Andrey Kovalev Today will never come

Paul Veriglio 'I am in panic, just interested.'
From interview for Ctheory magazine, 1996

The Universe shows out itself as an infinite unfolding tissue of forms of different organization types and ranks, from unfamiliar to us ether elements to human collectives and star systems. All these permanently changing forms, generate the global organizing process which unboundedly splits into pieces, and is continuous and indissoluble as a whole.
A.A. Bogdanov, 'Global Organizing Science' (Techtology)

It's too hard to reserve the temptation of organizing a revolution. To move from a sealed carriage on board the 'Grandma' schooner. To drink mate with creaking accompaniment of the leather jacket; to talk to peasants in the mountains and to cry out fiery speeches for bearded kazacks. Though, for a start, we have to do some study work - to define sources and motive forces of the future revolution, to get an exact concern if the 'upper strata' still can and the 'lower' wants. And, after a long period of secret addresses, fake beards, double-bottom suitcases and backyard escapes, to go 'into the people'. Little will be left then, but to occupy banks, the telegraph and the post-office, - and the first step to the World Revolution will be accomplished. Unfortunately, there had been many tries, and nothing was left but a belch either after pompous Lev Davidovich Trotsky, or short-spoken comrade Che. How dull and drearily is the end of the century. The best thing, of course, is to organize the World Revolution in the Internet, bursting into Yahoo with revolutionary detachments, or razing AOL and Cityline to the grounds. And then...

Though, who could we rely on in this odd world, and who could we fight? (If there's a desire to, of course.) The real enemy is elusive and immaterial, it dissappears like a dream, like a dawn mist. Except Bill Gates, general demon damned by all civilized humanity, there's no other person that resembles a classical bourgeois with a cigar. Fellow-travellers of the virtual revolution - freaks and various deviates - are, at least, odd, too. And all of them go on talking of endless and irreparable changes of the body and mind. The new age is coming, they explain. Actually, there will be no other revolution. So we can drive our armoured train into the depot and bury the 'Maxim' virtual machine-gun deep in the kitchen garden.

Continuous hysterics on so-called virtual space result from pathologic weakness of human sense for fabulous and secret. 'The virtual' inhabits that very area which is usually filled with macabre outcomes of childish horrors and ancient legends. If it could be judged from the point of view of mass mind, most brightly presented in Hollywood blockbusters like 'The Lawnmoverman', the virtual space would be only an instrument of attaining power over the world. It is possible to conquer 'that world' with the only method, which is to contract with the devil. Fortunately, according to the dream factory rules, stories like that one end happily (still), in the virtual space of the Hollywood. In the virtual battle the Good, nevertheless, overcomes the Bad, and we are back in the good old times. And this is good, since, according to Paul Veriglio, it is the moving pictures that make the most real reality of our time.

'Fast race to slow suicide' looks extremely dreadful and catastrophic - "We now live in the age of dead information, dead (electronic) space, and dead (cybernetic) rhetoric". These words belong to Arthur Kroker, panic theorist of new media and information trash. Like Virgiles, he gives an absolutely heart-rending picture of global demonic organization of the world (see the epigraph). However, the humanity has been always afraid of everything which could threaten or change its nature. People had to die of asphyxia travelling by locomotives. Though tympanic membrana don't break even at sixty kilometers per hour, and, they say, one Russian cosmonaut stayed at the Mir station, in the state of weightlessness, for more than a year.
Each time the humanity wonderfully adheres to the context generated by itself. Even 'clever' machines make no attempts to conquer the power over the world, to emasculate or eliminate the human gender. (In the first 'Terminator', the horrible Machine Riot takes place about 2015, very soon.) New disasters appear, and the 'new brave world' is being once more described with erotic breathe catching. The futurists worshipped the Machine and the Steamship in the same way. In the 60s-70s people admired 'the iron men'. And we can understand that, and Veriglio, who hasn't got a computer, presumes that "All technologies come to the same, leading to Deus ex Machina. In a sense, technologies abolished transcendental God in order to invent Machine-God."

By the way, what does the word 'virtual' mean? The dictionaries offer most contradictive definitions, though everyone understands that it means something which is not real. Something like angels pottering about the end of the needle, or succuba and incuba. Though it is clear that 'virtual magazine' is just a magazine existing in a digital form. The world, as they say, is a pure theatre, so the mass mind pictures a virtual thing like an endless chain of paranoid sparkling acid broad patterns and tangled tube plucks. It's worth saying that comprehension of 'virtual' among so-called media artists very slightly deviates from the Hollywood's. Classical neurotic abstraction that had been long ago overcome in premedia forms, enjoys triumph in the fields connected with new technologies. The virtual is a way of oneiric escape from reality. Simply speaking, while some people are working at a new winchester lock or multiply quadrillions by decaliters, others tirelessly dissipate the life, wandering from one drinking hole to another, and take coke. Meanwhile, wasted sperm is poring over the keyboards and staining the monitors. Instead of teasing girl-friends at the front doors or driving shabby bykes, the virtual addicts sit petrified, or teasing the mouse, fuck their own brains in the chats. Of course, there's nothing new in the fact that telephone chatting has already replaced body communication full of grimaces, eye games, smells and gestures. Virtual alternates that, instead of you, construct cities, kill skunks of feature dreadful Kazanovas, engender paranoic irresponsibility. (You may do whatever, though you must prepare yourself for the real life when the others might spit into your face, or kick you downstairs.)

Virtual Dr.Hyde might pretend that he doesn't know any real Mr.Jackil. You need only to save in the right time and to start from the beginning. It is these trash figures that overweight virtual space, however it would be too naive to reduce the problem of data trash to non-countable garbage flowing in the Internet. And there is nothing but rap papers, cores, empty packets, torn socks, pissed pampers and bloody tampaxes in this great junkyard. New technologies do not invent anything new, they raise the communication speed. The garbage never to be recycled, forgotten junkmail is filling my mind with continuously raising speed. A particular person produces too much information trash. There're lots of people that are keen on talking of themselves, of their cats, of stamps collection, of their children. The information superhighway is surrounded with smoking and stinking junkyards full of smashed carnival masks and concealed complexes amputated by the society of consumer desire. Fascist party leaflets, oppressed dreams of disgusting necrophilists, satanists, philatelists and cyclists rot and decay over there. Garbage is the only place where such a wonderful, global and total democracy (shitocracy, which is more to the point) is possible. Though, the main excuse of the Internet is in the great Pornography, new courtly lyrics which dominates over horror of dimmed eyes and sweatened palms. Call-girls are the only ones that understand love. The reality is realized by virtual addicts hooked on games. The private and the individual haven't survived but in the junkyard, among read-out newspapers, used-out condoms and fast-food packages.

Misha Verbitsky made not a bad definition of trash in his article 'Against Culture' (See almanach "Trash culture"). Though he defines nearly everything as trash - feminism, counterculture, consumer society, junk mail, etc. The noble desire of getting rid of everything bad and irritating is quite understandable. There's also peculiar romanticism in conspiratorial passion and searches of the World Evil source. However, Verbitsky is absolutely right saying that the notion of 'trash' has the public dimension, connotations with 'white trash', lumpens of city surburbs. So, data trash is not only information trash but public trash, all kinds of viles and riff-raffs thrown into the virtual space. There is, as well, the virtual class which is so pathetically spoken by Arthur Kroker in Data Trash. But he doesn't effectively reveal the dilemma - should we join the new digital class or the crowds of virtual maniacs and white trash. Kroker's reflections are usually taken as instructions to urgently take the running train in order not to be left on the side of the information superhighway. It's not so easy to become the Power party, as it is very well known. We have to give up something: "The information highway is the antithesis of the Net, in much the same way as the virtual calls must destroy the public dimension of the Internet for its own survival."

If, according to Marx, the class is defined by its relation to property, where are the exploiters and the exploited, the masters and slaves of the virtual space? Though, we can see free hunters, city freaks, clerks, tycoons, happy drunkers and city garillas. Looks like a description of a big city, though in the visible part of the virtual world there are lumpens only. Bankers do not wander crowding the Wall Street, superstars do not go partying in the Broadway. We can hear stories about them, and we can see their virtual bodies. The real virtual class sits at the monitors manipulating with incredible sums, generating 'humanitarian wars' and financial crisis. And it is subtlety and immateriality of the new ruling class, inevitability of new order that fills us with horror and conspirological mania. Here we ought to calm down and remember that there's nothing new under the sun. The new race of invisible rulers of the world inspires fear and trepidation, virtual class is something like nouveaux connoisseurs. Similar things took place in glorious times of the futurism when people worshipped the pilotes.

Whereas there's a class, there must be a class war, an uprising of lumpenized masses. Spring of 1999 was sort of a turning point, when it was realized that it's possible to protest against 'humanitarian bombing' of Yugoslavia in virtual form only. Virtual plebeians and smart guys protested against virtual soldiers and digital strategists. Abruptly, they became conscious of virtuality and mediality of the new war expressed merely by material irresponsibility of the soldiers and their generals. And these were the same people that mocked at personal courage and death fearlessness, the most ancient nobility pledge, and insisted (up to spring 1999) that the virtual war is not a war, 'as if'. It is a pure simulacrum. The following syllogism, for instance, became a platitude - "As Orwell declared, 'war is peace'. Here is a perfect example of two opposites imploding into each other. In Baudrillard's vision, there is no risk of a real war because we are in an age of simulation and controls. War only exists in media simulations, and any actual fighting is nothing but a simulacrum." These guys went hysterical themselves, Slavoy Jijeck being the only one who found a worthy response. And it's easy to understand him - invisible airplanes were flying over his head and his home in Slavenia.

To dischage Kroker's and other peageons of the virtual world, we can presume that the true Power is silent, as Rollan Bart used to declare. (On the contrary, analyst or 'mythologist' purposely explicit the concealed, according to Bart.) The bourgeoisie doesn't much like to be called so. The virtual class, i.e. the New Ruling Class, doesn't much desire to be called a class, too. Languages of power and might are always anonymous, as much as 'The Pravda' or 'The New York Times'. The 'pure information' is actually the puriest ideologemum, and not theoretical compositions of defenders of the current order. At a time, a fabulous literary history of the 'Commersant' will be written. It's a Russian daily which formulated the language of the whole class - pure virtual at the beginning, it got materialized before our eyes. Manifesting, a bit naively, with new languages of the Power, the ideologists of the 'Commersant' succeeded in exterminating the so-called personal opinion from the odd though individualistic political language of the perestroika age; prophets choking in their own texts and heralds were replace by analysts and topical satirists. The story is contained in the Text only, as usual. But the problem is that the Text is continuously trashed out, and, though not forgotten at all, turns into white noise, senseless nothing.

The prophet or the herald is personally resposible for his words. 'Information stream' is pure trade of the Absolute Mind. Roads of the Absolute are always inscrutable, so there's nothing surprising that, at the beginning, the Chechnya brigands were presented as white knights, fighting for their national life tenor and independence. Later the same people were incarnated into the Absolute Evil, on the same pages. The history of opinions doesn't exist, and is not being rewritten every day as in the Orwell's Truth Department. It is trashed out. And no-one will say 'Sorry, I was wrong', or 'Look, that's what I've been saying'. Divine impersonal essence of information machines doesn't allow them to remember the word that was pronounced the day before. Majority of information agencies perform in a rather strange way dispalying their newspapers in the Net and claiming for payment from the achives users. Information superhighway doesn't have either Past or Future, so the problems of the 1984 look just funny.

That is why there's reason in following the advice given by a clever person - 'Adapt or you're toast'. Adapted, we'll be able to turn into trash quite consciously and to penetrate into the new class like secret agent Schtirlitz (popular Russian TV hero). Which is much more better than imagining yourself a smart-eyed cyborg, though the latter is funny and promising, of course. Unfortunately, the reality is too dull and ordinary.