The Political Potential of the Web

...Likewise, sites like Matt Drudge's Drudge Report, Slashdot.org , and Plastic.com challenge accepted notions that there should be these people called "editors"—employed, it so happens, by huge, typically multinational, corporations— who are supposed to decide what news is, and then there are others—readerswho lap it up...

...When Gina Neff says that news sites aren't particularly popular with users—a claim I'm not sure is true—I hope you recognize that there are nontraditional sites that have a power and potential to shake CBS.com or CNN.com to their very roots...

...DISSENT / Summer 2001 • 83...

...But these characteristics, which surely are less relevant after the crash of Internet stocks last year, should not excuse the blithe ignorance of most Dissent editors and the outright hostility of its writers...

...Furthermore, as fate would have it, the biggest proponents of the Internet (a group hereafter affectionately referred to as "geeks") happen to have an anticapitalist attitude toward property—a true communitarian spirit that was responsible for the creation of the Internet itself...

...While Microsoft has leveraged its creations—some would say extorting the public in the process—the credo of open-source programmers allows people to freely use their work provided that they promise, in turn, not to charge others for it, and they agree to share whatever improvements they come up with...

...A protest anthem went from the writer's pen to hundreds of thousands in a matter of days...

...In my few forays into turn-of-the-century socialist thinkers, I have read how committed people of the left quixotically tried to rally around Esperanto (a so-called universal language that, reflecting the times, seemed a lot like a hybrid European language) to further social justice and end hatred around the globe...

...But it has also made it easier for oppression to come to the world's attention...

...Perhaps because of their outcast status in society, they have tended to minimize the importance of "owning" the programs they have created for the sake of improving everyone's interaction with the Internet...

...The haunting and beautiful song came to public light when Springsteen, a champion of the worker, unveiled it at a series of concerts at Madison Square Garden, drawing the wrath of the Policemen's Benevolent Association, normally a solid fan base of his...

...This ethic is obviously toxic to capitalism, but I'd say it is still the prevailing one on the Internet...

...In fact, progressive-minded unions, such as the Communications Workers of America, to which I used to belong, already have extensive ties to European counterparts...

...But the left passes over all the improvements such a common tongue could bring...

...Record executives, like news editors, no longer have exclusive control over what's in the public consciousness and what isn't...

...And the idea of Napster and a related program, DeCSS (software that breaks down protections on DVDs that could allow them to be swapped as well), has already motivated a sleepy, contented on-line population...

...There are a host of other examples of how the Web aids collective action, including the work of the Direct Action Network (www.directactionnetwork.org ), which helped organize the Seattle World Trade Organization protests...

...If a piece is killed for corporatist reasons, a reporter thankfully has another outlet...

...Challenge to Materialism If the open-source geeks, the alternative on-line news outlets, and the Napster file-sharers win out, they will obliterate the century-old structure organized around cultural packagers, those select few who are responsible for setting public tastes...

...I suppose Dissent would find reasons why manna from heaven would promote the current power structure, but joking aside, these articles' dyspeptic attitude toward the World Wide Web and all it contains and all it promises should be particularly disturbing to all of us...

...The song had not been released commercially, he had just written it, yet bootleg copies from the concert were soon burning up Napster...

...The opportunities for the left have never appeared greater, but that means learning about the new technological revolution, not mindlessly blocking it out...

...Who says that the range of human knowledge should be reserved for elite universities...

...The good thing is that these questions have already fueled a strong opposition movement— whether through relatively new organizations like the Electronic Freedom Forum or more established ones like the American Civil Liberties Union...

...Eventually, the Internet should make it easier for unions to organize internationally, as Marx and others imagined...

...For more than a year, the most compelling phenomenon on the Net has been Napster— with more than forty million users worldwide—which allows for unlimited swapping of all kinds of music (through MP3 files...

...Whether you like him or hate him for his right-wing slant, Drudge opens up the channels of newsgathering...

...It helps explain why the Web has resisted easy profits—not business-to-business companies, not peer-to-peer companies, or any other combination touted by investors...

...NOAM COHEN is executive editor for news at Inside.com...

...It's responsible for the "information wants to be free" mantra that has undercut my own employer—Inside.com, an entertainment and media news site...

...Who says that culture is fundamentally about marketing, rather than about the shared experience of creative works...

...Yes, in the short term, the Internet has made it easier for companies to hire cheap labor around the world...

...AS A RESULT, there is a growing following for the "open-source" movement, the particular scourge of software giant Microsoft...

...After losing a lawsuit against the major record labels, Napster—ever the business optimist— entered into a partnership with the parent of one of them, Bertelsmann, and plans to limit the service to paid subscribers...

...Who says a handful of people should decide what news is...

...A search for "John Ashcroft," for example, on Google, a popular Web search engine, leads to a box for an anti-Ashcroft site that provides facts and contact information...

...In Yugoslavia, China, and the Middle East, the freedom of the Internet has worked against the ironfisted control that allows oppression to continue...

...And if something like the Internet—which has conjured up a host of billion-dollar-valued companies in less than a decade, threatens to reconceive entire industries (such as recorded music, publishing, news gathering, and retail sales), and offers a heretofore unimagined model of community building—can't generate enthusiasm among a group of social critics, it's hard to imagine what will...

...It means that talented people on the left haven't even dipped their toes in the currents of cyberspace to consider how to use this unprecedented opportunity to heal the crazy, unjust world we live in...

...Sure, I, like nearly all Dissent readers, opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement because of the lower salaries and degraded working conditions it meant for American workers—the ones to whom I obviously owe the greatest allegiance—but I also recognize that some day we will have worldwide standards for workers and that I really should care about the Mexican workers whose base salaries and working conditions are invariably lifted by free-trade agreements like NAFTA...

...Napster is a broadening experience in another way, in that only a single copy of a song (say something long out of print) is required for it to proliferate to all who would want to hear it...

...Who says that music has to be so expensive...

...Bringing this argument closer to home, I can cite some practical examples of the ways that the Internet has already been used to destabilize the status quo and encourage the causes of democracy and political action...

...Granted, 82 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 ARGUMENTS there are gatekeepers acting like editors, but with a much lighter touch, with everything generated by contributors...

...On other matters of social justice, the Internet also has great potential...

...The content consists of submitted links plus the reader comments on these submissions...

...There are reasons why the Internet has been pushed aside by people on the left—so much of the discussion about the World Wide Web is linked to commerce and stock price, venture capitalists and day-traders...

...AS A LOYAL, if discontented, Dissent reader, I was only mildly surprised that you would print a pair of articles that are sullen and cautionary about a recent technological and cultural phenomenon called the Internet ("The Information Society, the New Economy, and the Hype," by James B. Rule, Fall 2000 and "Highway to Nowhere," by Gina Neff, Winter 2001...

...In fact, in the last few months, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and Disney, among others, have fled the Internet after losing millions of dollars...

...Slashdot and Plastic (with which Inside has a relationship) encourage readers to say that a certain text, a certain article, a certain song, is "big news...

...Yet we are told by Dissent that it is a neutral development, at best, that has already been horribly co-opted...

...And the geeks have fought hard against corporate attempts to rein in that spirit...

...So compelling is the argument that you can't charge for material "located" on the Internet—words, music, video, you name it— that businesses have had to look to other techniques, whether generating demographically useful E-mail lists or selling off-line products...

...This power of digitization and the Internet to make all music and all books available to people anywhere in the world can easily be overlooked when all one reads are churlish accounts like Harold Bloom's in the New York Times that fetishize "The Book" and imply that reading literature in any other format is somehow less than worthwhile...

...And we on the left should celebrate the world's coming together...

...Who says that people should watch or listen to what has been demographically chosen for them...

...Access to Information The Internet ties together like-minded thinkers...

...Yes, the connection is facilitated by money—although the advertising fees are surprisingly cheap—but suddenly people can be quickly joined together and assisted in protest...

...In fact, the Internet embodies much of the internationalist thinking that once used to characterize the left, all that "workers of the world, unite" stuff I read about in college...

...To recap, this thing called the Internet has the power to establish a sisterhood and brotherhood of the world, it is built on principles of sharing and common purpose, and it stubbornly resists the efforts of capital to yield profits...

...Yet, thanks to the Internet, we actually have such a language (English) and the means of universal communication that dreamers like DISSENT / Summer 2001 • 81 ARGUMENTS Antonio Gramsci could never have fathomed...

...Instead of decrying the capitalistic tilt of the Internet and globalism in general, shouldn't we be encouraging the globalization of labor...

...I think, also, of a Napster-fueled episode about a year ago—the spread of Bruce Springsteen's "41 Shots: American Skin" about the police killing of unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo...