home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale
/
Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso
/
Dr. Doyle
/
E-Taiwan Data - Kroker
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1994-10-10
|
4KB
|
79 lines
TAIWAN DATA HEAVEN
Arthur Kroker
Red Rock comes on-line. He tells me about a great new surfing
destination in Taiwan. Seems that it is the largest data storage dump
in the virtual world: unlimited FTPing territory, a kind of
cyber-world where a hacker could put down roots. It is comparable to
Turner's frontier thesis of the promised land, but rather than
stopping at the physical edge of continental USA, you keep on
vectoring towards the new horizon of the rising sun. Taiwan as the
geographic edge of virtual America. Everyone in California has
hard-wired their bodies, and are heading out for the interstitial
coordinates of the Taiwan FTP site. I can't resist the impulse, and so
I head out too. Before I disappear into the Net, I leave a note behind
saying that if I haven't been seen for a day, send a cyber-search
party, but be careful because I'm not sure what crash events await
unsuspecting travellers in the East.
The Taiwan FTP site was everything I could have hoped for.
Tetra-gigabytes of data: gleamingly arranged, sub-sonic vectors of
information banks arrayed against a background sky of liquid crystal
blue, pure data heaven. It's all there for the asking, and the
Taiwanese sysops are true to the word that has been put out on the Net
about them - "the friendliest folks I ever met," said Moog from
Amsterdam. A free-fall into data, almost heavy with its gravitational
weight. Less like a FTP site than a gigantic data harvesting-machine,
the Taiwan FTP site aimlessly strips the media-net of its content, and
archiving the human story into its humming machinery.
Red Rock signals me to get off at the freeway exit to alt.sex,
Taiwanese style. I flip on my encryption sensors, and head straight
for this new file horizon. And it's weird. A vast data storage bank
for cyber-sex: bondage rituals, stories of sado-masochism that make
you understand for the first time the pure aesthetics of disciplining
of the flesh, stories of virtual bodies that merge together to the
sound of crackling (electronic) body static as two neuro-skins that
would be one make love against a crystalline background of data walls.
It's perfect that the world's largest data management base should be
zoned away in Taiwanese electronic space. Data has always been future
to our past, and pure data is the East as the end of western history,
and the beginning of virtuality. The West, then, is just material for
more history: archiving and data management in real-(on-line)-time in
Taiwanese cyberspace as the telematic form assumed by the horizon of
the virtual history file. And something else too. Taiwan was one of
the first of the genuinely recombinant societies to surface from the
ruins of World War II. Neither authentically Taiwanese (after its
colonization by the fleeing Chinese nationalists) and certainly not
pure Chinese, Taiwan was always fated to be a unique historical
mutuation. A key part of global virtual economy, with its early
restructuring by multinational corporations in search of cheap labor
and even cheaper taxes, Taiwan has long been prepared as a data
management system for sifting through all of the detritus of the
virtual world. It has become a storage dump created by the intricate
web of the MNC's and policed by the aging nationalist autocracy for
downloading all of the electronic signals sent out by the pure
instrumental activism of the rest of the globe.
And this is just as it should be because when life has no history,
then data is the only sign of cynical power. Could this isolated
Taiwanese FTP site be that key node where the genealogy of the Chinese
mind is grafted onto telemetry, and the result is an infinite
circularity of digital history?
But then, I'm a lurker here, a traveller in virtual Taiwan who always
wanted to visit the East, and now doesn't have to bother.
_________________________________________________________________
Arthur Kroker teaches political theory at Concordia University,
Montreal. He is author of Spasm and The Possessed Individual among
others including the forthcoming Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual
Class with Michael Weinstein.
(Up to CTHEORY)