Date sent: Sun, 2 Jun 1996 14:50:27 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Geert Lovink
To: nettime-l@desk.nl
Subject: nettime: The Importance of Being Media

A Small Net in a Big World

Or: The Importance of Being Media

Do you think of the Internet as a gnostic conspiracy against the rotting, material world, we all would like to leave behind? Well, to be honest, I don't. Seen from an anti-capitalist, activist and autonomous/anarcho point of view, media are first of all pragmatic tools, not metaphysical entities. The 'Ideology of New Media' comes second and should not uphold any of our activities. Media Theory, Net Criticism, Computer Archeology, Cultural Studies, Digital Art Critique etc. give us an understanding of the 'Laws of Media', but they should not become a goal in itself, despite of all our (my) passions for these heroic-marginal, supra-intellectual enterprises.

For me, it is too easy to make the fancy and at the same time fairly realistic statement, that we should desappear from the realm of the Virtual and return to 'social action'. This legitimate call, to leave the hifhly overestimated 'Inforsphere' for what it is (namely overhyped empty 'fashion') and appear again on the level of 'the street', is making a false distinction between real and virtual politicies. Social movements have allways had a wide variety of media-related activities. Each 'action' (even the most 'direct') has a high level of 'information', addressing different groups and targets. Media, in this respect, express social relations in a very strong way. But what media can't is to regroup and organize social movements. If isolation and despair are widespread, and desorganisation rules, this is not because of the computer, nor can digital equipment help us out of the daily misery. It is too easy to blame the machines as the cause of the current 'real existing vagueness'. It's up to us to bring people together and start some new initiative, the machine won't do that for us.

So, should we just go back to a seventies-like, instrumental use of media (as megaphons for the true counter-propaganda)? No way. It is not any longer our first task to 'have the people's voices heard', the so- called 'voices of the oppressed'. This model still leaves the old top- down media-hierarchy in tact. We should try to stop speaking for other people. Nowadays, we can make a step further. With the spread of camcorders, tape recorders, photo cameras, xerox copy machines and... computers, ordinary people now have the possiblity to produce 'content' themself. It is no longer our duty, in the West, to produce their media-items in a pseudo-journalistic manner, but to spread the knowledge how to use and maintain the hard- and software and build up a common (global?) distribution system.

In order to do this we have to get a grip on these powerfull tools, understand their inner logic, their seductive side and destructive side effects, in order to use them in an effective way. And we should not keep this knowledge for ourselves. In Amsterdam, in the early eighties, there was the slogan: "Let a thousand antennas blossom," which meant, at the time, that we should have as many pirate radio transmitters on the roofs of the squattered buildings as possible. Do not share your broadcasting time with other personalities and groups... but empower groups with their own equipment, thereby destroying, step by step, the 'myth of media' alltogether. Finally, after some wild years of radio piracy we ended up with three independant ("consiously illegal") stations and some individuals in the legal, official radio. Having so many different frequences and voices, has been securing our existence over the last ten years. The same counts for local cablecasting groups and lately, also for the Internet, having a big variety of our own access and content facilities (like xs4all, digital city, desk.nl) and actions (hacking the Van Traa report, the Scientology-case, etc, see: Eveline's story in nettime).

It seems important not to fight over an articifially created scarcity. The freedom of expression and media will only be fullfilled once the capability to broadcast has been fully incorporated in the daily life 'of the billions'. In my view, each fight for liberation can easily contribute to the destruction of the media monopolies by putting out some messages themself (graffiti, pamphlets, zines, paintings, songs, imagery). Complaining about the multinational media giants is not enough (a critique of 'Wired' can only be a start...).

The final goal could be the 'democratization of the media' and eventually the 'abolition of media'. This goes further than to merely participate in other people's forums or plain 'public access'. It means an overall dispersion of equipment and knowledge into society. A funny side-effect of this is that media will become less and less important. At this moment, we have the tendency to project a lot of the actual power into this rising 'symbolic realm'. True marxists, of course, will point us at the much more powerfull realm of the virtual capital. Or at the real, hard work that is being done, producing material goods, that is becoming more and more invisible for us, Westerns, because it is done somewhere, in Asia, Eastern Europe or Latin-America. Or even at the dominance of the tourism industry over the relatively small media business. This is all true. But our 'false consiousness' is as true as the other people personal realities. The 'hegemony of the media realm', I would say, seems to be our reality. And we, a relatively small group of media activists, have the (limited) possibility, in this historical configuration, to fight 'media power' as such.

At the moment, the Internet is not going into this direction. Funny enough, the 'user friendly interfaces' are keeping people away from using the Net in an effective way. Networks turned into 'services' and users became consumers. Subsequently, we have seen no substantial rise in 'viritual communities' or independant servers. We therefor have to fight from now on all neo-liberal ideologies and supposively 'anarcho' slogans about individuals and their so-called power on the Net. This might be true for a few youngsters, making their way into the ruling 'virtual class'. But this is not how computer network come into being, start to get growing and, perhaps, one day, become a threat to the establishment.

We do not have to fear in the first place state intervention or even censorship. Compuserve has the right to filter out any kind of message they do not like, that's not censorship but a corporate policy of a large content provider. For me, the danger comes from within, from the inner logic of the Internet and how it is being perceived. Way too many cleaver individuals are just subscribing to commercial services like CompuServe or aol, instead of looking for independant, less/non- commercial providers or starting their own server. They are thereby failing to set up their own, autonomous communication structure (and not to forget: money-economy!).

Most of the political activists are still isolated and lack an offensive policy in crucial ereas like access and content. For example, both APC ('Third World') and Soros (Eastern Europe) are mainly concentrating on connecting the slow and official NGO-bureaucracies, leaving the rest of the population to 'the market' and its high prices. Of course, this is their own business. What we should do, is to show that it possible to establish a BBS, e-mail server, webserver, real audio, pirate radio, whatever. In order to achive this we have to share experiences and technical knowledge (unix/linux, routers, even html), collect and redistribute old computers and software, share knowledge about sponsers, funds and ways to set up our own economy. Only later, we can speak about content-related matters, like cultural biases and 'European Ideologies', the dangers of neo-Darwinist concepts, the growing necessity to set up 'translation offices' in the Net, in order to overcome the monopoly of the English language and other Subcult issues like the 'abolition of the Net'.

Budapest, sunday morning (!), june 2nd (!), 1996.