Customer Reviews

ReadMe! ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

"Nettime" is a mailing list for anarcho, Euro-lefty, digital-arts people. Nettime is what WIRED magazine would be if WIRED came out of a squat in East Berlin, and had no funding, no ads, no paper and no ink. Nettime is one of the few Internet lists that could generate a book worth reading. Much of this book is frankly inexplicable -- imagine cyberfeminists whose first language is Latvian discussing why Deleuze and Guattari made them start an interactive website -- but there are many gems amid the murk, and frankly, I rather enjoy a good wallow in murk-for-murk's-sake. The publisher, Autonomedia, deserves support for their unflinching devotion to zero-commercial-potential nosebleed postmodernism.

I was expecting more self-indulgence than I found here. There is, suprisingly, quite a bit of clear prose in here, mixed in with ascii art and high theory. I loved the "cooking pot markets" essay about the free circulation of ideas on the net.

This book is a gift, full of ideas and original thinking. I didn't see any of the hackneyed leftism that anti-alienation reviewer below noted. If thinking and words are not your bag, don't read any book. If you know the power of words and that ascii is the true gift of the net, then read this book!

This book is packed with words. Revenge indeed; knowledge indeed. Something really is happening on the internet, but you'll half to cast your net as wide as these far-flung correspondents if you want to limn it. Big names in net writing are here: Erik Davis, Manuel De Landa, and Mark Dery are excerpted, but a gaggle of names you've never heard of matches them word for word, writing about, munging, life on net time.

Worth it just for some of the liner notes and ascii art....

When I bought this book, I hoped to discover some fresh, practical, engaged and witty viewpoints on net culture and net politics - instead, I found a heap of old-school pomo navel gazing rhetorics, far removed from relevant action and practice. Pretty disappointing. Sympathetic, because avantgardistic and marginal? Maybe, but it'll take much more than this ivory tower in order to get things done, to raise active awareness and engagement - which we need much more than any piece of self-conceited babble. Get a life!