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Issue No. 143 | 05 July 2002 |
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Bad Bosses
Interview: Media Magnet Bad Boss: Abbott's Heroes Technology: All in the Family International: New Labour's Cracks Economics: Virtuality Check History: Necessary Utopias Poetry: Let Me Bring Love Review: How Not To Get It Together Satire: NZ, UK Added to Australia�s Migration Zone
The Soapbox The Locker Room Bosswatch Week in Review
 Lessons from Air DisasterBuggering the BushThe Great GiveawayDown and OutWhy I hate Telstra
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Economics Virtuality CheckBy Neale Towart
***************** Versions of these views keep being put forward, and clearly there is truth in them. Francois Fortier tries a political economic approach to the issues in Virtuality Check. As someone with an undistinguished background in political economy it's good to see someone grappling with the concepts and issues from this perspective. As Fortier puts it, "floating somewhere between this virtual heaven and hell, the truth about the infosphere remains hard to pin down...Technologies are neither the na�ve product of disinterested science nor the deterministic bearers of social processes. They are shaped by social relations, while in turn they open up opportunities for social change." The NSW ALP, not a body noted for its openness in decision making, but certainly a body noted for its drive to win "whatever it takes" has implicitly endorsed this view with its adoption of a motion on open standards software at the recent conference (see Michael Gadiel's article at http://workers.labor.net.au/137/news5_it.html) Information and communications technologies were developed by and for the military and corporate sectors, but this does not preclude progressive movements from using the technology for their own purposes. We make our own history, but not always in conditions of out choosing as Karl Marx, someone who knew a lot more about political economy than me, once said (something like that anyway). Just looking round the Internet makes this so obvious as to be banal, so why people argue about it I don't know. A myriad of groups wanting social change (for good or ill) use the Net to get the message across. What Fortier is asking is "whether ICTs are plausible democratic vectors" in relation to production and reproduction of labour power and the social order. He wants to "decipher the political economic assumptions and implications of analytical choices made about ICTs." He looks at how ICTs are being developed, and how they affect social relations through their impact on various forms of information. This information includes the form of capital goods and processes (industrial patents), manufacturing processes and artificial genomes. It also helps the circulation of products (brands, trademarks) and currencies. Here we get to the nub of the big players on the Net. Media and entertainment companies see it as a key place for profit so are constantly scrambling become gatekeepers and owners. In academic publishing the access of students and researchers has potentially been diminished rather than increased by the duopolies of Reed Elsevier and Thomson International who have taken over so many academic journals and offer them to university libraries on take one take all basis at inflated prices and for limited time access. No more photocopying for a few cents per page when they can rip heaps out of institutions for the wondrous electronic access, and put the prices up. All this for journals that have material provided for free by scientists and researchers paid from the public purse. The usual applies, public wears the cost of the workers research, corporations harvest the profits from the ale of there work. Was it ever thus. Scientists are starting to affect the other part of the political economy Fortier writes about. Late last year they began organising a boycott of journals controlled by the big two publishing houses (see http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s345514.htm for a discussion of this). We now seem to need a licence to read, handed out (at a price) by those who would be gatekeepers. The other question that impacts on strategy for those who seek to use the Net for social change is the point made by David Noble and explicated by Fortier as the fact that capital still controls most of the production process, including the production of web automation, search engines etc. Fortier maintains that the valid strategy is "digital resistance to the controlling forms and use of ICTs in production, trade, the media, and surveillance. Numerous examples exist", according to Fortier, "of appropriation for the purposes of resistance, such as browsers and websites that offer navigation with complete anonymity, thus preventing profiling and surveillance. ICTS are also sources of reproduction of knowledge, and are used by many social movements, so there is a role for alternative ICTs. Research by oppositional movements should push into this area and can address information and communication needs amongst those who seek a more civil society. "[A]lternative strategies must focus not only on technologies...but also...on the processes that determine the control of both the development and the content of information systems...We must refuse to substitute technology for politics. The goal must be not a human-centred technology but a human centred society." It must be struggled for. It comes down to a situation that the left presses have long faced, at least since World War II when the commercialisation of the mass media and the dominance of advertising in newspapers saw the fairly rapid decline in circulation of left wing papers. Commercial ISPs dominate the Net, and this will continue, but alternative providers play a crucial role in circulating information and ideas. The problem remains, as Michael Albert, founder of ZNET says in his book, "The Trajectory of Change," "face to face interaction with people who don't agree with us already, or who even disagree strongly with us, is at the heart of movement building." So often this small circle that gathers around a publication or website starts debating and abusing one another, rather than looking at the population as a whole. As he also says in his article "Dealing With Differences" Rather than waste time assaulting one another, we face, instead, the whole population. We bring them our different messages, and we see what happens." Fortier's book is a strong analysis and sound grounding in the political economy of ICTs. He calls the approach he favours historic inherence. Technology is a field of social struggle shaped by many groups. It is not a set of instruments that come preformed with inherent pro capitalist characteristics. If this were so then there would be no scope for alternative groups to shape them in a progressive manner. The question is how certain groups form and appropriate ICTs. So far its clear much ICT development and use has served to repress the poor and to increase capital accumulation and progressives should expose this. ICTs serve social control. They do not determine social processes however, so the room for manoeuvre remains to shape alternatives. The new book from Graham Meikle, Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet (Pluto Press) is a good account of how many alternative groups such as the Zapatistas and McSpotlight are actually doing that. Fran�ois Fortier. Virtuality Check: Power Relations and Alternative Strategies In The Information Society (London: Verso, 2001) To save yourself some bucks (as Verso imports are very expensive) use the Internet to go to a copy of Fortier's thesis on which this book is based. You will find it at http://www.interasia.org/background/fortier.html
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