What is my point?

I've had the same conversation with a number of people in the past year about what it is that's changed in the past eight or nine years. A bookstore owner I know here in Toronto says that he used to know dozens of people in Toronto who would get together and go over the books they were reading, or call him up because they were getting some people together for a potluck, or hang out and read their poetry to each other. Hakim Bey has said in interviews that his audiences have become these passive observers in the last decade. Another teacher at UB, but from Baltimore, remembers The Beehive Collective in Washington DC, which imploded in 1994. My friend Cate remembers that Riot Grrrl Convention very well. Everyone I knew was doing something.

I'll repeat that- Everyone I knew was doing something.

Making zines, shooting movies, forming bands, they were all doing something, and they were all trying to figure things out as they went along. And it wasn't doctrinaire leftism. It was fluidic, ludic creation. It was play. So, what happened?

I've been thinking about it. Why aren't there these get-togethers, potlucks, meetings and so forth going on? I started looking for them, and I found some small signs, and even a potluck- but, it was only four people, and only once a year. What happened to all those Temporary Autonomous Zones? Where did everyone go?

And then it hit me. Ten years ago, if I wanted to find people to talk with, like-minded individuals, and so forth, I couldn't go "on-line". I actually had to find them. I had to leave fliers in places and call people and make plans to meet them. I couldn't look up the Yahoo! Group, or the My Space listing, or go on Craiglist. I had to force myself to be social in the real world.

And I'm guessing a lot of other people did. It's so weird when people brag to me that their site gets _______ number of hits a day because it means fucking nothing. It isn't real. Nine-year old kids reading your blog on-line and laughing isn't the same as having a real conversation with a real person. This means nothing. It changes nothing. It's surrender.

I'm a hypocrite, of course. Here I am, on-line, suggesting that being on-line has cut a culture that I love off at the knees. Here I am, blogging, saying that this culture is passive and asocial and that it can't go on this way because it's as if we're giving up before we got started.

Well, not exactly.