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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Netochka's bad-girl pose is also seductive. Too far is not far enough for her.
"The legend is entirely negative, in a sense. But it turns out that people are really attracted to that," says David Zicarelli, the founder of Cycling '74, a small software company in San Francisco,
Zicarelli now runs the Max mailing list and is the current maintainer of Max, the graphical programming environment that the Nato software runs on. "You can't believe that someone would make such a spectacle of themselves," he says.
Zicarelli has personally been on the receiving end of Netochka's vitriol. He says he's been slandered, and that his company has been threatened with legal action. He's had his company's internal e-mail posted to the list. Netochka's response to being kicked off is still online.
His main offense? Refusing to bend to her will, says Zicarelli. Nato.0+55 requires Max to run, which makes Netochka dependent on Max, and ultimately on Zicarelli. For a radical arts collective in Europe, what could be worse than being vulnerable to the whims of an American company? Even more threatening, Zicarelli says Cycling '74 is now working on software that will compete with Nato.0+55.
Netochka threatens lawsuits, she revokes software licenses, she cries Nazi! So much as criticize her software publicly, and she might announce that you have been banned from using her software. It doesn't necessarily sound like the most prudent business strategy.
But Netochka's defenders see her whole online persona as her genius. The irritation and hand-wringing -- that's all part of the point. She speaks in tongues -- her own cryptic lexicon and syntax -- and then stands back to see just how disruptive this can be to an online community.
"Her contribution as a Net artist is in some ways more culturally significant than her work as a programmer," says Beatrice Beaubien.
Seen in this light, Netochka's highest art is the creation of her legend and the propagation of her own mythology. She doesn't care what you think of her, as long as you pay attention. Some of her victims asked me not to write about her at all, because I'd just be playing into her propaganda plan.
"The meme propagates itself by instigating some type of controversy so that it can make very loud cries of scandal and get people's attention. It's an effective way of self-marketing and self-replicating," says Joshua Kit Clayton, the electronic musician and computer programmer who's been a target of Netochka's ire.
After flirting with hiring him to do some work for Nato, she publicly accused him of thievery of intellectual property, says Clayton, and threatened to sue him and his employer, Cycling '74. Now, Clayton is working on his own video software.
Netochka lives for attention. And if I were to portray her as a cruel character assassin who slanders anyone who disagrees with her publicly -- the great terror of the Net! -- so much the better. Her critics so fear her retribution that most refuse to be quoted by name about her. Like a liberal ideologue who preaches tolerance as long as you always agree with him, Netochka squelches dissent.
Ask Netochka a question about herself, and the answers appear illusory, like water running through your fingers. "Is Netochka a figment of the Net's collective imagination?" meets with this enigmatic reply: "A ty budesh chitat? There is only 01 of me."
To the more straightforward question "Are you suing Cycling '74?" she responds: "My entire life I have wanted to be like the others. The world, however, in its loveliness, refused to listen to my plea and wanted to be like me." And this is when she isn't even pissed off at you. Yet.
If you e-mail Netochka privately, she has a habit of responding publicly on various mailing lists, like the 55 list, which is where she posted her answers to all of my interview questions. This is one of the pieces of evidence that fuels the speculation that she's more than one person -- everyone involved has to be kept abreast of what she's saying, so they won't contradict each other and expose the ruse.
Netochka refuses to be pinned down. As she puts it, in e-mail: "Being ambiguous, we are deemed confused, rather than praised for the complexity of the order in our minds."
It's an attitude that her admirers echo. "On the Internet, you're required to have a false identity to a certain extent and with her she takes the constructed and contrived identity to another level," says Miya Masaoka, a musician who has met one of the women who calls herself Netochka Nezvanova. "You start with a nickname and you can go anywhere."
"You only find out how attached you are to identity being locked down and battened down and unchanging when you bump into an entity like her. She is the acid test of whether people can deal with ambiguity," says Beaubien.
Only Netochka could transform the impulse to confine her to a single identity, to unmask the true, the real, the one and only Netochka, into a symptom of shallowness. Why do you feel that you have to know? Don't you get it?
