free speech

The Decline of the Public Sphere

Armin Medosch — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:56:37 +0200

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Jürgen Habermas (1962/1990) gives a historic account of the formation of the public sphere and its decline. There he argues that in the feudal system, while public events did happen, they were merely of a representational character. Everybody was present, but in a representational capacity only, there was no public discourse, no difference of opinion was allowed and all actual power was centralized in the institution of the souvereign/monarch. The events of public life followed a strict ceremonial protocol. The rise of the bourgeois as a political class was intricately linked with the emergence of a public life characterized by rational debate, the raisonnement of the educated liberal middle class man. The century of liberalism, which Habermas somehow dates between 1780 and 1880, was characterized by the high quality of rational discussion between free individuals. However, this was restricted to males of the capital owning middle class, with very few woman and people from other classes able to participate. By the beginning of the 1960ies in Western European countries class struggle had by and large subsided and been replaced by a postwar consensus that guaranteed a state of frozen peace with increasing levels of prosperity shared more equally in society. While the newspapers, in particular mass circulation daily papers were owned by 'press barons' (a figure immortalized by Citizen Kane, but one which had existed since the 1880ies and the fast rotating press and lithography) electronic media radio and TV were state regulated to prevent any form of leftwing or rightwing extremism.¹ In other words, by the beginning of the 1960ies the public as presented by mass media had become representational again, a 'spectacle' as opposed to an open public sphere where a rational debate happened which would not only be critical but also relevant for actual politics. The powers to be had been able to isolate themselves from any real political debate by holding the mass of voters as a captive audience in front of a TV screen which presented a manipulated worldview -- a situation which should only deteriorate from then on till today.

Into this situation of the Frozen Peace of the early 1960ies broke the New Left, a hotchpotch mix of non-orthodox Marxist splinter groups, the free speech movement, various civil rights and minority issue movements and the Anti-Vietnam movement, culminating in the Summer of Love in San Francisco 1967 and the student revolt of May 1968. These groups advocated grassroots participatory democracy or so called self-organisation and practiced a type of media use which was equivalent to their political ideas. Everybody should in principle also be a publisher, a radio journalist, a critique, a columnist or reviewer, in short, a producer. A participatory grassroots model for electronic media was applied by community media activists such as Deedee Halleck (2002) or the student radio during the revolutionary days in Berkeley, and later by the free radio movement in Europe.²

The poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger became the media theorist for this newly emerging paradigm of participatory media. Going back to Brecht and Benjamin he reitereated some of their demands, like the one that electronic media should be turned from a distribution medium into a communication medium. But he not only echoed some of the concerns of Brecht and Benjamin, he also updated them. According to Enzensberger, "the technical distinction between receivers and transmitters reflects the social division of labor into producers and consumers, which in the consciousness industry becomes of particular political importance." (Enzensberger 1970/1996, p. 64) He scolded the New Left for having reduced its criticism of the "development of the media to a single concept -- that of manipulation," yet agreed that "the present concept of manipulation [...] reflected the feeling of powerlessness of the Left and the objective reality that "the decisive means of production are in the enemies hands". (my emphasis) Like Benjamin and Brecht, Enzensberger believed into the emancipatory power of new media. But, shaped by the postwar experience and the rise of electronic consumer goods, he added some important qualifications. According to Enzensberger the decisive point about media was their collective structure. "For the prospect that in the future, with the aid of the media, everyone can become a producer, would remain apolitical and limited were this productive effort find an outlet in individual tinkering. Work on the media is possible for an individual only insofar as it remains socially and therefore aesthetically irrelevant. The collection of transparencies from the last holiday trip provides a model of this." (Ibid, p. 70) He went on to say that this was what the market was already aiming at. Many people were already owning Super 8 cameras and tape recorders but they could become at best "amateurs, not producers."³ Even the radio amateur movement had been tamed and reduced to a "harmless inconsequential hobby in the hands of scattered amateurs." (Ibid) Enzensberger's description of the chances offered by participatory media but also the danger of them becoming politically toothless by being kept within the confinement of amateurism or hobbyism were of an almost prophetic quality. Enzensberger also distanced himself from media determinism in the style of McLuhan and his many followers:

Anyone who believes that freedom for the media will be established if everyone is busy, transmitting and receiving, is the dupe of a liberalism, that, decked out in contemporary colours, merely peddles the faded concepts of a preordained harmony of social interests. (Ibid)
Enzensberger stressed that this was the point where "socialist concepts part company with the neoliberal and technocratic ones." No one can expect to be "emancipated by technological hardware, or by a system of hardware." To think like that would mean to fall "victim of an obscur belief in progress." (Ibid) This thesis is distilled into the dialectical formula that the "...the media demands organisation and makes it possible..." (Ibid) Enzensberger would like to see the "socialist movements take up the struggle for their own wavelengths." They should, he continues, "build their own transmitters and relay stations."⁴ (Ibid, p. 70) Enzensberger bemoans the fact that the "innate Luddism of Marxism has left a vacuum into which a stream of non-Marxist hypothesis and practices has consequently flowed." According to him the 'innocent' and the 'apolitical' had made "much more radical progress in dealing with the media than any grouping of the left." From Warhol's Factory to the Beatles and the Stones Enzensberger still saw an emancipatory potential in what was then underground rock culture, but also the multimedia art of the time as practiced by Pop Art.

For a more theoretic approach to the models of media regulation and different forms of media freedom cf. Barbrook 1995, Media Freedom.
According to Barbrook this was the first time that a model of media freedom emerged which matched participatory grassroots democracy or self-organisation, a model of media freedom distinctly different from prevailing models of media freedom -- the liberalist or Girondist model and the Jacobinite or state controlled model, and or a mix of the two. cf Barbrook 1995.
Web 2.0 platforms such as Flickr, MySpace or YouTube neutralise the potential of any submitted work through the way it is organized. Through the sheer fact that it is uploaded to those 'platforms' copyright is taken away from contributors and the platform owners reserve the right to censor content despite the alleged openness. Any artwork on MySpace competes with millions of images of supposedly individual expression which is in effect just an illustration of how relentlessly conformistic pressures have become. Myspace is actually Murdoch's space.
At the time when Enzensberger wrote that in Western Europe this was only possible if the state legally granted a licence to a free radio station or in underdeveloped countries such as Uruquay where the native Tupumaru tribe staged a media revolution using radio; a sort of predecessor to the Chiapas uprisal.

45 RPM / Revolutions Per Minute

Armin Medosch — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 14:53:30 +0200

Radio Art Histories Remixed, Maxi Single Version

Night and Day: Inside Nerdcore Central

Armin Medosch — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 19:27:30 +0200

Let me put it this way: generally speaking there are things implicit and things explicit -- and at the hackmeeting the overwhelming majority of things to know and find out were implicit. It is in the nature of the self-organised event with flat, or, rather no hierarchies that those things that matter do usually not come with a large banner in human readable code that explains everything. There is not really a spokesperson, there are few figureheads, even fame is implicit, is something to be known and shared between insiders. What is to be found out is mostly based on direct human relationships. Everything else is largely a question of the 'vibe'.

The situation is this: there is a large former factory hall where they have put rows of long tables and chairs. In one corner there is a bar, on the opposite end a sound system with a lot of free music and the AmaroK player http://amarok.kde.org/ for everyone to play with. Now you find yourself a place somewhere at one of those tables and squeeze in between people already there and then you beg for an empty power plug socket; and if you are really lucky there is also a free ethernet socket for the cable which you have wisely brought with you, because otherwise you ared doomed to use the very unreliable WLAN. And then you go, you just hack away, you do what you are doing anyway. The rest depends on how you are configured within the network of human relationships.

I came to sit next to Meinhard who had just hitchhiked around Europe and has written a blog about it http://benn.org/ We share also some friends we found out, such as Patrice Riemens and others who just had met at the Yaxwe meeting http://www.yaxwe.org/ in Pula. In 2004 I ad participated there in the Transnational hackmeeting. Meinhard's main project is Ecobytes http://ecobytes.net/ which provides hosting services for 'or activists, artists, individuals and small businesses supporting our idea'.

One of the busiest people was Giorgo who was sitting just opposite me but separated through a little tower of three computers and a monitor. He was using one of the boxes to set up darkice http://darkice.tyrell.hu/ an audio streaming software. The idea was to stream all the talks locally and also externally, the challenge to dump all the audio not just in one big endless file but split up nicely already into manageable files. Giorgo was installing, debugging, encoding day and night. When he helped me with my network set-up on my computer I learned 3 new commands within 45 seconds or so. When I spoke to him he emphasised the communicative aspects of free software. He is basically interested in making the technology work but there is also a reason external to the technology itself: it is about communication. He said that most people still didnt know all the possibilities to communicate by using free software and he saw it as his task to create examples and show people the various possibilities inherent to free software.

This is, I think, a special feature of the Italian hackscene. Here, hacking and political issues in general and free speech in particular are going closely together. Apart from Indymedia who were there, at least as long as we believe the various people wearing their t-shirts, there were a number of initiatives devoted to copyleft and anticopyright ideas, announcing local IP numbers for file sharing almost as if in the tradition of a public domain party. Near the entrance a book stall had positioned itself from the excellent Eléuthera publishing company. They are distributing books from, among others, Ippolita collective, founded by Baku, whom I met. They describe themselves as "a group of people working about hacker ethics, free software, media-activism : a meeting place for reality pirates, an independent server, a community of writers." http://www.ippolita.net Their first book, which came out in 2005, was called ¹. Just recently their second written work appeared, Luci e Ombre Di Google which is about "the future and past of the metadata industry". Written by hackers with a political angle, those sure must be interesting books. And, just to give another example, Freaknet distributed a DVD with many materials from Ngvision http://ngvision.org/ an audivisual platform for political media work. One of their very recent projects was to attack Vivienne Westwood at the Milano fashion week by presenting shit shaped chocolate cookies to her and gaining entrance by posing as the new fashion label serpica nero. http://www.ngvision.org/mediabase/941 Westwood, by the way, ate the cookie witout getting the 'merde' reference, she was only worried it might contain Marijuana, which it didn't.

As a sort of special intermezzo suddenly someone made an announcement via the loudspeakers that from now on a new system was going to be operated regarding network access, 'human dhcp'. For those less tech savvy, dhcp is a service whereby IP numbers get assigned to clients automatically. This basically means that you just need to create a physical connection to the local gateway and you are 'on'. 'Human Dhcp' meant that we all had to get up and form an queue and give our computer-name and in returnh get a hand assigned IP number. Some foreign visitors simply couldn't believe it why this had to be done manually, and the explanation which someone from Freaknet gave was that "this is the time to get up and talk to someone".

Oh yes, and before I forget, it was lovely to get to know more people of Freaknet (http://poetry.freaknet.org/). Those guys cant sit still for a minute. Not only did they distribute the above mentioned poetry.freaknet.org DVD, and sold many t-shirts, they also presented a real hack, the project 'sucast'. Italian 'su' means 'your'. On the internal network they set up a server which allowed people to upload their videos via a web-interface. The software then more or less automatically arranged the uploaded videos in tiles. People could also interact by clicking on the links of the uploaded videos which started them. Thus, Sucast is a sort of collective VJ software based on the dynebolic distro and tools. At any event with many people who produce audiovisual stuff Sucast could be massive fun. However, some degraded hacker types ;-) uploaded some quite nasty porn, but that was taken off quickly.

Before and after the Sucast demonstration acracia also known as Tatiana de la O did some excellent VJ-ing adding some political content and poetry to the event. She also showed me her latest project, a mash-up of a mash-up of emotional blogs which is, in her own words, an equalisation of information (like you 'equalise' music). Tatiana is running her own blog http://delcorp.org/abbadingo/ but maybe we can convince her to join us here as she is a great fan of, guess whom, Doll Yoko.

By the time Tatiana was VJ-ing the main hall was teeming with people. The light had been dimmed and the volume turned up, there was a realy party atmosphere, just the only difference that people were still hacking away on their keyboards rather than dancing. At this point I could not help but noticing a certain awkwardness about the nerds. I mean this 'awkward' in a totally friendly way. They are just strange people. Imagine, it is long past midnight, everybody is having beer, wine, spliffs, the music is loud and driving, but people are still hunched over keyboards and black screens with green fonts, sticking their heads together over difficult problems. The more I look around I discover that quite a few people have brought modified hardware with them, from transparent cases to no cases at all to a mainboard in an aquarium -- is this some expression of hardware sexuality? Other people have variously designed wifi-areals or are playing with arduino boards adding to the cyberpunk carnevalesque atmosphere.

In this situation I am introduced to xoanino, an ex-cracker. Some liberal intellectuals think they need to make this distinction between hacker=good and cracker=bad, but in their own eyes some of the crackers, people who remove the copy protection from commercial software, are the real Robin Hoods of the computer age. Remember, before there was free software, who has not used a cracked Photoshop or MS Word? Cracking was a service to the community, let's face it, no fake moral indignation here. One of xoanino's most famous cracks was the popular audio software Cubase. How many emergeing house and techno bedroom rockers has he helped thereby to be able to create their tracks? Yet, he does not pretend he did this coming from any anti-copyright political stance. It was all about being better than the other guy, who wrote the copy protection. The Cubase crack he had done in particular because the guy who had written the protection software had claimed that it was unbreakable. Naturally, such a claim couldn't be left standing. This of course happened deep in the past, another century, even Millennium. Now also xoanino is using Linux and officially free software and is working as a security consultant.

As the night went on, I went to the flat where I had been put up. It must have been 3.30 as I left and when I looked back over my shoulder the majority of people didnt look like they were going to sleep any time soon. There was no noticable diminuation of the level of activity.

The next day I gave my talk, which went well (maybe more about that separately), followed by Andy Mueller Maguhn. Andy is not only one of the veterans of the Chaos Computer Club http://www.ccc.de/ but has also served in various capacities as an input giver, from his position as user-elected representative on the ICANN http://icann.org/ board to official German working groups on government level where he tried to make a meaningful contribution to policy making. Considering this background it seems even more significant that Andy is angry. I have not seen such an angry Andy Mueller-Maguhn in a long time. In his talk he emphasised the need for 'postgovernmental organisations' as he could not see any meaningful way of working with current governments any longer, as assessment which must have been shaped by experiences with the new coalition government in Germany where the security agenda dominates policy. Andy is right to point out that it is not just about the current Minister of the Interior and that who ever would become his susccessor was likely to follow a similar line. With the whole onslaught on privacy the CCC is now the last organisation in Germany openly running a Tor server http://tor.eff.org/ for anonymous internet usage. Andy was strongly advocating independent self managed infrastructures, asking "where are ower own satellites"? He fears that even our governments, in times of a crisis, could decide to shut down the internet. Then hackers would be challenged to really have independently working infrastructures.

The last speaker at the end of a long day was Emmanuel Goldstein, founder of the 2600 hacker club http://www.2600.com/ and magazine. It was really interesting to hear, from a historical point of view, how everything started in the 1980ies, but the overlong speech which mainly dealt with the hacker folklore from the past had a certain tiring effect on me. Meanwhile many people had left already because of a train strike and a big demonstration in Bologna the next day. So, after some emotional goodbyes I called it quits, yet I am confident I will see this extended 'family' again.

Citekey "OPEN NON È FREE Comunità digitali tra etica hacker e mercato globale" not found