Changing world and challenged minds- 2 : Internet architecture and socialism

Back in 1991, when a few of us were tired of working on share transfer system programming on a Unix platform, one of my colleagues and I decided to step out of the office on KG Marg in Delhi for a cup of tea at Barakhamba Road in Connaught Place. It was a chilly winter evening, and the streets were mostly deserted. The winter nights in Delhi often resembled the beginnings of an alien film, with fog and faint lights creating an air of mystery.

As we sipped our masala chai and discussed the new open-source Linux platform rumored to be launched by a company called Red Hat in a couple of years and its potential, my colleague brought up his challenge of reaching people at other terminals connected to our intranet. Although intranet protocols existed at that time, they were expensive for companies that still relied on in-house software development under their data processing centers. Upon returning to the office, I decided to delve into SQL and eventually solved the problem with a six-line SQL script. It allowed for seeking, displaying, broadcasting, and receiving feedback on terminals, with options for exit or loop. In essence, it was a rudimentary form of today's chat platforms like Google, with the only difference being a maximum limit of 256 characters per message. Before we could explore remote terminals further, I left the company, moving on to mini platforms and DOS, while my colleague moved to the United States and eventually developed it into a full-fledged inter and intranet file transfer and communication protocol software, which he patented under Red Hat Linux, the open-source platform. By then, hundreds of similar products were available in the market, and Sabeer Bhatia had launched Hotmail in 1996.

From those early days of automated communication protocols, we now find ourselves in a time, more than two decades later, where communication protocols are no longer a need for us; rather, we have become indispensable to communication protocols. Across the globe, billions of data packets traverse intricate networks of wired and wireless connections every nanosecond, destined for recipients who will process them, turning data into both cost and currency. Perhaps, alongside stock exchanges, gambling, and warfare, internet communication stands as one of capitalism's most lucrative discoveries—something it has monetized to the fullest. It seamlessly fits into its business model, characterized by exclusivity, monopoly, speed, multitasking, and a structure that values productive man-hours.

However, it's essential not to confuse data with the internet communication protocol. This distinction can be likened to the contrast between Microsoft's Windows model and Bell Labs' Unix model. While the former operates as a closed, unilateral system where users can only be operators, the latter fosters a cooperative, federal, and democratic system where users can also become co-creators. This subtle difference underlines the essence of the internet, which empowers users to engage in a liberal, democratic exchange of ideas and information.

The telecommunication network business model, where pricing is uniformly metered, and telephone instruments serve primarily as interfaces for receiving and broadcasting conversations, led Bell Labs to develop a nonlinear, democratically liberal, easily accessible, and modifiable software structure. These communication protocols operate much like individuals within communities under the rule of law in a federal state. Unix functions with small scripts within shells under a broader Unix operating system. These scripts can be independent or interactive shells, or they can form collectives with shared interests or areas of exchange.

It's somewhat ironic that a profit-driven telecommunications company and its capitalistic economy became the architects of an egalitarian socialist system, given their reliance on telecommunication networks. The internet, also dependent on these networks, adopted a liberal socialist architecture rather than an individualistic capitalistic structure.

A closer look at successful internet-based systems reveals that only heavily subsidized or free systems have thrived and endured. Services like Google, email, wikis, social networks, YouTube, maps, and navigation, which operate within an egalitarian system of access, have outlasted their paid, unilateral, capitalistic counterparts that repeatedly attempt to establish a foothold in this socialist network space.

A comparison between Microsoft Windows during the pre-internet era—when chip maker Intel and Microsoft held monopolies and reaped profits through their closed, user-restricted software—and the current era dominated by free Android and Google platforms provides a clear picture of this shift.

The failure of the capitalistic business model worldwide can, to a significant extent, be attributed to the structure of the internet. This structure, founded at Bell Labs and based on a socialist architecture, directly contradicts capitalism. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, recently advocated for a more socialist approach to computing and business. As long as this network model remains dominant and paves the way for the future, all other systems, including capitalism and its business models, will need to adapt to this non-negotiable reality.

Imagine a world of socialistic capitalism! On the other hand, Facebook and its founder are attempting to monopolize the internet using a capitalistic model of architecture. This dynamic illustrates the ever-changing world and the challenges facing our evolving minds.

I don’t make art : I am art - innocuous contemporary art

In western philosophy,  way back in history during the golden Greek period, Plato declared,  “art is fake- and not original” as an aesthetic dictum . But with the change of time and at the onset of 21^st century, we are now celebrating “what makes art?” as the new aesthetic order. 

Material, ,medium, idea, practice and the viewer, the basic entities  for any creative production have all undergone immense  transformation and to be more specific the contextual objectivity of art does not remain “observer-observed and observation” anymore. 

Even during the heights of abstract expressionism and conceptual art, it was considered  “the relative positioning of artist, work of art and the viewer” is the most important factor in an art practice. (1), but with the technological and mass media explosion like internet, motion pictures and television, the very idea of viewer, the one who has an interest or the one who is initiated has now become irrelevant. In today’s world, a work of art simultaneously becomes an expression; creative idea, investment, performance, manipulation or gimmick- in other words the relative positioning does not remain the same and it has changed forever.

While with the death of modernism, where body and its interactions were subjected to the explorations of structures in cubism, social objectivity in constructivism, protest in Dadaism, idea of redemption in conceptual art, essential in minimalism and celebration of possible in pop art, those artistic engagements used to   occupy the creative space. As mentioned earlier, when mass media such as television, motion pictures and Internet offer everything a fine art other wise would have offered: entertainment, joy, aesthetics, idea, design, decoration and above all an interaction, today artists find it difficult to negotiate that space anymore. 

In this context, it has become essential for 21^st century artists to seek spaces other than what is essentially a mass media art  occupy; a space relevant but unexplored in its equation with mass appeal and importance. As it occurred during the surrealistic period of art, where the artist dealt with subjectivity of human mind and its fantasies, these days artists are dealing with subcultures more often than normal to the mainstream sensibilities.

                                                           

Rather than protesting, artists now provoke human mind with their artwork that deals with subcultures. These works of arts does not make you comfortable, an idea of aesthetics prevailed over thousands of years, but provoke you to seek the undeniable existence of sub-terrain facets of the world we live. It shatters the sense of security, the spectator presupposes in front of an artwork and it does not pose any question like Mark Rothko or Duchamp who had to deal with the self-sufficiency of art.

These new age artists rather try to be powerless to deal with such redundant subjects of the day.  Artists of the day subjects themselves to vulnerability along with their work of art like anyone else from outside the four walls of the white cube. Their work of art undergoes all traumas of living including its necessity of making material gain, market, power, brinkmanship and social pruning. Artists are not proving they are better than others neither in skill nor in expression.

But at the same time on the other side of the dice, Art, idioms and its scales did not remain the same anymore. With the kind of scaled up market stakes on one side and vulnerability on the other, the positions one take, the choices one adopt, the practice one derive now have more consequences in society than ever before. Now there are layers of media, communication and gallery practice along with a well-crafted curatorial regimentation with sound theoretical and academic arguments laid out for  the art practice.

Interestingly despite this inflated importance, visual art unfortunately is yet to be conceived as something very relevant to society. George Lechner in his essay “ Art- east and west” quotes Herbert Read, from Philosophy of modern art” (3) that “Do not let us deceive ourselves: The common man, such as we produce in our civilization, is aesthetically a dead man. He may cultivate art as a “culture”, as a passport to more exclusive circles of society. He may acquire the pattern of the appreciation, the accent of understanding. But he is not moved: he does not love: he is not changed by his experience. He will not alter his way of life – he will not go out from the art gallery and cast away his ugly possessions, pull down his ugly house, storm the Bastille where beauty lies imprisoned. He has more sense, as we say”.

This tragic alienation of art and artist in society can not be completely ascribed to lethargy of society at large as in the same essay (4) he further points out that “We must wait; wait perhaps for a very long time, before any vital connection can be reestablished between art and society. The modern work of art, as I have said is a symbol. The symbol, by its nature, is only intelligible to the initiated. It does not seem that the contradiction, which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society, can ever be resolved. “,

This dichotomy of contemporary art, the one that is important in society but irrelevant in appreciation becomes a tragedy for artists as their practice has became completely vulnerable to a slow but steady degradation to craft by curators of theoretical regimentation with much popular textual articulation. A historical similarity could be drawn here to the bhraminical practice of Indian art where the one who worked with hand is looked down upon while the theoreticians celebrated with creative ownership of idiom.

The biggest tragedy of this diabolic act is, as Thomas Craw explains in his foreword to Charles Harrison’s Art and Language “The current situation in art practice is one in which almost no possible artistic decision is free from the burden of historical and theoretical self consciousness”, that no artist is an inheritor of practice like craftsmen but in spite of the practice being a conscious effort, artists are losing out their independence of practice for curatorial articulation of textual excellence. Word is slowly and steadily displacing the work of art. I don’t mean to say that word is not work of art but certainly would like to remind word is not the only art.

Today conventional art forms like painting, sculpture, installation, performance, theater, singing, photography, cinema, computer graphics or the new age art forms like virtual reality, gaming, internet / transponder projections are no different from the word as all of them promise certain possibilities and certain limitations.

As avenue of art is vastly promising and liberated, it is rudimentary for any artist to stagnate or stretch one form of art over another or one for the other. Validity of every form of expression still holds valid and will hold valid. As discussed in the beginning “what makes art?” may be the new aesthetical order but since time immemorial the basic tenets of relationship, the foundation for human endeavor to that art is relevant remains the same.

“If there is a relationship, there exists an innate need for an aesthetical expression and it is not separate from the creator. So artists don’t make the art but artist is art, one is not secondary to the other and it is relevant enough for the world.”