Mark Stahlman (via RadioMail) on Tue, 3 Jun 1997 23:20:50 +0200 (MET DST) |
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Re: <nettime> The Piran Nettime Manifesto |
Folks: Barlow said: >> There is a lot of tinkering with industrial economies through regulation >> and tax incentives, but I would say more of these techniques are in decline >> and increasing low repute. Look at what is happening with >> telecommunications worldwide. I don't know a single country that still >> believes the PTT model is the way to optimize communications. And then Ted said: > And I don't know of a single country that really believes that its > citizens can eat electrons. Telecoms are only one facet of a broad > array of questions, all of which must be approached as necessarily > interrelated. That is the essence of the problem we're faced with. Well, both miss the point (although, at least Ted made some sense). The U.S.Telecom Bill of 1996 has ushered in enormous *increases* in regulation not the reverse. More not less. Meanwhile, telecom and media power has concentrated and competition has declined -- just as any competent analyst was saying from the beginning. Barlow is lying or plum ignorant (once again). As I discussed in Ljubljana, the move to implement digital television in the U.S. was a purely technocratic manipulation and was *not* reflecting the wishes of the the television (or any other) industry. Likewise, for the new $3.5 Billion "Universal Service" pot-o-gold which is intended to accelerate school and library hook-ups. These are infrastructure "reforms" which have no basis in "free-market" activities at all -- except that "free-market" ideologues have been very prominent in the process of breaking down previous domains of sovereignty to make way for the new technocratic ones. The whole GII exercize (presumably the anti-PTT "optimization" to which Barlow aludes) comes directly from Gore/Hundt and their team of technocrats. The point here is to accelerate the use of telecom to implement global post-industrialism. The point in the U.S. is to get everyone online by 2006 (give or take) in order to use these systems to re-define "democracy" away from representation towards opinion polling. Barlow has spent much more face time with these characters (Gore, Hundt, Toffler, Newt and their minions and mentors) than I have and I can't believe that he doesn't understand the game that is being played. Nope, I can't believe it for a minute. Far from the world not being "planned" any more, the technocrats have attacked an older (industrial) form of planning in order to replace it with their own (post-industrial) form of planning. It's a simple and time-worn technique. Distract the credulous with fairy tales, while stealing all the chickens from the yard. We shouldn't put up with it around here -- just because it works in WIRED and other propaganda organs. No oligarch is going to allow the world to truly go out-of-control. All that's happened is a shift in planning techniques (towards complexity and chaos control) and in planning goals (from growth to dark age "stability"). Surely, we're not the credulous, are we? Oh, yeah, what the hell, let's party! Mark Stahlman New Media Associates New York City newmedia@mcimail.com --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@icf.de