Regula Bochsler - Leaving Reality Behind - Inside the Battle for the Soul of the Internet

The protest had the added significance of being held on the tenth anniversary and in the same spot as the first spark of the city’s most explosive youth revolt of recent years, The Movement. In 1980 the Opera Riot was started by young people returning from a Bob Marley concert, and ended with barricades on the street, burning cars and police firing teargas and rubber bullets. The television pictures came as a shock to Switzerland’s staid community. In the following months The Movement staged many demonstrations, some of which also resulted in riots, as they made their demands: an end to the country’s ‘oppressive’ drugs policy; the introduction of a cultural policy that did not exclude the young (as the Opera did); and the funding of an ‘autonomous’ youth centre. The anti-consumerist protests were often wrapped in humour. Their chants on demonstrations included the Dadaist ‘Turn the State into a Cucumber Salad’ and ‘Down with the Alps, for a direct view of the Mediterranean!’ The demonstrations climaxed when 200 naked young people marched down Zürich’s Bahnhofstrasse, one of the world’s most exclusive shopping streets. The atmosphere was edgy, the crowd shouting, ‘We are the dead bodies of the cultural life of this city!’

Ten years on, the demonstrators outside Spross’s party lacked the impact of the previous generation but shared their spirit. They hung around in small groups, rousing themselves at the arrival of each new limousine.

One individual stood out from the crowd. Seventeen years old with carefully spiked blond hair, he wore a scruffy black leather jacket emblazoned with the words ‘Nazis Raus’ – Nazis Out – and bright-green Doctor Marten boots he had customised himself. The young man Herbert (though he later adopted the name agent.ZAI) was spotted by a producer from Swiss National Television who was on the talent trail for the youth programme Seismo , which needed reporters and presenters. When approached, Herbert railed against the authorities and talked about his involvement in the Students’ Union that he helped run at his high school. He was invited to a casting, where his fast-talking wit quickly secured him a starring role.

Herbert worked for the production for the next year, gaining special permission from his school to attend recordings and meetings. A two-hour discussion programme for young people, each episode covering a single topic, Seismo involved numerous guests, a live audience and band performances. The shows were brash, arresting spectacles that were always staged in strange locations – on one occasion it was set among the machinery at a water-purifying plant. Herbert gave compelling performances, interviewing guests and presenting recorded segments. The contrast between this spirited, jagged young man and Switzerland’s elder politicians and pundits made particularly engaging television.

Seismo taught Herbert much about the inner workings of the media, of which he was a keen and diligent student. The show also brought him a certain kudos. The press described him and his three fellow youth reporters as ‘lively, competent and cheeky’; they were interviewed and had their pictures published in the media, and occasionally Herbert was recognised in the street. During the course of that year he became more self-regarding than he had been before, and dyed his hair black to show off his good looks and intense eyes all the better on-screen. For the first time in his life he had achieved a kind of recognition. In a world where the old and comfortable truths of youth rebellion – the battles between East and West, between capital and labour – were no longer so easily grasped, the delights of the media and the celebrity that it brought were all the more enticing. It was a seduction that, as the years went on, Herbert found himself unable to resist.

At high school Herbert was not having such a good time. His bristling intelligence together with his rebelliousness annoyed his teachers at the straitlaced and traditional establishment that had a reputation as the proving ground for the Swiss elite. So he left, travelling to Basel to attend the most radical of all Swiss schools, the Anna Göldin-Gymnasium, named after the last Swiss witch to have been burned at the stake. The school was anti-authoritarian, governed for the most part by the students themselves, who democratically set and enforced the rules. But even in this most liberal of environments Herbert soon became embroiled in conflicts with both students and teachers. His free spirit did not flourish: without qualifications he moved back to Zürich.

The move left Herbert at a loose end, and by the spring of 1991 he was keen to find a place where he could feel comfortable and use his estimable skills. With a group of political activists and friends he broke into an old gas-meter factory called Wohlgrot and occupied the site. It was situated right in the centre of town, just behind Zürich’s main railway station, and included a cluster of buildings surrounding a courtyard, and a villa where the factory manager had once lived. The place became a popular and heavily populated squat, the most significant of countercultural happenings in the city since The Movement, and its existence was proclaimed by a huge parody of a station sign. Instead of ‘Zürich’, it read ‘Zureich’ – ‘Too Rich’.

During the coming months Herbert spent much of his time in the squat. With a café, a bar, a cinema and a concert venue, the place quickly took on the character of an underground cultural centre; it was illegal, for a start, but perhaps its most subversive feature was the ‘junkie room’, where heroin addicts could go either to shoot up or to receive medical help. But, as with Herbert’s radical school, amid the anarchy at the squat there was conflict. Late in 1991, when the new dance-beats of techno had arrived in the city, the squat’s first rave was held in a basement. A squatter threw a teargas grenade into the crowd in protest because he considered techno too ‘commercial’ for this fiercely anti-capitalist space. Herbert and his friends and everyone else present were forced to make a speedy exit up a narrow staircase. The event turned him against the puritan spirit of the protestors.

As time wore on, the idyllic utopia that Herbert had envisioned became the venue for more and more rancorous arguments. As he remembers, ‘We wanted the villa to be a special place, a nice place, but the others took over and it became dirty and fucked up.’ And so he began to dream of organising something independent, something over which he could wield more control.

Herbert’s yearning for his own thing resulted in his decision to stage a shocking performance. It was the summer of 1992, and Switzerland’s 156 numbers – the equivalent of America’s 1–900 numbers and Britain’s 0898 numbers – had just appeared and had immediately become synonymous with phone sex and pornographic chatlines. Hungry for this latest sordid, circulation-boosting story, newspaper editors had given the subject acres of newsprint, simultaneously titillating their readers with the details of what the phone services offered and condemning the lucrative schemes’ operators. To Herbert, too, this new phenomenon presented a glimmer of opportunity.

He remembers, ‘I wanted to be a pioneer at any price, because everything else seemed to be too boring.’ What he wanted to do was run his own 156 number, to use this very new technology to challenge the hypocrisy of the media and to pointedly shock the culture of the dull, lifeless and extraordinarily wealthy city of Zürich. He loved The Sex Pistols, the British band who in 1977 had reached Number One in Britain in the week of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and subsequently shocked the nation with their angry lyrics and by swearing on national television. Perhaps Herbert’s scam could do the same. Zürich, after all, had a history of bizarre events. Dada, the art movement that first shocked polite society by performing nonsense poetry, making collages and championing tomfoolery in the face of the horrors of the First World War, had begun here, and went on to influence almost every aspect of conceptual art in the twentieth century.