Electronic Cafe for Poetic Computation’s Material Cause for the Immaterial

The School for Poetic Computation’s (SFPC) Electronic Cafe for Poetic Computation (ECPC) is (was) an informal internet cafe developed for the Session Program at Recess. What began as an inspired social sculpture reflecting the design and energy of New York’s then-numerous internet cafes extended into a much-needed community space for networked cultural organization, workshops, relaxation, and free access to our modern mandatory multitool of our age, the computer.

ECPC lends itself towards a long tradition of providing urban centers a physical third space for a creative community to explore liberatory uses of networked technology within an abolitionist framework at no cost. ECPC is in direct conversation with another physical site of imagination, the Electronic Cafe Networking Project (ECNP) Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz created in 1984, a potential response to the Orwellian year, as part of their interest in how telecommunications can humanize a society increasingly framed by the use of modern technologies. If Galloway and Rabinowitz recognized such a moment and themselves as inside a particular inflection point, then SFPC followed that temporal vector of thought into 2023, when flawed 20th century utopian ideals of the internet have been inverted into a meat grinder of illegal data acquisition, surveillance, and diminished returns. The internet was once visualized as a world to surf and explore. Now it lends itself to a Shopping Mall with your pick of about seven social media storefronts, every aisle ultimately leading to consumption of its wares or users through personal data mining. In the wake of the digital once being a tool for users and not a field of user extraction, SFPC’s ECPC provided an simple but robust exploration towards a lost act; signifying technology together, to paraphrase ECNP’s 1984 Manifesto, “at a scale we can both create and destroy.” Those recognizing the digital as having a material cost is worth highlighting given the worsening if not impossible conditions of accessing living space in New York City. The existence of community cafes like ECPC counter the profit-driven models of city real estate acquisition, where every square foot of space is meant to be extracted for profit. In merely existing for a month or two, the ECPC recalls something the 1990s New York had much of, e-cafes, re-presenting an older model within a place that has succumbed to the desires of its late-stage capitalist private property owners: individuation, indexing, legibility, and commodification.

“Technostructure”, a term coined by economist John Kenneth Galbraith in his book The New Industrial State (1967), describes a newly emerging scarce-factor of production in mid-20th century American Capitalism: knowledge. The term forecasts the creation of a social group who would ultimately gain control of knowledge production. These “knowledge-experts” have come to be the engineers, scientists, managers, marketers, and accountants of our day, influencing corporations towards their financial and cultural ends for decades to come. A premonition in ‘67, market recognition in ‘84, and now in the driver’s seat of history, technostructuralists have moved their business from Palo Alto garages to Silicon Valley to Wall Street and Bitcoin ATMs inside of Brooklyn bodegas. If technology have become a distancing act between the worker and their tools of production, an e-cafe (and ECPC, by extension) was a radical act in providing education and resources in a field that increasingly has less interest in DIY technologies. Providing free computer use, synthesizer workshops, coding hours, and lectures for all ages results in alternate conditions of possibility; an imagined multiplicity of what knowledge(s) could actually be before being formalized by institutions and businesses. A ground-up model of knowledge production from everyday people deserves to be tended to.
The Informal community e-cafes (because who knows who can walk in!) provides a context to navigate spaces we consider to be spaceless together. A generative grounding. ECPC’s last day, community day, only amplified this notion. The day became a intergenerational space with coding activities, hula hooping, dance parties, lectures of the thought that can be derived from the Black electronic music tradition (by yours truly), and web applications galore to leave your mark in a nearby hard-drive or to simply explore a computer space that has little to do with likes or engagement outside the ones you’re literally having with those around you. SFPC’s Electronic Cafe was a thankful remembrance of an internet that once tried to gesture the values and outcomes of interdependence, and in a society whose leaders resist collective effort as an ethos, the intention to hold collective thought/laughter/time in a place you don’t have to pay-to-play, is worth appreciating.