Interview with Geert Lovink

This is an article published in an issue of Third Text titled Whither Tactical Media that I would like to discuss with any of you (maybe those interested in theory could start a reading group?).

Let me know,

Susanne

Third Text

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713448411

Reloading Tactical Media

Gregory Sholette; Gene Ray

Third Text, Vol. 22, Issue 5, September, 2008, 549–558

1 Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002, p 39

Reloading Tactical Media An Exchange with Geert Lovink

Gregory Sholette and Gene Ray

The problem is that today we have infinite technologies available, but there are simply not enough social movements to properly utilise what we have at our disposal. The what is to be done question therefore is: How do we create urgency in a situation of semiotic abundance?

Geert Lovink

In 1997, David Garcia and Geert Lovink wrote The ABC of Tactical Media, the first theoretically inclined text to label a variety of emerging, yet consistently nomadic, forms of DIY (do it yourself) activism made possible by digital technology and the Internet. Borrowing from the Situ- ationists as well as Michel de Certeau, the authors celebrate what they call Tactical Media (TM) as an experimental aesthetic of ‘poaching, polymorphic situations, tricking, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike’. The timing of the essay marked the highpoint of what Lovink terms the golden era of TM. Forged within the bubble of energy released by the end of the Cold War, yet amplified by globalisation, multicultur- alism, and above all by the growth of increasingly networked communi- cations media, TM took advantage of deterritorialisation brought about by post-Fordism. TM did not make real political power more demo- cratic, but with its DIY approach to new technology it sought to position resistance furtively inside the machinery of what Guy Debord termed ‘the spectacle’ rather than in transparent opposition to it from a claimed outside. Just as DIY movements like the anti-roads campaign in Great Britain or zinesters championed political autonomy and self-production, the political subject of TM engages in ‘a radical techno-engagement, expressed in festive forms of data nihilism, joyous negativism that resists reductive and essentialist strategies’.1

Today, ten years after Lovink and Garcia’s influential essay, TM has evolved into what Lovink calls a meme: a theory-as-virus which has escaped, for better and worse, from the laboratory of political resistance and activist circles, out into the world at large. And while TM still harbours genetic material that identifies its origins in ‘a media of crisis,

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © Third Text (2008) http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09528820802440102

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2 Geert Lovink, ‘Updating Tactical Media: Strategies for Media Activism’, unpublished manuscript, 2006

criticism, and opposition’, it has by now infected a wide range of practices, both inside and outside the dominant culture, from graffiti pranksters such as Banksy to mainstream media interventionists like the Yes Men and to CEOs seeking to ‘think outside the box’ through uncon- ventional business models or deviant, fringe and super-flexible forms of mass marketing. This shift from practical toolbox to life game is no less paradoxical than TM itself, and yet Lovink has also updated his descrip- tion of TM in such a way as to place added emphasis on the entire field of play in which hunter and hunted, master and slave interact with each other. In a recent essay he writes:

Being neither cute nor ugly, neither good nor bad, tactical media appear, strike, and disappear again. Instead of the old school rituals of negation and refusal, tactical media engage both maker and users, producers and viewers, into a game of appearances and disappearances.2

While these are subtle shifts in tone and emphasis, the real challenge is how TM can remain viable as a resistant practice in the post-September 11 era of imperial crusades and ‘war without end’ – the permanent wartime economy. What follows is an edited email exchange that took place in the spring of 2007 between Geert Lovink (Amsterdam), Gregory Sholette (New York City) and Gene Ray (Berlin).

Greg Sholette and Gene Ray Can you fill us in a bit on your personal history and how that led you to become involved in Tactical Media (TM)?

Geert Lovink With Baudrillard I would say that TM is a fatal object that came to me, not the opposite. It seduced me, if you like that kind of discourse. But let’s not mystify the production of critical concepts. TM is just another word for media activism, which has been around for centu- ries. I don’t want to go into pre-history, we all know what crucial role the printing press played in the Reformation and early revolutionary movements. This importance increased during the Enlightenment and became industrial in the mid-nineteenth century with the invention of the rotating press and the mass circulation of newspapers and books. The histories of social movements and technical media are deeply inter- woven, which, by the way, includes Fascism – it’s by no means limited to progressive struggles.

My involvement in media activism started in the late 1970s within the Amsterdam squatters’ movement. It is funny that the bi-weekly we founded in 1979 called Grachtenkrant still exists. Now that’s what they call ‘sustainable’, isn’t it? The circulation of 250 copies rarely went up or down and the punk aesthetic didn’t really change either. A robust meme, some would say. During the early 1980s I was involved in collaborative book publishing, and writing, of course. I worked with two publishing houses (Raket & Lont and SUA) and later founded one (Ravijn). We also made the squatters’ weekly bluf! (from 1981 to 1987) and from 1987 to the late 1990s I was involved in the free radio stations Radio 100 and Patapoe. After the demise of the squatters’ movement (which we described in our Adilkno book, Cracking the Movement) and the radical anti-nuclear movement, I became interested in the role of visual

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arts and design in social movements. This coincided with the fall of the Berlin wall and the rise of the personal computer, desktop publishing (zines) and the struggles for Internet access. The shifts in the political and media landscape are deeply related. In the period when we first discussed tactical media, in 1992, it made more sense for us to look at new political moments instead of holding onto the rhetoric and rituals of the past. I celebrated the fall of communism as a victory, having known so many people who had to live under those regimes. There was a lot of positive energy back then. We can’t merely reduce that time to the destructive politics of neo-liberalism. Tactical media expressed the sense of experimentation that we find these days in free software, wi-fi and ‘open source culture’ as Armin Medosch describes it.

GR & GS That so many now recognise, discuss and employ TM as a distinct and coherent approach to media activism is due in no small part to your ongoing writings and theorisations. Indeed, as you point out, it has become a meme, a concept with a viral life all its own. You devote a chapter of your new book to ‘running updates’ on the concept of TM, because ‘in the Change Society in which we’re stuck, yesterday’s concepts are not just worn out, they are by definition wrong as they are deconstructed at the time of their release’. Could you clarify the differ- ence between ‘updating’ and ‘upgrading’ and briefly enumerate the most important updates you’re proposing for TM?

GL Running updates is an integral part of our technological culture. It’s considered a necessary evil. Not to download the necessary patches is seen as suicidal. In contemporary theory production, this practice has yet to be introduced. Radio-maker and hacker Alexander Klosch from Weimar introduced me to the difference between updating and upgrad- ing. Wikipedia continuously upgrades and downgrades its articles. Whereas updating has a time element, upgrading usually refers to quality and status. A change does not by definition result in an improvement or a disqualification. According to Klosch, the update is best placed in collaborative work. A single code master is often over-stretched, keeping a complex structure up-to-date. This knowledge should also be applied to critical concepts in media art and activism. Instead of burying the TM concept, which could have been done years ago, we may as well celebrate its robustness.

My critique of TM is not its short-lived character. By definition, TM is non-sustainable, liminal and always on the verge of disappearance. Its unstable nature creates situations while setting clear limits for further growth. The updates that I propose in a chapter of my book Zero Comments (Routledge, 2007) deal with a reassessment of social networks and the importance of autonomous software production. Activists will have to deal with information overload and mustn’t reduce their role to that of a classic broadcaster of messages. There is still a lot to be learned from the Indymedia chapter, even though many will claim that they have moved on. The design of disagreement, debate and conflict is still up in the air. The same can be said about the shifting rela- tionship, back and forth, between the real and the virtual. It is often hard to admit that the realm of power (agenda-setting, decision-making) is

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as relatively autonomous of the techno-sphere as F2F (face-to-face) meetings. Instead, we all hang onto the idea that decentralised networks somehow dissolve power, over time.

GS More and more today we find TM and DIY forms of art attracting the attention of the established art world. One might even say that Nicolas Bourriaud’s book Relational Aesthetics is in large part an unac- knowledged response to the rising visibility of both informal networks of production, or what I call creative dark matter, as well as tactical modes of artistic activity. What do you make of this growing interest in TM by art world institutions, even when it is not explicitly called TM? Do you perhaps see this institutional interest helping to extend the range and potential of TM as a critical, social intervention, or by contrast is it an appropriation that requires its own ‘tactical response’?

GL We shouldn’t worry too much about the recent interest in TM among US institutions such as museums and universities. All social and aesthetic phenomena fall prey to these cultural machines that are in constant need for new concepts and fashions. It’s remarkable that it took them ten to fifteen years to ‘discover’ TM. To my knowledge this curiosity doesn’t (yet) exist elsewhere. TM, as I’ve come to understand it, has a pragmatic and parasitic relationship towards institutions. Even though they operate outside of established structures, there’s no dogmatic rejection or hostile attitude to be found. Maybe that’s disap- pointing, but that’s another matter. I came to look at these forms of activism as inhabiting a space beyond good and evil. There are aspects that I don’t like either, but I am not a moralist. I theorise about what I see happening around me, anticipate current trends, and project them into the near future. A fairly simple McLuhanist strategy, if you like. In my understanding TM is not, by definition, politically correct. Again, maybe you would wish to look at them in another way but that would be a normative stand. I’m not taking up a guru role here, and we should not turn TM into a brand. Having said that, we can of course clearly see that many activists use ‘viral marketing’ tactics to get their message across – not because it’s the latest fashion but because they have no access to the major media distribution channels.

I am realistic enough to see that all concepts, even the more radical ones, can be (and often are) turned into commodities. I have not yet seen memes that are robust enough to withstand the kind of pressure to remain ‘pure’. The solution to this is not to become bitter or dogmatic but to understand this cultural dynamic and withdraw. In the end, it all boils down to how you play the game of disappearances and reappear- ances. Just think of the humiliating experience of Hakim Bey and his Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ). That was a much worse case compared with what is happening to ‘TM’ right now, as TAZ had clear anarchist roots and then quickly became the radical chic of the 1990s by way of the techno-libertarian entrepreneurship that was popular then. TM never made great claims, it merely pointed at cultural techniques. It comes as no surprise that some museums and academics are now discov- ering the concept and its related artists and activist groups. But that’s a mild sell-out; and to some extent even disappointingly irrelevant as the military-entertainment complex has not yet come aboard. There is still

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3 Eyal Weizman, ‘Israel Goes on the Virtual Offensive’, http://www.salon.com/ news/feature/2007/03/23/ israel_strategy/ index_np.html

no money in TM, so it really makes you wonder what these critics in fact are talking about. We should demand substantive appropriations with real sell-outs. What we see happening right now is limited to a discursive level with the rise of a global language police who sit and judge who is the real autonomist activist and who is not: appropriation without rewards. Now that’s cheap, but understandable, if you take into account that everything has to be ‘free’ these days.

GS Maybe you’re sadly premature about the lack of military interest in TM? I say that in light of the recent paper by the architect Eyal Weizman in which he describes the ‘infestation’ of urban space by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as an attempt to ‘redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares’. They sound more like students of Paul Virilio than military theorists who perceive the city as ‘not just the site but also the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux’.3 But to return for a moment to the ques- tion of appropriation from another sector, what do you make of the tacti- cal interventions of al-Qaeda and other jihadist-type groups who have tactically intervened within the space of the Western ‘other’?

GL In this respect Israel is no different from other states and their secret services. The tactical use of the Internet, small cameras and mobile phones by Islamic fundamentalists is more interesting, and worrying, and should be properly studied. So far, I only know of three different sources that do this kind of research: Albert Benschop, in my faculty group, who got involved in online communications before, during and after the murder of Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh; Tom Keenan at Bard College who is into the distribution and aesthetics of the so-called hostage decapitation videos and last but not least the Israeli secret service with its so-called ‘scientific research organizations’. That said, I believe your remarks seem to indicate a small misunderstanding of my position. The Jihadist videos in no way address Western news organisations. It’s widely known that these short clips are produced for Islamic audiences in the Middle East and Asia. The Internet is used as a medium for primary distribution. Massive consumption of these images happens on cell phones and, of course, on the satellite television news channel, Al Jazeera. However, it is my guess that the sharing of such video files and related texts happens through cell phones. If only we could tell such stories about Indymedia! But let’s not complain about that. Where Islamists and anti- globalists meet is exactly in their distance from mainstream news produc- tion and their ‘tactical’ ways to reach their own audiences.

GR & GS Could you clarify what you see as the historical and contem- porary link between the theory and practice of TM and the critical activ- ism you describe as its ‘key’? The nature of this link is especially curious to us given that you describe TM as being born out of ‘disgust for ideol- ogy’. Is there an activist practice that does not have an implicit, if not explicit, set of ideological assumptions?

GL Well, of course, everyone is always already encapsulated in ideology. However, the problem with such a totalising approach is that it becomes impossible to break out of a given rhetoric or discourse as you are

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immediately caught in the next ideological language cage. For me, that’s a very disempowering discussion. People get depressed when they hear time and again that the System is re-appropriating all forms of resistance and creativity, no matter how odd, negative or irrelevant. We simply cannot avoid producing new power relations, and this is also true with TM. But what we can do is to raise (self-) awareness by establishing cultures that encourage self-reflection. What we have seen over the past decade or more is the rise of progressive and engaged forms of (media) activism that no longer operate within the nineteenth- and early twenti- eth-century movements such as Marxism and anarchism. Geek culture is probably the best example. The most obvious moment to situate this break is 1989, and with new social movements such as feminism and ecology. An important element is the breakaway from the vulgar notion that media are merely tools (owned and controlled by the Party or the Movement) that have to be used (correctly) in the name of the Struggle. The self-referential ‘fun’ aspect of hacking and tinkering is something that most activists do not appreciate and in fact often misjudge as counter-revolutionary. The response to that should be a classic one: ‘If I can’t hack, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.’

GS To my way of thinking, focusing on the moment of the absolute break with the past is as problematic as letting its dead weight crush us. I would argue that TM represents only the contemporary expression of a longer, largely invisible struggle – unrecorded, fragmented, often failed – in which resistance to the alienating effects of capitalism intimates a ‘history from below’. That is not to say this shadowy sphere of conflict ‘belongs’ to any one ideological position per se. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge see in the production of fantasy a form of resistance to alienation that is not totally annexed by mainstream media. This resis- tance can be both liberating, in a positive democratically inclusive way, or reactionary. I am aware of course that the moment one categorises or defines this resistant production as collective – historically, experientially – then we are inevitably propelled towards the thing postmodernists condemned: a meta-narrative that you would no doubt describe as ‘romantic,’ even dangerous. And yet I wonder if some degree of narra- tive, collectivised romanticism is not also necessary for TM even to exist as an abstract category, as opposed say to a non-aggregate of unrelated actions or technologies?

GL I don’t believe that we have to find a solution with a one-size-fits-all concept. We don’t need Western ideologies, let alone religion. I feel we have to go through a long and terribly cold ice age in which people will work on their own micro-issues. Every attempt to override these valuable and rich practices with large schemes is doomed to fail. Your long-range change proposal is a dream; let’s all hope it doesn’t end up a nightmare. What we have to deal with is cultural differences and conflicts, with very real shifts away from the West happening now as we speak. There are very interesting developments in huge countries like China, India and Brazil. We can finally enjoy the prospect of the Decline of the West on the horizon. We will see that it is really no longer our task in Europe or the USA to fill up the gap with some Big Concept. I am not arguing for realism or a new version of Third Way politics. I want

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my radical pragmatism to investigate how social movements come into being, or, to use Canetti’s terms, ‘how crystals grow into masses’. It is in this process that (tactical) media play a modest but crucial role. In the meanwhile, it is important to criticise the wet dreams of the radical left, a task that Baudrillard took up so well, with such an attractive negativ- ity. Sadly, he is no longer with us. The important point is for TM to break with such old-school representational politics. What cheap tech- nologies do well is self-empowerment – away from the traditional top- down politics where leaders think for the masses and direct them. This technological democratisation is clearly a threat for all elite vanguard strategists that use activists as if they are pieces on a chessboard. At the same time, it also means that we have to find new ways to create

common ground, communicate, argue and come to agreements. Z[oacrn]Zˇ izcaor[nzˇek

]

asks all the right questions in this respect. I disagree with some of his political solutions but in terms of the diagnosis I am pretty close to his tribe.

GS Shifting to the question of historical precedent, I have been doing research recently for a new book and was struck by the play of overlap and discord between the New Left and the counter-culture in the US in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, the way groups such as The Diggers in San Francisco or the Living Theater used cheap ‘do it yourself’ media including offset printing, photocopying, even mimeograph machines to enhance street performances that also intervened within urban spaces for brief periods of time. The investment in pleasure and play made by these largely counter-cultural groups reminded me of TM, as well as the way this informality contrasted with the didactic ‘grey on grey’ approach of the SDS or other New Left organisations. (I realise of course this distinc- tion is not absolute.) No doubt other historical examples would come to mind. What historical connection, if any, do you see between these older activist modes and TM given that you explicitly locate TM in the after- math of the Cold War era at a time when a ‘disgust for ideology’ prevailed?

GL The examples you give are spot-on and bring to mind a host of publications and media initiatives that I’ve witnessed or participated in in Europe since the late 1970s. In my experience, it is offset print tech- nology and the do-it-yourself building of radio transmitters that shaped the squatters’ movement in Amsterdam. These were by no means high tech. Still, to master these media one needed some skill and patience. You had to master the technique before you could properly run an offset press. One could say the same about assembling electronics. The word ‘geek’ does not apply here. We’re talking about a skill set that you have to learn from someone else. In the age of TM one no longer obtains knowledge in this way. We play around, use search engines, read FAQs and manuals. The big difference now is that there is no shortage of computers and computation time. The media that social movements in the 1960s used were comparatively primitive in this respect. Of course there were a lot of typewriters around, but not every- one was a typesetter. That’s the main difference compared with the late 1980s, when fanzine culture took off due to the rise of desktop publishing.

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The problem is that today we have infinite technologies available, but there are simply not enough social movements to properly utilise what we have at our disposal. Presently, there is simply not enough creativity, subversive energy, to vitalise our own channels. That’s what I call the Potentiality Surplus. Media are no longer tools, they’re a sphere, a simu- lacrum, a separate second reality that has exploded to such an extent that it constantly disorients people who want to make proper use of the channels that they created. How do we define the relation between Political Will and Technological Destiny today? We need a return to simplicity and shortage, but that’s no longer possible. So how do we create urgency in a situation of semiotic abundance? That’s the Tactical Condition, which doesn’t look very good, certainly in comparison with the cultural renaissance of the late 1960s and early 1970s when a massive number of youngsters left the system and rebelled.

What I believe in is Embedded Techno Determinism. Media technol- ogies do not provoke social movements. But once the social movements are born (out of anger and desire), their trajectory, their faith if you like, is very much determined by the capacity of the actors to communicate to others and build alliances in a short amount of time. If the moment arises, you have to be ready. These days we have amazing capabilities to synchronise social and environmental concerns. Simultaneously we can all witness that the lifetime of a movement or revolt has diminished. Protest these days is no doubt more volcanic – hard to predict for authorities, but also for us activists. Revolution, ready or not! Synchro- nised global action has only occurred rarely, with the great exception of 15 February 2003, of course. That global day of protest against the Iraqi war, a month before the actual invasion, is a day that could well play an important role in tomorrow’s imaginings.

GR & GS We’re struck by your frequent denigrations of ‘the left’. ‘There is no way back’, you write, ‘to the twentieth century, the protective nation-state and the gruesome tragedies of the “left”’. By your account the twentieth century appears mainly as a catastrophe of the left’s making. By contrast, capitalism – let alone Fascism, which as ‘leftists’ we understand as an emergency mutation of capitalism – does not come in for such critical treatment. We’re not at all denying the need for a tough and ongoing critique of the leftist tradition, but to us your attacks seem strangely exaggerated and one-sided. And yet, we also notice that your recent text still makes recourse to the words ‘progressive’ and ‘soli- darity’. Is it perhaps that you see capitalism, perhaps of an entrepreneur- ial anarcho-capitalist type, holding out more hope of increasing democratic participation and individual creativity than collectivised production?

GL Maybe it’s the European perspective that makes the difference here, of having lived and worked in the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe. That affiliation always reminds one of the millions that died under Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. I am surprised that you pull the old communist trick out of the hat, portraying someone as a proto- or pseudo-capitalist. The relevant point here is that TM breaks with such old-school representational politics. Cheap technologies

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4 Lovink, Dark Fiber, op cit, p 262

5 Sylvère Lotringer, ‘Foreword’ to Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2004, p 18

enhance self-empowerment and pull us away from the top-down politics where leaders think for the masses and direct them. If we want to dream up new strategies and think aloud, we can only do that in a more or less open, safe and creative atmosphere, a place without Trotskyites and other agitators who clearly only think in terms of how they can use the situation for their greater scheme and for whom otherness is some- thing that has to be suppressed, streamlined, forgotten, and – if neces- sary – eliminated. Even today, there is unreconstructed Marxism, and Stalin still has many fans. But there are also plenty of leftists who studied the Gulag and have drawn some grim conclusions from that darkest of chapters.

GS Point taken. But to go a bit further you write in your book Dark Fiber that ‘There is a need for contemporary forms of organisation, such as global (online) labor unions, networks of immigrants, refugee tongs, free association of digital artisans’.4 In light of global capitalism’s power to absorb surplus labour – including from intellectual workers, the so- called ‘cognitariat’ – how is such organising to be accomplished without a theory of organisation that is other than the default of the market?

GL First, I refuse to assume that the market is, by definition, wrong or ‘evil’. There were markets in historical socialism, in anarchist communes and in a variety of alternative societies. That said, I have never been a fan of ‘the market’ as a solution for contemporary problems that are actually caused by the incredible concentration of global capital and financial resources in the hands of a few. There’s a lot of space to play around with concepts such as ‘de-privatization’ and the reconstitution of the public domain, without necessarily putting the utilities and commu- nity services back into the hands of the state. What we need to break down is this diffuse culture of fear and suspicion that is cultivated amongst activists. The world would be so much more fun without this urge, this constant threat of punishment if you are not politically correct or aligned. Because of this moralising behaviour, the critique of PC (politically correctness) has fallen into the hands of the populist right. I do not believe the subversive strategies of PC are effective or impossible to appropriate or co-opt. I stand for the heuristics of trial and error, and the art of disappearing and reappearing if the time is right to do so. As Sylvère Lotringer writes, in his foreword to Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude:

Capitalism itself is revolutionary because it keeps fomenting inequality and provoking unrest. It also keeps providing its own kind of ‘commu- nism’ both as a vaccine, preventing further escalation, and an incentive to go beyond its own limitations. The multitude responds to both and can go either way, absorbing the shocks or multiplying the fractures that will occur in unpredictable ways.5

There can be so much revolutionary energy. The ‘élan vital’ of the multi- tude is simply there. We can of course deconstruct this Italo-workerism cult as the latest capitalist conspiracy to vampirically suck out everyone’s vitalism, but I find such a reading cynical and bitter. With Paolo Virno, we have to ask what we are capable of and commit untimely acts, with

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or without TM. We can easily proclaim that TM died long ago, around 2001, but who cares? The questions are still all there, right on the table – and the Media Question is one that I am certain will stay with us for quite some time.

With thanks to Henry Warwick for editing assistance.

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