The avant-garde never gives up. And tactical media has produced (at least)
three different theaters of operation to wage its struggle: media
activism, pure tactical aesthetics, and net conceptualism. The first
allows for "formal" net.art tactics (materialist, structural), the latter
two allow for "real" net.art tactics (native presence, site-specificity).

1) "Media activism" is what N5M knows best. In the classic mode of leftist
engagement it extends from access control issues like the "we want
bandwidth" campaign to more blatantly confrontational projects like
hacking in protest of Kevin Mitnick's imprisonment. Cyberfeminism, RTMARK,
Mongrel's techno morphs, free servers like xs4all, and prosthetic networks
like ZAMIR all fall under the rubric of media activism. In their very
existence, the postmedia venues (nettime, RHIZOME, etc.) and other
temporary autonomous communities belong here too (although sometimes these
venues become more conceptual than activist).

2) "Pure tactical aesthetics" is the label we use for new media's
art-for-art's-sake. It designates new media art that is truly
(web)site-specific. Jodi invented it. 7-11 perfected it. And today,
hell.com (and its residents) have evolved it to a higher form. Pure
tactical aesthetics are most often seen in a raising of the bar--a shock
of the shock--whose eventual goal is to define a new aesthetic totally
native to computers. This art stretches outward, past one's normal
creative purview to chart new cultural ground. It is a grenade in the
brain of the establishment. It is unsellable, unexhibitable and
uncritiquable.

3) "Net conceptualism" is web sculpture. It is the spacialization of the
web, a way of thinking new thoughts. To find net conceptualism look for
places where the art object has been dissolved into the network (or
rather, into *relationality* as such). "Refresh" was an early form. More
advanced conceptual projects include FloodNet and the Web Stalker. Heath
Bunting's "_readme" is pure net conceptualism, though he might deny it.
Electronic civil disobedience becomes conceptual when it sheds its offline
pretense. Online media activism becomes conceptual when it discovers what
is it when it cannot *be* anywhere else.

Intelligent systems (capitalism, Hollywood, language, internet) are
amazingly powerful, yet always produce their own grave diggers. Alternate
possibilities must necessarily emerge. For the internet our new virtues
are interactivity, collaboration, artificial life--each with a correlative
effect: anti-author, anti-hierarchy, and anti-fascism. Technology is
inherently tactical. Material change is nothing without cultural
innovation. You will fail who cannot do both. And finally we will realize
that tactical net.art is not just technology, it is a just technology.