1999-2009

For anyone visiting San Francisco in the summer of 1999, the atmosphere of the dot.com boom was all too evident. For one, there was strong air of gold rush frenzy: For instance, Newsweek ran a cover story on the middle classes fretting over the fact that ‘everyone is getting rich but me’. However, beyond the money-go-round, the San Francisco visitor would also find new ideas circulating – at university campuses, in arts museums, in the public discussion. In the centre of this culture, in some ways defining it, was one publication – Wired Magazine.
Today, one will rarely hear new media artists and activists commenting upon Wired in an appreciative manner. After the boom burst, the ad-heavy publication has been billed as ‘techno-utopian’ and ‘neo-liberal’ (echoing Richard Barbrook and Andrew Cameron’s 1995 critique of the magazine) and ‘the voice of the rich, highly educated capitalists’. Nevertheless, these same artists and activists tend to cite Wired as the publication where they first heard of certain key concepts. Neo-liberal or not, the publication was highly influential in serving as a conduit of new ideas and giving voice to a new set of theorists.
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During the same year, 1999, a number of books emerged – all inspired by the computer world, all alluding to similar analysis of the world: Eric S. Raymond’s hugely influential The Cathedral and the Bazaar; Open Sources:
Voices from the Open Source Revolution (featuring texts by Richard Stallman,
Linus Torvalds, as well as Raymond), and The Cluetrain Manifesto. Although the writers of these books (less so in the case of The Cluetrain Manifesto) stressed the fact that they were writing about software, and not society, these texts provided their readers with novel and evocative mental images, with which to navigate their social worlds.
These evocative books, together with the ideas put forward through conduits such as Wired, people who were active in new media circles were increasingly describing corporate capitalism in new ways. Monopolistic, bureaucratic, disciplinary, sluggish, and slightly laughable cathedrals were increasingly challenged by self-organising and intelligent bazaars of hackers, activists or consumers. While imposing and powerful, economic power structures ought not to be described as rigid motors, but as a hackable computer networks.