On my way to Zurich I just met a colleague at the airport. We both fly routinely. "I can't do it anymore." he said. "All this air travel is just too much downtime for me." I moved onward passing through airport lobbies in New York City, London, and finally my Swiss destination. In these inbetween spaces I was persistently confronted with big, fat back-lid ads. And they were all about time. T-Mobile's slogan is "Upgrade your downtime." The airline Jetblue draws attention to their wireless hotspots at John F. Kennedy with the commanding "downtime-download." The mantra of the British Vodaphone is "The power of now!" BT shows a jolly business man fly-jumping through what looks like a landscape of Powerpoint charts: "The digital network economy. Where business is done." At JFK, Sprint, the American cell phone tycoon, set up yellow placards in the size of a house that say "yes to making just about any place a work place." It made me stop. I was buffled. How dare they be so in my face about what I perceive as the agony of immaterial labor?

 
Before moving to San Francisco I had never heard terms like "quality time" or "downtime." In East Germany, for me, time was just time indiscriminately. For a wide variety of reasons there are many that pledge allegiance to everything not-networked, offline, and non-digital. Who can blame them? Post-Fordist work conditions turn the super-mobile manager into a networked lap dog. At six in the morning those waiting in the airport gate area pull out their laptops. Sneaking over their shoulders I see spread sheets. The networked early morning work day starts with coffee and a cheese-and-egg-pizza. Downtime now is download time. Life is work. There is not enough time to rest, cook, reflect, or walk in the woods. The insidious penetration of the Internet into our every grain is hard to deny. Workers become part-of-the-solution-nodes rather than full-time employees. Health insurance can be done away with. Wages in the immaterial networked realm don't have to bear resemblance to the work that was done. And, who ever mentioned pensions? Also Unions get whacked when the work force is geographically pieced together. Then there is all that sense of place stuff that Lucy Lippard was so adament about. But the uprooted lifestyle seems like peanuts compared to what is happening now, -- the horror, the horror. Passing through these airports, the net started to feel like an itch that we can't scratch.

Much of the discussion about networking is focused entirely on business. Howard Rheingold's essay "Technologies of Cooperation" is magnificent and inspired, imho, but it is written in large part to help out the amazon-dot-coms of this world. Doug Rushkoff comments on his blog that he hopes for the ideas in his latest book to help businesses (and well, also a few others). Fair enough. What's wrong with that you may ask? Well, let's just say that there is an utilitarian impetus that rarifies play and experiment at least if they don't link up with business interests sooner rather than later. Let's just say that I hope for people with insight into network technologies and their human uses to also take on projects that do not support those who already have plenty. Why help eBay to make even more money? Who really needs our help?


Some cultural workers have much in common with managerial networked types. Brian Holmes points to that. It's not just the rock stars of what Richard Florida calls the creative class who sit on planes next to the smiley jet set manager. Artists become entrepreneur of themselves. Self-worth is quantified in frequent flyer miles and numbers of invitations. But the opportunistic, ego-tripping art enterpriser is not all there is. Cultural practioners travel and perform their ideas all over the world. They are gift-givers with all the problematic hierarchies that this creates. On good days they enact their ideas with passion, inspiration and substance. The Brooklyn-based artist Martha Rosler documented her more than frequent passing through airports in many series of photographs and critical writing. She describes her motivation for these works related to her occupation. And in new media as much as in photography, the international scenes are closely knit. Travel is a substantial part of the lives of cultural producers. I can't point to the travelling managerial networkers "over there." They are not so very distant or conveniently different from me. I don't have all the ethical and political rightenousness on my side. I am part of the picture. The network beast also lives inside of me.

We move through space. "We" are all those cultural producers who fly thousands of miles to talk to different audiences or present their artwork. We are quite the experts when it comes to travel. We know it all. Airport, home, gallery, and lecture hall are equally familiar venues for us. We have it down. We know how to block off obnoxiously loud fellow travelers. We recognize how to remain friendly (most of the time)- with borderline-abusive security personnel. We inhale every magazine article about tricks of air travel. Our bodies are transported through the air. We are just resting. Covered with masks, our eyes are closed. We enter a think space. We know what to do about the lack of humidity on planes. The increased elevation at take-off jazzes us up. We know when to stretch and which way to rotate our ankles. We developed a continuity of purpose that makes it secondary where our bodies are located. The scenarios through which we move don't distract us so much anymore.

We repurpose trains, and airport lobbies into offices. The person next to us becomes unwillingly involved. We pull ourselves out of the public into the private networked space. We shift through the walkways of airports, drive in taxis and trains. Networked devices keep us always anchored, always in touch, consistently connected to myriads of social networks. But the flickering screens to which we are hooked are not just the bluetooth lifelines to the boss. We have all those with whom we share our lives in reach nearly at all times. We cannot feel the warmth of their faces. We cannot touch them. But in our "downtime" we can talk or exchange text messages. And doing so may prevent us from talking to the stranger right next to us.
    
We "grow" network tentacles (like air roots) that allow us to be always on. There is the perpetual, invisible link between our body and the nearest cell phone tower. We are always plugged in, interlinked at all times. In the city, at the moment when the subway train comes out of a tunnel to go over a bridge dozens of people who endured at least 15 minutes of out-of-reach time pull out their devices to feel reassured that they did not miss something. The technology is not plated into us. It is miniaturized. The only piece of hardware that Lev Manovich mentions on his blog, for example, is the "I-Go," a universal connecting plug for all kinds of devices. It allows him to leave the cable clutter at home. Our nano-sized multi purpose-devices are not what counts. What matters is the linkage that they establish. The wireless Internet signals casually picked up by our laptops facilitate exploitation. We have to look hard to see the emancipatory nature of socio-technical networks. But it's on the edges of network culture where the sun sparkles. It's not in the center of pesky business culture.

But network technologies cannot be reduced to instruments of oppression and casualized labor that squeeze every last drop of genuine energy and creativity out of the worker. Cooperation-enhancing technologies are not by default networked assembly lines. The Treo is not the beast. Laptops are not merely locative Wall Street furniture. Cell phones are not the pervasive enemy. Groups of protesters at the Republican convention used them to escape police tactics. But at the same token networked technologies are also not inherently linked to a deviant life style or oppositional cultural practice. Technologies define us. We are conditioned to relate to them in predefined ways. Using technologies changes what we know and how we know it. But we do have a say in this. We can shape the technologies that we are using.  Networked technologies do not have to stand for servitude. We can imagine  human uses. We can support emerging alternative socio-technical networks by reflecting on technologies without utopia-glazed eyes. Critiquing the vicious nature of networked, neoliberal managers is vitally important. But don't stop there. Don't leave the discourse about human uses of cooperation-enhancing tools and networking to them (or to them inside of us.)