Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/no need to argue/Necro Enema Amalgamated BLAM!

Text File | 1994-11-11 | 10KB | 175 lines

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.