The Teknomatrix
Summary Description Simon Vandore has discovered the 'nightclub index' of Internet company fortunes.
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Roullas Top10 Simon Vandore

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Editorial InformationArticle Location
Article Topic Vandore
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Story Group 001112
Post Date 10/11/2000 08:21 AM Status Posted Entered by Simon Vandore on 09/11/2000 10:59 AM


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Content
Introduction
Lost to the sands of time is a double page spread entitled 'Teknomatrix' published in a 1993 student newspaper by me and two friends.

Body
We found the word on a sticker attached to a $170 Dunlop bicycle at Big W in Bathurst, NSW. I bought the bike and until it was stolen six months later, everyone knew it as "Simon's Teknomatrix".
Our pages in the student newspaper contained quotes from William Gibson's cyberpunk fiction and various poems written by my two friends, inspired by early tunes from The Prodigy and techno DJs. We had not heard of the Internet and had never used networked computers, but there was a gut feeling that somehow, something was going to change.
The editor was bemused. She was a bit more conservative and didn't like all the black ink we used on the pages. Come to think of it, neither did the readers, who probably spent most of their lunchtime washing it off their hands. Last I heard, that editor was a high-flying reporter for The Canberra Times. My Teknomatrix compatriots became a Daily Telegraph journo and a Web designer at Spike, but shared a passion for huge dance parties or raves, and the emerging dance music culture that accompanied the Internet boom.
Large slices of 1990s youth joined them, but I'm afraid my own rave attendance is pretty low. Don't get me wrong, I respect dance music and sometimes it's exactly what I want to hear, but for me nothing beats listening to a live band performing original songs. I think I've been to four big dance parties and five nights at clubs, as opposed to about 27,371 pubs.
I met someone the other day who had nothing to do with the technology industry, but said he could gauge the downturn in Internet companies via the people he met at dance clubs. He told me with authority that job losses in the Australian dot com sector are now quite significant and there is a pattern of insolvency administrators walking in, changing the locks on the doors and sending everyone home -- all garnered from conversations under the influence of various designer drugs.
On Tuesday I picked up the latest copy of 3D World, a free Sydney newspaper dedicated to the dance scene. It was full of @s and e-words and URLs. It all looks pretty mainstream now, with ads for sydneytribe.com and various portals taking up the space that stuff like Teknomatrix might have demanded.
We were correct that dance music culture and cyberpunk geek stuff were headed along similar paths. True rave culture is all about global spiritual connectedness through stuff that runs on electricity, while the Internet's pioneers were approaching the same things from a different perspective.
But somehow I think neither has achieved its aims, the fatal flaw in each case being self-centredness. So much of the 3D World culture is now about being more beautiful, feeling more ecstatic than the next person. So much of the Internet is now about getting richer than everyone else, by screwing everyone else.
How on earth does this fit with bringing everyone together for global understanding? The plot seems rather lost.
Vandore appears every Friday on Newswire. You can contact Simon Vandore on svandore@acptech.net.


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Bulletin SummaryVandore: The Teknomatrix
Simon Vandore has discovered the 'nightclub index' of Internet company fortunes.

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Vandore: The Teknomatrix

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