DYNAMICS OF CRITICAL INTERNET CULTURE
69
CHAPTER THREE THE AMSTERDAM DIGITAL CITY GLORY AND DEMISE OF A COMMUNITY NETWORK
Power of a Metaphor The Amsterdam Digital City (1993-2001) has been one of Europe’s largest and well known independent community Internet projects. It was a ‘freenet,’ made up of free dial- up access, free email and webspace, within which many online communities formed. As one of its founders I have lectured and written about de digitale stad (DDS) on numerous occasions.1 In the introduction I have explained more about my personal involvement in this project. Not having to run the daily operations but still dedicated to certain aspects, this relative distance gave me the freedom to report and theorize about the inner workings of such a large system with tens of thousands of users. The Digital City Amsterdam did not intend to be a representation of the real city. Nor was it expressing a need to catch up with the global economic dynamics. In this case the city concept was used as a metaphor.2 Ever since the rise of computer networks there has been a desire to ‘spatialise’ virtual environments. The ‘cyberspace’ concept is a prime example of a powerful space metaphor. The name Digital City appealed to the imagination of thousands of users. Although maps were provided to assist in the navigation of the Digital City webspace, the city metaphor was used in a restrained way. The spatialization was neither a representation of a computer network nor a simulation of an actual city. The reference to the urban environment should rather be read as city being the prime space of culture. ‘City’ referred to a conceptual density that in its turn results into diversity and debate. Compact, compressed spaces are where culture is born from, not the vast and empty deserts (with dispersed homepages here and there). The collective mapping of complex community spaces was seen as an act of culture-in-the-making. The
1. Research presented here draws from my ongoing collaboration with Patrice Riemens. Material for this chapter has been partially based on the following (English) publications: “Creating a Virtual Public, The Digital City Amsterdam, in Mythos Information: Welcome to the Wired World, Catalogue of the Ars Electronica Festival, Karl Gerber, Peter Weibel (ed.), Springer Verlag, Wien-New York, 1995, pp. 180-185; “The Monkey’s Tail: The Amsterdam Digital City Three and a Half Years Later,” in Possible Urban Worlds: Urban Strategies at the End of the 20th Century, INURA (ed.), Birkhäuser Verlag, BaselBoston- Berlin, 1998, pp. 180-185 (earlier version posted on Nettime, June 16, 1997); “Amsterdam Public Digital Culture: Contradictions among User Profiles” (together with Patrice Riemens), posted on Nettime, July 20, 1998; “Amsterdam Public Digital Culture 2000” (with Patrice Riemens), in RiskVoice, 002, Stiftung Risiko-Dialog, St. Gallen, pp. 1-8, October, posted on Nettime, August 19, 2000. Another version, in German, appeared in the Telepolis web magazine: http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/special/ sam/6970/1.html. Much of my thinking about DDS goes back to an unrealized hypertext project from early 1995 in which I mapped the (critical) DDS discourse. Other related material in the interview I did with Michael van Eeden, DDS sys-op and founder of the Metro MOO (in Dutch), posted to Nettime-nl, November 29, 1996. Articles written in Dutch are not mentioned here. 2. This distinction between three types of digital cities is taken from P. van den Besselaar, M. Tanabe and T. Ishida, “Introduction: Digital Cities Research and Open Issues,” in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2362, 2002, pp1-9; accessed via http://www.swi.psy.uva.nl/usr/peter/peter.html.