-Caveat Lector- Dave Hartley http://www.Asheville-Computer.com/dave In Seattle's Aftermath: Linux, Independent Media, and the Survival of Democracy by Bryan Pfaffenberger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Bryan Pfaffenberger is Associate Professor of Technology, Culture, and Communication at the University of Virginia. LinuxJournal, 13-Dec-1999 <http://www2.linuxjournal.com/articles/currents/013.html> -------------------------------------------------------------- Independent digital media can't survive without an Operating System (OS) and an Internet that are free from corporate control. At a 1996 Media and Democracy conference in San Francisco, CA, Andy Sharpless, Vice President of Progressive Networks of Seattle, told his audience that independent, Internet-based media outlets had just five years to compete against large, corporate sites (Beacham, 1996). The five years are almost up, and it's abundantly clear that Sharpless' prediction was right on the money. Corporations are well on their way to transforming the Internet into a computerized version of broadcast television, replete with mind-numbing consumerism, an aversion to reporting of news that corporations dislike, and using all the tricks of broadcast TV (including fast-changing images, gratuitous sex, and subtle psychological manipulation) to keep your eyes glued to the screen. But it's not merely the dumbing-down of Internet content that worries independent media activists. Within the next five years, the transformation of Internet content will be coupled with intrusive, surreptitious content monitoring, akin to having your every move in a public bookstore or newsstand exhaustively catalogued and monitored, and then put up for sale to any interested party. In contrast to today's monitoring, which is ostensibly done without associating individuals' names with the collected data, tomorrow's will be more personal -- and far more damaging. Employers, after all, will doubtless be very keen to knowing whether job applicants have (say) visited sites discussing such matters as worker's compensation, alcoholism, depression, or (horror of horrors) trade unionism. If you've accessed the "wrong" site and some other, equally capable applicant hasn't, perhaps you won't get that job, but you'll never know why. ("Your credentials did not fit our needs at this time.") Skeptical? American workers are already terrified of making worker's compensation claims or seeking treatment for anxiety or depression, knowing full well that doing so may ruin their chances for future employment. In the corporate-shaped Internet to come, one may feel a powerful prior constraint concerning the mere seeking of any information -- the mere reading of any content -- that would displease an employer. This is repression on a scale as horrifying as anything envisioned in dystopian science fiction novels such as Brave New World ; perhaps even more horrifying, because it's all too clear that the needed technology is available right now. You'll find out soon enough that, in fact, it's already in use. For a time, there will be a big public outcry, and the first company that's caught will have to back off. After the furor dies down, though, the practice will become commonplace and unremarkable -- until, that is, it ruins your career. Make no mistake about it: there's a battle to come, and it's not really about "consumers" and "privacy" and the rest of the meaningless terminology you've heard. Fundamentally, it's about democracy : specifically, the right of the people to obtain the information and knowledge they need to govern themselves in freedom. And, as you'll see, Linux and the Open Source software movement promise to play a key role in this battle. WHY INDEPENDENT MEDIA MATTER If you get your news only from mainstream media, you'd think a "guerilla army of anti-trade activists" disrupted the WTO's recent Seattle conference ( Washington Post , 12/1/99) and what's more, that the Seattle police responded with force only after a "small band of self-described anarchists" started smashing downtown merchants' windows (CNN, 12/1/99). Animating the protesters, as stressed repeatedly by the media, was a grab bag of ill-formed, far-fetched ideas. To explain the protesters' concerns, a CNN reporter sought out the president of the National Association of Manufacturers (certainly a highly objective commentator) who could discern only "a lot of crazy different messages" from the "loopy protesters". A New York Times columnist summed up the demonstrators as a "Noah's ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions, and yuppies looking for their 1960s fix" (FAIR Media Advisory, December 7, 1999, <http://www.fair.org/activism/wto-prattle.html>). What you don't know has been reported only by the independent media movement; a coalition of web sites, progressive radio stations, book publishers, newspapers, and magazines devoted to providing an alternative to the world view offered by multinational corporations (Hazen and Winokur, 1997). Only through such outlets as The Independent Media Center <http://216.254.6.207/> could you learn the following: - In general, the protesters weren't opposed to trade per se , but rather to WTO policies that place free trade for multinational corporations over all other concerns. Specifically, they were protesting WTO policies that force member countries to repeal laws protecting workers, public health, and the environment; the promotion of new rules restricting member countries' ability to regulate the actions of multinational corporations; and rules requiring member countries to adhere to corporate-shaped U.S. definitions of intellectual property, which would commoditize virtually every aspect of information that was formerly freely available to the public, including software algorithms, scientific and news facts, and even the genetic information contained in the living tissue of plants, animals, and human beings. - To the extent that there was violence in the Seattle demonstrations, an unbiased and proportional coverage would instead focus on the actions of the Seattle police, who repeatedly used pepper spray, batons, and rubber bullets against peaceful demonstrators. In short, you weren't told the truth. And believe me, this wasn't the first time. WHY MAINSTREAM MEDIA WON'T TELL YOU THE TRUTH You don't have to be a genius or a conspiracy theorist to figure this one out. A few global media giants dominate the market; they have huge and growing holdings in virtually every means by which information is disseminated -- films, books, TV channels, radio stations, newspapers, and magazines (Herman and McChesney, 1998). And they pressure, whether overtly or not, authors and reporters to put a slant on the news -- specifically, a centrist to right-wing slant that favors the interests of the media's corporate owners. <http://www.fair.org/extra/9511/nbc.html> That's the reason you hear, over and over, why development matters more than preserving the environment, why free trade matters more than worker's rights, and why the U.S. has the right to impose its military power wherever it pleases. Apart from the general pressure to slant the news to the center and right, industry associations overtly pressure media outlets to censor certain types of news reporting by threatening to withdraw advertising. For example, thanks to pressure from restaurant associations, newspapers are reluctant to specify local restaurants which violate health department regulations. Even so, overt pressure isn't often needed. When you're in the media business, you know darned well you'd better not run stories that businesses won't like. You tone it down. You run it by them. And if they're not comfortable and you're not comfortable, you don't run it. In sum, you don't hear the truth because corporations don't want you to hear it and mainstream media are too cowardly to report it. Had you known the truth about Seattle (including substantive discussion of the specific issues concerning WTO policies), you might have thought more deeply about what's at stake. But that doesn't sell beer; why ask why, after all, when doing so is virtually unmarketable? Instead of providing the tools needed to think seriously about national policies, the media would much prefer to socialize viewers into becoming "neurotic in their need to buy advertised commodities", generating "mass spending on goods such as cosmetics, cigarettes, beer, soft drinks, and patent medicines completely out of proportion to the rational use of national income..." and diverting attention from "society's central needs, including public education, health care, [and] democratic economics" (Bagdikian, 1996:10). THE COMING ATTACK ON THE INTERNET'S COMMON CARRIER STATUS The Internet is giving corporate media companies the fits; it's just so darned hard to make the mainstream media model apply. If you can't bring billions of eyeballs to your site, how are you going to make money? Right now, the Internet is like a phone system, a common carrier operated in the public's interest, in which anyone can access anything and have a pretty good chance of getting it. Horrifying! Media corporations aren't content, of course, to sit back and let this intolerable situation endure, this unendurable situation in which some college kid can put up a page that, in principle, is just as accessible as Dot Com's. With the aid of U.S. legislatures that are essentially up for sale to the highest bidder, they're well on their way to transforming the Internet into something far more to their liking. Here's just some of what they're doing: - Pressuring Internet designers to build in bandwidth-reservation schemes and "quality of service" (QoS) guarantees that will funnel users to a few high-performance sites. If you don't want to visit the sites that have paid for QoS guarantees, that's just fine, but you may have to wait quite a while to get through. - Adapting to the Internet the known techniques used by broadcast television; namely, "endless scenes of violence and other aggressive melodrama, gratuitous sex, split-second cuts... [which] keep a viewer glued to the channel" (Bagdikian, 1997:11). - Transforming search engines into advertising media in which high-retrieval ranking requires a payment to the search engine provider. - Developing user monitoring and tracking systems that are incapable of detection by average users, and associating these systems with proposed legislation that defines "copyright management infrastructures" and spells out hefty prison terms for anyone who attempts to defeat them. - Using recently adopted copyright legislation to remove from the Internet leaked corporate documents that could inform the public of conspiratorial or even illegal corporate actions. - Pressuring the U.S. Congress to adopt new legal definitions of "facts" in digital media that essentially remove all forms of previously accessible knowledge from the public domain and transform them into commodities that cannot be used without the payment of a fee. - Pushing for legislation that criminalizes anonymity. I don't mean to allege some sort of industry-wide conspiracy here. What you're seeing is the outgrowth of many very large, very rich companies pursuing their short-term interests, without the slightest regard for the long-term consequences of their actions -- just as they did at the opening of the Industrial Age, when oligopolies and monopolies brought on widespread misery on such a shocking scale that even those partial to business saw the need for regulatory measures. LINUX AND OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE: A LINE OF DEFENSE AGAINST CORPORATE CONTROL OF THE INTERNET If you'd like just one good reason why Linux is so vital to the survival of the Internet as a publicly accessible medium, just take a look at Microsoft Windows 98. It's designed in such a way as to further Microsoft's market ambitions, as the good Judge Jackson recently affirmed, but it's also a dream come true for companies hoping to transform the Internet into a corporate-dominated medium. With Windows 98, you're basically forced to use Internet Explorer. You can't delete it, and you're in for a "jolting experience" should you try to run another browser. For this reason, there's a uniform, predictable platform that's in daily use by millions of Internet surfers. Tightly integrated with the operating system and Microsoft mail utilities, Internet Explorer ideally suits the interests of corporate intruders as well as virus authors. You can exploit the tight, internal connections in all sorts of creative ways. And if you're using this very dynamic duo, you can't shield yourself; you don't even know what's going on. Sure, Internet Explorer gives you the apparent means to defeat cookies, but this feature borders on deception. It amounts to an all-or-nothing proposition; essentially, either you accept all cookies without scrutiny, or you turn them off -- and then you can't visit any site that requires them. It's only when you escape from the world of corporate-controlled media that you see other options. For example, the KDE browser enables you to specify which domains you're willing to accept cookies from -- it's a simple, straightforward means to assure that you're tracked by only those sites you've chosen to trust. The privacy-busting possibilities built into the Windows 98/Internet Explorer duo are perfectly exemplified by Comet Systems' <http://www.cometsystems.com/> cute and freely downloadable cursors. The products take full advantage of the tight, opaque integration between Windows and Internet Explorer to track your movements through some 60,000 web sites. <http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/19991130/tc/internet_privacy_3.html> Of course, Comet and other companies playing variations on the same trick deny that they're collecting information on specific individuals. Still, the technology to accomplish such a privacy-busting association is already here, and it will someday be used (if it hasn't already). And the day will soon be upon us (perhaps two to five years) when your would-be employer consults databases of web-surfing profiles to determine whether you, the eager job applicant, just might have expressed an interest in subjects that make employers uncomfortable. Sure, such screening will almost certainly diminish the employability of people who innocently accessed questionable sites, but the claim will be made that the rights of these innocent victims mean nothing when placed against the savings employers expect to realize by avoiding the occasional freeloader, the Commie, the drunk. It won't occur to these employers, or their defenders, that there's a more fundamental violation of rights at stake here: namely, the right of free citizens in a democracy to acquire knowledge without fear that the topic of their inquiry will expose them to adverse consequences. So where do Linux and the Open Source movement come in? It's simple. We're talking about software that's created outside the corporate system -- and as a consequence, software that's insulated from the pressures corporations exert to destroy the Internet's inherent democracy. Linux rejects the tight coupling between the browser and the operating system. What's more, it enables users to look under the hood to find out what's going on; users astute in programming can analyze the source code, if necessary, to determine how the software operates. If there's anything funny, word will go out like lightning. A new generation of open-source software may emerge that, like the KDE browser, is specifically and pro-actively designed to protect users from intrusive monitoring. I wish I could say that these measures alone could help preserve the Internet's capacity to function democratically. Sure, they're a step in the right direction, but the forces arrayed against information democracy are powerful, wealthy, and determined to win. What will decide the outcome, in the end, is the much broader question of whether the Internet-using public pulls itself out of its apathy, realizes what's going on, and joins a mass movement to regain our freedom. In the meantime, of course, there's your daily, media-supplied apathy regimen, consisting quite possibly of beer and the boys and babes on Baywatch -- but maybe, just maybe, you'll take a look at the bibliography I've appended and learn what's at stake. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Media Studies 101: Understanding the Consequences of Corporate Media Control Alger, Dean. Megamedia: How Giant Corporations Dominate Mass Media, Distort Competition, and Endanger Democracy. Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Beacham, Frank. "The Internet in Transition", <http://www.beacham.com/net_transition.html>, 1996. Bagdikian, Ben. "Brave New World Minus 400", in G. Gerbner, H. Mowlana, and H. Schiller (eds.), Invisible Crises: What Conglomerate Control of Media Means for America and the World. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, pp. 7-14. 1996. Bagdikian, Ben. The Media Monopoly . Beacon Press, 1997. Barnouw, Erik, and Todd Gitlin. Conglomerates and the Media . New Press, 1998. Carey, Alex, Andrew Lohrey, and Noam Chomsky (eds.), Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty . University of Illinois Press. Hazen, Don, and Julie Winokur (eds.), We the Media: A Citizen's Guide to Fighting for Media Democracy . New Press. Herman, Edward, and Robert W. McChesney, The Global Media: The Missionaries of Global Capitalism . Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society . Pine Forge Press 1993. Solomon, Norman, and Jeff Cohen. Wizards of Media Oz: Behind the Curtain of Mainstream News . Common Courage Press, 1997. Solomon, Norman. The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media: Decoding Spin and Lies in Mainstream News . Common Courage Press, 1998. ================================= *** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. 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