Leaving Reality Behind: Inside the Battle for the Soul of the Internet. Regula Bochsler
However, their rudimentary Web site did not fulfil this ambition and their resources were not sufficient to turn it into a fully functioning virtual space. So, despite their rebellious sensibilities, they turned to government and private agencies for financial help. They were pioneers, and the grant givers did not understand them. One member of the Swiss Arts Council was wrong-footed by the unfamiliar ‘@’ sign on etoy’s business cards and asked what email addresses were; etoy soon realised that the funding bodies had no real idea what the Internet was – never mind the Web. One cultural bureaucrat even suggested to them that a CD-rom would be a more suitable project. This only made etoy all the more determined to prove themselves right.
To find a stage for their Web-based countercultural ideas, in April 1995 Herbert travelled to Linz in Austria in a bid to persuade the organisers of the prestigious arts festival Ars Electronica to hold an etoy event. Situated on the River Danube, with its tourist boats and cargo freighters, Linz had gained unwelcome notoriety as the place where Hitler attended school and was an unusual setting for such a forward-looking event. The festival was first held in the late 1970s, developed initially by the city council as a fringe programme to their annual festival celebrating the Victorian composer Anton Bruckner. The event soon flourished into a fully fledged festival of its own, exploring the relationship of art, technology and society and so becoming a draw for a stellar list of Big Thinkers such as Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene; William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, the fathers of cyberpunk; Jean Baudrillard, France’s favourite post-modern philosopher; Kevin Kelly, author of Out of Control and executive editor of the seminal magazine WIRED; Vilém Flusser, philosopher of communication, and his colleague, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek.
Each year, Ars Electronica has a different theme; and in 1995 it was ‘Welcome to the Wired World’. This was the first time that the festival celebrated the World Wide Web, and included in the schedule was a special prize category for innovative use of this new medium. Herbert hoped that etoy could organise a party there as a means of promoting themselves, but to his disappointment their project was outshone and undercut by some art students from Linz who had offered to organise a cheaper ‘Netnite’ party.
Even without an official role, etoy planned to use the festival as their stage. In preparation they brainstormed how best they could present themselves to the digital-arts world. They remained adamant that their countercultural ideas were best furthered not by a manifesto, a poem or a painting, but by a corporation. Herbert gave out the order that the whole crew must show up in Linz because, as he put it, ‘this is one of etoy’s markets’. The festival would be etoy’s first opportunity to launch their ‘corporation’ to the world of art and culture.
They had big dreams. As Franco remembers, ‘We were dreaming of a headquarters that was a skyscraper, all in glass with a big logo on top of it.’ The key to their venture was etoy’s ‘brand’. Hans borrowed a corporate-identity booklet from his father’s company; what they learned from this led to their decision to establish a rigorously defined set of rules concerning company presentation. Their first step was to design the etoy logo. It was agreed that the name would always appear only in lower case; they chose a typeface – Microstyle Bold Extended Oblique – with a precise stretch of 135 per cent; and then their corporate colour – orange – because it reminded them of warning signals.
One of the boys’ more remarkable moves was to jettison individual fashions in favour of a uniform corporate look. Throughout the Western world, people were ‘dressing down’ and wearing casuals – even Silicon Valley’s millionaires were increasingly jeans- and sneaker-clad – but Herbert and his gang were determined to follow a more time-honoured corporate aesthetic. Just as IBM had once been seen as an army of executives in identical blue jackets and pressed shirts, etoy would from now on adopt a consistent company style. They chose what would become their most notable icon: an orange bomber jacket with the etoy logo on the back. These were set off by black trousers, mirrored pilot sunglasses and little black attaché cases. The final touch was that they all shaved their heads. Spectators described them variously as resembling a group of astronauts, a security squad and a fascist street-gang.
etoy’s corporate identity was a striking break from normal modes of behaviour. It was as if they were forcing themselves into the most radical position with their look and their rigorous graphic style. They seemed to revel in – and criticise – the power of ‘brands’, precisely mirroring one of the era’s dominant themes.
Branding, in 1995, was in the middle of its magisterial rise to prominence. By the end of the nineties, Tom Peters – the preeminent management guru of the decade – would write, ‘It’s a new brand world.’ It was estimated that corporations were spending an annual $465 billion supporting the logos, tag lines and philosophies that gave ‘value’ to their products. Many of the world’s leading corporations divested themselves of responsibility for producing anything at all, instead positioning themselves at the centre of networks of independent contractors and establishing their role simply as ‘managers’ of the all-encompassing world-view of their various brands. As Naomi Klein would write in No Logo, ‘Overnight, “brands, not products!” became the rallying cry for a marketing renaissance led by a new breed of companies that saw themselves as “meaning brokers” instead of product producers.’
The etoy brand’s ‘meaning’ was the group’s antagonistic sensibility itself, standing against the banality of the ordinary, the dullness of life. They would steal the clothes of corporations – the branding, the rhetoric and the aesthetic – to create an absurdist critique of corporate culture. Theirs was a satire of the overbearing power of corporations, and yet they simultaneously paid a kind of twisted homage to the heroic brands that had dominated their youth. They were not afraid of playing both ends against the middle, paradoxically celebrating and lampooning corporate life in demonstration of their cynicism. Even their intentions became couched in the language of enterprise, as Herbert remembers, ‘We wanted to enter a market, the market of entertainment, art and culture. It’s a limited market, so we had to fight for recognition and promote etoy internationally … We played it hard.’
Beyond the thin epidermis of branding, the corporate ideal was to have a profound effect on how the gang behaved. Again like IBM, which in the 1950s had a corporate ideology that extended to a song book containing such lyrics as ‘All Hail to the IBM’, the etoy members resolved to push their absolutist dogma to its limits and submit to the will of the corporation. The source of this will was not to be a CEO or a Board of Directors, but rather a computer. As if the boys had canonised their computer system, they vested in it a power beyond their control. ‘The system itself was at the centre,’ says Herbert. ‘The server [computer] was like our god, being superhuman and incomprehensible.’
The commandments that this computer-Moses brought down from the mountain were absurd. The most important rule was that etoy members should always put the company first, which meant being reachable at all hours of the day and night and dedicating most of their energy to the company’s success. The corporation also determined when members were allowed to go on holiday – and even when they were allowed to see their girlfriends.
The commandments in a sense codified the dominant work-ethic of the contemporary technology industry. After all, computer scientists and early hackers had for years worked eccentrically long hours – a tendency only exacerbated by the arrival of the Web, when everything was always online and always available. In the frenzied ethos of the day, each moment spent away from a terminal came to seem like a missed opportunity. By the time one came in to work, who knew, the world might have changed again, another future forged by someone who had not gone out for dinner.
etoy’s company rules also insisted that members keep the group’s inner workings secret from outsiders; any transgression of this was fiercely punished. It was an intensely claustrophobic adventure that Herbert remembers being like a journey into space. ‘We often used the metaphor of the spacemen. They can only concentrate on their work when they are isolated from the rest of the world. The spaceship is also a symbol for risk and loneliness, for setting off and leaving many things behind.’
Their ultimate sacrifice on the altar of company ‘professionalism’ was their decision to give up their names. It was at