Doin’ their best do what they can getting them ready for Vietnam

In the September 1998 issue of ‘Blueprint’, Sadie Plant wrote a short essay entitled "Network Wars." In it, she posits a new metaphor for web structure: the Vietcong tunnels at Cu Chi, near Saigon. Built to provide shelter storage and logistic support during a period of intense enemy attack, the system could function if parts were breached, with a vast network of alternative routes. As a network, it could not be destroyed, or understood as a static structure.

"The US military likened the network to the new York subway. But there was to be a better link than this. One year after the Tet Offensive came ARPANET."

The story of the development of a military communications network where security of transmission was ensured by decentralisation is too familiar to be retold here: what is of interest is the need which Plant feels to give the Internet an alternative genealogy, to wrest the overall metaphor from U.S. military/corporate structures and to associate the internet with the oppositional. Utopian overestimation ("the Net has the potential to extend its routes to every person, every point in the world…") sits side by side with a call for the subversion of its conventions. The originating metaphor is a powerful spur, which is why the origin of the net as a military Cold War technology is constantly repressed.

The lyrical virtual body fantasies of William Gibson, for example, function as an organising paradigm. A.I. theory, cyberpunk evangelism, and a distaste for the actual sordid flesh body combine. The legend/ontology of the net becomes a fictional construct. An experience, which more often than not consists of typing, looking at a small screen, and clicking graphic switches takes on quasi-transcendental qualities. Plants’ warfare analogy creates a sense of shelter, survival, electric gypsies taking over space and making new kinds of connections.

The warfare analogy for me rings more truly in the context of Paul Virilios’ polemics on speed, destruction of real space-time, and the endo-colonisation processes of globalisation.

"Making information resonate globally, which is necessary in the age of the great planetary market, is in many ways going to resemble the practices and uses of military intelligence, and also political propaganda and its excesses. […]The emergence of a new kind of tele-vision; a television which no longer has the task of informing or entertaining the mass of viewers, but of exposing and invalidating individuals’ domestic space, like a new form of lighting, which is capable of revolutionising the notion of the neighbourhood unit, or of a building or a district."