"tech wreck". (Voiceover).

To what extent has the "tech wreck" and following scandals affected our understanding of new media? Critical new media practices have been slow to respond to both the rise and fall of dot-com mania: the world of IT firms and their volatile valuations on the world's stock markets seemed light years away from the new media arts galaxy. The speculative heydays of new media culture were the early to midnineties, before the rise of the World Wide Web. Theorists and artists jumped with great anticipation on the not yet existing and inaccessible technologies such as virtual reality; cyberspace generated a rich collection of mythologies; issues of embodiment and identity were fiercely debated. Only five years later, while Internet stocks were going through the roof, not much was left of the initial excitement in intellectual and artistic circles. Experimental techno culture missed out on the funny money. Over the last few years there has been a steady stagnation of new media cultures, both in terms of concepts and fu nding. With hundreds of millions of new users flocking onto the Net, the arts could no longer keep up and withdrew into its little world of festivals, mailing lists and workshops.

Whereas new media arts institutions, begging for goodwill, still portray artists as working at the forefront of technological developments, collaborating with state of the science, the reality is a different one. Multidisciplinary goodwill is at an all time low. At best, pointedly "artistic" new media products are "demo design" as described by Peter Lunenfeld in his book Snap to Grid. Often they do not even reach that level. New media arts, as defined by its few institutions, rarely reach audiences outside of its own subculture. What in positive terms could be described as the heroic fight for the establishment of a self-referential "new media arts system" through a frantic differentiation of works, concepts and traditions, may as well be classified as a dead end street. The acceptance of new media by leading museums and collectors will simply not happen. Why wait a few decades anyway? The majority of the new media art works on display at ZKM, the Ars Electronica Center, ICC or Cinemedia is hopeless in its in nocence, being neither critical nor radically utopian in its approach. It is for that reason that the new media arts sector, despite its steady growth, is getting increasingly Isolated, incapable of addressing the issues of today's globalized world. It is therefore understandable that the contemporary (visual) arts world is continuing Its decade-old boycott of (Interactive) new media works in galleries, biennales and blockbuster shows such as Documenta.

A critical reassessment of the role of arts and culture within today's network society seems necessary. Let's go beyond the "tactical" intentions of the players involved. This is not a blame game. The artist-engineer, tinkering with alternative human-machine interfaces, social software, digital aesthetics and more has effectively been operating in a self-imposed vacuum. Over the last few decades both science and business have successfully ignored the creative community. Even worse, artists have actively been sidelined in the name of "usability." The backlash movement against Web design, lead by IT-guru Jakob Nielsen, is a good example of this trend. Other contributing factors may have been the corporate dominance of AOL and Microsoft. Lawrence Lessig argues that innovation of the Internet as such is in danger. Meanwhile the younger generation is turning its back on the new media arts questions and operates as anti-corporate activists, if at all involved. After the dot-com crash the Internet has rapidly lost i ts imaginative attraction. File swapping and cell phones can only temporarily fill up the vacuum. New media have lost their magic spell. Bit by bit they are becoming part of boring everyday life. This long-term tendency, now in a phase of acceleration, seriously undermines the very notion of new media altogether.

Another issue is generationalism. With video and interactive installations being the domain of the 68 baby boomers, the generation of 89 has embraced the free Internet--ignored by the establishment, assisted by even younger geeks. The Internet turned out to be a trap. Whereas real assets, positions and power remains in the hands of the aging baby boomers, the gamble of its predecessors on the rise of new media did not materialize. The slow working bureaucracies within the educational sector have not yet grasped this new reality. Universities are still in the process of establishing new media departments. But that will also come to a halt at some point. The fifty something chairs and vice-chancellors must feel good about their persistent sabotage. What's new about new media anyway? Technology was hype after all, promoted by the criminals of Enron and WorldCom. It is sufficient for students to do a bit of email and Web surfing, safeguarded within a filtered and controlled intranet. It is for this cynical reason ing that we urgently need to analyze the ideology of the greedy nineties and Its techno-libertarianism. If we don't disassociate new media quickly from the previous decade, and if we continue with the same rhetoric, the isolation of the new media sector will sooner or later result in its death.

GEERT LOVINK is a Dutch media theorist and Internet critic, based in Sydney, Australia. He is co-founder of numerous Internet projects, amongst them the community server The Digital City and the nettime mailinglist. In 2002 the MIT Press will publish Dark Fiber, his collected essays on Internet culture, and Uncanny Network, interviews with media theorists and artists.