7

writing can be clear and accessible, but it should be made to resist the eye of the media. Fortunately this is easy to do. All
that is necessary is to make it ‘bad copy’. This is why CAE speaks in terms of general models and hypotheticals (and never
about specific actions). Not only would we not want to make specifics public for obvious reasons, but generalities (mod-
els) are not very interesting to the grand majority of the popular media audience. Models are bookish and slow, and in the
fast-paced image barrage of popular spectacle, they are simply boring. CAE also suggests looking to historical analogues
for examples of tactical actions, particularly ones that have been activated by authoritarian power vectors. None of the
popular media is particularly interested in more talk about olden times, nor are they interested in past atrocities (except
for those perpetrated by Nazis). Discussion of such topics leaves the media with nothing interesting to bring to the public.
This strategy goes back to issues of constellations, detournment, appropriation, etc. Use what is already available, give
the media vultures nothing, and the only option for cooptation left is cannibalism (hence the proliferation of retro). Now
clearly it's too late to stop media cooptation of ECD. It has already been sold for 15 minutes of fame, and is fueling a new
round of cyberhype, but e-activists can bring a halt to this current media event by supplying nothing more. We can also be
thankful that ECD and other forms of electronic resistance that have now been dematerialized into the hyperreal buzz of
“hacktivism’ are just more cyberfads that will rapidly fade on the technohorizon, leaving the committed to continue with
business as usual.

“For more information: All CAE books, including Electronic Civil Disobedience_, are available from Autonomedia (NYC) or
they can be downloaded free of charge at <http://mailer.fsu.edu/~sbarnes>. German (Passagen Verlag), French (I~eclat),
and Italian (Castelvecchi) translations are also available; unfortunately they are not available online, so contact CAE for
more information. **CAE would like to thank Heath Bunting for his valuable contribution to CAE'sdevelopment of a simula-
tionist model of subversion.

THE AVANT-GARDE
NEVER GIVES UP--

THOUGHTS ON ART AND ACTIVISM

KEYWORDS: MEDIA ACTIVISM, RESISTANCE, TACTICAL, NET.ART, CONCEPTUAL, AVANT-GARDE

The avant-garde never gives up. And tactical media has produced (at least) three different theaters of operation to wage
its struggle: media activism, pure tactical aesthetics, and net conceptualism. The first allows for “formal” net.art tactics
(materialist, structural), the latter two allow for “real” net.art tactics (native presence, site-specificity).

1) "Media activism" is what NSM knows best. In the classic mode of leftist engagement it extends from access control
issues like the "we want bandwidth” campaign to more blatantly confrontational projects like hacking in protest of
Kevin Mitnick's imprisonment. Cyberfeminism, RTMARK, Mongrel's techno morphs, free servers like xs4all, and
prosthetic networks like ZAMIR all fall under the rubric of media activism. In their very existence, the postmedia