Curses! My entire undergraduate education has just been rendered inert. I knew this day would come...

The author is certainly correct when he says that the culture we now inhabit is different than the one which produced classical postmodernism. And I think he has correctly identified the crucial difference, interactivity. The rest of his article is essentially an elitist elegy for the "good old days" of postmodernism. Its first defect is that, while it has hope for "pseudo-modernism", it is ignorant of any quality work being done in this milieu. The second is that I think his pessimism is misplaced; what makes "pseudo-modernism" disturbing is not that it is a radical break from past media but that it is rather a more powerful and immersive media: text vs. hypertext.

For example: "A culture based on these things can have no memory – certainly not the burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance which informed modernism and postmodernism. Non-reproducible and evanescent, pseudo-modernism is thus also amnesiac: these are cultural actions in the present moment with no sense of either past or future." For Kirby, improvisation is the same as amnesia. He confuses the act of playing or participating in the work with the work itself. For example, there is a small but enthusiastic subculture of video game emulation, where the hardware of old video game systems is reproduced as software, and one can play old video games on computers. Also, it is quite common for people to record video game performances for later viewing. There is, like theater, a "live" element to games, but this does not make them any more amnesiac than it makes theater amnesiac.

Prof. Kirby doesn't mince words when it comes to elitism: "The pseudo-modern era, at least so far, is a cultural desert." The reference to "dance music" (by which he apparently means all electronic music) is especially pompous. I hope most people here have enough of a clue to know that there exists very intelligent and enduring electronic music. This is perhaps evident enough in the the author's uncertain movement from labeling it "70's and 80's" (i.e. obsolete) music to calling it the forerunner of "pseudo-modern" music, and also the sloppy comparison he draws there between the structure of dance music and the contemporary forms of consumption of music.

Interactive media is a largely uncharted terrain with much promise, as Kirby himself admits. The mainstream is, as it was in the postmodern era -- and has been since the invention of mass media -- *is* rather vacuous. But there are plenty of intelligent video games and other interactive art being made. It is unfortunate that Prof. Kirby didn't bother to research them. The blog Grand Text Auto is a good resource in this regard: grandtextauto.gatech.edu/ I also moderate a tribe "new media art" -- newmedia.tribe.net

The second and more troubling error in this article is the suggestion that the spectacle (by which I assume he's referring to Situationism) is no longer to be seen in the media:

Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real were problematised. It therefore emphasised the television or the cinema screen. Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individual’s action the necessary condition of the cultural product.

Debord has this to say about the spectacle:

The spectacle is ideology par excellence, because it exposes and manifests in its fullness the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment, servitude and negation of real life. The spectacle is materially "the expression of the separation and estrangement between man and man." Through the "new power of fraud," concentrated at the base of the spectacle in this production, "the new domain of alien beings to whom man is subservient... grows coextensively with the mass of objects." It is the highest stage of an expansion which has turned need against life. "The need for money is thus the real need produced by political economy, and the only need it produces" (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts). The spectacle extends to all social life the principle which Hegel (in the Realphilosophie of Jena) conceives as the principle of money: it is "the life of what is dead, moving within itself."

Viewed in this way, the virtual reality of "pseudo-modernism" is a spectacle -- indeed a preeminently powerful one precisely because the participation of the audience draws them deeper into the illusion and farther away from reality. As Kirby says, "pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism" and "Pseudo-modernism is of course consumerist and conformist, a matter of moving around the world as it is given or sold." Kirby is practically quoting from "The Society of the Spectacle" there.