Dette ble skrevet for en måned siden og sendt til StopWTORound for en
drøy uke siden, men er enda mer aktuelt nå i lys av AOL-Time
Warner-fusjonen. Gir også noe perspektiv på diskusjonen om KKs
fremtid.
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Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 15:02:23 +0100 (CET)
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Reply-To: Erik Wesselius <erik225@knoware.nl>
Subject: [StopWTORound] In Seattle's Aftermath: Linux, Independent Media, and the Survival , of Democracy
From: Erik Wesselius <erik225@knoware.nl>
Found for you on the Internet:
--------------------------------------------------------------
In Seattle's Aftermath:
Linux, Independent Media, and the Survival of Democracy
by Bryan Pfaffenberger <bp@virginia.edu>
LinuxJournal, 13-Dec-1999
<http://www2.linuxjournal.com/articles/currents/013.html>
--------------------------------------------------------------
Independent digital media can't survive without an OS and an
Internet that are free from corporate control.
At a 1996 Media and Democracy conference in San Francisco, CA,
Andy Sharpless, Vice President of Progressive Networks of
Seattle, told his audience that independent, Internet-based media
outlets had just five years to compete against large, corporate
sites (Beacham, 1996). The five years are almost up, and it's
abundantly clear that Sharpless' prediction was right on the
money. Corporations are well on their way to transforming the
Internet into a computerized version of broadcast television,
replete with mind-numbing consumerism, an aversion to reporting
of news that corporations dislike, and using all the tricks of
broadcast TV (including fast-changing images, gratuitous sex, and
subtle psychological manipulation) to keep your eyes glued to the
screen.
But it's not merely the dumbing-down of Internet content that
worries independent media activists. Within the next five years,
the transformation of Internet content will be coupled with
intrusive, surreptitious content monitoring, akin to having your
every move in a public bookstore or newsstand exhaustively
catalogued and monitored, and then put up for sale to any
interested party. In contrast to today's monitoring, which is
ostensibly done without associating individuals' names with the
collected data, tomorrow's will be more personal -- and far more
damaging. Employers, after all, will doubtless be very keen to
knowing whether job applicants have (say) visited sites
discussing such matters as worker's compensation, alcoholism,
depression, or (horror of horrors) trade unionism. If you've
accessed the "wrong" site and some other, equally capable
applicant hasn't, perhaps you won't get that job, but you'll
never know why. ("Your credentials did not fit our needs at this
time.") Skeptical? American workers are already terrified of
making worker's compensation claims or seeking treatment for
anxiety or depression, knowing full well that doing so may ruin
their chances for future employment.
In the corporate-shaped Internet to come, one may feel a powerful
prior constraint concerning the mere seeking of any information
-- the mere <b>reading</b> of any content -- that would displease
an employer. This is repression on a scale as horrifying as
anything envisioned in dystopian science fiction novels such as
<I>Brave New World</I>; perhaps even more horrifying, because
it's all too clear that the needed technology is available right
now. You'll find out soon enough that, in fact, it's already in
use. For a time, there will be a big public outcry, and the first
company that's caught will have to back off. After the furor dies
down, though, the practice will become commonplace and
unremarkable -- until, that is, it ruins your career.
Make no mistake about it: there's a battle to come, and it's not
really about "consumers" and "privacy" and the rest of the
meaningless terminology you've heard. Fundamentally, it's about
<I>democracy</I>: specifically, the right of the people to obtain
the information and knowledge they need to govern themselves in
freedom. And, as you'll see, Linux and the Open Source software
movement promise to play a key role in this battle.
Why Independent Media Matter
If you get your news only from mainstream media, you'd think a
"guerilla army of anti-trade activists" disrupted the WTO's
recent Seattle conference (<I>Washington Post</I>, 12/1/99) and
what's more, that the Seattle police responded with force only
after a "small band of self-described anarchists" started
smashing downtown merchants' windows (CNN, 12/1/99). Animating
the protesters, as stressed repeatedly by the media, was a grab
bag of ill-formed, far-fetched ideas. To explain the protesters'
concerns, a CNN reporter sought out the president of the National
Association of Manufacturers (certainly a highly objective
commentator) who could discern only "a lot of crazy different
messages" from the "loopy protesters". A <I>New York Times</I>
columnist summed up the demonstrators as a "Noah's ark of
flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions, and yuppies
looking for their 1960s fix" (FAIR Media Advisory, December 7,
1999, <http://www.fair.org/activism/wto-prattle.html>).
What you <I>don't</I> know has been reported only by the
independent media movement; a coalition of web sites, progressive
radio stations, book publishers, newspapers, and magazines
devoted to providing an alternative to the world view offered by
multinational corporations (Hazen and Winokur, 1997). Only
through such outlets as The Independent Media Center
<http://216.254.6.207/> could you learn the following:
- In general, the protesters weren't opposed to trade <I>per
se</I>, but rather to WTO policies that place free trade for
multinational corporations over all other concerns. Specifically,
they were protesting WTO policies that force member countries to
repeal laws protecting workers, public health, and the
environment; the promotion of new rules restricting member
countries' ability to regulate the actions of multinational
corporations; and rules requiring member countries to adhere to
corporate-shaped U.S. definitions of intellectual property, which
would commoditize virtually every aspect of information that was
formerly freely available to the public, including software
algorithms, scientific and news facts, and even the genetic
information contained in the living tissue of plants, animals,
and human beings.
- To the extent that there was violence in the Seattle
demonstrations, an unbiased and proportional coverage would
instead focus on the actions of the Seattle police, who
repeatedly used pepper spray, batons, and rubber bullets against
peaceful demonstrators.
In short, you weren't told the truth. And believe me, this wasn't
the first time.
Why Mainstream Media Won't Tell You the Truth
You don't have to be a genius or a conspiracy theorist to figure
this one out. A few global media giants dominate the market;
they have huge and growing holdings in virtually every means by
which information is disseminated -- films, books, TV channels,
radio stations, newspapers, and magazines (Herman and McChesney,
1998). And they pressure, whether overtly or not, authors and
reporters to put a slant on the news -- specifically, a centrist
to right-wing slant that favors the interests of the media's
corporate owners. <http://www.fair.org/extra/9511/nbc.html>
That's the reason you hear, over and over, why development
matters more than preserving the environment, why free trade
matters more than worker's rights, and why the U.S. has the right
to impose its military power wherever it pleases.
Apart from the general pressure to slant the news to the center
and right, industry associations overtly pressure media outlets
to censor certain types of news reporting by threatening to
withdraw advertising. For example, thanks to pressure from
restaurant associations, newspapers are reluctant to specify
local restaurants which violate health department regulations.
Even so, overt pressure isn't often needed. When you're in the
media business, you know darned well you'd better not run stories
that businesses won't like. You tone it down. You run it by them.
And if they're not comfortable and you're not comfortable, you
don't run it.
In sum, you don't hear the truth because corporations don't want
you to hear it and mainstream media are too cowardly to report
it. Had you known the truth about Seattle (including substantive
discussion of the specific issues concerning WTO policies), you
might have thought more deeply about what's at stake. But that
doesn't sell beer; why ask why, after all, when doing so is
virtually unmarketable? Instead of providing the tools needed to
think seriously about national policies, the media would much
prefer to socialize viewers into becoming "neurotic in their need
to buy advertised commodities", generating "mass spending on
goods such as cosmetics, cigarettes, beer, soft drinks, and
patent medicines completely out of proportion to the rational use
of national income..." and diverting attention from "society's
central needs, including public education, health care, [and]
democratic economics" (Bagdikian, 1996:10).
The Coming Attack on the Internet's Common Carrier Status
The Internet is giving corporate media companies the fits; it's
just so darned hard to make the mainstream media model apply. If
you can't bring billions of eyeballs to your site, how are you
going to make money? Right now, the Internet is like a phone
system, a common carrier operated in the public's interest, in
which anyone can access anything and have a pretty good chance of
getting it. Horrifying! Media corporations aren't content, of
course, to sit back and let this intolerable situation endure,
this <I>unendurable</I> situation in which some college kid can
put up a page that, in principle, is just as accessible as Dot
Com's. With the aid of U.S. legislatures that are essentially up
for sale to the highest bidder, they're well on their way to
transforming the Internet into something far more to their
liking. Here's just some of what they're doing:
- Pressuring Internet designers to build in bandwidth-reservation
schemes and "quality of service" (QoS) guarantees that will
funnel users to a few high-performance sites. If you don't want
to visit the sites that have paid for QoS guarantees, that's just
fine, but you may have to wait quite a while to get through.
- Adapting to the Internet the known techniques used by broadcast
television; namely, "endless scenes of violence and other
aggressive melodrama, gratuitous sex, split-second cuts...
[which] keep a viewer glued to the channel"
(Bagdikian, 1997:11).
- Transforming search engines into advertising media in which
high-retrieval ranking requires a payment to the search engine
provider.
- Developing user monitoring and tracking systems that are
incapable of detection by average users, and associating these
systems with proposed legislation that defines "copyright
management infrastructures" and spells out hefty prison terms
for anyone who attempts to defeat them.
- Using recently adopted copyright legislation to remove from the
Internet leaked corporate documents that could inform the
public of conspiratorial or even illegal corporate actions.
- Pressuring the U.S. Congress to adopt new legal definitions of
"facts" in digital media that essentially remove all forms of
previously accessible knowledge from the public domain and
transform them into commodities that cannot be used without the
payment of a fee.
- Pushing for legislation that criminalizes anonymity.
I don't mean to allege some sort of industry-wide conspiracy
here. What you're seeing is the outgrowth of many very large,
very rich companies pursuing their short-term interests, without
the slightest regard for the long-term consequences of their
actions -- just as they did at the opening of the Industrial Age,
when oligopolies and monopolies brought on widespread misery on
such a shocking scale that even those partial to business saw the
need for regulatory measures.
Linux and Open-Source Software: A Line of Defense Against
Corporate Control of the Internet
If you'd like just one good reason why Linux is so vital to the
survival of the Internet as a publicly accessible medium, just
take a look at Microsoft Windows 98. It's designed in such a way
as to further Microsoft's market ambitions, as the good Judge
Jackson recently affirmed, but it's also a dream come true for
companies hoping to transform the Internet into a
corporate-dominated medium.
With Windows 98, you're basically forced to use Internet
Explorer. You can't delete it, and you're in for a "jolting
experience" should you try to run another browser. For this
reason, there's a uniform, predictable platform that's in daily
use by millions of Internet surfers. Tightly integrated with the
operating system and Microsoft mail utilities, Internet Explorer
ideally suits the interests of corporate intruders as well as
virus authors. You can exploit the tight, internal connections in
all sorts of creative ways. And if you're using this very dynamic
duo, you can't shield yourself; you don't even know what's going
on. Sure, Internet Explorer gives you the apparent means to
defeat cookies, but this feature borders on deception. It amounts
to an all-or-nothing proposition; essentially, either you accept
all cookies without scrutiny, or you turn them off -- and then
you can't visit <I>any</I> site that requires them. It's only
when you escape from the world of corporate-controlled media that
you see other options. For example, the KDE browser enables you
to specify which <I>domains</I> you're willing to accept cookies
from -- it's a simple, straightforward means to assure that
you're tracked by only those sites you've chosen to trust.
The privacy-busting possibilities built into the Windows
98/Internet Explorer duo are perfectly exemplified by Comet
Systems' <http://www.cometsystems.com/> cute and freely
downloadable cursors. The products take full advantage of the
tight, opaque integration between Windows and Internet Explorer
to track your movements through some 60,000 web sites.
<http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/19991130/tc/internet_privacy_3.html>
Of course, Comet and other companies playing variations on the
same trick deny that they're collecting information on specific
individuals. Still, the technology to accomplish such a
privacy-busting association is already here, and it will someday
be used (if it hasn't already). And the day will soon be upon us
(perhaps two to five years) when your would-be employer consults
databases of web-surfing profiles to determine whether you, the
eager job applicant, just might have expressed an interest in
subjects that make employers uncomfortable. Sure, such screening
will almost certainly diminish the employability of people who
innocently accessed questionable sites, but the claim will be
made that the rights of these innocent victims mean nothing when
placed against the savings employers expect to realize by
avoiding the occasional freeloader, the Commie, the drunk. It
won't occur to these employers, or their defenders, that there's
a more fundamental violation of rights at stake here: namely, the
right of free citizens in a democracy to acquire knowledge
without fear that the topic of their inquiry will expose them to
adverse consequences.
So where do Linux and the Open Source movement come in? It's
simple. We're talking about software that's created outside the
corporate system -- and as a consequence, software that's
insulated from the pressures corporations exert to destroy the
Internet's inherent democracy. Linux rejects the tight coupling
between the browser and the operating system. What's more, it
enables users to look under the hood to find out what's going on;
users astute in programming can analyze the source code, if
necessary, to determine how the software operates. If there's
anything funny, word will go out like lightning. A new generation
of open-source software may emerge that, like the KDE browser, is
specifically and pro-actively designed to protect users from
intrusive monitoring.
I wish I could say that these measures alone could help preserve
the Internet's capacity to function democratically. Sure, they're
a step in the right direction, but the forces arrayed against
information democracy are powerful, wealthy, and determined to
win. What will decide the outcome, in the end, is the much
broader question of whether the Internet-using public pulls
itself out of its apathy, realizes what's going on, and joins a
mass movement to regain our freedom. In the meantime, of course,
there's your daily, media-supplied apathy regimen, consisting
quite possibly of beer and the boys and babes on Baywatch -- but
maybe, just maybe, you'll take a look at the bibliography I've
appended and learn what's at stake.
Bryan Pfaffenberger is Associate Professor of Technology,
Culture, and Communication at the University of Virginia.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Media Studies 101: Understanding the Consequences of Corporate Media
Control
Alger, Dean. <I>Megamedia: How Giant Corporations Dominate Mass Media,
Distort Competition, and Endanger Democracy.</I> Rowman & Littlefield,
1998.
Beacham, Frank. "The Internet in Transition",
<http://www.beacham.com/net_transition.html>, 1996.
Bagdikian, Ben. "Brave New World Minus 400", in G. Gerbner, H. Mowlana,
and H. Schiller (eds.), <I>Invisible Crises: What Conglomerate Control of
Media Means for America and the World.</I> Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
pp. 7-14. 1996.
Bagdikian, Ben. <I>The Media Monopoly</I>. Beacon Press, 1997.
Barnouw, Erik, and Todd Gitlin. <I>Conglomerates and the Media</I>. New
Press, 1998.
Carey, Alex, Andrew Lohrey, and Noam Chomsky (eds.), <I>Taking the Risk
Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty</I>.
University of Illinois Press.
Hazen, Don, and Julie Winokur (eds.), <I>We the Media: A Citizen's Guide
to Fighting for Media Democracy</I>. New Press.
Herman, Edward, and Robert W. McChesney, <I>The Global Media: The
Missionaries of Global Capitalism</I>.
Ritzer, George. <I>The McDonaldization of Society</I>. Pine Forge Press,
1993.
Solomon, Norman, and Jeff Cohen. <I>Wizards of Media Oz: Behind the
Curtain of Mainstream News</I>. Common Courage Press, 1997.
Solomon, Norman. <I>The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media: Decoding Spin
and Lies in Mainstream News</I>. Common Courage Press, 1998.
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| jon | jonivar skullerud |
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\ | jonivar@bigfoot.com |
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