want to engage the outside world. It's more rhetoric than reality.

Fwiw, the internet has gotten me in touch with a lot of people who have as much passion for music as I do; that's introduced me to a lot of fantastic bands and ideas that I wouldn't have come across otherwise. It's stopped my musical tastes from atrophying, since the majority of people I know irl think Coldplay is cutting edge. If people consider that a grey and worthless pursuit, so be it.

Cripes!!!! What is it with new technology? When it's on the up, there are people to enthuse about it as if a new Age of Aquarius has dawned, and when an market downturn rears it's ugly head, out come the Jeremiahs contending that not only was the technology not all the (hopelessly ambitious and overoptimistic) predictions promised, but that it signals the End Of Society As We Know It(tm)!

"GET OFF THE INTERNET! I'LL MEET YOU IN THE STREET!"!??!?! Believe it or not, there are plenty of political activists the world who, having organised on the net, do precisely that. In such case, one could argue that rather than being complicit in a "loss of will", the internet allows a lot of like-minded people to concentrate their will conrete form. (And the fact that a lot of other people pay lip service to grass-roots action doesn't invalidate it- apathy wasn't exactly invented by the Internet.)

Having been involved in some activism myself, both on and offline, I do take a bit of an exception to the implication that net usage might "allows physical and social bonds to atrophy in favour of distanced emotional and intellectual bonds"! (Which sounds suspciously like yet another rewriting of the Geek/Nerdy Anorak stereotype.) This assumes one's online world completely seperate from the offline, with no overlap. Now, if you surf all day, naturally your social and physical bonds will tend to "atrophy", but then exactly the same argument could be made for something like (Hmmm...!) trainspotting!

However, I'm not one those people who likes sitting in front of a screen all day, and a great deal of my email traffic is between friends I see in real-life, and former friends who have moved away! I've also been actively searching out local bands on the likes of mp3.com etc, corresponding with some of them, going to concerts, and so on. The net's certainly useful for hearing local stuff yer average local radio station wouldn't play... And also for enabling one to find out what street to meet in when one has got off the Internet! :)

As to the issue whether what people do online is "useful": (Notwithstanding the fact that some of it undoubtably is) I would ask the question: Why concentrate on the internet? How much of what we do in the real wold is "useful"? One could take a similarly severe assessment of one's offline life based on such criteria. Seems to me like an issue of personal motivation, net or no net... And there is an assumption being made of what "usefulness" actually constitutes. I mean, having a laff down the pub with your mates isn't exactly 100% "useful", but it doesn't exactly "atrophy" one's social bonds. :)

But did the Net lead to "a combination of fashion and lack of will" that "have pushed politics off the agenda"? I'd argue that those seeds were sown long before anyone heard of Netscape, particularly the increasing commercialisation of even the most "alternative" rock cliches in the commecial mainstream music media. (Hello MTV!) And, while we're at it, doesn't this start encroaching on Le Tigre's fashionable alt-indie territory? One could question what is exactly so "useful" about a guitar band who, say, makes a record that slags off apathy on the internet, as opposed to, say, a well-read website (like Slashdot, etc.) that slags off apathy on the internet? One could argue that latter is likely to have more impact as the former is more likely to preaching to the converted. One could also argue that if yer trendy sites on the internet say a lot but don't really do anything, then one could level a very similar argument at the door of certain of yer trendy "political" guitar bands, and any carping from the latter about the former would be simply the latest in a long line of reactions from the latter to the latest new technology and trends stealing their thunder. (See pevious slaggings of rave, hip- hop, disco, etc.) And it's not as if technology-based music hasn't explored the darker issues surrounding technology either...

Of course, I haven't heard Le Tigre's effort yet, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they practice what they preach. :) (Also, I like Sterling's thesis of the Internet being a deliberate metaphor for apathy.) But I'm wouldn't be too surprised to see a number of smart-alec indie folks jumping on the "internet users = zombies!!" bandwagon, and the irony is- it'll just be as much a combination of fashion and lack of self will as that which they claim to defend themselves against!

Old Fart!!!!

I could tell this was one of those pieces that might get a response. OK. First of all, I apologise to any netophiles who may have taken personal offense at my disillusionment with the Internet. The piece, like most pieces on FT, is my examining my own response to something and then seeing what I can make of that in terms of the general situation, in pop or in online culture or anything else. It was not meant to say that the Internet sucked or was worthless - I may have agreed with what I saw as Kathleen Hanna's interpretation of some of the deadening aspects of the 'net, but I also wanted to stress the extraordinary potential that she seemed to miss out. But I was trying to make sure that the only person I named and blamed was myself.

The main thing I wanted to say is I think this - in most of the talk about weblogs and personal websites and the Internet as a communications medium, talk which was triumphant a year ago and is now in places elegiac, the stress was on the potential for personal expression, putting yourself and your thoughts on the screen, unfettered. And what I am concerned about is what I see as people going that far and no further, not trying to reach out and have an impact on a wider public, including perhaps a public who aren't online. Currently I am interested in what that impact might be in political terms, for whatever reasons (liberal middle-class guilt, most likely). But it needn't be political. Self-expression is a de facto good but I think that self-expression with a purpose is better and the technologies of the 'net give us a better opportunity than ever to realise those purposes. In a weird way my piece was meant to be a response to the net-veteran "end of an era" mourning that's set in in the wake of the dot-com bust, saying yes, it is the end of an era, so what, we now have the opportunity to do things that are more interesting.

But obviously it didn't read like that. Old Fart speared the two biggest holes in the piece - the fact that it looked like I was assuming webloggers etc. weren't using the net for political activity too, and the fact that the net is being used enormously as a political tool. On both of those I concede entirely - one of the reasons I wrote the article was to have something out there that would, by its very existence and rightness or wrongness, force me to find out more about what I was writing about, both in politics and internet terms.

I think a lot of the problem comes from my using a song called "Get Off The Internet" as the framing device for this stuff. I like the song a lot. I do not however think we should all literally get off the internet and go and rock out in the street and have a revolution. Nor do I think that Kathleen Hanna is a paragon - and besides, even if KH is useless, it does not make the uselessness of most net culture any *less* so. As Sterling outlined and OF so elegantly summarised, at base I agree that the Internet represents apathy in general in the song. I also think it represents the Internet, though. But I am trying to suggest that my disillusionment is with the net as it is, not the 'net full stop. Otherwise I would have put a big "THE END" on the article and closed the site.

Sterling - I did actually get some (most!) of this from the song, in the indirect way I'm talking about in the other piece, how good political pop acts as a spur for suggestion and inspiration. The song came along and clicked some of my latent thoughts into place. And though I think your reading is more intelligent than mine, I still hear my surface interpretation when I play it. And "mourning the disconnect between art and action" is kind of what I was trying to do, too.

But - and this is going off topic a little - I do think the Internet is a qualitative shift, or at least a very very large quantitative one, given that it takes what was a fairly abstruse and academic mode of discourse - criticism of a text by breaking it up and interspersing it with commentary - and turns it into the basic mode of discussion. With the result, I think, that a lot of Internet discussion gets focussed on minutae very quickly - a reason incidentally why I didn't make this forum threaded.

My distinctions between social/physical and intellectual bonds, and between discussion/action are heavy-handed at best though, and I shouldn't have left them in unexamined just 'cause they read forcefully. I'm still thinking about those issues - i.e. what if any specific effects the Internet or parts of its technology has on culture/society/'us' - and I won't say more about them right now, except that I still worry a lot about the inanity of most online content and thinking. I think I was opposing it to the wrong things, though, and I suspect it can best be fought in the way you'd fight inanity anywhere, by fearless criticism of the bad stuff and hearty recommendation of the good.

I'd be very interested to hear what you, or anyone else, thinks the Freaky Trigger ethos is ;)

Thanks, as ever, for reading carefully and commenting intelligently.

I worry a lot about the inanity of most things in the world, full stop.

But I'm still a utopian, however much some internet content makes me think of giving everything up.

Thanks for an eloquent thread. I think I know where I stand better now.