McKenzie Wark on Sun, 9 Sep 2001 23:39:45 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
<nettime> L is for Law |
L is for LAW / 9th September 2001 McKenzie Wark Nothing signals the changing structure of the ruling class more than the legal constraints within which it agrees to operate. For decades media corporations have been obliged to work within regulatory limits that conform to the interests of capital as a whole. Now they are breaking free of those fetters. For all its talk about diversity and democracy, capital's real interest in limiting the growth of media conglomerates lies in preventing them from emerging as a separate power with the ability to influence the direction of commodified life in a direction more amenable to the commodification of information, and the subordination not only of the whole of life, but of other kinds of commodification to the rule of information. Three judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia have recently declared that they don't see the justification for limiting television networks to reaching a mere 35% of American households. Nor do they see why a cable company ought not to own a television station broadcasting to the same customers. The judges are coming around to the views of the networks and cable corps, who argued before the court, as one report put it, that such regulations "violate their First Amendment rights to reach an unlimited audience." While this may appear as a travesty of the Constitution's meaning and intention, perhaps it merely points to a contradiction that arises out of it. The protection of free speech was meant to protect those who have something to say. Now it is construed to mean the protection of those who own the means by which all speech finds its listeners. It was simply not in the 18th century heads of the Great White Men who wrote the Constitution that a separation would arise between the producers of original speech and those who profit by it. The regulatory framework within which American media currently operates stems from a time when the 20th century ruling class did indeed recognise a distinction between the author of an idea and the owner of a television network. The former were to be free to speak as they please, knowing full well that this right doesn't amount to much when the means of communication are in corporate hands. But the latter are to be put under strict constraints. Capital feared the owners of the means of communication more than the producers of incendiary ideas. What is clear is that capital is no longer solely in charge. The state represents an unstable compromise between capital and a rising new interest: the vectoral class. The vectoralists which profits by the ownership and control of intellectual property in all its forms, but in particular, the means of communication -- the vectors of wire and frequency. Just as capital struggled against landed interested and agricultural production, so the vectoral class struggles against capital. Each is based in turn on distinct forms of property -- land, capital, intellectual property, and each in turn clamours for a rewriting of the law in its favour. But where the struggle between landed interests and capital produced a violent civil war, the struggle between capitalist and vectoralist interests produces merely an oblique trace in those few media vectors not under monopoly control already. The difficulty for capital is that having struggled to overcome the state's hostility to monopoly and its trust-busting instincts, it finds the same logic used by a rising class competitor. What the TV networks, the cable companies and Microsoft have in common is a desire to create for themselves monopoly or quasi-monopoly positions in the marketplace for information. They are using as their weapon the anti-regulation arguments pioneered by capital. This is hardly an outcome amenable to capital, which finds both the manufacture and sale of things dependent on the owners of information. Just as landed interested resented their dependence on capital caused by the mechanisation of agriculture, so too the capitalist interest resents its dependence on the vector caused by a rising dependence on information. On every front, the law comes increasingly to reflect a new interest, an interest in the consolidation of intellectual property as the legal means for a new form of class domination. A class domination dependent on the abstractions of intellectual property, sanctioned by law, which insinuates itself into all aspects of commodified life. This emerging regime speaks in the name of the producers of ideas, but is really designed for the benefit of the owners of ideas. The vectoralist class is nothing but a parasite upon the creativity of intellectual life. A HACKER MANIFESTO http://www.feelergauge.net/projects/hackermanifesto/version_2.0/ INDEX TO THIS FABULOUS WORLD http://www.fineartforum.org/Backissues/Vol_15/faf_v15_n09/text/fe ature.html NOTES Stephen Labaton, 'Court Weighs Easing Limits On Big Media', New York Times, 8th September 2001, http://www.nytimes.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ We no longer have roots, we have aerials. ~~~~~~~~~~ McKenzie Wark ~~~~~~~~~ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net