For a week they sat around the dining-room table in the holiday apartment and deliberated about their future. Everyone had been asked to prepare a paper to present to the others about their special interests and aspirations. Herbert submitted his thoughts about commercial sponsorship. Hans spoke about corporate identity; he admired Andy Warhol and the way he had used the aesthetic of commercial art to satirise and celebrate advertising. Peter, the plastic pop-boy, and Franco, his tall charming collaborator, talked about music and the use of multimedia, and about their desire to be pop stars, like David Bowie, the Sex Pistols or Madonna. Alberto lectured about Archigram, a 1960s collective of architects who became famous for their visions of ‘plug-in cities’.
The arduous meetings lasted for up to eighteen hours a day. The atmosphere was combative and exhausting. ‘We were searching for ideas, but it was no fun at all,’ Peter recalls. ‘The process of creating a group with these people who are so different was very strenuous.’ For Alberto, the very impossibility of agreement was the purpose. ‘It was a test, whether we could manage to spend one week together. It had a symbolic character,’ he recalls. Herbert taped all the meetings with a cheap video camera, convinced that they would later have some historical value – and because they all wanted a record of them in case arguments broke out in the future about what had been agreed.
The group acknowledged that, in this ‘multimedia’ world, becoming ‘pop stars’ or just being ‘artists’ would not necessarily guarantee their success. They spent hours discussing their collective view that the world was undergoing a ‘multimedialisation’ – by which they meant that the separate disciplines of text, images and sound were collapsing together, since all now relied to a greater or lesser degree on computers. The co-operation between artists of different media was required. They saw the success of manufactured boy-bands and avant-garde art groups as a demonstration of the need for some kind of collaboration. Also they had all witnessed the power of their combined forces in the clubs that Herbert had so avidly formed in previous years: the HIRN-lein, the Society for the Professional Use of the Amiga and – to a lesser degree – Elastic Worldwide 4D.
Instead of a club they decided to form a corporation. Says Juri, ‘We were kids who pretended we were doing business.’ Previous generations might have blanched at such a commercial take on youth rebellion. But this group felt no guilt. Capitalism dominated the world and had just ‘won’ the Cold War; the Berlin Wall had crumbled only a few years before. Indeed, brands – of sneakers, in fashion and music – were often the heroic icons of the moment. ‘We were fascinated by multinational corporations – millions of people, one name, one brand. Like Sony,’ says Alberto, who especially admired anything Japanese.
For these young men it was as if there was no alternative to ‘a company’ as an engine of ideas, cultural change and defiant rebellion. The bickering, political correctness of the Old Left in the squat and in the radical Anna Göldin-Gymnasium was hardly a compelling alternative. Indeed it was clear that the furthering of their opinions would be better done by creating a corporation and a brand than by employing the outdated and singular methods of music, art or literature. This was how to triumph in the nineties.
It was as if they were going to turn on its head the behaviour of big-brand corporations that ‘steal’ the cool of rebel music and the élan of street fashion for marketing their burgers, sneakers and clothes. As a lyric of Peter’s favourite band, Chumbawamba, said, ‘They think it is funny turning rebellion into money’. Now Herbert and his friends were going to steal from the power of the dominant corporate ideal and turn it to their own defiant ends. And if it could make some kind of profit too, then all the better.
The boys set out to codify this ‘just do it’ philosophy into the constitution of their corporation. But they could not finally do away with the collectivist ideology employed by the protesters and squatters. They agreed that on the inside they were to be a collective, that no one would have any hierarchical power over any other, that everything was to be agreed by democratic vote. Once a rule was agreed it would be followed like a corporate diktat, and policed with determined and aggressive diligence. The first rule to be instituted was that no one was allowed to eat during meetings – it was considered ‘unprofessional’.
Despite this theoretical agreement, in practice Herbert exerted his influence. ‘He was very much in the centre of the group because he established the rules,’ remembers Franco. ‘He was the only one that still had energy at the end of the day, when everybody else was totally exhausted. These were the moments where his opinion got accepted by the rest of the group.’
Since part of the group would be living in Vienna and the others in Zürich, they also discussed their modus operandi. They felt that they were in need of what they called a ‘virtual office-system’. Juri, the hacker, suggested that they might use the Internet rather like a special kind of phone or fax machine, for swapping information – just a boring utility. Like most of the rest of the world, the others had little idea what the Internet was. By 1994, the Internet still had a comparatively small number of people connected to it, and the majority of those in the backwaters of the scientific-research community, in the corporate offices of Silicon Valley, or in localised enclaves, like the rave scene in San Francisco.
Juri knew his way around the Internet, but it was far from simple. The software that was used, such as it was, had been written inside the academic computer-science community and was not really intended for the average home-user. Getting online was hard in itself, and asked for dogged determination. Modems were expensive and their installation involved the typing in of many seemingly random and complicated series of numbers and letters, user names, and passwords. Mistyping meant failure to connect, with no friendly error-message – often just a blank screen. The difficulty of the logging-on process cloaked a uniquely powerful network that was about to leap into the public consciousness.
The network’s success owes much to one man, Jon Postel. By 1994, he had twenty years’ experience – first as a graduate student and eventually as a professor – writing and editing a number of key documents that formed the foundations of the Internet. These described how computers would be able to communicate with each other. The Internet is not so much a radical new technology but rather a set of brilliantly written rules that computer scientists call Standards. These rules are consistently applied by all computers across the network; without a set of Standards computers live on the Tower of Babel, unable to speak to each other because they do not share a common language. Like the internationally agreed size for cargo containers, or the regulations of the Universal Postal Union, Internet Standards are not especially complicated – but when the network grew large and ubiquitous it became an extraordinarily powerful way of trading information.
The first Standards were written in the late 1960s in response to the request by an obscure research agency, the Applied Research Projects Agency (ARPA), associated with the American Defense Department, that wanted, apart from anything else, to communicate at a time of war. Since then the Standards have been improved and clarified through a loose network of computer academics and consultants, nurtured and corralled by Postel and a few others. To begin with, the few constitutionally appointed organisations and the culture were very much in line with the T-shirt slogan of one of the central bodies, ‘We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.’
The Economist once proclaimed that, ‘If the Net does have a god, he is probably Jon Postel’ – and, with his long hair, bushy white beard and open-toed sandals, he does have the look of an Old Testament prophet. This Professor of Computing at the University of Southern California was a product of the hippy movement, and the key Internet Standard, the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), of which he was the co-author, chimed with his personality. Enshrined within the code was a dislike of central authorities and the promotion of individual freedom. Previously computer networks and telephone systems had depended on a central commanding authority – even making a local telephone call requires dialling a central exchange, which then routes the call back to the receiver. The US military thought this was a vulnerable way of setting up a communication system. The network that TCP/IP governed was to have none of this.
The Standards of the Internet were to eschew this kind of centrality. It was to be a network