REFERENCE
Gozzi, R., Jr. (2001). A brief history of Internet time. ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 58, 470.
Nathalia Rogers
Dowling College, rogersn@dowling.edu
Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture, by Geert Lovink. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2002. ISBN 0-262-12249-9 cloth, 7 × 9, 394 pp., Electronic Culture Series.
The book is a collection of 25 essays by the author on various aspects of Internet culture,
written between 1996 and 2001. The term Dark Fiber in the title of the book refers to unused
fiber-optic cable laid in anticipation of future growth and commonly leased to individuals or
companies who must provide their own systems to make use of it. How this relates to the con-
tent of the book is left up to the reader to interpret. The reviewer’s interpretation is that cul-
ture, art, and political activism ride on the dark fiber of the Internet, whereas its backbone is
dominated by mainstream media and the corporate agendas. Geert Lovink is a prominent fig-
ure in cyber culture and new media art, with the street wisdom of a former squatter and a radi-
cal postmodern intellect who has been active over a decade as founder of magazines, online
community networks, temporary media labs and intellectual forums, organizer of confer-
ences on media art, and book author.
The core theme of the book is the impact of the Internet on social and political activism,
alternative media, and the interplay among the corporate, technical, and social agendas. For
example, in “Travelogues,” essays focus on media arts and culture in countries such as Alba-
nia (after the collapse of 1998), Taiwan (after the earthquake in 1999), and Delhi, India (at
the opening of the New Media Center Sarai, 2001, on the advisory board of which the author
serves). In “Towards a Political Economy,” the focus is on interpretations of the dotcom hys-
teria of the late 1990s and its outcomes. In “Reality Check,” the discussion is about media
arts, and the dynamics of the associated social networks, both in cyberspace and in physical
space.
Social and political activists have made use of the Internet as a means to disseminate news
and ideologies associated with existing movements. This is the first level of “net activism.”
Campaigning and connecting people from different contexts is the second level. The third
level involves purely virtual protests mounted over the Internet, causing virtual losses to cor-
porations such as counterbranding. Lovink is, however, disappointed that the full potential of
the new medium has not been realized, in part because the economic and legal boundaries of
the net are determined by nation states and telecom giants.
It is interesting to note how during the Iraq war, as this review was being written, informa-
tion about the war from multiple points of view, both in national media (such as the BBC) and
in alternative sources (such as ZNet), was readily accessible over the Internet, dealing a deci-
sive blow to the CNN monopoly on the news and the army’s control of information flow via
the new concept of embedded journalism. Why there was an abrupt halt to the English-lan-
guage web site of Al-Jazeera during the war is anyone’s guess. The book’s essay on the war
in Kosovo was indeed prophetic of what was to happen in the Iraq war.
Thanks to the Net, there is no limit to the availability of the counterinformation required
for being informed in a well-rounded fashion. Such information is useful, however, only to
those who have the time to look for and digest it. Tactical networks, the online networks for
142 SOCIAL SCIENCE COMPUTER REVIEW

social organization and mobilization, are forced to operate within the parameters of global
capitalism.
To what extent can the new media facilitate new ways of political participation and
thereby renew politics by offering efficient ways of political participation? The Net is indeed
testing the will of political establishments to open up on the Net and to promote a participa-
tory democracy at a much larger scale than ever previously known since the Athenian
democracy. This is not only an opportunity, but also a threat, as information and propaganda
on the Net are much harder to control, unlike that over traditional media. Will it ever come to
the point that the new media actually replaces politics, by becoming the primary stage of
political discourse?
According to the author, online communities and the communal Internet have spawned
mailing list communities and Usenet newsgroups embody and reflect the aesthetics of text.
The social networks created via e-mail have a lifecycle: They are exciting initially but then
the limitation of online communication steps in and participants lose interest. E-mail is fast,
but e-mail overload has made it difficult for us to keep up with the communication flow, to
the extent that e-mail can often be slower than regular physical mail. Excess of e-mail does
not speed up communication, it slows it down. Spam is making things even worse. Time is
again the limiting resource in electronic communication.
In relation to electronic arts, the author discusses communities that are naturally tied to
the Net. Impediments are that they are in need of space outside of institutional control (of the
state or of the corporations). The need to meet in real space is present; actual production is
best done face-to-face. Also the tensions that easily build up in virtual worlds must be
resolved face-to-face. Virtual meetings, on the other hand, are good for discussing and pre-
paring. Transition of social groups into cyberspace is poorly understood, and research into it
is as important as research on the technology of the Net.
The author states that cultural content on the Net is dominated by corporations. The vast
majority of Net users passively consume Internet information. Culture has been reduced to
“innocent commodified technotainment,” manifesting itself through ever more channels, but
at the same time with ever less real content and impact. Synthetic and systematic analysis of
the facts is shifted to the viewer. A prediction is made that the current state of affairs will
result in a sudden realization that the viewer is being tricked, causing a “rage against the
machine” and the implosion of media. Global media is now the battleground of infowars,
which is where actual wars are fought as well. The Iraq war is an example. The alternative
public sphere is shrinking, and the Internet has not been able to compensate. The official
media have long pursued the Orwellian view of censorship in free societies: Unpopular ideas
and inconvenient facts are kept in the dark because they are deemed not newsworthy, without
any need for an official ban.
Accordingly, there is no new economy, only a process of transforming and adapting the
old economy to information technology. The author concludes that the dotcom mania’s rise
was due to a myth that the number of users and their hunger for online services would con-
tinue to grow beyond bound. After the burst of the speculative bubble around dotcoms, the
dotcom workforce became integrated into the existing corporate structures. The problem of
who will pay for the information available on the Internet and how is still open. The hacker
community that created the Internet promoted the ideology that information needs to be free.
The dotcom mania evolved separately from the cultural arm of the Internet, including the
media, the arts, and academia. It is still the case that money is made with technology, not con-
tent. There is no word of the neglect of social policies and public education or the decline of
the public sphere. Open, decentralized citizen networks have no place in the Internet econ-
omy. The Free Software Movement assumes that its members have a regular income from
BOOK REVIEWS 143