Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/Michael Ney's Cyberculture/Cyberculture/Necro Enema Amalgamated - BLAM!

Text File | 1994-09-02 | 11KB | 207 lines

Topic 431       Necro Enema Amalgamated - BLAM!
peg:visionary   cyberculture zone        3:36 PM  Aug 20, 1994


Forwarded by <[e-mail]>

 From: [e-mail] (Brant Shapiro)
 Date: Wed, 27 Jul 94
 To: [e-mail] (Leri)
 Subject: Necro Enema Amalgamated
 Organization: [MindVox] / Phantom Access Technologies

The NEA Agenda - by Necro Enema Amalgamated


Who is Necro Enema Amalgamated?

The NEA is a Devil's Advocacy group and entrepreneurial innovator of
manipulative software, subliminal semiotics, and coercive advertising.
It was founded by Keith Seward (Necro) and Eric Swenson (Enema) on a
clear autumn night in October, 1992. Like the National Endowment for
the Arts, Necro Enema Amalgamated plans to give money to people who
spend their time prettifying the world with their creative energies
("artists") and, like the National Educational Association, also hopes
to give shape to the nation's educational policies (see our
forthcoming review of Toilet-Training the Retarded for a taste of
what's to coe!) The NEA's flagship venture, BLAM!, is a hypermedia
explosion that concentrates bad energy, good looks, big muscles, and a
small mind into one Mac-readable CD-ROM. We believe that BLAM! will do
for hypermedia what St. Paul did for Christ, what rats did for the
plague, what Edie Sedgwick did for the miniskirt - bring it to the
masses. There are no strong words, only weak ears.


What is Devil's Advocacy?

When the Catholic church nominates some virgin stiff for beatification
or canonization, the duty of the advocatus diaboli is to raise
objections and examine the facts. For example, the cadavers of true
saints are not supposed to rot, so the Devil's Advocate might take it
upon himself to demonstrate that however impervious Mother Superior
may be to the charms of penises, she can't help but spread for the
worms. That is what it means to play the devil: to prove the mortality
of the saint, to take up any cause in the face of even the most
hallowed truths, assertions, or beliefs. Tis es not mean that Devil's
Advocacy is nihilistic.

Why fight for Nothing when it is the vigorous heartbeat of struggle
that keeps the lifeblood pounding in your veins?  With the instincts
of a true mercenary, the Devil's Advocate takes up any banner with
that terrific war cry: Yes! "Profound aversion to reposing once and
for all in any one total view of the world," as Nietzsche says.
"Fascination of the opposing point of view:  refusal to be deprived of
the stimulus of the enigmatic."  We're not God's antagonist, we're the
Devil's Advocate. When we say No, we mean Yes.


The truth about cyberspace.

To judge by some of the popular and academic rhetoric that surrounds
it, "cyberspace" is sort of like heaven:  a place where people can
connect seamlessly without judging each other in terms of zits, big
tits, or appalling bodily disfigurements. Joe can be a mutant
pickle-man, but his dry sense of humor can earn him friends on the
Net. Isn't that swell?  The NEA answer: Yes, it's swell, if you happen
to have the frosed-flake ideals of a church-going Johnsonian Democrat.

On one hand, there's the version of cyberspace promised by latent
Puritans (with all of their obligatory contemptus corporis). Notions
of assisted psychic and spiritual disembodiment are nothing new, so
why promise more mana to the masses? Every enthusiasm for a
disembodied, religious cyberspace is an insult to sensuality: Virtual
Reality is for eunuchs, ascetics and priests. On the other hand,
there's the version of cyberspace promised by those good-intentioned
hangovers from the Summer of Love:  Virtual Reality for communes,
farms, and planned communities. It has all the saccharine equalities
promised by the Puritans, only this time from a political rather than
a covertly religious standpoint. "New Age" doesn't describe it as well
as "Old Fart."  Democracy, as the cynical Helen Keller pointed out, is
but a name.

"We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two
bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between
Tweedledum and Tweedledee." Facit, public. Charles Manson was right.
"Nobody wants responsibility. They want to be told what to do, what to
believe, what's really true and really real."  Buy BLAM!!


What happened to cybertime?

There are two things to be remarked about the history of the concept
of space: the first is that it has theological origins (i.e. space as
an attribute of God: "Newton thought it necessary and expedient to
make these theological ideas an integral part of his theory of space,"
writes Max Jammer in his History of Theories of Space in Physics.)
Perhaps this helps to explain the reverence with which the very word
"cyberspace" is uttered by those lambs who have seen the virtual
light. The other interesting thing about the history of the concept of
space is that it appears to precede time as a category of
consciousness. This is evidenced even by the way we speak of time in
spatial terms: we say thereafter instead of thenafter, always instead
of all the time, and so on.

Space, then, is the more primitive category of thoug and perhaps it
shouldn't be surprising that - with so many modern primitives running
amok - few have risen to the task of conceptualizing the role of time
in digital media. (This is excepting the one group of non-philosophers
who consistently manipulate digital time:  capitalists, whose temporal
pretensions can be summed up in the price of >>connect time.<<) Maybe
this is obvious, and yet it seems as if every other product on the
market is based on spatial metaphors.

The whole idea of "exploring" a digital space has been grossly
overused, especially since exploring is essentially boring. What makes
Raiders of the Lost Ark exciting is not the endless treks through
jungles and deserts, the sheer drudgery of which is never conveyed on
screen;  what makes Raiders exciting is that it has a plot, and a plot
is a structuring of time. Though the first issue of BLAM! is
structured around the spatial metaphor of mine shafts, we have also
rediscovered the lost continent of cyberspace - the fourth dimension.
In BLAM!, we've manipulated time in essentially three fashions:
through plot, montage, and speed - especially speed. (Go see for
yourself. Only $25.00 + p/h + tax for New Yorkers.)  As Sun Tzu says,
"Speed is the essence of war."


The absurdity of interactivity.

"Interactivity" is one of those euphemisms like "democracy" or
"equality."  There's no color to the word. It paints a grey picture of
a world where used-car salesmen would give you your dollar's worth,
little boys wouldn't pick on little girls, and snakes wouldn't eat
cute little furry creatures. There's no food chain in a word like
"interactivity."  That's why at Necro Enema Amalgamated we think of it
not as "interactivity" but as offense and defense. All that
no-caffeine rhetoric about empowering users makes us laugh - not with
but at.

(Laughter is Satanic, says Baudelaire, and since we're the Devil's
Advocates, we find ourselves laughing a lot!)  Giving a user more and
more buttons to click is like giving extra links to dog chain. Sure,
you can call three feet of mobility "freedom," if you want. You can
think of BLAM! as empowering you, but we know that we're the ones
jerking the end of your chain. We've determined what every last little
button accomplishes. Programmers are just that: >>programmers.<<  We
train you to use BLAM! just as Pavlov trained dogs to salivate. Did
you know that "cyber" comes from the Greek >>kybernan,<< meaning "to
steer, to govern?" Maybe we could reconcile ourselves to the concept
of cyberspace, after all - if you define it as >>space (or more
correctly, space-time) that we control.<<


The textbook for user manipulation.

Foster Goodwill reads about BLAM! in Mondo 2000, rushes out and buys a
copy. When he gets it home, he reads some of our propaganda:  >>We're
joy riding on the roof of an elevator and the 21st century suddenly
approaches like the ceiling of our tenement building. What do you want
to do?  Do you want to get off?  Yes?  No? BLAM!!<<  Excited, Goodwill
loads the BLAM! CD into his drive d >>follows our instructions<< for
starting it up. The interface appears and turns the sound on his
computer up, up, up!  He's frustrated he can't turn it down, but
perseveres. He chooses to view a piece by Th. Metzger, infamous rant
ejaculator and author of This Is Your Final Warning! (Autonomedia). He
doesn't finish reading it before he tries to quit out. Surprise!
Necro Enema Amalgamated insists that you read a piece by Th. Metzger,
and so Goodwill is thrown into a special punishment supplement  -
"Devil in a Dead Man's Underwear," an epic poem about Spam written by
Th. Metzger. He can't get out of it, except by crashing his computer,
which he's afraid to do. (If he'd finished reading the first Metzger
piece, he wouldn't have to suffer through "Devil.")

Goodwill gets back to the interface and tries another piece:  "Fever,"
by a mysterious "Rita." At first, it sort of reminds him of a Japanese
cartoon, and the animations of an apparently young girl crying in the
bathroom turn him on. He likes the "interactive" features - he has to
click the girl's cunt to drive the piece forward - but it puzzles him
that clicking her cunt only offers him that one option:  forward. Is
that interactivity?  Or is that irony? Goodwill gets back to the
interface and looks for an explanation in Necro Enema Amalgamated's
"Ode to Interactivity." He discovers that the "Ode" is >>not the least
bit interactive.<<  What sort of tribute is that?

(Excerpt from an interview with the creator. "The 'Ode' is predicated
on the dilemma. When I was making it, I thought:  >>What if you had a
choice, but it was between two equally terrible alternatives?<<  What
if your button-clicking necessarily triggered the most heinous rapes,
murders, and so on?  I wanted the 'Ode' to embody such dilemmas, but
then I removed the interactivity. I removed the choices altogether.")
Confused, Goodwill finds enlightenment again in our propaganda:
BLAM!!  >>It's not "immersive," it's expulsive: sounds so loud we've
had noise complaints from the dead, type big Martians can read it by
means of the naked eye, rants so hard they knock the wind out of you.
BLAM!!  We don't wait for you to push our buttons, we push yours first.<<


The future.

Necro Enema Amalgamated is not just the publisher of BLAM!. It is not
just a hypermedia design studio. It is an aesthetic, a way of life, a
couple of Neat Enthusiastic American guys who use computers sometimes
- sometimes not - to spread their word:  God is in the details, but
the Devil is at large.

_ eof -