Hauntology in the Hyperreal: Digital Relics in Hypertext.

"There is no band." ===>[Mulholland Dr.]
===== All ... is a recording =====
"There is no longer a double, one is already in the other world, which is no longer an other, without a mirror, without a projection, or a utopia that can reflect it - simulation is insuperable, unsurpassable, dull and flat, without exteriority - we will no longer even pass through to ‘the other side of the mirror,’ that was still the golden age of transcendence.”
The hyperreal has now almost-completely colonised and superceded the real. [See Baudrillard ]
The notion of the derelict and the disused comes up. Julian raised the idea - via Gibson (in one of the later novels) - of disused cyberspace: the websites of companies that have ceased to trade, digital relics awaiting re-population.

[like this one, the oldest dormant hypertext in Ireland, from 1994, which, uncannily, coincided with the date of birth of Ireland's "Celtic Tiger" post-modern frenetic capitalism, to which the political shenannegans described in the hypertext allude],
the undead of the web, hyperreality at rest.

The first website hypertext, created by Hypertext/WWW inventor Tim Berners-Lee in August 1991 at CERN in Switzerland, no longer exists, "only" surviving instead as an exact copy of a relic
[ the original URL address - now defunct - was http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, confirming once again that hypertext persists, while its territorial location, its physical infrastructure (the Internet), perishes, fades away],
much as, in the establishment art canon, perfect painterly reproductions of the Masters are, without irony, called "genuine fakes."
Extract
World Wide Web
The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access
to a large universe of documents.
Everything there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly to this document, including an executive summary of the project, Mailing lists , Policy , November's W3 news , Frequently Asked Questions .
[1991] Files available on the net, posted on alt.hypertext (6, 16, 19th Aug)
[1985] Earliest Internet Domain Names [the first was SYMBOLICS.COM, registered on 15th March, 1985]

Amazingly, web-creator Tim Berners-Lee, quoted from his blog above, has only recently (last December) set up his own blog: timbl's blog.

2 Comments:
?? They know that, but they don't believe it ... isn't this why postmodernity is [cynically] reactionary, taking recourse into the phantasmatic "real" of the inner narcissistic? Isn't it such a fantasy [of an underlying real] that makes the post-modern possible?
Perhaps I didn't make my point clearly enough, so maybe I'll be cruelly Zizekian by asking, "What was the question again? :-)
Yes, Mark, the claim that there is an unambiguous real is indeed opposed to most renderings of the post-modern, except by those who actually subscribe to the ideology of post-modernity.
Isn't this the sham of post-modernity, the pretence that "nothing matters", all is [redundant] perspective, while all the time being fundamentalists of the symbolic real of Kapital? Isn't the current obsession with the everything "iconic", for instance, a desperate attempt to grasp some - ephemeral phantom as "real"?
This is going to run and run ...
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