Blog Art! The Death of Email (or Death by Email)

Date: Fri Dec 17 10:48:11 2004
CHOGM

Hi all,

I don’t know if I am missing something here, if the corporate media sphere
has fried my brain, but here are some of the democratically elected
governments that will attend CHOGM in Brisbane.

Bangladesh (I think the world’s poorest country)
Swaziland
Tuvalu
Tonga
Ghuna
Fiji
Lesotho

CHOGM has only 4 developed countries (5 if you count New Zealand out of
its 53 members.

I note that on the http://www.stopchogm.org/workers.htm Stop CHOGM web
site, that it says that CHOGM is “no different than the WEF or the WTO?” Am
I missing something here, how are they the same? I think that something
else looks mysteriously the same here (baaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrr) Sorry,
I am more interested in what the elected government of Tonga has to say
about the world than
some Australian radicals.

I wonder, since when has being misinformed been radical? And what is
British Imperialism, sorry what Century are we in?

My grandmother from Lesotho is going to be at the meeting, talking about
the good old days in 1907 when she could spank naughty boys and girls on
the bottom for targeting the wrong people. CHOGM is one of the very
institutions that is and can be used to manage globalisation. Is the truth
too hard to engage with, or now we have ’self-publishing’ we are so much
better informed?

have a fine day old Chaps,

call for action: ICANN comes to Melbourne

Hi,

I an a disbarred historian working on the
history of Fitzroy and milkbars to help understand things that effect the
whole world! I also don’t understand what ICANN does, but we could always
ask them. Someone once described democracy to me as hanging out with a
bunch of cretins who you don’t really like but you will try and get on with
then anyway in the name of some bigger picture. Can’t we hang out with them
when they come here? A Palestinian also told me that ICANN’s twelve
employees will become a world government really soon. Perhaps after they
string up all the Arabs, and torture all the Hindu’s, and free all the
Chinese from the tyranny of being Chinese. Anyway, trying not to be a
devil’s advocate here, but before we spiral into some narrow determinist
argument about DNS being the new world order, lets contextualise what
ICANNDY does in a larger circulation of ideas and power. Am I missing
something?

Date: Saturday, December 11, 1999, 11:17:55 AM

Subject: Winners and Losers..

===8<==============Original message text===============

In the constructive desire to halt any animosity that I may have created

with Damien by my rather pedestrian concerns that technology

can only be understood within broader social, historical and political

structures, I have decided to log-off and find a less conflicted soap-box.

Sorry if I have offended anyone, just a grumpy young historian in a dying

discipline flogging out-moded ideas in increasingly constricted spaces.

milkbar boy…

I liked you paper and I wish that I had have heard you presenting it. I especially like the idea of embedding your arguments of masculinity and patriarchy within the culture in which we live. All too often the Gibsonesque drones look for an escape in that barren soul-less place called ‘cyberspace’. I saw one of those awful bubble cars the other day–you know, the sort that Bikers used to piss on at the Broadford rallys–and it had the word”Cyber” blazoned along it’s side. Now there is Cyberspace. Surely there is more room in a HR Manaro?

I’m not sure if I’m a big fan of Fukuyama either. There is a great book by an Australian named Keith Windshuttle The Killing of History: How a Discipline is being Murdered by Literary Theory and Cultural Critics. The past and history are two different things. The past is just there, but history is something that allot of dedicated people spend years scraping through dusty archives to support an argument or empower some group, be they conservative, liberals, or lefties. The thing that makes History different than all other disciplines is that it requires the weight of evidence to support the seeking of truths. The history department at Melb Uni is ironically called “The Department of History and Women’s Studies”. History is the solution, not the problem. It is the lack of History that is the problem. A lack of History means that all these young boof-head Kennett clones get around thinking they are hip when really they look like Duran Duran or Culture Club or some other 80s relic. Now this is tragic. No one owns the past as no one owns history. History is political and this is why Henry Reynolds helped win the Mabo case. It is the lack if History that makes us patriarchal or capitalist or whatever. Now I remember a country where rabid right-wing red-necks had to read a few books before they took public positions….such a long time ago.

His-story

I’m a big fan of Margaret Verthein’s The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace also (but you forgot to put quotation marks around her work cited).I think that the most pertinent questions to ask about any medium is what can its use tell us about the state of the culture and society in which we actually live today? Of course the medium, be it VR or Film or whatever is going to be used for commercial purposes because this is the nature of the country in which we live, possible the most deeply conservative Western nation at the moment. I was talking to an author the other day about the quality of some of the discussion surrounding new media.

People have been grappling with the ‘real’ and the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ or whatever for a millennium. Knowledge is something that is built upon other knowledge and VR did not come out of nowhere, it comes out of our culture, it is acculturated and is built upon a rich history that is worth exploring. Possible the reason that VR is not being used for other purposes is because of the demographic in which it is situated. Most people who deal in text, someone like Christopher Koch…one of Australia’s
most renown authors, would be lucky to have earn’t 20K last year. Why is this? A book is VR.

There are about twenty thousand PR people in Australia, yet 10 years ago there were only 400 professional historians.. now there are only 200. Why is this? If you use any medium to enrich, to empower, or to actually give something back then you will always be marginal in a society like ours. Who watches SBS? Technology follows culture and although culture is informed by technology it is not determinist. It is a US centric didactic arrogance that says that Australians are incapable of independent minds. Technology as progress is a very old-fashion 50s notion, well suited to Howard’s battlers. Technology as past…now this is avant garde…….

When I was at battler school, in North West Tasmania…a state that this century has reaped extinction on not only the Tasmanian Tiger but also an entire race of people (Trugennini was the last Tasmanian Aboriginal and Terrance was the last Tasmanian Tiger) I learnt that you need a complete unit before you can call it one. Very simple really, half a unit is 0.5 and three quarters is 0.75. A unit is not one unit until it is complete ie. the end of January is only one twelfth of the year and a child is not one year old until she has been on the earth for twelve months. So, what I don’t understand is why when nine units have passed, that we now call it ten? How come at the end of 1999 years that we now count 2000 or when only 99 years of a century has passed that we say 100? I suppose that this is indicative of the truth versus popular opinion, or if you get enough people to believe something, that it becomes the truth…(like that there could be such a thing as a popular elected president under the Westminster system or that technology is the only agent of change, like many of the Internet-preachers tell us). I am still waiting for that computer-led leisure society so depicted in the 1970’s. The only people who share in this dream now are the unemployed.

I only have 19 dollars to spend on booze tonight, perhaps I can convince the barman that I really have twenty.

more to come….