Limos and Shopping Carts

(Part 4)

Gregori goes on to say, "For me, Sfnet has taken on that sense of community. It feels a great deal like it was when I was a kid. We have a Net Get (together) once every month or two and when we have our yearly picnic we get 80 or a 100 people who come - and they all know one another and they've known each other for years. Knowing someone online is an intimate thing - you spend a lot of time talking and you talk about everything. So get people who know each other really well. And man, they have fun!

It's been I guess three million years we've been crawling around on this earth and for almost all of that time we've been in small groups - maybe thirty to fifty - and now Bang! we've got cities of millions of people who don't even know each other. It's clear from Sfnet and it's driven the point home to me that people need to be in environments that are on a human scale. Sfnet is that "human scale". It's when it becomes too expansive and amorphous that people lose the ability to relate.

I think the web is riding a wave of enthusiasm at the moment and that once corporate America digs their ugly little claws into it - as I've heard with Sony and Panasonic and their 300 dollar TV internet device - it will become just another broadcast medium where everyone's just selling their wares on it. It will be just as boring, just as unenthusiastic and bland, as the suburbs. I don't have much hope for it. But I do have hope for small ventures."

Gregori wants the service to be taken up by others create their own communities and using Colorado-based eSofts BBS software, which he described as "the original internet appliance", he'll be licensing terminal software and hardware, complete with cabinet plans.

The newly corporatised companies, some founded by ex-cyberhippies, who fought for a commerce-free internet, are now finally co-opted by the mainstream media and hidden behind corporate edifices, hard to contact and get a response from, and now instead fight for a corporate-safe internet. In these new community-corporate hybrids, the recently shorn, ex-maverics have gone the way of Graham Greene, and turned "catholic" in the senescence of older age, driven by fear of fame, and most importantly, fortune, slipping away.

As it turns out, those most vociferously anti-corporate are sometimes the most dangerous of all because it is those ideologues who have sold out most, who use community language and skills, and skills and ideas derived from the publically-provided university system, to lock up public resources into privately-owned intellectual property to be copyrighted and flogged off as digital real estate subdivisions (divisions being the operative word) on the outskirts of town to unsuspecting investors before the next stock market shakedown. Their youthful acolytes cluster eagerly about their feet, digicash cyberglyphs in their eyes. All sense of sharing the future is lost or obscured.

Like the ubiquitous San Franciscan fog that wreaths The City's towers, symbols of the death-defying power of corporate hubris, their original point is lost, hidden in clouds of bullmarketshit, obscuring the ideals, and the promise, of technoculture. From the topmost floor windows, Bill, Marc and Louis look out into the swirling fog - their future - trying desperately to divine the patterns moving under their feet.

And down below, those condemned to wage slave bonded labour - or worse, underemployed or bonded to the proposed low wage ghettos of dreary forced workhouses just to get the dole - provide a place for a new community of disaffection to breed, to "grow", quietly and ominously, in the streetwise veins and sinews of the sleek neocapitalist machinebeast. No amount of Libertarian fairy floss, cyberhip bread and circuses or more police on the streets and guns in the hands of citizens can flush these cultural viruses from out of the cultural capillaries.

Need proof? Wait for the first big sneeze, already the temperature's rising.

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