<nettime> The corner bar

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

Down the street there used to be a bar called Dorothy's. A real Chicago 
dive, it was run forever by a Greek guy known as Gus. Home to 
down-and-outs and shambling drunks, the place would be seized by 
wild-eyed hilarity on Saturday nights or during football games. I used 
to stop by to pick up a beer and chat with Gus, but I never actually sat 
down in there. I was too busy with things like nettime.
For us, Saturday night was the tech-boom, free software, globalization, 
war, empire. It was trends, events, technologies, social movements, 
economies, meltdowns, revolutions and the ways you can interpret them, 
via art, algorithms, philosophical concepts, social sciences, straw 
polls, news items or just plain keyboard improvisation. Apparently all 
of us somehow cared what the other, known or unknown, might have to say 
about it, because we were willing to rant, argue, research, compose, 
deleriate, flame on, get embarassed, make up, sulk, forget it, go back 
to it, and so on for about two decades. Sometimes we were wild-eyed, 
other times dull and predictable. Surely more than a few owe a lot to 
this obscure activity. Personally, that is how I became a writer.
That is also how many of us "wasted" a lot of time. You can't exactly 
capitalize on weeks of reading, websearching, analysis, and back-channel 
discussions that finally amount to an ascii post on an antiquated 
majordomo listserve. No professional credit accrues to the public 
amateur. Instead you either become an isolated crank, or mutate into a 
reticulated transsubjectivity - or more likely, some combination of the 
two. I cannot count the number of people on at least three continents 
that I first met on nettime, before finding the actual bar, cafe, 
conference hall, hack lab, protest march or living room where we could 
meet in the flesh. Sometimes the meetings led to vast quixotic projects, 
such as the Technopolitics odessey that Armin Medosch and I got into, or 
they became private sinkholes of uncalculable energy, like learning 
Linux without a command-line clue. As I became more of a crank (moving 
to Chicago and whatnot) the meetings became rarer yet even more 
important, arbitrary, one-off, lasting friendship, strange misconnect, 
whatever. I guess the Holy Grail of this whole thing was the idea that a 
certain missing cybernetic loop might actually open up a viable way to 
inhabit the twenty-first century.
About a year ago (or maybe it's already been two) Gus decided to hang it 
up and move back to his village on a Greek island. The bar was taken 
over by a nephew, just as the neighborhood began to gentrify. Now a 
hipster set with jobs in the Loop packs away ten-dollar beers and 
samples craft whiskies, while the shambling drunks are reduced to 
panhandling at the door. Sign of the times. What capitalism calls 
propserity are the boring moments without any revolution.
Ted and Felix - our collective Gus - are apparently ready to hang it in, 
with or without the Greek island. Perhaps they have other things to do, 
or they're just plain burnt out at a low moment (maybe even an unplumbed 
depth) of recent history. They haven't capitalized on this thing, but 
they wasted even more time than the rest of us, so we all owe them the 
unrepayable, which I hope can occasionally translate into something more 
concrete here and there, in terms of hospitality and/or collaboration. 
Anyway, the April Fool moment is wierdly existential. Since I am still 
not really interested in sitting down at what used to be Dorothy's, the 
question arises, what I am gonna do for a corner bar? How am I gonna 
meet y'all in the future?
As gray hair and the rest of it sets in, we can certainly imagine 
ourselves as shambling email drunks sitting at the doorway to the 
newest, glitziest social media, hoping for the toss of a virtual dime. 
However, human life is a lot longer and richer than the cycles of 
technological innovation, and in reality we are a multigenerational 
interpretative community of unusual breadth, sobriety, madness and 
unexplored potential. Has nettime really become nottime? Who in the hell 
has a Greek island to go to? Don't we need to set up something cheaper, 
more trustworthy, less dreadfully privatized, and more open to 
philosophical, artistic, literary and technical complexity than the 
current versions of like-button interactive community? Otherwise, where 
we gonna get wild-eyed and hilarious when the rollercoaster of social 
change gets rolling again? Because it will, sooner than you think.
Hoping for an answer to this question, Brian


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org