Both pushed exaggeration to the point of a strategic takeover. The Digital revolution ate it's children. Despite the fact that universal access to the nets has hardly been realized, we have already landed in the age of disappointment, boredom and cynicism for the few. Internet's Golden Age is over, before it even began. We had meetings in Frankfurt, Venice, Budapest and Amsterdam and just published a 'book in progress' called ZK Proceedings, which serves as text pool for upcoming publications and was temporary distributed on paper at the Next Five Minutes Conference in Amsterdam, Jan 96.
All texts are available on the web and get collected trough a mailinglist called nettime.
Net criticism, as we see it, is not an own discipline yet, but a fragmented field where one develops tactical tools to 'deregulate' the centralisation of subjectivity production in times of an delirious info-capitalism. The utopic narrations running under the label of 'californian ideology' are not able to handle the multiple forces of a conflictuous non-virtual world. It is more a behaviour than a project, more a parasite then a strategical position, more based on a diffuse corpus of works than an academic knowledge, it is heavily interfered by contradictions and techno-pleasure, and it keeps vivid in this way. Pit Schultz lives and works in Berlin. At 5cyberconf, which took place early june, 1996.