by misterwolf - August, 2000
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Re: 602P by misterwolf - August, 2000 |
Dear Friends, A well intentioned friend forwarded me an alarming email message about "Bill 602P." The message explains, for those of you who don't know, that 602P is a bill currently under consideration by congress which will allow the federal government to charge internet users a nickel for every email they send. "Do not sit by and watch your freedom erode away!" pleads the message "Send this to E-mail to EVERYONE on your listä" I was panic stricken. But in spite of my panic, I refrained from rebroadcasting the message, as it demanded, and I decided to do a quick web search to find out more about this threat to my freedom. Freedom, the monumental spook to be daily invoked in the name of anything what so ever (have you driven a Hyundai advertising campaign lately?). If we could question freedom or just forget it for a few fuckin' minutes then a space might open up where we would find a vocabulary to talk about it, honestly. The web search revealed a number of sites which contested that 602P is indeed not a bill under consideration by congress and even went so far as to call it a "hoax." I don't like the preclusive feeling I get from the word "hoax." This two minute exercise transformed my panic into inquiry. It turns out that the 602P email belongs to a class of fraudulent messages that circulate around the internet. There are many such messages yet to come our way, read "Postmodern E-mail" in Issue 8 of Chicago art zine, Gravy. I remember one about the Public Radio no longer receiving NEA money. These are not hoaxes but work like "urban myths". True or not, they are fantasies that play on our anxiety, they are effective panic valves for us, the emailienated. One wonders where this thing came from? Did the link in the message to commoncause.org reveal its origin? Some kind of publicity stunt? Or perhaps the message in it fraudulence is intended to subvert the legitimacy of Common Cause, "a citizen's lobbying organization promoting open, honest and accountable government." But speculating about who wrote the message only develops its fantasies. For the typical recipient of this message there is no way to know who wrote it. As with urban myths, the origin of the message is everywhere. More immediately important is the agenda of the message. Though I suspect its authors didn't see themselves as having one, agenda cannot stay obscure for long. This message wishes to play with the power of broadcast. It becomes clear when you amputate the superfluous "6" and are left with "02P" that this message is about the pleasure of release, the joy of broadcast. Oh, to pee! In turn, these messages set our young, tight political sphincters into diuretic, hemeroidal eruptions. Why are our political sphincters so young and tight? I think there are a great number of us who are just learning what it might be to participate in some kind of political arena. We are recovering from our schooling and finally have the chance to educate ourselves--to practice a bit of autodidactism--and we need to because the educational institutions we were trapped in did little or nothing to teach us about democracy or any other kind of political agency (I'm talking mostly, but not exclusively, about grade school). Is the following statement true or false? Our education taught us to live in a democracy by being democratic. It's false. When ever any of my class mates acted politically it was either framed in a way to make it cute and ineffectual or dismissed as disruptive. We've heard it before, but I want to try to articulate some of the mechanics of it: the internet is proving to be a strong tool in the struggle to teach ourselves democracy and politics. It serves as a political prosthetic. Last spring I got a message that called itself an "activist spam" urging petrofuel consumers to stage a "gas out", a day long boycott of gasoline retailers to protest rising gas prices. Despite the questionable activism of the spam and the lack any indication as to why a gas out is a good idea, the arrival of the message in my community (if you will) was a catalyst for our own conversation about the economic machinery of the fossil fuel industry and our role in it. These messages, and the act of forwarding them express some political agency or at least lubricate the narrow tubes of political expression. However, since the panic induced can be damaging it's tempting to compare the 602P message to yelling fire in a crowded theatre. But the internet is better when it follows the social map of a dinner party not that of a theatre; the internet serves us best when everyone is participating, talking, playing. If we are alert and calm then sending messages such as this one is like attending that party in drag. It is to play with a common order of things. Play, simulation, and fraud are thrilling, they inflame our desires, and hopefully they encourage conversation. Instead of getting flustered by 602P let it be one of the lessons that the internet teaches us about democracy and being in the political arena. Don't let panic induced broadcast bread panic induced broadcast (We're not the only people who could learn that lesson). Let's use panic as a signal to ask each other some basic questions. What's going on here? All Too Sincerely, Misterwolf Please Forward! |
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