Hans searched for a name that would match his aspirations and chose to become agent.BRAINHARD. Herbert called himself agent.ZAI and for years afterwards would symbolically spell it for journalists, Zoo, America, Idiot. Alberto used Gramazio; Franco chose Esposto; Juri opted for Udatny and Thomas became Kubli. Henceforth they would only be known by these titles, except on occasions when the group swapped names to confuse journalists. Despite the boys’ real names being easily available on the Web, Zai still sweats with anger when journalists reveal his.
As time wore on, the boys’ intonation and vocabulary sounded increasingly similar; this, along with their orange jackets and skinheads and interchangeable names, ensured that it became nearly impossible for anyone to tell them apart. In some ways they were merging into a single character, played out by seven individuals, their own identities more and more difficult to distinguish. In uniformity, the etoy group found a salve for their explosive egos, because, as Zai explains, ‘It prevented members from putting their individual characters into the foreground. No one could stick out, and this guaranteed the group’s equilibrium; it solved several problems at once. That the members were interchangeable was good for the art aspect also.’
Submitting to the company was a painful process that most of the group did not enjoy, but they were prisoners of ambition and friendship. ‘It was a collective decision,’ Brainhard (formerly the blustering poet Hans) remembers. ‘It was, in a very cool way, radical, experimental and completely crazy.’ They all thought they were playing an ‘edge game’ pushing ideas about identity and technology to their limits in the hope of provoking a response both from the world’s staid institutions and from their peers, who they dreamed of as their fans. The result was a complicated intellectual construct, an absurd fantasy-world of branding that was a sort of amalgamation of a company, an artists’ club, and an absolutist sect.
They hoped also that this weird world might be able to make them a living. Like the designer of Diesel Jeans, Renzo Rosso, who piously claims, ‘We don’t sell a product, we sell a style of life’, etoy declares, ‘The notion of lifestyle is central to what we were searching for. We wanted to create our own lifestyle and sell it.’ More specifically, they wanted to sell what they called ‘Digital Lifestyle’, which would include their products, projected images and music for parties.
It was with this rigorous formation in place that etoy set forth to conquer Ars Electronica, determined to make their mark although still without an official role. The festival was opened in June 1995 by the Mayor of Linz and comprised, among other things, a collection of performances, including one by the New York artist and musician Laurie Anderson. There was also what the programme esoterically described as ‘an attempt to do a critical analysis of Wagner’s works on the basis of Bernard Shaw’s simultaneous reading of Wagner’s operas and Karl Marx’s Kapital.’
Heads turned as the seven orange-clad shaven-headed youths wandered the streets of Linz. ‘We staged ourselves like a boy-band, and we always drank too much,’ Zai recalls. But when they gatecrashed the gala party and tried to shock the celebrating crowd, they were received with only wry amusement from the openhearted liberals.
One of the festival events was a symposium to which a dozen speakers had been invited to share their visions of a wired future. As the programme stated, ‘no longer do we live in streets and houses alone, but also in cable channels, telegraph wires, email boxes, and global digital Net-worlds’. Zai and the gang were diligent attendees, while one of the major stars to appear was Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.
Another was John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist, now a pre-eminent defender of liberty on the Internet. In the five years prior to this Ars Electronica, he had established himself as a sort of roving ambassador, travelling the world promoting the Internet community. Some of this time had been spent as an advisor to US Vice President Al Gore and also to Newt Gingrich, yet in conflicts and court cases against the government he was often taking the side of hackers and community insiders.
In the auditorium at Ars Electronica, John Perry Barlow told the assembled mass – including the attentive etoy crew – how he had initially found his way on to the Internet, in the late 1980s. At the time he was a farmer, running a cattle ranch in Wyoming, and he had wanted to eavesdrop on a community of Grateful Dead fans – the Deadheads. Someone pointed him towards the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL), an early online service that had started in 1985 and was for the most part a collection of bulletin boards. Users could send a message to whichever board they found of particular interest, and in turn provoke responses from others in lively strings of discussion that would continue intermittently. These debates about politics, music, culture and technology were often thoughtful, erudite and long-running. As a result, the WELL was regarded for years to come as the prototypical model for all ‘online communities’.
Barlow told the audience at the festival of how he won his struggle with modems and cables to gain access to the WELL: ‘I found myself looking at the glowing yellow word “Login”, beyond which lay my future … I was delighted. I felt I had found the new locale of human community.’ Remarkably, for a community where people had no physical contact, he thought it much like his home in Pinedale, Wyoming, because its members ‘had a place [where] their hearts could remain as the companies they worked for shuffled their bodies around America. They could put down roots which could not be ripped out by forces of economic history. They had a collective stake.’
What had most intrigued Barlow was that this was a self-governing community, pioneering its own set of laws about member behaviour and applying its own sanctions against those who transgressed them. Consequently Barlow was one of the first to identify the Internet as being a place with real politics, where interest groups and individuals could struggle for power between themselves. To distinguish the Internet as an arena for social forces, power and politics, he decided to name it borrowing William Gibson’s word, cyberspace, and in so doing gave it political intent.
Almost as soon as he found cyberspace, Barlow became concerned that governments and corporations were trying to impose their will on ‘the desperadoes and mountain men and vigilantes’ of the digital Wild West. Thus in 1990 he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to defend freedom of speech online. His partner was Mitch Kapor, the man who founded Lotus Computers and who was by 1990 a bona fide member of Silicon Valley royalty. Together, Barlow and Kapor corralled a collection of their friends – some of them the founders of Sun Microsystems and Apple Computers – to sit on the board and make hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of donations. The EFF began by defending kids who were victims of an FBI crackdown on computer crime, and went on to fight attempts by the US government to impose censorship on the Internet.
With the rhetoric he used and the images he painted, Barlow positioned himself as a kind of cowboy survivalist, armed and ready to defend his cyberspace wilderness from the approaching posse of Federal forces. Barlow’s most grandiose and historic political stand came when he proclaimed himself as the Thomas Jefferson of the new world. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he wrote ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, in which he demanded that governments back off.
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear …