I am an Internet junkie. I'm a techno-believer and an information age addict. I think navigating and, to a degree, inhabiting the Internet is as important as other critical life skills like whittling, changing a tire, building a lean-to, reading and French kissing. I will argue until I die (and judging from the amount of time I spend in front of a computer screen, that may be quite soon) that the most progressive communities on the planet are, at this point, virtual.
Sure, talking shop on message boards, forums and blogs is just an extension of the water cooler, café, local 'zine, etc., but with the welcome addition of a substantially expanded experience base. Going global allows any small community to be turned on its head by a potentially constant influx of observations, hierarchies, traditions and biases. Burning Man may manifest as a physical city of more than 30,000 people for only a week at a time, but it's an online teeming metropolis of many more than that year 'round, complete with ideological struggles, political machinations and good neighbors. The Center for Art and Visual Culture and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center plan to release a book this Spring detailing their project:
Museums of Tomorrow, A Virtual Discussion
. It is probably the most salient, engaging contemporary document about the museum as a dynamic in society that exists today, and it's a conversation that happened entirely over the Internet.
I do sometimes wake up at night in what I'm pretty sure is actual cold sweat with nightmarish visions of the total loss of human contact. Not just on a personal level-I still have people around who care enough about me to drag me out of my office and my home-based web-hole long enough to get some sun on my atrophied-white ass-but I have shuddering visions of annoying teen-aged mall store managers as digital avatars and terrifying "hyperlink" dinner parties where everyone is click-tasting around a make-believe banquet table while trembling at the crusted edges of their feeding tubes from the "comfort" of a Microsoft
Isolation Tank. Then, in the morning while negotiating brutish and homicidal Santa Fe drivers en route to work, I begin to wonder if an isolation tank would be all that bad.
But if actual communities-you know, with visionary leadership like a mayor who passionately addresses the citizens about carving a bold future and a civic leadership engaged in the dynamic cultural evolution of the community (obviously we're speaking hypothetically here)-were to take a cue from the strategies behind progressive online communities, some very intriguing things could happen. "Wiki-wiki" is Hawaiian for "quick" and the shortened "Wiki" has been appropriated as a name for virtual communities which share the graphic interface of a website, but where every user has the capability to make changes to any given page. It is immediate, direct-action democracy of the simplest order. Wiki is really a sub-category of "Open Source," a theory primarily concerned with quality in computer software. Open Source proponents have proven that when a piece of software is released from proprietary restrictions and any programmer who fancies can take a shot at refining the code, it rapidly approaches perfection and, if the project is interesting enough, it continues to evolve at an extremely high level of refinement. Imagine millions of copy editors combing a document for errors-very quickly there are none and the discussion moves on to improving elements of style and clarity. Open Source software has so far proven to be much more stable and innovative than private, corporate, secret software. And it rewards proactive involvement.
Imagine it in terms of art. It's like
The Gong Show
, only when you don't like the way someone's act is turning out, you don't get to just hit the gong, you've got to step up to the stage and improve the performance yourself. You don't like somebody's painting, but you think the basic idea is worthwhile? Make it better. What if our entire community had access to the bylaws, board minutes and programming schedules of every non-profit art and presenting organization in town? How long would it take the arts community and audience-working independently, a few minutes at a time, but as an inherently democratic force-to trim the fat, optimize local fundraising and entirely eliminate mission overlap?
How about local government? What if Santa Fe's ordinances were cored of bad code the way a group of hackers attack an inefficient bit of freeware? Why bother with committees of pork-obsessed legislators at the State level when the fine-tuning necessary to create a well-rounded and fair piece of legislation could be a hotlinked bit of tweakage away from every citizen's desktop?
Okay, so not every citizen has the luxury of online participation either in terms of physical assets or time. It's also true that not every citizen cares enough to participate. But to hell with those people-If the best they can do is to show up every four years and check the president box that Fox News or NPR or their dad told them to, well, they've already effectively given up their right to participate.
But what about that human contact bit…what about something tangible to inspire the technophobes and give us all something to do when we crawl out of our isolation chambers?
How about we start small and designate three City-owned areas as Santa Fe Free Zones, modest plots of land where architects, artists, landscapers, bricklayers, yurt lovers-whoever wants to, can go and create infill communities; groupings of residential, commercial and open space. The caveat to crazy citizens would be that they plan it and pay for it and the resulting project must be mixed-use and beat affordability standards in perpetuity. The caveat for the City would be that they give the land away and the projects aren't inhibited by any code beyond basic safety. It would be freestyle architectural mayhem, chaotic urban planning by mob rule with the most thoughtful refinements from the most engaged constituents filtering to the top.
We've considered amnesty for immigrants, seat belts for dogs and leashes for cats, so, you know, there's precedent for wacky ideas. In the best-case scenario we become a cutting-edge attraction for young, energetic, proactive art types wanting to find affordable access into Santa Fe. What's the worst case? A "TetherTown" balloon city populated by hippies? We can always just pull up their moorings and use the property to build more isolation tanks.
