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| − | == <small>'''Text'''</small> ==
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| − | The DEAD MEDIA Project: A Modest Proposal and a Public Appeal
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| − | by Bruce Sterling
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| − | Ever notice how many books there are about the Internet these days?
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| − | About 13,493 so far, right? And how about "multimedia?" There are
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| − | 8,784 books on this topic, even though no one has ever successfully
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| − | defined the term. CD-ROM -- is there a single marketable topic left that
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| − | hasn't been shovelwared into the vast digital mire that is CD-ROM? And
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| − | how about the "Information Superhighway" and "Virtual Reality"? Every
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| − | magazine on the planet has done awestruck vaporware cover stories on
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| − | these two consensus-hallucinations.
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| − |
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| − | Our culture is experiencing a profound radiation of new species of
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| − | media. The centralized, dinosaurian one-to-many media that roared and
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| − | trampled through the 20th century are poorly adapted to the postmodern
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| − | technological environment. The new media environment is aswarm with
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| − | lumbering toothy digital mammals. It's all lynxes here, and gophers there,
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| − | plus big fat venomous webcrawlers, appearing in Pleistocene profusion.
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| − |
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| − | This is all well and good, and it's lovely that so many people are
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| − | paying attention to this. Nothing gives me greater pleasure as a
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| − | professional garage futurist than to ponder some weird new mutant
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| − | medium and wonder how this squawking little monster is going to wriggle
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| − | its way into the interstices between human beings. Still, there's a
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| − | difference between this pleasurable contemplation of the technological
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| − | sublime and an actual coherent understanding of the life and death of
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| − | media. We have no idea in hell what we are doing to ourselves with these
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| − | new media technologies, and no consistent way even to discuss the
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| − | subject. Something constructive ought to be done about this situation.
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| − |
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| − | I can't do much about it, personally, because I'm booked up to the
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| − | eyeballs until the end of the millennium. So is my good friend Richard
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| − | Kadrey, author of the COVERT CULTURE SOURCEBOOK. Both Kadrey and
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| − | myself, however, recently came to a joint understanding that what we'd
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| − | really like to see at this cultural conjunction is an entirely new kind of
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| − | book on media. A media book of the dead.
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| − |
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| − | Plenty of wild wired promises are already being made for all the
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| − | infant media. What we need is a somber, thoughtful, thorough, hype-free,
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| − | even lugubrious book that honors the dead and resuscitates the spiritual
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| − | ancestors of today's mediated frenzy. A book to give its readership a
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| − | deeper, paleontological perspective right in the dizzy midst of the digital
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| − | revolution. We need a book about the failures of media, the collapses of
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| − | media, the supercessions of media, the strangulations of media, a book
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| − | detailing all the freakish and hideous media mistakes that we should know
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| − | enough now not to repeat, a book about media that have died on the barbed
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| − | wire of technological advance, media that didn't make it, martyred media,
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| − | dead media. THE HANDBOOK OF DEAD MEDIA. A naturalist's field guide for
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| − | the communications paleontologist.
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| − |
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| − | Neither Richard Kadrey nor myself are currently in any position to
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| − | write this proposed handbook. However, we both feel that our culture
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| − | truly requires this book: this rich, witty, insightful, profusely
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| − | illustrated, perfectbound, acid-free-paper coffee-table book, which is to
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| − | be brought out, theoretically, eventually, by some really with-it, cutting-
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| − | edge early-21st century publisher. The kind of book that will appear in
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| − | seventeen different sections of your local chainstore: Political Affairs,
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| − | Postmodern Theory, Computer Science, Popular Mechanics, Design Studies,
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| − | the coffeetable artbook section, the remainder table -- you know,
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| − | whatever.
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| − |
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| − | It's a rather rare phenomenon for an established medium to die. If
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| − | media make it past their Golden Vaporware stage, they usually expand
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| − | wildly in their early days and then shrink back to some protective niche as
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| − | they are challenged by later and more highly evolved competitors. Radio
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| − | didn't kill newspapers, TV didn't kill radio or movies, video and cable
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| − | didn't kill broadcast network TV; they just all jostled around seeking a
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| − | more perfect app.
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| − |
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| − | But some media do, in fact, perish. Such as: the phenakistoscope.
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| − | The teleharmonium. The Edison wax cylinder. The stereopticon. The
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| − | Panorama. Early 20th century electric searchlight spectacles. Morton
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| − | Heilig's early virtual reality. Telefon Hirmondo. The various species of
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| − | magic lantern. The pneumatic transfer tubes that once riddled the
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| − | underground of Chicago. Was the Antikythera Device a medium? How
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| − | about the Big Character Poster Democracy Wall in Peking in the early 80s?
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| − |
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| − | Never heard of any of these? Well, that's the problem. Both Kadrey
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| − | and I happen to be vague aficionados of this field of study, and yet we both
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| − | suspect that there must be hundreds of dead media, known to few if any.
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| − | It would take the combined and formidable scholarly talents of, say,
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| − | Carolyn "When Old Technologies Were New" Marvin and Ricky "Learned Pigs
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| − | and Fireproof Women" Jay to do this ambitious project genuine justice.
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| − | Though we haven't asked, we kinda suspect that these two distinguished
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| − | scholars are even busier than me and Kadrey, who, after all, are just
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| − | science fiction writers who spend most of our time watching Chinese
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| − | videos, reading fanzines and making up weird crap.
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| − |
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| − | However. We do have one, possibly crucial, advantage. We have
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| − | Internet access. If we can somehow convince the current digital media
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| − | community-at-large that DEAD MEDIA is a worthwhile project, we believe
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| − | that we may be able to compile a useful public-access net archive on this
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| − | subject. We plan to begin with the DEAD MEDIA World Wide Web Page, on a
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| − | site to-be-announced. Move on, perhaps, to alt.dead.media. Compile the
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| − | Dead Media FAQ. We hope to exploit the considerable strengths of today's
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| − | cutting-edge media to create a general public-domain homage to the media
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| − | pioneers of the past.
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| − |
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| − | Here's the deal. Kadrey and I are going to start pooling our notes.
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| − | We're gonna make those notes freely available to anybody on the Net. If
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| − | we can get enough net.parties to express interest and pitch in reports,
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| − | stories, and documentation about dead media, we're willing to take on the
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| − | hideous burdens of editing and system administration -- no small deal
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| − | when it comes to this supposedly "free" information.
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| − |
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| − | We both know that authors are supposed to jealously guard really
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| − | swell ideas like this, but we strongly feel that that just ain't the way to
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| − | do a project of this sort. A project of this sort is a spiritual quest and an
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| − | act in the general community interest. Our net heritage belongs to all
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| − | netkind. If you yourself want to exploit these notes to write the DEAD
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| − | MEDIA HANDBOOK -- sure, it's our "idea," our "intellectual property," but
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| − | hey, we're cyberpunks, we write for magazines like BOING BOING, we can't
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| − | be bothered with that crap in this situation. Write the book. Use our
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| − | notes and everybody's else's. We won't sue you, we promise. Do it. Knock
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| − | yourself out.
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| − |
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| − | I'll go farther, ladies and gentlemen. To prove the profound
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| − | commercial potential of this tilt at the windmill, I'll personally offer a
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| − | CRISP FIFTY-DOLLAR BILL for the first guy, gal, or combination thereof to
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| − | write and publish THE DEAD MEDIA HANDBOOK. You can even have the title
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| − | if you want it. Just keep in mind that me and Kadrey (or any combination
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| − | thereof) reserve the right to do a book of our own on the same topic if you
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| − | fail to sufficiently scratch our itch. The prospect of "competition"
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| − | frightens us not at all. It never has, frankly. If there's room for 19,785
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| − | "Guide to the Internet" books, there has got to be room for a few useful
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| − | tomes on dead media.
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| − |
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| − | Think of it this way. How long will it be before the much-touted
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| − | World Wide Web interface is itself a dead medium? And what will become
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| − | of all those billions of thoughts, words, images and expressions poured
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| − | onto the Internet? Won't they vanish just like the vile lacquered smoke
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| − | from a burning pile of junked Victrolas? As a net.person, doesn't this
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| − | stark realization fill you with a certain deep misgiving, a peculiarly
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| − | postmodern remorse, an almost Heian Japanese sense of the pathos of lost
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| − | things? If it doesn't, why doesn't it? It ought to.
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| − |
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| − | Speaking of dead media and mono no aware -- what about those
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| − | little poems that Lady Murasaki used to write and stick inside cleft
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| − | sticks? To be carried by foot-messager to the bamboo-shrouded estate of
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| − | some lucky admirer after a night's erotic tryst? That was a medium. That
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| − | medium was very alive once, a mainstay of one of the most artistically
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| − | advanced cultures on earth. And isn't it dead? What are we doing today
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| − | that is the functional equivalent of the cleft sticks of Murasaki Shikibu,
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| − | the world's first novelist? If we ignore her historical experience, how
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| − | will we learn from our own?
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| − |
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| − | Listen to the following, all you digital hipsters. This is Jaqueline
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| − | Goddard speaking in January 1995. Jacqueline was born in 1911, and she
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| − | was one of the 20th century's great icons of bohemian femininity. Man Ray
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| − | photographed her in Paris in 1930, and if we can manage it without being
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| − | sued by the Juliet Man Ray Trust, we're gonna put brother Man Ray's knock-
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| − | you-down-and-stomp-you-gorgeous image of Jacqueline up on our
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| − | vaporware Website someday. She may be the patron saint of this effort.
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| − |
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| − | Jacqueline testifies: "After a day of work, the artists wanted to get
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| − | away from their studios, and get away from what they were creating.
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| − | They all met in the cafes to argue about this and that, to discuss their
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| − | work, politics and philosophy.... We went to the bar of La Coupole. Bob,
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| − | the barman, was a terrible nice chap... As there was no telephone in those
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| − | days everybody used him to leave messages. At the Dome we also had a
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| − | little place behind the door for messages. The telephone was the death of
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| − | Montparnasse."
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| − |
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| − | "''The telephone was the death of Montparnasse.''" Mull that
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| − | Surrealist testimony over a little while, all you cafe-society modemites.
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| − | Jacqueline may not grok TCP/IP, but she has been there and done that. I
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| − | haven't stopped thinking about that remark since I first read it. For whom
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| − | does the telephone bell toll? It tolls for me and thee -- sooner or later.
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| − |
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| − | Can you help us? We wish you would, and think you ought to.
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| − |
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| − | Bruce Sterling -- bruces@well.sf.ca.us
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| − | Richard Kadrey -- kadrey@well.sf.ca.us
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| − |
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| − | == <small>'''File'''</small> ==
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| − | [[File:Dead Media Project.pdf|thumbnail|left]]
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| − |
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| − | == <small>'''Links'''</small> ==
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| − |
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| − | '''URL:'''
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| − | http://www.deadmedia.org/modest-proposal.html
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| − | https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/Dead_Media_Project/dmp_sterling.proposal
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| − |
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| − | '''Wayback Machine:'''
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| − | https://web.archive.org/web/20160901032251/http://www.deadmedia.org/modest-proposal.html
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| − | https://web.archive.org/web/20160901032343/https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/Dead_Media_Project/dmp_sterling.proposal
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| − | [[Category:Manifestos]]
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| − | [[Category:English]]
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| − | [[Category:USA]]
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| − | [[Category:1995]]
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| − | [[Category:Bruce Sterling]]
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