Goran Maric on Wed, 9 Mar 2011 04:05:39 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> David Solomonoff on the perils and pitfalls of InternetFreedom - "The Internet's Unholy Marriage to Capitalism " |
This is a first part of a bit longer but quite an interesting reading written by John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, "The Internet's Unholy Marriage to Capitalism." Unfortunately the history of the Internet, form its birth up to now, reminds me quite a bit to the the U.S. history of radio broadcast, i.e., how a democratic nature, intention and purpose of a medium / media, such as transmition of radio waves through the ether, get to be totally inverted and degenerated in relation to its originated ideas and or goals. The full reading here: http://therealnews.com/t2/component/content/article/80-more-blog-posts-from-robert-mcchesney/593-the-internets-unholy-marriage-to-capitalism "Robert W. McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2002 he was the co-founder of Free Press, a national media reform organization. McChesney also hosts the Media Matters weekly radio program every Sunday afternoon on NPR-affiliate WILL-AM radio. McChesney has written or edited eighteen books. His most recent book, written with John Nichols, is the multiple award-winning The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again (Nation Books, 2010). His work has been translated into 27 languages. " The Internet's Unholy Marriage to Capitalism John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney The United States and the world are now a good two decades into the Internet revolution, or what was once called the information age. The past generation has seen a blizzard of mind-boggling developments in communication, ranging from the World Wide Web and broadband, to ubiquitous cell phones that are quickly becoming high-powered wireless computers in their own right. Firms such as Google, Amazon, Craigslist, and Facebook have become iconic. Immersion in the digital world is now or soon to be a requirement for successful participation in society. The subject for debate is no longer whether the Internet can be regarded as a technological development in the same class as television or the telephone. Increasingly, the debate is turning to whether this is a communication revolution closer to the advent of the printing press.1 The full impact of the Internet revolution will only become apparent in the future, as more technological change is on the horizon that can barely be imagined and hardly anticipated.2 But enough time has transpired, and institutions and practices have been developed, that an assessment of the digital era is possible, as well as a sense of its likely trajectory into the future. Our analysis in this article will focus on the United States-not only because it is the society that we know best, and the Internet's point of origin, but also because it is there, we believe, that one most clearly finds the integration of monopoly-finance capital and the Internet, representing the dominant tendency of the global capitalist system. This is not meant to suggest that the current U.S. dominance of the Internet is not open to change, or that other countries may not choose to take other paths-but only that all alternatives in this realm will have to struggle against the trajectory now being set by U.S. capitalism, with its immense global influence and power. What is striking, as one returns to the late 1980s and early 1990s and reads about the Internet and its future, is that these accounts were almost uniformly optimistic. With all information available to everyone at the speed of light and impervious to censorship, all existing institutions were going to be changed for the better. There was going to be a worldwide two-way flow, or multi-flow, a democratization of communication unthinkable before then. Corporations could no longer bamboozle consumers and crush upstart competitors; governments could no longer operate in secrecy with a kept-press spouting propaganda; students from the poorest and most remote areas would have access to educational resources once restricted to the elite. In short, people would have unprecedented tools and power. For the first time in human history, there would not only be information equality and uninhibited instant communication access between all people everywhere, but there would also be access to a treasure trove of uncensored knowledge that only years earlier would have been unthinkable, even for the world's most powerful ruler or richest billionaire. Inequality and exploitation were soon to be dealt their mightiest blow. The Internet, or more broadly, the digital revolution is truly changing the world at multiple levels. But it has also failed to deliver on much of the promise that was once seen as implicit in its technology. If the Internet was expected to provide more competitive markets and accountable businesses, open government, an end to corruption, and decreasing inequality-or, to put it baldly, increased human happiness-it has been a disappointment. To put it another way, if the Internet actually improved the world over the past twenty years as much as its champions once predicted, we dread to think where the world would be if it had never existed. We do not argue that the initial sense of the Internet's promise was pure fantasy, although some of it can be attributed to the utopian enthusiasm that major new technologies can engender when they first emerge. (One is reminded of the early-twentieth-century view of the Nobel Prize-winning chemist and philosopher of energetics, Wilhelm Ostwald, who contended that the advent of the "flying machine" was a key part of a universal process that could erase international boundaries associated with nations, languages, and money, "bringing about the brotherhood of man."3) Instead, we argue that there was-and remains-extraordinary democratic and revolutionary promise in this communication revolution. But technologies do not ride roughshod over history, regardless of their immense powers. They are developed in a social, political, and economic context. And this has strongly conditioned the course and shape of the communication revolution. This economic context points to the paradox of the Internet as it has developed in a capitalist society. The Internet has been subjected, to a significant extent, to the capital accumulation process, which has a clear logic of its own, inimical to much of the democratic potential of digital communication, and that will be ever more so, going forward. What seemed to be an increasingly open public sphere, removed from the world of commodity exchange, seems to be morphing into a private sphere of increasingly closed, proprietary, even monopolistic markets. Our argument is not a socialist argument against capitalism's anti-democratic tendencies per se, which we then extend to the case of the Internet. Although we would not be uncomfortable taking such a position, it would make something as extraordinary and unique as the digital revolution too much a dependent variable-and it would allow those opposed to socialism to dismiss the argument categorically. Instead, we base our argument on elements of conventional economic thought, produced by scholars who, by and large, favor capitalism as a system. Our critique, derived from classical and mainstream terms of analysis, will repeatedly demonstrate the weaknesses of allowing the profit motive to dictate the development of the Internet. In particular, we argue that applying the "Lauderdale Paradox" (or the contradiction between public wealth and private riches) of classical political economy makes a strong case that the most prudent course for any society is to start from the assumption that the Internet should be fundamentally outside the domain of capital. We hope to provide a necessary alternative way to imagine how best to develop the Internet in contrast to the commodified, privatized world of capital accumulation. This does not mean that there can be no commerce, even extensive commerce, in the digital realm, but merely that the system's overriding logic-and the starting point for all policy discussions-must be as an institution operated on public interest values, at bare minimum as a public utility. It is true that in any capitalist society there is going to be strong, even at times overwhelming, pressure to open up areas that can be profitably exploited by capital, regardless of the social costs, or "negative externalities," as economists put it. After all, capitalists-by definition, given their economic power-exercise inordinate political power. But it is not a given that all areas will be subjected to the market. Indeed, many areas in nature and human existence cannot be so subjected without destroying the fabric of life itself-and large portions of capitalist societies have historically been and remain largely outside of the capital accumulation process. One could think of community, family, religion, education, romance, elections, research, and national defense as partial examples, although capital is pressing to colonize those where it can. Many important political debates in a capitalist society are concerned with determining the areas where the pursuit of profit will be allowed to rule, and where it will not. At their most rational, and most humane, capitalist societies tend to preserve large noncommercial sectors, including areas such as health care and old-age pensions, that might be highly profitable if turned over to commercial interests. At the very least, the more democratic a capitalist society is, the more likely it is for there to be credible public debates on these matters. However-and this is a point dripping in irony-such a fundamental debate never took place in relation to the Internet. The entire realm of digital communication was developed through government-subsidized-and-directed research and during the postwar decades, primarily through the military and leading research universities. Had the matter been left to the private sector, to the "free market," the Internet never would have come into existence. The total amount of the federal subsidy of the Internet is impossible to determine with precision. As Sascha Meinrath, a leading policy expert, puts it: calculating the amount of the historical federal subsidy of the Internet "depends on how one parses government spending-it's fairly modest in terms of direct cash outlays. But once one takes into account rights of way access that were donated and the whole research agenda (through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, etc.), it's pretty substantial. And if you include the costs of the wireless subsidies, tax breaks (e.g., no sales taxes on online purchases), etc., it's well into the hundreds of billions range."4 For context, Meinrath's estimate puts the federal investment in the Internet at least ten times greater than the cost of the Manhattan Project, allowing for inflation.5 That is not all. The early Internet was not only noncommercial, it was also anti-commercial. Prior to the early 1990s, the National Science Foundation Network, the forerunner to the Internet, explicitly limited the network to noncommercial uses. If anyone dared to sell something online, that person would likely be "flamed," meaning that other outraged Internet users would clog the individual's email inbox with contemptuous messages demanding that the sales pitch be removed. This internal policing by Internet users was based on the assumption that commercialism and an honest, democratic public sphere did not mix. Corporate media were the problem, and the Internet was the solution. Good Internet citizens needed to be on the level; they should not hustle for profit by any means necessary. The lack of debate about how the Internet should be developed was due, to a certain extent, to the digital revolution exploding at precisely the moment that neoliberalism was in ascendance, its flowery rhetoric concerning "free markets" most redolent. The core spirit was that businesses should always be permitted to develop any area where profits could be found, and that this was the most efficient use of resources for an economy. Anything interfering with capitalist exploitation was bad economics and ideologically loaded, and was usually advanced by a deadbeat "special interest" group that could not cut the mustard in the world of free market competition and so sought protection from the corrupt netherworld of government regulation and bureaucracy.6 This credo led the drive for "deregulation" across the economy, and for the privatization of once public sector activities. The rhetoric of free markets was adopted by all sides in the communications debate in the early 1990s, as the World Wide Web turned the Internet seemingly overnight into a mass medium. For the business community and politicians, the Internet was all about unleashing entrepreneurs, slaying monopolies, promoting innovation, and generating "friction-free capitalism," as Bill Gates famously put it.7 There was great money to be made. Even those skeptical toward corporations and commercialism tended to be unconcerned, if not sanguine, about the capitalist invasion, as the power of this apparently magical technology could override the efforts of dinosaur corporations to tame it. There was plenty of room for everybody. The Internet bubble of the late 1990s certainly encouraged capitalism's embrace of the Internet, and U.S. news media could barely contain themselves with their enthusiasm for the happy couple. Capitalism and the Internet seemed a marriage made in heaven. Internet Service Providers A more sober analysis, however, can locate certain inconsistencies, if not contradictions, in ascribing so called "free markets" to the Internet, beyond the fact that the Internet's very existence was a testament to public sector investment. Three areas stood out early on or have emerged forcefully in subsequent years. ... To continue reading, please go to: http://therealnews.com/t2/component/content/article/80-more-blog-posts-from-robert-mcchesney/593-the-internets-unholy-marriage-to-capitalism Best, gORAN <...> # 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: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org