The whole question of "what people want" is inseparable from the enormous propaganda industry whose task it is to direct desire. Analyst Robert J. Cohen of McCann-Erickson Worldwide Advertising has estimated that U.S. advertising expenditures for 1999 will reach $212.3 billion. This would be about half the global expenditure on advertising (estimated to be $440.5 billion). Not a little of this prodigious outlay has been pouring into internet ventures. In a matter of a few years, the internet that knit universities, government research laboratories, and pioneering computer companies has become an infrastructure for countless global marketing initiatives. The surreptitious collection and analysis of "browser" behavior is continuing, through automation, to articulate a viciously potent suasion engine. A sophist's mechanism, it makes the lesser seem the greater. It makes the worker pay dearly for the products s/he makes. It convinces that regression is progression, that bad is good, that, for instance, people should get ads instead of art or entertainment. That they should be frisked if they try to assemble.
A recent cable television advertisement pictured a man in an arm-chair wrapped thoroughly in coaxial cable. During the ad, the cable was unwound. The intended message: that new features offered by the cable service provider are freeing the viewer from the bonds of old technology. Considering that the new systems, exemplified by WebTV (Microsoft), monitor everything viewers watch, buy, and ignore, the truth would seem to resemble the advertisement running in reverse. Departments of marketers analyze feedback data, which are correlated with demographic and zip-code information, and perhaps, soon enough, with cellular phone global positioning coordinates.
Regardless of how one feels about targeted, anticipatory advertising---the
helping hand advanced by pointcast marketing---it may be worth considering
its connection to the long arm of the law.
In the U.S., there are now more private security police than state and
local police combined; all manner of personal records once kept by
the state (and some new ones) are increasingly available for a price over
the internet (Example).
I am suggesting that marketing's road ahead is merging with law
enforcement's, leading to a dismal enclosure of invasive foreknowledge,
contingent opportunities, and programmatic constraints. Omnipresent
security is reaching alarmingly powerful proportions. The annoying and
counterproductive "login" authentication and card-swiping gateways of today
beget instantaneous, uncontrovertible
In the wake of the cold war, with the transfer of punitive energies to
populations within the "winning" societies, the burden of suppression has
fallen not only to the burgeoning police and prison industrial complex,
but equally to the media, which try to convince skeptical consumers that
terrorism is the fountainhead of geopolitical distress (not a reaction).
Represented as such, it will not stop, but serve as a sink hole for
billions of dollars of defense expenditures. A more convincing message
would be that media misrepresentation, motivated by the interests of
advertisers and big business, impedes serious dialog and
conflict resolution. Allan Sekula:
Confronted with the illegitimate power and authority of the mass media, and
now software monopolist, Microsoft, those who would chart alternative courses
face a diversified front of coercive institutions and agendas that sustain the
official ideologies. Consumers of corporate media in the First World are continually
taught to assimilate repression, violence, and mediocrity. The deregulation
of media holdings limits in the 1980s allowed a quiet consolidation that has
affected the vast majority of broadcast channels. A few dozen media titans like
Time-Warner, Bertelsmann, Viacom, Disney, Microsoft, and Gannet, produce the
advertising-riddled lite show that governs the tone of public discourse, driving
foreign and domestic policies with Hurrapatriotismus and smiles. Their media analysts
would have the U.S. dropping more bombs on Iraq, while the sadists who approved the
use of depleted uranium artillery may never be brought to justice for their
crime against soldiers and the Iraqi people. Such injustices do not pass
without considerable disinformation!
In the broken economies of the South, North, East, and West, although the
abandoned and ignored poor may, by degrees, penetrate the bogus news fictions
emanating from G7 media, they do not avoid the scorched-earth larceny of their
resources and cultures. Sensible of this disenfranchisement, the differential
meaning of the media for populations who can and cannot create for the new media, Roger F.
Malina has cautioned of the "Dangers of the World Wide Web":
While the internet is being besieged with old problems that have curdled broadcast,
and with an assortment of new hazards, it's evolution is governed, also, by a contingent of
resisters who have begun to realize the collective power of software development by
geographically dispersed individuals and groups. With infinitely replicable bits and
bytes, serious strides have been made toward the decommoditization of software.
Eric S. Raymond has depicted the "open source" culture in several on-line essays. In
"Homesteading the Noosphere", he anthropologizes his fellow hackers:
In New York City, machines that have been used
in the service of the propaganda industry, to underinform
and dazzle consumers out of their wits with virtualities
of ever greater impalpability, are now to be found in trash
dumpsters and on street corners. There is little shortage of computer
hardware, for the people of the United States; more a lack of
knowledge of how to use it, and why. To be sure, the situation is quite
different in the Third World, where there is no comparable
abundance of cameras, recording equipment, computers,
printers, etc. In the countless and growing numbers of squalid
barrios, war ravaged shanty towns, and slave plantations, the
illiteracy and scarcity of electronic tools for representation of their
stories diminishes the scope of aspirations for social change via media.
In a few rare situations, such as the martyrdom of Ogoni playwright
and tele-novelist, Ken Saro Wiwa, the stage of operations of Third World activism
coincides precariously with the media boundaries of advanced
industrialized nations. His selfless struggles against Shell Oil and the
military dictatorship of Nigeria (sustained by the
multinational oil companies), which ultimately
cost him his life, led to a brief rupture of the ideological
isolation of the First World.
Saro-Wiwa's story of the ecological terrorism visited upon
southern Nigeria by foreign oil companies should be of more than
passing significance to Americans and Europeans of conscience.
Indeed, there is little need for high-tech representations of the
subject in Ogoniland, where the problems are well known. Since the
large majority of the sales of Shell's and Chevron's product occur in the U.S. and
Europe, the pertinence of Saro Wiwa's cause to consumers in these
places is clear. Nevertheless, in the absence of
seductive images live at six and eleven, the news languishes in favor
of feeble and still-born metropolitan stories about near misses and
pets. The pace of news production, particularly television news,
compels a procedural dependence on press kits and pre-fabricated (promotional)
utterances that forestalls penetration into the complexities of
international relations, regional struggles, and all forms of conflict
with authorities. When essentially newsworthy stories do air, the
lack of institutional conviction to press ahead with conclusions that
are unflattering to news consumers leads to an infantile state of
distraction.
The consequent importance of a global network such as the internet
must not be underestimated. While from a technical point of view
Third World activists are reduced to a dependency on terrorism, martyrdom, and
the spectacle; expatriates have been quick to adopt the internet as a
means of disseminating information. For despite unequal distribution
of resources and instruction, within the First World societies
the material and technical prerequisites for a wide reaching activism
are comparatively modest.
Even with the proliferation of commercial
and governmental initiatives to harness, regulate, and exploit the internet,
it remains an imperfect but useful resource for exhiles, activists,
and researchers. While the flow of internet technologies into, say, the Niger
Delta, remains somewhat distant, the effects of this
slightly freer information network have some impact on the chain of
corporate and governmental policy decisions.
Having recognized this, however, one is still confronted with the
intractable problems of First World apathy, depoliticization, and
ignorance, all imbricated with the same new media. For it is equally
true of the internet that it does not by its nature demand the sorts of
border crossings and cultural interchanges that exemplify its clearest
value; rather, the seduction of gratifying mass-market software
interfaces lead users in ever more inert and commercially paced
lock step.
Attention must be turned away from vilification of the
internet as an anarchic and uncontrolled space, to the
looming danger that it will be controlled. Hans Magnus Enzensberger's
assertion, in Constituents of a Theory of the Media, that
the Orwellian "bogey of a monolithic consciousness
industry derives from a view of the media that is undialectical and
obsolete" may be strictly accurate; but automated statistical
analysis and unencumbered surveillance access lead to a
substantially similar dystopia. He continues:
While the reality of privileged government access to
all internet traffic remains to be established ("In a setback for the FBI,
the Federal Communications Commission has given the telecommunications industry
an additional 20 months to comply with a federal law meant to bring law
enforcement surveillance into the digital age." John Markoff, NYTimes,
September 14, 1998), the ground work has been laid for internet service
providers to act as wire tapping collaborators.
(See also ECHELON satellite
surveillance network)
Enzensberger's conclusions
notwithstanding, insofar as systemic software is uniform, and encryption regulated,
the prospects for privacy do not appear bright. The internet "portal" marketplace
currently taking shape suggests that the vast majority of users will be working
with software that is designed to be cooperative with an emerging
suite of surveillance software. Although the sort of analysis software
needed to evaluate for the meaning of data passed over the internet is
still in its infancy; and although the quantities of messages would
seem to defy control; it may be possible to effectively discourage
utterances of certain types by automatically limiting
services to users who employ particular words, data formats, encryption
techniques, etc. In this way the need for watchful human eyes is
superseded by watchful programs. Such programs to the extent that they
already exist, are incapable of really controlling much; but as service
provision becomes more centralized? If the present operating system
hegemony continues?
Much as one would like to see swift diversification of entrenched hierarchies
of authority and influence, recent years have made abundantly clear just how
hard-fought will be the ready access to the attention of internet users.
Here, one is struck by the incursions of Microsoft toward controlling the
standards used over the network. As its operating systems continue to
dominate, not only for client desktops, but increasingly for servers, the
occasion presents itself for Microsoft to devise new services strategems that
will actively select against their competitors---particularly those
who provide free products. The open source movement, which
figures to harness the energies of millions of dispersed
programmers to excel the corporate software industry, has much to
lose if Microsoft succeeds in unilaterally establishing new internet standards.
Such a situation could jeopardize the essential indifference of present
transmission protocols concerning data content types, opening the door for
arcane codes of Microsoft's own pernicious design, which would privilege
their content offerings and institute "efficient" pay-per-view
networking. Already with the WebTV initiative, users are
carefully watched, their every action databased for marketing
research purposes. This state could advance until the tyranny of
television begins to seem quaint.
The juxtaposition of cryptography and open source as resistance strategies
warrants consideration. With privacy assailed from both government
and commerce, encryption presents the possibility of secure communications,
which has stirred to action legislative attempts to
restrict cryptography. Ironically, although corporations have been
the first to adopt encryption for sensitive communications, their
closed-source shrink-wrapped programs are more likely
to fall in line with cryptographic back-door privileges available
by soebpena. Or by covert chicanery. No doubt, encryption will
ascend into the high sciences.
The real and hypothetical potential for coordinated global movements that
challenge the legitimacy of existing regimes will insure that internet
security remains a red letter issue for the foreseeable future. With
security and privacy at cross purposes, this
would be a bad time for civil libertarians to blink. Over the internet,
the notion of "free speech" has made a sea change, and while the Telecommunications
Decency Act was proved unconstitutional, the somber new colors of freedom may
show themselves through the obscure algorithms that administer formulaic
selection. Filter upon filter, and super-computer crypto-analysis: these
are the new domains of central "intelligence." Ever stronger security
measures are demanded by duplicitous, cynical, false leaders, crusading to preserve
privilege, and instability. We may reasonably ask what the military defense complex is
moving cyber-ward to combat?
The cyberspace crime fighting initiative announced by U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno*
(*In February 1998, US Attorney General Janet Reno
announced that she would ask Congress for US$64
million to fund a new US center for fighting
cybercrime. The National Infrastructure Protection
Center would be a hub for a renewed
counterattack on hackers around the world. )
is reminiscent of another announcement by New York City Public Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew,
about why police should manage security not only around schools, but IN them:
If we are to listen to, and act in solidarity with, the polyphonic testimony
of the oppressed and exploited, we should recognize that some of this
testimony...will take the ambiguous form of visual documents, documents of the
microphysics of barbarism. These documents can easily fall into the hands of
the police or their intellectual apologists. Our problem, as artists and intellectuals
living near but not at the center of a global system of power, will be to help
prevent the cancellation of that testimony by more authoritative and official
texts. (Sekula, 1981: p.379) Quoted in Technoscience and Cyberculture
Very few people---under 100 million individuals on the planet---have access to
the Internet's computer networks. This access is highly concentrated in developed
countries and, within those countries, to individuals within companies and organizations
or with sufficient personal wealth and access to expertise. The overwhelming majority
of the world's population is excluded from the World Wide Web. The development of these
new and expensive communication technologies leads to the further concentration of
information and resources among those who are already in privileged positions.
[Roger F. Malina - "The Fourth World: The Promises and Dangers of the World Wide Web"
Leonardo 28, No. 1 (1995)]
Malina speaks from the position of one who has had simple access
to publishing for years. What is more remarkable, which he seems to miss, is that 150 million
(Recent statistics).
people have access to this expansive network for exchange of ideas, collaboration, and
contestation of the "official texts."
The network is dominated by people in "companies and organizations or with
sufficient personal wealth," and this goes a long way toward explaining the cosmetic
banality of much of the first few years of Web production. Some, however, have recognized
in present conditions the resources needed to produce collaborative media arts,
software tools, and systems.
Obvious parallels with the hacker `gift culture' as I have characterized it
abound in academia. Once a researcher achieves tenure, there is no need to worry
about survival issues....In the absence of survival issues reputation
enhancement becomes the driving goal, which encourages sharing of
new ideas and research through journals and other media.
(Homesteading the Noosphere)
Whatever the psychological motivations of the participants, the open source movement has
led to operating systems and tools, comparable or better in quality to commercial
equivalents, but for free. Although still a far cry from the "struggle for the
decommoditization of medicine, housing, education, food, and so on" called for by
Aronowitz and DiFazio, the open source movement is consonant with the ideas of those
authors as they have analyzed the technological elimination of work. The "gift culture"
logic also prevails in France, currently, where work weeks are limited to 35 hours, so
that more people may have jobs.
The possibility of total control of such
a system at a central point belongs not to the future
but to the past. With the aid of systems theory,...
it can be demonstrated that a linked series of communications
or, to use the technical term, a switchable network, to the
degree that it exceeds a certain critical size, can no longer
be centrally controlled but only dealt with statistically.
"[this policy] puts us on a road to producing the sort of safety environment
that we have a growing need for."
The day dream of a security environment concerns
technology, fear, and an Utopian aspiration for control.
Contracted, interlocked, shrewdly negotiated arrangements
of authority sustain the manufacturers, politicians, and bureaucrats
who peddle this fantasy. It glows through the
screens of the wired world. It is the habitat, the imaginative terrain
of the marketplace of ideas. An environment with an a aptitude to
inspire mismeasurements of the real, the aesthetic, the just.
To confuse the serious with the trivial. An enormous aptitude for seeming
that issues a sea of sameness, arrested development,
iterations of the same idea ad infinitum, bouncing urban myths,
perpetual NEA funding petitions...
Make the connection....enjoy
the surge! Corrections is facing
an explosion....why shouldn't your
company profit from this incredible growth?
-1994 promotional brochure,
American Correctional Association
Make the connection indeed. Reinvent discourse beyond the sloganism of
advertising lingo. Re-articulate art with politics so that it might
appeal to the grand publique (not _just_ through intuition). Eschew
the new liberalism, and with it the corrupt messengers and their
mercenary and cynical exploitation of the spectacle. Enough of malaise;
enough of resignation and meek introverted fixations. Resist the ooze
of mediocrity - media-mendacity! In countless
contexts there are constructive means of engagement. Contexts are everyday
objects, spaces, languages, behaviors, laws, algorithms, gestures,
habits! They are also communities. But opportunities for changing them
can slip away into carceral, caste-perturbed compressions of dignity,
justice, and liberty. Articulate new contexts in the most ad-vanced,
insidious, derivative-stunned electronic spaces that affect so
severely Our perception of the present and conception of the future.
© 1998-1999 Andy Deck
