nettime: HYPERMEDIA FREEDOM - Richard Barbrook

[Pit Schultz <pit@contrib.de>]

HYPERMEDIA FREEDOM
Richard Barbrook


Deregulation or Reregulation?

By passing the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the two dominant parties in 
the USA have jointly agreed that the convergence of media, 
telecommunications and computing should be driven by market competition 
between large corporations. Recognising that massive economies of scale are 
needed for the construction of a national broadband network, the Democrat 
President and the Republican legislature have lifted most restrictions on 
the cross-ownership of media and telecommunications systems. In addition, 
further legislation is pending which will propose a dramatic extension of 
the rights of copyright owners to provide the legal structure for an 
electronic marketplace in information commodities. Quietly forgetting its 
New Deal aspirations for an information superhighway construction programme, 
the Federal government has now abdicated its strategic responsibilities to 
the private sector. But, this faith in market competition entails risks. In 
the near future, no nation will be able to compete within the global 
marketplace without a fibreoptic grid. Just as the building of railway, 
road, electricity, gas, telephone and water networks in the past laid the 
basis for modern urban living, the infobahn will provide the basic 
infrastructure for the next stage of capitalism. The fibre-optic grid will 
not only distribute entertainment and information, but also enable people to 
work collaboratively in almost every sector of production. Encouraged by 
funding from hitech corporations, the American political establishment is 
gambling that the construction of the national information infrastructure 
can be successfully carried out through the neo-liberal panaceas of 
deregulation and privatisation. 
Given the history of the development of the PC and the Net, it seems more 
likely that the infobahn will emerge from the miscegenation of the public, 
private and community sectors. Yet, ironically, debate in the USA over the 
Telecommunications Act hasn't been centred on whether or not unrestrained 
market competition between private companies is the only way to develop 
cyberspace. Instead, a fierce controversy has raged around an attempt to 
impose broadcasting-style content controls on the Net. Under the terms of 
the new Telecommunications Act, on-line services cannot allow children 
access to 'pornography' or use the 'seven dirty words' in any form. From 
being a largely unregulated form of communications, the Net has now suddenly 
come under the most restrictive form of censorship applied in the USA. Not 
surprisingly, there has been a storm of protest from the on-line community. 
Net sites have been turned black and blue ribbons have been attached to Web 
pages in protest against these restrictions on the freedom of speech. Legal 
actions are planned to test whether the regulations contravene the right of 
freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment of the constitution. 
There are important issues at stake in this controversy. Parents
are justified to be concerned about paedophiles using the Net to contact 
minors or distribute pornography. Children should be allowed to grow into 
puberty at their own pace and free from sexual violence. Yet, the 
restrictions in the Telecommunications Act aren't simply concerned with 
clamping down on a small minority of child abusers. Under pressure from 
Christian fundamentalists, the two main political parties have passed a law 
which could potentially prevent the distribution of any form of sexual 
material - even among consenting adults. If this attempt at censorship 
succeeds, on-line services in the USA would only be able to provide content 
which conformed to the repressives mores of the American Puritan tradition.  
Turn On, Log In and Drop Out!
As with any other law, the Telecommunications Act will face the problem of 
enforcement. The 'War on Drugs' hasn't stopped Americans voraciously 
consuming billions of dollars of illegal chemicals every year. There must be 
similar doubts about the practicality of the censorship measures in the new 
Telecommuncations Act. Is the American state really going to be able to 
prevent its citizens saying 'fuck' to each other in their private e-mails? 
How will it prevent people logging-on to Web sites in other countries with a 
less hypocritical attitude towards adult sexuality? The development of 
hypermedia is the result of the convergence of not only radio and television 
broadcasting, but also other types of less censored media, such as printing 
and music. Why should the Net be subject to broadcasting-style restrictions 
rather than those applied to printed material? A long political battle is 
now beginning to find an acceptable level of legal controls over the new 
forms of social communications. 
Yet, at this crucial moment, one of the leaders of the principal 
cyber-rights lobbying group - the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) - has 
been gripped by an attack of ideological hysteria. In bizarre act of 
presumption, John Perry Barlow, the EFF's co-founder, has issued a 
'Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace'. In this manifesto, he casts 
himself as the new Thomas Jefferson calling the people to arms against the 
tyranny of Bill Clinton: 'the great invertebrate in Washington'. Claiming to 
speak 'on behalf of the future', he declares that the elected government of 
the USA has no right to legislate over 'Cyberspace, the new home of the 
Mind'. Because 'we are creating a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, 
but it is not where bodies live', Barlow asserts that cyberspace exists 
outside the jurisdication of the American or any other existing state. In 
cyberspace, only Net users have the right to decide the rules. According to 
Barlow, the inhabitants of this virtual space already police themselves 
without any interference from Federal legislators: 'you do not know our 
culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society 
with more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.' Users of 
the Net should therefore 'reject the authorities of distant, uninformed 
powers' and ignore the censorship imposed by the Telecommunications Act. 
It is too easy to laugh at this 'Declaration' as a hitech version of the old 
hippie fantasy of dropping out of straight society into a psychedelic 
dreamworld. In sci-fi novels, cyberspace has been often poetically described 
as a 'consensual hallucination'. Yet, in reality, the construction of the 
infobahn is an intensely physical act. It is flesh and blood workers who 
spend many hours of their lives developing hardware, assembling PCs, laying 
cables, installing router systems, writing software programs, designing Web 
pages and so on. It is obviously a fantasy to believe that cyberspace can be 
ever be separated from the societies - and states - within which these 
people spend their lives. Barlow's 'Declaration of Independence of 
Cyberspace' therefore cannot be treated as a serious response to the threat 
to civil liberties on the Net posed by the Christian fundamentalists and 
other bigots. Instead, it is a symptom of the intense ideological crisis now 
facing the advocates of free market libertarianism within the on-line 
community. At the very moment that cyberspace is about to become opened up 
to the general public, the individual freedom which they prized in the Net 
seems about to be legislated out of existence with little or no political 
opposition. Crucially, the lifting of restrictions on market competition 
hasn't advanced the cause of freedom of expression at all. On the contrary, 
the privatisation of cyberspace seems to be taking place alongside the 
introduction of heavy censorship. Unable to explain this phenomenon within 
the confines of the 'Californian Ideology', Barlow has decided to escape 
into neo-liberal hyper-reality rather than face the contradictions of really 
existing capitalism.
Cyberspace - the Final Frontier
The ideological bankruptcy of the West Coast libertarians derives from their 
historically inaccurate belief that cyberspace has been developed by the 
'leftright fusion of free minds with free markets' (Louis Rossetto - 
editor-in-cheif of 'Wired'). As Andy Cameron and I showed in 'The 
Californian Ideology', neoliberalism has been embraced by the West Coast 
'virtual class' as a way of reconciling the anarchism of the New Left with 
the entrepreneurial zeal of the New Right. Above all, this weird hybrid has 
relied on projecting old myths about the American revolution onto the 
process of digital convergence. According to 'Wired' magazine, the 
development of hypermedia would create a hi-tech 'Jeffersonian Democracy' - 
the eighteenth century will be reborn in the twenty-first century. 
In his 'Declaration', John Perry Barlow consciously mimicks the rhetoric of 
the Founding Father's 'Declaration of Independence of the United States'. 
Once again, free-spirited individuals are standing up to oppressive and 
corrupt government. Yet, these revolutionary phrases from the past contain 
within them many reactionary aspirations. Back in 1776, Jefferson expressed 
the national dream of building a rural utopia in the wilderness of America. 
The winning of independence from Britain was necessary so that Americans 
could live as independent, self-sufficent farmers in small villages. 
Jefferson's pastoral vision rejected city-life as the source of corruption - 
which he saw in the rapidly expanding conurbations of
contemporary Europe. But, as America itself began to industrialise, the 
pastoral dream had to be displaced westwards towards the frontier. Even 
after the Indian wars had ended, the Wild West remained a place of 
individual freedom and self-discovery in American mythology. Jefferson had 
become a cowboy.
By its name, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is therefore invoking not 
just the cowboy myths of the last century, but also the pastoral fantasies 
of the writer of the original 'Declaration of Independence'. When American 
government agencies first decided to crack down on hackers, a group of old 
radicals decided to defend the new generation of cyberpunks. Out of this act 
of solidarity, the EFF emerged as the political lobby group of the West 
Coast cyber-community. Using libertarian arguments, it campaigned for 
minimal censorship and regulation over the new information technologies. 
But, the EFF was never just a campaign for cyber-rights. It was also a 
leading cheerleader for the individualist fantasies of the 'Californian 
Ideology'. According to the tenets of this confused doctrine, hippie 
anti-authoritianism is being finally realised through the fusion of digital 
technologies with free market liberalism. Yet, the inevitable rebirth of 
'Jeffersonian Democracy' now seems to have postponed. Above all, the 
lobbying work of the EFF appears to have been in vain - the repressive 
measures in the Telecommunications Act passed with almost no opposition 
within the legislature or from the executive. At this moment of crisis, 
Barlow has embraced the wildest fantasies of the West Coast 
anarcho-capitalists. Once encryption is widely available, they believe that 
free-spirited individuals will be able to live within a virtual world free 
from censorship, taxes and all the other evils of big government. Unable to 
face the social contradictions of living within the digital city, Barlow has 
decided to join the virtual cowboys living on the electronic frontier. 
If this is the Electronic Frontier, who are the Injuns? 
It is no accident that Barlow mimicks Jefferson for this retro-futurist 
programme. Unlike Europeans who fantasied about rural utopias, Jefferson 
never rejected technology along with the city. On the contrary, the 'sage of 
Monticello' was an enthusiastic proponent of technological innovation. 
Crucially, he believed that it was possible to freeze the social development 
of the United States while simultaneously modernising its methods of 
production. The proponents of the 'Californian Ideology' follow a similar 
logic. They wish to preserve cyberspace as the home of rugged individuals 
and innovative entrepreneurs while at the same time supporting the 
commercial expansion of the Net. For them, the development of the new 
information society can only take place through the realisation of the 
eternal principles of liberalism revealed by the Founding Fathers. Yet, like 
all other countries, the United States exists within profane history. Its 
political and economic structures are the result of centuries of 
contradictory social processes, not the expression of sacred truths. Its 
leaders were complex human beings, not one-sided 'men of marble'. 
 This dialectical reality can be most easily seen by looking at the lives of 
those Founding Fathers Jefferson, Washington and Madison - invoked by Barlow 
in his 'Declaration'. On the one hand, they were great revolutionaries who 
successfully won national independence and established constitutional 
government in America. Yet, at the same time, they were vicious 
plantation-owners who lived off the forced labour of their slaves. In other 
countries, people have come to terms with the contradictory nature of their 
modernising revolutionaries. Even Chinese Communists now admit that Mao 
Zedong's legacy contains both positive elements, such as the liberation of 
the country from colonialism, and negative features, such as the massacres 
of the 'Cultural Revolution'. In contrast, Barlow - and many other Americans 
- can never acknowledge that their beloved republic wasn't just created by 
hard-working, freedom-loving farmers, but also through the slavery of black 
people and the 'ethnic cleansing' of Indians. The plantation economy of the 
Old South and the extermination of the First Nations are the equivalents of 
the Irish Famine, the Holocaust and the Gulag Archipelago in American 
history. But, these contradictions of the real history of the USA are too 
painful to contemplate for Barlow and other believers in the ahistorical 
truths of liberal individualism. Jefferson must remain as an unsullied 
portrait chiselled into the face of Mount Rushmore.  
Yet, in understanding contemporary debates over the future of the Net, it is