"Net.art disrupts spectorial mastery, denying users interactivity and making them view internet technologies critically" (White, 2006: 86)
The Critical Arts Ensemble notes on their website, "Avant-gaurdism is grounded in the dangerous notion that there exists an elite class possessing enlightened consciousness. The fear is that one tyrant will simply be replaced by another", but then insists, ..."but only such a new avant-garde, undecidably artistic and technocratic, will be able to write the code for electronic disturbance" (CAE, 1994: 28) This attitude towards online activism must be tolerated with caution because although the augmentation of corporeality is undesirable, so to is accepting a techno-oligarchy. The online graffiti platform drawball presents a rudimentary, though nonetheless apt example of techno-elitism at work. Upon one's first visit to the site you receive an ink well of just 0.2%, which is barely enough to draw a circle around your piece of cyberwall. To even get this far though you must have Macromedia flash software and circumvent, which harks Flew's reprisal against net-utopianism: "Technology is implicated in perpetuating antidemocratic power relations and in eroding social contexts for developing and expressing citizenship" (Flew, 2005: 64).
