Late To The Party, Again ------------------------ Blame the Boomers. Growing up as I did in the aftermath of the 1960s, my teenage years were overshadowed by the sense that I had arrived too late on the scene, just missing out on grand and glorious bacchanal that was the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius. And, for a time, those burned out ex-hippies wouldn't ever let me or anyone else forget it, as, looking forever back through their rose-coloured granny glasses, they relentlessly celebrated their lost youth and fading wonderfulness. Or so it seemed. And though it's not really true - I do, sometimes, arrive on time - the pervading sense of having missed out, of perpetually showing up late, has stayed with me and coloured much of my experience in the years since. A couple of weeks ago I was chatting with Shauna, Oliver and Nick about a project we're working on, to restore, document and preserve one of the earliest media art websites in Canada, ANIMA, which came online in January 1994. Despite living in the same city as its progenitors and being only one or two degrees of separation removed, I don't think I was aware of it at the time. Which, fair enough. Media art wasn't at all my thing back then. ANIMA was a directory of sorts, its links now a veritable graveyard of very early art-related web sites. The ghosts of some live on, more or less, in the Internet Archive, though for many others these listings may be the only remaining trace of their existence. But, surprisingly, some small number of linked sites have lasted these thirty years and more. A notable example of which, Oliver mentioned, was the online journal CTheory [1]. Surely I must have heard of it? It was edited by noted Canadian cultural critics and media theorists Arthur and Marilouise Kroker [2] ... ... who, it transpired, were faculty at the university where I work ... ... retired now, (and Marilouise Kroker has since passed away), but were a notable presence on campus for the first 15 years I worked there ... ... led a research institute called Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture (PACTAC) that did all kinds of interesting things [3] ... ... who wrote about stuff I am now super interested in, about how computers and networks are transforming society, subjectivity, and humanity ... ... who were associates of Bruce Sterling, and lots of other interesting folks, some of whose names I recognize ... ... and whose digital archives (CTheory, CTheory Books, PACTAC Videos) are hosted in a couple of digital asset management systems my department is responsible for maintaining, on the technical operations side ... [4] ... Nope. Can't say I ever heard of them. Bloody hell, late again. Totally missed the PACTAC party. But I guess, better late than never. There's a wealth of amazing work here. Over the holidays I've been dipping into the rather large collection of material, starting with some early issues of CTheory and a couple of the Kroker's early books (_Spasm_ and _Hacking the Future: Stories for the Flesh-Eating 90s_). One of their essays, "Slumming in Gopherspace", I couldn't resist posting here in my gopherhole.[5] I dig the idea that we're all squatters in long-abandoned "empty pixel hallways", our makeshift spaces constructed out of fallen data beams. And then there's this: The 90s began with a decisive split between two opposing political tendencies: the triumphant technotopia of the virtual class, and diverse forms of retro-fascism. Like a rapidly mutating cellular mass, this split was of extremely short duration, lasting only four years from start to finish before it evolved into something very different. Under the impact of a /managed/ worldwide economic depression (that drove working- and middle class adherents of welfare state liberalism towards right wing populism), and the failure of the so-called "information superhighway" to live up to its utopian billing (that drove members of the technological class into the waiting game of bunker individualism - the psychological breeding ground of conservative fundamentalism), these two previously divided, and bitterly opposed, movements suddenly merged. Their combination in the ideological form of retro-techno, which is to say the merger of the fiscally conservative, morally puritanical, and anti-government populist energies of the right with the technocratic know-how of the virtual class, this merger of reactionary politics and techno-knowledge, produces the dominant ideology of the 90s ... Today, the political right is actually authoring the Operating System of society.[6] And I am left, dumbfounded, with the thought that although this probably would have made no sense at all to me had I read it back when it was written, it's all quite remarkably lucid, in the flickering, failing light of our present moment. References ---------- 1. CTheory Archives https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/index 2. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker https://web.archive.org/web/20190125070615/http://krokers.net/ 3. PACTAC https://web.archive.org/web/20190119220153/http://pactac.net/ 4. CTheory Archives, PACTAC Videos https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/6168 5. Slumming in Gopherspace gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/jdd/slumming_in_gopherspace.txt 6. Arthur & Marilouise Kroker. Hacking The Future, Stories For The Flesh-Eating 90s. Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1996 p. 141-142 http://hdl.handle.net/1828/7133 Sat Jan 10 16:39:31 PST 2026