Personally, I am not very paranoid. I am inclined to think that you don't need to invoke conspiracies to explain the vast quantity of stupidity, oppression, and injustice in the world; "business as usual" and the everyday functioning of corporations and bureaucracies is enough to account for it all. I've looked at Dean's and Flieger's books; I would agree that they are pointing to something that does have a real presence in contemporary popular culture, just because the pace and magnitude of technological change, combined with the power of elites, gives reasons why the idea of conspiracy is so prevalent in so many minds. I enjoy The X-Files, but I was a bigger fan of Chris Carter's other TV show, Millennium (I don't know whether this showed in Croatia; it only played in the US for 3 seasons, never got good ratings, and was then cancelled). Millennium was a little different than The X-Files, because its main trope was not conspiracy-theory paranoia, but a kind of religious mania and metaphysical anxiety. As for Pynchon: his most recent, and I believe, greatest book, Mason & Dixon, pretty much renounces the paranoia of Gravity's Rainbow. Zoran Roško: In Croatia we've had only The X-Files on tv. If you are not paranoic enough, maybe that's so because you are informationhysteric too much ( I'm just kidding ).What reviews, magazines and journals are you reading and like the most? Have you discovered some new exciting web-sites or e-journals lately. Are you a victim of the information overload yet, or, in other terms, are you capable to download the Silence?
4.13 Möbius strip. A Möbius band is defined as “a surface with only one side and only one boundary component.” Image shared by photographer David Benbennick under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.
I wonder whether information overload and The Silence aren't really the same thing-the excess of too much, and the subtlety of almost-nothing (since when all is silent you find yourself hearing the silence itself ) might be the two interconnecting moebius-strip sides of the same thing. Zoran Roško: Have you jumped to any "conclusions" considering netart, digital art, tele-art, hypertextual fiction (and the theory behind it, for example Roy Ascott's)? Do you consider it as the NEW BIG THING ? I'd say we should always beware of the NEW BIG THING, which is usually just an effect of marketing. Or, to put the same idea differently, in a "postmodern" age where everything new is instantly commodified, where continual "innovation" is itself the way the system of control reproduces itself and thereby remains the same, that maybe the strategy to adopt is not one of being the next big thing, but of flying under the radar as it were, of moving so stealthily and so close to the ground that you don't get noticed. Zoran Roško: In your texts, you are writing about My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, Bjork, Prince etc and in this conversation you said that you are finding more inspiration in music than in theory, at least lately. In "Spasm" the Krokers said that "music rules today as a dominant ideogram of power.. [ that it is ] a real ruling labaratory of the age of sacrificial power... the key code of the postmodern body as a war machine" and that "sampler technology is the forward Reality Hackers : Appendices : Participants
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