Podcast Current

Transcript

Ashanka Kumari: Welcome to MASH. This is an online journal of media, arts, and humanities housed in the English department at the University of Louisville. The contributors to this podcast are Patrick Danner, Ashanka Kumari, Rick Wysocki, and Dr. Stephen Schneider. In this episode Siegfried Zielinski's Deep Time of the Media talking about potentially misleading narratives of progress and media histories that follow them. We also take up this orientation by examining Usenet as it relates to how we think about the development of the internet. Thanks so much for listening.

[musical interlude]

Stephen Schneider: So, today we're talking through Siegfried Zielinski's Deep Time of the Media, which is kind of interesting in comparison to other media theories that emphasize medium as apparatus. So for McLuhan or Kittler, they're going to think through what does it mean to make media into technical objects? Whereas I think Zielinski offers us a different way in, which is to look at media quite literally as medium, the space between kind of two points, and to think through it as, what he terms, "relational space." For him this opens up a more, kind of vibrant, creative space to kind of do work such as "anarchaeology" or "variantology" of media and media space. So it may be worth initially thinking about how to tease out what it means to think of media as a "relational space"? Particularly with the kind of rise of social media, which would seem to action be perfectly in line with what Zielinski’s thinking. So I wonder, what does it mean to call media a "relational space" say as opposed to an "apparatus"?

Rick Wysocki: Yeah, so we might think of social media as highlighting that tension. So do we think of media, or social media rather, as being the relationship with other human beings? Relationship with the "Other" in Zielinski's terms? Or is it relationship with just the interface to media? And this gets to the concern in the text of the media of Empedocles, the old Greek philosopher, versus Democritus. Empedocles, his theory is via sympathy, relationship with the Other, literally the skin is the median between the Other and––summarizing and paraphrasing haphazardly––good vibes go in through pores in the skin, which is a great little poem too. So that's the "perfect medium." On the other hand, Democritus takes that and creates the interface of the "air." So the compressed air is where the good vibes go to be transmitted to the Other. And Zielinski's point is from that point on, we start thinking of media in a way where we need more and more to create the perfect medium as opposed to the sort of the "originary" exact relationship with the Other. So I guess the question, to say again, that we are dealing with here is "What is Facebook in that sense?"

Stephen Schneider: So is it a space where I'm actually communicating with you or is it a space where I just record the detritus of my day for eternity? Like "I went to the shops today... Pudding was 99 cents, and then I went home, and I was upset with what happened on Castle." I mean, is this... is this... so I mean, Is this a relational space then? Or is it... ? You know, what people kind of complain is it an echo box? Right, that I go in, that I get in social media really just to kind of hear myself, hear myself talk.

Ashanka Kumari: At the same time, social media are talking to other social media. Like Facebook talks to Twitter, which talks to Temple Run or whatever games you play on your phone or social media apps. So, at the same, in that way, it's not just an interface, it's also working back and forth.

Rick Wysocki: So we might think of it as... cause at the same time, you know, I think we can all agree that we actually are talking to other people on social media; we don't want to go so far as to theorize ourselves out of the facts that in a certain sense we are communicating with other individuals. But like you say, Ashanka, at the same time, media are communicating with each other through that same apparatus. Is the question then, which one wins out in that? Or is the question which one has primacy?

Stephen Schneider: Or maybe another way to think about it is, what does it mean that human relationships go through those technical leakages? Right, that if social media aspires to become like a perfect environment for keeping in touch with your friends. Right. That you've got these clusters and I can hit "share" and that no matter what kind of social media someone's using, right––except maybe Cyber Dust, which only Mark Cuban uses––I can reach them. Right? Except that, as you're saying, it has to go through a set of technical permutations to get there, so.

Rick Wysocki: Well maybe––you're point about Cyber Dust and no one using that––that might get––

Stephen Schneider: Except Mark Cuban

Rick Wysocki: Except Mark Cuban, of course.

Stephen Schneider: He uses it all the time, and only uses it

Rick Wysocki: Mark Cuban might technically be considered a media activist then, by Zielinski's terms, but we'll get into that as we discuss

Stephen Schneider: Well sure, he considers it, I mean, he considers himself a media activist, right? With his kind of work on HDTV and Shark Tank––so maybe he'll run for the Republican nomination

Rick Wysocki: Progressive media activist Republican candidate.––But I guess this gets to the question of––cause the non-Mark Cuban individuals among us use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, which gets us to the point that Zielinski makes where increasingly media become homogenized. He calls it the "ergonomization," which I'm never going to pronounce exactly right, I apologize.

Stephen Schneider: The one time you got it right was on tape though.

Rick Wysocki: Oh it was?

Stephen Schneider: Yeah, just then

Rick Wysocki: "Ergonomization" [mispronounced]

Stephen Schneider: You got it––don't overthink it.

Rick Wysocki: Alright, right on.

Stephen Schneider: We're looking for the perfect media. If you get it right though.

Rick Wysocki: Perfect media, perfect pronunciation. So, what he says is increasingly, we sort map a telos onto the, what becomes staticized and standardized in media, which for social media, obviously, is the big three, maybe big four: Twitter, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, and Instagram, and Amazon.

Patrick Danner: Are those four?

Rick Wysocki: Yeah.

Stephen Schneider: Maybe Pinterest... it seems to. I mean it seems to be a constant, right? I mean I'm not sure the userbase is.

Rick Wysocki: Yeah, and obviously there's sort of a proliferation of them, but like we said, they all kind of get––Facebook seems to be a sort of locus, where they all connect in a certain sense.

Ashanka Kumari: Because you can log in anywhere with Facebook. You don't even need emails anymore.

Rick Wysocki: Or Google+

Ashanka Kumari: Yeah.

Stephen Schneider: But no one's on Google+. Like everyone has Gmail, but no one's on Google+.

Ashanka Kumari: Right. You'd think that model would work.

Stephen Schneider: Maybe Zielinski can help us with that quandary. I love Google Docs, but I don't use Google+

Ashanka Kumari: Yeah, you would think that would work with everyone already having the account, because we all use it for email, but it doesn't just translate into "we're gonna use this as our platform"

Stephen Schneider: And I feel like a lot of people don't, or they express dislike of, Facebook even when you're on it, right? They kind of think Mark Zuckerberg is a "bit of a tweaker," you know, and that "Facebook's too powerful" and it just lets people with boring lives inflict their boring lives on you. I feel like there's a lot of kind of general expressed lack of contentment, but that hasn't caused the crowd to flock to Google+

Ashanka Kumari: At the same time, often people get alienated if they don't have a Facebook, so, there's that end of it too.

Stephen Schneider: Which is an interesting way to think about it too, to think about "ergonomization." Right, it's to say that it's not just about a kind of, say, a "smooth space" of media, right, where we can move from one, from Facebook, to Twitter, to Instagram, to Pinterest. I was at a orphan's picnic on the weekend and went to a food truck, and they said "Do you follow us on Instagram?" and I was like "No, I just want a doughnut." That was really interesting that they then said "If you wanna know where we are, we have a media presence." It would seem interesting to me to say that it's not just about how they work together, but also about this idea that there's almost a kind of compulsion, right, that if you are not on

Ashanka Kumari: You're missing something

Stephen Schneider: Right, if you're not in this particular social media world, then you're in the outer darkness.

Rick Wysocki: So then we could say, "standardized media," which in Zielinski's framework, is what becomes the sort of norm. Or what the end result of "ergonomization" is. Standardized media also standardizes relationships. Things like, you said Ashanka, "if you're not on Facebook, you feel alienated," you know, you are sort of outside the purview of media

Ashanka Kumari: And often teased for not having that media

Rick Wysocki: Teased, yeah. And you like really––so like we're having a party, right? And there's someone I know who doesn't have a Facebook, and I realized this yesterday, and I was like "Oh my god, this person"... like this party has never been discussed until right now, in real life. Like it's all Facebook, all Facebook communicated.

Stephen Schneider: Which is interesting ‘cause it seems to bear out then that this is like the "perfect media space" - right, if it has managed to bring all things onto it. But yeah, as you say, there's this kind of odd tension between what it does well––it helps us organize parties––and what seems to be more of a kind of demanding side. Like you "have to" be involved. If you're not on Facebook, you might miss out on the party or parties.

Ashanka Kumari: Or even just knowing what's going on in your friend's life––that so-and-so had a baby, that so-and-so is engaged, and so-and-so just got married. Just like knowing who your friends are through that medium

Rick Wysocki: Like I don't even know that though [laughs]

Ashanka Kumari: Right, but what did we do before then, call each other I guess?

Patrick Danner: I was just going to say that it seems like some sort of tension between the, how perfect the space is and the ergonomization of it, because, to get back to what you were saying about the doughnut truck, right, you have to

Stephen Schneider: Good doughnuts too

Patrick Danner: I've never heard of this

Stephen Schneider: High Five - High Five Doughnuts, yeah. You pick a doughnut, like you buy a doughnut, and then you select a glaze and a topping. And they do it for you on the spot.

Ashanka Kumari: That's awesome.

Patrick Danner: And I would love to know about it

Stephen Schneider: Why wouldn't you follow that on Instagram?

Patrick Danner: Exactly. Well, because I don't have an Instagram, and they, I assume, they have an Instagram, but it's not hooked up to their Facebook page, right. As that tries to get streamlined, unless you do it perfectly right, you actually can't participate in that media space with them. Right, you can't be the seer on that side of the equation.

Stephen Schneider: Yeah. You miss out on a doughnut, which is odd. Right? It's also odd that it's removed the happenstance of the food truck. Right, I mean, I remember, even like 5 years ago, you happened upon them. And there wasn't a kind of Twitter game of reporting out where the food truck was, right? "Manny's Tacos! Is on..." You know? But now, they actually report it out themselves "We're going to be at this location," which feels more like a pop-up restaurant, than a food truck.

Rick Wysocki: I used to live in Southern California, and sometimes you'd be in LA, and you'd turn the corner and there would be like 60 people standing on the street for no apparent reason. And you'd realize like in 10 minutes, the food truck is going to show up.

Stephen Schneider: It's either a zombie apocalypse or tacos are coming.

Rick Wysocki: Yeah, exactly. This weird, like, social movement of nothing

Stephen Schneider: Occupy Food Truck

[all laugh]

Stephen Schneider: So maybe, it would seem like it's kind of like, maybe one other interesting question then is one that Zielinski raises about–– If we do take social media––right, all those social media clusters––to be this perfect space, or spaces where communication's never been simpler. What do we make of his contention that that can actually drive the way we understand the history of media? Right, so it seems like his basic contention is "If you think Google's the greatest thing on Earth, then you're likely to actually make you're history of media conform to that being the kind of telos, the end point. Right, that we start with Empedocles and Democritus, but they were already just anticipating Google. And now that we've got Google, we don't need Empedocles and Democritus. Maybe we are in a kind of media present that Flusser warned about, or championed, depending I guess on how you want to read him, but. So I'm wondering what this does to our sense of history and the way we tell media history.

Rick Wysocki: Well, I mean, what happens is, I think at least in Zielinski's read, is we don't really tell media history, we tell sort of like the one story of Google, the one true Google of media history, right? And we ignore things like––we either ignore things like Usenet or, you know, Arpanet, like other weird things that don't get told in the history of the Internet or of Google. Or when we do, we say "Oh Arpanet was step number 5,017,001 toward Google, and, for Zielinski, which I think makes a lot of sense that it's a sort of odd way to think about history, given as you said, you know, Empedocles was not, he’s like ‘get this perfect media down’ and I'm going to get like 5,000 search results when I look up "Taylor Swift," you know? Like that's not how media works.

Stephen Schneider: I think the Empedocles point with skin is a pretty neat thing

Rick Wysocki: Yeah, exactly.

Stephen Schneider: I wonder what we could do with that

Rick Wysocki: Yeah. But I guess then the question would be, cause I was looking at the Wikipedia page, you know, for Usenet––Wikipedia page for various ones for thinking about the Internet––because I don't have time to do real research, but [laughs] I noticed, what I think is interesting, that Wikipedia, like wholly falls in line with like "Arpanet was the precursor to the Internet; Usenet was one of the precursors to email." And I think we tend to think in those ways. So the question would be, what would it look like to think otherwise? In Zielinski's terms, like what would it look like to do a variantology, meaning looking at things not as hierarchical or linear, but as sort of horizontal

Stephen Schneider: They're proliferated

Rick Wysocki: Yeah, proliferated. Like thinking about the Internet then. Cause the Internet does seem to have dominated how we think about media.

Stephen Schneider: So I guess then a question is, "are there multiple internets that we don't talk about?"

Rick Wysocki: So you asked...

Stephen Schneider: Like the deep web or the dark net or Usenet, which you already kind of brought up, like what do we miss then?

Rick Wysocki: Cause Usenet does seem to be folded into that history, but things like Arpanet, which is the connection to the military, seem to be kind of squashed a little bit in the general understanding of the history, which you could say something with Kittler about the militaristic roots of the Internet but

Stephen Schneider: Well there does seem to be an anxiety among kind of like technophiles, about the linkages between, say technical advancement and the military. Like we don't really like to talk about the connections between those things. Almost as though admitting those connections somehow limits the Internet, right? "It's just a military exercise" which is obviously not true. Right, or the idea that Google Earth is making use of all sorts of satellites, some of which were probably put up for defense purposes among others. But Google seems at pains to kind of say "We're not the government; we're not the NSA; we're not the military" like "we don't, that's not us" right? It seems like there is some kind of tension between admitting that the Arpanet link. Or put another way, is it that Usenet is actually kind of taken to be that first democratic space. Right? That first space that people logged in, could talk with one another, it seemed to be kind of free exchange of ideas. I think even Zielinski talks about this, when he's talking about kind of Eastern bloc politics that what the Internet did was made available communication in spaces that were kind of politically confined. Right. Is it that Usenet's kind of captured that imagination then? Kind of pushed us... right. That history is easy to tell if you take Usenet to be, you know, "here was democracy+ and now we have Google+" but...

Rick Wysocki: And Humanity+ too. But, yeah, I think, just also fit within existing conceptual frames too, which I think you're kind of getting at. Usenet kind of fit within an already existing narrative of "Oh look, increasing democracy" sort of like a telos of increasing liberated democracy, which I think might be one of the reasons why we don't talk about things like the deep web or darknet where it's like no democracy, just assassins and buying drugs. That's sort of the stereotype of what goes on.

Ashanka Kumari: Judging by the names, yeah.

Rick Wysocki: Yeah, which to my understanding is true. It's sort of what goes on there. I was actually reading, because I was trying to learn more about it, the deep web is like way bigger than the Internet. Like there's actually way more data on the deep web. Which seems opposite, at least to me. I guess we don't really think about the Internet in sort of popular consciousness, but the dark net, deep web, I don't know what the preferred nomenclature is, is actually technically much bigger and is much more.

Stephen Schneider: How much of that too is just people who are running like a game server? You're like "Hey I need to run a server so I can still play Doom. Or whatever. Well, I guess Dune wasn't on a server, but... Half-Life. And in our area, people kind of dial in. Though you may not be mappable. You may not be mapped on there. So I wonder how much of that too is just kind of like connected servers and connected data that doesn't... link up. That hasn't been mapped by Google.

Rick Wysocki: I think, well technically none of it has been mapped by Google, right? On the deep web.

Stephen Schneider: Right, but I'm wondering how much of that is really mundane kind of

Rick Wysocki: Oh, I see what you mean

Stephen Schneider: Like "hey I have a server at my house that––" Like people allow other people to kind of use their server space during quiet times, or people find out ways to kind of park programs and things and servers that don't really belong to them or just to use those to kind of do some data crunching if there is space available, which I gather is more of what hacking is about than anything else. But yeah, it does seem harder with the kind of popular conception of the deep web to talk about that as actually being potentially the democratic space.

Rick Wysocki: Yeah, exactly.

Patrick Danner: Have you read that, what's the Pynchon novel, Bleeding Edge? Sort of like this post-9/11 novel, he has this whole description of, you know, his character sort of entering the deep web and it does seem like this, like this sort of like, what am I trying to say, it's like this perfect example of the democratic space, where they end up sort of constructing their own worlds within there and then ultimately get lost in it, but yeah. So in that popular imagination ––

Stephen Schneider: Sounds like Tron.

Patrick Danner: Sure.

Stephen Schneider: Like the new one, not the old one that was actually cool.

Patrick Danner: I don't think I've seen the new one.

Rick Wysocki: Really?

Stephen Schneider: But Jeff Bridges gets lost in the video arcade.

Patrick Danner: So yeah, it's exactly like

Stephen Schneider: And Olivia Wilde turns up

Patrick Danner: So to construct this space, this mediated space, and then end up lost in it, but––just throwing that out there, just another example of that democratic space.

Rick Wysocki: Well I wonder if that's why the dark web is less discussed, or potentially feared, because it represents that like, the possible, like, terribleness of actual freedom in democracy. So it's like "Oh look, Google hasn't standardized us, we're free. Who wants to buy some cocaine?" I mean, I think that's what the deep web represents too.

Patrick Danner: And that's sort of the same way we used to talk about things like Reddit and 4Chan before they became more popularized. This unregulated space where people were sharing whatever hidden behind––I don't know anything about what that stuff was hidden behind––whatever wall they could build up.

Stephen Schneider: The thing with 4Chan is still, it's a tricky one. Like people love Wikleaks, like you go to any number of digital humanities conferences and Wikileaks is held up as this model of "good" kind of activism. But it seems like it works precisely because it seems to have that structural connections to a kind of Google-ized world where information, more information is better. Right. Even though we all like privacy, I think there's even a tension in that. But on one hand, information is better, and on the other hand, you know, it invokes this kind of Wikipedia, Wikileak-type model where anyone can contribute, right. So, I feel like it's really easy to discuss but groups like Anonymous or various, kind of, hacking collectives are a bit trickier cause they seem to do things that people don't like or are uncomfortable with, you know. So yeah, I think those are precisely the kinds of challenging formations that it seems like Zielinski would want to turn our attention to, right, that any kind of. So he'll call it "deep time" which is kind of convenient, to think about the deep web as the kind of deep time of the internet, right, but that these are all of the different areas we are working in, right. I know, Rick, you were talking about the kind of repurposing of Usenet to do kind of file transfer.

Rick Wysocki: Yeah, so I think that gets us to the point that you're making about Zielinski, where Usenet in a certain sense became a model for what email became, but that's not all it was and it was actually repurposed. So, if you're familiar with torrenting; it became sort of a torrenting service.

Stephen Schneider: If you're familiar with torrenting, you shouldn't do it.

Rick Wysocki: Yeah.

Stephen Schneider: It's illegal - disclaimer. We neither endorse...

Rick Wysocki: I'm going to, in a very academic sense, describe torrenting and Usenet based on academic research.

Stephen Schneider: Based on reading Wikipedia pages.

Rick Wysocki: Exactly. From my understanding, torrenting happens through peer-to-peer connections I believe, and

Stephen Schneider: The real Napster

Rick Wysocki: There's a process called "seeding," which basically broadcasts your IP address for almost anyone to read, so that's how people get caught torrenting. What people realized was that Usenet, which was an old service made up of news groups, specifically an old newsgroup called alt.binary was only used for file transfers, which runs outside the Internet. It runs through, it's sort of its own service that you can access through various news servers that you would pay a subscription to. By paying the subscription, you can now host your sort of existence on a website like "Super News" for instance––total academic explanation here, just research. There's a place called "Super News" where you would pay a subscription, and instead of seeding anything, you would retain your own sort of connection to "Super News," you would point through another service––this is getting really technical, I know––you would point Super News to download a file through another service that would give you the link to the alt.binary page and then it would download it to "Super News" and, from there, go to your computer, which completely eliminated the risk of being caught doing this, because your IP address would be not broadcast in any sense. Now, what happened is, the government started shutting down what were called "Indexing services," which would point "Super News" to the file, but it's interesting––that wasn’t interesting––but in the context of this conversation, what's interesting, is that this really had no precedent until file sharing became problematic in the Internet. You know, this was just happening freely in Usenet, but then these really complicated systems got built around what some might call "dead technology," and sort of repurposed its function. So no one really goes onto Usenet anymore to my knowledge to find information, to participate in forum discussions, but at least for a while––I don't know what the status is anymore––people were using it in a very intense way for file sharing, which was not the original purpose.

Stephen Schneider: Which also seems interesting that it seems like a kind of refraction of that social media logic, right, where the social media we’re sending information or we’re communicating via kind of certain linkages that have the appearance of kind of making us transparent to one another. Right, like "Look, here's a picture of my kid. It's almost like you were there." So that's how you know someone had a child. It seems here that you actually now precisely use it as technical linkages and technical affordances to avoid that moment of making ourselves transparent or present in any kind of real way. And, in fact, the computer, right your "Super News" service talks to an indexing service, which talks to another service, which can go find a file is actually, you know, almost kind of eclipsed for the human interaction in that sense.

Rick Wysocki: Except though, for the indexing service, because it's impossible to find, because you can't search Usenet, so it's actually, I think it necessarily has to be human beings to go find all the individual files and label them and title them on Usenet. So, yeah.

Stephen Schneider: Right, so we're seeing that then that in terms of the file transfer, right, that people can kind of step back.

Rick Wysocki: Yes.

Stephen Schneider: It's like if I left my filing cabinet open, as long as the labels are right, people can do whatever they wanted to. But it seems like what's really interesting is that there is a particular kind of technical impersonality to the activity that we don't like, right? That we don't like that level of mediation in our lives in a lot of ways. Like we turn "Who's reading my email? I don't want Amazon deciding what I should buy" on the one hand, on the social media front, but here, it's actually a particular kind of reinvention of privacy in a particular way, a particular file warming of that activity, which I think is

Rick Wysocki: Yeah, I think what's interesting is the privacy aspect, but it also, in a certain sense, with the indexing, it's trying to like Google-ify Usenet too, so I think it's moving in two directions where no one really wanted to search Usenet when that was around, but since now we understand searching technologies, we've sort of returned to Usenet in a certain sense. It's almost like Google was a stepping stone to sort of invert it, we could maybe think of Google as being, as having, influenced a new understanding of Usenet.

Stephen Schneider: Well, and maybe that's what doing the anarcheology or the variantology that Zielinski's talking about, maybe that's what it gets us, right, is like if you want to understand Usenet, you have to understand it as a non-searchable technology, that it wasn't about searching and cataloging in the way we think about it now, right? To say that it was really just a space for connecting, and much like I can't go back and say, search the conversations I had in the street yesterday. Well, I record them all on my smartphone actually but... But much like the things that we can't catalogue and search, or that we don't think about as cataloging or searching technologies. I think that's a kind of interesting point. We're thinking through "how do we tell those stories?" right, it's like we have to recognize what the space was in its moment, in the kind of moment of deep time as opposed to what's it become and even what we understand Usenet as now involves its indexing, which as you say, seems to be drawing on Google or on a kind of search, a search understanding of the Internet, but.

Rick Wysocki: Fun fact, Phish, the band, who I'm a big fan of

Stephen Schneider: There's nothing fun about Phish - then why aren't you following them around on tour instead of bringing them into our beautiful podcast?

Rick Wysocki: I couldn't afford it this summer. But, they're one of the first bands, they actually spearheaded file transfer for bands, because they would be recording in sort of like the late 80s, they started recording all of their live sets and of course no one would buy every live Phish show except me. So they would put them all up on Usenet and sort of help to sort of work out this, "so how do we do file transfer?"––we can cut this out later.

Stephen Schneider: No, but I think, but again, I think it's a story you're not gonna get to via that kind of standard media history, is to think, well, if you're a jam band, actually, live shows are really important, right, because you're technically not playing any song the same way twice in theory. I think they all sound the same, but that says more about my ears than it does about their music.

Rick Wysocki: They're playing the same song the same way infinite times...

Stephen Schneider: You know, but then, oddly enough, when we reach a particular kind of media era, right, where we kind of have these archives of sound, right, the question becomes "what do we do with it?" Well, we try file transfer, right. But even that, we don't think about that in quite the same way, right, that that also seemed to have its moment. I guess Napster was the, the beautiful burning supernova of the file transfer era, right. Now we've got torrenting, but that seems to be a kind of different operation. It seems actually a lot more proprietary. Like you have to have access to a torrent site, then you have to have a particular software that, in a lot of cases, unpacks the file that you get, it lets you open and read it. As opposed to Napster where you get on someone's computer and say "Oh look! Garth Brooks is covering Don McLean."

Rick Wysocki: "And it took me 12 hours to download this"

Stephen Schneider: "Yeah, look at that, a 56 kbps. Oh yeah!"

Rick Wysocki: I wonder then, so for Kittler, like we've sort of intimated or briefly discussed, the military influences on technology, but for Zielinski, he makes this comment a couple of times, the interweaving of artistic praxis and media theory and media development. So, for like, again returning to Phish, like their sort of like "artistic praxis" their live band, like I said they wanted to share all this live music. That's also part of how we should be thinking about media for Zielinski too, I think. Like, for him I think, sort of, very explicitly, it's artists who break that deadlock of standardization when they want to find new ways of relating. Right? Does that make sense?

Patrick Danner and Ashanka Kumari: Right, yeah.

Patrick Danner: I was sort of, I was just thinking about that but it from the direction of, and Ashanka this is something you brought up in the email, the ideas of mixing or combination that he brings up, which seem to suggest right, in the examples just given, that there are different methods for sharing media. Usenet can become Google-ized, or you know. But before that it was also like a file sharing and almost had like a chatroom function in some ways. But all of these, all of these different types of media just seem to be, in our examples, just combinations of things that have come before or happened since, but then you know, ultimately return back to, which ultimately seems kind of closed in a lot of ways. And I think Zielinski might say that explicitly that, in these models, they are sort of closed media worlds. But the Phish examples, and I think when we talk about "artistic praxis," then we do see this sort of possibility for something new to be introduced. But I'm trying to think of another example besides Phish, but now..

Stephen Schneider: I mean, if you think about, like even kind of variations. Even like conceptual art, which is meant to kind of, in some cases, break certain kinds of aesthetic rules in an attempt to get you thinking differently about your relationship to art, or a given... I mean, it's oddly didactic, right, we're gonna, we're gonna present these things in such a way to get you thinking about a particular concept, but the medium becomes precisely the way we build new, build that new relationship, and it's a relationship we have both with the concept but also with an artist, right, who wants to communicate that to us in a certain way, right. And I think there's an oddly neat strand to Zielinski's thought, which is that you really have to aestheticize or poeticize our particular understandings of the world around us, right? Or I think, Nietzsche has a particular version of kind of, I guess what's been called will-to-power, that has attracted something of a bad reputation. I think Zielinski would be arguing that it's not about the kind of supreme triumph of a kind of self, right, but rather that aestheticization brings us into new relationships with an other. And if media is doing that, two thumbs up, right? And if media is just more Google hits than you could possibly do anything with, right, it's like, it's impossible to have a meaningful relationship with the information you get on Google, right. Then maybe that’s the other way to kind of think of this space too. Or say like installation art, or flash mobs, or all these various ways of kind of hijacking and repurposing space, and it's almost always about space. That maybe he wants us to attend to this as well, like, how do we refashion our relationships in space? For him it's a technical question, but he seems to be drawing us to this other kind of history of art performance, not performance art, but the way that art is kind of built and distributed and performed.

Rick Wysocki: I guess that leaves, well, the question, we're left with then, which I'm sort of drawing on all––nevermind, I was thinking of Franco Berardi, but he has a very, a more pessimistic take on this, but I'm wondering if it's possible, which Berardi says it's not, but we don't have to go there––whether it's possible to agitate, in Zielinski's terms, sort of a paraphrase, to agitate the semantics of the Internet anymore. Which, Zielinski thinks it's possible.

Stephen Schneider: Well I think Berardi's an interesting case, because he does it. Like he claims pessimism, right, but he thinks it's a good thing that the kids of today want to write poetry. Right? That this is one of his single moments that everything might yet be OK in Europe, that people want to be artists.

Rick Wysocki: I think the difference is, Berardi would say, "your art has to sort of drop out of the Internet" in a certain sense, and Zielinski would say "No, art has to move in"––at least in my read. Sort of "move in and agitate."

Stephen Schneider: So, for someone like Berardi, that moment of refusal is the first step in kind of building a new world, right, that you first have to say no to the kind of world around you and then build something new and try to really understand it in new terms. And he––this is not so difficult. You would think that for, like, Zielinski, that "no, the point is to re-aestheticize one's relationships” via these processes like anarcheology, variantology, which he does seem to think of as activist practices, this isn't just a "here's a methodology for drawing cute diagrams about the relationship between Edouard Glissant and the Czech Republic." For people who are interested, the book does have really interesting maps that are either, a map of every tactical campaign in World War I, OR, a sort of cartography of the media.

Rick Wysocki: Or in the case of, we saw a conference he was at––Patrick, Stephen, and I––map of media technology that goes 50 years into the future, which I thought was pretty great.

Stephen Schneider: So, some would make a claim though, right, that his argument for cartography at the end would be about kind of re-aestheticizing our relationship to media potentially and seeing what could be built, which would seem contra-Berardi, for Zielinski to be an open question. It's not all automated; it's not all algorithms and functions of machines, but, actually, these are still spaces where human beings have relationships to one another.

Rick Wysocki: I guess the question is "Who's right?" which I do not have an answer for; although, technically, it's probably Zielinski.

Stephen Schneider: Well, I was gonna say, only one of them has a map that goes 50 years into the future. Berardi is done with the future. So, I think, on that one, point to Zielinski.

[musical interlude]

Ashanka Kumari: Thanks for listening to MASH. For further readings on these topics check out essays and reviews by the contributors on our website. We'd like to thank Dr. Schneider and the University of Louisville English Department for their ongoing support.