Pit Schultz on Mon, 11 Mar 96 10:00 MET |
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nettime: HYPERMEDIA FREEDOM - Richard Barbrook |
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