Only people with nothing to fear see the idea of a completely connected world as unequivocally good

The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.

I was also a decidedly goofy, awkward kid with occasionally misfiring maternal instincts who hung out with a lot of very cool queer women and had a lot of anxiety about it. (I still do sometimes!)

The future we're fighting for has no analog in mainstream tech, and so it's hard to articulate our strategy using their words. I know that we can feel it, though-- when a new person suddenly gets what we are attempting to do, it is like two instruments slowly coming into tune.

The philosophy of the modern web has saturated our world so thoroughly that corporate goals have the appearance of common sense

The hurdle we face today is not lack of skill, it's depression

stop waiting for these companies to get better

Avant-Pop artists welcome the new Electronic Age with open arms because we know that this will vastly increase our chances of finding an audience of like-minded individuals who we can communicate and collaborate with

Writers who continue to support an outmoded concept of the lone writer dissociated from the various niche communities at their disposal will eventually lose touch with the nanosecond speed at which the movement-chemistry wanders and will find their own work and its individually-isolated movement decelerating into turtle-like oblivion

Avant-Pop artists and their pirate signals promoting wild station identifications are ready to expand into your home right now, just log on, click around and find them. It's all up to YOU, the interactive Avant-Pop artist/participant.

Soon the Data Superhighway will finally once and for all do away with the high-priced middlemen, and artists will reap the benefits of their own hard-earned labor. The distribution formula will radically change from Author - Agent - Publisher - Printer - Distributor - Retailer - Consumer to a more simplified and direct Author (Sender) - Interactive Participant (Receiver)

The emerging wave of Avant-Pop artists now arriving on the scene find themselves caught in this struggle to rapidly transform our sick, commodity-infested workaday culture into a more sensual, trippy, exotic and networked Avant-Pop experience. One way to achieve this would be by creating and expanding niche communities. Niche communities, many of which already exist through the zine scene, will become, by virtue of the convergent electronic environments, virtual communities. By actively engaging themselves in the continuous exchange and proliferation of collectively-generated electronic publications, individually- designed creative works, manifestos, live on-line readings, multi- media interactive hypertexts, conferences, etc., Avant-Pop artists and the alternative networks they are part of will eat away at the conventional relics of a bygone era where the individual artist- author creates their beautifully-crafted, original works of art to be consumed primarily by the elitist art-world and their business- cronies who pass judgement on what is appropriate and what is not.

Avant-Pop artists wear each other's experiential data like waves of chaotic energy

The main tenet that will evolve for the Avant-Pop movement is: I, whoever that is, am always interacting with data created by the Collective You, whoever that is, and by interacting with and supplementing the Collective You, will find meaning.

Creating a work of art will depend more and more on the ability of the artist to select, organize and present the bits of raw data we have at our disposal

By sucking on the contaminated bosom of mainstream culture, Avant-Pop artists are turning into Mutant Fictioneers, it's true, but our goal is and always has been to face up to our monster deformation and to find wild and adventurous ways to love it for what it is

the artists who create Avant-Pop art are the Children of Mass Media (even more than being the children of their parents who have much less influence over them)

something else is starting to take hold in the cultural imagination

I made the library, and these initial zines, as a personal act to get out of a depression

My dream is to have people inspired to make webpages again about whatever they'd like, and share them in ways that don't promote competitive, addictive 'engagement stats'. And to have cyber-regional zine libraries that are collecting and supporting different scenes' work

to visit a dat site, much like reading a zine, requires that you ask for it from the creator of it (or be a part of a culture that is supporting and sharing them)

There is no implicit way to discover dat sites--instead you have to share your link with friends and hope they support, seed, and share the link too. A dat site spreads, then, through classic, social and 'underground' channels

Work with what you have, to support the people around you and together you'll create a community that has a defined shape and form only in hindsight. Instead of worrying about having enough onboarding ramps, I say we make a future space that is so exciting, so fun, that is such a cool party with lights so bright that everyone wants to build their own methods to get here and join in. And I thought: what's the coolest, most party thing in the world? Reading.

The future I want is decentralized, consensual, anarchist, feminist, and cool