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Leaving Reality Behind etoy vs eToys com other battles to control cyberspace By: Adam Wishart Regula Bochsler ISBN: 0066210763 See detail of this book on Amazon.com Book served by AMAZON NOIR (www.amazon-noir.com) project by: PAOLO CIRIO paolocirio.net UBERMORGEN.COM ubermorgen.com ALESSANDRO LUDOVICO neural.it Page 1 discovering a new toy "The new artist protests, he no longer paints." -Dadaist artist Tristan Tzara, Zh, 1916 On the balmy evening of June 1, 1990, fleets of expensive cars pulled up outside the Zurich Opera House. Stepping out and passing through the pillared porticoes was a Who's Who of Swiss society-the head of state, national sports icons, former ministers and army generals-all of whom had come to celebrate the sixty-fifth birthday of Werner Spross, the owner of a huge horticultural business empire. As one of Zurich's wealthiest and best-connected men, it was perhaps fitting that 650 of his "close friends" had been invited to attend the event, a lavish banquet followed by a performance of Romeo and Juliet. Defiantly greeting the guests were 200 demonstrators standing in the square in front of the opera house. Mostly young, wearing scruffy clothes and sporting punky haircuts, they whistled and booed, angry that the opera house had been sold out, allowing itself for the first time to be taken over by a rich patron. They were also chanting slogans about the inequity of Swiss society and the wealth of Spross's guests. The glittering horde did its very best to ignore the disturbance. The protest had the added significance of being held on the tenth anniversary of the first spark of the city's most explosive youth revolt of recent years, The Movement. Called the Opera Riot, it was started in 1980 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 LEAVING REALITY BEHIND by young people returning from a Bob Marley concert and ended with barricades on the street, burning cars and police firing tear gas and rubber bullets. The television pictures came as a shock to Switzerland's staid community. In the following months The Movement staged many demonstrations, some of which also resulted in riots, as it made its demands: an end to the country's "oppressive" drug policy; the introduction of a cultural policy that did not exclude the young (as the Opera did); and the funding of an "autonomous" youth center. The anticonsumerist protests were often wrapped in humor. Their chants at demonstrations included the Dadaist "Turn the state into a cucumber salad" and "Down with the Alps, for a direct view of the Mediterranean!" At its peak two hundred naked young people marched down Zurich's Bahnhofstrasse, one of the world's most exclusive shopping streets, shouting, "We are the dead bodies of the cultural life of this city!" Ten years later, the demonstrators outside Spross's party, standing on the spot where the Opera Riot sparked, lacked the impact of the previous generation but shared its spirit. They hung around in small groups, rousing themselves at the arrival of each new limousine. One individual stood out. Herbert, a seventeen-year-old with carefully spiked blond hair, wore a scruffy black leather jacket emblazoned with the words NAZIS RAVs-Nazis Out-and bright-green Doc Marten boots he had customized himself. The young man (who later adopted the name agent.ZAI) was spotted by a producer from Swiss National Television who was on the talent trail for the youth program Seisrno, which needed reporters and presenters. When approached, Herbert railed against the authorities and talked about his involvement in the Students' Union that he helped run at his high school. Invited to a casting, he displayed a fast-talking wit that quickly secured him a starring role. Over the next year Herbert worked for the production, gaining special permission from his school to attend recordings and meetings. A two-hour discussion program for young people, each episode covering a single topic, Seisrno involved numerous guests, a live audience and band performances. The shows were brash, arresting spectacles that were always staged in strange locations-on one occasion it was set among the machinery at a water-purifying plant. Herbert gave compelling Page 7 discovering a new toy 7 mances, interviewing guests and presenting recorded segments. The contrast between this spirited, jagged young man and Switzerland's elder politicians and pundits made particularly engaging television. Seismo taught Herbert much about the inner workings of the media, of which he was a keen and diligent student. The show also brought him certain kudos. The press described him and his three fellow youth reporters as "lively, competent and cheeky"; they were interviewed and had their pictures published in the media, and occasionally Herbert was recognized in the street. During the course of that year he became more selfregarding and dyed his hair black to emphasize his good looks and intense eyes onscreen. For the first time in his life he had achieved a kind of recognition. In a world where the old and comfortable truths of youth rebellion-the battles between East and West, between capital and labor-were no longer so easily grasped, the delights of the media and the celebrity that it brought were all the more enticing. It was a seduction that Herbert found himself unable to resist as the years went by. At the same time as Seismo, Herbert was in a straitlaced and traditional elite high school that had a reputation as the proving ground for the Swiss elite. There his bristling intelligence together with his rebelliousness annoyed his teachers. So he left, traveling to Basel to attend the most radical of all Swiss schools, the Anna Gn-Gymnasium, named after the last Swiss witch to have been burned at the stake. The antiauthoritarian school was governed for the most part by the students themselves, who set and enforced the rules in a democratic process. But even in this most liberal of environments Herbert did not conform, refusing to attend classes and getting embroiled in conflicts with his teachers. His free spirit did not flourish: without qualifications he moved back to Zurich. In the spring of 1991, Herbert was at a loose end and keen to find a place where he could feel comfortable and use his brain. With a group of political activists and friends he broke into an old gas-meter factory called Wohlgrot and occupied the site. It was situated right in the center of town, just behind Zurich's main railway station, and included a cluster of buildings surrounding a courtyard, and a villa where the factory manager had once lived. The place became a popular and heavily populated squat, the most significant of countercultural happenings in the city Page 8 of zH, it read ZUREIcx, meaning "Too Rich." During the coming months Herbert spent much of his time in the squat. With a cafa bar, a cinema and a concert venue, the place quickly took on the character of an underground cultural center; it was illegal, for a start, but perhaps its most subversive feature was the "junkie room," where heroin addicts could go to shoot up and to receive medical help. Late in 1991, when the new dance beats of techno had arrived in the city, the squat's first rave was held in a basement. One particularly radical squatter threw a tear-gas grenade into the crowd in protest because he thought techno was too "commercial" for this fiercely anticapitalist space. Herbert and his friends and everyone else present were forced to make a speedy exit up a narrow staircase. As a consequence of this event Herbert turned against the puritan spirit of the grenade thrower and his leftist fellow travelers. As time went by the idyllic utopia that Herbert had imagined turned further into a cauldron of rancorous arguments. He remembers: "We wanted the villa to be a special place, a nice place, but the others took over and it became dirty and fucked up." So Herbert began to dream of organizing something independent, something that he could control. In the summer of 1992, Herbert staged a shocking performance. At the time Switzerland's "156" numbers (an equivalent of 1-900 numbers in America) used for phone sex and pornographic chat lines were emerging. The media reveled in this new industry, using this titillating subject to boost newspaper circulations. At the same time, they condemned the operators. This new phenomenon gave Herbert a glimmer of opportunity. He remembers: "I wanted to be a pioneer at any price, because everything else seemed to be too boring." What he wanted to do was run his own 156 number, to use this very new technology to challenge the hypocrisy of the media and to pointedly shock the culture of the dull, lifeless and extraordinarily wealthy city of Zh. He loved the Sex Pistols, the British band that in 1977 had reached number one in Britain in the week of the Queen's Silver Jubilee and shocked the nation with its angry lyrics and by swearing on national television. Perhaps Herbert's Page 9 discovering a new toy 9 scam could do the same. Zurich, after all, had a history of bizarre events. Dada, the art movement that first shook polite society by performing nonsense poetry, making collages and championing tomfoolery in the face of the horrors of World War I, had begun here and had gone on to influence almost every aspect of conceptual art in the twentieth century. Herbert also liked the 156 idea because it made him feel like a grownup.

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