Dark Fiber/Planeta.com

Dark Fiber
a review by Ron Mader

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On the heels of The Language of New Media, MIT has published another ground-breaking book about Internet Culture: Dark Fiber by Geert Lovink.

Dark fiber is optical fiber infrastructure (cabling and repeaters) that is currently in place but is not being used. It's a brilliant metaphor for the ideas that are covered in this book.

A brilliant thinker working at the intersection of net criticism and social activism, Lovink has figured prominently in cyberculture for the past decade. He discusses the rise and fall of dotcom mania, the erosion of email, debates over a common Internet time standard, virtual communities, and the clashes and synergies among governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Excerpts from Dark Fiber

After discovery and colonization, what remains is the socialization of cyberspace. (p. 2)
One of the steps in this process is the recognition of the importance of arts and culture in IT (Information Technology) and the implementation of a cultural policy of new media, which consists of more than installing a few terminals in technologically deprived social spaces. It is not about bringing computers inside the museum or digitizing cultural heritage. What is at stake here is the acceptance that we are living in an "technological culture." (p. 11)
Electronic mailing lists are described as "Internet based discussion groups (as opposed to one-directional distribution lists) ... Going back to the mid 1960s, electronic lists are considered a low-tech, cheap and open way to exchange information and arguments. They often results into a (virtual) community. (p. 70)
On mailing lists the moderation issue is the most sensitive topic ... In most cases the "moderator" is also the "list owner," the person who owns the password to change the list configuration. The list owner can switch the list from open-unmoderated to closed-filtered, let email go through with or without attachments, let people from outside the list have the possibility to post, etc. A good moderator is first of all a facilitator, inviting people off list to post their material or opinion on certain topics. List facilitators are always on the look for relevant, new content, spurring up debates and cooling them down if they end in flame wars. (p. 71)
The legacy of our inherited 19th-century temporal model segmenting the planet into 24 separate time zones (and two simultaneous dates) increasingly no longer fits well with our nascent third-millennium global temporal perceptions ... Wading more deeply into a post-wired world and digitally networked future, 24 time zones are increasingly being seen by many as being 23 too many. (p. 142)
It seems that new media conferences ought not to raise controversies. A successful event generates a cloud of expectations and good feelings ... One keynote lecture after another, with a panel session to answer some of the questions, that's it. Experts, put in random panels, working in wildly different areas, not knowing each other's work, have little to exchange, let along to argue about. After a while audiences stop visiting such gatherings. (pp. 244-245)
Critical media scholars such as Noam Chomsky show no interest in new media. The same counts for Neil Postman and other "media ecology" defenders of book culture. Cultural studies has so far mainly been dealing with MTV television/pop culture. This rough picture is slowly changing, but the introduction of critical cyber texts and their authors still takes a long time. (p. 246)
Jesse Hirsch, a Toronto-based net activist, once said at the 1999 Next Five Minutes 3 conference that while e-commerce was moving economic activity from the actual to the virtual environment, it was going to be the task of activists to bring the virtual back to the actual. (p. 248)
The early NGO critiques focused on high overhead costs and salaries, internal power struggles and the misuse of funds collected by the innocent, well-meaning middle class citizenry. This process took place inside the ecological movement throughout the 1980s, and soon this managerial "corporate" approach would reach all "independent" organizations dealing with arts, culture and politics. But then the Berlin Wall fell and numerous NGOs moved into Eastern Europe, created from this "corporate-style" model. There it became really visible what the NGO was in essence all about. They are a response to downsized governments, replacing old bureaucracies while creating new ones, a process typical for the post-ideological global times. A new European saying goes like this: "We no longer work for the Party, we work for the organization." In Western Europe NGO critique never really took off -- or at least not up to this moment. The autonomous movements of the 1970s and 1980s were falling apart and their remains had turned into small NGOs themselves, even the most radical and dogmatic ones. The long march to become an Organization. (p. 298)
Most money is still made with software, infrastructure and access, not with content. The interest of venture capitalists in cultural content is next to zero, with little or no cash returns or profit in sight. (p. 332)