| 1999. The numbers mean a little or they mean a lot. It all depends on whose calendar you go by. America is a land of many cultures, and as we have seen over the last decade or so, it is a country overdue for self analysis.
The Afro-Futurism zone is a place where the issues that have come to be defined as core aspects of African-American ethnicity and its unfolding in the American disappeared, replaced by a zone of electromagnetic interactions - simulations, coded exchanges of ideology... legacies of displacement translated into the binary space between the algorithms electro-modernity together. Urban culture, transitory flows of identity along the lines of flight demarcated by the streets, the lights, the sounds, the representations that hold it all together.
A long while ago a cultural theoretician by the name of W.E.B. Dubois wrote a classic text on African American identity that has parallels with today's contemporary electronicicized world. In The Souls of Black Folk, a catalog of essays and songs interwoven together by gospels and work songs of an African American community that was just then beginning to find its way out of the shadows of structural racism, endemic economic and class barriers, and a corrosive environment where human life--Indian, Hispanic, black or white--was determined strictly by the value of the amount of labor a person could produce.
Many years ago, Garret A. Morgan, the inventor of the system of signals that controls the flow of movement through the urban landscape that we just call "traffic signals" posited that light and movement, code and control, were just parts of how the urban landscape spoke its words of existence to itself - just as in cybernetics where controls systems coordinate data in a flow of information there's a parable that would highlight some of the issues I'm talking about. Today, the new streets are on-line, the new places of code configure identity in a way that highlights how far technology has outstripped the social machinery of an American reality predicated on an industrial revolution many centuries ago.
One day Morgan saw an accident between a horse carriage and a then unfamiliar vehicle - an automobile. People were thrown from their vehicles and strewn throughout the intersection. Modernity had clashed with the past, and chaos was the only result. So Morgan went home and thought about the urban landscape and came up with a system for regulating movement. The rest, as people can see anywhere in the world, is history.
"It's a peculiar sensation," DuBois wrote long ago, 'this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness - an American, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder...." There are parallels in-line/on-line to the same psychological conditions Dubois wrote of so long ago, but the racial content of his observations has become etherialzed and has spread throughout the milieu I like to call electro-modernity.
Several years ago, the acclaimed psychologist, Sherry Turkle wrote a collection of essays called The Second Self, in which she posited that life on-line/in-line was part of a psychological environment where people created identities based on their interaction with the electronic environment of internet culture, a place she called an "identity workshop." As Turkle wrote in her essay "Constructions and Reconstructions of the Self in Virtual Reality": "watch for a nascent culture of virtual reality that is paradoxically a culture of the concrete, placing new saliency on the notion that we construct gender and that we become what we play, argue about, and build..." On-line culture is a social and psychological world configured first and foremost by the codes and algorithms of a cybernetic syntax--a system for creating codes that are first and foremost utilitarian, and meant to be used as components in a larger framework. In short--pretty much everything you encounter on-line is part of a structure where identity (as code, as representation of self, etc etc) much like the "real world" is utterly relative and based on a completely variable system of controls.
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