Waves and Code › 45 RPM / Revolutions Per Minute ›

The Internet as Democratic Media Cornucopia

Submitted by Armin Medosch on Mon, 10/08/2007 - 16:16
in

The 20th century can be understood along the lines of a process of democratization of access to media and the means of cultural production. Things that originally were the privilege of social elites only became accessible for a much greater number of people. At the beginning of the 20th century access to education and knowledge was restricted as well as access to high culture. People from lower income classes had insufficient means of participating in the democratic process because they were either not allowed to vote or they did not have an opportunity to get an informed opinion. The socialist and social democrat movements in the 1920s tried to change that. After WWII radio facilitated free access to cultural goods, and, as this progressively increased through miniaturization and the introduction of the transistor in the 1960ies and 1970ies pop and rock radio democratized the means of cultural hedonism. In a parallel development people also started to get access to the means of cultural production1 -- starting with Super 8 film cameras, small film photography, cassette machines and the first portable video machines. However, what is eerie is that each of those steps of democratisation of access which at a different point would have meant a real revolution -- a significant change of social relationships which inevitably would have implied a political revolution and not only one of the communication media -- was always absorbed by the capitalist system. I do not propose to construct this as a rule of the form that media revolutions were only allowed to happen once society was ready to absorb them. To say that would be defeatist. But I want to point this out as a warning to those who too enthusiastically project political hopes into improvements of the configuration of the media. In the 1980ies with Subcom we thought that once we had access to the means of production we -- whereby I refer to a collective we of underground media producers -- could have a significant impact on the media landscape. We found that not to be true and that, on the contrary, we were lacking a distribution medium and on top of that accessible free spaces for cultural self-organisation were breaking away.2

In the late 1970ies, early 1980ies the home computer made its debut. Rather than just being one medium it promised to be a meta-medium, a freely programmable machine which could be used to build other 'machines' -- tools, instruments, media systems. The computer could be a printing press, a desktop typesetting studio, a graphic layout studio, a sound studio, a film/video studio and it could be combinations and crossovers of such things. Media convergence was looming. Despite the appearance of early BBS systems in the 1980ies, what was still missing was access to the means of dissemination. This arrived with the internet.
As the internet started to open up for public use in the early 1990ies it was welcomed by many people and groups from a broad spectrum who all belonged to counter- and subcultural movements who finally saw their moment coming. Distribution was what everybody had been lacking. The fanzine culture of the 1980ies, the community media groups working with radio and video, many of them saw a chance of finally getting their own channels. However, there remained a number of problems. While the internet was fairly open from 1993 onwards, bandwidth remained the bottleneck. Another problem was the software. In order to stream audio and video a codec is needed. The only available software to do that was proprietary. The 'player' software for a person to listen to an audio stream was free, but the producer software and the server cost money. Despite those limitations in the 1990ies many media activists settled on the net and a thriving culture of online forums, discussion groups, live streaming events and online magazines quickly originated. This was matched by a culture of real life meetings. It was not just enough to communicate online, it was important to meet in real space, to make friends, to learn together, to discuss strategies and projects.3

For the first time in history there existed the real possibility of a full on participatory, interactive and decentralized media paradigm to become the dominant model.4 There were problems and bottle necks but there were no more real barriers to a participatory media practice as Brecht, Benjamin and Enzensberger had imagined it. One important focal point of this energy were the Next 5 Minutes conferences in Amsterdam in 1993, 1996 and 1999.5 The decentralized, participatory and interactive media utopia had become real. However, what it could not do, was change the economic basis. On the contrary, the internet was instrumentalized to prop up an already fading neoliberalism. A strange alliance of US post-Hippie techno entrepreneurs and neoliberals drove the 'digital revolution' through media such as Wired magazine and boasted about the superior model of private enterprise, epitomised in the culture of networks of small companies financed by venture capital. By 1996, when Netscape went to the stock exchange and made billions, it was clear that a veritable boom was under way. The internet boom was ideologically and propagandistically used by the Clinton administration as evidence that the US system of a particular mix of market economy and democracy was the most inventive one in the world. US style neoliberalism became the model for social change, which was unanimously accepted to be the way to go by most countries.6

At the same time the internet became also the means of political organisation for a very scattered and fragmented opposition which included all sorts of people, from the party anarchists of Reclaim The Streets to the Zapatistas in Chiapas, to trade unionists in Latin America and the more middle class Attac people in Europe. The potential of the internet as a platform for political organisation was highlighted by two powerful protest events, by June 18 1999 in London and by 'Seattle' later that same year, which brought all those people togaether and showed that the new 'movement without leaders and an ideology' could achieve critical mass. Highly decentralized participatory grassroots organisations had found with the internet an equally decentralized and participatory medium. Another important aspect had more drirectly to do with the technology and its form of social production. Key technologies of the internet were produced through a methodology which became known as 'peer based commons production' (Stalder 2005). Since 1984 the Free Software Foundation led by Richard Stallman had been fighting what was at first a rather lonely struggle for Free Software. Believing that all software should be free, free to use, free to inspect and modify and free to give away again, the FSF had developed a licence model, the General Public Licence which enshrined those freedoms. It also set out to create a completely free operating system which it called GNU. But first it had to go through the arduous task of wrighting tools to make tools, an editor (Emacs), a compiler (gcc) and many other useful bits and pieces. So, when in 1991 the Finnish computer studend Linus Torvalds used those tools to write the operating System Linux, it was only natural for him to publish it under the GPL. The combination of the GPL, the GNU tools, Linux and the internet enabled software developers all around the world to collaborate on complex software projects without the need for a company structure or expensive computer labs. This extraordinarly successful 'bazar model' was eagerly adopted not only by the mainstream of open source developers who considered themselves to be 'apolitical' but also by hacker-activists with a politicized worldview. The licence model of the GPL helped to further a collaborative production method between equals or peers with the result of their labour becoming public goods -- which is the essence of peer based commons production.

Hackers driven by social motivations and sometimes loosely, sometimes more closely aligned with the new global opposition movement used this methodology to satisfy Benjamin's demand that 'authors' work towards the facilitation of cultural and political self expression of the general public. Illustrating the 'collective' aspect that Enzensberger has emphasised this new culture thrives around open hacklabs where people can meet, collaborate, exchange ideas. Since the 1990ies this political netculture scene has been growing and expanding. It is like a matrix from which continually exciting new projects emerge.7

The Italian computer hacker and artist Denis Jaromil Rojo is the lead developer of Dyne:bolic, a customized Linux distribution and Live CD optimized for cultural production in general and radio in particular. His initial idea was to create a 'nomadic' radio station which would move from server to server and thereby evade any attempts of control. With the Dynebolic Live CD almost any computer can be turned within minutes form a boring office machine into a net radio studio for production and dissemination. Particular attention has been given by the developers to the system being able to work on old machines with low processor speed and on bad internet connections -- the quality of the stream adapts to the quality of the internet connection.http://dyne.org/ last accessed August 2007." href="#footnote8_itc58tc">8
The processing of audio signals has been revolutionized by the software Pure Data.http://puredata.info/ last accessed August 2007." href="#footnote9_3jn78mr">9 Its inventor Miller Puckette has deep roots in the electroacoustic music scene. The software which he wrote consists of a graphical toolbox to model acoustic events inside the computer -- sine wave generators, oscillators, amplifications, filters and effects. Every conceivable sonic machine or instrument can be built through a combination of those simple elements. Pure Data is much more than an instrument or tool in any conventional sense, it is a meta level tool which is based on deep knowledge of electroacoustics and the science of waves. It is also open and extendable. Users of the software can swap the 'patches' they have written (tools which they constructed) while expert progranmmers can write extensions to the software, so called 'externals' in the programming language C. Those properties make Pure Data particularly popular among sound artists and radio artists such as Martin Howse/xxxxx,http://1010.co.uk/ last accessed August 2007." href="#footnote10_jgzmqyl">10 Yves Degoyon, Ramiro Cosentino, Tatiana De La O, and many others, who use Pure Data in very unconventional ways to create live streaming environments for radio art improvisationshttp://r23.cc/interface/ last accessed August 2007." href="#footnote11_sgm9zg6">11 and live art.

Examples could go on almost endlessly, with content management systems of a new generation such as Drupal, which facilitates the creation of 'social media' such as online magazines, podcasts, blogs and fora, or Puredyne, which combines Dynebolic and PureData, and the free streaming media environment Shoutcast. In addition to that free software and the bazar model of creativity is also used for artistic projects such as the work of the group Mongrelhttp://www.mongrel.org.uk/ last accessed August 2007." href="#footnote12_qdq1xtt">12 with projects like 9Nine, an internet platform for the formulation of digital subjectivity, and Telephone Trottoir, a communication system for the Congolese community in London using Voice-over-IP (Internet telephony). The exact border definition between artist and engineer become difficult when artists become engineers of social media platforms and programmers create artful tools.http://interrupt.org.uk/symposia/engineer/ last accessed August 2007." href="#footnote13_uewmnaj">13

A process underpinning this development is that the capacity of communication technologies increases while at the same time they get ever cheaper. Often falsely attributed to Moore's law alone, this has to do as much with technical innovation as with the exploitation of cheap labour in China and other rapidly industrializing economies. However, the outcome is that consumers worldwide can buy cheap electronic goods with ever higher processor speeds and more memory.

Radio is making a comeback with wireless data networks. Technically that means that receiving and transmitting EM waves can now be controlled by computers in very efficient and inventive ways such as spread spectrum and frequency hopping technologies. This is the basis of a variety of wireless data network technologies for different purposes and in different bands of the EM spectrum, from Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) to 3rd Generation mobile telephony networks and protocols for short distance communication such as bluetooth. The combination of wireless transmissions and computer technologies opens up a wide variety of possibilities, both technically and socially.14 Since around 2000 a movement has started, first in cities such as London, New York, Seattle, to build wireless community networks using WLAN, an idea quickly picked up by people in Berlin, Madrid, Athens, Jakarta and many other places worldwide. These networks are created by the people in a collaborative effort without central command and control; those network infrastructures are communally owned and based on conventions of free traffic of information so that those independent network infrastructures form a Network Commons. A range of projects in London around the free network provider Free2air.org have shown the potential of free wireless infrastructures for art whereby some of those projects have been carried out in collaboration with conventional radio stations such as Resonance.fm, Radio Fro and Radio Cycle.15

While the old order controls the mass media, the oil and the weapons, so that those things are still in the hands of the enemy so to speak, the dissenting unorthodox left is not just owning the means of production, it is actually producing them and thereby shaping the course of future technological development. As Bert Brecht has imagined, this has the potential to unspin the capitalist system from within. Just as he said, the continuous, never ending production of new apparatuses (and not just proposals as to their uses) in the interest of the general public shakes up the social Basis of those apparatuses. The commons based peer production makes technologic development autonomous from the dictate of capital and puts the decision about what to produce into the hands of the programmers themselves.

Yet we need to be careful about predictions of the imminent end of capitalism. It is an interesting notion that, as Marx said, capitalism will be happy to produce the shovels needed to dig its own grave. Those shovels could well turn out to be computers and cabled bound and wireless network technologies. At the same time mass media are are keeping a corrosive grip on people's imagination. Capitalism is now promoting its own version of the participatory media paradigm. A new internet boom has started since 2 or 3 years which uses many of the tools and ideas created by the free netculture movement and sells it back to the masses as an achievement of venture capital driven innovation. So called Web 2.0 or social software platforms such as YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, are the most prominent examples of a new industry which threatens a new enclosure movement. First, in the attention economy of the mainstream media we hear a lot about those but nothing about this other world of free software which has created the conditions for those venture capital funded network platforms to grow. Secondly, also free and open source software programmers live within a capitalist economy which forces them to earn money. A process of buying up scores of key people form free software projects to work on those proprietary projects can already be observed. And last not least the copyright industry is trying to clamp down on the free exchange of information and is trying to cripple the hardware architecture of computers and the inner working of the net in order to install global copy protection schemes. Finally, the paranoid militant nation state is seeing it as its good right to install surveillance architectures to monitor the global flows of information.

  • 1. None of these processes happened without problems. Dictatorial states and elite groups did not easily give up the privilege of education and the right to control the flow of information in the first half of the 20th century. When some industries started to produce consumer electronics other industries started to fear for their business models as tape recorders could be used to copy music at home.
  • 2. Another way of looking at this would be to say that aesthetically we won as the subcultural media aesthetic became copied and in many ways is the dominant aesthetics now, but politically this did not further our concerns at all.
  • 3. A lively collection of the concerns of the time can be found in the online documentation of the conference Art Servers Unlimited, London 1998. http://asu.sil.at/
  • 4. In a way this was also the point when the subculture/mainstream dichotomy stopped making any sense. On this point compare Stalder 2005.
  • 5. cf The Next 5 Minutes http://www.next5minutes.org/
  • 6. In the late 1990ies 'flexible' man and the 'risk taking society' became sociological buzzwords -- both euphemisms for more precarity. cf Medosch 2007.
  • 7. I have looked into this link more deeply in "Piratology", cf. Medosch 2003.
  • 8. cf Dyne:bolic website, available from http://dyne.org/ last accessed August 2007.
  • 9. cf. Pure Data website, available from http://puredata.info/ last accessed August 2007.
  • 10. cf. xxxxx website, available from http://1010.co.uk/ last accessed August 2007.
  • 11. cf. website of the live streaming network r23.cc, available from http://r23.cc/interface/ last accessed August 2007.
  • 12. cf. Mongrel website available from http://www.mongrel.org.uk/ last accessed August 2007.
  • 13. cf. the Interrupt Symposium by i-Dat, Plymouth 2003, project description available online from http://interrupt.org.uk/symposia/engineer/ last accessed August 2007.
  • 14. I have pointed at some of those possibilities in: Society in Ad-hoc mode, Medosch 2004.
  • 15. I give an overview of those movements in: On Free Wavelength. cf. Medosch 2006.