************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 2000 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * * * * ************************************************************** Modem primitives The word "sabotage" comes from the French word "sabot". A sabot is a wooden shoe. Sabotage's commonly accepted etymology is a story about French factory workers throwing their wooden shoes into their machines in a hopeless attempt to prevent massive unemployed caused by Industrial Revolution automation. It's a neat image, workers smashing their machines, but sabotage's genesis isn't so parsimonious. Sabotage, though the word was born out of protest against the Industrial Revolution, really traces its origin to the metaphor of the wooden shoe. It is big and clunky. What we'd call "work to rule" today, the French called sabotage in the 19th century. To sabotage really meant just doing a slow, crappy job. The Industrial Revolution's best known anti-automation movement was the British Luddite movement. The Luddites, who took their name from their leader Ned Ludd, were weavers who destroyed their automatic knitting machines. There's some debate whether the movement Quixotically sought to forestall the Industrial Revolution or simply draw attention to its dehumanizing effects. Whatever the group's goal, history and dictionaries are written by the victors. To call someone a Luddite today implies the person mindlessly opposes progress. A modern movement called the Neo Luddites seeks to revise the popular notion of the Luddite. See www.syntac.net/hoax/ludd.html for a collection of Neo Luddite readings. If you're to believe the Neon Luddite press, the Luddites of old were not mindless rough necks who believed progress was necessarily bad. They simply wanted to bring attention to their horrifying working conditions: inhuman hours working in a dangerous environment. Neo Luddites see a parallel in the Information Revolution. Like the child laborers of the Industrial Revolution, our best and brightest youths have been wildly abused. Yeah. They've been thrown into small cubicles, not much different from veal fattening pens. They're fed a steady diet of free Coke, coffee, pizza, and M&Ms. They're placed in front of computers and expected to work ten hours a day plus put in some time on Saturday. The lighting, ergonomics of the keyboard and mouse, air filtration, and electromagnetic shielding are all of questionable quality. The lure of riches from stock options that vest in two or three years time keeps them in their pens. A tech worker's sense of self-worth, happiness, emotional well being, and perceived attractiveness to the opposite sex are all based on the rising and falling of the company's share price. But what happens when the bottom falls out of Nasdaq? When you see 200 point drops every day? Right. Revolution. Maybe even a poster campaign. A few weeks ago some disgruntled dot.com types began plastering the streets of San Francisco with posters lampooning the e- commerce world. The posters featured fake web addresses like "AnythingIFoundInMyGarageForSale.com". That was one of the few clean ones. Most of the fake web page names can't be published in a Sunday newspaper. Suffice it to say they made a lot of scatological and sexual references. Word spread of the poster campaign. To help spread the message to poster campaigners in other cities, the organizers put up, of all things, a dot.com web page and made the poster art available via PDF files. Like the Hamster Dance site and Mahir's I Kiss You page, word of mouth helped make the site so popular it couldn't support the bandwidth demands. The very technology used for the technology undoing was undone by the technology they sought to undo. Follow? San Francisco, with its proximity to Silicon Valley, is a locus of strange, and sometimes, paradoxical Neo Luddite activity. This is California and things don't always have to make sense in California. The Burning Man festival, founded in 1986 by San Francisco resident Larry Harvey, is the biggest annual coming together of Neo Luddites and modem primitives. In a clothing optional environment, techies, multimedia artists, and others hunker down in the middle of a dessert over the labor day weekend. Their goal is basically to survive with minimal facilities and engage in body painting. It's like Woodstock but instead of watching Limp Bizkit the attendees burn a gigantic wooden man. Hence the name. You can learn more about Burning Man at www.burningman.com.