The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement 9781442657267

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TH E E M PI R E O F MIN D : DIGITAL PIRACY AND THE ANTI-CAPITALIST MOVEMENT Where many critics see the Internet as an instrument of corporate hegemony, Michael Strangelove sees something else: an alternative space inhabited by communities dedicated to anarchic freedom, culture jamming, alternative journalism, and resistance to authoritarian forms of consumer capitalism and globalization. In The Empire of Mind, Strangelove, the scholar Canadian Business referred to as the ‘acknowledged dean of Internet entrepreneurs’ and Wired called ‘the Canadian guru of Internet advertising,’ presents the compelling argument that the Internet and new digital communication technology actually undermine the power of capital, producing an alternative symbolic economy. Strangelove contends that the Internet breaks with the capitalist logic of commodification and that, while television produces a passive consumer audience, Internet audiences are more active, creative, and subversive. Writers, activists, and artists on the Internet undermine commercial media and its management of consumer behaviour, a behaviour that is challenged by the Web’s tendency towards the disintegration of intellectual property rights. Case studies describe the invention of new meaning given to cultural and consumer icons like Barbie and McDonald’s and explore how novel modes of online news production alter the representation of the world produced by the mainstream, corporate press. In the course of exploring new media, The Empire of Mind also makes apparent that digital piracy will not be eliminated. The Internet community effectively converts private property into public, thereby presenting serious obstacles to the management of consumer behaviour and significantly eroding brand value. Much to the dismay of the corporate sector, online communities are uninterested in the ethics of private property. In fact, the entire philosophical framework on which capitalism is based is threatened by these alternative means of cultural production. (Digitial Futures) michael strangelove is a lecturer in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa.

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MICHAEL STRANGELOVE

The Empire of Mind Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement

U N I V E R S I T Y O F TO R O N TO P R E S S Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2005 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada Reprinted 2011, 2012 ISBN 0-8020-3898-0 (cloth) ISBN 0-8020-3818-2 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Strangelove, Michael, 1962– The empire of mind : digital piracy and the anti-capitalist movement / Michael Strangelove. (Digital futures) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-3898-0 (bound) ISBN 0-8020-3818-2 (pbk.) 1. Internet – Social aspects. 2. Mass media – Social aspects. 3. Piracy (Copyright) – Social aspects. I. Title. II. Series. HM861.S77 2005

303.48’33

C2005-900391-X

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

In memory of Marc Christian Gauthier 1965–2003

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction

3

1 Capitalism and the Limits to Thought 23 2 Content and Audiences beyond Control

56

3 The Abnormalization of the Internet 79 4 Culture Jamming and the Transformation of Cultural Heresies 5 Naughty Barbies and Greasy Clowns

99

134

6 Online Journalism and the Subversion of Commercial News 162 7 Utopic Capitalism, Global Resistance, and the New Public Sphere 199 Conclusion Notes

218

233

Bibliography

285

Name Index

313

Subject Index

319

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Acknowledgments

Twenty years ago my studies began at the University of Ottawa’s Department of Religious Studies, and this book owes a substantial debt to my teachers who helped give shape to the ideas gathered herein. I am particularly indebted to Carl Kazmierski’s passion for teaching and the multidisciplinary approach, which left an indelible mark on me, and to Marie-Françoise Guédon, who gave me the latitude and support to combine anthropology, economics, and media studies in my doctoral studies. I am also grateful to Patrick J. Brunet and the Department of Communication for the opportunity to teach a wide variety of communication courses at the University of Ottawa. As every teacher in this field knows, students provide an invaluable environment for testing notions and confirming emerging patterns of technology use and social change. Thanks also to my dear friends Dr Marc Fonda and Aneurin Bosley for years of stimulating conversation and debate. I owe special thanks to Siobhan McMenemy, Acquisitions Editor at the University of Toronto Press, for helping me through each stage of the publishing process, and to John St James for his detailed copyediting. I am also indebted to the anonymous referees who evaluated The Empire of Mind in its initial manuscript form and helped improve upon the final version. Special thanks to Anne St. Jacques for typing assistance and years of emotional support, and to Suzanne St. Jacques for her enthusiastic feedback as each chapter was completed. Finally, my greatest debt is to my parents, Audrey and George Leon Slade, for all their love.

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TH E E M PI R E O F MIN D : DIGITAL PIRACY AND THE ANTI-CAPITALIST MOVEMENT

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Introduction

Perhaps no other word characterizes the dawn of the twenty-first century more than ‘empire.’ Within the World Wide Web the word occurs approximately fifty million times. It is a word that evokes fear. It is often used to draw a contrast with democracy, and is frequently applied to the United States of America. Reflecting on the new popularity of the notion of ‘empire,’ journalist Doug Saunders related the following to readers of Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail: ‘Until quite recently, it was used only by writers on the extreme left and right, or by journalists seeking some sort of hyperbolic boast. Not any longer. Since 2001, it has come to be uttered without irony by White House advisors and military commanders, by conservatives and liberals; it is an entity taken for granted in much popular and academic writing.’1 Herein the notion of empire is not taken for granted, as the stakes are far too high. This book explores how capitalism operates as a form of empire, one that works not merely through the marketplace and the much maligned military-industrial complex of modern states, but also through the mind itself. That capitalism is a form of empire is hardly a new insight, and my goal herein is not to prove this widely held notion. Capitalism has been described as a form of empire for over a century. Here I explore how capitalism operates as an empire through commercial media. Again, in itself this is not a stunning revelation. The propaganda role of commercial media on behalf of capitalism has been the subject of intense study throughout the second half of the last century and is also a basic tenet of critical theory. Yet something new has appeared within capitalism’s ‘Empire of Mind,’ something that threatens to destabilize its ability to produce beliefs and actions that correspond to its goals. That new

4 The Empire of Mind

thing is the Internet, and its impact upon commercial media’s ability to manage belief and action is the central subject herein. The concern here is with the future of the audience and the future of cultural production, but the focus is on the present. What is actually going on deep within cyberspace and how does the Internet community affect the balance of power within empire? The future of the mass audience has never been more uncertain. Advertisers are scrambling to follow quickly changing viewing patterns. New digital technologies are fragmenting audiences and forcing closer collaboration between content producers, advertising agencies, and their clients. The line that once divided advertising from media content is fast evaporating as television shows, movies, popular magazines, and press coverage increasingly operate as extended commercials. Uncovered nipples and energetic crotch grabbing are showing up in Super Bowl half-time shows as entertainers struggle to get attention anyway they can. There is a general sense throughout the corporate sector that control over the audience is slipping away. Without question, the Internet has contributed to this erosion of control, and corporations are desperately seeking new business models as well as legal and technical solutions. In the mid-1980s ABC, CBS, NBC, Time Warner, and the New York Times commissioned a study of how new electronic media and personal computers will affect audience behaviour. The result was W. Russell Neuman’s book The Future of the Mass Audience (1991), an ambitious work that suffered the fate of drawing conclusions just before one of the biggest developments in the mass audience in the past century – the Internet. His observations provide a benchmark for how fast things can change. Neuman’s research suggested that video games had ‘turned out to be a fad,’ using remote controls to change channels during commercials was a ‘seldom used capacity,’ and that, on the whole, audiences ‘prefer not to have to interact’ with media.2 Fifteen years later the video-game industry is in some respects larger than the film industry and, as far as advertisers are concerned, represents a serious drain on the television audience. Channel changing to avoid commercials is so widespread that advertisers see it as decreasing the value of commercial programming. And while audiences have been reluctant to embrace interactive television programming, the Internet clearly demonstrates that a great thirst exists for interaction, just not the kind offered by the commercial sector. Neuman’s study painted a picture of a compliant, passive audience

Introduction 5

and suggested that, as in the past, in the future few would be moved to communicate with fellow citizens. The motivation to communicate would not change. He did foresee an increase in communication volume, but argued that there would not be a corresponding increase in communications diversity. Yet, due to the rise of the Internet, we find that the online audience is extremely active as compulsive communicators. The audience has transformed itself from a passive state to the highly active state of content creators and distributors. What changed was the rapid spread of the Internet and its enabling characteristics. Commercial media does not allow the audience any meaningful participation as content creators. But the Internet introduced a new structure of global mass media, one that proved to be highly motivating. With a new structure of media came new expressive freedoms and new motivations to participate. Within this new media structure individuals participate as autonomous content creators. The chapters that follow describe how the online audience operates as compulsive content creators who have responded to expanded communicative capabilities. The result is exactly the opposite of Neuman’s forecast – a stunning increase in communications diversity, one that threatens to erode the effectiveness of capitalism’s propaganda capabilities. Neuman can hardly be faulted for his failure to account for the Internet in 1991. What is striking is how little his analysis, along with the bulk of media theory of the last century, accounts for the role of the audience as a content producer. At that time, there was no real reason to do so. Likewise, in 1997 James G. Webster and Patricia F. Phalen summarized four decades of research of audience behaviour in The Mass Audience.3 It is indicative of both the state of research and the structure of pre-Internet media that the role of the audience as a producer of cultural content is absent from their study. The structure of media has undergone a fundamental change, and as a result, much of the theory from the last century provides limited insight into the future of the mass audience, simply because (generally speaking) it never conceived of the possibility that the audience itself would become a major source of globalized content production. This leads to a tendency to misread the audience’s new-found ability to move beyond simply reproducing capitalist ideology and create the cultural foundations for new social orders. In his brief overview of new media theory and practice, Jay David Boiter likewise notes that within cultural studies, critics often assume that new media will follow the same pattern of hegemonic production as was seen in the commercial

6 The Empire of Mind

mass media of the 1900s.4 Cultural and communication studies both developed in an era when the mass audience did not have access to the means of production. Obviously this has changed, and as I will demonstrate, this structural change in the media system is poorly accounted for by many contemporary theorists. The entire notion of audience resistance is in need of re-evaluation in light of the individual’s new role as a content producer who has access to an affordable means of global dissemination, one that is quite difficult to censor. Also absent from Neuman’s model of the future of audience behaviour is the notion of resistance. This highlights a problem endemic within analysis sponsored by the corporate sector – the unwillingness to fully account for corporate media as a mechanism of control. The failure to account for the ideological function of commercial media – its role in the management of consumer behaviour – is the foremost characteristic of literature produced by corporate consultants. Given the enormous volume of anti-corporate material on the Web, it is curious how so many corporate futurists can write about the Internet and ignore or dismiss the phenomenon altogether. Don Tapscott’s Growing Up Digital (1998) overlooks one of the most distinctive elements of online youth culture – culture jamming. Tapscott makes a point of reassuring the business reader that anti-corporate sentiment is rare within the emerging Internet generation – the next generation will be marketfriendly, efficient consumers.5 Yet anti-corporate activism is one of the most prominent features of online youth culture. Tapscott and a host of other high-tech consultants invariably paint a picture of the Internet consumer that is palatable to the business audience. The Empire of Mind presents the other side of the story, one far less likely to comfort the corporate sector. Too often, commercial media in general, and capitalism in particular, are modelled as benign systems. Indeed, they are usually seen as overwhelmingly positive forces within the social order, a perspective widely held among business analysts and the corporate press. This bias leads to a gross misunderstanding of how new communication freedoms, such as those realized within the Internet, will be used to subvert the goals of the corporate sector. How we understand the Internet is largely determined by how we understand commercial media and capitalism. One of the main goals of The Empire of Mind is to redress the myths about media and markets that corrupt the analysis of the present and near-future of the networked, online audience. Clearly, the Internet provides the online com-

Introduction 7

munity with expanded expressive freedoms. What Internet users do with their new-found expressive freedoms – their ability to create and disseminate cultural products – is substantially determined by the preexisting conditions of the surrounding social order. There is a widespread tendency to portray the Internet audience as a collaborator with the commercial sector. This is particularly true among those who sell their analytical services to the corporate sector (and this includes many among the academic community). This notion was implicit within the business models that were behind the Internet stock-market bubble of the late 1990s. It was widely held that consumers would eagerly embrace pay-per-view services, online retail, proprietary content, and advertising-supported Web sites. The real world of online behaviour proved to be quite different from the corporate vision of the ‘wired economy.’ What went wrong was not simply a combination of greed, stock-market hustlers, inane business models, and a small army of silicon snake-oil salesmen. Ultimately, what went wrong was that investors, business analysts, and large tracts of the retail and commercial sector were blinded by the market’s own propaganda system. The market misread consumer preference. It wrongly discounted the compelling value of online experiences and cultural products that exist outside the realm of the market. Not for the first time, the market became its own victim. A prevalent problem with theories about the online audience is the tendency to misrepresent, or not account for, the conditions that surround the audience. Where Marx once pointed out, quite rightly, that capitalism is both the best and the worst thing to happen to us, within the corporate sector (and not uncommonly within conservative scholarship), the ‘worst’ is often overlooked or denied. This seriously undermines one’s ability to arrive at a balanced model of Internet behaviour. Thus the notion of collaborator is frequently favoured, while the reality of online resistance often disappears within the writings of corporate consultants and academics. That analytical material produced for the corporate sector tends to be compromised by the need not to offend is hardly an extraordinary observation, yet the explicit recognition of this dynamic within academic literature and of its effect on scholarly production is rare indeed. Vested interests are attributed to the commercial sector; academics less frequently ascribe the dynamic to their own mode of production. Herein I model capitalism as a form of holocaust, a source of unparalleled violence and looming globe-spanning biocide that requires a

8 The Empire of Mind

massive correction if its destructive trajectory is to be halted (this argument, along with critical theory’s critique of capitalism as a form of holocaust, is explored in further detail in chapter 7). It will be argued that only by positioning the online audience within the context of a controlling and destructive economic system is it possible to gain a reasonable picture of how the social use of the Internet is unfolding. Yes, there is collaboration between the audience and the corporate sector, but there are also growing forces of resistance that must be accounted for within models of online behaviour. Scholars on both the right and the left recognize that contemporary capitalism is in a state of crisis. Conservative economic theory readily admits to capitalism’s intrinsic problems of social instability and economic inequality. What is less frequently recognized is that the economic system poses severe barriers to democracy while simultaneously establishing limits to thought itself. The same system also suppresses any radical critique of the economy that deviates from the narrow ideological range defined by competing factions of liberal and conservative elites. There are exceptions, but corporate media is not in the business of offering a sustained critical analysis of the worst abuses of capitalism. It is generally assumed that no serious alternative to capitalism exists and corporate propaganda ensures that simply contemplating an alternative is seen as unreasonable. My purpose here is not to prove the dystopic nature of capitalism or catalogue the extensive list of problems generated by the market economy, but to clearly state the operative assumptions at work therein. Where one ends up in the analysis of the social order is strongly predetermined by where one begins, but this is not a simple matter of asserting a collection of indisputable facts and arriving at an incontrovertible picture of the social order. There is no consensus on the nature of capitalism or the trajectory of globalization within academia, and the postmodern condition of knowledge ensures that any such consensus is no longer possible. Where I maintain that capitalism suppresses selfawareness, sociologist Manuel Castells believes the present Information Age has the potential to unleash the power of the mind, thereby dramatically increasing productivity, which will in turn foster greater leisure, which will be used to achieve greater spiritual depth and more environmental consciousness, all without sacrificing the material wellbeing of future generations. This sounds like a promise that by adding informational processes to industrial capitalism and by collectively making the right choices we will eventually have it all. Castells draws

Introduction 9

heavily on Marx, yet manages to resurrect the liberal promise of the Enlightenment when he concludes that it is within our reach to solve the problems of humankind through science and reason.6 Essentially, Castells carries forward the promises of the industrial revolution by replacing the antiquated metaphor of the machine with that of the network. My interpretation of the trajectory of capitalism is far less optimistic than such a simple revival of the promises of the Enlightenment and of its faith in reason and science. Contemporary capitalism is aggressively eroding national sovereignty, privatizing knowledge and shared culture, and destroying the physical and social environment because the democratic system is increasingly incapable of restraining multinational corporations. It is also subjecting the entire range of human experience to the logic of the marketplace, which strives to commodify ever more areas of interaction and cultural production. These issues have been repeatedly chronicled throughout the literature of critical scholarship. Herein the left’s indictment of capitalism is accepted as an essential element in establishing the context in which online cultural production takes place. Media theorist Nick Dyer-Witheford describes the context established by capitalism as ‘inimical not only to movements for higher wages, more free time, or better working conditions – classic labor movement objectives – but also to movements for equality-in-difference, peace, and the preservation of nature.’7 By virtue of its promotion of unequal class, race, and gender relations capitalism invariably produces resistance. This resistance takes the form of a contest over the meaning of things and events. Structural changes in the architecture of communication lead to new forms and strategies of resistance. The Empire of Mind identifies characteristics of these structural changes and outlines their implications for resistance to capitalism’s definitional control over meaning. Capitalist social orders inevitably generate high levels of discontent among large portions of the population, while simultaneously discouraging the general population from laying blame at the feet of an economic system that promotes unrestrained individualism. Everything within capitalism conspires to limit collective self-awareness and conceal the degree to which the individual is subordinated to the requirements of the economy. When mass discontent is properly accounted for in a model of the global world order, then the actual consequences of increased online communicative freedom are more readily seen. Whereas corporate media and, to a considerable extent, the education

10

The Empire of Mind

system, provide the primary location for the celebration of capitalism by the corporate (commercial) voice, the non-corporate spaces within cyberspace are evolving into the primary location for the elaboration and expression of mass discontent. Another major theme explored herein is the trajectory of the online audience. Perhaps the main reason why the notion of resistance is discounted within both right- and left-wing scholarship (as will be demonstrated) is because of the prevalence of the normalization thesis. This perspective argues that resistance within the Internet community will diminish in significance as control is gradually re-established by state and market forces. Within both the corporate sector and academic analysis, it is widely assumed that the online audience will shortly mirror the ‘normal’ controlled behaviour that characterized the mass audience in the pre-Internet era. In contrast, The Empire of Mind will present an alternative scenario, one that does not correspond to the corporate fantasy of impending totalizing control. The Internet, it will be argued, has in all probability achieved a stable state. The expanded expressive freedoms and unconstrained communicative capabilities of the audience will not be easily stifled. When capitalism is modelled as a violent and controlling system, and the Internet is modelled as a new type of public sphere, one that is very difficult to censor, then the Net’s role as a catalyst for expanded resistance within the social order is more clearly seen – but only if we step outside of the dominant myths that insist on the individual’s willing participation in capitalism and democracy. The Internet community has been observed long enough for us to safely conclude that it is indeed very difficult to censor. Even the formidable will and resources of the Chinese state have not enabled complete control over the use of the Internet and other digital communication technologies within China’s borders. A crucial step in the cultural analysis of the Internet lies in correctly identifying the context in which this new phenomenon of unconstrained cultural production and expression has arisen. Misreading the context leads to painting a picture of online behaviour that merely corresponds to pre-existing notions about the social order and its dominant mode of production and exchange. It is a grave error to present the Internet community as promoting a cultural convergence with commercial media and capitalism. To a certain extent, convergence is certainly occurring, and capitalism is firmly rooted within cyberspace. Nonetheless, a much more significant phenomenon is underway

Introduction

11

within cyberspace. A digital future is unfolding, one propelled by a cultural divorce between the values of the commercial sector and a newly empowered online audience. This online audience is free to produce and disseminate its own version of the world. This online audience is unconstrained by the market economy of corporate media. To the great dismay of the corporate sector, this online audience is also disinterested in the ethics of private property and is capable of producing compelling content of great cultural significance. What follows is a theory of cultural transmission that takes into account a new structure of communication that is altogether alien to the pre-Internet era. We are moving away from a period where cultural production and transmission took place almost exclusively within the confines of the corporate sector and conformed to the logic of the market economy. This mode of cultural production and transmission is not about to disappear, yet what is new is that it now must compete against a novel mode of cultural transmission – one that exists largely beyond the control of the corporate sector or the state and does not conform to the logic of private property and market exchange. The social orders within capitalism’s realm have been substantially influenced by the commercial mode of production. Furthermore, capitalism has faced very little competition in the domain of cultural production. Thus capitalism has exercised considerable definitional control over the social order. (Indeed, this could be considered a nearly universal axiom of cultural theory). The meaning of things, the individual’s perceptual apparatus, the majority of shared symbols, the very limits to thought itself – all this and more exists under the sway of a privately owned and operated definitional system. Any theory of cultural transmission must now account for a new mode of production, one that enables massive volumes and varieties of non-corporate cultural products to circulate through the social system. The production of cultural products outside the confines of the market economy is not new (herein I refer to this as the ‘non-commercial’ or ‘non-corporate’ production of culture). What is new, and of great consequence, is the ability to distribute and archive cultural products on a global scale, at extremely low cost, and do so beyond the confines of the market economy. Thus we see the prevalence of freely available material on the World Wide Web, to the extreme consternation of the commercial sector. It is very difficult to compete against ‘free.’8 In the chapters that follow I will argue that this novel mode of non-commercial cultural production undermines the definitional

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The Empire of Mind

capabilities of capitalism and its commercial media. The corporate sector is facing an erosion of its ability to manage consumer behaviour. In essence, The Empire of Mind proposes that the entire apparatus of capitalism’s belief system is experiencing increased competition over the production and management of beliefs, values, and action. Yet, at the present time, capitalism’s influence over the social order still reigns supreme. If anything, its globe-spanning power as a belief system is widely underestimated and frequently denied at the very time when it is on the verge of being significantly enhanced through the digitization of the economy and media environment. Western cultures place a premium on the notion of the independent self, and the average individual gives little thought to the impact that commercial media has on cherished beliefs and habits of consumption. While there is a tendency to dismiss notions of social order and mass society and in their place posit a postmodern economy of fragmented audiences, expanded choices, and heightened freedom, it is argued here that capitalism’s grip on the social order, is tightening. In the midst of an unquestionably chaotic ‘new world order,’ the standardization of thought and action is evident everywhere. Postmodern theory certainly has utility and value, but it often fails to adequately account for the real world of mass behaviour patterns. This failure is seen in media theorist Ien Ang’s insistence that the indeterminacy of meaning ‘does away with any notion of an essence of social order.’9 Yet claims about rising levels of social disintegration due to the ‘infinite play of differences which makes all identities and meanings precarious’ must be measured against what could be called the ‘Wal-Mart factor.’ Widely shared consumption patterns remain the most prominent feature of capitalism. Ever larger chunks of the marketplace are falling under the control of corporate oligopolies, while media corporations undergo a similar trend of global consolidation. Postmodern forces of audience fragmentation and the increasing indeterminacy of meaning are undeniably at work within the social order, yet capitalism nonetheless remains a system that tends toward totalization, embracing all before it within its homogenizing logic of social organization. At present there is an enormous consolidation of definitional control underway within capitalism. Postmodern theorists such as Ang too quickly dismiss the structural predetermination of meaning and thought at the very point when the economic system is intensifying its definitional capabilities through a wide variety of mechanisms, such as international harmonization of intellectual property laws, con-

Introduction 13

solidation of media properties, and digital tracking of consumer spending and viewing habits. Along with misreading the level of chaos at work in ‘capitalist postmodernity,’ Ang also grossly understates the imperial nature of the global world order when she writes that ‘capitalism is no longer sustained through coercive submission of colonized peoples’ (165). As will be argued, capitalism is no less coercive than it was in the past. Indeed, there are reasons for believing that the primitive application of force seen in the nineteenth-century high imperialism of Western empires has been replaced by much more sophisticated and powerful forms of control that are embedded deep within the economy, the social system, and the mind itself. Futhermore, coercion can take place not merely through enforcing what is required, but also through the denial of alternatives, a denial that is effectively maintained through globalizing capitalism and the political systems of the northern hemisphere that it serves. America and the Empire of Mind Capitalism manifests itself as an ‘empire of mind’ that is maintained not only through the economy, but also through the state and the military. The following situates my notion of an empire of mind within the expanding field of empire studies. One of the larger debates within academia and within the popular press revolves around the role of the United States as an emerging empire. The unilateralism of the United States, as expressed within George W. Bush’s doctrine of pre-emptive war, its willingness to ignore international law and worldwide opinion, its indifference to international agreements, the frequency with which it has gone to war, the level of deception its leaders have employed to justify their actions publicly – all this and more has led to an intense debate over the nature of the United States as an empire. The answer to the question ‘What type of empire is America?’ varies dramatically, from benevolent (Matthew Fraser), humanitarian (Michael Ignatieff), or reluctant (Niall Ferguson), to the accusation that the United States is nothing less than the world’s leading terrorist state (Noam Chomsky). Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century its leaders denied that the United States is an empire. But something has changed in the way America relates to the global community. The current and distinctly imperial rhetoric of its claim to represent ‘a single sustain-

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The Empire of Mind

able model for national success’ and embody values that are ‘right and true for every person, in every society’ betrays the moral parochialism employed by every empire that has professed to represent universal values.10 American leaders at both ends of the political spectrum do not hesitate to proclaim their nation’s moral leadership. Yet within the global community there exists a high level of distrust and outright hostility towards the United States. As foreign-affairs columnist for the New York Times Thomas L. Friedman observed, ‘The idea of America as the embodiment of the promise of freedom and democracy – not just of technology and high living standards – is integral to how we think of ourselves, but it is no longer how a lot of others think of us.’11 Even conservative opinion leaders such as Friedman cannot avoid recognizing that a tremendous gap exists between America’s self-perception and the actual impact of the nation’s actions upon the world stage. As the full complexity of the contemporary debate over empire cannot be adequately treated in this volume, here I will address a widely debated postmodern notion of empire, one that fails to fully account for the central role of the United States as an emerging empire. The book Empire (2000), a collaborative effort by American literary theorist Michael Hardt and Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri, is one of the most widely debated contemporary advances in theorizing the changing nature of the nation-state. Empire describes how state-centred imperialism has been undermined and transformed by globalizing capitalism: ‘Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule – in short, a new form of sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world.’12 Hardt and Negri position their notion of ‘Empire’ as a break with previous historical manifestations of ‘empire’ as state-based imperialism. It is not ‘a weak echo of modern imperialisms but a fundamentally new form of rule’ (146). Empire is deterritorialized and decentred, a direct result of the ‘postmodernization of the global economy,’ and represents a radical break with the past that transcends previous forms of state-based sovereignty (xiii). Typical of postmodern theorists, the authors propose a ‘fundamentally new situation,’ a rupture in the world order that has produced ‘a single supranatural figure of political power’ called Empire (8, 9). I suspect that in a more theological age this singular, centreless, borderless, transcendent, unifying totality would have been called ‘God.’

Introduction 15

Hardt and Negri underestimate the role of localized elite interests entrenched within territorially bounded nation-states, which leads directly to a unsatisfactory account of the United States’ role in the global world order. Their description of a transcendent Empire that ‘establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers’ is a quintessentially postmodern act of philosophical excess (xii). One of the most contentious claims made by Hardt and Negri is that the United States is not an imperialist power. They do admit the obvious, that the United States ‘certainly occupies a privileged position in the global segmentations and hierarchies of Empire’ (384). The United States is a lone superpower that ‘holds hegemony over the global use of force,’ is actively dominating the global economy, and is projecting American jurisprudence across the globe (180, 82). Many commentators have noted that it is difficult to see how this classic combination of imperial mechanisms of domination – military, economic, and judicial – can be disassociated from the notion of an imperial world order that emanates from the territorial centre of the United States In contrast, Hardt and Negri make the dubious argument that Empire is ‘not American and the United States is not its center ... [Empire’s] power has no actual and localizable terrain or center’ (384). Their declaration that ‘our postmodern Empire has no Rome’ (317) falsely projects a sudden rupture with the past. In so doing, Hardt and Negri understate the degree to which the growth of a transnational economic system actively promoted American authority into the international sphere. The geographical mobility of capital, its ability to relocate from nation to nation, has not diminished the significance of localized reality – the fixity of specific elite interests that inevitably tie the use of capital and other forms of power to national interests and ideologies. The United States established decisive regulatory regimes such as universalizing legal norms and market controls that regulate the flow of transnational capital and it also dominates key institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Obviously, it would be overstating the case to suggest that America has a complete monopoly on the exercise of power within the global world order. America stands at the apex of a constellation of Western liberal democracies, but it requires the cooperation of former empires to maintain its imperial project. The United States relies on far more than regulatory influence over the transnational economy and the soft power of its cultural industries

16

The Empire of Mind

to extend their imperial dominance. The role of history’s largest military must also be accounted for when taking the measure of empire. Hardt and Negri provide a very brief account of the U.S. military. Their analysis appears exceedingly naive when they argue that contemporary acts of American military aggression represent the maturity of an American constitutional process. Their argument that a constitutional process produces ‘international juridical norms that raise up the power of the hegemonic actor [the United States] in a durable and legal way’ (180) is entirely unconvincing after the deceitful, self-interested, and immoral acts of aggression that came into the full light of international scrutiny during and after the second Gulf War. Whereas their analysis of the first Gulf War boldly asserts that the United States emerged as ‘the only power able to manage international justice,’ the second Gulf War strongly contradicts their contention that ‘this new role of the United States [acting in the universal interest] is different’ (180). The Bush doctrine of pre-emptive warfare, the intense opposition to the second Gulf War by many world leaders (both of which occurred after the writing of Hardt and Negri’s Empire), and widely publicized incidents of torture, sexual assault, and theft committed by American military personnel against Iraqi civilians make it amply clear that the Gulf Wars were simply business-as-usual conducted through imperialist military aggression in the most classic sense. A crucial correction to Hardt and Negri’s thesis is found in the argument made by Chalmers Johnson in The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. Whereas Hardt and Negri almost entirely overlook the imperial role of the U.S. military, Johnson describes a model of world order that places American military aggression at its very centre. A vast network of overseas American military bases exist and operate in a manner largely invisible to the domestic U.S. population and serve to project American economic and political interests across the globe. What is striking about the postmodernist conception of a decentred Empire is its failure to account for the effect of trillions of dollars invested in the American military machine over the last century. Surely it is misreading the state of the world to propose that such huge sums invested in an imperial project are now lost to a transcendent ‘Empire,’ one that no longer represents the specific, localized interests of a particular nation-state and its closest allies. Johnson’s analysis of American militarism provides an account of how nefarious objectives of Anglo-American political elites have been achieved through military unilateralism. These objectives have been

Introduction 17

concealed within a narrative of globalization that celebrates the moral superiority of American constitutional democracy and ‘free market’ capitalism as the only legitimate social order. Johnson’s work directly contradicts Hardt and Negri’s argument that the failure of the Vietnam War marked a ‘final moment’ of old-world imperialism, and paved the way to ‘a new regime of the constitution’ that becomes integral to the operation of Empire (178). In stark contrast, Johnson argues that the Pentagon and the presidency are being divorced from any constitutional form of accountability and threaten to destroy the very fabric of the American democratic system. Where Hardt and Negri describe a new form of Empire that is ‘born through the global expansion of the internal U.S. constitutional project’ (182), Johnson fears a serious erosion of constitutional rights and democracy as a result of the United States’ permanent military domination of the world.13 In this he is not alone. Throughout the later half of the twentieth century, economist John Kenneth Galbraith repeatedly raised the alarm that the U.S. military operated as an autonomous power. Galbraith argues that within the United States there is ‘substantial military control of the legislative process.’14 While I will focus herein on the communicative mechanisms of empire, the empire of mind should be understood as an extension of economic, political, and military objectives. The empire of mind itself is subject to postmodern conditions typified by globalization, yet nonetheless it primarily represents a manifestation of the will of economic and political elites embedded within privileged nations of the northern hemisphere. Even though the nation-state is undergoing dramatic changes, it is premature at this time to dismiss the notion of imperial control embedded within the nation-state. The Empire of Mind argues that capitalist economy operates as a form of empire wherein the economy is the dominant site of symbolic production. This process of symbolic production does not float free from the particular interests of the most powerful institutions of global order, institutions that largely remain embedded in and around the United States. Postmodern conditions of diffuse and decentred power are anchored in the modern reality of state-based cultural, economic, and military imperialism. I realize that models of global order that presume a centre and a periphery are often seen as out-of-date. Nonetheless, the single largest, most expensive, and most powerful institution – the U.S. military – stands as a reminder that even in the midst of undeniable postmodern forces, there remains the very concrete expression of national interests that

18

The Empire of Mind

direct the unequal flow of wealth and privilege across the world system. The projection of military power across the globe is only one aspect of America’s imperial aspirations. It is reasonable to place the United States at the centre of the empire of mind when one considers the extension of the American media system throughout the globe. A combination of aggressive American foreign policy and oligopolistic media markets has led to a global superculture, wherein American-made products dominate foreign media markets. Most conservatives are quick to dismiss the notion of American cultural imperialism, while others readily recognize it and claim that the world needs more of America’s cultural exports. A recognition of the reality and threat of American cultural imperialism has been a central aspect of Canadian and European cultural policy throughout the twentieth century. It takes elaborate mental gymnastics to argue away the existence of concentrated media-cultural power within the United States. When the Honourable Liza Frulla, federal minister of Canadian Heritage, proclaimed, ‘We’re surrounded with a certain menace coming from the United States, let’s face it,’ she was stating a cultural fact recognized across the globe.15 This statement was made all the more striking by the reaction that followed. As far as I could ascertain, there was none. No calls for a retraction from members of the Loyal Opposition. No moral outrage about anti-Americanism in the newspapers. Nothing from the political or cultural watchdogs that populate the Web. One reason for this silence may have been the press’s fixation on the upcoming American election, another may have been that it occurred during the summer, when Canadians disappear en masse into cottage country and learn the fine art of making out in a canoe, in a tent, in the woods, on the beach, anywhere in the warm sun. The nation may have been distracted by the all-too-brief seasonal parade of skin and tan lines, but the comment probably failed to elicit any great outcry because, in the mind of the average Canadian, it was simply true. The empire of mind is more than a threat to Canadians, it also poses a dire threat to Americans. As the American media critic Robert W. McChesney noted in The Problem of the Media (2004), the American media system is ‘a significantly antidemocratic force,’ and is a menace to its own people.16 In the United States we find a society most fully under the grip of a hypercommercialized empire of mind. McChesney provides an excellent survey of how American media corporations have hijacked United States cultural policy, bought off politicians, cor-

Introduction 19

rupted journalism, assisted in the selling of immoral wars, undermined confidence in government, and robbed the public domain. Leaving aside the larger issue of an imperial America, The Empire of Mind will explore how a privileged mode of cultural production is under attack from within the very centre of empire. Chapter 1 sets the foundation for a theory of cultural transmission by exploring how the economic system manages belief and action through the commercial media. The combination of commercial media products and an endless variety of consumer goods has resulted in a meaning-production system that efficiently standardizes wants and beliefs. Economic, communication, and anthropological notions are deployed in the effort to account for persistent and highly visible patterns of mass thought and action within capitalist social orders. Given the premise that capitalism operates as a meaning-production system that exercises substantial control over our cultures and minds, chapters 2 to 7 examine how the Internet (also referred to herein as the Net and cyberspace) subverts the dominant flow of meaning. There are, of course, many varieties of capitalism throughout the globe. Herein I treat all major economic systems, including statist forms such as is found in China, as sharing in common the socialization of belief and action. While the United States presents a hypercommercial model of society that has gone the furthest down this road of market-based management of the mind, it should be kept in mind that the extension of the economy into the mind of the consumer is found throughout the world economic system. The empire of mind is a global phenomenon, but here the focus is on the centre of empire, with case studies involving some of its master symbols (Barbie and McDonald’s) and its primary organ of propaganda (corporate news). Some aspects of the Internet seem to change very rapidly while also not changing at all. Digital piracy is one such aspect. Every week the corporate sector announces a new initiative intended to end digital piracy on the high seas of cyberspace, and every business quarter (with few exceptions)17 reports are produced indicating a growth in online thievery. Chapter 2 argues that digital piracy will continue to plague the entertainment sector for the foreseeable future. Here I take issue with Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, who argues that in a few short years the Internet will devolve into the perfect tool for the control of audiences and content. Typical of such theories of impending totalizing control, Lessig’s discounts the real world of resistance, subversion, and evasion, as well as consumer, corporate, and state deviance.

20

The Empire of Mind

Lessig represents a school of thought that sees digital technology as enabling a new type of totalitarian society before which all other empires pale in comparison. Yet today, within the Internet, content and audiences are out of control. I maintain that the online audience has achieved a stable state – the degree of communicative freedom manifested by the online community is best seen as a social constant. Chapter 3 critiques what may well be the dominant paradigm within Internet cultural analysis – the normalization thesis. It is generally assumed that online activity and content are becoming a mirror of the corporate mode of cultural production. The Internet will eventually take on the characteristics of corporate media and the marketplace will dominate online behaviour. Overlooked by the normalization thesis is the tremendous significance of non-market cultural production by the online community. The Internet is doing far more than reproducing commercial media products. It is also producing an enormous volume of cultural products that circulate entirely outside of the market economy. This class of cultural production takes place largely beyond the control of legislators and the courts, and operates as a challenge to the implicit values of capitalism. The Internet is de-pacifying the audience and creating an alternative symbolic economy, one that is highly corrosive to the values of capitalism’s dominant symbolic economy. While the press is fixated on the subject of digital piracy, another form of piracy is taking place within the Internet, one that threatens to have a much greater impact on the operation of the economy in the long run. Chapter 4 explores how capitalism’s cultural authority – the corporate sector’s influence over the social order – is undermined by the destruction of intellectual property within the Internet. Culture jamming is one of the more visible examples of the destruction of meaning. Although a small community, jammers represent a widespread feature of online cultural production – the public reinterpretation of privately owned meanings, meanings that are critical to the reproduction of capitalism. There are historical precedents for the transformation of cultural heresies into normative belief systems by new communication technologies. The Internet may prove to be the foundation for another such transformation. Too often it is assumed that capitalism will reign unchallenged as the final arbiter of belief and action. Yet there are reasons for believing that new modes of cultural transmission can undermine any empire. Anthropological theory suggests that symbols play a central role in reproducing a social order over time. Capitalism has a collection of pri-

Introduction 21

vately owned master symbols that transport the implicit values of the economy throughout the social order. Chapter 5 looks at the destruction of two of capitalism’s master symbols – Barbie and McDonald’s – by members of the Internet community. The transformation of corporate intellectual property into naughty Barbie dolls and greasy clowns provides a demonstration of the failure of the corporate sector and the legal system to extend definitional control into cyberspace. The symbolic economy that generates real-world consumption is facing intense competition from a growing alternative symbolic economy within cyberspace. Capitalism’s substantial power rests in its ability to control the meaning of things in the consumer’s life-world, yet online, capitalism’s mechanisms of definitional control are powerless against the Internet’s new mode of cultural transmission. One of the most significant techniques of meaning-production within capitalism is the corporate news system. Critical theory sees the press as a mode of cultural production that is closely allied with the values of the corporate sector and the elite. Chapter 6 explores how novel modes of online news production are undermining the representation of reality that is produced by the corporate press. Chapter 7 explores the tendency within liberal theory to align the Internet with a proposed form of utopian digital capitalism, a new stage in the evolution of the social order that once again positions members of the Internet community as willing collaborators with the corporate sector. Here I take issue with French philosopher Pierre Lévy, who presents cyberspace and globalization as facilitating an evolutionary project of enlightenment. In contrast to the liberal celebration of utopic communitarianism, I model globalizing capitalism as a highly destructive force. Claims about the Internet community embracing capitalism’s cultural hegemony fail to account for the emerging anti-capitalist movement and underestimate the role of the new online public sphere in giving voice to dissent. Until there is substantial evidence to the contrary, models of Internet behaviour must take into account the possibility that significant anti-capitalist cultural forces have been unleashed. These cultural forces enable resistance, evasion, and subversion, as well as the production of vast volumes of anti-capitalist cultural material that collectively present a serious threat to the reproduction of capitalism. The empire of mind is under attack from within, and this century will almost certainly be defined by the new-found communicative freedoms unleashed within the Internet. In 1994 I proposed that the Internet ‘liberates the audience from the

22

The Empire of Mind

control of corporate and state content providers.’18 Theorizing the social impact of the Internet upon our digital future begins with the recognition that this proposition remains true – the online audience has communicative freedoms not previously available within the confines of twentieth-century media. The real world of Internet behaviour strongly suggests that, as cultural producers, the online audience remains largely unconstrained by the state and corporations. Here a careful definition is in order. Only by rejecting or ignoring huge tracts of scholarship from the past century could one claim that expression is now free from structural and psychological constraints, and this is certainly not my intention. My use of the phrase ‘unconstrained expression’ is intended to highlight the lack of corporate and state control over the production of online content and discourse, and should not be read as meaning unconstrained from pre-existing ideological perspectives. Unconstrained expression is limited by prior socialization, but it is also freed from institutional constraints. I speak of unconstrained expression in relation to the suppression of public discourse and the institutionalized control over cultural production within capitalism. Unconstrained expression describes a form of personal expression that is liberated from the structural constraints of corporate media and institutionalized modes of discourse, such as are seen within the production of commercial news. While one is never truly free, in cyberspace the individual experiences a greater degree of expressive freedom than is otherwise made available in the meatspaces of capitalism’s social orders.

CHAP TER 1

Capitalism and the Limits to Thought

It has long been recognized that, along with the production of goods, capitalism also produces the desire to consume. Within market economies desire is ubiquitous and taken for granted. Nothing sounds less convincing than a consumer who claims to be unaffected by advertising’s compelling voice. It is a rare individual who is truly content, with no desire for more cash, more clothes, more vacations, more living space, more stuff. Anyone who claims to be free of desire risks being labelled either a fool or a liar. Desire is hardly a novel product of the modern economy. Eve desired knowledge. King David desired Bathsheba. George W. Bush desired revenge. Desire is an intimate part of the human condition. Indeed, there is a distinct tendency among religions to equate the absence of desire with the divine and the enlightened. Needless to say, such a state is seldom attained. While capitalism certainly did not invent desire, it has become highly adept at using desire to manage consumer behaviour. In the mid-1900s John Kenneth Galbraith sent tremors through the field of economics when he insisted that consumers do not merely participate in the marketplace, they are also the product of the systematic deployment of power throughout society. Within this deployment of power commercial media ensures that consumers adopt values and beliefs that match the general requirements of the economy. The individual’s participation in mass behaviour patterns is not a spontaneous reaction to random forces. Consumers engage in shared patterns of consumption because they live within an economic system that operates as a belief system. It exercises considerable control over the meaning and value of things. When the economy functions as a belief

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The Empire of Mind

system it establishes severe limits on a consumer’s free choice. As consumers our choices are not sovereign, they are not entirely our own. Our beliefs, values, thoughts, and emotions are highly conditioned to match the needs of the marketplace. Capitalist economies rely on the commercial media’s ability to establish the meaning of things within the consumer’s world. Diamond rings, Barbie dolls, hamburgers, Happy Meals, red sports cars, miniskirts, business suits – all products come into the individual’s life with a substantial amount of pre-defined meaning. Although we are not always sure exactly how or to what degree, advertising does work. The economy’s persuasion system works to such a degree that it challenges our cherished notion of the individual. Galbraith placed the mind firmly within the grip of the economic system, a grip that is every bit as powerful today as it was in the mid1900s. The management of behaviour and belief, he argued, is made possible through a complex persuasion system that moulds the consumer’s mind to the needs of the market. Capitalism’s success rests on its power as a belief system wherein desire is manipulated so as to match production with a reasonable (profitable) degree of predictability. Not only is individual desire managed, but social attitudes convenient to economic goals are also produced by the economy’s persuasion system. Market economies effectively align individual and state goals with the economic system itself. A young couple’s attitude towards a diamond engagement ring provides a glaring demonstration of capitalism’s ability to program wants among consumers. Ritual exchanges of goods within the marriage ceremony are significantly structured by the dictates of the marketplace. Calculations that will be made by both bride and groom over the purchase of an engagement ring involve a complex set of social attitudes about the relationship between earning power, self-worth, the proper expression of romantic love, and the cost of the ring (‘she’s worth two months salary’). That these attitudes have their source in the economy’s value system is seen in the highly successful campaign of the N.W. Ayers advertising agency, which in 1947 brought us the phrase ‘A diamond is forever.’ Ayers described its campaign as ‘dealing with a problem in mass psychology. We seek to ... strengthen the tradition of the diamond engagement ring – to make it a psychological necessity capable of competing successfully at the retail level with utility goods and services.’1 Twenty years of advertising by Ayers had a dramatic effect. By 1959

Capitalism and the Limits to Thought 25

the company was able to boast, ‘Since 1939 an entirely new generation of young people has grown to marriageable age. To the new generation, a diamond ring is considered a necessity for engagement to virtually everyone.’2 Advertising had successfully programmed American consumer attitudes towards diamond engagement rings. Ayers then turned its attention to overseas markets. Sixty years later, global consumer attitudes towards diamond rings remain highly engineered by the market’s propaganda system. An advertisement entitled ‘A Man’s Guide to Buying Diamonds’ in Time magazine provides insight into how attitudes about the meaning of a diamond ring are engineered.3 ‘A diamond solitaire is irresistible to many women’ is a rare piece of ad copy, as it is entirely true. This ad embodies the double-speak of the marketplace. It presents a massproduced product as an opportunity for the expression of individual uniqueness – ‘You want nothing less than a diamond as unique as your love.’ Within the logic of the market the individual and the product are one and the same: ‘To know diamonds is to know her.’ Intimate knowledge of the beloved is gained through knowledge of diamonds. The marketplace collapses product and person into one. More than just suggesting that knowledge of the other and romantic love are achieved through consumption, the market’s persuasion system ensures that a diamond ring is a necessary prerequisite for the nuptial ceremony. If there is to be a bride, chances are there will be a groom holding forth a diamond ring. As is often the case, the marketplace’s value system compels the consumer to act, while at the same time defining the acceptable parameters of action. The social imperative behind the ritual purchase of an engagement ring amply demonstrates Galbraith’s argument that the economy shapes behaviour to meet its needs: ‘Production is great not necessarily where there is great need; it may be great where there is great capacity for managing the behaviour of the individual consumer.’4 The genius of the diamond cartel lies in its ability to control the production of diamonds while manufacturing the demand for diamonds, with the result of fairly predictable costs and seasonal patterns in consumption. Galbraith described this management of demand as a ‘subtle arrangement in social design [that] works not on the individual but on the mass.’5 This is an odd limitation to place on the value system, as consumption patterns are the sum of individual choices. Our shared consumption patterns raise a most uncomfortable question for the contemporary individual – why do we share so many patterns of thought

26

The Empire of Mind

and action while simultaneously insisting on our self-determination? In the case of the engagement ring, the desire for this particular product on this particular occasion has far more to do with the value system than the individual personality. Individual choice will influence the selection of a particular ring but, for the vast majority, the imperative to provide a diamond ring is a non-negotiable demand imposed by the economic system over the social order (and not a case of the social order imposing itself on the marketplace). It would not be an exaggeration to say that the ancient requirement of virginity has been replaced by a demonstration of the ability to participate in the economy. The exchange of ‘two months salary’ for a diamond ring provides proof of the groom’s access to employment (or easy credit). The issue of virginity is socially irrelevant, replaced by the paramount importance of consumption capability.6 Of equal importance to the creation of explicit wants, such as a diamond ring, is capitalism’s ability to produce implicit beliefs, a process that Galbraith calls ‘a triumph of unexamined but constantly reiterated assumption over extant thought.’7 The widespread assumption that increasing levels of production is a worthy social goal is an example of how social attitudes have been adapted to economic goals: ‘this assumption the ordinary individual encounters, in the ordinary course of business, a thousand times a year. Things are better because production is up. There is exceptional improvement because it is up more than ever before. That social progress is identical with a rising standard of living has the aspect of faith’ (164). Other assumptions created by the economy’s belief system include the merits of the state underwriting the costs of research and development, the legal necessity of limited liability for corporations, the high social value accorded to technological change, and the imperative to seek higher wages and engage in ever-increasing levels of consumption, conspicuous or otherwise. Through propagating these assumptions the belief system produces a social order wherein ‘what is deemed to be sound social purpose is a reflection of the goals of the corporation’ (166). Within capitalism the reigning assumptions are that what is good for business is good for all and that human needs can best be satisfied through the acquisition of more stuff. Corporate media maintains a blanket of silence on the issue of the management of consumer behaviour, preferring instead to reassure the audience that more choices in breakfast cereal or lipstick is tantamount to more personal freedom. When Canada’s largest department-store

Capitalism and the Limits to Thought 27

retailer, The Bay, boldly proclaimed that ‘Shopping Is Good,’ the implicit message was that capitalism itself was good for the soul. The propaganda mechanisms of market economies continually encourages citizens to construct their individuality through consumption. Throughout the 1900s intellectuals raised the alarm over how the capitalist social order moulded the individual to its needs. While Galbraith was developing his economic critique, Herbert Marcuse emerged in the 1960s as one of the more vocal opponents of capitalist and communist societies. He saw advanced industrial societies as intrinsically repressive, violent, and destructive. Marcuse offered a philosophical analysis that mirrored Galbraith’s economic notions. Advertising, the mass market, and the ideology of consumerism indoctrinated the individual in the ideology of the capitalist system. The result was dehumanization, alienation, wageslavery, waste, and destruction. His main work, One-Dimensional Man (1964), argued that the individual’s indoctrination within capitalism produced needs that are determined by ‘external powers over which the individual has no control.’8 Carrying forward Freud’s criticism of civilization, Marcuse insisted that the dominant interests of society demanded repression of the individual. Joy and happiness were inevitably sacrificed for the pursuit of goods and profit. He saw new forms of technological social control leading to the total mobilization of society for the realization of the goals of industrial capitalism. Marcuse proposed that individuals were losing the ability to dissent and suggested that capitalism was stabilizing and becoming immune from the possibility of radical social change. The Empire of Mind stands in the long tradition of radical social critique and carries the spirit of Marcuse forward, but as will be seen, I do not share Marcuse’s pessimism that freedom is on the retreat. Marcuse did not foresee the rise of a new mode of cultural production (the Internet) that brought forth a new terrain of political struggle. Where he saw capitalist social orders as totalizing, the Internet’s decommodified mode of expression and production has led to the mobilization of global opposition to capital. This occurred at the very point in time when both the left and the right saw the fall of communism as heralding the end to any significant opposition to capitalism. Today, few would deny that capitalism is a belief system, but the debate over the nature of that system is far from resolved. That the economy operates as a belief system marks one of Galbraith’s main contributions to the study of economics. In essence,

28

The Empire of Mind

Galbraith argues that capitalism is a communication system that enables corporations to reach ‘forward to control its markets and on beyond to manage the market behavior and shape the social attitudes of those, ostensibly, that it serves.’9 In this empire of mind instructions flow from corporation to consumer through commercial media’s ‘relentless propaganda on behalf of goods’ (209). When the economy is conceived of as a communication system, a necessity emerges – nothing must be permitted to interfere with capitalism’s ability to condition attitudes necessary for its operation. Thus capitalism’s dependency on persuasion accords ‘great immunity to its techniques for managing demand’ (217). The economy requires the ‘greatest possible freedom in the exercise of persuasion’ (216). Indeed, ‘the greatest possible freedom’ precisely describes what society has given over to corporate expression in all its varieties. Corporate messages aggressively invade all areas of life with little resistance from a population conditioned to accept their presence. Governments around the world bend to the corporate will for greater media concentration, less regulation, and larger market shares. Media companies and advertisers avoid censure through self-regulation and through legal challenges to any attempt to limit corporate speech in the public sphere. The extreme difficulties encountered by governments in their attempt to control advertising directed at children is one of the more glaring examples of capitalism’s immunity over its engineering of consumption.10 My purpose here is not to defend Galbraith’s argument but to assume its conclusions as a framework from which we can explore the Internet’s impact on the management of belief and desire. Indeed, that capitalism conditions belief and perception is more a matter of the recognition of readily observable consumption patterns than an unreasonable assumption. The economy’s conditioning of social action and belief will shed light on how the Internet undermines capitalism’s communicative processes. As a communication system, capitalism guarantees its continued existence by producing consumers who constantly desire more goods and equate social good with the economy’s goals. A perpetual state of desire is instilled among the consuming masses through the production of a superabundant variety of goods. This guarantees that income is never sufficient to satiate wants. Easy credit ensures that spending meets and often exceeds income and the resulting debt ensures continued participation in the workforce. Endless and omnipresent propa-

Capitalism and the Limits to Thought 29

ganda on behalf of goods promotes the equation of consumption with pleasure and happiness, while the prestige of capitalism serves to reduce criticism to the marginal activity of liberal academics, impractical youths, and unreasonable ascetics.11 Empire and the ‘Sovereign’ Consumer The economy comes with its own set of myths about the individual, myths that serve the status quo. To fully grasp the significance of the Internet as a subversive force within capitalism it is essential to disperse the cloud of one such myth regarding consumer sovereignty – the free choice of the individual within the marketplace. Neoclassical economic models deny that the corporation has any substantial power over the consumer. As anthropologist Mary Douglas and economist Baron Isherwood have observed, ‘economists carefully shun the question of why people want goods.’12 The myth of sovereign consumer choice, choice made independent of undue external influence, insists that corporate power is limited to the control of prices and costs.13 This myth has its origins in a conservative ideology of the sovereign consumer that insists that the influence of the marketplace stops where the skin of the consumer starts. Among both economists and consumers there is a general perception that wants are independently derived. Advertising encourages this perception by reassuring consumers that their choice of Brand X reflects their unique personality. Few individuals are willing to admit that advertising plays a substantial role in their choices or their sense of identity. In the midst of history’s most expensive and omnipresent propaganda system there remains widespread disbelief in advertising’s efficacy. This tendency to deny the power that corporations exercise over individual choice can be seen at work within the Economist magazine’s insistence that the advertising strategy of branding gives consumers substantial influence over the behaviour of companies. Here we witness an opinion leader within the economy assuring readers that advertising tactics are becoming ‘an effective weapon for holding the largest corporations to account.’14 Branding will lead to a future where consumers, not corporations, ‘dictate the social agenda’ (28). In other words, by submitting to the economy’s persuasion system consumers will gain more power over corporations. How reassuring to be told that consumers collectively hold corporations accountable. How strange to hear that consumers will control the social agenda not

30

The Empire of Mind

through the democratic process but through exposure to advertising and habitual participation in acquisition. By positioning corporations under the will of consumers, the Economist demonstrates that little has changed in the established view of consumer sovereignty. Given that power within society tends toward disguise and deflection, it is not surprising that conservative economic discourse continually reassures consumers that their collective voice trumps the will of the world’s largest corporations. Such a myth discourages the interrogation of economic power, its methods of persuasion, and the limits the market establishes on individual freedom of thought and action. Thirty years before the Economist claimed that branding is the source of consumer power over corporations Galbraith observed that ‘in the established view economic life remains a process by which the individual imposes his will on the producer.’15 Undoubtedly, my use of a liberal economist will be criticized (the National Post is predictably critical of Galbraith’s writings). Where some accuse Galbraith of being out-of-date, I would reply that his critique of the market’s persuasion system remains relevant. Galbraith’s economic model is far from perfect and tends to reflect trends in play in the mid-1900s. As a result, he overstated the degree to which government planning coordinates the actions of corporations, and thus understated the role of competition in the market. Galbraith did not foresee the present era of growing international competition, shareholder activism, and deregulation. His portrait of a bureaucratic industrial economy encased within rigid hierarchical management structures no longer adequately describes the transformations in business practices that new communication technologies have produced. But Galbraith’s description of the role the economy plays in producing and managing consumer behaviour remains insightful. While the bureaucratic industrial economy has undergone substantial restructuring since the 1970s, its propaganda apparatus has been significantly enhanced and expanded. Thus, his insights on commercial media’s role in the management of consumer action remain useful, particularly in light of the vastly greater concentration of media properties within contemporary media oligopolies, and the vastly greater levels of media consumption within capitalist societies. Consumer sovereignty over action and belief is limited by a massive persuasion system that continually exposes individuals to marketplace images, messages, and values. This constant exposure defines the parameters of actions, like the often inescapable purchase of a

Capitalism and the Limits to Thought 31

wedding ring, diamond or otherwise, and conditions the consumer’s perception of self, others, and the world. Throughout his writings Galbraith chided economists for ignoring the economic significance of the persuasion system. He insisted that the market is profoundly dependent on an omnipresent persuasion system that provides ‘comprehensive, repetitive and compelling communication by the managers of demand with the managed.’16 A typical denial of the power of the marketplace’s persuasion system argues that the choice to pursue the satisfaction of needs through the consumption of commodities is more a matter of free will – ‘Who is to say we have not freely chosen this path?’17 Over 263 billion dollars in annual advertising expenditure within the United States suggests that considerable effort is being directed at interfering with our free choice.18 (The U.S. presidential elections of 2004 alone were responsible for generating over 1.5 billion U.S. dollars in advertising revenue.) This is not an issue of choice or no free will at all. It is more a question of ascertaining the degree to which our behaviour is managed. Within capitalism consumers are not masters of their wallets. The entire apparatus of commercial media is intent on diminishing awareness of our lack of self-mastery. Almost forty years ago Galbraith observed that ‘the notion of independently determined wants still survives.’19 It is a measure of the effectiveness of the commercial propaganda system that forty years later, the belief in independently determined wants still exists. Comprehensive, repetitive, and compelling is an accurate description of corporate media. While economists have been reluctant to recognize the central role corporate media plays, communication theorists have long argued that corporations use the media to exploit individual psychology. In 1948 early communication theorists Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton suggested that ‘organized business’ used a new type of social control to manage opinions and beliefs – propaganda.20 The corporate sector was an early adopter of mass persuasion techniques developed for use in wartime. As early adopters of propaganda (soon to be renamed ‘public relations’), businesses aggressively manipulated the mass audience. This new type of social control developed in parallel with the deployment of high-speed rotary printing presses and electronic mass media. In the late 1940s communication science was a young field. Lazarsfeld and Merton complained that their task of evaluating the social role of mass media was hampered by a paucity of studies and a lack of ‘certified knowledge’ about media effects (458).

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The following fifty years would produce an avalanche of studies that would cast considerable doubt upon Lazarsfeld and Merton’s conclusion that commercial media plays ‘a comparatively minor role in shaping society’ (460), a role that is ‘largely confined to peripheral social concerns’ (472). Half a century later, describing the extent of the corporate communication empire has become a major preoccupation of the communication sciences. The main difference between the social order of the early pioneers of mass media and that of today is the overwhelming presence of corporate messages within the urban landscape. By 1989 media theorist Herbert I. Schiller could rightly describe America’s physical landscape as a ‘private preserve, carrying the messages and culture of the corporations that dominate economic and political life.’21 The same can be said of most industrialized societies: ‘[B]y the close of the twentieth century, in highly developed market economies at least, most symbolic production and human creativity have been captured by and subject to market relations ... The last fifty years have seen an acceleration in the decline of nonmarket-controlled creative work and symbolic output. At the same time, there has been a huge growth in its commercial production’ (32). Not only is physical space inundated with the corporate voice, but an enormous amount of time is also given over to the paragon of marketplace culture – television. Between the marketplace’s invasion of the visual landscape and the mass surrender of leisure time to watching television, reading about television, and discussing television, the conditions of daily life ensure near constant exposure to corporate-sponsored messages. In Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression, Schiller describes a century-long process wherein corporations consolidated meaning production into highly centralized ‘symbol-making factories’ that colonize individual consciousness (42). The centralization of meaning production within the economic system has created a society dominated by corporate expression. Perhaps the most significant feature of corporate expression, a feature that Schiller suggests is largely ignored, is the ‘pervasive ideological character’ of the products that flow from capitalism’s symbol-making factories (33). Within capitalism’s social order the individual is force-fed ‘a daily, if not hourly, diet of systemic values’ delivered to all audiences by the omnipresent meaning-production system (33). Media products enable the economy to adapt belief to its needs because they embed the ‘rules and values of the market system that produced them’ (33). If the Internet offers audi-

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ences an alternative to this diet of systemic values, then capitalism’s continued ability to manage belief and produce desire within the masses is at risk. The analysis that follows will make use of Schiller’s notion of ‘corporate speech’ – a phrase that encapsulates the total communicative output of the economic system. The concept of corporate speech serves as a reminder that corporate media is only one part of the economy’s persuasion system. Schiller convincingly argues that throughout areas under capitalism’s influence the public’s communication environment has been industrialized and turned into a privately owned commercial arena dominated by corporate speech. Corporate speech continues to expand as market forces gain increasing control over creativity and symbolic production. The voice that gains the greatest audience within capitalism is the marketplace’s own ‘message making and transmission system,’ a system that is owned and operated by a handful of corporations (32). Corporate speech includes all the usual elements of mass media, such as music, television, film, and publishing, but also extends to corporate owned ‘public spaces’ such as America’s 50,000 malls.22 Amusement parks, museums, art galleries, annual parades and festivals, public schools, the surface of buildings, trash cans, washrooms, public transportation, clothing, all forms of mass-produced products, almost every visual surface, social environment, and manufactured item now functions as a vehicle for corporate speech – a vehicle for the marketplace’s production of meaning. A defining characteristic of contemporary life is the sheer impossibility of escaping from the presence of corporate speech. To live in society is to live within a constant stream of marketplace messages. One of the most visible mechanisms of the economy’s production of meaning is the advertising industry. Within both business and academic communities the degree to which advertising influences consumption choices is a matter of intense debate. Yet the evidence of everyday life provides ample confirmation of the relationship between advertising tactics such as branding and shifts in consumption patterns. Even the Economist magazine’s spirited defence of brands did not shy away from recognizing that this form of corporate speech effectively exploits ‘people’s emotional needs as well as their desire to consume.’23 Hundreds of billions of dollars in global advertising revenue, the sheer size of this industry, as well as its inescapable presence indicates that fixing meaning and establishing wants within the consumer’s life is an essential economic process.

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Advertising represents a form of corporate speech that tends toward saturation of the collective visual landscape. Advertising saturates the consumer’s visual field with the cultural products of the economic system. Attempts have been made at quantifying the degree of saturation that occurs within a North American’s visual diet. Just how many ads is an individual exposed to in the course of one day? Quantitative studies report numbers ranging from 1500 to 3000 ads per day.24 Annually, children are exposed to an average of 390 hours of television commercials. The actual exposure for both children and adults is much higher if it is recognized that all forms of corporate speech communicate the imperatives of acquisition and consumption. It is disingenuous to distinguish a fashion ad in a magazine from the constant parade of fashion on a television show such as Friends. There is no substantial difference between advertising, sitcoms, news, and any other form of media because all forms of corporate speech operate in the service of the economy. Corporate media is a consolidated meaning-production system. News broadcasts, advertisements, and situation comedies transmit the underlying assumptions of capitalism. To suggest otherwise is to artificially divorce the press and the entertainment sector from the persuasion system: ‘The essential point is that an entire broadcast, informational, and cultural system, privately owned and managed, often helped by government policy but mainly dependent on transnational advertising on behalf of corporate sponsors is being set in place. When such a system is consolidated, the utility of analyzing the effects of one program or medium is futile. The entire social mechanism has been transformed into a corporate exhibit or channel.’25 Schiller’s critics accuse him of overstating the extent of corporate speech, yet the impossibility of retreating from the domain of commercial media, along with the phenomenal growth in the volume of advertising, confirms his argument. Clearly, it is not in the best interests of the economic system to continually remind the audience that the entire entertainment and informational system is all an advertisement, is inescapable, and is very, very powerful. If the consuming masses interpreted their exposure to corporate speech in this light, then issues of media ownership, public programming, and content control would rise to the top of the political agenda. Therefore, the audience is reassured that it is all merely news and entertainment, benign in its intent to assist the citizen and the consumer to make intelligent, informed decisions. The political economy of corporate media is one of the most well

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documented and damning aspects of capitalism. In their call for American citizens to mobilize a mass movement for media reform, Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols argue that U.S. media policy has ‘been made in a corrupt manner with minimal public participation ... The system works to advance the interests of the wealthy few.’26 Commenting on the moral state of the American policy-making process, McChesney argues that the Federal Communications Commission chairman, Michael Powell, is ‘one of the most dishonorable public officials of our times.’27 Under Powell and his predecessors, American media policy handed monopolistic social power to a handful of very large media corporations that have a clear political agenda – keeping citizens ‘ignorant of their basic democratic rights and responsibilities’ (297). Contrary to the myth of a liberal media system, the U.S. media system’s political agenda has been captured by the conservative right wing. The problem is not, however, confined to the United States. We are now faced with a world system of transnational media corporations that are intensely anti-democratic, intimately entwined with the highest levels of government, and aggressively eroding the public domain while shrinking the marketplace of ideas. This system is most highly developed within the United States and it is there that its effects are most visible – a weak democracy and ‘rampant citizen ignorance and depoliticization.’28 Media corporations in the United States have used their market power to execute one of history’s most successful propaganda campaigns, which has popularized the notions that ‘Corporate America’ has created a highly diverse marketplace of ideas and that the ‘free market’ is the only possible guarantor of a free press. Ben Compaine has offered a dissenting view, disagreeing with McChesney and Nichols, as well as Lawrence Lessig (an FCC critic) and Ben Bagdikian, author of the widely quoted Media Monopoly. Compaine proposes that the fears of ‘anti-FCC activists’ are overblown; ‘there is no compelling evidence that the current level of media concentration has had negative consequences for consumers, culture, or democracy.’29 Compaine’s defence entirely ignores the political economy of American media corporations. We are asked to believe that concentrated media ownership has no negative consequences, that within market economies, media systems are benign players in the socialization of thought and action. On this point it is significant that Compaine’s article appeared in the online edition of Reason magazine, which describes itself as concerned with ‘“free minds and free markets” ... Reason provides a refreshing alternative to right-wing and left-

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wing opinion magazines by making a principled case for liberty and individual choice.’ It is hardly surprising that ‘making a principled case for liberty and individual choice’ involves Compaine’s spirited defence of free markets. What is surprising is to see this championing of unfettered capitalism described as an ‘alternative to right-wing’ opinion. Compaine, a consultant to the telecommunications industry, is unwilling to admit what is obvious to the industry itself, that corporate media carefully protects its own interests. Even writers for trade magazines such as Variety have observed that media conglomerates often censor stories that conflict with their business interests and muzzle social dissent.30 In a typical manifestation of conservative economic ideology, Compaine would have us believe that the market ensures a great diversity of opinions, while he also assures us that there is great danger in democratic governments exercising control over content.31 The notion that the market is the most certain guarantor of diversity within the media system is a particularly pernicious and widespread fallacy. This fallacy refuses to acknowledge the existence of extensive censorship mechanisms within the corporate media system. Whereas the state was once the main practitioner of censorship, now we find that the economic system plays the greatest role in controlling access to public discourse and knowledge production. Indeed, one of the most oft-repeated observations in the contemporary study of censorship is that the market itself plays a significant role in limiting the distribution of knowledge and information. It is not by coincidence that free-market ideology champions the marketplace as the best guarantor of diversity. Market economies are based on the myth of intellectual self-determination, so censorship practices are carefully disguised and hidden behind the notion of a highly diverse marketplace of ideas. Yet the historical suppression of radical political ideas and lifestyles (particularly alternative sexualities) within liberal democracies clearly suggests otherwise. There is a growing class of intellectuals who produce conservative appraisals of capitalism and corporate media while simultaneously consulting to the business sector. The impact that this type of relationship has on intellectuals is one of the least discussed aspects of scholarly production within academic literature (the intellectual’s role within capitalism will be explored in the conclusion). Critical theory has long pointed out the role intellectuals play in supporting a society’s dominant ideology. New hiring, management, and fundraising priorities within universities are intensifying the ideological relation-

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ship between intellectuals and capital, and this is having a direct impact on the growing conservative assessment of media effects. Only the most myopic doctrinal alignment to the corporate sector could produce the conclusion that concentrated private ownership of cultural production has no negative consequences for consumers, culture, or democracy. One might reasonably contest the specific details of the propaganda model of media presented by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, yet their conclusions detailed in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) cogently capture the critical consensus surrounding the social role of corporate media. Herman and Chomsky described this social role of corporate media as the inculcation and defence of the ‘economic, social and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state.’32 The obvious failure of American journalism in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, confirms the basic outlines of the propaganda model of media: ‘[T]he media’s lack of interest, investigative zeal, and basic news reporting on the accumulating illegalities of the [U.S.] executive branch have regularly permitted and even encouraged ever larger violations of the law’ (301). This failure of corporate journalism (discussed further in chapter 6) is also reflected in Chalmers Johnson’s description of the erosion of democracy and the constitutional process within the United States by the Pentagon and the government administration. The widely recognized failure of American corporate news during the second Gulf War suggests that a propaganda model of capitalism’s media system continues to wield considerable explanatory utility. The concentration of media ownership only promises to increase the propaganda function of corporate media within capitalist societies. In democratic states around the world, media systems have been brought under a regime of centralized conglomerates. The story of ongoing media concentration is now over half a century old and each revision of the tale tells the same thing – ever more media properties are owned by fewer and fewer corporations.33 Particularly in light of the present climate of free-market triumphalism, the numbers behind this story are nothing less than shocking: five companies control 85 per cent of America’s media sources; five recording labels control 85 per cent of the American music market; five cable companies serve 74 per cent of American cable subscribers; four companies control 90 per cent of American radio advertising revenues; and ten companies control half of America’s newspaper circulation. And although the

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Canadian market is much smaller, the level of media concentration in Canada is higher than in the United States. This hyperconcentrated system erodes the public’s control over corporate behaviour while simultaneously intensifying the economy’s ability to program consumer behaviour. What is particularly striking about capitalism’s trajectory toward hyperconcentration, hypercommercialism, and the erosion of individual and state sovereignty is the tendency among some interpreters to view this as a ‘postmodern’ marketplace that erodes capitalism’s ideological cohesion and liberates the individual within an arena of overwhelming choice. This type of argument is similar to telling prisoners that higher walls and stronger fences will lead to their imminent freedom. The Myth of Mass Customization An early precursor to this line of thought, Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave (1980), predicted a decentralization in corporate power, markets, and media.34 America’s pre-eminent futurist forecast a market that would promote freedom of choice and highly individualized lifestyles. Within ten years, the rise of Silicon Valley and intense computerization of manufacturing processes led many to foresee the end of the mass market and the beginning of a postmodern market where most consumption activity would be highly personalized. The general assumption was that a market that can make jeans exactly my size and allow me to put my own slogan on a pair of customized Nike sneakers would somehow free me from capitalism’s ideological octopus. Overhyped promises of micro-customization of consumer goods led many prematurely to declare the end of the mass market. Canadian Internet futurist Don Tapscott made much noise about the coming world of mass customization replacing the present mass-production economy.35 Tapscott forecast a world where customers would have ‘the power of choice’ and ‘the power of customization’ coming from ‘near perfect information’ within the supply and manufacturing chain.36 This vision of a perfectly efficient market was widely promoted by the alpha geek of high-tech gurus, Bill Gates: ‘Computers will enable the kinds of goods that are mass-produced today to be custom-made for particular customers ... Often the customized item will cost no more than a mass-produced one would. In many product categories, “mass customization” will replace mass production, just as a few generations ago mass production largely replaced made-to-order.’37 Gates promises a world where all products, from jeans to history lessons, are

Capitalism and the Limits to Thought 39

uniquely customized for each individual consumer. Some professional intellectuals uncritically accept the picture of a customized marketplace as promoted by industry cheerleaders. Thus we find the Burger King fast-food restaurant, certain chain hotels, and even recent changes in McDonald’s menu being held up as positive examples of mass customization.38 Something has gone terribly wrong in critical analysis when ‘having it your way’ at Burger King is celebrated as a ‘paradigm shift’ toward increased consumer choice.39 Behind the rhetoric of consumer empowerment in a mass customized world is the reality that computerized manufacturing processes still deliver goods through the process of mass production with few, relatively minor changes intended to give the customer a feeling of personal involvement in the production process. Within ten years customized consumer goods may account for 20 to 30 per cent of all products sold.40 But, again, most of the customized process will simply involve choosing from a predetermined menu or having branded clothes made to fit. Predictions about mass customization made at the dizzying heights of the dot-com bubble also failed to take into account the desire for personal attention that shoppers, particularly wealthy ones, prefer (mass-customization technology generally requires that customers interact with machines, not people). The irony of the promise of a highly customized marketplace is found in the rapid spread of Wal-Mart and other big-box merchants, and the decimation of local businesses throughout the 1990s. Whether or not we arrive at a mass-customized marketplace, it is hard to see how relatively minor personalized options would have any bearing on the economy’s function as an ideological system, except to improve marketing strategies. Mass customization is a red herring that detracts attention from corporate power over the social order. The drive toward mass customization is not merely due to a concern with more efficient production processes. Behind it stands a clear concern for intensified consumer control. Mass customization is the production side of mass-customized branding. It is intensely ironic that this latest trend in highly customized marketing is celebrated as liberating. Customization is best seen as part of evolving marketing strategies.41 Mass customization, the hyperconcentration of media ownership, and the parallel intrusion of the corporate system into the operation of the state are part of a historical process. Its roots are found in the late 1800s when the industrial system was confronted with the need to mass produce consumers who would solve the growing problem of increased levels of supply brought on by mechanization. Control over production

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had to be extended to control over consumption or the emerging system of industrial capitalism would implode through the spiraling deflation of oversupply. The development of modern mass-marketing and public-relations techniques, initially deployed for wartime propaganda, solved the crisis of overproduction by giving birth to the consumer society of the 1900s. The outline of this early stage is well known and widely repeated throughout the extant literature. As the twentieth century came to a close the corporate system had consolidated into a largely cooperative club of billionaires. While it is perhaps too early to sketch the outlines of a new stage in corporate control, current events suggest that corporations are now consolidating their position and subjecting the state to their regime of control. Within commercial media, journalism has been reduced to the economy’s lapdog, which effectively reduces the ability of the citizenry to be informed of any crisis whatsoever. This allows the corporate sector to pillage public resources and privatize public services in the name of free markets and efficiency, while claiming that dissent is marginal and unreasonable. But here I have raced ahead to the discussion of globalization and dissent (chapter 7). For now it is enough to say that expanding powers of definitional control that come with the hyperconcentration of media ownership have far more than just consumer management as their goal. The world is quickly becoming a corporate oyster. It is worth noting that both conservative economic theory and conservative media theory emphasize the consumer’s sovereignty and minimize the extent to which individual behaviour is manipulated by external forces. The high degree of autonomy attributed to individual thought and action plays an ideological role within a motivating system such as capitalism. For the economy to operate as a belief system and do so with the minimum of social friction it must ensure that individuals hold firmly onto the notion of their own independence. We have been taught to believe in our freedom of economic choice, and this very belief ensures that the consuming masses do not attempt to assert their independence.42 If it were not widely assumed that choices are freely made, then there would be increased resistance to a social order that is seen to constrain belief and compel participation. The Active Audience The degree to which the media system influences social reality and subordinates the individual will to the needs of the economic system is

Capitalism and the Limits to Thought 41

grossly underestimated. This is particularly true, ironically, within the centre of the empire of mind – America. As Schiller points out, ‘[C]urrent theorists writing about communication find media influence highly overrated. For the most part, they view the media as more subject to audience preferences than to its own material interests and imperatives.’43 This view argues that individuals aggressively reinterpret the meanings embedded within commercial media and so resist the influence of the economy’s persuasion system. Schiller suggests that the ‘active audience theory’ also serves an ideological function: ‘How much more satisfying to be told that you already possess power than to be instructed that you must struggle against some very formidable opponents’ (152). This warmly received and widely accepted theory places the audience in a privileged position of immunity from the influence of the economy’s definitional control. But media theorist David Morley reminds us that the individual mind is no match for the overwhelming influence of omnipresent corporate speech that follows the consumer from the cradle to the grave: ‘The power of viewers to reinterpret meanings is hardly equivalent to the discursive power of centralised media institutions to construct the texts which the viewer then interprets, and to imagine otherwise is simply foolish.’44 The individual cannot escape the influence of the social order, and the contemporary social order is firmly in the grasp of a globe-spanning economic system. The active-audience thesis shortcircuits further interrogation into the nature of power within the consumer’s world and thereby ‘presents little threat to the maintenance of the established order.’45 You are the master of the machine, keep watching TV. No preacher could ever deliver a more comforting message! Within the study of consumer society there is growing recognition that the economy’s control over meaning, its ability to define the meaning of things, extends far beyond the cultural products of commercial media and includes the entire world of commodities – consumer goods. Along with economics and communication theory, consumption studies also entertain the notion that the economy is a system of belief. In Consumer Culture Reborn, Martyn J. Lee concludes: ‘One may even go so far as to suggest that the success of today’s consumer economy actually depends upon the regulation of the symbolic and cultural dimensions of commodities; that is, the exercise of control over the economy of symbolic or cultural goods.’46 The current explosion in consumption studies is paying serious attention to Galbraith’s argument

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that the economy must and does effectively manage the purchasing habits of both the private consumer and the state by exercising control over individual perception. Almost forty years after Galbraith spoke of ‘the now well understood ability of the industrial system to adapt belief to its needs,’ we are still coming to terms with the extent to which desire, perception, and belief are managed by the economic system.47 The persuasion system is capable of directing consumption behaviour because its control of media content leads directly to control over the meaning of consumer goods. All manufactured objects carry social meaning. Within societies under the sway of capitalism, consumer goods act as carriers of the economy’s diet of values. Social Structure and the Structure of Belief Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood have suggested that individuals use goods to create a particular form of social order. Through their consumption choices individuals make and maintain social relationships and generate shared cultural categories. Here culture is seen as a pattern of meaning, and consumption choices are a way of fixing or challenging the meanings that constitute the social order. The contest between a teenager and a parent over tastes in music and attire is an example of consumption choices used in a struggle over the ‘proper’ social order. In this way, consumption choices act as a medium for displaying cultural patterns and producing ‘a universe of values. Consumption uses goods to make firm and visible a particular set of judgements in the fluid processes of classifying persons and events. Consumption is an active process in which all the social categories are being continually redefined.’48 Douglas and Isherwood draw attention to how consumption choices are used in the normative debate – the endless debate that defines what is normal and therefore legitimate within society. While their analysis marked a major achievement in both anthropology and economics, their account of how goods act as a medium paid little attention to how the exchange and consumption of goods propagate capitalism’s diet of values. Taking the lead from Douglas’s exploration of the relationship between social structure and the structure of belief, my analysis of the empire of mind explores the relationship between the structure of communication systems and the structure of belief within market economies. What happens to symbolic products such as news, toys, engagement rings, pornography, and advertising brands when they

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are reproduced within the Internet? When cultural products move from one medium of expression to another, meanings change, sometimes subtly, sometimes subversively. These changes have tremendous implications for the social order. Culture is patterned meaning, and corporate speech is a primary producer of the meanings that constitute culture. The Internet’s subversion of the dominant meanings produced by corporate speech (explored in chapters 4, 5, and 6) thereby implies trouble for capitalism’s management of the consumer and the citizen. Here I am following Douglas’s lead when she suggests in Natural Symbols that ‘symbolic life is not entirely free. It works through a medium of expression. The peculiar limitations set by the medium are worth examining.’49 Whether in the marketing and consumption of goods or in corporate media itself, the dominant symbols in circulation throughout the social order establish limits to thought. These limits are established by the primary medium of expression, which in capitalist societies is commercial media. Different mediums have different limitations and therefore allow certain patterns of meanings while disallowing others. Each type of medium of expression establishes different limits to thought. Meanings do not float free of the medium of expression, but are conditioned by the medium. In a similar fashion, the mind cannot be divorced from the medium of expression. Douglas’s insistence that the mind is structurally determined by a society’s dominant medium of expression is similar to the media theory put forth by Harold A. Innis in the 1950s (although I am not aware of any direct influence or connection between the British anthropologist and the Canadian media theorist). Innis argued that a dominant medium of communication generates a bias within a cultural system.50 Innis’s thesis was that an empire is intimately shaped by the type of communication system it employs – within European civilization of the Middle Ages, parchment created a bias toward ecclesiastical organization, while the printing press generated a bias toward political organization. Innis’s argument that electronic communication generated a bias within civilization toward the rationality and ethical bankruptcy of capitalism needs to be adjusted in light of the unforeseen bias embedded within digital networked communication. In contrast to the marketplace and imperial bias of corporate media, the Internet exhibits a bias toward decommodified cultural expression. The chapters that follow attempt to map out the character and implication of the bias of the Internet. The implications of Innis’s work rippled through the next sixty years

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of media studies – the type of democratic system a people enjoy (or suffer) is strongly influenced by the type of communication systems at their disposal. Innis proposed that mass communication within the United States increased the concentration of power within the executive branch of government. Commercial communication monopolies led to increased central control over social planning and socialization of the masses – and this in turn helped justify the political use of force as a ‘stabilizing factor’ (170). Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Marshall McLuhan popularized Innis’s basic insight that there is a relationship between the structure of thought and structure of communications media.51 Many of McLuhan’s notions, such as ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ mediums and ‘sense ratios,’ have since been rejected as unscientific, yet he nonetheless popularized the idea that communication technology influences consciousness and the social order – an idea that was to become a central part of cultural policy throughout liberal democracies. Recognizing the social and technological determinants to thought does not mean that we are doomed to resurrecting the sociological determinism of a bygone century. The mind does not exist in an iron cage of society, but neither does it roam free, disembodied from the uncomfortable confines of skin, bone, and media monopolies. As many media theorists have recognized, liberating consciousness from social mechanisms of control starts with recognizing that control exists and that thought is enslaved by the conditions established within the dominant communication system. Corporate speech promotes the notion that capitalism provides the highest form of social order. Democracy and capitalism are assumed to be the best available political and economic systems. To question this is to expose oneself to the full censure of the system. The superior nature of this ‘dynamic duo’ is one of the core assumptions produced by the persuasion system. Capitalism and democracy are often seen as immortal. They are the end of history. All other societies will fall in line or fail. No further choices need be made. Yet in the end they are merely one in a long string of cosmologies, and are as fragile as any other empire. Contemporary capitalism is reproduced through a symbolic medium, corporate speech, that coerces choices from each new generation and ensures the reproduction of a capitalist social order. But Douglas reminds us that a symbolic environment is nothing more than a system, and not a destiny, and, as with all systems, ‘it can be cracked whenever any part of it is breached.’52 The Empire of Mind explores how

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the Internet has breached the highly monopolized and tightly controlled symbolic environment of the contemporary consumer. Cracks have begun to appear in capitalism’s cosmology. The system of consumer and citizen socialization has been breached. One of the first indications of a breach in the economy’s tightly controlled medium of expression – commercial media – is the increase in resistance seen in the streets and on the Internet. Consumer and Audience Resistance Civilizations, economies, cultures – all modes of organizing collective action exact a toll on the individual. Groups subordinate the individual to the needs of the collective in exchange for benefits such as protection from external enemies. Along with benefits come demands, the primary demand being that the individual ‘fit’ into the existing social order with as little friction as possible. Often the demands of the collective upon the individual are excessive and resistance is the inevitable result. How resistance is manifested depends upon how individuals perceive the forces acting upon them. As the economy now provides the central organizing logic to the social order, it has become the centre of resistance. Given the incessant propaganda for capitalism that flows from corporate media, it is easy to lose sight of the individual’s position within an economic system that operates on behalf of the elite owners and operators of industry. While corporate media communicates a constant enthusiasm for capitalism, critical theory sees modern consumption as the arena for oppression and resistance. Within the corporate sector there is a common effort to own consumers’ eyeballs and experiences and so influence their behaviour. The effort to influence behaviour does not go unnoticed. The marketplace’s attempt to manipulate the masses has made national celebrities out of media theorists and turned books about the persuasion system into best-sellers throughout the second half of the 1900s. Individuals are aware of the marketplace’s attempt to manipulate their behaviour. The illusions, myths, and propaganda that flow from the economic system have not prevented consumers from perceiving that external forces are directed at influencing their thoughts and actions. Massive inequality in the distribution of wealth, decaying environmental conditions, and the ethical failures of the corporate sector foster opposition to producers and ambivalence toward the state and the elite. Many see the economic system not only as the source of social and environmental

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problems but also as a contributing factor to the spread of terrorism.53 Indeed, one of the most distinctive characteristics of the present stage of capitalism is the level of violence and frequency of conflict directed against economic organizations and marketplace symbols. Following the legacy of Marx, Daniel Miller also sees capitalism as establishing conditions that are problematic for the individual. Miller notes that consumption is generally considered to be ‘most oppressive under the conditions of capitalism.’54 Capitalism relies on mass production and property ownership, which in turn produce inequalities and social oppression. Capitalism is culpable and, to varying degrees, people are aware of its culpability. The relationship between the production system, inequality, and oppression has fostered a consumer culture that is fundamentally alienating. Consumers feel this alienation and respond by using consumption to wrest the meaning of goods from the forces that created them. Miller argues that one of the main imperatives behind modern consumption is the attempt to negate the alienating circumstances of the marketplace through the appropriation and transformation of meanings produced by the economic system. People are able to resist meanings that arrive from the production system and, through this resistance, ‘extract their own humanity’ by changing the intended meaning of goods.55 Individuals appropriate the meaning of goods in the effort to replace alienating cultural forces with ‘inalienable culture.’56 Here Miller is explicitly repeating Hegel’s description of the central problem of modernity – culture creates conditions of alienation. Ironically, alienation is the cost that the individual must accept as a member of a group. Individuals can resist the negative consequences of the production system and preserve themselves from an alienating society through reappropriating the world of meaning. We see this resistance and appropriation in the wide use of derogatory terms for brand names – Canadian Tire becomes ‘Crappy Tire,’ Starbucks becomes ‘Fourbucks,’ and McDonalds becomes ‘McGrease’ in colloquial usage. As a stance toward capitalism, appropriation is the defining characteristic of a significant form of counter-cultural expression loosely identified as culture jamming. The popularity of culture jamming’s flagship magazine, Adbusters, is indicative of a drive among politicized consumers to appropriate meaning from capitalism’s alienating symbolic environment. It is possible that this movement attributes too much power to the individual’s ability to reconfigure the meaning of things within the consumer’s world. How we evaluate the latitude the consumer has to

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reconfigure shared meanings depends on how much power we attribute to two forces that shape the mind and the social order: the corporate sector’s control of expression within capitalism, and the cultural processes that constrain thought and action. Miller accuses Galbraith of attributing too much power to corporations. Corporations failed to achieve their goal of a homogenized and reliable market. Social changes, new production techniques, and the proliferation of information technology led to increased diversity of goods within the marketplace. This new diversity renders consumption trends less predictable and advertising less effective.57 Within a marketplace that is increasingly diverse and a persuasion system that is less effective, the consumer becomes ‘much more autonomous of business intentions and manipulations of the symbolic potential of commodities than was previously thought.’58 Yet there is no necessary erosion of corporate programming power because consumers have more choice. The multitude of goods are still produced from within capitalism. It would be an altogether different matter if we were suddenly flooded with goods from a vastly different economic system. There are others forces at work that ensure that the new diversity of goods does not undermine the values communicated through corporate speech. The vast majority of all books, music, news, and entertainment flow from five major corporations. A constantly shrinking handful of corporations own the majority of the global communication and informational complex. From cars to perfumes, a similar level of superaggregation is taking place in most economic sectors. A highly concentrated global network of corporations is controlling ever larger market shares, while international trade agreements aggressively undermine the ability of nations to control local economic policy and protect indigenous cultural industries. As to the effectiveness of advertising, the same forces of digital technology that are enabling mass customization of production are also creating the possibility of individualized consumer programming. Electronic payments continue to displace the use of analog ‘hard cash’ by consumers. The rise of digitized currency creates opportunities for highly targeted advertising that combines information from the previously separate spheres of purchasing and viewing, marketplace and media. There is a distinct tendency to see current transformations in the economy as heralding a new era of compassionate capitalism. Yet even in its unfolding digital form, capitalism is best understood as a type of global feudalism.59 I maintain that the forces of definitional control are

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increasing. The trajectory of capitalism points to intensified corporate control over the individual mind and the collective order. Underestimating the power that corporations wield over the social order leads to overevaluating the individual’s freedom from the effects of corporate speech. Even if we attribute a high degree of interpretive freedom to the individual under capitalism, there are enormous difficulties in evaluating the significance of our freedom to appropriate corporate speech. E. Ann Kaplan’s analysis of MTV viewers recommends caution when assessing the role of appropriation. Perhaps nowhere else in Western societies is the attempt to define a stance in opposition to the dominant social order more apparent than in youth culture and rock and roll music. Kaplan argues that each new phase of anti-establishment protest is swept up by MTV, reshaped, and reused for its own end – the continuous promotion of consumption.60 The violence, racism, and explicit sexuality of rock’s counter-culture are simply incorporated into commercially successful music, television, and fashion. Each new appropriation of meaning by the counter-culture becomes the next commercial trend within the marketplace. A marketplace that is increasingly adept at appropriating the counter-culture’s own appropriations obviously throws into question the liberating potential of the consumer’s project of self-definition through appropriated meanings. Our appropriations will be assimilated and sold back to us next season. The consumer’s ability to disengage goods from the production system by divesting them of their intended meanings is not in dispute here. A growing body of ethnographic studies has demonstrated that the meaning and use of goods is subject to the unique characteristics of local culture and individual personality. Yet the analysis of consumption habits often leaves one with the impression that mass behaviour patterns seen within the marketplace and on the street are only a minor social fact with little bearing on individual thought and action. The study of consumption, corporate media, and consumer culture tends to circle around a common issue: Do the media and the marketplace oppress or liberate the individual? Obviously, any critical appraisal of the consumer’s position within capitalism will recognize that opportunities exist for resistance and empowerment as well as for manipulation and assimilation. Nonetheless, there is a distinct tendency within the social sciences to emphasize people’s ability to resist capitalism’s definitional control and establish identities outside

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of market and media influences. The argument that favours freedom over determinism rests on a number of assumptions about the degree of choices available to the consumer of media and goods. Throughout the 1800s and 1900s there was an explosion in the amount and variety of commodities available to consumers. Capitalist production quickly spread from meeting industrial needs to saturating all aspects of daily life with mass-produced goods. The introduction of easy credit in the 1960s ensured the triumph of consumer culture by creating a sudden expansion in the individual’s buying power. Consumer spending now accounts for two-thirds of all economic activity,61 thereby placing consumers at the very centre of an economy that promises personal fulfilment while delivering an endless variety of options. In the evaluation of consumer resistance the significance of diversity within the marketplace has become a central issue. As Peter K. Lunt and Sonia M. Livingstone have observed, ‘Modern consumption theories must consider whether this diversity also allows more real expression of personal choice.’62 Within the study of both media and marketplace consumption there is a tendency to equate diversity with self-determination. Lunt and Livingstone argue that participation in the marketplace leads to greater freedom for individuals to establish an identity. ‘The economic conditions which created the consumer market through modern production methods vastly increase the diversity of goods available to the consumer. This explosion in goods provides material conditions which overwhelm traditional identities based on social class position, allowing for a growing individual freedom from social determinism’ (18). The diversity of media products and the explosion of available goods provides an escape from the restraints of traditional societies. Yet while capitalism is deleterious to traditional identities, it is not necessarily any less deterministic than pre-industrial social orders. The increasing variety of consumption choices does not lead to unrestrained thought and action when all the options presented to the consumer derive from the same production system. The contemporary economy is a deterministic system that moulds individual perception while promoting certain beliefs and values. One of the key mechanisms for determining the consumer’s perception is the very variety of goods and media products. A densely populated landscape of commodities and media products saturates the environment and effectively transmits the economy’s primary message throughout the social

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system – consume! Social determinism aptly expresses the economy’s drive to maintain the individual in a state of perpetual consumption. Those who travel from the frontiers of capitalism’s symbolic order to urban centres sense the deterministic quality of capitalism’s central message. Individuals who live in remote areas and occasionally travel to major urban areas report an acute awareness of the presence of a new ‘voice’ that coaxes them to open their wallets and join the surrounding frenzy of consumption. One cannot pass through capitalism’s symbolic order and remain unmoved by its dense population of symbols and omnipresent communicative forces. Mass behaviour patterns suggest that the management of belief and desire is a highly successful project. If I say to my friends, ‘golden arches,’ chances are they will think ‘McDonald’s.’ But there is no way to be certain that, in the minds of my friends, ‘McDonald’s’ will mean many happy meals or some greasy clown. Individuals do have interpretive freedom, but to what degree? Grant McCracken’s analysis of the consumer’s manipulation of the meaningful properties of goods argues that, within the Western consumer system, individuals have ‘an enormous freedom in the meaning they seek to draw from goods.’63 Goods are used in a process of liberation and self-definition; ‘the consumer system supplies individuals with the cultural materials to realize their various ideas of what it is to be a man or a woman, middleaged or elderly, a parent, a citizen, or a professional. All these cultural notions are concretized in goods, and it is through their possession and use that the individual realizes the notions in his own life’ (88). The consumer system is one of the main sources of cultural material that we use to construct and communicate our identities. But exactly how much latitude we have to draw a diversity of meanings from goods is a matter of considerable dispute. In stark contrast to McCracken, Lee argues that consumers have ‘clear limits placed upon the range of meanings and uses which they may assign to commodities.’64 These limits arise out of the meanings and uses assigned to goods by the advertising system, through the product’s design, and through ‘the lived meanings and uses of commodities’ within daily life (49). Cultural material that derives from the marketplace will carry varying degrees of embedded meaning peculiar to the production system. Along with the communicative intentions of advertising and industrial design, the meaning of products is further fixed in place though the general consensus of daily use. All our interpretive capabilities cannot transform a gang uniform into a business

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suit when their respective meanings are continually reinforced through their representation within the media system and their use in the social order. Within the social environment the individual’s self-determination confronts immediate limitations. Freedom to interpret the meaning of goods and the ability to appropriate corporate speech is an important factor, but individualized acts of interpretation and appropriation must be intelligible to others if they are to have any relevance within the social order. Colin Campbell argues for caution when evaluating the meaningful properties of goods from within a consumption-as-communication paradigm: ‘[T]here is a considerable gulf between the wide range of meanings which an observer might claim that they can discern in the consumption activities of an individual and the very limited and highly general messages which any individual can possibly hope to succeed in conveying consciously and deliberately to others solely by means of their deployment of consumer goods.’65 There are limits to what can be expressed though a different choice of tie styles and colours. Mary Douglas also acknowledges the existence of communicative limits and suggests that it is the social environment itself which establishes limits to expression.66 Different social environments allow for different communicative possibilities. The communicative limits of the social environment may help explain why mass patterns of behaviour continue to persist within postmodern conditions of extreme interpretive freedom. Could it be that highly personal acts of interpretation and symbolic resistance are largely unintelligible if they are not part of the marketplace’s production of meaning? In a social environment where the flow of symbols is largely confined to commercial media, the meaning of appropriated and individualized consumption practices is publicly available only once the economy reappropriates these novel practices and reincorporates them back into the shared communication system of commercial media. Perhaps it is not overstating the case to suggest that, in certain instances, meanings are not publicly available until they have been mass-produced by the marketplace. Of course, the co-opting of private meanings by the marketplace severely limits the possibility that ‘massified’ individual meanings would substantially contradict the economy’s value system. Positing an enormous amount of freedom within the consumer’s interpretation of goods mistakes an enormous amount of variety for freedom. The advance of capitalism brought with it a rapid increase in variety within the social order. Capitalism has promoted more types of

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time, more types of family arrangements, employment, entertainment, destinations, food, fashion – in general, more types of people and things. Yet when individuals participate in the social order and pursue a project of self-definition through consumption, their actions are bound by the range of options established by the economic system. The category of ‘female’ or ‘male’ is so thoroughly influenced by commercial media that our projects of self-definition as women and men are hopelessly compromised by the marketplace’s projection of gender roles. Likewise, while a young groom may have freedom to invest a ring with all variety of meaning, corporate speech severely curtails his freedom to buy his fiancée a toaster oven instead of an engagement ring. It is conceivable that, within capitalism, we are given enormous latitude to endow our purchases with alternative meanings, but we are nonetheless compelled to participate in mass consumption patterns. Because the prevalence of mass consumption creates a widely shared set of symbols through the circulation of goods, and because the meaning of these symbols is constantly reinforced through commercial media and daily use, whatever degree of interpretive freedom the individual possesses is constantly under assault from the persuasion system. No amount of interpretive freedom will allow our young bride to accept a toaster oven in place of an engagement ring. We participate in the social order on terms established by both the presence of corporate speech in our lives and the cultural conditions of the social order. Our culture predisposes us to recognize two individuals’ mating choices through marriage rituals, while the economic system ensures that the rituals will follow certain consumption patterns established and reinforced by the presence of corporate speech in our lives. The consumer’s available choices and often inevitable actions arise out of a combination of economic and cultural forces. These multiple forces shape the individual’s perception and mould the social order into the mass patterns that characterize life under capitalism. As Douglas and Isherwood have noted, ‘Far from exercising a sovereign choice, the wretched consumer, as often as not, feels like the passive holder of a wallet whose contents are pre-emptied’ by strong forces at work around him.67 These strong forces are the cultural processes of standardization that make social order possible: ‘In order to live in a society the individual consumer has to develop categories of thought and tastes conformable with those of his fellows.’68 Shared categories of thought and tastes are particularly visible dur-

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ing periods of ritualized collective consumption such as Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s Day. During these periods of frantic collective consumption few escape the experience of having their wallets and purses emptied by social commitments and group expectations. Ritualized collective consumption exemplifies how the mind of the ‘wretched consumer’ develops within the boundaries established by multiple economic and cultural forces of standardization. These forces impose very real limits to thought and action under capitalism or any other social order. While recognizing that the degree of standardization within capitalism is subject to intense debate, I find myself in agreement with Fredric Jameson when he concludes that ‘no society has ever been so standardized as this one.’69 The widespread belief in the variety of experience and freedom offered by capitalism is the product of the commercial propaganda system itself. The near universal defence of this belief is one of the surest signs that the belief is itself a manifestation of a highly persuasive ideological system. How wretched are the masses that consume? They are not sovereign over their choices, their attempts at constructing a culture out of appropriated meanings are often the source of the next commercial success, and their entire perceptual apparatus largely conforms to the needs of the economic system. It almost appears that freedom and the individual both evaporate in the midst of capitalism’s strong forces. Where some see freedom in and through consumption, others see only enslavement. Jean Baudrillard insists that consumption reproduces an alienating social order that is compatible with the demands of capitalism. Within the marketplace, commodities ‘tyranically induce categories of persons,’ police social meanings, and reduce consumers to hollow men who are merely the product of capitalism’s ability to manipulate the meaning of things.70 Douglas Kellner’s critique of Baudrillard provides an important caveat for the evaluation of the economy’s definitional control. Kellner accuses Baudrillard of interpreting the role of commodities strictly from the standpoint of the corporation’s own fantasy of control.71 By overemphasizing the power of corporate speech, critical theory can end up merely reinforcing the corporate world’s inflated sense of power. By understating capitalism’s management of belief and desire, critical theory risks being reduced to a cheerleader for corporatism and further obscuring the operation of the economic system. Corporate speech’s ability to limit the range of the meaning assigned to a red sports car, a toaster oven, or a diamond

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ring is substantial but it is not absolute. Cultural resistance does occur and, even within the symbolic centres of capitalism, alternative spaces are created. Widespread actions of resistance imply that some consumers do feel oppressed, repressed, bent, folded, and otherwise mutilated by capitalism. Contrariwise, other consumers would be mystified by the very idea of resisting the world as it is presented to them by capitalism. The pursuit of the good life leaves many with no desire to place themselves in opposition to the status quo. Membership in capitalism has its rewards. Yet, the rewards of capitalism exist because this system of social organization is not democratic. Wants must be manufactured and participation must be compelled. The meaning of commodities is not the result of a popular vote among the audience – they are the dictates of the programming system. People may ‘vote’ to watch a show such as Friends, but when masses of young women show up in hair salons insisting on a ‘Rachel,’ claims about sovereign consumers that produce meaning from the cornucopia of the marketplace sound hollow. No one dictated that the ‘Rachel’ would become the hairstyle of choice, yet the choice was made within the narrow limits of corporate speech. Somehow we have moved from a democracy of options to a tyranny of market behaviour. The inseparable relationship between the economic origins of goods and their use in the social order certainly establishes limits to thought and influences the formation of consumption patterns. But this is not the whole story. Mass patterns of action are not simply a given – they are subject to tremendous dispute within the social order. It may be that the individual emerges within the dispute over which pattern of behaviour to adopt. There are boundaries to thought and action within capitalism. These boundaries find expression in the categories of thought, tastes, and feeling so clearly seen in consumption patterns, and are defined by a surrounding struggle over the shape of the social order. This struggle involves groups that compete with each other over the shape of the ideal society. Competing groups attempt to have their vision of society accepted by others as the legitimate and normal order of affairs. The contest involves an attempt to muster collective support, legitimize coercion, and compel others to abide by a particular view of what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘abnormal.’ The social order and its dominant patterns of meaning and action are constantly fought over and constantly in need of legitimation. Mary Douglas’s analysis of social action

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continually reminds us that the shape of the social order and the shape of the future are the result of this debate. ‘Each individual who enters a social relation is drawn at the same time into a debate about what the relation is and how it ought to be conducted. This is the normative debate ... The object of the debate is to legitimize the form of their society.’72 This debate produces the collective identity, shared conceptual categories, metaphors, rituals, and history that constitute a cultural pattern. As a result of the debate a normative social order arises, one that is disputed but nonetheless legitimated through the categories and institutions that communicate a recognizable social order. Douglas argues that the processes that establish a cultural pattern also limit the possible options available within the social order, ‘This is the central argument of cultural theory: culture itself is constrained. It cannot make any number of combinations and permutations’ (136). As a cultural system, capitalism cannot be all things to all people. The same processes that establish capitalism as a cultural pattern also standardize individual wants, emotions, values, beliefs, and thought itself. Culture is constrained, consumption choices are constrained, and so also is the mind constrained.

C H A PT E R 2

Content and Audiences beyond Control

Within the Internet there is a tremendous conflict between consumer behaviour and the law. Corporations have proven themselves incapable of maintaining control over digital products such as games, music, software, and films. Future developments in technology, corporate alliances, Internet architecture, and law could potentially re-establish control over private property within the Internet, but what if control is not re-established? What could happen to the social order under capitalism if online consumer behaviour continues to evade the reach of law and the status of private property continues to be undermined through widespread digital piracy? I will argue that full control will not be re-established. There are inherent limits to law, technology, and corporations as regulating forces. Nothing epitomizes the Internet consumer’s ambivalent relationship to the law more than digital piracy. In the late 1990s a freely available software program named Napster made it possible for millions of Internet users to exchange digital files for music and software. By 2001, 50 million Internet users were downloading over 2.5 billion digital files each month through Napster. This global exchange was a gross violation of property rights and was eventually shut down in the autumn of 2001. The term ‘napsterization’ has come to signify the business community’s fear that the digitization of products will lead to a massive volume of uncontrolled duplication and exchange outside the marketplace and beyond the reach of the law. Media corporations, the entire entertainment sector, and producers of digital products such as books and software have good reason to fear the napsterization of their industries. Napster may have been defeated, but the underlying phenomenon of peer-to-peer file sharing continues to grow at a staggering rate.

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Less than two years after Napster was shut down, online consumers were pirating three billion songs and equally outrageous numbers of software programs, books, games, and television shows each month through new file-sharing programs such as Kazaa. Now the music industry’s problem is also shared by Hollywood. Over eighteen million movie files are pirated each month by Internet users.1 By summer 2004 the recording industry had filed over three thousand copyrightinfringement lawsuits against individual downloaders (including children) in an effort to stem the tide. While the lawsuits against American Internet users had little effect on the volume of music piracy within Canada, volume within the United States initially declined and then began increasing once again.2 It is far from certain that the solution to online piracy will be found in the courts.3 Since 1993 the business community has been looking for the ‘killer application’ that would compel consumers to connect to the online marketplace. Yet thus far, the Internet has been synonymous with annoying advertising techniques, junk e-mail, viruses, failed business models, financially disastrous mergers, record-breaking bankruptcy, and illegal stock pumping by Wall Street. Undeniably, there are successful business applications of e-commerce, but pornography, unwanted e-mail advertisements, viruses, and piracy are far more synonymous with the word ‘Internet’ than is success. Out of the rubble of e-commerce, digital piracy has emerged as the ‘killer app’ of the Internet. The world’s most powerful media and entertainment corporations have failed to control content and consumer behaviour within the Internet. Over 70 per cent of Canadian Internet users have high-speed access. By 2005 it is expected that 50 per cent of American homes will also have broadband (high speed) Internet connections. The fast rate of adoption of broadband Internet service across the globe ensures that digital piracy will continue to plague the content and entertainment industry. In 2003, 27 per cent of Americans and 13 per cent of Europeans engaged in digital piracy.4 The vast majority of students in my university courses readily admit to pirating music, software, books, and movies over the Internet. The problem of piracy is usually presented as a consumer problem, but businesses are also extremely active software pirates. Curiously, although 40 per cent of its products are pirated, the software industry is nonetheless thriving.5 In nations around the world laws have been revised in an attempt to rein in digital piracy, but the real world of online consumer behaviour

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has demonstrated that legal remedies are severely limited when applied to cyberspace. The failure of the rule of law to overcome the massive volume of digital piracy may have severe consequences for an economic system that is based on the legal fiction of private property. When the Internet gold rush started in 1993, the business community assumed it could easily convert Internet users into compulsive online shoppers and lucrative audiences for advertisers. Yet online advertising and online retail sales have failed to live up to business projections and investor expectations. Internet users have been persistently unwilling to use the Internet primarily as an extension of the marketplace. Nonetheless, there is economic activity on the Web, and the online retail sector continues to expand. It is clear that the Internet has changed consumer behaviour. One need only consider the widespread use of the Internet to research cars, homes, and consumer goods before purchasing off-the-Web in ‘bricks and mortar’ stores. By 2003 the U.S. Department of Commerce reported that online retail sales rose by 26 per cent, to $55 billion. In the same year online consumers bought $10 billion (U.S.) worth of travel services and traded $24 billion (U.S.) worth of goods over eBay. Yet revenues from online retail remain a tiny fraction of overall sales in most sectors, and amount to only 1.6 per cent of total retail sales. While there has been a modest adoption of online subscription and pay-per-view services for information and entertainment,6 thus far Internet audiences support only marginal economic activity while evading each new attempt to monopolize their eyeballs within corporate Web sites. The push by governments and the business sector to get citizens and consumers online is not without irony. The much anticipated ‘new economy’ has turned out to be an economy of freeloaders and thieves. The mass adoption of the Internet led to a densely populated communicative space that contradicts corporate media’s operating logic of monopolization and commodification. Much of what I argue in this book would prove misguided if Internet content and audiences were eventually reined in and brought under strict control. The main thrust of this chapter will be to establish that Internet content and online behaviour will remain as they are now – largely beyond complete control by law, technology, and the marketplace. By taking such a position I am standing against the current tide of opinion, which claims that the once wild frontier of cyberspace is quickly falling under the control of the corporations. The assumption that economic forces will eventually triumph over the Net has many

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powerful friends. For the business community this is a necessary assumption. Investors would flee from the media sector if it were not widely believed that commercialization will eventually transform online audience behaviour and rein in digital piracy. This tide of opinion is not entirely new. In the spring of 1993, after I launched a print magazine entitled the Internet Business Journal, I received a telephone call from New York. The caller said he represented a group of investors who wanted to buy the Internet. I explained that my company was a publishing, training, and advertising firm, but that we didn’t sell Internet connections. I will never forget the caller’s response: ‘No, we don’t want to buy a connection. We want to buy the Internet – all of it.’ Back in the early 1990s a prevalent assumption in the public mind and the business press was that the Internet would quickly succumb to market forces and suffer the fate of so many other media systems – privatization, commercialization, and monopolization. The fear of expanding corporate control was also widely expressed after Netscape was introduced in 1994 and again after the merger between America Online (AOL), the world’s largest Internet service provider, and Time Warner in 2001. On the day following the announcement of the planned merger one series of e-mail exchanges discussing the looming corporate marriage was 75,000 words long.7 These fears remain an integral part of the Internet’s cultural landscape. They reflect an awareness that the mass audience has gained new communicative capabilities that numerous forces are attempting to limit or remove. The irony of projecting a radical transformation in online content and behaviour is that this position ends up adopting the corporate view of totalizing control as an inevitable event. This vision of intensified control over online content and audiences is behind the strategy of convergence. In Canada, Quebecor, Rogers Communications, BCE, and CanWest Global Communications all suffered tremendous financial losses betting on this strategy.8 Convergence is a utopian business dream of a perfect marketplace where one company delivers all content to all audiences, ideally through one ‘box’ that combines the interactive capabilities of a computer with television’s mass-advertising audience. This totalizing vision was embraced throughout the 1990s and continues to influence the media sector. CanWest Global Communications, publisher of the rabidly conservative Canadian newspaper the National Post, proudly advertises a convergence strategy to consumers and investors through their motto, ‘If you can watch it, read it, hear it or download it, we want to be the source.’ This is an excellent,

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and not atypical, example of how corporate culture generates the impulse to impose extreme measures of control on consumer behaviour. Media and entertainment corporations promote the assumption that a highly centralized media system would be warmly embraced by the consuming masses. However, many consumers are very uncomfortable with the idea of getting all their news and entertainment from one corporate source. One source for all you watch, read, or hear? One source for all your online experience? The implications are nothing less than totalitarian, yet this business strategy is paraded as a desirable goal. Where the business community proclaims a wonderful vision, the consumer perceives a dark tyranny. This disconnect between what corporations want and what consumers actually desire and do was a contributing factor in many dot-com failures and will continue to confound the ‘wired’ economy. Throughout the 1990s media corporations aggressively acquired smaller firms as they pursued their convergence strategies. Large corporations transformed into huge multinational conglomerates that contained multiple business units and a wide variety of audiences, products, and channels. By 2002 the shopping spree that turned major media corporations into powerful conglomerates, such as AOL Time Warner, had failed to return projected profits and was severely criticized in the business press. Tyler Cowen explained to National Post readers that ‘economists and financial analysts have failed to find good reasons for these corporate shopping sprees. They do not guarantee control of the marketplace, provide effective diversification, or result in significant synergies.’9 That corporations have the capital to buy large audiences does not automatically imply that they also have the ability to successfully manage multiple business units and a wide variety of media products. The attempt to gain increased control over online consumer behaviour proved to be limited by the operational effectiveness of very large conglomerates. The fragile union of AOL and Time Warner suggests that there are limits to corporate strategies of audience aggregation. The merger was supposed to have been the model for the future of the commercial Internet. But AOL’s dependency on advertising revenue, its failure to dominate the high-speed Internet market, its inability to contain its members within the walls of its proprietary content, infighting between AOL and Time Warner managers, and accusations of illegal accounting practices led business analysts to voice second thoughts

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about the merger. Those who bet that the market is a reliable guide to the future of the Internet audience made a costly wager. The quest for intensified control over consumer behaviour proved to be limited by forces operating within complex corporate conglomerates. Forces such as conflicting corporate cultures and business strategies, turf wars between managers, clashes between the egos of business leaders, and financial disasters brought on by widespread failure of business ethics inhibited attempts to control vast tracks of the marketplace and consumer behaviour. AOL Time Warner’s pursuit of convergence demonstrated that operational effectiveness can constrain the pursuit of intensified control. The logic of capitalism demands that the Internet eventually succumb to market forces and be reduced in status to just another form of private property to be carved up and divided among corporations. An extensive body of literature has identified possible legal, technical, and economic mechanisms of intensified control over online behaviour and digital content. Control of content and audiences could be achieved through mergers between content producers and Internet service providers (ISPs), through the aggregation of ISPs, or through monopolization of telephone lines, cable wires, fibre optics, and wireless signals that connect the more than one billion computers that constitute the Net, or through strict control over the desktop interface. It is widely assumed that communicative freedom within the Internet is threatened by concentration within the telecommunications sector. Cable and telephone companies often dominate local ISP markets. Yet the breakup of AT&T in the United States, the erosion of network television’s audience share due to the growth of cable and satellite services, and intense competition within the cell-phone and wireless consumer-electronics sector suggest caution before pronouncing the imminent end to competition at the ‘back end’ of the Internet. Arguments that forecast the imminent monopolization of digital delivery systems are theoretical and inconclusive. They involve forecasting a stable economic environment that has eluded the telecom sector. The substantial market shares commanded by Rogers (cable) and Bell (telephone) in Canada have not diminished communicative freedom among Internet users. Highly concentrated ISP markets can still be competitive. As with many aspects of the Internet’s communicative freedom, if changes in the telecommunications market substantially altered what could be done in cyberspace, we would then in all probability see a

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swift response from the grassroots technical community (a force that was largely responsible for the early development of many aspects of the Internet). There are numerous technologies, many of them completely wireless, that could be deployed to create cooperative community-based networks. Numerous such experiments are already underway across the globe.10 It is not unreasonable to propose that if the telecommunications industry and the ISP market refused to deliver the level of online communicative freedom currently available, then consumer-owned wireless cooperatives would step in to meet the demand. It is a grave mistake to assume that only market-based models and major corporations are capable of deploying the type of open-systems network technology that lies at the heart of the Internet. With each passing year, the corporate ‘backbone’ – the telecommunications infrastructure that constitutes the shared ‘highway’ of the Internet – is faced with more competition from grassroots network alternatives, and the cost to deploy such alternatives continues to decrease. If the market ceases to deliver communicative freedom, the grassroots could well provide an alternative solution. These factors strongly suggest that there are limits to how far the infrastructure of the Internet could be altered before an alternative network is established. Control over content could also be implemented through digital rights management (DRM) technologies. While the commercial press is continually announcing new initiatives in this area, such announcements are best seen as part of a public-relations strategy intent on reassuring investors that a solution to the problem of digital piracy is forthcoming. It would be a mistake to assume that this is a problem that will be easily solved. DRM technologies are fraught with difficulties. One study concludes that given the current and foreseeable state of technology the content protection features of DRM are not effective at combating piracy. The key problem is that even if a small fraction of users are able to transform content from a protected to an unprotected form, then the illegitimate distribution networks are likely to make the content available ubiquitously. One possible technological solution to the problem is what we call ‘draconian DRM,’ which involves deploying devices that only process managed content. However, we find that such systems face significant, if not insurmountable, obstacles.11

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In 2004 Sony’s Japanese music unit announced that it would no longer use DRM in its music CDs. The company denies that it did so because of a consumer backlash, yet it is unlikely that they would admit to such a backlash affecting their marketshare. Sony’s claim that the company decided to stop making copy-protected CDs because they felt their anti-piracy message had changed consumer behaviour rings hollow at best. Other music companies are continuing to experiment with DRM technology in an effort to prevent consumers from copying CDs. The very discussion of DRM systems provides hackers with useful information on how to defeat DRM systems.12 Although there are many strategies under development for substantially reducing the autonomy of the Internet audience, all are fraught with difficulties. Although theoretically possible, total control over content and complete commercialization of the Internet remains far beyond the reach of the corporate sector. My intention here is not to dismiss the number and variety of threats to the unique character of the Internet. That threats to the open nature of the Internet are numerous, growing, and complex is widely recognized and not in dispute. What is also certain is that the Internet community itself participates in the construction of the Net as a communication system. The Internet is not just a technical thing – it is also a cultural phenomenon capable of reacting to forces acting upon it to a much greater degree than could older analog media, with its one-way flow of communication and highly constrained audience. It enables an entirely new level of feedback and reflexivity within the social order. These factors lead to the central problem of forecasting the future state of the Internet. While we have over fifty years of research into commercial media’s audiences as social actors, we know comparatively little about the nature of the Internet audience as a social force. This lack of knowledge is reflected in literature analysing the commercialization of the Internet, where minimal attention is paid to the Internet audience itself as an agent of change. Lessig’s Architecture of Perfect Control It is possible, at least in theory, to gain control over the flow of Internet content through centralized ownership of the programming architecture, the software code, that lies at the most critical layer of the net-

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work’s technology. Bit by bit, the open architecture of the Internet could be replaced by privately owned software code. The code would dictate exactly what could be done within the Internet and one company would control the code, thereby stopping peer-to-peer piracy, trademark, and copyright violations. The fear that expressive freedom may dissolve under the deployment of a new software architecture has found support in Lawrence Lessig’s theory that corporations will eventually control intellectual property rights on the Internet through control of the underlying architectural code.13 Lessig argues that market forces will inevitably lead to code-based regulation of online activity, substantial restriction of expression, and the commodification of online behaviour. The invisible hand of the marketplace would turn the Internet into a ‘perfect tool of control’ (6). Under code-based regulation, anonymity, the free flow of information and ideas, and piracy would evaporate as marketplace activity moves into a dominant position within cyberspace. Theorizing the possibility for the absolute control of the Internet’s architectural code is similar to proposing absolute control over intellectual property and digital rights. The improbability of achieving totalizing DRM systems sheds light on the key flaw in Lessig’s theory of code control. As Stefan Bechtold suggests: ‘[T]o argue that DRM will inevitably lead to an Orwellian world of perfect private control suffers from a general problem cyberlaw has to deal with: although a world of perfect control would indeed be highly desirable, it is often unclear whether such perfection will ever occur in the real world.’14 While Lessig is certainly correct in identifying code as a new form of regulatory power, his vision of the Internet’s fate suffers from other serious flaws. Lessig assumes that a privately owned architecture would result in a uniform set of rules.15 These rules would govern all Internet transactions and impose severe restrictions on how the Internet could be used. But market competition could also lead to multiple architectures that allow for choice between multiple sets of rules governing communicative capabilities.16 While the market does have monopolistic and oligopolistic tendencies, it is also an area of intense competition. Indeed, behind peer-to-peer piracy are exactly such divisive forces that have set one commercial sector against another. Michael Robertson, an entrepreneur in the digital music industry, offered a $100,000 (U.S.) prize for anyone who cracks the code behind Microsoft’s game-playing computer called Xbox. Robertson started the contest because he thought that ‘people should have the choice to run

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the software they want on the hardware of their choice.’17 The key issue here is not that the code will or will not be cracked eventually, but that various sectors of the economy stand to gain from open architectures. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that any company seen to be gaining control over the Internet would face similar resistance from competing firms. Already we have witnessed the RealNetworks Corporation file a $1 billion (U.S.) antitrust lawsuit that accuses Microsoft of restricting competition and limiting consumer choice in the digital media markets.18 Similar action would certainly arise if Microsoft or Time Warner were seen to be restricting competition and consumer choice within the Internet. Of course, the ability of major corporations to evade the law limits the effectiveness of anti-monopoly lawsuits, even when such claims are successful. John Markoff, technology reporter for the New York Times, informed readers that, according to court-ordered reports, ‘the November 2002 antitrust consent decree between Microsoft and the [U.S.] Justice Department has neither fostered significant competition nor changed Microsoft’s anticompetitive behavior ... The government’s agreement with Microsoft to settle its antitrust lawsuit has “fallen short” of its goal of creating competition.’19 Microsoft has the ability to stifle competition in the digital entertainment sector if left unregulated and if states fail to hold the corporation accountable to their own rulings. The courts have repeatedly intervened in the market to ensure that Microsoft stops forcing consumers to use the company’s products while accessing various areas of the Internet. With each introduction of a new version of its operating system Microsoft attempts to force consumers to access the Internet solely through its proprietary operating systems. Typical of this pattern is Microsoft’s agreement, in 2004, ‘to make changes in its Windows XP operating system so that it no longer forces consumers searching for music online to use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Government antitrust lawyers decided that the link violated the 2002 consent decree’ (2). Government intervention in the market and the contradictory intentions of various business sectors (turf wars within the market) have the potential to thwart any effort to gain control through a new Internet architecture. The struggle between the high-technology consumer goods sector and the entertainment industry over the rapid deployment of MP3 (digital music) players is another example of competition frustrating efforts to control consumer behaviour. MP3 players are used in conjunction with digital piracy. In 1999 the recording industry

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pressured manufacturers of MP3 players to adhere to standards designed to foil digital piracy. Their effort fell apart under the weight of conflicting interests, and digital piracy is now advertised as a product feature. Apple Corporation’s ‘Rip, Mix, Burn’ ad campaign of 2001 promoted Apple’s products as useful tools for enjoying pirated digital products. This was followed by a joint Pepsi and Apple promotion shown during the 2004 Super Bowl. The ad celebrated as heroes a group of teenagers who have each been sued for downloading illegal music. With the song ‘I Fought the Law’ playing in the background, the teenagers thumbed their noses at the music industry. Clearly, consumers now demand the ability to manipulate and share their digital products and the consumer electronics industry is intent on helping them do so.20 As the Economist has observed, the ‘consumer-entertainment industry has little to gain by making products that seriously hinder piracy, as that would be unattractive to customers and hurt sales.’21 In 2002 the conflict between the entertainment and technology sectors ended up on the floor of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, where Walt Disney Corporation’s chairman, Michael D. Eisner, accused the technology industry of profiting from piracy: ‘We’re dealing with an industry where an unspoken strategy is that the killer app is piracy. Their quarter-to-quarter growth is definitely pushed forward by people wanting to get anything for free on their television or computer or handheld device.’22 Competition between business sectors for the consumer’s wallet and the failure of the recording industry, portable digital-music-player manufacturers, and software developers to deploy effective anti-piracy standards teaches an important lesson in the limits of control. These events highlight the improbability of coordinated action within the economic system leading to reduced communicative freedom within the Internet. The second major flaw in Lessig’s scenario lies not in the nature of the threat, but in Lessig’s proposed solution. Because the code behind any software architecture codifies values, Lessig argues that the choices among different architectures of cyberspace must be made through the political process so that collective values can be embedded in the code. The framers of the American constitution ‘gave us values, and our task is to carry those values into cyberspace.’23 Again, Lessig is insightful in identifying the significant relationship between architectural codes and social values. But a single architecture that embeds the unique social values of the American constitution into the Internet

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would just be another form of tyranny; in this case, the tyranny of one set of culturally specific values over all others. Consider what would happen if a new architecture carried the values of the American First Amendment within its code. On the surface, the American notion of free speech appears as an obvious candidate for priority inclusion in any new architectural code regulating communication among Internet users. But the First Amendment does not express a universal value. The notion of free speech that it embodies is highly particular to the American social order. The American ‘code’ of free speech, as embedded in First Amendment jurisprudence, operates by favouring the individual over the group. Yet many also argue that the courts tend to favour corporate interests when interpreting the First Amendment. Differences between Canadian and American interpretations of free speech highlight the problem with any proposal to embed one nation’s values in the architecture of cyberspace. Canadians organize their society under a notion of free speech that reflects their commitment to a pluralistic society. In Canada, individual expression is placed in a subordinate position to the collective good.24 The multiculturalism and pluralism that are celebrated within Canada have led to a willingness to constrain individual public expression that would constitute serious harm to others. Here the welfare of the community is regarded as more important than the ‘right’ to speech acts that could bring harm to others. Thus, Canada has one of the most extensive collections of laws directed at controlling hate speech. The American situation is exactly the opposite. Where most other countries also restrict hate speech, the United States has comparatively few statutes restricting hate-related speech, placing it ‘significantly outside of the international mainstream in this regard.’25 The collective values of Americans, as expressed in First Amendment jurisprudence, allow an alarming volume of hate speech within American Web sites (345). While any attempt to embed the American notion of free speech in an architectural code that governs online communicative capabilities may, on the surface, appear well intentioned, it would have nefarious consequences for the global community. If the architecture of the Internet universalized First Amendment jurisprudence, the result would be the exportation of highly particular American social values. A new architecture that embeds values from one society or only one economic system would be nothing less than tyranny by exclusion. A future where a single government controlled the code and a dominant collec-

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tive dictated the values embedded in that code would be as dark as Lessig’s fear of corporate takeover. Lessig’s vision of the Internet suffers from another major flaw that results from his overestimation of the significance of AOL Time Warner. Lessig argues that AOL will be able to recreate the Internet in its own image. Innovation in content and applications will be tightly controlled by an unholy alliance between AOL Time Warner and Microsoft. ‘Hence the next five years [2001–6] will be radically different from the past ten.’ Lessig forecasts this impending ‘architecture of control’ because he sees America Online as the dominant environment ‘for almost a majority of those who use the Internet.’ AOL will gain such complete control over what content can be added to the Internet, over access to the Internet, and over what computer applications can be used within the Internet that, within five short years, ‘the innovation commons will have been carved up and sold.’26 But such overwhelming market power does not automatically result from a large market share and substantial capitalization. In his analysis of competition within the ISP market, Rob Frieden observes that ‘[s]ome markets operate competitively despite the fact that a few quite large enterprises have captured the dominant market share.’27 Lessig overstates the market power of AOL Time Warner, the size of the AOL community, and AOL’s ability to control its online audience. In this he is not alone. Since the earliest days of the Internet gold rush there has been a widespread tendency to overestimate the ability of the media and technology sector to control content, access, and applications within the Internet. Consider Dan Schiller’s similar claim that by 1998 ‘the prospect of an open Net ... had been laid to rest.’28 Schiller cites AOL as the epitome of this commercialization trend. ‘[I]ts proprietary content accounted for a claimed 80 per cent of its users’ total online time’ in mid-1997 (121). Yet by March of 2001, 89 per cent of AOL users were using AOL as a gateway to explore Internet content that lay beyond the proprietary walls of AOL.29 The sudden rise of Internet growth in the late 1980s and early 1990s forced proprietary commercial networks to open up their closed environment to the wider world of the Internet or face massive defection of their members to other ISPs. It is highly improbable that over half a billion Internet users could now be weaned off the Internet’s non-commercial content and corralled in a proprietary online environment. Accessing non-proprietary content, content produced outside the marketplace and beyond the control of corporations, is one of the main

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motivations behind Internet use. Any strategy based on reducing access to non-proprietary content will be doomed to failure in the face of massive audience defection to friendlier ISPs. If AOL shut off access to the wider and wilder Internet it would self-destruct. Lessig’s argument that incremental changes in the Internet’s architecture could enable corporations to control Internet content and the users’ communicative capabilities is, in theory, true. But theory is often far removed from daily praxis. AOL is not capable of keeping its members away from what they desire most – access to the uncensored World Wide Web. Within the argument over what is the preferred online experience AOL is also used to make claims about consumer preference. Marjory S. Blumenthal and David D. Clark suggest that ‘[o]ne can speculate about the sorts of experience that the customer favors by looking at what AOL offers.’30 But their claim that AOL’s proprietary content is favored by the online consumer does not hold up against the surfing habits of AOL members. Almost 90 per cent use AOL as a gateway to the larger world of the Internet. In March 2003, Saul Hansell informed readers of the New York Times that consumer research indicated that ‘the online public has little interest in AOL’s vision of enhanced content.’31 Clearly, the AOL case does tell us much about the preferred online experience. Paying for enhanced, proprietary content is not what the online audience favours. The online consumer research by Odyssey showed that ‘only 33 percent of online users said “online service provider’s content”’ was important (8). The history of online business strategies strongly suggests that the attempt to build ‘value added’ pay-per-use content is a risky gamble. It requires that Internet users pay for Internet access and then pay again for content. This places the strategy in direct competition with the vast world of freely accessible Internet content. AOL’s chief executive, Jonathan Miller, says he is intent on casting ‘a big tent so people don’t leave AOL to get what they want.’ That would be a very big tent indeed. When measured against the volume, diversity, and richness of non-commercial online content, such an effort strikes me as the highest form of corporate hubris. In essence, Miller is asking investors to bet against the ability of the Internet to entice AOL users into the much larger world of non-proprietary online content. AOL, the dominant ISP in the United States, commanded 24 per cent of all U.S. Internet customers by May 2004.32 Yet how large its share of the domestic market will grow is far from certain. Market shares of

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ISPs are notoriously difficult to estimate. By September 2004 AOL’s share of the global market had reportedly dropped to 14 per cent. In Canada AOL controls a very small portion of the total ISP market. In view of the fact that billions of dollars were recently lost on Wall Street because businesses and investors could not interpret online behaviour patterns, the attempt to forecast the Internet’s future through numbers reported in the business press borders on foolhardiness. Nonetheless, and contrary to Lessig’s claims about AOL’s growing control over the Internet community, it is unlikely that AOL will be able to exercise substantial influence over the global Internet community. AOL’s community is not irrelevant, but it hardly presents a threat or even a preferred online experience to the hundreds of millions of Internet users who live beyond its proprietary walls. Lessig highlights the most serious force that could alter the fundamental nature of the Internet. If the software architecture of the Internet undergoes radical transformation, then it would lose any claim to being a unique form of communication. Cyberspace would be reduced to just another corporate media space. In his analysis of the limits to law within the Internet, Stuart Biegel likewise suggests that architecture-based regulation is ‘potentially the most effective form of regulation currently available’ and the ‘easiest to set in motion.’33 This threat to the Internet’s current form would be easy to set in motion because it can be implemented through market forces without recourse to legal regulation. Where law and the state have failed, the market may triumph. Yet perfect control through code-based regulation remains only a theoretical projection of a dystopic future. Biegel notes three significant forces that could undermine any attempt to bring the Internet under corporate control: lawsuits, code-breaking technologies, and consumer behaviour (209–11). Laws could be passed to limit any architectural changes that threaten basic legal rights. The significant global community of hackers could initiate a ‘code war’ to counter the controlling effects of any architectural changes.34 Finally, and most significantly, extensive code-based changes to the communicative capabilities of the Internet could fail due to disinterest and disengagement by Internet users. The potential for online consumers to withdraw their consent to be regulated by a corporate regime of control represents the most serious impediment to the economy’s trajectory of intensified control. It must be kept in mind that the Internet did not become the fastest growing form of communication because it was a new way to shop or

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access the same corporate content readily available elsewhere. The mass adoption of the Internet was not driven by corporate planning. Rather, the driving force behind the mass connect to cyberspace was the unique qualities of the Internet that distinguish it from existing forms of corporate media. Behind the Internet’s stunning rate of adoption was a lack of interactivity and an inability to contribute or manipulate content within corporate media systems. Users were not simply connecting to the Net, they were also disconnecting from a stifling and over-controlled corporate media environment. If forces within capitalism institute extreme measures of intensified regulation within the Internet, they could kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Extensive control of online consumer and audience behaviour could backfire and lead to a mass disconnect. I am suggesting that a primary motive behind the use of the Internet is the experience of enhanced communicative freedom. Change the architecture, turn Web sites into pay-sites, remove new-found freedoms, and you will have eliminated the compelling motivations for Internet use. Hubris tends to distort corporations’ perception of what consumers really want. Over-confidence in the marketplace’s ability to provide compelling substitutions for online non-market activities continues to plague business planning. Each new technology of control attracts the corporate sector’s attention but fails to gain widespread adoption by consumers. In 1997 new ‘push’ technologies appeared to promise intensified control over audiences and content. These technologies made it possible for media companies to deliver complete packages of news and entertainment to an Internet user’s computer. This delivery system held forth the promise of ‘adding value’ to Internet media products by reducing Internet users’ tendency to ‘surf’ in an uncontrolled fashion from Web site to Web site. Push technology exemplifies the desire within the corporate sector to return the Internet audience to the more passive state of the television audience. Push technologies were promoted as a way to enhance the delivery of consistent and measurable audiences to advertisers – a central component of many business strategies. This technology of control was adopted on the assumption that consumers were intimidated by the interactivity of the Web and preferred a more passive mode of online experience.35 This rather strange assumption proved incorrect. Time and again, analysts of audience behaviour have delivered interpretations of consumer preference that conveniently match corporations’ business goals and desire for control. The business community requires enhanced audi-

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ence control, and so it tends to believe that consumers will embrace services that reflect a broad corporate strategy which would undermine enhanced communicative freedom within the Internet. While Lessig draws attention to the potential threat of enclosure within the Internet commons, his overreliance on primarily American legal precedents and his overevaluation of AOL as indicative of the Internet’s trajectory lead him to conclude prematurely that the battle is already lost. Napster was defeated in a Californian court, but neither American law nor raw corporate power has proven capable of stemming the tide of digital piracy. It is unlikely that either one country, one company, or one economic system will determine the fate of the global Internet community. With the transfer of the American Internet’s backbone (its main ‘highway’) from the U.S. government to corporations in late 1992 many feared that the Net’s doom was at hand. Two short years after businesses rushed onto the Internet, Edmund Lee declared in the Village Voice that ‘[t]here aren’t any public parks or libraries in cyberspace – it has all been sold.’36 Pioneers were returning from the frontier of cyberspace and announcing that the virtual garden was being paved over and turned into Wal-Mart.com. Fear for the future of the Internet runs deep through contemporary North American society. The publication of Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace received considerable attention in the press. Lessig became a cultural icon within the Internet community owing to his role in the American federal antitrust lawsuit against the Microsoft Corporation and his dire warnings about the Internet’s future: ‘[I]t’s not an accident that the emerging Internet architecture makes it easier to track people and collect private data, because tracking people is what governments like and collecting private data is what commerce likes.’37 People have responded to Lessig because there is a general agreement that the threat is real. History testifies to the fact that social orders can be subject to totalitarian forces. Lessig and a chorus of other voices highlight the relationship between freedom, vigilance, and struggle. Their voices alert the community to new dangers as they appear on the horizon, and segments of the Internet community invariably respond by organizing and engaging in political action. In Free Culture (2004) Lessig again repeats his claim that law and technology increasingly enable control over cultural production within the Internet. Lessig repeatedly insists on this scenario, but provides no proof that illegal forms of cultural production are on the decline within cyberspace. Indeed, what we find is exactly the opposite. Year after

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year, the Internet witnesses phenomenal growth in illegal appropriative activity and uncontrolled cultural production. Laws are often irrelevant in the real-world of online behaviour and technological restraints are frequently circumvented. In Free Culture it is curious to see Lessig insist that the production of ‘free’ culture must be bounded by the notion of property.38 As a lawyer, Lessig is incapable of envisioning a mode of cultural production that exists outside the regulatory mechanisms of capitalism. As an American, he imagines that the Congress of the United States will decide the global fate of the Internet community.39 Even though he is a left-wing intellectual, Lessig’s ability to theorize the fate of the Internet’s unique mode of cultural production remains firmly rooted in the imperial domain of the empire of mind. Claims about online behaviour tend toward the extreme: the Internet is a wild, uncontrolled frontier or corporate take-over is all but a fait accompli. Between hysteria over the ‘end of the Net as we know and love it’ and the persistent myth that the Net is completely beyond control, a description of the present and future state of the Internet requires careful qualification. Manuel Castells’s proclamation that the Internet ‘is no longer a free realm’ must be weighed against the real world of day-to-day online behaviour.40 With every law passed and with each new form of technical protection for digital property, illegal Internet activity has only increased. When Castells describes property rights as being restored due to the mobilization of music companies and government legislation in the contest against Napster (181), one can only wonder what, if anything, was really restored. The attempt to control digital property within the Internet has utterly failed. To varying degrees, the Internet has undermined national sovereignty, state control, and economic regulation. Furthermore, Lessig’s claim that ‘[t]hose threatened by this technology of freedom have learned how to turn the technology off,’41 and claims such as Castells’s that the use of the Internet can be ‘biased, if not monopolized, by commercial, ideological, and political interests’ remain in the realm of theory, have yet to be realized, and do not describe the real world of online behaviour.42 The analysis of the Internet must carefully distinguish between what is possible and that which is actually realized in normative online behaviour. Digital Piracy and Corporate Deviance Recognizing the annual increase in anarchic online behaviour does not mean dismissing the reality of regulation. A substantial and growing

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body of case law demonstrates that law is not powerless against online activity. The attempt to broadcast television programs illegally over the Web in 2002 was defeated in the Canadian courts. Individuals involved in the massive distribution of digital property over the Internet have been prosecuted. In 2002 British police arrested 1200 individuals for possessing Internet child pornography. A year earlier Texas resident Thomas Reedy was sentenced to 1335 years for running an Internet child pornography portal.43 The long arm of the law does indeed reach into the depths of cyberspace. Yet if we were able to ‘weigh’ the successes of regulation against the real world of online behaviour, it is clear on which side the scales would tip. Copyright and trademark violations, unrestricted expression, and digital piracy are normative Internet behaviour. Claims that intensified regulation of illicit online behaviour will be effective must be weighed against the persistent and pervasive reality of the deviance that takes place in the global economy. A substantial amount of illicit behaviour within the mediascape and the marketplace defies control. Projections of intensified online control do not adequately address the precedent of uncontrolled, illegal, and untaxed economic activity. In 2002 the global software market was valued at $152 billion (U.S.), while global losses from piracy totaled $13 billion, according to the Business Software Alliance.44 For over twenty years the software industry has fought a losing battle against piracy. This failure highlights the improbability of defeating Internet-facilitated piracy. The industry is using more sophisticated methods at tracking down online pirates. At the same time, the pirates are developing new methods of evading detection. The problem extends far beyond home computer users. Twenty-five per cent of business software programs in the United States are pirated,45 while in Canada the figure stands at 38 per cent. The business community complains bitterly about online piracy, yet with such a heavy use by business of pirated software, this double standard is not lost on online consumers. The consumption of vast quantities of pirated digital products in the off-line marketplaces of China, Taiwan, Russia, and developing nations continues to evade the reach of American courts and the rule of international trade laws.46 In many areas of the world, piracy is not simply a matter of what digital technology enables. It is also a matter of nationalism and resistance to American economic domination and globalization. Shujen Wang’s watershed analysis, Framing Piracy: Glo-

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balization and Film Distribution in Greater China (2003), demonstrates that piracy often occurs with the blessing of the state, threatens the information economy, and will not be eliminated in the foreseeable future.47 Wang’s innovative study argues that Hollywood’s domination of the world entertainment market is maintained through its control of ‘monopolistic distribution schemes.’ For Hollywood, ‘control over distribution is a key to control over finance.’ Pirates seriously undermine the control of distribution and thus threaten enormous revenues ($791.2 billion U.S.) generated by copyright industries (2–3). At stake is the ability to sell intellectual property rights: ‘The control of intellectual property rights becomes crucial since what constitutes the global economy of signs is the trading of the rights to those signs’ (22). Wang sees the situation as deteriorating; ‘it is increasingly difficult for the majors [the dominant film companies] to control the distribution [of their products]’ (188). If piracy continues to expand and further undermines the control of reproduction and distribution, then Hollywood’s ability to sell rights to its products will be substantially eroded. The problem is further complicated by nationalistic responses to what is seen to be American economic domination of foreign markets. Framing the solution to the issue of piracy as a simple matter of digital copyright-protection schemes and international trade law overlooks the underlying will to resist what are largely American initiatives to control global trade. ‘[T]ransnational copyright protection regimes are very much operating along the North-South divide ... where North demands that the South comply with the copyright protection regulations and agreements authored mostly by the North and in its interests’ (188). Increased efforts at controlling piracy invariably lead to anti-anti-piracy nationalistic responses (as already seen in Taiwan) and increased evasion. The behaviour of the Chinese government also provides an example of how piracy by consumers and foreign corporations is not likely to end in the foreseeable future. It is widely recognized that the Chinese government is not intent on taking strong action against online or offline piracy. State penalties for intellectual property violations are weak, while law enforcement is irregular, ineffective, and mostly used as a political tool. Illegal factories are often shielded from raids, as government authorities prefer to protect jobs over trademarks. With increasing frequency, American corporations are unable to extend their patents, trademarks, and intellectual property rights over Chinese cor-

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porations intent on copying a wide variety of products, from cars, to Viagra, to Madonna. Large tracks of both individual and corporate behaviour consistently evade regulation. The nine trillion (U.S.) dollars’ worth of activity within the underground economy represented 23 per cent of global economic activity in 1998.48 The illegal sale of tobacco, alcohol, and both illegal and legal drugs is commonplace. The pharmaceutical industry, music companies, and Wall Street brokerages are repeatedly fined substantial sums for a variety of illegal practices. Convicted of price fixing, the world’s three largest vitamin manufacturers recently paid over $1 billion (U.S.) to American consumers and may have to settle with foreign customers as well.49 Microsoft Corporation agreed to pay $1.1 billion (U.S.) to Californian computer users to settle a lawsuit alleging unfair pricing practices. Illegal accounting and stock-trading practices were defining characteristics of the high technology sector in the 1990s, and led directly to one of the largest bankruptcies in history. In 2003 a dozen Wall Street firms agreed to pay $1.5 billion (U.S.) in fines.50 In return, the American government ended a highly embarrassing eighteen-month investigation into stock analysts who were misleading investors by selling technology stocks that they knew were worthless. Companies willingly paid these fines in an effort to prevent more revelations of illegal practices that would further undermine investor confidence in Wall Street. While the business press treats malefactors as only a few rotten apples among the harvest, others argue that anti-social and criminal behaviour are endemic within the for-profit corporate sector.51 One study of corporate behaviour concludes that the problem is not confined to a few bad apples. Rather, ‘the evidence suggests ... the emergence of a kleptocratic corporate culture, that is, a culture ruled by thieves.’52 The authors note that ethical behaviour is frequently ridiculed among business students and widely seen to be potentially damaging to one’s business career (523, 546–7). Business schools are highly adept at producing individuals who possess the Machiavellian values necessary for integration into corporate culture. This dismal state of business ethics has generated a climate of contempt towards business leaders and corporations. Widespread antagonism toward the corporate sector can be inferred from the popularity of the work of the American documentarian Michael Moore and of the Canadian-made documentary The Corporation (2004). Highly critical of business ethics, The Corporation generated three times more revenue in its first year

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($3,000,000) than Canada’s most successful documentary to that point, Manufacturing Consent (1992; a biography of Noam Chomsky). Corporate malfeasance has reduced the notion of business and law ethics to a joke in the press and the public mind. Corporations in a wide variety of economic sectors are paying out billion-dollar settlements as if settling parking tickets. The fines that corporations pay are usually trivial in comparison to their profits and do little to deter illegal practices. Within Canada corporations punished for anti-competitive practices paid the equivalent of a $131 fine against a person earning $15,000 a year.53 The most visible manifestation of illegal and unethical corporate behaviour, the massive degradation of the environment, is perhaps the largest symbol of an economic system devoid of any real claim to upholding ethical norms and participating in any meaningful form of a social contract. In light of capitalism’s track record, it is hardly surprising that consumers so willingly evade the rule of law in both online and offline worlds and aggressively defend what freedoms the Internet has created, no matter how illicit the implications of these freedoms may be. The analysis of computer-facilitated regulatory mechanisms is rife with claims that computers will allow almost perfect forms of control to be deployed. Yet such claims fail to account for the multiple sources of resistance within the economic system and the social world. Pervasive deviant behaviour by consumers, corporations, and entire nations implies that highly intensified systems of regulation will face substantial resistance and subversion. Forces of resistance and deviance, combined with competition and conflicting interests within the corporate sector, could result in a deadlock between competing groups. The very characteristics of digital media that render it a potent tool for regulation also embed the possibilities of resistance and evasion within digital communication systems. Let us assume, then, that Lessig’s future of perfect control and diminished freedoms never arrives. Resistance, deviance, and competition sufficiently limit the controlling effects of future changes to the Internet’s architecture, changes to the hardware and software of personal computing devices, and changes to local law and international regulations. The combination of resistance, deviance, and competition could ensure that the Internet has arrived at a ‘stable state’ in so far as its unique communicative capabilities are concerned. Proceeding from this assumption of a stable state, the following chapters will explore how the Internet’s communicative capabilities may affect the econ-

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omy’s ability to produce and manage consumer behaviour. Such an approach has the advantage of rendering a picture of the future that does not happen to coincide with the corporate fantasy of impending totalizing control. There is no argument I can offer that conclusively dispels any concern for the future state of the Internet, and this is because of the future’s inherent indeterminacy and the undeniable fact that there are good reasons for concern. My goal here is to state clearly the premises on which my argument hangs; that resistance, deviance, and competition may severely frustrate market and state strategies of containment and control. The Internet’s enhanced communicative freedoms will remain. The inherent limits of law and technology as regulating forces, competition and conflicting interests among business sectors, conflicting international laws, the concerns of national sovereignty, the limits of globalization, conflicting social values, emerging normative online behaviour, and the Internet community’s collective will to preserve the unique communicative capabilities of cyberspace all suggest that, for the foreseeable future, the Internet will remain an anomaly within capitalism’s media system.

CHAP TER 3

The Abnormalization of the Internet

Almost immediately after businesses first rushed onto the Internet back in 1993, the call was heard that this wired frontier must be civilized. The marketplace, cried business leaders, will bring order to the chaos of cyberspace. The online audience must be corralled in corporate Web sites, eyeballs must be owned, surfing habits ‘monetized,’ freeloaders converted into online subscribers, and piracy reined in once and for all. Books such as Steven E. Miller’s Civilizing Cyberspace: Policy, Power, and the Information Superhighway (1996) and Joseph Migga Kizza’s Civilizing the Internet: Global Concerns and Efforts Toward Regulation (1998), along with magazine articles and newspaper headlines, repeated the call to ‘civilize’ the Net.1 Even civil libertarian organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation concluded that the ‘collision between Society and Cyberspace’ could be remedied only through ‘bringing civilization to Cyberspace.’2 To many it seemed as though an anomaly had appeared within the social system, one that had to be normalized or dire consequences would certainly unfold. Many in both the academic and business communities readily assumed that it was only a matter of time until the missionary work of entrepreneurs, legislators, and media moguls fenced in the online commons and converted savage wired surfers into online shoppers and passive audiences ready for delivery to clients of advertising agencies. But the existence of rampant digital piracy, child pornography, sexual predators, hate speech, organized crime, networked terrorist organizations, fraud, persistent hacker attacks, identity thieves, prolific virus creators, and out-of-control junk e-mail, along with widespread appropriation of intellectual property, indicates that the Internet remains far from civilized or normalized. This chapter will explore common

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fallacies and questionable assumptions that lie behind claims of the impending normalization of the Internet. Proponents of the Internet’s imminent normalization are quick to declare that the Web has been, or is soon to be, domesticated by governments and corporations. This is the conclusion of Michael Margolis and David Resnick’s Politics as Usual: The Cyberspace ‘Revolution,’ wherein the authors argue that market forces and politics ‘largely will shape the fate of cyberspace.’3 Their argument rests on the claim that interactions within the Internet resemble those of the market economy as Internet users increasingly act ‘primarily as consumers or audience members, not as producers, discussants, technical wizards, or political participants’ (48). Likewise, Geert Lovink’s dismissive (‘the net is becoming a paranoid sphere’) rant, Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture, proclaims the impending death of an open Net: ‘[L]aw and order are taking command over the last pockets of digital wilderness. Logging onto the net will soon be as fascinating and meaningful as picking up the phone.’4 For Lovink, the Internet is little more than a ‘money machine’ with an accommodating cyberculture that has ‘refrained from any gesture of resistance towards the establishment ... [P]laytime for the early colonizers is over’ (338). The sun has set on the golden age of cyberspace and little remains of the Internet except the digital rubbish of the unwashed masses and corporate brochures parading as Web sites. Lovink’s portrait of the ‘state-monopoly capitalist destruction of the Internet’ is reminiscent of the high-culture/lowculture debate of the past century (343). High culture is supposedly in fast retreat on the virtual frontier as the masses and their corporate shepherds advance across the Internet. Typically for the normalization thesis, Margolis and Resnick interpret online audience behaviour as evolving into the one-to-many patterns of broadcast media: ‘[T]he amateurs and hobbyists have been crowded out by professionals and by a mass audience of consumers, entertainment and information seekers, and curious tourists.’5 Also characteristic of the normalization thesis is their suggestion that the ‘more we experience life online, the more it looks like life offline’ (14). Here life online is seen as a simple mirror of the real world: ‘We call it the normalization thesis to emphasize the fact that cyberspace is taking on the characteristics of ordinary life’ (2). Their argument embodies three recurring themes of the normalization thesis. The first theme is the oft-repeated assertion that online content is evolving into a straightforward mirror of content in the surrounding

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commercial media system. The second is that the online audience will return to the familiar state of relatively passive audience members and commodity consumers. Marketplace behaviour and corporate media behaviour – individuals acting as consumers and individuals as part of aggregated audiences delivered to advertisers – are becoming dominant forms of online behaviour. The third theme is found in the use of the concept of ‘normal.’ This portrait of a maturing Internet relies on the unspoken assumption that the highly conditioned and equally highly constrained behaviour of Western individuals is something that the audience wants to return to, and not escape from through the Internet. That large numbers of consumers are actively resisting the combined constraints of corporate media and marketplace is deemed to be of little or no significance within the normalization thesis. While utopian descriptions of the Internet as a field of boundless freedom have been widely and well critiqued, the alternative – the normalization thesis – ends up adopting the economy’s ideology of marketplace determinism. Marketplace determinism is part of what could be called an imperial economic world view. This world view goes hand in hand with the general climate of American triumphalism, which assumes that one world power and one economic system have eliminated any real competition from alternative social orders. Imperial economics presents capitalism as a comprehensive system that lacks competition from rival modes of production and presents no option but participation.6 The irony here is that liberal academic discourse has succumbed to the marketplace myth that says resistance is futile. Such is the power of the empire of mind that many of society’s professional thinkers are unable to escape the assumption that all emerging social forms must quickly conform to the dictates of capitalism. Robert McChesney offers a sophisticated defence of the normalization thesis mainly based on an economic argument. The Net, McChesney predicts, ‘will likely be dominated by the usual corporate suspects.’7 It will succumb to the market forces of corporate concentration, media conglomeration, and hypercommercialism that have defined the entertainment, telecommunications, and media industries. Without question, as Schiller and a host of other voices have pointed out, this is the trajectory of the media and communication sector. Thus, it is widely assumed that this trajectory will also inevitably define the Internet’s future. The belief that market forces will quickly gain control of the Net lies at the heart of the normalization thesis and is both its strongest and weakest premise. After all, the lesson of history is plain

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for all to see – all new media systems have been privatized and centralized. Yet there are characteristics of the Net that make comparison to historical market trends a weak predictive factor. All previous media systems were highly centralized technologies. Printing presses, radio stations, and television studios are large and expensive production factories. This fact rendered these media technologies susceptible to regulatory mechanisms and centralized ownership. Ownership and content production were easily regulated and contained in pre-digital technologies. Comparing market trends between centralized analog media technologies of the twentieth century and highly distributed digital technologies of the twenty-first century introduces far too many uncertainties in the equation to proclaim the triumph of the marketplace. Yes, consolidation is taking place within the ISP market, through joint ownership across the media, content, and technology sectors, and within major Web properties, but none of this has enabled any one corporation to control content or audience behaviour on the Internet. It is far too early to assume that past trends will define future possibilities, particularly in light of the unknown and unprecedented characteristics of a globally distributed digital system. It is significant that McChesney’s prediction of the triumph of capitalism over the Internet, like many such predictions, was written before the massive failure of Internet companies in 2000. After the bursting of the Internet ‘bubble’ it is much harder to defend statements such as ‘By all accounts electronic commerce is becoming the future of retailing and commerce.’8 Here we arrive at the crux of the problem with the normalization thesis – it embodies predictions that were forecast during the time of the Internet bubble. The heady days of the dotcom gold rush and its irrational exuberance generated a constant stream of rosey predictions of endless wealth to be harvested from the online user-turned-consumer. The marketplace’s dream failed to materialize and an estimated one trillion dollars in stock-market wealth evaporated by 2001. By relying on business news sources, government proclamations, and stock-market trends the normalization thesis has effectively reduced itself to a form of marketplace hype. Online retail, for example, is currently generating only a minor portion of total revenues in most sectors and, with very few exceptions, appears unlikely to gain dominant market share.9 The vast majority of economic activity within the Internet is between companies, not within the consumer sector.

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Since the beginning of the Net’s commercialization, survey after survey has indicated that social use dominates, while shopping online consumes only a small percentage of online time. Aside from the notable exception of the music industry, online retail may be about as transformative a force as catalogue sales – a far cry from a ‘new economy’ of endless growth. The Economist suggests that history may repeat itself on this account: It is worth recalling that catalogue shopping once started almost as explosively as the Internet. Sears Roebuck published its first catalogue in 1888 ... [T]he idea caught on quickly, and for the next five years catalogue shopping grew by leaps and bounds, with the annual rate of increase never falling below 25%. The sales pitch was remarkably similar to today’s, too: no need to struggle to the store, a huge choice, the lowest possible prices. Yet after the novelty had worn off, the growth of catalogue shopping slowed sharply. Today, the sector takes a steady share of about a tenth of all retail sales in America, and less than that in other countries.10

Along with the failure of online retail, the attempt to develop subscription and pay-per-view services has been an unmitigated disaster. Corporations can barely convince the online consumer to pay for even the best or the dirtiest content, ‘[T]here are virtually no examples (except porn) of content subscription services working anywhere online. Even the Wall Street Journal online service, which has always been the grail of Internet paid-for content, is little more than a breakeven operation – and it’s had to curtail original-content-creation efforts in order to reach break-even.’11 Even the pornography industry is not all fun and lubricant online. Playboy.com, the flagship of the online soft-porn industry, has suffered millions in losses. I am not denying that there is a market for information and entertainment services online. Excluding gambling and pornography, American consumers paid $1.2 billion (U.S.) for Internet content in 2002.12 But this is a very small portion of the overall content market. The Economist described the problem in the following terms: ‘In the old, physical world, the entertainment industry has two revenue streams: subscription and advertising. But in the new, electronic world, there are few things that consumers seem willing to pay for. They boil down to the Wall Street Journal (if it will forgive its categorisation as entertainment), some games and a good deal of pornogra-

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phy.’13 The content industry problems deepened in 2004 when it became apparent that a minor consumer revolt was underway against pop-up advertisements. Pop-up ads disrupt a reader’s view by suddenly appearing on top of a Web page. The New York Times noted that, for many people, this type of advertising is ‘the most obnoxious feature on the Internet.’ It is very difficult to get Internet users to pay for content, and it is getting more difficult to support the production of free content through ad revenues. Times journalist Saul Hansell reported that ‘[a]dvertising executives, in television and the Internet market, note that consumers who block the ads are undercutting the economic model that provides them with free entertainment and information.’14 Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo have deployed pop-up blockers to limit the number of annoying ads and improve the audience’s ‘surfing’ experience. As can be expected, some advertising companies intend to deploy new technology that will enable pop-up advertisements to evade any blocking software (even within the commercial sector, digital technology is used to evade control measures by other corporations). The non-market cultural climate of the Internet may be influenced by surrounding economic trends in the entertainment and media sector. Consumers are carrying their resistance to paying for entertainment into the Internet environment. This resistance is seen in wider pricing trends. The North American content industry is facing a longterm trend of downward price pressure. As Michael Wolff explained to readers of the New York Magazine, ‘[T]he ever-falling price of consumer electronic equipment, instead of creating more and more platforms for expensive content, may also have contributed to the general sense of deflated entertainment value ... But paying for content – at least content for content’s sake – has become an un-American trait. We believe in getting it all. A bigger and bigger bundle for a lower and lower price. The flat fee rules (we don’t even pay for long-distance telephone calls anymore). And a flat fee is very close in function and perception to no fee.’15 The only exception to the trend in deflated entertainment value appears to be the steady increase in movie and music prices. This upward trend continues even as these commodities are evolving into the favourite target of online piracy. It seems that the industry keeps giving consumers every reason to get online and get their entertainment for free. What is striking about the pricing of entertainment in North America is that, while there has been very modest adoption of pay-per-view content via cable television, somehow the industry

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expects consumers to eagerly embrace pay-per-view services on the Internet. At every level of analysis the industry’s plans to salvage the dot-com bust appears misguided. The normalization thesis overestimates the ‘uptake’ of online retail, subscription, and pay-per-view services, and also misinterprets the significance of America Online (AOL). In McChesney’s argument we once again encounter the highly suspect claim that AOL presents the dominant archetype for the future of the Internet audience. McChesney cites the defunct 1998 statistic that 80 per cent of AOL users do not surf beyond AOL’s online properties (it is striking how frequently AOL is cited by analysts as the future of the Internet).16 There is always a danger in taking statistics generated by a company at face value. AOL has a reputation for allegedly inflating its statistics so that the enterprise looks attractive to investors, advertisers, and content suppliers.17 When journalist Alec Klein of the Washington Post conducted a detailed investigation of AOL’s unorthodox accounting methods, the corporation responded by trying to bully the Post into not publishing Klein’s articles. AOL Time Warner ‘reacted to questions from Klein by hiring one of the nation’s most feared libel lawyers, Thomas Yannucci, and threatened to sue.’18 The future of AOL is far from certain. With the passing of Wall Street’s Internet gold rush it is easier to see the precarious position of a market leader in a new sector. By 2003 AOL Time Warner reported a loss of almost $100 billion (the largest annual loss in United States corporate history),19 had far less than one-third of the American ISP dialup market, controlled only a small percentage of the Canadian and global ISP market, captured less than one in thirty American broadband accounts, and was losing ground to competitors.20 That same period saw the three biggest American ISPs controlling only two million subscribers of a total broadband market consisting of sixteen million American subscribers. News stories throughout 2002, 2003, and 2004 reported that AOL was facing subscriber defections to faster broadband ISPs.21 Its overseas branches were also in trouble. By May 2004 AOL had closed its operation in Japan, selling it for less than a tenth of what had been invested in it. Its performance in Latin America was also weak in the face of price competition and subscriber defections. Both within the United States and across the globe, AOL’s growth rate was grinding down dramatically. Meanwhile AOL Time Warner abandoned its interactive television product, AOLTV, which allowed users to surf the Web and send e-mail from their televisions. By September

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2003 the company was seen as such a liability that AOL was dropped from the corporate name. So much for the imminent monopoly threat. CBC columnist Judy Rebick repeated the basic tenet of the normalization thesis when she declared that the Internet ‘is quickly turning into a nightmare of corporate monopoly that will make newspaper concentration look minor in comparison.’22 Yet AOL users spend a significant amount of time exploring the diversity of the Web. The tendency to assume that online users do not see value in the much vaster world of non-commercial Web sites is striking and demonstrates the widespread assumption that only corporations are capable of producing online experiences that draw and hold audiences. This type of analysis derives directly from the marketing hype that surrounds corporate enterprises and also is surprisingly prevalent in academic analysis. The problem begins when analysis uncritically draws upon business news sources – the very same sources that provided most of the hype behind the Internet stock bubble. In 1997, as the Internet gold rush was kicking into high gear, Ronald Bettig echoed the thoughts of many business analysts and stockbrokers when he confidently told readers of Critical Studies in Mass Communication that the Internet will ‘serve primarily for selling commodities, including cultural goods and information.’23 Back then this seemed to be the way the Net was going. Within three years hundreds of billions in investor wealth disappeared from the stock markets when Internet users declined to embrace a flood of inane commercial services. Internet entrepreneurs failed to transform non-market online activity into profitable consumption patterns. Misreading AOL as the archetype for the future online audience, overestimating the attraction of corporate Web properties, underestimating the significance of non-commercial Web sites and non-market Internet use, overstating the future of online retail, generalizing from analog technology trends, assuming digital piracy will soon be reined in, and viewing the individual from the warped perspective of corporations are all characteristic flaws within the normalization thesis. Surely the future of the Internet audience lies somewhere in between utopic freedom and marketplace determinism. There is no necessary correlation between consolidation in certain areas of the technology and media sectors and totalizing control over content and audience behaviour. It is possible that AOL could own a substantial share of the American online market but that its control over content and behaviour would nonetheless be subject to surrounding market forces and legal constraints. Anything less than a total

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monopoly would only lead to subscribers abandoning a highly restrictive ISP for one that grants its members more communicative freedom. It is this desire for communicative freedom that will prove to be the most powerful restraint on the ability of market forces to constrain online audiences. The analog media systems of the twentieth century did not have the technological characteristics that promote intense levels of communicative freedom, nor did they spread quickly enough before privatization to allow the general population to experience any substantial level of enhanced freedom. The situation is entirely different with the Internet. The marketplace determinism of the normalization thesis fails to account for the effect of new communication capabilities on the audience as a political actor experienced in defending the right to produce content online. Marketplace determinism that looks forward to the imminent normalization of the online audience overlooks the possibility that the Internet has already ‘normalized’ its members within a new communicative experience. The corporate sector could experience considerable difficulty taking away, without an intense and protracted political battle, that which many American Internet users now associate with First Amendment rights. In an early outline of his normalization thesis David Resnick argued that the Internet ‘has not successfully challenged the power of established media conglomerates.’24 While I am not proposing that the Internet is about to bring the media industry to its knees, it is too soon to dismiss the Internet as a potential threat to the power of established media. The challenge is still gathering momentum within the online community. Clearly, the Net is a threat. Corporations fully realize that it is a threat. It is more a question of the degree of threat and of the speed and trajectory of change. What is beyond questioning is that capitalism’s symbolic economy is facing a sustained attack from within cyberspace. Online digital piracy is nowhere close to being eliminated. Trademarks, copyright, brand identity, and privately owned symbols and meanings are being illegally appropriated, rearticulated, and subverted. Add to these control failures the ongoing failure of corporations to fully commoditize online behaviour and confine audiences to corporate Web sites, and we begin to see the outlines of the challenge to the power of established media. There are limits to corporate power within the Internet. In What’s the Matter with the Internet? (a title that immediately positions the Internet as a problem), Mark Poster likewise notes that the

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Internet ‘was designated not for marketing and distributing commodities but for the cost-free sharing of cultural objects ... It may be that commodities produced under capitalist principles cannot sustain their status as objects in the temporal-spatial domain of the Net.’25 Corporations have failed to protect their property rights and are in direct competition with hundreds of millions of individuals producing cultural products who are operating outside the logic of the market economy. So why is the mantra of the inevitable supremacy of corporations over the online world repeated throughout business and academic writing? I suspect that within the empire of mind the suggestion that corporations are not going to control online cultural production and audience behaviour violates the basic creed of imperial economics, and this creed promotes the tendency to underestimate the role of non-commercial cultural production within the life of the Internet community. Resnick is far from alone when he dismisses the ‘primitive exchange economy’ of Internet members and claims that their altruism and their contribution to the Web has been ‘pushed to the periphery’ by corporate content (51). In a similar fashion, McChesney concludes that the ‘nonprofit and civic sector has been relegated to the distant margins of cyberspace.’26 While it is true that corporate Web sites do enjoy the largest audience share, this cannot simply be equated with a marginalization of non-commercial Internet use. E-mail use provides insight into non-market Internet usage. The use of e-mail for personal relationships has at times outpaced growth in the work-related use of e-mail.27 Positioning marketplace content and activity at the centre of the Internet neglects the largely invisible world of one-to-many group conversations that take place on e-mail ‘listservs’ and within Usenet newsgroups (group conversations). Marc A. Smith’s analysis of the social structure of Usenet, aptly titled ‘Invisible Crowds in Cyberspace,’ provides valuable insight into e-mail conversations as a dominant form of interaction and content production within cyberspace. Usenet is the third most widely used form of interaction on the Internet (behind e-mail and the Web). In 1999 there were over 14,347 newsgroups, carrying six gigabytes of messages per day, and on an average day 20,000 individuals posted 300,000 messages.28 This third most active area of the Internet is not owned by any one company and has spread without central planning. As with the Internet itself, ‘[n]o single individual, group or cabal is in complete or even dominant control’ (199). The curious thing about Usenet is that it represents the first time that local and global group conversations of an

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everyday nature are ‘fixed’ – archived, searchable, and retrievable. Group conversation within the Internet is endowed with memory – it is often archived for future retrieval. This is something quite new. Before the Internet only the discourse of the elite was archived and remembered. Historically, group conversation and crowds have been perceived as a threat by the elite, and for good reason. That online communities such as Usenet newsgroups exhibit a striking amount of cooperation and collaboration is the subject of much speculation over changing power relations within society.29 Group conversation is not a trivial matter, particularly within capitalism’s highly stratified social order. As Allan C. Hutchinson concluded in his survey of the state of expressive freedom, ‘conversation is inimical to hierarchy.’30 Expressive freedom interferes with social control. In capitalist social orders, established interests exercise considerable control over the means of communication. But there has been a seismic shift in contemporary society’s resources for conversation. The maldistribution of speech power within capitalism is being redressed through the chatty crowds of cyberspace. Lovink’s misleading rant about the unbearable noise level on Usenet due to ‘clumsy, arrogant, or illinformed individuals’31 typifies a distinct tendency to malign Usenet and other forms of online conversation. Yet these online conversations hold enormous potential as agents of change given the historical suppression of speech power within capitalism. With the sexy, highly visual Web getting the lion’s share of attention it is easy to overlook the hidden threat posed by unrestrained online group conversation. Being so entrenched in the visual logic of television we have dismissed words, particularly the humble speech of the unwashed masses, as being of no import. Social communication, particularly unconstrained conversation, may embody the dominant use of the Internet. Why is this intense level of social interaction considered passive and peripheral? Exactly where the Internet’s ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ are located, and what is done at the centre and the periphery are questions that remain open to debate. If we focus on the Web, the spectre of corporations appears to dominate, but if we include e-mail conversation and peer-to-peer file exchange in the equation, then the issue of who holds the centre ground of cyberspace becomes much more complex. Corporations have a large audience share of the visual Web, but control next to nothing within the flow of words. Which is more important to the management of mind – images or words? How much power does one inspired

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online author have relative to a mountain of public-relations drivel? To a degree never before seen, mundane conversation is now a form of cultural production. Along with social communication-as-content, Internet members are also very active producers of Web-based content. There are millions of individuals who own non-commercial Webs sites. These millions of individuals are producing billions of Web pages. If we include other forms of online cultural production such as e-mail discussions, Usenet newsgroups, FTP archives, and peer-to-peer file trading (to name a few), this ‘relatively passive medium’ may well be the most vibrant instance of cultural production since the Republic of Letters provided the foundation to the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. The tendency to dismiss non-commercial cultural production as irrelevant is simply mind-boggling and in need of further investigation. Why do we so quickly dismiss the significance of nonmarket activity? A dominant cultural assumption – that the best things in life cost considerable sums of money – provides a partial explanation for the lack of regard for non-commercial cultural production. Habitual Content Producers Admittedly, I have the unfair advantage that comes with the march of time, and my rather harsh critique of Margolis and Resnick should not detract from their otherwise insightful analysis of the political utility of the Internet. Still, given the sheer volume of Web-page production, email exchange, online chatting, and peer-to-peer file trading, there is a remarkable dearth of quantitative analysis of non-commercial cultural production on the Web. The distributed nature of this virtual beast makes counting just about anything within the Internet a problematic enterprise. Something as deceptively simple as measuring the number of business Web sites in the United States can quickly degrade into sophisticated guesswork.32 Fortunately, the Pew Internet and American Life Project and Princeton Survey Research Associates conducted a survey of United States Internet users that sheds light on the production and exchange of content. In 2002 there were twenty-four million Americans with broadband (high speed) Internet connections at home. Broadband users are particularly important for the study of the Internet as it is widely believed that it is only a matter of a few years before the majority of North American Internet users have broadband connections. By 2003 slightly more than 50 per cent of all time spent on the Internet in North America was through broadband connections. Cur-

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rently, home broadband adoption rates are the same as the adoption rate of personal computers and faster than were those of colour television and the VCR.33 Thus, to a certain extent, by looking at broadband users, we are looking into the near future of the Internet community. What the Pew survey revealed was a complete contradiction of any claims that a normalization process, spearheaded by the invasion of corporate content, is pacifying the online audience. The survey results describe broadband users as ‘habitual posters of content ... Fully 59% of broadband users have at one time created content or shared files with others online; 26% do these things on a typical day [and they are] about twice as likely as dial-up users to have done these things.’34 As people migrate from slow dial-up Internet connections to fast broadband accounts they become more, not less, active as content producers and content sharers, ‘A broadband connection increases the likelihood that a high-speed user will download files or music, create content, or share files online three to five times’ more often than dial-up users (12). Among a group identified as the broadband elite (25 per cent of broadband users fall into this category), we find that fully 81 per cent post content to the Internet and 78 per cent download files on any given day (3–4). Thus, the emergent normative Internet user can be described as either an active or extremely active content contributor and file exchanger. The Pew survey concludes that ‘the ability to upload material and make it available to a wide audience is something that is attractive to a significant segment of the broadband using community’ (26). So much for the imminent pacification of the online audience. While the normalization thesis claims that corporations are pacifying Internet users into the ‘normal’ status of the mass audience, actual trends reveal that the Internet is fostering habitual content production and file sharing. This reality will further complicate the attempt to confine audiences within corporate Web properties and make it very difficult for pay-per-view and online subscription services to compete against a growing body of information that is free, entertaining, and useful. Capitalism’s law of supply and demand breaks down in a networked environment that promotes abundance. If the Internet continues to normalize users into habitual posters and sharers of content, then business models based on the principle of scarcity will have dubious long-term prospects. The operating logic of commercial media is in conflict with the operating logic of the Internet, which can be described as cooperation, non-market-based exchange, and the aggres-

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sive destruction of property rights. Private property and the positioning of the individual as a consumer within a commodity market tends to dissolve within the domain of the Internet. Within analyses of the ‘information society’ it is fairly standard to propose that the underlying property relations of capitalism remain unaltered (and are actually reinforced) in the face of advancing technologies.35 If the Internet had not appeared on the scene this line of argument would prevail. But not all information technologies wholly reinforce the logic of the system that produced them. The irony of the transformation of industrial capitalism into its current form of information capitalism is that its dependency on a closed communication system and privatized meaning-production renders the present form of capitalism more susceptible to emancipatory movements and organized consumer resistance than its industrial predecessor.36 As capitalism becomes entrenched in processes that shape the consumer’s mind, it simultaneously exposes itself to attack from alternative communication systems and their non-commercial mode of meaning production. It is true that the first ten years of the Web’s existence have not substantially altered the relationship between labour and the captains of industry. Yet we can trace the destruction of the status of digital property and a growing threat to monopolistic distribution networks (particularly within the entertainment, software, and copyright industries), all of which erode capitalism’s vital symbolic economy. Existing property relations require tight control over both distribution networks and the symbolic economy. Shujen Wang’s observation that the ability to control distribution networks is the key to financing in the film industry is particularly revealing on this point.37 Piracy is a fundamental threat to a complex set of international trade relations that create and maintain market monopolies. It seems highly unlikely that monopolistic distribution networks that arose within an analog environment can withstand changing patterns in the flow of goods within a digital, networked era. This would not be the first time in history that new modes of transportation eroded distribution monopolies entrenched in older technologies. Before we can speak with confidence about the information society reinforcing existing property relations there must first arise much stronger measures for the protection of intellectual property and distribution networks. The proposal that property relations are undisturbed by the rise of the information age also overlooks the way in which the Internet undermines the symbolic economy that reproduces capitalism

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through time. Both property relations and the status of intellectual property are damaged within the Internet, and it is unclear if they can be ‘fixed.’ Attempts at commodifying non-market activity will have dubious prospects for success as long as Internet users are free to act as content producers and free to engage in unrestrained file exchange and group conversation. I am not suggesting that all online business activity is doomed, or that there is no room for the market within the Internet. But the attempt to reposition the Internet community, to ‘normalize’ the user, so that the dominant mode of use takes place through various forms of market exchange and corporate content will not determine the future of the Internet. How will the normalization of the user as a habitual content producer affect capitalism’s persuasion system? Unchallenged until the rise of the Net, the economy’s monopoly over the mind of the consumer is clearly threatened by hundreds of millions of habitual content producers. Imperial economic theory makes it anathema to propose that the dominant symbolic medium should ever face serious competition. Yet this is precisely the scenario that must be considered. What would happen to the social order if the collective cultural output of the Internet community achieved some form of parity with corporate media? The widespread dismissal of such a possibility speaks to the level of control imposed on the imagination within the empire of mind. McChesney repeats the imperial creed when he claims that ‘the evidence suggests that the content of the digital communications world will appear quite similar to that of the predigital commercial media world.’38 But the evidence is out of date. The Internet is now the medium of choice for non-commercial cultural production. Nonmarket content production is transforming the collective mediascape – the mental environment – into something altogether different from the predigital world of commercial media. Radical Sceptics and the Perfection of Capitalism The contention that computer networks in general, and the Internet in particular, are instruments of control is widespread throughout the academic literature. I do not deny that digital technology enables enhanced social control. Yet the same technologies also enable resistance, evasion, and decommodified cultural production. Canadian media theorist Darin Barney provides a further example of the normal-

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ization thesis and its tendency to under-account for the decommodification of online cultural production and the utility of the Internet as a domain of resistance. Barney positions network technologies as contributing to the ‘perfection of capitalist economies’ because of their ‘proficiency as a control utility.’39 Barney is unquestionably correct when he points out that computer networks ‘have formidable control capacities,’ yet he too quickly adopts the perspective of Bill Gates and company when he describes the economics of network technology as distinctly capitalist and heralding the imminent arrival of ‘friction-free, perfect capitalism’ (123, 124). If anything, the Internet has ushered in an era of unparalleled friction, as is seen in a growing online anticapitalist movement, contested meanings (the illegal appropriation of intellectual property), and the online destruction of private property (digital piracy). Only by adopting the overall framework of the normalization thesis can we assume that digital networks will completely remove friction from the marketplace and perfect capitalism. Barney’s central error lies in his claim that, within a digitized economy, the mode of production ‘has remained distinctly capitalist’ (124). Without denying that capitalism is firmly rooted in cyberspace, I maintain that the opposite has occurred. The Internet’s digital economy has manifested a non-capitalist mode of production that coexists with market-based modes of exchange. One of the greatest unforeseen consequences of digitization is the arrival of a vast domain of noncapitalist, decommodified production and, along with it, a growing volume of unconstrained anti-capitalist expression. Strikingly absent from Barney’s analysis is any account of online non-commercial cultural production and, strikingly present within his analysis is the tendency to dismiss online democratic action. Barney repeats the basic tenet of the normalization thesis – that cyberspace accelerates the colonizing capabilities of capitalism. However, as will be demonstrated in the following chapters, cyberspace is a long way from succumbing to the collective interests of capital. We are moving away from an era where public expression and cultural production were firmly under the control of corporate media to what Poster calls ‘a non-imperialist context of exchange of symbols.’40 The rate of online non-market-based cultural production may actually be outpacing the rate of corporate cultural production. It is therefore a grave error to propose that the capitalist mode of production dominates cyberspace. Contrary to McChesney’s view and the expectations of the normalization thesis, the content of the digital world will not be

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a simple mirror of commercial media. The changes in the production and distribution system brought on by the Internet are substantial enough to lead to an entirely different cultural landscape. So what kind of world will this produce? The Internet is creating an alternative communication system that is substantially, though not wholly, disengaged from both state and commercial control. This disengagement is leading to an erosion of the power and privileges of ownership and of legal regulatory mechanisms normally used to determine content and property relations within the life of the audience. Add to this disengagement the emerging role of the Net as a radicalized form of expressive freedom, uncontrolled content production, and cultural appropriation and we have an entirely new structure of communication and property relations at the very centre (not the margin or periphery) of the empire of mind. This has occurred after half a century or more of constant movement towards the deregulation and privatization of the global media and informational system in the name of commercial culture and ‘free’ markets. This trajectory of a market-based communication economy is now suddenly confronted with a transnational public space that defies assimilation into the market system. The contrast between these two systems, transnational corporate media and transnational noncommercial public media, represents one of the most striking sets of oppositional forces emerging in the new millennium (not to dismiss the current clash between civilizations playing out daily on CNN). This structural shift in the media system and within the public sphere strongly implies a subsequent shift in the balance of power among participants within the normative debate. Previously marginalized voices are emerging, new options are being placed on the table, and a new social order will follow if capitalism’s cosmology continues to be redefined within cyberspace. The normalization thesis underestimates the degree to which alternative modes of cultural production are developing within cyberspace. It therefore also underestimates the degree to which capitalism could be destabilized through the uncontrolled production of meaning. The mistake lies in insisting that corporations are the dominant force within the Internet. McChesney claims that ‘dominant forces in cyberspace are producing the exact type of depoliticized culture that some Internet utopians claimed the technology would slay.’41 This sounds very much like Lovink’s bizarre description of a supposedly accommodating cyberculture that has ‘refrained from any gesture of resistance towards

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the establishment’42 and also resonates with Resnick’s conclusion that the rise of the Web has ‘transformed the Net into a relatively passive medium.’43 Barney joins this chorus of radical scepticism when he declares that computer networks are ‘likely to be instruments of democracy at its worst.’44 According to the normalization thesis, a hegemony of corporate content, pacified audiences, depoliticized citizens, and the ‘normal’ behaviour of the consuming masses define the Internet’s next stage of development. The irresistible forces of the market have conquered the Internet. Get out your wallets, the revolution is over. Is the Internet truly on the road to being a depoliticized culture where resistance is marginalized? I maintain that the Internet is developing in precisely the opposite direction to that foreseen by the normalization thesis – its content is beyond control, its audience is extraordinarily active, and its civic life is far from being depoliticized. This ‘abnormalization’ of the Internet community holds dire consequences for an economy that is centred on the management of the consumer’s mind through a controlled communication system. Now that capitalist property relations are entrenched in the symbolic economy, and wholly dependent upon that economy, its inability to control a global domain of non-commercial cultural production suggests that the economy’s greatest strength – its ability to produce the mind of the consumer – is fast becoming its greatest weakness. The stable state of the Internet’s new communicative freedoms may lead directly to the growing subversion of the economy’s communicative processes. Capitalism’s cosmology is under direct attack from within cyberspace, and neither law, technology, nor corporations have been able to marginalize or eradicate the online assault. As things stand at the turn of the millennium, it appears that they will not be able to end the online assault in the foreseeable future. What are we to make of McChesney’s claim that the Internet does not appear to be capable of changing the ‘identity and nature of those in power’?45 This matter of identity highlights the normalization thesis’s failure to see the significance of the Net’s emergent alternative cosmology. When McChesney assumes that there is no real difference between the content of the Internet and that of the pre-digital world, then he naturally also assumes that identity is not threatened. But this is far removed from the reality of what is going on within cyberspace. A communication system that creates a space for unrestrained conversation, fixes that conversation into a semi-permanent historical record,

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and allows non-commercial cultural production to flourish can hardly be equated with a stable environment for identity. The following chapters explore how non-commercial cultural production, collaborative consumer activism, and unrestrained group conversation have produced a body of online content that actively subverts capitalism’s master symbols and arguably transforms corporate identity. Those familiar with the critical literature surrounding computer technologies and the Internet will have undoubtedly noticed the absence herein of a key word – the panopticon. The panopticon signifies the ability of network technologies to intensify surveillance and control systems deployed within capitalism and the contemporary state. Radical sceptics interpret the Internet as inherently or predominantly dystopic because it embeds within the social order further mechanisms of electronic monitoring and social control. This I do not deny. The scholarly literature produced by sceptics such as McChesney and Barney provides an extensive catalogue of the nefarious impact of network technologies. Computer technologies in all their various manifestations enable the erosion of consumer and citizen privacy, increase the ability of corporations and governments to gather data on individuals, and can generally be described as enhancing the ability of the market and the state to exercise control over the social order. This is not theory. This is the indisputable reality of the deep penetration of computer technologies into the capitalist social order. The ultimate challenge in assessing the Internet as a mode of cultural production lies in the task of drawing a balanced model of the dystopic and utopic possibilities that arise within the Net. Scientific inquiry offers no method that will allow us to measure empirically the contradictory effects and arrive at the conclusion that either the repressive or the liberatory effects ‘outweigh’ the other. A delicate balance of theory and anthropological investigation of online behaviour itself will nonetheless provide insight. My own survey of the literature (which admittedly is far beyond the grasp of a single investigator) tentatively suggests a deficit in investigations of the Internet that are predominantly philosophical in nature. This anthropological deficit arises from an insufficient engagement with actual online behaviour, which is often dismissed as a pale reflection of some form or another of real or authentic being. Another class of radical scepticism arises out of great familiarity with the political economy of corporate media within the twentieth century. Here the critical theorist gazes upon the Internet and only sees the inevitable

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penetration of media monopolies deep into the fabric of cyberspace. Whatever has been gained by the individual will shortly be lost to the advancing tide of market forces. Within critical theory, philosophical and economic enquiry tends to recreate the Internet in the image of the twentieth century. In both instances, the investigator will quickly come to the conclusion that communication, resistance, and political action within the Internet fail to escape the hegemony of capital and in fact further entrench the individual in the web of the marketplace. It is not my goal to dismiss or deny that capitalism uses the network to further its own ends. In the chapters that follow, however, I will describe the other side of the equation. To paraphrase Foucault, each movement toward enhanced control within the panopticon of networked society invites a counter-offensive from the other side.

CHAP TER 4

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The Internet’s potential to destabilize capitalism’s management of the consumer’s mind would be insignificant if the economy did not exercise substantial control over expression and the free flow of information. But such control exists and thus gives special significance to the Internet’s emergent role in introducing profound changes in contemporary discourse and cultural production. Until the mass adoption of the Internet, consumers had very little access to information that was not produced by the economic system, and the physical range of their discourse was limited to their local social networks. The success of capitalism throughout the 1900s owes a great deal to its ability to limit the individual’s communicative capabilities and access to alternative sources of knowledge. The mind of an isolated consumer proved to be easily managed within a social system increasingly dominated by the products of corporate speech. The problem for capitalism is that the production of meaning within the Internet is beyond corporate control and, to a certain degree, antagonistic toward corporate goals. An Internet that provides the consumer with extensive communication and knowledge resources that are beyond the control of the corporate sector could interrupt socialization processes within consumer culture. Of course, if proponents of the normalization thesis are correct, and if the corporate take-over of the Internet proceeds in a manner predicted by Lawrence Lessig, Robert McChesney, and others, then the corporate sector has little reason to fear. But if the Internet has already achieved a stable state, if enhanced communicative freedom is the normative state of the Net, then the following century could prove to be shaped by a dramatic redistribution of speech power.

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Proceeding with the assumption that the Internet has arrived at a stable state, in so far as the individual’s communicative freedom is concerned, this chapter will explore the implications of enhanced communicative freedom for a social system dominated by the commercial media and characterized by an intensely uneven distribution of speech power. Without sliding into hyperbole I wish to counter claims that acts of consumer resistance are marginal and will be increasingly marginalized within the Internet. There is a substantial amount of online activity that can be described as consumer resistance – activity directed at corporations and the political elite that challenges the meanings that are disseminated through commercial media. Nothing less than an astounding volume and variety of online consumer resistance is occurring. In the spring of 2003 the word ‘boycott’ appeared on the Web over 4,000,000 times. By spring 2004, ‘boycott’ appeared over 7,450,000 times throughout the Web.1 This suggests substantial consumer dissatisfaction and activism. It is difficult to find a major corporation, widely used product, or high-profile brand that is not under attack by a multitude of individuals in numerous countries. The problem has not escaped the attention of corporate leaders. The Financial Times quoted media consultant Doug Miller as saying, ‘I visit 75 boardrooms a year and I can tell you the members of the boards are living in fear of getting their corporate reputations blown away in two months on the Internet.’2 Clearly, ‘living in fear’ suggests that corporations do have something to hide from consumers. That the Net has so quickly evolved into the single largest collection of anti-corporate sentiment in the history of capitalism stands in stark contrast to the fears of Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein, outlined in Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class (1994), a hysterical polemic against the growth of ‘cyber-authoritarianism.’3 Kroker and Weinstein forecast the rise of a virtual class that is ‘the after-shock of the living dead’ – their poetic metaphor for an emerging capitalist class that will soon rule the Internet and society. Motivated by an ‘impulse to nihilism’ this virtual class will crush ‘any and all dissent’ (5). Kroker and Weinstein’s diatribe reeks of disdain for the common man. The authors claim that the ‘late twentieth-century mind’ has the same nihilistic vision of itself as the ruling virtual class has of the masses (6). The virtual class will seduce the masses, destroy their online public spaces, and finally exercise absolute control over intellectual property and experience itself (5–7). Kroker and Weinstein successfully identify the drive to control that lies beneath the rhetoric of Silicon Valley, but their

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forecast of totalizing social control underestimates the possibilities of resistance, evasion, and subversion. Rob Latham has charted how Kroker and Weinstein’s ‘monolithic negativism’ fits in with a pattern of thought among left-leaning critics.4 These critics join the ranks of Lessig and McChesney and claim that the Internet will inevitably evolve into a tool for the complete commodification of culture (182). Traces of this normalization thesis run throughout the literature. Robert Adrian X sees online interaction inevitably reduced to the interaction of online consumers with their wallets.5 Howard Besser sees the two-way flow of communication within the Net being reduced to the asymmetrical flow of television.6 Kevin Robins and Frank Webster compare the Net to a Foucaultian panopticon that will further reinforce the online audience’s drive to consume.7 Frank Beacham, ‘who enthused about the Internet as the public sphere outside of corporate or governmental control in early 1995, lamented one year later that the Internet was shifting “from being a participatory medium that serves the interests of the public to being a broadcast medium where corporations deliver consumer-oriented information. Interactivity would be reduced to little more than sales transactions and email.”’8 There is an irony to this critical position of the left – it mirrors the triumphant claims about the online marketplace made by Bill Gates and a mob of industry consultants. Futurists such as Frank Feather made bold projections about the level of economic activity and structural change that would soon take place. The dust jacket of Feather’s book FutureConsumer.Com: The Webvolution of Shopping to 2010 describes the author as follows: ‘Formerly a strategic planning executive with three of the world’s largest banks, he has forecast the future with uncanny accuracy since 1981 ... Even the big consulting firms frequently pick his brain.’ Feather forecasted that ‘[a]round 2005, online purchases will reach 10–15 percent of total sales in most categories, wiping out the profits of most retailers. By 2010, online shopping will grab 31 percent of all retail sales – 43 percent if you exclude the automobile and education categories. All but the most savvy will be killed. Most strip malls and many shopping malls, along with half the department stores, supermarkets, retail chains, banks, and local shops, will vanish without a trace as click-and-buy e-tailing takes over.’9 Here it is hard to decide which is more extraordinary – the claim that the future can be forecast with ‘uncanny accuracy’ or the belief that consumers care so little for the physical world of stores and shopping malls that most will simply vanish into the digital ether of cyberspace.

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The now infamous Internet stock-market bubble of the late 1990s was accompanied by a set of beliefs about consumer preference. Investors in Internet-related stocks made a bet about what type of experiences consumers prefer. For the most part, the market lost the bet. Online retail spending is nowhere close to wiping out the profits of most retailers. Why are the body and the solid physical world deemed of no significance in visions of the digital, networked future? I find it unlikely that we will so readily abandon the physical experience of shopping in the sensual wonderland of touch, taste, and feel. The physical marketplace offers some of the most deeply personal, intense, visceral experiences. Descriptions of how the Internet influences consumer preference must take into account the body, and not simply dismiss it. Along with discounting the value of the physical world and its role in the retail experience, early expectations of the Internet too readily assumed that its users would readily act as collaborators with market forces. Both the critical left and Silicon Valley cheerleaders underestimate the degree to which the Internet is a threat to the reproduction of the consumer. It is widely held that the Internet community will offer little resistance to an emerging digital capitalism that will in turn foster a more efficient consumer culture. Such claims are made by the left and the right, by academics, business leaders, and techno-cheerleaders. They represent a near consensus that in one form or another the Internet will be reduced to being capitalism’s handmaiden. But what if the Internet promotes sustained resistance to capitalism? E-mail and Cultural Subversion The extreme ease with which online consumer resistance can be found and the staggering variety of targets and tactics used cast substantial doubt upon claims about the marginal character of this activity. Consider the rapidly spreading form of consumer resistance that takes place through e-mail. The increase in high-speed connections and improvements in e-mail technology combined with the popularity of digital cameras (which now outsell film cameras), user-friendly image manipulation software such as Photoshop (easily pirated from the Internet), and inexpensive scanners have led to the widespread modification and exchange of all forms of advertisements and political images. Usually produced by amateurs, these appropriated images are altered in such a way that they subvert the intended meaning of the original message.

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A typical image widely exchanged after the second Gulf War was a photograph of the president of the United States of America sitting behind a desk during a press conference. An anonymous individual altered the image, making it appear as if George W. Bush were wearing the evil ring of power that was featured in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.10 The second movie based on the Tolkien trilogy, The Two Towers, was recently released and made it fairly obvious that the association of Sauron’s evil ring with the president was not a flattering comparison. This altered image was particularly effective because it combined semiotic elements that are well known and easily decoded – power and the corruption of power. Tolkien’s work is widely discussed on the Internet and pirated copies of the movie trilogy and his books are available on the Web and via peer-to-peer file-sharing programs. Tolkien’s description of the ring is itself widely reproduced throughout the Net (‘One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them’), and further reinforces the subversive quality of the altered image. Under these conditions the message of this appropriated image was immediately obvious – Bush had the ring of power and was going to gather the world under the new American empire ‘and in the darkness bind them.’ Along with politicians, a favourite target of altered images are major brands and advertising campaigns. Around the same time that the ‘Bush wearing the evil ring of power’ image arrived in my mailbox, I also received a re-articulation of the widely seen De Beers advertisements that featured black and white silhouettes of a man giving a woman a diamond ring. This parody of the De Beers campaign showed a black silhouette of a women with her hair in a bun (reminiscent of the elegance of the De Beers advertisements) engaged in fellatio. The image included text that read ‘She’ll pretty much have to ...’11 Next to the text was a diamond ring and the famous De Beers tag line ‘A Diamond Is Forever.’ The image and its text worked together to form a commentary on the ritualized use of commodities such as diamond rings and on male power (or at least male fantasies of power). Needless to say, the image would not sit well with De Beers’s lawyers. What is particularly striking about this form of online cultural resistance is that many altered images exchanged by e-mail carry subversive messages. It is true that advertisers have had success with ‘viral’ campaigns in which an advertisement was widely exchanged by e-mail. Nonetheless, the exchange of images by e-mail appears to be dominated by home-made productions and subversions of corporate

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material that often reflect current events such as ‘9/11’-inspired parodies of Osama bin Laden, or Gulf War–inspired parodies of George W. Bush, are humorous, and are often obscene or pornographic. This phenomenon of exchanging re-articulated products of corporate speech via e-mail represents the epitome of the Internet’s function within an otherwise highly controlled communication environment. Individuals are using the new media to do exactly what they cannot do within the old media – they are appropriating the products of corporate speech and using them to transmit their own interpretation of the world. While in 2004 such e-mail exchanges were largely limited to static images, it is only a matter of a few years before the e-mail box will evolve into being the location for the exchange of short audiovideo files that will once again expand the expressive capabilities of consumer resistance. As digital photography and digital movie cameras continue to decrease in cost and increase in sales, and as technically savvy generations grow up in a world where digital imaging tools are ubiquitous, this type of subversive symbol flow will almost certainly grow in its level of sophistication, production volume, audience size, and cultural influence. Often, e-mail is used to spread awareness about Web-based multimedia productions that subvert political and corporate targets. A typical example of the subversion of meaning through the combined use of e-mail and the Web was seen in January 2004 when an e-mail message with the subject line ‘For all you Starbucks fans ...’ was widely exchanged. The e-mail contained a hypertext link that, when clicked on, led to an animated comic featuring ‘Star-Smucks Coffee.’12 Starbucks is clearly parodied in the animation (a large coffee ‘is now called “Ven-tee”’). Other examples are literally too numerous to catalogue. Culture Jamming This destruction of commercially produced meanings is usually referred to as culture jamming, adbusting, or subvertising. Culture jamming encompasses an enormous range of tactics across all mediums (video, pirate radio, digital photography, billboards, websites, songs – to name a few), is usually appropriative in that it uses corporate intellectual property without permission, and is therefore usually illegal. It is also characteristically subversive in its intent. Its goal is to challenge or destroy all forms of corporate intellectual property. A typical selfportrait of the movement is found at the Adbusters Media Foundation:

Culture Jamming and the Transformation of Cultural Heresies 105 We are a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century ... We want a world in which the economy and ecology resonate in balance. We try to coax people from spectator to participant in this quest. We want folks to get mad about corporate disinformation, injustices in the global economy, and any industry that pollutes our physical or mental commons.13

The language and metaphors of war run throughout the Web sites, manifestos, and autobiographies of culture jammers. Kalle Lasn, a widely quoted spokesperson for the movement, makes frequent use of war metaphors: ‘The next revolution will be, as media guru Marshall McLuhan predicted, “a guerrilla information war.” It will be fought in the streets with signs, slogans, banners and graffiti, but it will be won in newspapers, on the radio, on TV and in cyberspace. It will be a dirty, no-holds-barred propaganda war of competing worldviews and alternative visions of the future.’14 Within the empire of mind, culture jamming is guerrilla warfare, a protest against the aggressive take-over of our shared mental landscape by commercial messages and a direct attack on corporations’ claims of sovereignty over the meaning of their intellectual property and cultural products. In an oft-quoted article titled ‘Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare,’ Umberto Eco describes a ‘residual freedom’ that allows the audience to reinterpret messages. Eco suggests the deployment of ‘communication guerrillas,’ working with this residual freedom, ‘who would restore a critical dimension to passive reception.’15 When Eco wrote this (1967), appropriation was already in full swing as a dominant feature of professional artistic production. Eco urged the audience to ‘control the message and its multiple possibilities of interpretation’ and looked forward to a time when ‘one medium can be employed to communicate a series of opinions on another medium’ (143). Twentyfive years later the proliferation of desktop computers and the Internet would unleash a globalized army of communication guerrillas. Perhaps this is one of the main social functions of the Internet – it enables public reinterpretation of privately owned messages and meanings. The subversive element of appropriation is culture jamming’s critical dimension, as seen when Bush is associated with the evil ring of power or when De Beers is associated with male power and the com-

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modification of romance. Culture jammers use the Internet in their effort to foster a critical dimension in the audience. The Internet allows for a much greater level of active response to corporate speech than did older media technology such as the analog television sets of the twentieth century. While the culture-jamming community itself is quite small, it should be kept in mind that it represents a pervasive characteristic of online cultural production – the reinterpretation of dominant meanings. There are fundamental differences between television and the Internet. Each offers a different level of communicative freedom. Different structures of communication technology provide the audience with different levels of communicative freedom. The commercial communication systems of the pre-Internet era actively diminished communicative freedom, while the Internet clearly enhances communicative freedom to the point where it is seen as a problem of social control by the state and the market. Culture jamming capitalizes on the freedom afforded by the Internet. The Internet enables enhanced expression and thereby expands the audience’s critical dimension within a social order that routinely and systematically constrains individual expression. Culture jamming confronts the audience with the dark side of capitalism’s consumer culture, the concealed realities that are cloaked by an oligopolistic media system and decloaked by cultural guerrillas and media terrorists armed with new communication capabilities. Culture jamming has all the trappings of a maturing social movement: primary texts such as Kalle Lasn’s Culture Jam – The Uncooling of America (1999); organizing collectives such as Guerrilla Girls, the Billboard Liberation Front, and indie (independent) media centres; prominent interpreters such as Naomi Klein, author of the widely read No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; professional jammers such as Joey Skaggs, Rodriguez de Gerada, and Ron English; and the obligatory signifier of any subculture: a newsstand ‘flagship’ magazine, the Vancouver-based Adbusters16 (founded by ex-adman Kalle Lasn). This brief list does not accurately portray the depth and breadth of a movement that spans the globe and is responsible for an enormous volume of artistic, popular, and scholarly cultural production across all mediums and genres.17 While the term ‘culture jamming’ was coined in 1984 by the San Francisco audio-collage band Negativland, the phenomenon that it represents has its origins in the rise of early-twentieth-century corporate media. With roots stretching back to the early 1900s, an anti-advertising movement blossomed in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash

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and found a voice in a New York–based magazine called Ballyhoo. This precursor to Adbusters gained a circulation of more than 1.5 million in 1931 and reflected the readers’ disgust with advertising and highpressure sales tactics.18 Ballyhoo appropriated ads and created parodies of popular products and sales pitches. The magazine also targeted politicians and, as with Adbusters magazine, encouraged its readers to alter billboard advertisements. Both Ballyhoo and Adbusters indicate that the historical development of capitalism and its media system prompted parallel developments in cultural resistance and media activism. Capitalism’s colonization of public and mental space, its gradual elimination of meaningful choice, and its steady erosion of individual sovereignty went hand in hand with the rise of countercultural forces such as culture jamming. By the opening years of the twenty-first century this resistance has coalesced into an anti-corporate movement rife with manifestos and loosely identified by the culturejamming label. Culture jamming encompasses a broad set of practices ranging from media activism to computer hacking. On the Internet artists and media activists advertise courses in culture jamming, while others freely disseminate texts that describe illegal jamming tactics. One widely reproduced document on the Web, ‘Smashing the Image Factory,’ provides explicit details on how to illegally alter billboard advertisements or, for the more daring, how to completely tear them down. Many of these practices take place in ‘meatspace’ – on the street, on buses, in shop windows, and on the sides of buildings. Although not restricted to advertising, culture jams frequently employ ads and reworked brand names such as ‘Virginia Slime,’ ‘Joe Chemo,’ ‘McDeath,’ and ‘Cancer Country.’ For those unfamiliar with culture jamming, a quick visit to www.subvertise.org and www.adbusters.org will provide hundreds of examples in a variety of mediums. While there is a growing body of literature addressing culture jamming (most of which resides on the Net itself), the extant literature overlooks an aspect of culture jamming that appears to be highly particular to online anti-corporate cultural production. This aspect is the obscene and pornographic character of many anti-corporate culture jams. The genre of obscene culture jams should not be dismissed as a product of sick minds or juvenile imagination. Obscenity played a special role in the origins of Western modernity and is connected with the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. The creators of obscene culture jams, as a form of

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social criticism, stand in line with an ancient literary tradition indigenous to early modern Europe and constituted by heretics, free-thinkers, and libertines. The social significance of obscene culture jams can be inferred from Lynn Hunt’s work in The Invention of Pornography, wherein Hunt cogently argues that ‘between 1500 and 1800, pornography was most often a vehicle for using the shock value of sex to criticize religious and political authorities.’19 While within the Internet pornography is predominantly a vehicle for marketplace exchange and organized crime, it is also used as a prominent tactic in the subversion of corporate meanings and the destruction of brand image. After the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press, pornography developed on the fringes of print culture and was frequently employed as a way to attack absolutist political and religious authority and the hypocritical conventions of society. Whereas Hunt observes that the pornographic novel of the eighteenth century was ‘immensely revealing of the social concerns of the time’ (39), today we can find social issues embedded within obscene culture jams. The De Beers fellatio appropriation, for example, operates as a commentary on the commercialization of romance and sexual politics, as well as acting as an explicit attack on De Beers itself. Other examples of obscene culture jams are seen in a variety of images that combine various parts of the body (vagina, breasts, penis) with the phrase ‘happy meal.’ One anonymous artist has created an image of a plastic dildo in the shape of Ronald McDonald. Some McDonald’s restaurants have an outside bench that features a seated sculpture of Ronald McDonald. Numerous individuals have had their picture taken as they sit beside Ronald and pretend to perform fellatio on him.20 As the obscene has played a substantial role in criticizing the status quo in the past, attention should be paid to how it is now being used within the underground of cyberspace’s media activists. By combining the word ‘fuck’ with any brand name or corporation in a Google search the chances are you will end up in an anti-branding Web site. Anti-corporate speech that uses obscenity will almost certainly continue to proliferate within the Internet. Many acts of anti-corporate expression are carried out with a black magic marker. Since 1997 ads have been appearing behind plexiglas and metal frames in washroom stalls and above urinals. During a brief visit to a washroom at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law I found myself standing in front of one such washroom ad that had the words ‘No ads in University of Ottawa’ scrawled on it in a black

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marker. The ad above the next urinal was covered in spit. Throughout downtown Ottawa, newspaper boxes were covered in anti-corporate slogans, while the Ottawa Citizen newspaper boxes announced a reward for any tips leading to the arrest of anyone defacing the boxes. A Globe and Mail newspaper box that ironically encouraged people to ‘Think for Yourself’ had the word ‘LIES’ scrawled in black marker across its window. The National Post box standing next to it had a sticker on its front window that read ‘Capitalism Kills.’ On the front of an Ottawa Sun box someone wrote ‘Stop the Mad Cowboy Disease.’21 At street level in urban areas across Canada, a quiet war is underway between corporate media and legions of urban communication guerrillas. My interest here is in how the semiotic activity of graffiti artists and culture jammers, and other forms of consumer resistance, are exchanged and archived within the Internet. Subversive countercultural production needs to be re-evaluated in light of the ease with which corporate speech products can be appropriated, mimicked, subverted, and circulated among a global audience. One of the more powerful tactics used by culture jammers is the appropriation of technique. The proliferation of digital imaging technology and sophisticated but accessible reproduction technologies, such as colour laser printing, have made it possible for individuals to create artefacts that are indistinguishable from professionally produced advertisements and other forms of corporate speech. Digital cameras, imaging software, powerful computers, and high-speed Internet access, all of which are now affordable for the average consumer, enable individuals to mimic the ‘look and feel’ of corporate communications. By mimicking technique, culture jammers are able to challenge the authority of corporate speech. Corporate messages can no longer be distinguished by their mastery of technique. This loss of a monopoly over technique can be said to erode authority because it eliminates the ability of the corporate voice to distinguish itself from the public voice. Allow me to draw a crude analogy of everyone constructing the same image as is constructed by an American president. The propaganda effect behind appearing in the Oval Office, being surrounded by various symbols of power, landing on an aircraft carrier, and so on would lose the ability to project authority and a host of other meanings if this was the way we all appeared to each other. If everyone wore a ‘power suit,’ then expensive business attire would no longer be a useful tool for projecting power and authority. Mimicking technique is a subver-

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sive cultural practice that is now accessible to ordinary computer users with minimal technical skills. Accessibility of technique and technology led to the rapid resurgence of culture jamming through the 1990s, but jamming has not seen a resurgence of activity simply because the tools are widely available. The question must be asked, ‘Why are people using the tools in this way?’ The motivation for this form of cultural production arises directly from the individual’s exposure to corporate speech and the daily experience of capitalism’s social environment. A defining feature of contemporary capitalism is the impossibility of the individual’s escaping from the presence of the corporate voice. The individual is left with only a marginal space for existence between the cracks of private property and private (corporate) voices. Jammers themselves frequently describe their motives as arising from the loss of public space, public voice, and meaningful choice within the mediascape and the marketplace. One of the most common themes in the discussion of culture jamming, and also in the self-reflections of culture jammers, is the complaint that capitalism has created ‘public’ space and legal codes that leave little room for individual expression in the public sphere. Culture jamming is a visible expression of a widely shared desire to reclaim mental space and public landscape from a highly intrusive marketplace that seeks to ‘own eyeballs’ and command ‘mind share’ amid the consuming masses. Isolated events of appropriation and subversive re-articulations are now transmitted, shared, globalized, and remembered – archived within the World Wide Web and maintained within the endless flow of e-mail that itself acts as a form of memory. Ideas, images, and videos are constantly circulating through the network of cyberspace, creating a form of social memory that no longer relies on official archives and is not subject to the control of ‘place.’ Accessible techniques of image creation and manipulation, combined with accessible technologies of reproduction and distribution, have enhanced communicative capabilities and have enabled a greater proliferation of alternative meanings. These meanings gain significance because they are now remembered – they persist within the cultural landscape. The significance of the Internet lies in its role as a public archive. Within it, alternative meanings are fixed in time and space. What happens when alternative discourse does not dissipate once the speaker returns to silence? Although such historical comparisons are fraught with difficulty, consider the role the Gutenberg press had in transforming heresy into orthodoxy.

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In The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983), Elizabeth L. Eisenstein explores the relationship between the advent of printing and three major changes in the flow of meaning within early modern times: the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the rise of modern science. Her work suggests that a strong relationship exists between enhanced communication capabilities and the spread of alternative systems of meaning and belief. To shed light on how the Internet may change the position of consumer dissent within a predominantly corporate-controlled communication environment, we can find a crude analogy in the effect that print technology had on religious dissent in the 1500s. From the earliest beginnings of the Church, Christianity struggled with alternative interpretations. Heresies and heretics led to the growth of minor sects, but Western Christendom maintained a dominant position throughout this period. For well over a thousand years heretics remained a minor social force, but by the 1500s heresy had utterly shattered the Catholic monopoly on religious learning. The difference between all the lost heresies of the Middle Ages and the Protestant revolt was not the uniqueness of Luther and his particular heresy, but the simple fact that it was the first religious movement to exploit the potential of moveable-type printing as a mass medium. Eisenstein argues that the key difference between the failure of medieval heresies and the success of the Protestant revolt was ‘typographical fixity’ – the ability of print to fix ideas in time and space.22 Print allowed novel theologies to persist through time and travel farther through space. Until the arrival of the printing press, new ideas tended to remain localized and transitory. They tended to die along with their founders. But print changed the way information moved through space. It could go farther and faster and remain in circulation longer. Through print, new ideas could be archived in the public memory. They could be more easily stored, retrieved, and remembered: ‘Partly because religious dissent was implemented by print, it could leave a much more indelible and far-reaching impression than dissent had ever left before’ (154). Thus, Latin Christendom was permanently fragmented by printing technology. Eisenstein’s survey of the effect printing had on the transmission of new ideas provides a compelling argument that preservative powers must be considered as an important effect of the Internet. There is a relationship between enhanced social memory and the transformation of dissent into a viable alternative social order. In the sixteenth century print transformed dissent from a marginal cultural phenomenon to a

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major driving force behind entirely new social orders. It did pretty much the same thing with the spread of secular ideas. Printing transformed a series of transitory classical revivals into a lasting Renaissance: ‘[T]he preservative powers of print changed the character of all forms of survival and revival.’23 As with medieval heresies, medieval classical revivals were short lived until the advent of printing. This ‘Gutenberg effect’ further casts doubt on the frequently repeated claim that corporate media will continue to dominate the production of shared culture. Consumer dissent during the analog age of corporate mass media was easily marginalized within a highly controlled media system. Yet, as with dissent in the sixteenth century, the balance of discourse power has suddenly shifted. The Gutenberg press’s ability to transform dissent into a viable world view suggests caution when dismissing online consumer dissent as a minor social force of little consequence. What was marginal in the late Middle Ages or in contemporary social orders can be quickly normalized once a society deploys a novel communication technology and experiences a dramatic shift in communicative capabilities. This is why claims about what constitutes the ‘centre’ and the ‘margin’ of cyberspace are highly suspect. Borders and boundaries within media culture are always shifting. The case could be made that the Internet actually amplifies subversive messages because of the enhanced communicative freedom that it provides. Consider what happened after former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s director of communications, Françoise Ducros, resigned in the wake of her off-the-record remark to a reporter, suggesting what many had long suspected, that George W. Bush is a moron. After her remark, thousands of Web sites featured news reports, personal reflections, and parodies of Bush as a moron. One individual’s remark was duplicated and amplified across the Internet. The Web did contain commentary on the subject of ‘Bush is a moron’ before Ducros’s comment (see, for example, www.presidentmoron.com), but her comment nonetheless led to a sharp increase in the occurrence of the topic both within the corporate press and on the Internet. The Ducros incident highlights substantial differences between the way information flows through commercial media and the way it flows within the Internet. Whereas the media coverage of this event disappeared within a few weeks, the memory of the moron incident is retained in the Internet and thereby prolonged within public memory. The Internet also makes it easier to correlate events and issues. A

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search on Google.com quickly reveals that Ducros’s comment was hardly original. The actor Martin Sheen, who plays the American president in the television series The West Wing, publicly referred to Bush as a moron in February 2001.24 Almost none of the press coverage on Ducros’s comment noted that such a judgment had been delivered in the past. News media, particularly television news, tends to frame events as episodic and without precedent. This episodic character of the symbol flow within corporate media inhibits the audience’s ability to see interconnections, cumulate information, organize it into patterns, and draw conclusions about actions and consequences within the social system.25 Corporate cultural authority requires a certain level of forgetfulness on the part of the audience. Management of the consumer’s mind proceeds more smoothly when access to the past is limited. Corporate public relations has been the primary beneficiary of a restricted public memory and depends on the public’s lack of memory for the management of corporate reputations. Forgetfulness, the social amnesia suffered by the audience, is promoted through the structural characteristics of commercial media. It could reasonably be claimed that the Internet does precisely the opposite to collective memory and the flow of information within the social system. The interconnected hypertextual character of the Internet allows the online audience to track trends, make comparisons, and ‘connect the dots’ because its symbol flow is more easily stored and retrieved. Information within the Internet is far from permanent (print is still a superior archival technology). Yet it must be recognized that the Internet nonetheless affords more access to the past than does the local newsstand or television. Simply by virtue of its archival and interconnected quality, symbol flow within the Internet gains a subversive potential within the surrounding context of ephemeral commercial media products and a constrained collective memory. Commercial media is not in the business of reminding the consuming masses that economic prosperity has an insidious relationship with a century of ethnic cleansing, species genocide, a perpetual state of war, and a spiralling environmental crisis. The strategy of branding often involves creating a false memory, a past that never existed, an inauthentic form of retro-authenticity that is used to feed consumers, adrift in the perpetual now of the ‘new new thing.’ Culture jammers are continually attacking this construction of a marketplace past. What we see in the Internet is a continual undermining of the

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intense memory practices of capitalism – a war over the past. This dispute extends from the distant reaches of the Web to the privileged space of individuals’ ‘in’ boxes on their e-mail accounts. Law and technology cannot control the Internet’s ability to challenge the status of history as a form of private property. The capitalist system requires a certain degree of control over the past, present, and future, whereas cyberspace denies any degree of hegemonic control of memory. Subversive memories and appropriated meanings will continue to circulate among Web sites and e-mail boxes. The largely undocumented exchange of culture jams via e-mail highlights how cultural production within the Internet is characterized by a high level of appropriation. Through countless and uncountable acts of appropriation the Internet community is turning the mass-produced products of corporate speech into highly subversive commentaries on political and commercial messages. This re-articulation of corporate speech is a cultural phenomenon that is not unique to the Internet, but it is uniquely facilitated by the digital technology and open communication networks that constitute the Net. Jim Collins’s exploration of how cultural expression interacts with information technology can be usefully mined for clues as to the significance of the Internet as a natural site for the appropriation of corporate speech. In his Architectures of Excess: Cultural Life in the Information Age, Collins argues that the current age of information is producing an extreme variety of cultural expression, a ‘semiotic excess’ that destabilizes ideological cohesiveness. Ideological cohesiveness is essential for the maintenance of a hegemonic world view (a shared set of intellectual paradigms). The present ‘age of information’ produces ‘modes of transmission, storage and retrieval that destabilize the ... ideological cohesiveness essential for any zeitgeist.’26 As many others have also observed, new communication technology has made it harder to control the production and distribution of information, which in turn makes it harder to organize social action. Capitalism requires a high level of participation in a shared view of the world. But computers, the Internet, cell phones, satellites, and other information technologies have increased the variety of meanings circulating through society. This proliferation of meaning (cultural expression) makes it hard to control the social order within empire: ‘If anything, the technologies of information and absorption that continue to emerge at an ever-increasing rate only intensify the heterogeneity of all semiotic activity, which makes this an age without a zeitgeist, an age which may be character-

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ized by the proliferation of technologies, but technologies that fail to determine with any overwhelming consistency what is delivered, or how it will be put to use’ (8). It could easily be argued, however, that the contemporary period certainly does have its own Zeitgeist, its own master narrative, in the corporatism of the market economy that has infected all levels of social organization. Canadian philosopher-in-residence John Ralston Saul has made a career out of describing the outlines and ethics of the ruling corporate Zeitgeist.27 One need only turn on the television to observe a dominant cultural world view disseminated on behalf of a loose association of millionaires and billionaires. David Muggleton’s postmodernist analysis of resistance within punk culture echoes the claim that capitalist society lacks an identifiable Zeitgeist; ‘the breakdown of mass society has ensured that there is no longer a coherent dominant culture against which a subculture can express itself.’28 It is intensely ironic that postmodern theorists claim to see the end of massifying forces within capitalism even as streetlevel protests against the homogenizing effects of globalization and McDonaldization are growing into history’s largest manifestation of public resistance. Any claims about the demise of mass society must be weighed against growing mass movements that express an awareness that contemporary capitalism threatens to assimilate the individual into the organizing logic of the market. Nonetheless, Collins’s exploration of the reformulation and re-articulation of mass-produced cultural products provides insight into the reconfiguration of corporate speech by the Internet community. The intense proliferation of technologies within the present ‘age of information’ multiplies available meanings. Collins describes this dramatic increase in the diversity of meaning as an intensification of the ‘heterogeneity of all semiotic activity’ – a dramatic increase in the plurality of meanings that in turn breaks down the homogenizing effects of mass culture.29 The cultural authority of mass-produced, corporate-owned commodities is diluted by masses of technologically empowered individuals who are constantly re-articulating the meanings embedded in corporate speech. Cultural Convergence or a Cultural Divorce? As a set of cultural practices, culture jamming and related acts of appropriation within the Internet fall under the category of experience known as popular culture. While the notion of popular culture is often

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used to denote the mass appeal of commercially produced media products and consumer goods, or to contrast the ‘good’ high culture of the elite from the ‘bad’ low culture of the masses, here I use the term to refer to the equivalent of folk culture – the domain of expression that involves active creative expression on the part of individuals. Popular culture often uses commercially produced products, but goes beyond the intended use or the intended meaning of the commercial product. Such a definition provides a way to distinguish between consumer goods and media products as they are produced and as they are reworked in their daily use at ‘street level.’ This focus highlights the degree to which consumers deviate from the marketplace’s intended use and meaning of things. Implicit in my use of the concept of popular culture is the notion that some uses of commodities and media products do not stray very far from their intended meanings as embedded in the economy’s meaningproduction system. Here I have in mind the example of the ‘branded personality’ – the individual who constructs a presentation of the self through consumption that almost exactly accords with the dictates of the market. This category of consumer is easily identified by a strict adherence to market-dictated tastes and trends and often presents an image that appears to have been lifted directly from an advertising campaign. The masses of teenage consumers who dress in the image of their favourite television or music star are examples of consumption practices that attempt to replicate precisely the dictates of media and marketplace. Collins’s examination of appropriation within popular culture focuses on the professional artistic community from the late fifties to the early nineties, yet his observations can usefully be applied to the everyday acts of resistance that take place among both amateur and professional artists within the Internet community. Collins defines appropriation as an act of hijacking meaning, taking ‘control over that which originated elsewhere for other semiotic/ideological purposes’ (93). This hijacking of meaning has tremendous significance within a broader social context wherein corporations are responsible for the creation and transmission of the bulk of shared meaning, which is then vigorously defended as private property. Acts of appropriation are ‘the refusal to grant cultural sovereignty to any institution’ (93). Acts of appropriation are often described by culture jammers as an attempt to deny corporations any sovereignty over the meaning of cultural products that constitute the consumer’s world and self-identity.

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The appropriative culture of the Internet is intensely aggressive in its hijacking of corporate speech because corporations are equally aggressive in saturating the mental landscape with their meanings, and in defending their claims to sovereignty over the interpretation and representation of their products and brands. The monopolization of cultural production within the economic system has led to a challenge to capitalism’s cultural sovereignty. As corporations increase their level of control over cultural products, artists have responded with a shift in focus. Both at the professional level and at street level a major theme in art is resistance to corporate cultural authority. Collins charts a shift in the motivation and strategies of appropriation within the professional artistic community in the early 1980s: ‘The exigencies of appropriation were no longer a matter of personal expression as formal experimentation, but a matter of hijacking an image, forcing it to say that which it wanted to keep secret’ (106). Placing the ‘ring of power’ on an image of Bush is clearly such an act – a commentary on the actions of a warriorpresident. Contemporary artistic production is widely described as highly politicized forms of critical intervention that operate as a radical critique of capitalistic society (95). Culture jamming is just one of many forms of critical intervention gaining currency today. As with many aspects of the Internet, the creative activity of its indigenous culture jammers reflects trends at play within the surrounding social system. Here we see the social order strongly conditioning how media technology is used by consumers and audiences. Appropriation is not unique to the Internet, but it is highly characteristic of its mode of cultural production. The Internet is intensifying appropriation as a cultural practice, even as appropriation has come to characterize culture production both within the corporate realm and throughout society: ‘One of the great truisms regarding cultural production since the advent of postmodernism is that all forms of art and entertainment have become merely one form of appropriation or another, whether it be called pastiche, parody, revivalism or just plain retro’ (92). The television series The Simpsons is probably one of the clearer examples of corporate speech appropriating itself as its own subject. The fact that everybody is appropriating everybody (and even themselves ...) does not diminish the significance of culture jamming. There are differences between the appropriation of corporate speech products by corporations and the appropriation of corporate speech by the private individual.

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Appropriation within the corporate media system takes place with the blessing of lawyers. Disagreements do make their way to the courts, as was seen when Mattel Corporation sued the band Aqua for their use of the idea of Barbie in their song ‘Barbie Girl’ (Mattel lost the lawsuit). Disagreements arise, yet the production of content within the economic system takes place under the watchful eye of lawyers and thus proceeds with a minimum of friction between corporations. The same cannot be said of appropriation undertaken by culture jammers. Such appropriation is not sanctioned by corporate lawyers. The appropriative activity of culture jammers tends to be motivated by a desire to destroy or subvert corporate meanings, to challenge the economic system’s sovereignty over its cultural production. Cultural jamming is not simply a re-articulation of pre-existing codes; it is an attempt to create a new code, propagate a new faith, and lay the foundations for a new social order. It is an attack on the meanings and values necessary for the reproduction of capitalist society. No wonder corporations tend to let loose the dogs of law upon those who dare tinker with their intellectual property. Appropriation within culture jamming is similar to the intense level of borrowing that takes place within fan culture. Fan culture is the world populated by Trekkies, Barbie doll collectors, amateur filmmakers armed with Star Wars costumes and home-made movie scripts, masters of Tolkien’s Elfish language, and a thousand varieties of groups who are intensely involved with commercial media products. The study of fan culture predates the study of culture jamming and thus provides a window into many aspects of the debate about appropriation, resistance, and co-optation within popular culture. As with culture jammers, fans are also consumers. Both groups participate in identity construction through the marketplace (as we all do). Both groups appropriate and re-articulate corporate intellectual property. Both groups are subject to being co-opted by marketers. As with culture-jamming activity, fans do not escape from the corporate protection of intellectual property. Cease-and-desist letters often target fan Web sites, ’zine publishers, amateur filmmakers, and authors. Yet there is a difference between fan culture and culture jamming that marks these two cultural practices as distinct categories. This difference lies in the destructive intent that motivates culture jammers and runs throughout their manifestos and biographical Web sites. Kalle Lasn provides a typical example of destructive intent among culture jammers: ‘We will jam its [corporate America] image factory

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until the day it comes to a sudden shattering halt. And then on the ruins of the old consumer culture, we will build a new one with a noncommercial heart and soul.’30 This sentiment is alien to fan communities. Fans’ creative use of corporate cultural products preserves the media product within popular culture and often extends its market life cycle considerably. Star Trek fans’ claim to be responsible for the revival of the series is an oft-cited example of fan activity extending the life cycle of a commercial brand. In stark contrast to this symbiotic relationship between commercial media and fan communities, culture jammers tend to be antagonistic towards commercial media products and agitate for the destruction of the corporate production system altogether. Given this distinction, it needs to be recognized that contradictory practices will reside in both communities. Membership in one group does not preclude membership in another. An individual could act as a fan in the morning, as a consumer in the afternoon, and as a vocal culture jammer armed with ‘McDeath’ stickers in an anti-globalization rally later that evening. These practices are not necessarily isolated from one another, nor do they need to be manifested as ‘pure’ categories of action to have significance. Social reality is messy, and theory must be careful not to remove contradictions for the sake of an easily described social order. As with culture jamming, fan culture cannot be easily encompassed within one definition. Participants of fan cultures cannot be described as either passive consumers or anti-commercial ideologues.31 Fan practices invariably involve contradictory processes of resisting commercialization while simultaneously intensifying consumption practices. Fans are often avid consumers of books, magazines, videos, comics, models, board games, and figurines. Fan communities thus provide examples of heightened consumption-based identity construction among their members. Yet neither are fans slavish sycophants. Fans are not constrained by the authorized meaning of a text. Like culture jammers, they rework corporate intellectual property to make new meanings. Henry Jenkins uses Michel de Certeau’s concept of poaching to explore the cultural practices of fan communities. De Certeau describes readers as moving ‘across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields.’32 Following de Certeau, Jenkins argues in Textual Poachers that social and legal practices encourage readers to respect the integrity of the text with the result that the popular audience’s interpretative capabilities are ‘delegitimized in favor of the commercial interests of authorized authors.’33

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It may be that fan culture and the culture-jamming movement signal a broad shift away from a generalized respect for the text’s integrity. Widespread appropriation inside and outside of the corporate cultural machine, rising levels of digital piracy, and endemic plagiarism may signal a broad shift away from authorial meaning and regard for property status. Fan communities, culture jammers, and the 250 million downloads of the peer-to-peer file-sharing program Kazaa are part of a new ethic emerging in the wake of the widespread deployment of digital communication technology. Jenkins’s Textual Poachers (1992) predates the mass adoption of the Internet, and thus he makes certain judgments about the relative powerlessness of the fan community: ‘Like poachers of old, fans operate from a position of cultural marginality and social weakness. Like other popular readers, fans lack direct access to the means of commercial cultural production and have only the most limited resources with which to influence the entertainment industry’s decision ... [W]ithin the cultural economy, fans are peasants, not proprietors.’34 Of course, any argument about a community’s lack of power due to a lack of access to the means of cultural production must be revised in light of the emergence of the Internet. True, the Internet is not the cultural powerhouse that the commercial media is, nor does it compare to television’s domination of leisure time (although time spent online is no longer insignificant, particularly among younger audiences).35 But it is far too early to pronounce final judgement on the status of appropriative communities armed with new digital technologies and the means for the global dissemination of grassroots cultural products. Jenkins’s later work does take into account the Internet’s role in appropriation within fan culture and tends to reflect the technoenthusiasm that MIT produced throughout the 1990s. Inspired by the economic trend of media convergence, Jenkins proposes that new media technologies may shift the position of the mass audience: One of the real potentials of cyberspace is that it is altering the balance of power between media producers and media consumers, enabling grassroots cultural production to reach a broader readership and enabling amateurs to construct websites that often look as professional and are often more detailed and more accurate to the original than the commercially-produced sites. In such a world, the category of the audience, as a mass of passive consumers for pre-produced materials, may give way to the category of cultural participants, which would include both profes-

Culture Jamming and the Transformation of Cultural Heresies 121 sionals and amateurs. We will certainly need and value the contributions of skilled professional storytellers but we will also provide the tools to empower popular creativity, often in response to what the storytellers put before us.36

In this vision of the future, Jenkins sees a form of ‘cultural convergence’ wherein digital media technologies promote a more participatory audience, ‘a world where all of us can participate in the creation and circulation of central cultural myths.’37 Jenkins recognizes that there are contradictory forces at work here. The audience’s demand for increased participation in the production of culture, epitomized by fan communities, generates expanded marketing opportunities, but is not entirely welcomed by the commercial media sector. Digital technologies are increasing the audience’s ability to appropriate corporate cultural products at the very point in history where intellectual property rights are being aggressively extended and defended by the private sector. The cultural convergence foreseen by Jenkins largely amounts to a more intense level of audience participation in new forms of commercial media. Audiences will act as junior partners to cultural industries. Analog audiences were passive audiences, whereas digital audiences will be collaborators who actively participate in the economy’s production of culture. In a field dominated by the metaphor of warfare, it is curious that Jenkins’s vision of cultural convergence favours the notion of collaboration. While we can all agree that the balance of power between producers and consumers of meaning is shifting because of digital technologies, describing the new position of the empowered audience as collaborative serves to reinforce the existing relationships within media culture. Media conglomerates remain in position as the dominant storytellers, while the audience is permitted occasionally to colour outside the lines. Jenkins does see enormous potential in appropriation as a cultural force, particularly when combined with the utility of the Internet. Yet his vision of the future of media culture exhibits qualities that I call ‘pre-Gutenberg.’ Jenkins argues that the Internet’s success as a cultural force ultimately depends on ‘the creation and maintenance of a shared cultural frame of reference, and for the present moment the most likely source of that frame of reference is the infrastructure created by centralized commercial media ... All kinds of interesting cultural material is originating on the web, but most of it only reaches a larger commu-

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nity when it attracts the attention of traditional media.’38 Corporate media will continue to dominate cultural production, the audience will be repositioned as collaborators, and cultural material within the Web will influence society’s shared frame of reference only when it is filtered through the corporate media system. The pre-Gutenberg mindset of Internet analysis consistently understates the degree to which a radically novel communication technology can transform resistance and alternative symbol systems (cultural heresies) into major social forces. Again, allow me to draw an admittedly crude analogy to the transformation that took place in the sixteenth century. Imagine a lost fragment, a memo from the pope, written shortly after Martin Luther called for a discussion of his ninety-five theses. The papal memo responding to Luther reads as follows: For Brother Luther’s radical ideas to be successful they will depend on the creation and maintenance of a shared cultural frame of reference, and for the present moment the most likely source of that frame of reference is the infrastructure created by the most Holy Roman Catholic Church ... In our wisdom we recognize that all kinds of interesting spiritual material has originated from heresies of the past, but most of these only reach the community of the faithful when they first attract the attention of the appointed shepherd in Rome, who is appointed by our Lord to guarantee the worthiness of novel ideas before they are consumed by the flock he guides and protects from heresy ... Luther is but one man and his radical notions may be safely ignored.

Now I fully realize that there is a world of difference between contemporary capitalism and the social order of the late Middle Ages. Yet both periods are characterized by structural monopolies over the production of learning and the management of belief. Both periods also witnessed the rise of a communication technology that was substantially differentiated from existing communication systems. We can no more safely assume that corporate media will prove to be the ultimate mediator of a shared cultural frame of reference in the future than a pontiff could assume that the infrastructure created by the Roman Catholic church would continue to provide the most likely source for a monolithic culture through the sixteenth century and onward. The Gutenberg press shattered a monopoly over the creation and maintenance of a shared frame of reference in the sixteenth century. The possibility of a ‘Gutenberg effect’ occurring in the twenty-first cen-

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tury should not be dismissed. To speak of a cultural convergence resulting from the spread of the printing press in the sixteenth century would have been wrong. The press led to a cultural divorce between the old symbol system of the Catholic church and the emerging heresies of the Protestant revolt, the Renaissance, and the scientific revolution. Claims about the centrality of corporate media for the continued transmission of a shared cultural frame of reference are highly tenuous at this juncture. When Jenkins proposes a coming cultural convergence he implies that resistance will take a back seat to co-option. This may be due to his interpretation of fan culture as expressing a high degree of affinity with corporate media. For Jenkins, fandom is predominantly collaborative. These collaborative communities are earlier adopters of new media technologies and, as a consequence, ‘their aesthetics and cultural politics have been highly influential in shaping public understanding of the relationship between dominant and grassroots media. Such groups seek not to shut down the corporate apparatus of the mass media but rather to build on their enjoyment of particular media products, to claim affiliation with specific films or television programs, and to use them as inspiration for their own cultural production, social interaction, and intellectual exchange.’39 Jenkins is arguing that these earlier adopters of new media are also earlier adopters of a particular type of relationship between the grassroots and corporations. Fan communities show us the future state of the mass audience as a collaborator with the commercial myth-making machine. The cultural politics of media collaborators are projected as the vanguard of the coming cultural convergence. Yet the idea that the emergent media system of the digital era will render us willing collaborators with Disney, CNN, Fox, Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black, the Aspers, the Bronfmans, and the military-industrial complex, which own the commercial media system is unlikely to sit well with every producer of grassroots media or every member of the audience. Jenkins’s description of fan culture leaves one with the impression that the participants of fandom eagerly want to be embraced by corporate media as ‘active associates and niche marketers.’40 His attitude towards culture jammers further reinforces the impression that Jenkins can see no valid position for the audience outside of commodity culture. For Jenkins, culture jammers fail to see ‘unrealized potentials’ in popular culture. Fan culture reflects the good audience that is ‘dialogic,’ ‘affective,’ and ‘collaborative.’ Jammers reflect a bad

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audience that is ‘disruptive,’ ‘ideological,’ and ‘confrontational’ (167). The old division of the ‘bad’ passive audience versus the ‘good’ active audience is here replaced by good collaborators versus bad activists. When Jenkins suggests, perhaps quite rightly, that fans want to share media power, he underestimates how this sharing of power with corporate media has the obvious potential to corrupt the collaborator and reduce the fan community to little more than another tool of the market. In an entirely stunning example of the drive to marginalize dissent, Jenkins also includes the phenomenon of blogging as essentially pro-market. Blogging, shorthand for ‘Web logging,’ is predominantly personal expression through Web sites – diaries, articles, rants, photo-journals, and so on. Jenkins takes the act of communicating via the Web and turns it into a collaborative activity that facilitates, rather than jams, the ‘signal flow’ of corporate media (168). Blogging for Jenkins is ‘a communication process, not an ideological position ... [C]onsumer power may now be best exercised by blogging rather than jamming media signals’ (168). But the blogging phenomenon is simply people communicating via Web sites. That Jenkins should insist that bloggers are ‘intermediaries, facilitators,’ but not jammers, of corporate media is simply bizarre and reinforces a suspicion that, in the end, Jenkins is intent on reassuring the corporate sector that no real harm will come from the Internet community if corporations embrace their appropriative activity and use it the better to market their products (168). Blogging covers the entire ideological spectrum, yet Jenkins appears eager to strip it of any ideology whatsoever. By elevating this phenomenon of supposedly non-ideological communication to the ideal location of consumer power, Jenkins once again returns to the notion that the ideal position of the digital audience is that of collaborator. While culture jammers have launched an attack on the empire of mind, it is far too early to expect to see substantial impact upon the consumer’s mind. This needs to be repeated often, not to make excuses for the phenomenon but to remind us that our concern here is with embryonic dynamics. Internet-facilitated appropriation of corporate speech is barely a decade old. Contrary to the fears of Lessig and company, and contrary to the intentions of control-hungry corporations, appropriation with destructive intent will remain a characteristic feature of cultural production within the Internet community. Arguments proposing that online appropriation will diminish must resort

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to attributing far too high a level of control to technology and law while simultaneously discounting the control-avoidance capabilities of networked digital technology. This marks a great distinction between the media system of the 1900s and the emergent media system of the new century. The Internet has introduced a new era of opposition and challenge to the dominant meanings produced within capitalism. Until the rise of the Internet and its culture of appropriation, corporations were able to fix meanings in the public mind with little resistance. Now we can speak of a globalized alternative media system wherein ‘official’ meanings are constantly challenged, appropriated, re-articulated, and, to a certain degree, ‘unfixed.’ To what degree ‘official’ privately owned meanings that are re-articulated in the online public realm actually affect the management of consumer desire remains to be seen, but it would be a mistake to dismiss such an outpouring of grassroots appropriation as marginal and of little import. I find it striking that Collins should declare that the intensification of appropriation within popular culture destabilizes (‘problematizes’) the ‘stability of categories of shared information.’41 His concern lies specifically with film genres as categories of cultural literacy, but this erosion of stable categories could easily be applied to brand identity and corporate personality within the marketplace. Where Collins interprets appropriation as a ‘fundamental shift in what constitutes both entertainment and cultural literacy’ (139), I would add that a parallel shift is occurring in what we could call marketplace or consumer literacy – our shared mastery of the meanings generated by the symbolic economy. The widespread re-articulation of corporate speech within the Internet threatens to destabilize the meaning of corporate brands. These brands constitute some of the most widely shared features within the collective mental landscape. As a result of the growth in culture-jamming activity and anti-globalization activism, brands that were once almost universally seen as good are now seen as suspect or downright nefarious. In this sense brands such as McDonald’s, Starbucks, or Nike can no longer be described as stable categories. Rather, they have undergone substantial transformation in the eyes of consumers – particularly young consumers. This young generation of consumers demonstrates a hyperconsciousness about the politics of consumer products and brands that was largely absent from the marketplace of the 1950s, barely visible in the 1970s, but ubiquitous by the late 1990s.

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The Normative Debate Anthropology is intensely concerned with the notion of shared categories (such as food, dirt, pet, sister, good, and bad) and provides an insightful theoretical perspective for interrogating the Internet’s symbol flow. The bulk of Mary Douglas’s work is concerned with how shared categories are initially constituted and what role they play in providing stability to cultures over time. Douglas approaches the issue of collective action – action that constitutes society – through the assumption that collective action is difficult. There are plenty of reasons for communities and social bonds to fly apart. Douglas sees the normative debate as a process that holds a society together. Within the normative debate individuals scrutinize their social arrangements – they monitor each other’s behaviour and contribution to the collective. All aspects of behaviour, such as individual self-regarding preference (what economists like to call ‘self-interest’) are subject to scrutiny within the normative debate. Through the debate, a community provides the context of accountability for individual action: ‘[E]ven within capitalist society, the way the individual can pursue his own gain is determined by the society, its laws and conventions.’42 We are not free to act as we wish without regard for the constraints imposed by our local culture. The normative debate goes on all the time in all forms of social action, and its object is to legitimize a particular form of society. In my media ethics courses I often have students follow the neo-liberal Globe and Mail and the arch-conservative National Post newspapers so they can learn to identify the debate over the proper shape and future of Canadian society and the ever-elusive Canadian identity. Within the National Post it is easy to identify the conservative attack on the legitimacy of the Palestinian people, same-sex marriage, liberalization of marijuana laws, and even nationalized public media (the CBC). Moral judgments are constantly communicated through the media system, the legitimacy of groups attacked or defended, and cultural authority proclaimed. While the normative debate takes place throughout all social action, the media acts as a window on some of the more broadly shared concerns, while also playing a large role in defining what will be of concern to people. It sets the agenda for the debate and biases the discussion from the perspective of media owners and the elite. Within capitalist social orders the normative debate has been narrowly framed and muted because of corporate media systems that

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act as a major arena for the debates (this will be explored further in chapter 6). Douglas’s all-too-brief description of the normative debate does not address the role of media systems in the struggle over the future shape of society, but she does provide insightful clues as to how the Internet’s rise might affect a society’s contest over the ‘good society.’ The intent behind the normative debate is to mobilize support for a particular view of the good society. Which type(s) of society is to be considered desirable is defined by the contenders in the debate.43 If you are not part of the debate, then your vision of society is not placed on the table – it is not one of the options. This issue of the contenders defining the options tells us much about the Internet’s impact upon the process of social change. In a society where the bulk of the public sphere has been monopolized by the corporate sector, the normative debate is muted – the field of contenders is reduced. Thus, in a social system where the contenders in the debate are few, it stands to reason that the options – the possible cultural patterns – are equally limited. Indeed, this touches upon the central criticism of corporate media – that it has monopolized cultural production and severely limited the possibilities of individual identity and social order. By providing an alternative forum in which collective support can be mustered, the Internet has multiplied the number of contenders that can participate in the normative debate and can thus be said to have expanded the options for society. An expanded normative debate means that culture is less constrained, the future holds more possibilities (though this expansion in possible futures includes the dystopic as well!). If we are to take seriously anthropology’s insight into the role that symbol flow plays in the construction of social order, then we must allow for the possibility that an unconstrained symbol flow, such as is epitomized by the Internet, has far-reaching implications for a capitalist social order that developed under a highly constrained media system and a muted normative debate. Culture may indeed be constrained, as Douglas often points out, but only to the extent that its primary symbol flow is constrained. We simply do not have a prior example of a culture that developed in the midst of a highly interconnected and unconstrained flow of meaning so as to be certain about exactly where the Internet will take us. We can be hopeful that the Internet will loosen the bounds of corporate media on the form and substance of the normative debate, expand the number and variety of contenders within the debate, and alter our notion of the common good.

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While the focus in this analysis of the Internet’s impact upon capitalism’s empire of mind is on the Net’s ability to empower the articulation of oppositional meanings and subversive cultural products, such an analysis must avoid the claim that the Internet is first and foremost anti-market or anti-capitalist in orientation. I have argued that its unique structure renders it impervious to totalizing control by market forces, but I carefully want to avoid the accusation that I am modelling the Internet as primarily constituted by liberating and subversive cultural practices. At this time it is simply impossible to validate claims that market activity and corporate media hold sway over the Internet community, yet it is equally impossible to elevate subversion as the dominant and definitive cultural activity shaping the Internet community. What can most clearly be affirmed is that the architecture of the arena in which social control and cultural resistance take place has changed. This arena is shaped by the available media systems that mould consent and consensus. A new architecture of public debate is now in place. This architecture, I have argued, is stable and is promoting the production, dissemination, and archiving of a rich body of re-articulated meanings that undermine the marketplace’s ability to direct consumption practices. When re-articulated products of corporate speech are circulated on the Internet, the empire of mind’s ability to engineer consent, manage the consumer, and direct desire is at risk. Where William Gibson famously described cyberspace as a ‘consensual hallucination,’ we could borrow his metaphor and describe culture jamming as an attempt to snap consumers out of the consensual hallucination created by corporate speech. Thirty years before Marshall McLuhan predicted that the mass audience would ‘one day try to control media fallout,’44 pioneering media activists and the publishers of Ballyhoo were already challenging the sovereignty and authority of corporate speech. This history suggests that there was no need to predict approaching armies of communication guerrillas; no need because the alternative voice has always been present alongside corporate speech. What has changed is the position of this voice within the normative debate. Cultural Resistance and Marketing Ideology The marketing industry was quick to acknowledge the presence of culture jamming’s voice and naturally understands the anti-branding movement’s potential to disrupt branding strategies and erode brand

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value. Douglas B. Holt of Harvard Business School argues that consumer resistance, such as the anti-branding movement, reinforces the market’s hold on the consumer’s mind.45 Holt’s argument is representative of the conservative thinking that takes place within business and marketing schools, fostered to no small degree by the necessity of creating a curriculum that is not overtly hostile to the economy. As N. Craig Smith has observed, ‘[M]arketing is more of an ideology than a science.’46 Business schools exist in a symbiotic relationship with the business community. They rely heavily on financial support from business, draw many of their teaching staff from the corporate sector, and, as a result, closely identify with the goals of the economic system. Within this context, academic marketing theory almost inevitably ends up elevating the marketplace as the guarantor of consumer sovereignty. Holt’s argument rests on the contention that there has been a shift in the way corporations engineer meaning in the lives of consumers. He sees an evolution from a modern consumer culture, where corporations exercised unchallenged cultural authority, to a supposedly postmodern consumer culture that offers an intense plurality of meanings, but insists that only meanings derived from brands have any value.47 In other words, only the market provides access to authentic and meaningful lifestyles. But this attempt at constructed authenticity did not dupe the entire population. The anti-branding movement quickly realized that postmodern branding tactics were merely the latest techniques of cultural coercion, and resistance continued to flourish. Thus, Holt proposed the emergence of a ‘post-postmodern’ market where brands will survive consumer activism by evolving into truly authentic cultural resources. It is hard to see how this scenario differs from the current role of commercial products. Holt recognizes that the majority of consumers in this post-postmodern marketplace will continue to rely on the market for material in their identity-construction projects. In the end, Holt’s vision of the future economic system is merely a claim that companies will act with greater civic responsibility and so deflect the critical attention of consumer activists. He rejects claims that the contemporary market dictates meaning in the consumers’ world and insists that just the opposite is true – postmodern consumer culture produces an ‘experiential and symbolic freedom’ that liberates the consumer (88). The only truly revolutionary role that resistant consumers can play is in creating opportunities for companies to adapt to the new branding environment.

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What Holt is actually offering is a more sophisticated version of the Economist’s defence of brands as the means to social justice. Consumer activism, it is claimed, is forcing corporations to be responsible for their conditions of production: ‘Brands will be trusted to serve as cultural source materials when their sponsors have demonstrated that they shoulder civic responsibility as would a community pillar’ (88). Whereas postmodern brands were deceitful about their labour, health, and environmental practices, in the post-postmodern market they will be truly authentic and thus obliterate possibilities of resistance. When McDonald’s is given an award by the Canadian Institute of Child Health for ‘ongoing commitment to the promotion of healthy living,’ we see the attempt to construct a new authenticity.48 Of course, the grand assumption behind Holt’s argument, and all self-serving corporate awards, is that producers will actually change their ways enough to be identified with authentic experiences and social justice (can we really equate fast food with healthy living?). This is tantamount to claiming that capitalism will reform itself and that the marketplace will actually become the epitome of honesty, transparency, fair dealing, and wholesome fast food. Holt is proposing that brands and the marketplace will evolve into a powerful arena for social reformation. He embraces the notion that corporate social responsibility will transform firms into authentic social actors. This seems highly unlikely at best. Even the Economist recognizes that the key issue here is appearance – brands ‘will need to seem ethically robust and environmentally pure.’49 The Economist called corporate social responsibility ‘one of the biggest corporate fads of the 1990s.’50 Holt overlooks the market’s cynical use of social responsibility as a propaganda technique. As the Economist notes, there is no need to transform firms into locations of social justice when they only need to seem ‘ethically robust and environmentally pure.’ This class of argument tries to reframe corporate civic accountability and consumer sovereignty by claiming that citizens’ power is now supplanted by consumer power. But the arrival of a ‘post-postmodern’ market where firms fully ‘shoulder civic responsibility’ is at best utopic thinking. Consider the response to the ‘greening’ of corporate practices as recorded in the Girona Declaration: As a result of public pressure, some corporations have made changes in the direction of social and environmental sustainability. They are now more likely to admit that they have an impact on communities and the

Culture Jamming and the Transformation of Cultural Heresies 131 environment and some positive steps have been taken to remedy this. There are, however, limits to such change. Companies are eager to point to their ‘best practices’ as examples of corporate environmentalism and social conscience. However, core business practices in major sectors continue to be wholly unsustainable, and the deeper changes are not being made. As a result, much of what may be perceived as corporate environmentalism is merely greenwash – an attempt to achieve the appearance of social and environmental good without corresponding substance. Such greenwash is being used skilfully to manipulate public perceptions of corporations and diffuse public pressure to impose binding regulations. Through branding, corporate philanthropy, high-profile partnerships with NGOs and governments, and isolated but highly publicized ‘best practice’ projects, corporations are making every effort to improve their image. All in order to avoid making the necessary changes to their core business practices demanded of them by civil society. By creating a benign public image and dominating international fora, corporations have exercised a virtual veto power over many initiatives seeking to impose obligations on them or force them to comply with basic social and environmental standards. If change has to happen, they want it at their pace and in their chosen direction.51

Holt’s analysis effectively reassures the business reader that the market will win in the end, ‘What has been termed “consumer resistance” is actually a form of market-sanctioned cultural experimentation through which the market rejuvenates itself.’52 This is indeed an extraordinary claim – consumer resistance occurs with the blessing of the market. I do not question the obvious, that the market quickly co-opts consumer resistance; but Holt goes too far when he implies that resistance merely rejuvenates the market. It is a popular line of thought, because it encourages the business community to think that capitalism is safe from, and will actually be reinforced by, our mundane acts of resistance. Thomas Frank repeats this argument in his book The Conquest of Cool (1997). Written in the grand tradition of journalistic sociology, it attempts to prove that the sixties ‘are a commercial template for our times, a historical prototype for the construction of cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent.’53 Here again we find the twentieth century being used as the template for the twenty-first century. Given the constant mutation in social orders throughout the historical record, it is odd that so many

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American thinkers see in capitalism the assimilation of all resistance and the prototype of our collective future. Consumer resistance, claim Holt and Frank, is little more than an opportunity for attaining market domination and inevitably plays into the hands of marketing departments and brand managers. In the contemporary context of intensified conglomeration of media properties under ever smaller numbers of corporations, and with recent examples of unparalleled opinion management by the American government, it is difficult to agree with Holt’s claim that the social-engineering paradigm of the modern market economy has ‘hit a cultural dead end.’54 With ever smaller numbers of corporations dominating market shares throughout the economy, claims about the diversity of products leading to a postmodern consumer culture where choice and diversity of meaning flourish ring hollow when that same ‘postmodern’ market is dominated by Wal-Marts and mass patterns of consumption. Holt recognizes that the mass market still dominates consumption activity: ‘[C]onsumers now form communities around brands, a distinctively postmodern mode of sociality in which consumers claim to be doing their own thing while doing it with thousands of like-minded others’ (83). Yet he fails to connect this ‘postmodern mode of sociality’ to the market’s domination of the symbolic economy and the mental landscape. If anything, branding is the logical extension of a modern market that continues to monopolize cultural authority. Calling such mass behaviour management ‘post-postmodern’ and equating it with emancipation is tantamount to raising a new flag over the empire of mind, rebranding the marketing machine, and assuring its management and new recruits that the discipline is hip, socially productive, and liberating. Nonetheless, Holt does provide insight into the way the market responds to consumer resistance. New marketing tactics are developed whenever new forms of resistance arise. Holt recognizes that it is becoming more difficult for corporations to control meaning (and thus control consumption). As popular culture is now the site of so much meaning production, Holt suggests that a new strategy of meaning-control is on the horizon: Market power resides with those firms that can effectively control the sites producing new meanings and experiences in public culture. For example, consider that Nike has all but abandoned the ‘best practices’ of modern marketing, in which companies aim to transfer to their brands those particular cultural meanings that build a consistent differentiated

Culture Jamming and the Transformation of Cultural Heresies 133 brand image. Instead, Nike is bent upon attaching the ‘swoosh’ logo to any person, place, or thing that is granted cultural value in the world of sports. Monopolizing the public channels of meaning creation is becoming more important than monopolizing particular meanings.55

Corporations, says Holt, must compete for control of popular culture – ‘the public channels of meaning creation’ – which is another way of saying that they must compete against each other in the race to privatize meanings that rise up from street level. If market power will indeed reside with firms that ‘control the sites producing new meanings and experiences in public culture,’ then the future market faces a very serious problem. The Internet is evolving into the primary site of new meaning production within public culture, and it is the very site at which corporations have the least control over meaning. Just as it is becoming strategically vital to control social environments that produce new meaning, along comes the Internet and blows away any possibility of control.

C H A PT E R 5

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The state and the economic system have limited control over the flow of goods. Billions of dollars are lost to software piracy, trillions of dollars to the underground economy, yet the economic system absorbs these losses and continues to work. While some businesses bitterly protest online piracy, others use it as a covert marketing strategy. Some of the largest companies within the software industry have been accused of promoting piracy in Third World markets as a strategy for gaining increased market penetration. Piracy is used as a strategy for locking cash-poor markets into applications before the competition can establish itself.1 Activity this widespread constitutes normal, ‘everyday’ economic behaviour. The moral panic expressed over digital piracy has overshadowed a much greater threat. The consumer’s role as a digital pirate is insignificant in comparison to the new role of the online consumer as a producer of cultural products. Throughout the 1900s capitalism played a central role in the production of cultural goods. These cultural goods in turn played a central role in organizing mass patterns of thought and action. One of the key differences between the 1900s and the present is the erosion of capitalism’s monopoly over the production of cultural goods. The Internet is challenging capitalism’s mastery of cultural production on two fronts: through the legal production of non-commercial cultural material, and through the illegal adaptation of corporate material. Internet users are producing enormous volumes of unique content within millions of Web sites. This cultural material includes such things as personal Web sites, Weblogs (also known as blogs), all forms of visual arts, homemade videos, games, erotica, and academic discourse. While such types of cultural material are not new, the scale of

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their production and their global accessibility within the Net is without precedent. Also without precedent is the illegal adaptation of corporate material, often referred to as culture jamming. Again, this form of cultural expression is not new, but the volume of production is unprecedented. Songs, pictures, movies, trademarks, brand names, and corporate Web pages are altered and redistributed among Internet users via the Web, e-mail, and peer-to-peer systems. I refer to these communicative acts as non-commercial cultural production because they occur outside of the marketplace. This productive activity is meant to be freely viewed and exchanged by the Internet community. This chapter will further explore how non-commercial cultural production and unconstrained expression within the Internet undermines capitalism’s production of meaning. The focus here is on how online consumer resistance transforms the meanings embedded in various forms of corporate speech such as brands, corporate identity, and products. Capitalism organizes our lives and our societies by extending its control over the production of things to also encompass the meaning of things. Diamond rings would not be on the fingers of so many brides if the consumer’s mind was not subject to powerful methods of persuasion and socialization.2 This persuasion system has been protected from external attacks through the regulatory mechanism of law and the legal fiction of private property. Trademark, copyright, and other aspects of intellectual property law give corporations extensive rights over the meaning and representation of their brands, logos, products, and corporate identity. Within capitalism meaning and identity have been transformed into a form of private property. This poses a particular problem within consumer culture. The social use of commercially produced meanings is restricted when these widely shared meanings are treated as private property. Corporate legal power shapes individual values and personal identity through its control of the meaning of consumer goods, such as diamond rings and Barbie dolls. This diet of values, transmitted through the products of corporate speech, must be fed to the online audience. Nothing less than the integrity of capitalism’s persuasion system and the management of the consumer’s mind are at risk here. In one of the more insightful explorations of how the corporate system of proprietary meaning is under attack from online consumer resistance, Rosemary J. Coombe and Andrew Herman describe intellectual property law as the link that connects commodity production to

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consumption.3 When the law treats meaning as a form of private property it thereby reinforces capitalism’s capacity to control meaning and interpretation ‘through strategic possessive activities designed to constrain surplus meaning and prevent the dilution of symbolic value’ (920). Coombe and Herman argue that corporations have failed to prevent the subversion of the privately owned symbolic economy by members of the Internet community. As with my own research in this area,4 they also note that when corporations attempt to extend their control of meaning over the realm of the Internet the general result is increased consumer activism, the spread of contested symbols, and an expanding circle of resistance against the privatization of meaning. The Internet defies legal constraints on meaning within the empire of mind by creating a communicative environment that dilutes corporately owned meanings and releases an unprecedented amount of surplus meaning into the mental landscape of consumer culture. One of the central issues in the discussion of consumer and audience resistance is an ongoing debate over whether or not popular culture has been absorbed and co-opted by capitalism’s dominant ideology. We have seen how the left dismisses the Internet as a failed domain of resistance within popular culture. Within academia, the left tends to interpret popular culture as an impotent form of resistance. The general outline of this attitude toward cultural resistance follows the argument put forward in The German Ideology, where Marx and Engels claim that, without control over the means of material production, the hapless bourgeoisie would never gain control over the means of mental production.5 McChesney, Schiller, Lessig, Lovink, Kroker, and others have prematurely thrown in the towel when they describe the Internet as having succumbed or as imminently succumbing to corporate control. The radical scepticism of the left is far from having achieved consensus. There is a large collection of literature that explores the democratic and anarchistic potential of the Internet.6 One of the more significant explorations of the Internet as a site for subversion and insurgency is Nick Dyer-Witheford’s Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (1999). Dyer-Witheford’s analysis parallels many of the conclusions reached herein (‘What people want from the on-line environment is global, communal conversation rather than digital consumer services’) and provides a critical corrective to the left’s failure to account for the Internet as a potential site for the interruption of capitalism’s trajectory of increased control.7 While I would not go

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so far as to suggest, as Dyer-Witheford does, that a classless society is being brought about through digital media, his argument that the arrival of a post-capitalist society could be facilitated by the global network marks a significant contribution to the field of Internet cultural studies. Barbie and Online Cultural Resistance In contrast to the general tendency to dismiss the Internet as a viable field for strategic cultural resistance, this chapter will explore instances of resistance within online popular culture that are paradigmatic examples of popular control over the means of meaning production. Corporations are desperately trying to project the marketplace’s programming of belief and action into the online media environment. Thus far they have failed. An American cultural icon, the Barbie doll, provides fertile ground for investigating this failure to control intellectual property – privately owned meanings – within the Net. Barbie’s position in the cultural history of the Net reveals the extent of the failure to extend property rights and definitional control into cyberspace. The transformation of the pink princess into a resistance fighter in a cultural war of the twenty-first century suggests that achieving control over meaning within the Internet will prove to be equally improbable as the attempt to eliminate digital piracy, if not moreso. In a survey of the economic and cultural impact of Barbie, the Economist borrowed ‘resistance is futile’ language from Star Trek’s terrifying Borg collective to describe the pink mass-marketing phenomenon: ‘Of all the forces against which resistance is futile, Barbie ranks right up near the top ... [O]ver one billion Barbie dolls have been sold. The average American girl aged between three and 11 owns a staggering ten Barbie dolls ... An Italian or British girl owns seven; a French or German girl, five. The Barbie brand is worth some $2 billion – a little ahead of Armani, just behind the Wall Street Journal – making it the most valuable toy brand in the world.’8 Cultural interpreters have long noted the fantastic plastic girl’s role as an icon – a gendered representation of the American dream – huge breasts, fast cars, unlimited clothes, undying youth, and desired by hundreds of millions of children and adults. Mattel describes Barbie as a programmer of consumption and a representative of the ideal American consumer. Barbie is a ‘lifestyle, not just a toy... a fashion statement, a way of life’ (21). Few things better represent the marketplace’s pro-

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gramming of desire and colonization of the imagination than Mattel Corporation’s Barbie doll. Barbie occupies a unique place in the cosmology of consumer culture. Given her status as an icon, Barbie provides a way to test the success or failure of the corporate control of meaning within the Internet. With over a thousand lawsuits or legal threats in play against Internet members who have made use of the Barbie image, Mattel has gained a reputation as ‘one of the most vociferous and energetic of corporate censors in cyberspace.’9 Mattel is well known for its exceptionally aggressive and punitive use of litigation as a method of bullying artists and Internet members who dare make use of the pink Icon. The corporation’s zealous defence of the purity of Barbie’s meaning has even extended to legal assaults on authors of Barbie jokes. Between 1996 and 1998 I studied Mattel’s legal actions against online artists. Returning to the subject five years later I found that Mattel was fighting a losing battle. For every appropriated image or Web-site parody Mattel’s lawyers have managed to remove from the Web, others appear in its place. While it is extremely difficult to quantify material on the Internet, the amount of Barbie parodies has increased dramatically since my initial investigation. Where they were once largely confined to Web pages, now Barbie parodies are exchanged by e-mail and through new peer-to-peer applications such as Kazaa. Significantly, re-articulated images of Barbie now appear six times among the first twenty images returned under Google’s ‘Images’ search function when ‘Barbie’ is entered. This is yet another indication of the degree of subversion taking place among brands online. Illegal Barbie art exchanged through Web sites, Usenet newsgroups, file-sharing programs, online auctions, and e-mail servers has transformed a corporation’s pink princess into the Sorority Slut Barbie, Hacker Barbie, Tourette Syndrome Barbie, Lesbian Bondage Barbie, Gangsta Bitch Barbie, Exotic Dancer Barbie, Transgendered Barbie, and Barbie on a Cross.10 Barbie is a favourite object for erotic humour. Typical of the use of Barbie within erotica Web sites, one Web page asks, ‘What Naughty Barbie Are You?’11 Appropriated Barbie dolls also appear in erotic and violent videos. One widely traded video, Wheelchair Rebecca by Roy T. Wood, features two dolls named ‘Darbie and Ben’ having rough sex.12 Another video combines music with Barbie and a tattooed Ken doll engaging in vigorous sex.13 A Spanish-language parody, Ken bin Laden and Barbie Taliban, also demonstrates the increasingly international scale of online consumer appropriations.

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Within the Net Barbie is a favourite subject of the visual arts, erotica, political protest, personal reflection, humour, and social commentary. Barbie has left her parents’ home, shacked up in cyberspace, and now leads a double life as both a cultural icon of capitalism and a taboofilled symbol of consumer resistance and identity politics. Barbie made her debut as a female symbol in 1957 after Ruth Handler designed a doll with a body based on Bild Lili, a German doll that was marketed as a sex toy for men. Lili first appeared as a prostitute in a German comic strip. Ruth formed the Mattel Corporation with her husband Elliot Handler and named Mattel’s first product after their daughter, Barbie. The Barbie doll grew up to become one of the most prominent and lucrative symbols of consumer culture and the American female. Within consumer culture both on and off the Internet there is an ongoing struggle between the Mattel Corporation and numerous groups over the representation of Barbie. Typical of this struggle over the meaning of Barbie were the actions of the New York–based Barbie Liberation Organization. During Christmas 1993 this self-described network of artists, parents, feminists, and anti-war activists switched the voice boxes of three hundred ‘Talking Duke’ G.I. Joe and ‘Teen Talk’ Barbie dolls, then placed the tampered toys back on store shelves. This action made news headlines when over Christmas deepvoiced Barbies were heard to say, ‘Dead men tell no lies,’ while G.I. Joes openly worried in a female voice, ‘Will we ever have enough clothes?’ Mattel has engaged in legal battles over the use of the Barbie name and image in song recordings, documentaries, magazines, visual art, and Web sites. The Internet’s erosion of capitalism’s definitional control can be seen in a normative debate that has pitted artist Mark Napier and his supporters against Mattel. These two groups engaged in a battle over the use of Barbie’s image within Napier’s visual art. In 1996 Napier created a Web site called The Distorted Barbie, which featured images of Barbie digitally reshaped to mimic media icons, such as Kate Moss and Dolly Parton, as well as distorted images titled ‘Fat and Ugly Barbie,’ and ‘Possessed Barbie.’ Napier gives the following explanation of Barbie’s meaning and his artwork: Barbie says a lot about the world. I can’t think of any other icon that is more widely accepted as an image of femininity. Barbie is a defining force for both women and men, for the culture in general. We have chosen this

140 The Empire of Mind image, voted for it with our dollars, promoted it unconsciously or consciously ... But I think it’s about time this icon diversified a little. What about all those aspects of our society that are not represented by Barbie? Let’s open up the closet doors and let out the repressed real-world Barbies; Barbie’s extended family of disowned and inbred rejects; politically correct Barbies that celebrate the ignored and disenfranchised.14

In October 1997 Napier received a letter from Mattel’s lawyers which claimed that Napier’s Web site violated their trademark and copyright. Napier responded to the legal threat by changing all the Barbie images within his Web site. But before Napier changed his Web site, a group of artists at Detritus.net made duplicate copies of Napier’s original Barbie images, which then remained on the Internet and propagated to other Web sites. Napier, a painter of Barbie images since 1987, found himself caught up in a definitional struggle with Mattel over the meaning of Barbie. Napier’s own description of the meaning of Barbie reveals an awareness that the values of the economic system are at stake within this cultural debate: This is about the sacred cows of western culture. The golden idols. Not symbols of religious power, they are symbols of buying power, profit and revenue streams. These are secular idols known in the corporate world simply as ‘cash cows.’ One such cow is called ‘Barbie.’ Idols of identity. Symbols representing the values and traditions of a consumeristic society ... Pick any icon. Barbie is a perfect subject for an inquiry into symbols. She is nearly ubiquitous, crosses international and religious borders. She is available to children and so is a part of their education and growth, and she is a product of the contemporary commercial image making industry, in some ways the same industry that produced the images, of Ronald Reagan, Kate Moss, Nintendo and the Persian Gulf War.15

Barbie is at the middle of a fierce debate over her role in the management of desire among young consumers. Barbie plays a very specific role within the economic system – the eroticization of female identity and the socialization of each new generation of consumers. The Mattel Corporation is acutely aware of Barbie’s role as the pink programmer of young consumers and profits handsomely from the plastic princess of capitalism. In 1996 Mattel and Avon joined forces to introduce a line of Barbie lip balms, perfumes, shampoos, conditioners, bubble

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bath, and hand creams. Their target market was girls aged six to twelve in the United States, Canada, and various Latin American countries, with plans for expansion into Europe and Asia. Barbie’s influence on consumers’ buying patterns proved to be formidable. Mattel uses Barbie for much more than branding young girls’ use of personal care products. The Barbie brand name is attached to a wide variety of products such as toy computers, beauty products, home decor items, fashion accessories, and sporting goods. Barbie’s role as a programmer of consumer behaviour renders her a target for illegal appropriation and redefinition. Care must be taken not to overstate the evasion of the rule of law within the Internet. Many redefined Barbie images have been removed after artists received cease-and-desist legal threats from Mattel’s lawyers. Often artists place a scanned copy of the cease-and-desist order and their own reply on the Web in place of the redefined Barbie image or satirical text. These replies usually dispute Mattel’s claims about fair use of copyrighted property, yet recognize that the artist cannot afford an expensive legal battle. Yet frequently an image, a Web page, or an entire Web site that has been removed quickly reappears elsewhere on the Net. One such redefined Barbie image that was forced off the Web by Mattel lawyers, only to reappear instantly, is Barbie on the Cross by American artist Carol McCullough. McCullough describes her art as a response to abuse and self-censorship. Censorship for me is a life-long issue. When I was a small child I was abused by a trusted adult and family friend: the minister of our church. I was threatened with death and damnation to hell if I dared to even think about the incident. It affected my life in profound ways which I am only now, 33 years later, beginning to understand. Because of this, I censored myself and especially my artwork. Now, as I have regained awareness of my past, I am able to remove the harsh internalized censor. I can now express my soul in my art, which is the highest form of beauty. Once I began this new journey of allowing my true beliefs, visions, horrors, pain, and ecstasy to become externalized in the ‘real’ world, I faced a new problem: censorship by others.16

Typical of the virus-like effect that cyberspace has upon content, McCullough’s Barbie on the Cross image reappeared on other Web sites in defiance of Mattel’s censorship actions. While Mattel can enforce its

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definitional control over Barbie within commercial media systems such as magazines, recordings, and commercial products, the corporation experiences extreme difficulty in enforcing a similar level of control in cyberspace. When Mattel wins a lawsuit, the disputed material is no longer distributed within commercial media. But within cyberspace a successful lawsuit or threat of legal action often fails to eliminate the disputed material. Contested material, such as Napier’s Barbie artwork, simply migrates almost instantly to multiple locations on the Web. Whereas in commercial media the contested use of Barbie is quickly suppressed, within the Internet subversive Barbie symbols are a constant feature of the symbolic landscape. Mattel can easily suppress redefined images of Barbie within corporate media systems because these systems are structurally isolated and highly responsive to the rule of law. It is rare for material that violates a copyright to migrate from one print publisher to another. But cyberspace is an integrated, networked environment where millions of different Web sites are connected to each other. This allows symbols to flow throughout the global Web at near instantaneous speed. The Internet is a structurally differentiated mode of communication that can be described as holographic. Information and symbols act as if they are located not at any one place but at all places at the same time. The holographic character of the Internet renders corporations largely incapable of suppressing every appropriated piece of corporate speech. Within cyberspace illegal symbols and texts spread from Web site to Web site, mailbox to mailbox, and infect the symbolic landscape with subversive meanings and taboo-ridden values. The online audience is unconstrained by direct definitional control. Individuals respond to the absence of expressive freedom in corporate media by creating and disseminating their own preferred meanings within cyberspace. This has led to a crisis within capitalism’s symbolic economy. If companies do not protect their intellectual properties, then they risk their trademarks being diluted and entering the public sphere or being challenged by a competing company. If they aggressively protect their property claims within the Internet they risk encouraging collective action in a consumer environment that is distinctly hostile to corporations. The common legal response of sending a cease-and-desist letter to the author of an appropriated image can backfire. These letters are now used as a source of authentication and validation among the culture jamming community.17 Any strategy corporations use to preserve

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the status of their intellectual property within the Internet tends to foster counter-strategies. The legal system’s failure to restrict the circulation of appropriated proprietary meanings represents a serious threat to the reproduction of capitalism. In an economy where the consumer generates twothirds of all economic activity, it is imperative that law control the meaning of corporate brands and consumer goods. Yet an aggressive assault on appropriated images generates further negative commentary on a company’s behaviour. Belligerent attempts at controlling meaning almost inevitably lead to Web sites being created for the sole purpose of tracking a corporation’s abusive trademark claims and documenting any related ethical breaches, such as labour, health, and environmental transgressions. Whereas there were no Web sites dedicated to tracking Mattel’s actions in 1996, by 2003 there were at least two – barbieslapp.com and mattelsucks.org. While these anti-Mattel Web sites may also succumb to legal attack by Mattel, as did the mattelsucks.com and barbieshome.com sites, we can reasonably predict that a successful legal assault will only generate other anti-Mattel Web sites in their place. Anti-corporate speech on the Internet will not be suppressed solely through legal mechanisms. When corporations attempt to intensify their control over meaning within the Internet, the effort invariably leads to increased efforts at liberating corporate intellectual property. Isolated acts of appropriation often gain national press exposure when popular brands and companies are involved. This further encourages collective action in support of art and artists under assault, and the entire event can end up archived throughout the Internet. This is precisely what happened in the assault on Napier’s art. Mattel’s failure to constrain Napier’s reinterpretation of Barbie has been documented in scholarly journals, popular books, Internet case law, doctoral dissertations, student papers, and online university seminars such as Harvard Law School’s Intellectual Property in Cyberspace 2000.18 The Napier case has become part of university courses in the fields of communication, law, media, culture, women’s studies, and numerous other subject areas. By attempting to extend definitional control over Napier’s art, the Mattel Corporation inadvertently fostered the spread of his appropriated Barbies and ensured that their meanings were entrenched in multiple areas of academia and popular culture. His appropriated meanings are further preserved as part of the cultural history of the Internet. By trying to overdetermine the meaning of its private prop-

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erty, Mattel guaranteed that competing alternative meanings propagated and became fixed within the Internet’s cosmology. This dynamic carries far-reaching implications for the description of Internet culture as a source of social change. Capitalism and the Ideal Body Although Mattel’s Barbie is just a toy, she also represents an ideal body within the symbolic landscape of capitalism.19 Mary Douglas’s argument that symbols based on the human body express different social experiences reveals the significance of appropriated Barbies proliferating within the symbolic landscape.20 A social order and its ideal notions of the body tend to correspond with a dominant pattern of symbols (119). Yet any one social order never incorporates the entire range of human experience. As a prostitute, lesbian, drug addict, Christ-figure, and so forth, Barbie’s symbolic form represents widely divergent social experiences. The critical difference between Mattel’s official symbol set and the ‘illegitimate’ symbols of cyberspace is that the officially sanctioned Barbies maintain a dominant presence, while appropriated Barbies are largely relegated to art shows, the alternative press, and the Internet. It could be argued that while capitalism strives to suppress certain human experiences, the Internet allows these experiences to be fully expressed in symbolic form. Appropriated Barbies reveal how the Internet allows for the unconstrained representation of social experience, whereas corporate media’s symbol flow represents a more constrained representation of social experience. The corporate Barbie of Mattel expresses capitalism’s eroticization of female identity and its preferred method of selfconstruction through the acquisition of consumer goods. Consumers replicate these approved meanings within Barbie enthusiasts’ Web sites, while others subvert Mattel’s Barbie with a wide variety of alternative meanings – drugs, alternative sexuality, poverty, single motherhood, inter-racial sex, and subverted religious meanings such as Barbie semi-nude on a cross. Such alternative meanings do occasionally occur within corporate media, as is seen in the case of the Aqua song ‘Barbie Girl’ and in the publication of Tom Forsythe’s visual art.21 In both of these instances Mattel’s litigation failed to eliminate the reinterpreted Barbies from the cultural landscape and store shelves. The critical point here is that within cyberspace such meanings almost entirely escape the censorship filter of the corporate definitional system.

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In commercial media Barbie is carefully defined by Mattel and confirms Douglas’s observation that highly controlled symbolic behaviour expresses all-embracing social constraints. A highly controlled symbol system and a highly controlled social order go hand in hand. Within commercial media, and with few exceptions, Barbie expresses only those meanings deemed acceptable by her corporate parent, Mattel. A highly controlled Barbie corresponds to the intense level of social conditioning that takes place within the empire of mind. Social constraints are propagated through the economy’s proprietary symbol system. Master symbols of the body are disseminated through the marketplace and guarded from appropriation by the regulatory mechanism of the law. Until the Internet arrived, capitalism maintained a monopoly over the production and distribution of master symbols that shape experience. The anomaly of cyberspace has injected uncontrolled symbols into the cosmology of capitalism. Douglas also notes that highly uncontrolled symbolic behaviour, the type of symbolic behaviour readily observable throughout cyberspace, is less taboo-ridden. Indeed, in cyberspace Barbie’s behaviour is barely constrained by either taboos or her corporate parent. Douglas’s suggestion that each social environment establishes its own limits to expression raises an intriguing question as to what happens when a social order fails to establish limits to expression.22 It appears that we have just begun a collective experiment that will eventually answer this question. The contrasting symbol systems of commercial media and cyberspace would be irrelevant if the symbolic order were merely an expression of the social order. However, the cultural theory of Douglas does not reduce the symbolic order to that level. If symbols only represented social reality, then they would play no role in changing collective experience. However, the situation is more complex than simple representation, and it is in this complexity that the Internet gains significance as a source of social change. Douglas argues in Natural Symbols that symbols carry the power to control a social order through the implicit assumptions that they represent. Symbols, particularly those involving the body, create a perceptual bias ‘with strong philosophical and political as well as religious aspects’ through which the world is perceived (xiv). This bias serves to reproduce and control the social order. The bias embedded in a set of privileged symbols of the body actively orders social action through their implicit meanings, and thus it is ‘essential for us to understand what bodily symbols are dominating

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the social life’ (xiv). Barbie is the object of an intense debate because individuals are aware of her ability to influence the social order. Capitalism’s social order is reinforced through the assumptions implicit in its widely shared master symbols. The subversion of Barbie is best seen, therefore, as a reaction against the implicit assumptions of capitalism as embodied in Mattel’s constrained Barbie. A nude Barbie on a cross is simultaneously a symbolic deconstruction of Mattel’s plastic princess and a proposal for a new range of experiences within the social order. Douglas describes this type of symbolic destruction of categories as a response to social life excessively structured by rules that determine how individuals relate to each other (xvi). The officially sanctioned corporate Barbie and flesh-and-blood females both exist within capitalism as highly determined in terms of sexual identity, consumption patterns, acceptable roles, mating, and reproduction expectations. By overdetermining meaning and excessively structuring the social order, capitalism invites the destruction of its master symbols. Overdetermination promotes resistance within a highly constrained consumer culture. Barbie provides an example of public meanings being both fixed and challenged through the implicit meanings embedded within the consumption activities of various groups of Barbie users. Within consumer culture Barbie is good to think with. As with the often illegal or highly litigated work of artists, Mattel also replicates variety in the social order through its continually expanding line of Barbie products. By appropriating multicultural identities and adapting Barbie to the changing position of women in the workforce, Mattel produces a wide variety of ethnic and career Barbies. Yet corporate Barbie’s diversity of social experiences is less than liberating and empowering. Hannah Tavares’s analysis of Mattel’s Polynesian Barbie places the ethnic doll in the context of officially sanctioned visions of Polynesia. Tavares suggests that Mattel’s representation of Polynesian women and culture reproduces the ‘colonialist discourses that have coded Pacific cultures in infantile and idyllic ways ... [S]uch representations work to reduce the historical Pacific ... to a static space of childlike and placid bodies.’23 In products such as Hispanic Barbie, black Barbie, and Asian Barbie, Mattel incorporates multicultural sensibilities as a way of responding to growing demand for cultural diversity in consumer goods. The result, however, is not liberation but the reproduction of colonial attitudes. On the surface it appears as if expanding variety in the marketplace provides consumers of Barbie dolls with a greater diversity of choice in self-construc-

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tion. Yet these products reproduce the discourse of empire, the colonial subject, and the codes associated with the heterosexual male gaze. What looks like diversity and freedom of choice turns out to be stereotypical constructions of femininity and race (60). Widely shared symbols such as Barbie or the performer Madonna are not without contradiction, as they embody the complexity inherent in the social order itself. Yet the recognition of contradictory elements within a master symbol should not be taken to mean that there are no privileged or preferred meanings in the economy’s sanctioned symbols. Madonna is widely cited as an example of a contradictory set of meanings.24 Her work actively subverts the male gaze while reinforcing the imperative to consume and be consumed. Both Barbie and Madonna function as contradictory messages of liberation and subjugation, but to suggest that these symbol sets equally convey contradictory elements would overlook how the commercial media privileges those meanings that replicate economic values. When Madonna is presented within the context of MTV, the consumption imperative strongly influences the reception of the meaning of Madonna. Here I am suggesting that the meaning of a symbol is strongly influenced by its location within the media system. When the symbol-set of Madonna is located within commercial media, those meanings that are compliant with capitalism are thereby privileged. The location of a symbol is a critical indicator of its use within the social order. This is another way of saying that, as a system, commercial media in general and television in particular do not free the audience to derive any meaning they please. Content is selected and structured in such a way as to ensure that meanings compliant with capitalism come to the foreground, while contradictory meanings are reduced to noise in the signal. Commercial media cannot be reduced to a Fiskian ‘semiotic democracy,’25 an environment that delegates the production of meaning to the audience, without dismissing the intention of the system behind the medium. Crediting the audience with a high degree of perceptual and interpretive freedom is tantamount to saying that hundreds of billions of dollars in the entertainment and advertising industries are wasted on an audience that is free to interpret the world uninfluenced by the medium in which it is immersed. The mind and the body cannot be isolated from the dominant symbolic economy of the surrounding social system. The way we experience our own body is inevitably a result of the dominant representation of an ideal body. Barbie is one of many such

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ideal bodies produced by corporate speech that carries implicit assumptions, a diet of values, that structure the social order. Within capitalism, corporate speech monopolizes the representation of the ideal body and defends its monopoly through the aggressive use of law. Through its control of commercial media and its disproportionate access to expensive legal regulatory mechanisms, corporate speech ensures that the body is subject to the dictates of the symbolic economy. The law plays a special role in enabling the economy to treat both the physical body and symbolic representation of the body as property. A seminal account of the body in legal thought, Alan Hyde’s Bodies of Law, describes how law constructs the body as property and commodity.26 The law’s treatment of the body, Hyde argues, normalizes exploitation and facilitates the regulation and domination of the individual. Capitalism requires that we experience our own bodies in a way that fits with the dominant logic of the marketplace and law ensures this end by propagating property metaphors for the way we conceive of bodies, be they our own or Barbie’s. Hyde describes law as an apparatus of social control that suppresses alternative conceptions of the body. He also argues that legal discourse is poorly equipped for dealing with the use of the body ‘as a symbol in a larger communicative message’ (220). So whether the law is dealing with our own bodies or the privately owned body of Barbie, it is ill equipped to account for the communicative impact of controlled bodies on the social order. With a weak capacity to deal with the body-assymbol, the law overwhelmingly submits to the regulatory apparatus of capital and generally displays ‘fear and hatred of the body’ (117). This tendency has an immediate impact on outlaw sexualities or any representation of gender beyond normative heterosexuality. Hyde does not deny that there is freedom of body construction within the social order. He recognizes that wide ranges of competing discourses and multiple representations of the body do exist, but notes that these competing discursive constructions ‘have a contemporary subterranean existence’ (261). It can be safely argued that the Net is fast becoming the primary location for discursive constructions of the body that refuse to submit to the regulatory apparatus of law and capital. As I wrote this section on the control of the body within capitalism, newspapers in Canada announced the federal Liberal government’s move to legally recognize gay marriage. Meanwhile, the American Supreme Court announced a landmark decision that overturned laws that criminalize homosexual

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behaviour in Texas. Once again, we find that the destruction of the symbolic economy taking place within the Internet is mirrored in the surrounding social world. The aggressive redefinition of the body and ‘legitimate’ sexuality within cyberspace are part of a broader postmodern fragmentation of long-standing categories of marriage, sexuality, and identity. Through the subterranean cultural environment of the Internet, competing constructions of the body are polluting the controlled symbolic landscape of capitalism. Because symbols actively influence the shape of the social order (as opposed to merely representing social experience), these alternative representations have the potential to undermine capitalism’s mastery of the symbolic economy and its social order. The redefinition of the body is at the centre of the struggle over corporate power. Uncontrolled online bodies and out-of-control Barbies are a direct threat to the ideal social body of capitalism. The assumption that capitalism’s regulatory regimes will eventually rein in uncontrolled representation will leave corporations unprepared for the emergence of a new cosmology of non-commercial symbols within the heart of the empire of mind. McDonald’s and Online Cultural Resistance When it comes to consumer resistance on the Internet, Barbie’s body is just the tip of the iceberg. Entire corporations are also under sustained assault. McDonald’s provides an example of corporate impotence in the face of online criticism. The following case study explores how McDonald’s functions as another master symbol of capitalism and further demonstrates that, at present, consumers enjoy unparalleled capabilities of uncontrolled anti-capitalist expression. Members of the Internet community have engaged in cooperative online media activism and removed the grease paint from one of capitalism’s favourite clowns. Between October 1989 and September 1990 the McDonald’s Corporation sent undercover private investigators to infiltrate the civil rights and environmental group London Greenpeace.27 Based on the findings of these industrial spies, McDonald’s issued writs for libel in 1990 against five members of London Greenpeace for responsibility in distributing a leaflet titled What’s Wrong with McDonald’s? The leaflet accused McDonald’s of exploiting children with advertising, promoting an unhealthy diet, poor labour practice, environmental negligence,

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and the ill treatment of animals. Three of the five formally apologized but two individuals, Helen Steel and Dave Morris, decided to represent themselves in court against the corporation. This was the first time that anyone went to court against McDonald’s in a libel trial. McDonald’s legal action led to the longest and most expensive libel trial in Britain’s history.28 By the close of the trial, on 17 July 1996, there were more than 40,000 pages of documentary evidence and 20,000 pages of transcript testimony. When the trial came to an end Chief Justice Roger Bell ruled that Helen and Dave had libelled McDonald’s, but as the two defendants had proved many of their allegations, they would only owe half of the £60,000 claimed damages. The judge found that the defendants had proved ‘that McDonald’s “exploit children” with their advertising, falsely advertise their food as nutritious, risk the health of their most regular, long term customers, are “culpably responsible” for cruelty to animals, are “strongly antipathetic” to unions, and pay their workers low wages.’29 Two days after the verdict Helen and Dave were once again leafleting outside McDonald’s. In what was probably a calculated publicrelations move, McDonald’s dropped their claim for damages and did not seek an injunction. Meanwhile, an estimated 400,000 What’s Wrong with McDonald’s? leaflets were distributed outside 500 of McDonald’s 750 outlets in Great Britain. The court case failed to stop the flow of leaflets, generated global press exposure, created what may have been one of the greatest corporate public-relations disasters, further encouraged solidarity protests around the world, and increased the readership of the leaflet far beyond the efforts of a few isolated protesters. This trial, referred to as McLibel by the world press, provides an example of an intense normative debate over a central symbol of capitalism. The debate over the meaning of McDonald’s reveals how uncontrolled expression by the Internet community subverts the meaning of capitalism in a manner simply not possible within the structural constraints of commercial media. In an effort to publicize the struggle against McDonald’s and raise a legal defence fund, the McSpotlight Web site (mcspotlight.org) was launched in February 1996. McSpotlight now provides an almost complete record of the trial and contains the entire 800-page judgment of Justice Bell, the official summary of the verdict as read in court by Bell, the entire official court transcripts (over 30,000 pages), the closing submissions from plaintiff and defendants, over ninety witness state-

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ments, company publications, scientific reports, newspaper articles, transcripts of television and radio interviews, internal company memos, a fifty-three-minute video documentary titled McLibel: Two Worlds Collide, copies of the original What’s Wrong with McDonald’s? leaflet, ready for printing in over a dozen languages, and much more. The McSpotlight Web site was created by the McInformation Network, a team of sixty volunteers in twenty-two countries on four continents.30 The volunteers gave the following reasons for creating McSpotlight: [T]o support the heroic efforts of campaigners around the world attempting to expose the realities behind the glossy public images of multinational corporations; to show McDonald’s and the world that legal action and bullying by big business in an attempt to censor and silence critics (as in the McLibel trial) will not be accepted, and to show that such attempts can only fail now that the Internet provides an open and uncensored forum for the public; to demonstrate to other progressive campaigners that the Internet provides a new forum that need not rely on the attention of the traditional media – which invariably fails to fully cover progressive campaigns.31

The McSpotlight Web site, arguably one of the most sophisticated, widely seen, and effective Web protest models, was created and maintained at very low cost, with donations and fund-raising covering the hard costs of equipment and telephone-line rental. It continues to challenge the McDonald’s identity (brand perception) and its product claims. In 2000, mcspotlight.org was recording 1.5 million hits per month, which suggests that the site is still being accessed by tens of thousands of individuals. In February 2004, the search engine Google.com returned 23,600 hits on a Web search of ‘mcspotlight.’ The same term appeared 6400 within Google’s search of online discussion groups. The equally large occurrence of the term ‘McLibel’ on the Web (17,500) and within discussion groups (6740) indicates the degree to which the trial has become fixed within Internet culture as a symbol of consumer resistance, and suggests as well an erosion of the McDonald’s brand image within the online community. As with Barbie, McDonald’s provides a symbol of the economy’s values. Reflecting on its role as a symbol of capitalism, Douglas Kellner suggests that it is ‘one of the most contested corporations and media spectacles of the present moment.’32 McDonald’s operates as a master symbol of capitalism and globalization. Members of London

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Greenpeace targeted McDonald’s because of its role in symbolizing ‘everything they considered wrong with the prevailing corporate mentality.’33 Defendant Dave Morris described the McLibel trial as a public investigation into a corporation that ‘symbolizes a whole economic system.’34 Resistant consumers see McDonald’s as representative of capitalism’s core values. To attack McDonald’s is to attack capitalism, globalization, and American cultural imperialism. McSpotlight provides the following explanation of why McDonald’s became the target of a collective, global protest: McDonald’s was ‘singled out’ because, despite an annual global advertising budget of around $2 billion dollars, they have made every effort to stifle public criticism – from campaigners to trade unions, disgruntled workers to customers, and from the media ... Another key reason that McDonald’s has been singled out is that, because of the nature of the food industry, they come under criticism from many different campaigning groups – nutritionists, environmentalists, trade unionists, animal welfare campaigners and so on. In this way, they symbolise a wide range of different injustices, abuses and exploitations that are prevalent in the modern world ... They have also pioneered many business practices that have been taken up by others, and have come to represent a symbol of the way that society is going – ‘McDonaldization.’35

This interpretation of McDonald’s naturally differs greatly from the Corporation’s self-definition. McDonald’s presents itself as a corporation with a community-loving conscience. Their corporate Web site (mcdonalds.com) explains how they support sick children, protect the environment, fund education, and promote health. The McSpotlight Web site disputes most of these claims. As with Mattel, the McDonald’s Corporation has failed to control the meaning of its brand within cyberspace. The McSpotlight Web site has been duplicated around the globe, the leaflet continues to be distributed through cyberspace, and the Web site itself is a symbol of the Internet community’s ability to evade corporate mechanisms that control consumer expression and resistance. McSpotlight also provides a clear demonstration of the Internet’s structurally differentiated nature: it facilitates a high level of evasion from legal constraints. The site allows for the global dissemination of massive amounts of anti-capitalistic text at very low cost, which no other media system is structurally capable of doing. Online consumer resistance to McDonald’s extends

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far beyond the activity represented in McSpotlight.org and, as with many forms of non-commercial cultural production, is so extensive it defies cataloguing. There are tens of thousands of Web pages that contain anti-McDonald’s material.36 Anti-McDonald’s expression online is multinational, multilingual, scholarly, and populist. Online criticism of McDonald’s appears to be far beyond the reach of corporate definitional control. Only the application of tyrannical force could silence online anti-McDonald’s expression. Kellner provides a fair representation of what could be called a critical consensus when he argues that ‘there are a variety of objective reasons, revolving around health, environment, economics, and politics, that would justify criticism of McDonald’s and resistance to its products.’37 Within the academic literature there is a general consensus that McDonald’s food is unhealthy, bland, and a poor imitation of homemade meals. The academic consensus extends beyond a condemnation of McDonald’s food and includes a general agreement that the Corporation’s practices are environmentally degrading, that its advertising is highly misleading and manipulates children in particular,38 that its management practices degrade and alienate labour, and even that the architectural environment of its outlets is sterile and dehumanizing.39 Kellner effectively summarizes the entire issue of the place of McDonald’s in society when he writes that ‘there is little good one can say of this particularly noxious institution.’40 McDonald’s and the Moral Critique of Capitalism Online consumer resistance is part of a larger phenomenon of resistance that occurs offline across the globe. This is particularly true of anti-McDonald’s activism. Since 1999 McDonald’s restaurants have been bombed over eight times around the world. This poster child of capitalism is attacked at virtually every anti-globalization demonstration. As I wrote this book in the coffee shops of downtown Ottawa, the local McDonald’s restaurant was regularly boarded up every time a major protest rolled into town. None of the other equally culpable restaurant chains were attacked. Once a celebrated symbol of the American way, McDonald’s has been transformed into ‘the target of choice in protests against globalization and the poster child for what was wrong with Americanized and globalized consumer culture’ (47). From its founding in the 1950s to the early 1990s McDonald’s was perceived almost entirely positively by both consumers and the press

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(47). Now the Corporation acts as a barometer for consumer and citizen rage against destructive economic and political forces. McDonald’s has responded to the intensified criticism with aggressive litigation against its detractors. In the 1980s the Corporation sued over eighty British publications and organizations.41 As with Disney and Mattel, McDonald’s has made aggressive use of legal threats, with the result of muted criticism in the commercial press but with negligible effect upon online expression. Once again we encounter a corporation known for its aggressive use of law to silence its critics but impotent in the face of online consumer expression. Kellner describes McDonald’s as ‘the paradigm of mass homogeneity, sameness and standardization, which erases individuality, specificity, and difference.’42 McDonald’s acts as a reminder that resistance to capitalism is far from extinct. The resistance is massing in both the online and off-line worlds. A cultural divorce is well underway between the capitalist impulse towards the standardization of wants, the colonization of consciousness, and an Internet-facilitated fragmentation of meaning. At the centre of this cultural divorce are master symbols, such as McDonald’s, that profess to embody the very idea of America. That McDonald’s has come to represent American commercial imperialism cannot be dismissed as merely a product of the hypercritical imagination of a marginal community. In Britain, McDonald’s itself has actively attempted to associate its brand with the idea of America through advertising slogans such as ‘United Tastes of America.’ John S. Caputo’s semiotic analysis argues that McDonald’s advertising campaigns are successful within the global market because the Corporation has created an identity narrative tied to the myth of the American dream: ‘The McDonald’s narrative – the story – is an illusion that contains our [national] ideology.’43 By making false claims about what they are and what they represent, capitalism’s master symbols unwittingly invite challenge and resistance. The deconstruction of false claims is a particularly interesting example of an uncontrolled medium interfering with the corporate construction of the consumer’s world. As an uncontrolled medium the Internet allows individuals to challenge the McDonald’s Corporation’s own myths within a new public sphere. This process can be seen in the McSpotlight Web site, which repeatedly contradicts the public claims of McDonald’s through the use of internal corporate memos, the McDonald’s Web site, and statements made by McDonald’s executives

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during the trial. By putting McDonald’s in a position where the Corporation had to defend its actions, Helen and Dave provided their online supporters with a series of revelations about the flaws of McDonald’s, revelations that are now archived throughout the Internet. Within the Internet consumer resistance leads to revelation. Resistance to McDonald’s arises in no small part because of the role the Corporation plays as a master symbol of the economy itself. The most widely cited exploration of the role of McDonald’s as an exemplar of capitalism is George Ritzer’s The McDonaldization of Society. Ritzer’s restatement of Weber’s rationalization thesis argues that McDonald’s is a prime example of how economic rationalization promotes predictability and standardization. Rationalization has led to the standardization of cultural products. Ritzer coined the term ‘McDonaldization’ as a way of describing the contemporary process of rationalization. McDonaldization refers to a capitalist paradigm of economic and social organization that values ‘efficiency, predictability, calculability, control and the irrationality of rationality.’44 The rationalization that is promoted through the corporate practices of McDonald’s also occurs throughout most sectors of the economy. Following a century-long argument with roots in Marx and Durkheim, Ritzer insists that the economy operates by imposing limits to thought on the consuming masses. Capitalism’s rational economic processes create structural constraints that ‘exert considerable control over human subjectivity’ (239) and make it ‘much more difficult to manifest autonomy and individuality’ (240). In other words, through Ritzer we have arrived back where we started with John Kenneth Galbraith and Mary Douglas: the economy operates by standardizing wants, minimizing consumer sovereignty, and controlling the most fundamental processes of individual perception. As I have argued in chapter 1, Ritzer also argues that this process is expanding throughout society.45 For Ritzer the process of McDonaldization is a source of moral outrage and is comparable to the Holocaust: ‘[I]t might be that the only difference between McDonald’s and a concentration camp is that the former is killing its clients more slowly than did the latter.’46 Ritzer here joins the company of Martin Heidegger and Zygmunt Bauman when he likens capitalistic processes to the Holocaust.47 That McDonald’s and capitalism are compared to the Holocaust in both academic and popular discourse indicates the extreme degree to which the economic system is seen to be culpable. There is a clear tendency to

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equate McDonald’s with death, as can be seen by the recent appearance of the term ‘McFascism’ in popular and scholarly discourse and by the 4600 hits on Google when searching the term ‘McDeath.’ The expanding negative semantic field around McDonald’s is an obvious indication of a brand under sustained public criticism. This semantic field includes terms such as McDeath, McFascism, McGrease, McSlaves, McJobs, McNazis, McCholesterol, McCancer, McCardiac Disease, McCruelty, McSlime, and ‘unhappy meal.’ While most of the academic literature on McDonaldization focuses on Ritzer’s model of rationalization, little attention has been paid to consumer resistance to McDonaldization (as Ritzer himself has noted).48 Kellner notes that many of Ritzer’s critics ‘create apologetics and celebration of the mass culture he criticizes, thereby uncritically replicating a position increasingly widespread in cultural studies that puts all the weight of praxis and production of meaning on the side of the subject, thus effectively erasing the problematics of domination, manipulation and oppression from critical social theory.’49 McDonald’s can be read as an occasion for consumer sovereignty and an active audience, but only at the expense of situating the individual within a benign social environment devoid of structural domination, manipulation, and oppression. Intellectuals are not immune to a larger social context that celebrates America and McDonald’s as the epitome of democratic order and a free market, and ‘are all too eager to defend mass culture, consumption or McDonaldization against Ritzer’s often scathing criticisms’ (195). Attacking McDonald’s or, by extension, America, is tantamount to blasphemy within the sacred cosmology of capitalism. When Martin Parker rhetorically asks, ‘What foundations do we have for criticising McDonald’s?’ when it is enjoyed by billions of people, he makes light of some very serious charges the Corporation is facing in the court of public opinion.50 Even if a critique of McDonald’s requires a condemnation of something billions of people enjoy, that critique still must be made. When Parker asks, ‘Who has the right to take this kind of position?’ he overlooks the possibility that this is not a matter of rights but of moral imperative – an obligation to humanity and nature. Capitalism stands judged. Exercising moral judgment upon one corporation, billions of McDonald’s patrons, or all of humanity is not snobbery. A stern rebuke of McDonald’s is not the act of a cultural snob, it is an act of moral leadership, one hopefully tempered by a recognition that we are all culpable within capitalism. Parker does

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readily admit that there are many things about McDonald’s that are worthy of condemnation. Yet he overcomplicates the issue of what, if anything, would count as ‘compelling evidence’ (15). It is not uncommon to see analysts accuse Ritzer of cultural elitism and defend McDonald’s because millions of people want what the Corporation provides; therefore, they cannot all be wrong.51 This type of argument rests on a democratic sense of morality – if millions do it, desire it, or praise it, then it is just fine, thank you very much. Such judgments are tantamount to arguing that if it is a mass behaviour, then it is beyond criticism. This line of reasoning appears sound only because it disconnects what people want from the persuasion system that structures wants and likewise discounts what people do from the systemic consequences of their consumption patterns. How valid is a desire if the desire is the product of social engineering and therefore an erosion of individual sovereignty? Judging McDonald’s involves far more than observing the simple fact of the pleasure of a happy meal. Is Resistance Futile? Ritzer has been widely criticized for his position on resistance, which is seen as either pragmatic or fatalistic. He appeals to history as a guide and proposes that ‘McDonaldized systems will survive, even proliferate, long after we have moved beyond postmodern society and scholars have relegated postmodernism to the status of a concept of little more than historical interest.’52 Within academic discourse the suggestion that capitalism could recede into history and be replaced by another dominant mode of organization (or a multiplicity of modes) is often greeted with incredulity. History attests to the rise and fall of empires, economic systems, and cosmologies, yet Ritzer appeals to history as the ultimate proof that resistance against the capitalist mode of social order is futile. Ritzer’s grim confession that he does not think McDonaldization will be stopped underestimates the varieties of human experience that lie in our past and our future.53 The denial of the utility of resistance and the defence of capitalism as a permanent mode of organization is itself a product of the capitalist ideology. What could possibly affirm the naturalness or inevitability of a belief system more than the claim that resistance is futile? Many of Ritzer’s critics exhibit the same level of faith in the immortality and benevolence of capitalism. Deena Weinstein and Michael A. Weinstein dismiss any fight over the values implicated in McDonald-

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ization as ‘fruitless.’54 Richard Münch closes the door on the possibility of an alternative cultural system replacing capitalism’s rationalization of the social order when he claims that ‘no production of culture can pull itself away from the constraints of the market.’55 (What is the Internet if not a glaring demonstration that culture can be produced outside the constraints of the market?) Steven Miles argues that a rationalized economy allows young consumers to be ‘happier and more stable.’56 Miles does not extend the temporal scope of his analysis and thus avoids addressing how these same young consumers will feel when many arrive at an obese middle age and find this same liberating economy has bankrupted their health, retirement savings, and medical insurance.57 Kathryn Hausbeck and Barbara G. Brents’s claim that the efficiency, predictability, control, and calculability that are promoted by McDonaldization are, ‘perhaps, the most common and sought-after conditions of consumer life’ may be true or may reflect a fading paradigm of boomer-generation consumption.58 It may simply be the case that the consumer has been placed in a position where there is little choice but to accept the conditions of McDonaldization. That which is desired by business and that which is desired by the individual consumer are not necessarily the same thing. In the marketplace, business usually has the upper hand. It is a grave mistake to read the conditions of the marketplace as a simple reflection of consumer preference. The conditions of the marketplace reflect the concerns of the business community far more than they reflect the concerns of the individual. Robin Wynyard naively dismisses the impact of the economy as a persuasion system when he derides the charge that ‘we become what organizations like McDonald’s make us’ as ‘crass and patently untrue. At the end of the day, no one is forced to eat a Big Mac.’59 Wynyard would have us take ‘the reasons people give for their actions’ as a sufficient explanation for their actions (165). His analysis is tantamount to dismissing the entire persuasion system as little more than background noise within the social order. Likewise, when Mark Alfino appeals to Freud and suggests that ‘sometimes a Big Mac is just a burger,’ critical analysis demands a rejection of such simplistic reductionism.60 Systemic analysis – seeing the relationship between things and systems – demands that the burger never be divorced from the production system that brought it to our table. To disconnect social and environmental conditions from the mode of production that brings forth the burger is the ultimate injustice, for it hides the real cost of the burger from the con-

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sumer and so diminishes the possibility that individuals will take full responsibility for their acts of consumption. When Douglas Kellner insists that ‘[t]here is no question but that McDonaldization is here to stay,’ he also presumes too much.61 There is no question that capitalism is going to be with us for some time yet, but why insist that it will be a permanent feature of future history? To do so suggests a failure of the imagination as well as a failure to understand our innate ability to reimagine the world. Perhaps the biggest challenge to the effectiveness of resistance comes from the paradox of the Habermasian and Marxist perspectives. As summarized by Thomas M. Jeannot, their paradoxical view of society as an iron cage throws into question the utility of individual resistance to systemic forces: ‘[A]lternative action orientations presented on the level of individual responses can have no serious impact on the logic of systemic imperatives that both materially and symbolically structure our personal lives. If the pathological effects of McDonaldization can be reversed at all, then they must be reversed systematically.’ The iron cage is ‘a colonizing system of institutional values that lie beyond the capacity of merely private persons to substantially affect.’62 Of course, the key difference between the social system that Marx and Habermas described and the contemporary social order of the twenty-first century is the ability of the private individual to create and disseminate globally accessible public meanings that contradict the values of the colonizing system. Henceforth, capitalism’s colonizing value system is subject to the democratizing forces of the Internet. The strategic importance of system-reinforcing structures such as the state or corporate media as barriers to change has shifted. Now that unconstrained global expression has arrived as a permanent feature of the cultural landscape, the cosmology behind these structures – the ‘colonizing system of institutional values’ – is vulnerable in a way that it never has been before. As the Gutenberg press once did, so too is the Internet making it possible for individuals, and particularly groups of individuals, to substantially affect the symbolic economy that underwrites the institutionalized values of a colonizing system. This is also why there is limited value in the theoretical perspectives of earlytwentieth-century social theorists. Their models of colonizing systems and individual action did not foresee the rise of unconstrained global expression by private individuals. This led to overestimating the constraining force of institutions and underestimating the efficacy of

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counter-cultural expression, an oversight that continues to plague cultural analysis. The lack of attention to the phenomenon of resistance and the outright denial of any legitimate resistant position towards McDonaldization may have their roots in the elevation of theory over praxis within academic culture. It may also be due to a disconnect between popular culture and the privileged world of intellectuals. When Geert Lovink despairs that ‘[i]n general no big ideological debates occur in society. The Internet is no exception,’ one can only wonder what exactly he means by ‘big.’63 The proliferation of media collectives and anti-corporate volunteer networks, countless examples of online consumer resistance, millions of citizens marching in the streets against American imperial aggression on the same day – surely these constitute a big ideological debate over the shape and direction of world order. Along with his denial that there is any substantial ideological challenge underway within society, Lovink fails to see how the Internet is rapidly expanding the muted normative debate within corporate media culture. He even insists that ‘the global dissemination of a dialogical medium’ – people having conversations on the Internet – will fail to ‘spur real discussion’ (7). His claim that the online flow of symbols and words do not constitute ‘real discussion’ that can lead to social change is a striking example of an intellectual dismissing the value of non-commercial cultural production and grassroots dialogue. Perhaps now, more than ever, it is clear that the globalization that is at the core of Ritzer’s McDonaldization thesis is generating a global resistance movement. How Lovink can fail to see that consumer resistance to globalization/McDonaldization represents one of the biggest ideological debates in recent history, and why he dismisses the exchange of words and images over the Internet as an impotent force, is once again simply mind-boggling. Lovink is far from alone when he denigrates communicative exchanges that take place within the Internet community. Ritzer also disparages ‘most of the messages’ exchanged within cyberspace as ‘impersonal’ and concludes that online communication is ‘dehumanizing.’64 Again and again we encounter sceptics who are quick to dismiss communicative action within the Internet community. Jean Baudrillard dismisses communication mediums as the site of non-communication. Jodi Dean sees Internet communication as little more than an extension of marketplace ideology. Internet users are not engaged in real communication but in ‘communicative capitalism,’ a commodification of com-

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munication that undermines democratic action.65 In a similar fashion, Darin Barney argues that networked communication ‘shares less with community and commonality that it does with commodities.’66 He suggests that the reduction of online communication to digital bits (binary language) transforms the very essence of communication into an inferior phenomenon. Barney’s argument that computer networks transform such an exchange from interaction to a commodity-style transaction is philosophical excess in need of anthropological grounding. Barney believes that the use of computer networks for communication collapses information and communication ‘into the single category of exchange’ (97). Here we again encounter the effects of the normalization thesis at work. It is assumed that capitalism’s logic dominates the network, and thus transforms communication into a marketplace phenomenon of exchange. Again and again we find that capitalism provides theorists with the dominant set of interpretative metaphors for Internet activity. McChesney, Lovink, Ritzer, Baudrillard, Dean, and Barney all place the market in a dominant position within the Internet and thus quickly assume that it contaminates all online activity and outcomes. Their error lies in insisting that communications become commodities in the very environment that transforms commodities into publicly shared goods. Online consumer resistance also transforms the status of meaning as private property while simultaneously transforming the meanings embedded in intellectual property. Deep within the cultural roots of the Internet lies a hostility to the very notion of property. This century will reveal whether or not capitalism is capable of digging up these roots. Contemporary cultural theory must pay more attention to decommodified online behaviour and non-market cultural activity. Too often it is assumed that the Internet is a hypermarket when it may be better modelled as a predominantly anti-market cultural zone.

C H A PT E R 6

Online Journalism and the Subversion of Commercial News

Societies dominated by market economies share a common feature. Within the social orders of capitalism, the production of meaning is concentrated within an increasingly centralized network of corporations. Another defining aspect of capitalism is that it treats meaning as a form of private property. This system of centralized and privatized meaning production serves a very specific purpose – the management of individual belief and action. Still, the media environment is rapidly changing. Capitalism’s system of meaning production is now confronted with a highly decentralized communication system that treats meaning as public property. Industrialized meaning production is faced with the rise of an alternative meaning-production system – the Internet. This alternative system is barely two decades old, and as such can hardly be expected to have demonstrated a profound effect on the capitalist social order.1 Yet within the Internet we can see the beginnings of a revolt against commercially produced meanings and a general disregard for the notion of private property. One of the most active areas of cultural dissent is found within the sector of corporate meaning production known as the news. This chapter will outline this revolt against the commercial news industry and provide an indication of how the Internet may destabilize the industry’s ability to manage public opinion. Given the prevalence of the normalization thesis (i.e., the Internet will evolve into a predominantly commercial media system) among both left- and right-wing media theorists, it is not surprising that many see online journalism as a minor phenomenon with little potential as an agent of social change. Robert W. McChesney provides a typical example of the interpretation of online journalism from the perspective

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of the normalization thesis when he claims that the Internet ‘will not free us from a world where Wall Street and Madison Avenue have control over our journalism and culture.’2 (He is far from alone in his pessimistic evaluation of the Internet’s future.) McChesney reaches this conclusion because he believes that online news production will have to become commercially viable (for-profit), and that the Internet intensifies media concentration and convergence. He argues that a corporate hegemony of media conglomerates will eliminate any new media rivals within the Web. Having addressed the major flaws in McChesney’s normalization thesis in chapter 3, I will focus here on his claim that online journalism can only be viable if it is done by professionals working within the marketplace. For McChesney, ‘viable websites for journalism and information need resources and people who earn a living at producing them.’3 McChesney offers no real explanation of why the production of viable online content must take place within a capitalist form of commodity exchange. Given that hundreds of thousands (millions?) of entirely not-for-profit Web sites already exist and attract audiences, it is odd that he so readily dismisses non-market modes of content production. When McChesney claims that ‘there is little reason to expect a journalistic renaissance online,’ he has in mind a renaissance within online corporate journalism, and here I absolutely agree with him.4 But a focus on commercial Web sites in the news and entertainment sector leads McChesney to despair that ‘the media giants will be able to draw the Internet into their existing empire’5 and establish ‘hegemony over any new media rivals on the Web.’6 He argues that online news will lead to greater media concentration because it will surely succumb to the old corporate media hegemony. McChesney dismisses the significance of non-corporate online news as a potential source of change, claiming it has been ‘relegated to the distant margins of cyberspace.’7 Yet he underestimates the scale of participation in non-corporate news, the volume of production, and the quality of this new form of news, and overestimates the ability of the commercial sector to extend control over the online production and consumption of news. This chapter explores these issues of participation, quantity, quality, and control. I will argue that the Internet is not following the current trend in the commoditization of information and news and that, precisely because it remains outside the realm of the marketplace, it threatens the marketplace.

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Oddly enough, while McChesney is quick to dismiss novel forms of news production on the Web, the media industry itself is more cautious about this threat. When Anne Moore, Time Inc. chairman and CEO, expressed concern about the ‘proliferation of unchecked media on places like the web,’ she was putting into words a concern felt throughout the commercial media sector.8 Ken Auletta, author of the book Backstory: Inside the Business of News and media columnist for the New Yorker magazine, also notes that the Internet’s promotion of selfpublishing and diversity of opinions ‘scares the heck out of media moguls. It is a distribution source they don’t control.’9 Media executives have many good reasons for believing that unconstrained expression within the Internet is a threat to their market share, authority, legitimacy, and opinion-shaping capabilities. As with other areas of the Internet’s symbolic economy, the significance of the production of online news lies in the degree to which it contradicts commercial speech. Online news is significant as an agent of change because it is different. It is different because it is not subject to corporate control. Outside the Internet, news is the product of a handful of corporations. Its content is determined by the business needs of the corporations that own the news system, as well as by the needs of the entire commercial sector. Its content is also further shaped by commercialized newsfare’s dependency on the advertising sector. Many parties are involved in the production of commercial news, but the bulk of production is the result of cooperation between corporations. Commercial news is best understood as a product that enables the corporate sector to communicate with consumers. Journalists and publishers tend to deny that advertising and business interests erode journalistic standards, even though media critics have produced countless reports on how these vested interests alter news coverage.10 News is one of the rare forms of commercial product that is sharply discounted – the consumer actually pays little or nothing for it. Consumers pay very little for news because advertisers ‘foot’ the production bill. News corporations receive the largest portion of their revenue from advertising (usually around 75 per cent). This relationship is so integral to the media sector that the business press regards media and news corporations as a branch of the advertising sector.11 News corporations do not sell news, they sell an aggregation of eyeballs to advertisers. Through this exchange relationship commercial news is inseparably tied to the interests of the corporate sector. Perhaps one of the more socially significant aspects of the Internet is

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that it has enabled mass participation in the production and dissemination of news. While commercial news production is increasingly concentrated in the hands of an ever smaller number of media corporations, within the Internet we see exactly the opposite trend. A definitive feature of online news production is the very multitude of individuals who are engaged in one form or another of event recording, event commentary, and criticism of commercial news itself. It is impossible to ascertain exactly how many individuals contribute to the production of news online and do so outside the realm of the commercial news sector. Yet it is safe to say that the number of people involved in the production of online news who do so outside the corporate sector far exceeds the number of professional journalists. Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Matt Welch aptly summarizes the situation when he notes that ‘[n]ever before have so many passionate outsiders – hundreds of thousands, at minimum – stormed the ramparts of professional journalism’ (and here he only refers to those who keep Web logs).12 But a strict comparison of the number of amateur and professional journalists in either system – non-profit versus commercial news – is not really the issue. The issue here is the nature of the commercial system and the development of a novel system of news production. Within the Internet we find the presence of commercial news, but we also encounter an enormous volume of both news and commentary on the news that takes place outside of the commercial news sector and beyond its control. To varying degrees, this alternative system can be labelled non-profit. Some individuals do create news sites that sell banner advertising or promote other products or services. Sometimes these independent online journalists will receive a measure of fame (and profit from their fame), as happened to Matt Drudge. Sometimes they will simply solicit donations to help pay for server costs, connection fees, or the rent. Nonetheless, the vast majority of individuals who produce news and commentary on the Internet do so outside of formal corporate structures, institutional settings, and systems of economic reward. While many varieties of online news production exist, my purpose here is not to document the richness of this variety but to describe the outlines of alternative news production in general, which here I will label non-corporate news.13 Non-corporate news refers to the production of news within the Internet that does not occur within the confines of the commercial news sector and, therefore, produces unconstrained content. Non-corporate news systems within the Internet produce

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news that is not constrained by business relations with advertisers or other businesses – the much-criticized vested interests that circumscribe the production of news within the commercial sector. The difference I am describing is not absolute – exceptions do exist – but noncorporate online news can be said to exhibit a very weak relationship with the economic system, while the commercial news sector has an extremely strong relationship with businesses and advertisers. Non-corporate news encompasses the production of content within the Internet by amateurs and professionals working outside of formal corporate structures of news production and, generally speaking, beyond a system of market exchange. The vast majority of individuals involved are unpaid amateur producers of freely accessible content, but there are notable exceptions. My definition is similar to Jay Hamilton’s when he suggests that alternative media is distinguished by what it is not: ‘[C]onsider alternative media not as a technology or a product, but as the creation, spread, and adoption of new forms of representing the crisis of neoliberalism that are as de-professionalized, decapitalized, and de-institutionalized as they are incisive, mobilising, and accessible in production.’14 These characteristics provide an apt description of non-corporate news within the Internet. Within the critical analysis of commercial news there is a consensus that it serves the general purposes of the economic system, produces content that is congenial to the goals of capitalism, and is highly influenced by its relationship with the state and the business sector. In contrast to the economic and social function of commercial news, noncorporate news represents a substantial transition in the nature of news. Between the mid-1800s and the dawn of the 1900s news underwent a transformation from being largely controlled by the state to being largely controlled by the business sector.15 State-controlled media persisted throughout the 1900s and on into the present, but within areas where capitalism flourishes, this period saw the news quickly succumb to corporate ownership and control. We are now witnessing the third major historical shift in the economy, ownership, and structure of news production. I refer to this stage herein as non-corporate news because the significant factor in this third stage of development is the rise of a news-production system that is disconnected from the constraints of the corporate sector and connected to a very inexpensive global distribution platform (the Internet). This amounts to a new mode of production and dissemination that is liberated from the systemic constraints that characterize commercial news. Calling this a new economy

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of news production would miss the point of its most salient features – it is an anti-economy that resists and evades the imposition of marketbased modes of production and exchange. One of the main tenets of the liberal theory of journalism is the claim that news, like commercial media in general, has a substantial effect upon public opinion, public policy (governance), and the health of democratic states. Not surprisingly, conservative media theory and commercial journalism both insist that the power of media and the news is overstated. A typical example of commercial journalism denying its social power was seen when Newsweek columnist Robert J. Samuelson assured his readers that, ‘because the media are everywhere,’ people confuse this visibility with power.16 Journalists, Samuelson claims, ‘rarely create or manipulate’ public opinion (45). This is a naive argument that betrays a lack of understanding of critical media theory – a form of ignorance common among media professionals.17 As British journalist David Walker summarized the issue, ‘[I]t would be uncontroversial to say that the media are powerful, in terms, say, of newspapers’ influence on the agenda of public policy debates, the tone of political discourse, the shaping of collective decision making.’18 Contrary to Samuelson, dominating the representation of reality, which is surely what commercial media does (it is indeed everywhere), gives the media substantial influence over what is seen to be legitimate. That which is legitimated through the omnipresence of the media is deemed normal, while that which remains relegated to the margins of the symbol system is deemed deviant. Samuelson denies any relationship between representation and social reality – between a dominant flow of meanings and normalized thought and behaviour. Samuelson is wrong; visibility is power. Theory aside, the motives of media barons also contradict Samuelson’s naive defence of journalism’s powerlessness. Media barons often make it clear that they own media products so they can influence public opinion and policy.19 As Paul Krugman told readers of the New York Times, ‘It goes without saying that Lord [Conrad] Black, like Rupert Murdoch, has used his media empire to promote a conservative political agenda ... [and] to reward friends, including journalists, who share his political views.’20 A substantial body of research has demonstrated that news manipulates public opinion. One of the more common techniques of opinion management is the simple process of selection and emphasis. Giving prominence to one subject while letting another recede into the background enables the media to manipulate the public’s priorities and

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fears. The process is imperfect and subject to competing agendas among political factions, elites, and business sectors, but Samuelson’s claim that news only rarely creates or manipulates public opinion is simply ridiculous. Those who deny media power usually decry hypodermic-needle conceptions of power that give the impression that the audience is a mindless mass ready to receive every suggestion from their puppet masters. Others will make a straw man out of systemic models of media influence, as exemplified by Christopher Dornan’s sophomoric dismissal of Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model as ‘some master plan for the manipulation of the masses.’21 Dornan, former director of the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University, offers an apolitical description of media production that ignores the regulatory function of the economy and denies the guiding hand of systemic values, elite interests, and business goals within commercial news. In place of any notion that commercial news might serve the political and business interests of its corporate parents, he proposes that news production takes place ‘in absurd, directionless and irrational gyrations’ (149). No systemic values here. No notion of editorial impositions by media owners, such as the Aspers’ pro-Israeli command-and-control editorial policies over the National Post. No recognition of the blatant pro-business, antilabour bias so pervasive in commercial journalism. Dornan does recognize that journalism, along with the entire mix of commercial media products, establishes ‘what is to be taken for real’ (a point that is lost on Samuelson), but he fails to ask ‘Whose reality?’ (149). The ‘real’ that is taken for granted in commercial news and media comprises the assumptions and values of capitalism. Justin Lewis describes news as delivering capitalist realism through a high level of structure and direction: ‘The news is ... a structure of highly coded messages, shaped by a complex series of codes that derive from the economic and ideological conditions of its production.’22 Likewise, Roger Fowler provides a stark contrast to Dornan and Samuelson when he concludes that ‘the practices of news selection and presentation are habitual and conventional as much as they are deliberate and controlled.’23 Consider the near complete news blackout by American media on the 2003 Federal Communications Commission vote to relax limits on the ownership of radio and TV stations and newspapers (thus opening the way for further media concentration in a smaller number of giant corporations).24 Such silence on the issue suggests deliberate control of news in the name of economic self-interest. That a director of

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a school of journalism and a writer in the employ of Newsweek both disconnect the media system from the systemic bias of the economic system demonstrates just how successfully the production system socializes the individual knowledge worker to its needs. The operation of power through commercial news is far more structured than ‘directionless and irrational gyrations’ and far more subtle than a conspiratorial master plan. As James Curran notes in Media Power, ‘The media can persuade, change and mobilize. However, the principal way in which the media influence the public is not through campaigning and overt persuasion but through routine representations of reality. This power of definition influences public understanding of the world, and in an indirect and contingent way, public attitudes and behaviour.’ Curran observes an ‘advancing tide of revisionist argument’ that understates media power – an observation about active audience theories that has been made throughout the critical literature.25 When academic analysis of media power confirms the denial of power that is repeated throughout the commercial news sector, scholarship becomes little more than cheerleading for capitalism. While the Internet is affecting commercial journalism in a variety of ways, the focus here is on what is occurring outside the domain of commercial news. It is unlikely that any changes in the corporate production of news brought about by the Internet will destabilize capitalism’s symbolic economy, as commercial news is merely the servant of the economy. But what will happen to the propaganda function of commercial news, its ability to assist in the manufacturing of consent and consumption within capitalism, if a substantial alternative news system arises within the Internet and beyond the constraints of the market? Already within the Internet the routine representation of reality is severely contradicted by non-corporate news. Every issue and cause is addressed by some form of non-corporate news voicing its concerns and feeding an audience online (they usually self-identify as alternative media). The Challenge of Non-Corporate Online News The Internet’s contradictory representation of reality – its ability to construct an alternative news discourse that critiques representations made by commercial news – is among its most significant characteristics as an agent of change. Of course, arguing that non-corporate online news is subversive begins with the premise that commercial news is

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part of a system of control and is implicated in a larger symbolic economy that produces and manages the consumer and the citizen. Here I have simply drawn the outlines of this premise. Needless to say, if commercial news has little or no propaganda effect within the economy and democracy, then any challenge to commercial news within the Internet will have that much less social significance. The literature surrounding online journalism is replete with reflections on the Internet’s conversational and collaborative dimension. This dialogic and egalitarian system of production is frequently contrasted with commercial journalism and its ongoing transformation into self-interested commercialism. Within the commercial sector, professional journalists respond with the accusation that online amateur journalists are not worthy of the title ‘journalist’ and that audiences demand the legitimacy guaranteed by known brands over the rantings of private and poorly trained individuals. That professional journalists and newscasters have had to defend their legitimacy and attack Internet-based information was one of the earliest effects of non-corporate online news. This may prove to be one of its most important effects – a sustained questioning of the legitimacy, credibility, and vested interest of commercial news. The representation of reality by commercial news looms so large in our life that it tempts us to assume that the Internet could never substantially contradict the dominant representational system. While it is exceedingly difficult and perhaps impossible to measure, it is nonetheless important to have a reasonable notion of the level of participation in online news production and the subsequent volume of production. The level of participation and content production in non-corporate news will suggest the degree to which the Internet offers a contradictory representation. If we restrict the measurement of online journalism to criteria defined by commercial journalism, then the non-corporate news system will appear small. Yet journalism no longer depends on specific institutional circumstances. Although there remains a strong tendency to define journalism by its institutional setting, the Internet is changing both how journalists work and what is defined as journalism. Within the Internet the act of journalism is being disconnected from institutional and organizational constraints and forcing a reconceptualization of what constitutes journalism. But not without a fight. An industry that already lacks binding codes of conduct, licensing, and regulatory bodies – one that is not strictly regarded as a profes-

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sion – is vigorously defending its weak boundaries from further incursion by the unwashed wired masses. Beneath the argument over what constitutes valid journalism is a deep cultural debate over who may legitimately produce representations of reality – those within the commercial news sector or anyone with a desire to communicate and the means to disseminate a record of events and a point of view? Those who argue that news can only be produced by professional journalists overlook the effect that training and the corporate workplace have on journalists. Journalists undergo a socialization process that results in their identifying with the world view of their privileged sources and their institutional context. Thus, Hanno Hardt speaks of the ideological position of journalists as a ‘shared belief in the virtues of capitalism.’26 Hardt convincingly argues that not just the news but journalists themselves are part of the problem. Journalists are no longer independent intellectual workers, they are servants of commerce (222). James W. Carey likewise concludes that ‘journalism has been sold, to a significant degree, to the entertainment and information industries.’27 These judgments are echoed throughout the critical literature. News is one of the most prolific forms of content on the Internet. News consumption, information seeking, and content production are among the main activities of Internet users. There is no disputing that news consumption is a definitive feature of online activity. Traffic to online news sites rose from 67.5 million in January 2002 to 82 million in January 2003, involving nearly two out of three American Internet users.28 Consider the findings of the Pew Internet and American Life survey: ‘In the days following the [11 September 2001 World Trade Center] attacks, 33% of American Internet users read or posted material in chat rooms, bulletin boards, or other online forums.’29 Not all of these 30 million American Internet users were consuming alternative media in the days following the World Trade Center attacks, but they nonetheless represent a thirst for news that is not being quenched by the commercial sector. While news looms large in the symbolic economy of the Internet, the critique of non-corporate online news dismisses its potential force as an agent of change because, it is argued, these forms of alternative news serve marginal communities of insignificant size: ‘We should not extrapolate from the experiences of a small community of activists to think that this will become the heart and soul of the Internet experience. It has not and it will not.’30 When McChesney makes this claim he is focusing on the size of specific audiences and underestimates the

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size of the complete universe of alternative news production and consumption. Granted, non-corporate news does not attract the audience share of major online brands such as CNN.com. But McChesney wrongly equates non-corporate news with ‘a small community of activists’ and thus grossly underestimates the scale of the phenomenon. AlterNet.org, an all-volunteer project that offers alternative news coverage, has reported over one million unique visitors in one month.31 Such traffic levels defy attempts to dismiss non-corporate news as an atypical activity of marginal ‘activist’ communities. Noncorporate news is more than an underground cultural economy. Non-corporate news production is occurring in far more areas than among marginalized grassroots activists. An enormous variety of news-related discourse takes place in discussion groups (e-mail and Usenet), on Web sites and Web logs, through peer-to-peer fileexchange programs, instant messaging, and audio/video online broadcasting, and in a variety of forms – from rants to investigative journalism, independent media centres, group authorship, news commentary and analysis, satire, and the outpouring of collective event reporting and commentary that takes place surrounding mass events, such as elections, the shuttle disaster, and the 2003 blackout on the North American East Coast. While it is a phrase that is tired and overused, I believe that it is appropriate to speak here of the Internet democratizing the news-production system. The routine representation of reality is still dominated by commercial media but, as with the Catholic church of the fifteenth century, its monopoly over representation and interpretation is quickly eroding. News normally takes the form of a monologue, a product that is delivered to a relatively passive audience. The Internet is redefining news as a dialogic process that occurs within a highly active community, a process that occurs without the mediation of the corporate sector. Why insist, as McChesney does, that ‘[a]s a rule, journalism is not something that can be done piecemeal by amateurs working in their spare time’?32 With every day that passes, the Internet is proving McChesney wrong. The work of professional journalists is shredded daily by large communities of online fact checkers and media critiques, while amateurs are regularly breaking stories, making headlines, and attracting offers for employment from major commercial news companies.33 Contrary to McChesney’s view, the Internet’s collective, nonhierarchical dialogue and related forms of news gathering, reporting, and commentary cannot be described as marginal activism. There is

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every reason to expect a journalistic renaissance online; it just is not happening in the corporate sector (and it is therefore subject to considerable criticism). This is not to say that the majority of the Internet community is busily involved in news consumption and production. Yet neither can these activities be relegated to the margins of ‘activist’ communities. The analysis of non-corporate news should take seriously the claim that a new structure of media has led to new forms of de-professionalized journalism. Non-corporate news is far removed from the operating logic of commercial news, a logic that regards journalism as the stuff between the ads. The news is no longer that which is selected by corporate gatekeeping processes, but that which is actively circulating in the public sphere. It might be argued that I am conflating opinion columnists with investigative journalism, as a considerable amount of Internet activity certainly fits within the opinion category. Yet it is artificial to insist that non-corporate news be measured by the terms of professional journalism in general or investigative journalism in particular. Commercial news is a system of content production that includes far more than just journalistic production. Within the commercial system the bulk of what constitutes news is hardly more than edited press releases and fluff pieces (entertainment parading as news). Indeed, one of the ironies of dismissing non-corporate news because it does not always meet the high standards of investigative journalism is that, within commercial media, investigative journalism is itself being marginalized due to cost cutting and pressures from vested interests. The evidence is in McChesney’s favour when he concludes that ‘time-consuming and expensive investigative journalism looking into subjects that raise any questions about the ultimate legitimacy of our ruling institutions is not welcome in the domain of corporate media and the professional journalism it spawns.’34 To paraphrase McChesney, if journalism consistently did what it claims it does, then it would be very, very bad for business. It is not beyond the realm of the possible that non-corporate news will one day be responsible for the majority of critical investigative journalism. While I strongly disagree with his interpretation of the Internet, I do believe McChesney aptly portrays the decline of journalism as a public service and its transformation into a highly censored servant of media barons, the ruling elite, and the corporate sector. There are exceptions, yet one of the most frequently noted aspects of commercial news is its

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marginalization of ideas critical of capitalism and its aggressive promotion of the marketplace’s expansion into all areas of public and private life. Also marginalized are ideas that celebrate the labour movement, social spending, the regulation of business and advertising, and any alternative economic policies. McChesney convincingly argues these trends and concludes that professional journalism is in a state of crisis and that the standards of commercial news are in sharp decline: ‘[M]any observers concede that journalistic autonomy has been shrunk or eliminated under commercial pressures from corporate owners’ (274). There is a widely recognized crisis underway within commercial news. Journalism is being reduced to corporate cheerleading. Meanwhile, the Internet is attracting young audiences, producing community-based grassroots news, and eroding the legitimacy and trust in commercial news through aggressive fact checking by online readers. The Internet has the potential to aggravate all the current problems experienced within the commercial news sector. Blogging and the Failure of Commercial News One form of online self-publishing, Web logs (blogs), is the cause of considerable speculation about the future of news. Blogging software makes it very easy to add content to Web pages. This can be done by people who lack any knowledge of the hypertext markup language normally used to create Web content. Blogging enables the masses of Internet users who have very little technical knowledge to become producers of Internet content, even if they do not own a Web site. As a technical innovation, blogging lowered the technical and economic barriers to Internet content production. The result was a massive outpouring of personal diaries, amateur and professional news sites, and all other forms of digital content. In January 2003 it was estimated that there were 500,000 Web logs.35 Six months later the estimated number of blogs climbed to between 2.4 and 2.9 million, with a projection for six million by the end of 2003 and ten million by 2005.36 While news production is not the sole activity of blogging, this does represent an enormous drive towards discourse within the Internet community (perhaps the driving force behind the Internet). The blogging phenomenon highlights three central aspects of the Internet’s impact upon commercial news: the ability of any Internet user to participate in uncontrolled news production; the sudden

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expansion in participation in news production; and the ability of the online community to dissect (fact check) the work of professional journalists. By 2003 blogging was the issue in the news industry. It was impossible to pick up a trade magazine and not find an article or an entire issue devoted to the topic. Professional journalist Matt Welch described blogging as an activity that provides a strong contrast to the standardized production of content within the commercial sector: ‘For all the history made by newspapers between 1960 and 2000, the profession was also busy contracting, standardizing and homogenizing. Most cities now have their monopolist daily, their alt weekly or two, their business journal. Journalism is done a certain way by a certain kind of people. Bloggers are basically oblivious to such traditions, so reading the best of them is like receiving a bracing slap in the face. It’s a reminder that America is far more diverse and iconoclastic than its newsrooms.’37 How big of a slap is difficult to determine. Most blogs are little more than online diaries, but many identify themselves as news blogs, and news-related blogs number in the tens of thousands. The blogging phenomenon highlights how the Internet is itself an enormous school of journalism. Amateurs learn how professionals work, critique their work, and sometimes end up joining their ranks. It is possible to get an idea of what is dominant within the symbolic economy of the blogging community. Certain subjects are widely discussed by this highly interconnected group of compulsive communicators. The MIT Media Laboratory tracks the diffusion of information across the Web logging community in its Blogdex (blogdex.net). The Blogdex generates an index of the most popular hypertext links made by the blogging community. Its index of linked articles provides an indication of how information is spreading and what type of subjects are circulating within the online news-reading community. Over 80 per cent of the top one hundred links were directly related to news coverage, suggesting an intense relationship between the blogging community and news.38 The motivating force behind the explosion in discourse as seen in news blogs is found in commercial media itself. A homogeneous news market has created a demand for the diversity of online opinions. This dynamic also explains why McChesney’s pessimistic prediction that media corporations will exterminate online competition and extend their news hegemony over the Internet is wrong. Corporations create a demand for non-market sources of news when they pursue content

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and editorial standardizing strategies and erode journalistic autonomy in the name of cost cutting and vested interests. The degradation of the journalist’s autonomy and the pursuit of content-control strategies motivate a segment of the audience to seek alternative voices online. Control tactics foster a thirst for non-commercial news. The reality of commercial news production is far removed from diversity. Whereas amateur online journalists are producing vast quantities of news commentary and original content, most commercial news sites are simply posting the same wire copy from news services such as the Associated Press and Reuters.39 The corporate sector and its cheerleaders continue to insist on the diversity of media content, yet ‘a handful of news agencies controls no less than 80 per cent of world news,’40 and as much as 60 per cent of television and newspaper news content is supplied by the public-relations industry.41 Robert Fulford’s claim that the ‘rise of great media companies has been accompanied by diversity and heightened freedom [of content choices]’ sounds more like corporate propaganda than sound media analysis when we consider the measure of diversity and choice within the Internet.42 Fulford’s giddy celebration of commercial media overlooks how the ‘free market’ has evolved into a powerful censorship mechanism. Generally speaking, within capitalism’s empire there is widespread denial that the market itself operates as a major source of censorship. Admitting that the market acts as a censor would lead to acknowledging the ideological basis of the ‘free market.’ The Western media system is generally regarded as the epitome of freedom and commercial media fosters this impression by frequently demonizing any form of state-owned media. Thus, there is considerable resistance toward the idea that the market itself also operates as an ideological censor. Yet a large volume of literary and artistic production has been blacklisted by dominant media institutions because the producers would not submit to marketplace agendas.43 Any claims about diversity and heightened freedom within the marketplace must be carefully balanced by a recognition that the corporate sector plays a substantial role in restricting the flow of cultural goods, particularly goods that represent a threat to capitalism’s ideology. The homogeneous fare produced by the commercial sector cannot possibly match the enormous diversity of non-corporate news. The diversity and heightened freedom of choice that occurs outside the economic system may make it difficult for corporations to defend grossly overstated claims of brand quality such as ‘all the news that’s fit to print’ (New

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York Times), ‘the most trusted name in news’ (CNN), and ‘fair and balanced’ (Fox News). Behind blogging is a collective attack on the credibility of commercial news. Readers are dissatisfied with the corporate point of view and engage in a level of intense fact checking that has caught the industry off guard. This fact checking is done by both the left and the right, and is a particularly prominent activity among conservative American Internet users who feel that their media is dominated by liberals. A typical example of this can be seen at the TimesWatch.org Web site, a conservative project ‘dedicated to documenting and exposing the liberal political agenda of the New York Times.’44 Non-corporate news is not bound to any one ideological position, and should not be interpreted as the sole domain of the left. The unconstrained speech of the Internet community cannot be read as a simple revolt against corporate speech, for individuals will carry their socialization with them into cyberspace. My use of the term ‘unconstrained’ is intended to highlight the lack of corporate control over the production of online content, and should not be read as meaning unconstrained from preexisting ideological perspectives. Dan Gillmor, a pioneer in the journalistic use of Web logs, relates that the experience of blogging taught him that his readers know more than he does.45 His experience highlights the collective intelligence that the Internet brings to the production of news. Non-corporate online news is larger than the sum of its parts. While most individual efforts are modest at best, when taken as a totality the ability of the Internet community to produce in-depth coverage achieves parity with the production capabilities of the commercial sector. The collective output of non-corporate news produces unparalleled diversity, stunning depth and breadth of coverage within an unlimited news hole (the space allotted for actual news in print media), an unrestricted agenda, the de-repression of events, and intense criticism of commercial journalism. These characteristics distinguish non-corporate news as posing a serious challenge to the commercial sector. In the discussion of blogging-as-news, the issues that are repeatedly mentioned by professional journalists reflect an industry that is confronted with a level of feedback with which it is both unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Blogging and other forms of non-corporate news are seen as contributing to the ‘truth-finding’ process of journalism by exposing bias and error, challenging the industry’s loss of personal contact, and creating greater transparency (readers get to discover the

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behind-the-scenes process of newsmaking). These factors can be seen in the genre known as ‘war blogs’ – blogs that cover the Iraq War and other current military conflicts. War blogs are characteristic of noncorporate news’ ability to encompass all ideologies. They come in both left- and right-wing varieties. There tends to be a high level of dialogue within the blogging community as opponents on various sides of an issue engage in vigorous debates. The blog NoWarBlog.org, which describes itself as ‘The LeftRight Blog Opposing an Invasion of Iraq,’ created an index of over eighty anti-war46 sites and encouraged dialogue (a ‘cross-blog debate’) with the pro-war side of the Internet. Members of NoWarBlog engage in dialogue with members of the conservative blog The Truth Laid Bear (sic), at www.truthlaidbear.com. These two groups were also busy creating a system for measuring readership and activity among left and right blogs. As the blogging phenomenon matured, larger subjectoriented indexes (aggregators) also appeared. One such aggregator, PeaceBlogs.org, provides an index to over 2200 anti-war blogs in over 71 countries. During the first six days following the beginning of the Iraq War the Pew Internet & American Life Project conducted a survey to determine how Americans were using the Internet to get news about the war. The results of the survey reveal a population of Internet users who are also heavy consumers of online news. More than three-quarters of online Americans used the Internet during this period to get news about the war in Iraq.47 The Web sites most used by Americans were those of American TV networks (32 per cent) and American newspapers (29 per cent). There was also a strong desire for new sources of information. Non-mainstream sources – foreign news organizations, alternative news sites, and blogs – were visited by 22 per cent of online Americans. Variety of sources appears to be one of the most attractive features of the Internet for news consumers. When asked what was important about news on the Internet, over half of American users responded that getting points of view different from those in traditional news and government sources was important. Yet 64 per cent found little difference between online news and that of television and newspapers. Given the brief and unique period of time covered by the survey, it would be reckless to read too much into these results. Nonetheless, they do indicate that there is a thirst for a variety of viewpoints and that the Internet does lead to greater variety within the total universe of news.

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What was most surprising about the survey was the difference in online news consumption between war supporters and war opponents. Online opponents of the war were more politically active, more engaged in dialogue, and more likely to seek out a variety of sources.48 Within a hegemonic media environment dissenting individuals are more likely to use the Internet to keep up to date with events, to arrive at an opinion, and to make their views known to others. For those who disagree with the empire of mind, the Internet proves to be a strategic tool for constructing and disseminating their dissent. Commenting on war blogs, Joanne Jacobs described a dynamic of non-corporate news production that highlights the limits of commercial news – its inability to maintain focus on a story once it is seen as ‘old’ or no longer newsworthy: There’s no doubt that there is extraordinary power in war blogs, particularly as mainstream media are reducing coverage of the war in favour of ‘regular programming.’ It seems that while everyone likes watching a winner, as the war images are becoming more ugly, people are turning off. And so for those of us who want coverage of the war – not just mainstream media, but editorialised, and personalised accounts of war – the internet in general, and blogs in particular, are filling that void of information. But best of all, blogs are not subject to the media blankets that regulate our consumption of war information. It is possible through blogs to receive ... unadulterated, ‘real’ and often personalised perspectives on regulated and official military action ... [B]logs satisfy the search for the underlying reality in a world full of (commercial, government and media) representation.49

There is a strong feeling within the Internet community that noncorporate news can deliver a picture of events that simply does not fit within commercial news. The reason for this oft-repeated notion is the media’s reliance on a very select and narrow set of voices. When Monika Jensen-Stevenson told readers of the Globe and Mail that Web logs and e-mails written by American soldiers detailed troop complaints and low morale, she was acknowledging a failure of the U.S. press to truthfully represent troop conditions among the occupying force.50 At one point the U.S. Defense Department was actually charging injured reservists $8 a day for food while in field hospitals. On top of this indignity, injured troops were also required to buy their own toilet paper. News of this poor treatment migrated to the Web and then to

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mainstream media. War blogs written by soldiers shed light on the repressed realities of poorly trained, poorly provisioned, and poorly paid troops. Commercial News and Elite Attitudes The production of commercial news takes place through close association with officially sanctioned sources and institutions. Professional journalists are specialists at accessing powerful institutions, wealthy elites, and official authorities. Fowler describes how commercial journalism relies heavily on a reciprocal relationship with members of society’s elite – royalty, politicians, civil servants, business executives, experts, and movie personalities.51 Journalists expect to gain an audience with these individuals who, in turn, expect to receive a voice in the press. The public-relations sector further reinforces this relationship by providing professional access to news exposure for those who can afford to pay (the U.S. government regularly employs publicrelations firms when going to war). This privilege leads to modes of journalistic discourse that ‘already encode the attitudes of a powerful élite’ (23). Commercial news discourse transforms elite attitudes – typically expressed as conservative opinions on war, drugs, social medicine, alternative sexualities, poverty, immigration, minorities, labour, and state welfare – into acceptable wisdom. Along with having systemic ties to the elite, the discourse produced by commercial news is also highly gendered – it is largely stories about men produced by men.52 One of the more substantial effects of the Internet on news production may be in the introduction of the female perspective. Women’s eNews (www.womensenews.org), a non-profit independent news service, is a modest example of the emerging female perspective in the Internet. The site is read by over 70,000 visitors each day.53 Given that the vast majority of reporters and newsmakers within the commercial press are men (over 75 per cent), the growth of the female voice within the online community is another indication of the audience evading control by the gendered commercial media. By virtue of its structural relationship to the elite, commercial news reproduces a world view that mirrors that of the elite. This is one of the main reasons why many find the news alienating and irrelevant. A system that privileges the voice of the elite generates an oft-noted ‘imbalance between the representation of the already privileged, on the one hand, and the already unprivileged, on the other, with the

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views of the official, the powerful and the rich being constantly invoked to legitimate the status quo.’54 Fowler’s now out-of-date point that ‘there is no regular mechanism for capturing the activities and views [of the ordinary public]’ highlights the significance of the Internet’s role in producing a representation of the unprivileged (22). Through the Internet, we now have a regular mechanism for capturing the activities and views of the ordinary public. What could prove to be most troubling for the dissemination of an elite point of view as acceptable wisdom (common sense) is the disconnect that is occurring between official sources and non-corporate online news. There is far less reliance on privileged sources within the amateur production of news. It is not uncommon for official sources to decline interviews with amateur journalists.55 This disconnect means that official sources play a diminished role in the construction of the Internet’s alternative symbolic economy. Over time, the Internet could produce a substantial representation of reality that does not reflect reality as it is encoded by commercial journalistic practices. Non-corporate news provides the social system with a mechanism for the production of the mundane, the opinion of the impoverished, and the views of the average. What will happen to the formation of public opinion now that we have a mechanism that privileges the activities and views of the ordinary public is uncertain.56 Commercial news and its subsidiary, the public-relations industry, has had a substantial influence on public opinion. Thus, the failure to contain a globalized mechanism that disseminates non-corporate news is bound to have consequences for a social order constructed through the privileged discourse of the elite. Within commercial news, the combination of a mode of discourse that reproduces the attitudes of a powerful elite with the constant necessity of not aggravating advertisers and the state (lest money and access be cut off) leads to the repression of events that challenge the basic assumptions of capitalism and its social order. Certain stories are inconvenient to the ideological position of commercial news and are therefore under-reported. One of the clearest examples of this is the imbalance between the coverage of violence done to the Israelis and that of violence done to the Palestinians. When Heather Gautney argues that the mainstream U.S. media play a major role in repressing the Palestinian plight, she voices what amounts to a consensus within the critical scholarship.57 While the pro-Israel side of the story receives substantial coverage, the plight of the Palestinian people is grossly

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mis- and under-represented in Western media. Part of this can be explained by the support of Israel by Western nations, part can be explained by a general climate of anti-Arab sentiment that is pervasive in the West and its media,58 and part can be explained by the political orientation of media owners, such as the explicit pro-Israel editorial position of the National Post, as maintained by the Aspers. As a result of systemic bias in the news, Palestinians are likely to be painted as the aggressors and Israel as the innocent victim, and Palestinian deaths are less likely to be reported than Israeli deaths. Typical of this systemic bias, Israeli deaths create headlines while Palestinian casualties are rarely front-page news.59 The late Izzy Asper’s imposition of centralized editorial control over his family’s newspaper chain led journalists at the Montreal Gazette to write: ‘We’ve seen the ugly face of censorship at the Gazette and ... [it] looks a lot like Izzy Asper’s ... Izzy and company have fired an acclaimed national columnist (they deny it was because they didn’t like the way he wrote about their friend the prime minister) and have clamped down on news, criticism or commentary that is anything but 100% pro-Israel.’60 The problem extends far beyond the Asper media holdings. Reflecting on his experience of reporting on the Middle East, journalist Robert Fisk notes that ‘a criticism of Israel, however soft and remote, will elicit an overemotional response and the reporter will be accused of being an anti-Semite or a racist.’61 Fisk, a favourite target of right-wing American bloggers, is hardly overstating the media bias against the Palestinians. Journalist Patricia Pearson resigned from the National Post because of its explicit bias: ‘When CanWest, controlled by the Asper family, acquired the paper from Conrad Black, I no longer dared to express sympathy for Palestinians.’62 Non-corporate online news aggressively de-represses news events. The Palestinian Media Watch (PMWatch, www.pmwatch.org), an allvolunteer organization with no full-time staff and no fixed budget, is an example of non-market collective news production that contradicts the ideological position of commercial news. PMWatch is a network of dozens of chapters across the United States whose members help identify journalistic failures by the American media in covering the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. A much more substantial example of the de-repression of events by non-corporate news is seen at the Electronic Intifada (EI, electronicintifada.net). The EI and its ‘sister site,’ the Electronic Iraq (electroniciraq.net), promote a wide range of content production, including research, reference, commentary and analysis,

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personal journals from the frontlines of the conflict, media news and analysis, and satire. These two sites claim a combined total of between 300,000 and 1,000,000 visitors each month. My point in highlighting these Web sites is not to claim that they offer a bias-free source of news but to underline the Internet’s function as a source of counterhegemonic meaning production. Western news readers are subject to institutionalized bias, while Palestinian news readers are left with equally biased Arab media sources that exist under the strict control of Arab governments. In this context the Internet distinguishes itself as a source of extreme diversity and prolific criticism of systemic media bias. It is a measure of our collective fixation on commercial media that we find it difficult to envision the possibility that the Internet will enable alternative media to prevail. For Chris Atton, the range, number, and diversity of alternative media are pushing the theory of liberal pluralism to its limits: ‘A model of the media where “people using small-scale media prevail” need not be the product of idealism or entail the overthrow of large scale media; we may find spaces in which small-scale media prevail.’63 What form this will take remains uncertain, but it is unreasonable to propose that non-corporate news will shortly be drowned in an advancing tide of commercial speech and run off the Internet by the commercial news hegemony. 9/11 and Online Counter-Discourse The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon provide an opportunity to compare online news with the performance of commercial media in the aftermath of America’s painful introduction to the new world order it has helped to create. The following will compare McChesney’s analysis of the performance of commercial news with Stuart Allan’s analysis of non-corporate online news in an effort to see what differences in coverage were produced by these two systems. McChesney argues that commercial press coverage ‘highlighted the anti-democratic tendencies already in existence’ within American media.64 Every time the United States has gone into a major conflict the media has acted as ‘a superior propaganda organ for militarism and war’ (93). This observation provides the historical context for the events that unfolded in the American media after 9/11. McChesney notes that the American press failed to question a host of claims made by the Bush government, such as the need for a global war, the accusa-

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tion that if you are not with the United States then you are for terrorism, the need for a military solution, and the economic benefits of an unchecked war that will go to powerful interests: ‘Extraordinarily logical questions, questions that would be posed by US journalists arguably to any other government in a similar situation, were ignored or marginalized’ (93). There is a general perception that European reporters were more willing to ask hard questions than were their American colleagues. Joshua Meyrowitz also notes that journalists avoided questioning the mantra that America is the greatest country in the world and its enemies are pure evil.65 One of the best examples of this was seen when Dan Rather told CNN’s Larry King, ‘They hate us because they’re losers and we are winners. There are just evil people in some places.’ Here Rather is merely repeating Bush’s vapid ‘good versus evil’ explanation of 9/11 – ‘They hate our freedoms.’ Rather’s comments reflect the most notable trend within the U.S. media following 9/11 – the press adopted the President’s war rhetoric and uncritically transmitted facile and duplicitous justifications provided by the Bush administration. There were exceptions, such as the editorial pages of the New York Times, but exceptions they remained. McChesney notes that the U.S. press relied on military experts, members of the intelligence community, and official sources for their information, thus producing press coverage that represented the united opinion of the elite and of officials. Along with reproducing elite opinions and ignoring alternative perspectives, the press suspended criticism of President Bush. Faced with serving an international audience that was hostile to the U.S.-lead war, CNN produced two different versions of the war: ‘a critical one for global audiences and a sugar-coated one for Americans. Indeed, [CNN President Walter] Isaacson instructed the domestic CNN to be certain that any story that might undermine support for the US war needed to be balanced with a reminder that the war on terrorism was a good war.’66 Over time, the volume of press jingoism decreased and the range of debate expanded, but ‘[f]undamental issues will remain decidedly off limits. The role of the military as the ultimate source of power will not be questioned. The notion that the United States is a uniquely benevolent force in the world will be undisputed. The premise that the United States and the United States alone – unless it deputizes a nation like Israel – has a right to invade any country it wants at any time if it wishes will remain undebatable’ (97).

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McChesney also argues that the economic benefit that the militaryindustrial complex would enjoy because of a prolonged, borderless war on terrorism resulted in the reduction of mainstream U.S. journalism to mindless propaganda. War profiteering was not the only factor. By providing media coverage that reflected an almost complete consensus with the U.S. government, American media corporations returned the favour for numerous policy actions implemented on their behalf. These policy favours include international trade deals and intellectual-property agreements brokered by the state, and the relaxation of ownership regulations for media companies, resulting in greater access to overseas markets and further media consolidation within the domestic market. McChesney further suggests that, given the close and long-term historical relationship between media corporations and the government, anything other than providing a propaganda service to military and economic interests would be suicidal for American media corporations. Pragmatic self-interest and a history of mutual support explain why American media provide a propaganda function in times of crisis. The one major exception to the reproduction of elite interests in the press is the Internet: ‘Here one often finds stories about US complicity and the complicity of US allies with terrorists and terrorism. Here, one is more likely to find a much more complex world where the US government’s motives are held to the same standard as those of other governments’ (99). McChesney’s assessment may sound radical, but it represents a near consensus within critical scholarship in the aftermath of 9/11. Douglas Kellner echoes McChesney’s conclusion: ‘[T]he media on the whole performed disastrously and dangerously, whipping up war hysteria while failing to provide a coherent account of what happened, why it happened, and what would count as responsible responses to the terrorist attacks.’67 Kellner likewise notes the almost complete absence of a counter-discourse in the media. For that we need to turn to the Internet. As is now common with mass events such as wars and disasters, amateur news reporters used the Internet to produce their own stories and eyewitness accounts about the events of September 11th. Stuart Allan describes how the collapse of the twin towers immediately led to the disruption of local telephone, television, and radio signals in parts of the upper Eastern seaboard, and to severe congestion of commercial online news sites due to overwhelming traffic levels.68 These blockages in the communication system were alleviated by amateur Web sites

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that disseminated news and information. Typically of online action by concerned citizens, William Shunn created a Web site where people could post their names to let friends know they were okay. Shunn claims that the site www.shunn.com/okay received over a million hits between September 11 and 12. Normal patterns of news consumption shifted as Internet users turned to content produced by amateurs and international news providers such as the CBC and the BBC. Efforts such as Shunn’s Web service and shifts in consumption patterns are indicative of the Internet’s strength as a robust communication platform in a time of crisis. Yet the significant impact of the Internet lies in more long-term effects. Non-corporate online news and commercial media diverge in the coverage of 9/11 along structural lines. Privileged voices, official sources, and state propaganda recede into the background and personal accounts, individual opinions, and, most significantly, dissent emerges within the part of the Web woven by individuals. Jon Katz, a member of the online community Slashdot.org, described the key difference between the Internet and commercial news: ‘All points of view appeared, and instantly.’69 Katz suggests that voices of dissent appeared within the Internet before they were heard in mainstream media. One of the things that makes the Internet substantially different from commercial media is its diversity of opinions. Allan makes the rather remarkable claim that, within the Internet, the ‘diversity of available viewpoints has been steadily diminishing’ due to self-censorship and harassment (136). It is true that some voices will always be silenced by self-censorship. Allan also refers to Web site owners being threatened by people claiming to be from the FBI, and Internet service providers (ISPs) directly and indirectly silencing ‘voices of opposition and dissent’ (137). Yet these rare instances of pressure tactics and even direct censorship could not and did not result in any significant reduction of opinions.70 The Internet’s unique structural design makes the forced permanent removal of opinions virtually impossible. Indicative of the system’s supreme mobility of content and opinion is the state’s failure to suppress online hate speech, junk e-mail, virus creators, and child pornographers – a failure (certainly unfortunate in these instances) that strongly suggests that online dissent will not easily be suppressed. There is a constant production of new Web sites within and beyond the United States that continue to protest against the Iraq War. The argument that diversity of opinion is diminishing within the Internet is

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seen throughout the critical literature and is indicative of the predominance of the normalization perspective. Dave Healy’s claim that the Internet ‘promotes uniformity more than diversity, homogeneity more than heterogeneity,’ and James A. Knapp’s similar claim that there appears to be an ‘inevitable homogenization of the Internet’ are typical of the normalization thesis.71 Such claims simply do not account for the extreme variety of non-corporate cultural production within the Web, the existence of a largely unconstrained online public discourse, and the tactics of resistance and evasion that come into play whenever public expression is under attack within the online community. Allan makes another claim that is equally suspect. He argues that the dominant presence of major corporate news sites ‘makes it obvious that what counts as “news” (or a “credible source”) will be constrained within the limits of corporate culture’ (136). This is a gross misunderstanding of the dynamics of online discourse. The mere presence of commercial news on the Internet is insufficient in itself to counter a sustained attack from masses of amateur media critics. Credibility is far easier to maintain in a communication environment dominated by the corporate voice – the type of environment that characterized the 1900s. The environment in which commercial news gained trust, authority, and legitimacy has changed. Now people can talk back, talk to each other with greater ease, and create fast-growing collections of content that interrogates a privileged discourse and challenges the authoritative claims of commercial news. It is far more probable that credibility will be difficult to maintain in the face of unconstrained speech and its production of an alternative symbolic economy. Unconstrained News Production Along with the proliferation of serious critical efforts, hundreds of news satire sites also provide an indication of how commercial news credibility is under constant attack from within cyberspace. Being subject to a constant stream of satire is certainly a challenge to pretensions of authority and credibility. The structure of commercial news production has been thoroughly mapped and the evidence of its effect on content, although not indisputable, is certainly damning. The twentieth century saw the economic system effectively de-radicalize the press. The press is now predominantly supportive of established power and sensitive to the requirements of its primary patrons – advertisers, the corporate sector, and the

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state. Such history and relationships do not hold sway over non-corporate online news. A content production system unconstrained by the economy will, by simple virtue of the extreme difference in structural conditions, produce dramatically different content. Again, I am not claiming here that non-corporate news only produces radically subversive messages. All ideologies are encompassed by this new medium. This fact in itself marks a huge rift between the media system of the 1900s and our contemporary media situation. The rift is due to the de-professionalized, de-institutionalized, and nonmarket mode of production and distribution itself, which lends itself to a different type of news and a different type of public discourse. As long as commercial media relies on access to privileged sources it will fulfil a propaganda function, and as long as it relies on corporate sponsorship (advertising revenue) for the lion’s share of its revenue its voice will be constrained. Yet we now have two major truth-production (or reality-production) systems, one under control of the market, the other largely disconnected from the market. The new communication system lacks the constraints that invariably come packaged with the capitalist mode of content production. A counter-hegemonic symbolic economy has arisen that is much more substantial than the alternative media of the 1900s. Endowed with archival memory, this counter-hegemonic symbolic economy enhances the audience’s ability to engage in resistance. As a result, it disrupts the commercial sector’s routine representation of reality. It also engages that representation in an expanded normative debate while simultaneously producing a counter-hegemonic representation of reality. Lewis suggests that the audience’s ability to resist the view of the world that is propagated by the corporate sector ‘depends upon the existence of an alternative ideological framework ... [I]n the absence of other information’ about the world and events, ‘it is the media’s framework or nothing.’72 The development of an alternative media framework is particularly significant given the oft-noted impoverished understanding of world affairs that is generated among the American public.73 The knowledge deficit among Americans has left the citizens of empire poorly equipped to understand world events and their role in various crises. A media system that is closely aligned with the goals and values of the U.S. Administration bears considerable responsibility for this dangerous knowledge deficit. But there is hope. It may be the case that capitalist empires are entering into a historical period marked by a dramatic increase in the production of alternative ideo-

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logical frameworks and a parallel increase in conditions and mechanisms that heighten the possibilities of resistance. As commercial news production is bound by its economic structure and working practices, the goals and effects of commercial media will be different from the goals and effects of non-corporate news. One of the main social functions of commercial news is the communication of elite opinion about deviance. By defining ‘common sense’ notions of deviance the commercial news sector plays a key role in the construction of social order. In their study of how the presentation of deviance within news determines social values, Richard V. Ericson, Patricia M. Baranek, and Janet B.L. Chan argue that news is ‘the most common stock of knowledge generated to meet the desire to control and command the environment.’74 News constructs a shared sense of order and consensus by defining moral classifications and propagating notions of risk. Aspects of deviance labelling are pervasive in news discourse and permeate ‘every section of a newspaper or news broadcast’ (48). One of the potential effects of non-corporate news could be a weakening of the elite’s ability to influence the social perception of deviance. Non-corporate online news produces effects that the corporate sector will find impossible to imitate because of structural constraints within the commercial sector. These constraints create a strategic advantage for non-corporate news – to use marketing language, a ‘unique selling proposition’ – that drives readers toward alternative media. Whereas McChesney fears that alternative online news will be incorporated into the corporate hegemony, it is perhaps more accurate to theorize that decommodified online news will become a permanent source of counter-hegemonic cultural production. Commercial media will always drive a segment of the audience into the arms of non-corporate media. While I have been careful to avoid asserting that non-corporate news is the sole domain of the left, it could nonetheless be argued that this system produces subversive material regardless of whether it derives from the left or the right end of the ideological spectrum. This claim arises out of recognition that the production of reality by commercial news is based on access to privileged voices and institutions. The very act of deinstitutionalized news production, whether by the right or the left, takes place under structural conditions different from those of the corporate sector, and therefore can be said to be the production of a de-institutionalized mode of discourse. While conservative Internet users produce representations of reality that resonate with commercial

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news, they invariably produce difference simply by virtue of being outside of the institutional setting of commercial media. The modes of discourse used by both ends of the ideological spectrum within the Internet are different from the modes of discourse employed by commercial journalism. Mundane discourse, ordinary communication by the average individual, is potentially subversive within a social context dominated by corporate speech. I am suggesting that by simply allowing all voices a forum, the Internet subverts the hegemonic construction of reality. Any expansion in the level of involvement in the normative debate can have subversive potential. Atton’s study of alternative media suggests that it is not simply the content of non-corporate news that is significant. The context of production ‘can be the radical equal of content in the pursuit of social change.’75 This applies both to the Internet itself and to the ‘meatspace’ context of alternative news production. Changing the context not only changes the message but also changes the messenger. The context of much non-corporate news production is itself a radical social force (egalitarian, volunteer-based, institutional philosophies ranging from collective to anarchical, and so on). An increased level of personal involvement with collective experiments in news production, brought on by the Internet, may itself have social consequences. Atton raises an interesting question when he asks what is radical about radical media? Alternative media is distinguished from mass media when it is ‘available to ordinary people without the necessity of professional training, without excessive capital outlay’ (22). Within the Internet, masses of ordinary people participate in creating, producing, and disseminating news. Notions of professionalism, competence, and expertise are transformed (and thus objections about the lack of these are also nullified). In a sense, non-corporate news is the epitome of postmodernism: it has no clear delineation of roles and there is no external authority validating the process or the identity of the producer. The reader is also a reporter, editor, designer, printer, distributor, and publisher. The criticism of non-corporate news tends to decry the absence of clearly defined and institutionally legitimated roles (they are not journalists, it is not news ...). Non-corporate news is a rule-breaking phenomenon that affronts the status quo / rule-maintenance that occurs through commercial media. To borrow Atton’s description of alternative media, non-corporate news is an area of cultural production that is an ‘autonomous field ... constituted by its own rules’ (26).

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The criticism directed toward the amateur production of online news also overlooks how news mutates with each historical era. Gerald J. Baldasty concluded his survey of the commercialization of news in the nineteenth century with some observations that suggest caution before we dismiss non-corporate news as ‘not news by those who are not journalists.’ News is a social construct that is defined through the changing relationship of the press and society, through economic forces, and through the structure and daily operations of the press.76 What must be underlined is that all three of these factors are transformed within non-corporate news. Baldasty points out that news is not a stable construct. Rather, it changes as social conditions change. In the 1800s the production of news depended on the links between the press and political parties. By the 1900s news was defined by its connection to business. As a result of this shift, editors who once defined their readers as voters came to see their audience primarily as consumers, and news values changed to match the ‘new’ audience (144). We are at the beginning of another major transition in the social construction of news. This transition is marked by the online audience’s ability to act as producers of news. Commercial news is faced with a radically novel mode of news production that the corporate sector cannot control. A new form of news is being produced outside of formal institutional settings, it is largely a non-market phenomenon (a gift economy), it has very weak ties to business and the state, it produces a mode of discourse that is not conditioned by institutional practices and conventions (for the most part), and its structure, methods, and daily operations are largely foreign to the commercial sector. Yet what it produces is news, although we may not yet recognize it as such. What Baldasty notes of the shift in news values that occurred at the turn of the 1900s could easily apply today – ‘New definitions of news emerged’ (139). Much can be learned from the effect that commercialization of news had on content and news values in the 1900s. This shift saw marketing value become the prime determinant of what constituted newsworthy content. Typically of marketing-driven news values, content for women appeared in the late 1880s primarily in response to the desire among advertisers to have women read their ads and buy their products (126). This led to a strident attack on suffrage in the press and aided in the swift conversion of women to the growing culture of consumerism. During this period the very purpose of news production changed from an exercise of political power to an accommodation of

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advertisers (140). Newspapers shifted from being advocates for political parties to being advocates for business (141). In the aftermath of this shift, news served one main constituency – the corporate sector. Here I am not arguing that there was a golden past to which we must return, but rather highlighting just how far news was transformed into a servant of the marketplace. When we include magazines, television, and radio in the mix, this becomes the definitive feature of content production in the twentieth century. Content serves the market, not the public. It is here that the Internet promises to distinguish itself as a realm wherein large tracts of content production are disconnected from the market. Non-corporate online news is evolving into a collective advocate for the masses, underprivileged voices, repressed social realities, and the underrepresented. The pressing question is ‘Will the Internet’s partial disconnect from the marketplace manifest large-scale social change?’ History has seen the rise of institutions and mechanisms that consolidated power for the state, and then saw the rise of new institutions and mechanisms that consolidated power for corporations. Perhaps the Internet will prove to be the foundation for the moulding of the public into a ‘third power bloc’ (although the previous two powers often act in the form of an alliance). Perhaps this third stage will see the role of the public evolve into something more than just a means of wielding power through the tools of commercial news, propaganda, public relations, and the mastery of corporate speech. The present situation mirrors Stuart Hall’s formulation of ‘the people versus the power-bloc,’ but adds to the polarized ‘terrain of culture’ an expanded system of news production that arises from popular culture.77 John Fiske describes how the power bloc – an alliance of elite forces of domination exercised through government, politics, industry, law, and so on – exerts its power on the public through control of the news. Along lines similar to Baldasty’s description of the commercialization of news, Fiske notes that the power bloc suppressed the ‘undisciplined news’ of the nineteenth century until the press was eventually aligned with the interests of the power bloc.78 The problem for the power bloc in the nineteenth century was that the press was partisan, explicitly aligned with political parties, and news ‘was explicitly an arena of public argument. Much of it, therefore, lay outside the control of the power bloc and, indeed, contested that control from popular points of view’ (45). The power bloc had to eliminate public discourse that contested its legitimacy, and by the late 1800s had done so. The

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commercialized press replaced public debate with a press that claimed to be based in the news values of objectivity and truth. As a system of truth production, the allegiance of commercialized news turned out to be ‘a wonderful prize to win’ (46). Now, of course, with the Internet, the power bloc is facing a growing volume of unsuppressed speech that resists the truth claims of corporate speech and the press. When one is theorizing about the Internet’s impact on society, the phenomenon must be situated in the context of the oppositional stance to the power bloc that is maintained by a significant portion of the masses. The history of the control of the press attests to the suppression of any mechanisms that would enable the public to resist and evade control in any substantial form. The existence of widespread, substantial mechanisms of social control within democratic states suggests that capitalism is a system that must be maintained through an extreme and constant production of propaganda on its own behalf. A model of society that does not admit to substantial resistance will have trouble explaining enormous expenditures made in the pursuit of social control. We are left with having to explain away either control or resistance. Fiske has been widely criticized for overstating the degree to which popular culture is an expression of active resistance. Yet, online popular cultural production such as non-corporate news and culture jamming confirms his assertion that the products of popular culture arise out of people’s experience of being subordinated by the power bloc. Unconstrained expression on the Internet can be read as a response to the suppression of public discourse within capitalism: The news that the people want, make and circulate among themselves may differ widely from that which the power-bloc wishes them to have. Popular taste (because the people can only be defined oppositionally) is for information that contradicts that of the power-bloc: the interests of the people are served by arguing with the power-bloc, not by listening to it. Popular information, then, is partisan, not objective: it is information that serves the people’s interests, not information as a servant of an objective truth acting as a mask for domination. (46–7)

Fiske probably did not have the Internet in mind when he wrote this description of the audience’s oppositional position to elite rule. Nonetheless, it does partially explain the impulse behind the production of popular information online. There is a thirst for a point of view that is

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not produced by commercial media. There is a thirst, and far more than a marginal thirst, for news that aggressively contradicts the representation of reality that is produced by the state-corporate alliance. A significant amount of non-corporate online news confirms that popular taste yearns for information that contradicts the commercial press. As the marketplace has failed to satisfy this thirst, and is structurally incapable of satisfying this thirst, the need is now being met by nonmarket forms of online news. The rising popularity of non-corporate news represents a market failure within commercial media – one that cannot be fixed by the market. Interpreting the Internet as a domain of popular evasion and resistance provides a far more plausible foundation for theorizing about its effects than proposing that it will degrade into yet one more domain for the expansion of hypercommercialism and hegemony. This is a more plausible foundation because it accounts for the online audience’s ability to evade control and does not assume that resistance is marginal. McChesney’s argument that the content of the new digital world will ‘appear quite similar to the content of the pre-digital commercial media world’ understates the will to resist within the audience and underestimates the volume of alternative content that is being produced by an online audience actively evading and resisting control.79 The new digital world is facing a phenomenon that did not exist in the era of pre-digital commercial media – mass participation in the representation of reality. Popular culture now has its own global distribution and archival system. McChesney recognizes that there will be a ‘vibrant, exciting, and important noncommercial citizen sector in cyberspace,’ but he mistakenly sees the ‘operating logic of the dominant commercial sector’ as the prime arbitrator of content and audiences within the Internet (183). The commercial sector does have an enormous presence within the Internet, but its operating logic does not dictate what people choose to create and circulate within the Web. Exactly the contrary appears to be happening. Popular interests are de-repressed within cyberspace – the operating logic of the commercial media sector compels individuals to seek out their own space and their own voice. Yet McChesney comes to a very different conclusion about the role of the Internet in promoting social change: ‘The digital revolution seems less a process of empowering the less powerful than a process that will further the corporate and commercial penetration and domination of life’ (185). He is far from alone in his opinion of the Internet’s fate. Herbert I. Schiller argues that

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the ‘transformation of the Internet into a predominantly commercial venue’ is just around the corner.80 James R. Beniger maintains that ‘those who control society at large’ will most likely control cyberspace.81 Douglas Rushkoff sees nothing new coming from the Internet: ‘Instead of forging a whole new world, the World Wide Web gives us a new window on the same old world ... [The Web] is dead.’82 There is no denying that the Internet will be used for commercial propaganda. But the jury is still out as to whether online commercial propaganda will prove to be a greater social force than mass participation in non-corporate content production and dissemination. Indeed, the overall social impact of decommodified online content production could prove to be as massive an affair as was the social impact of commercial media in the 1900s. The Internet provides a remarkable demonstration of Fiske’s claim that ‘[p]opular politics tend towards those domains where popular interests may be best promoted.’83 There are plenty of reasons for popular politics and personal expression to migrate to the Internet. Our public sphere has been thoroughly colonized by commercial and state interests. Outside of the Internet there is little left of the public square, the town hall, or the commons. The public domain of free expression is under constant assault by the power bloc. It has been subject to multiple forces of containment and restriction on multiple fronts, such as the privatization of space in the urban and suburban environment and the ongoing attempt to gain control of the public-school curriculum by corporations. Within the contemporary public sphere, street-level political activism is increasingly framed as anti-democratic and tarred with terrorism rhetoric. Indeed, within the United States, political dissent in general is increasingly framed as unpatriotic. Throughout the 1900s capitalism was highly adept at limiting the forms and forums of public expression while simultaneously reducing the collective influence that people could exert on the operation of governments and corporations. Labour, consumer, and feminist movements, along with ‘black power,’ were reigned in, just as were progressive politics of the early 1900s. Antagonistic social movements were marginalized and left under-represented (to say nothing of demonized) within commercial media. These trends have made the Internet a preferred domain for promoting popular politics. Where Fiske observes that ‘capitalism has proven remarkably adept at staving off crisis conditions of acute antagonism’ (62), there is reason to hope that the Internet will provide a forum for increased antagonism. Hope

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lies in the possibility that unconstrained speech would produce sustained antagonism and a crisis in the legitimacy of the power bloc through the unfettered production of an alternative symbolic economy. Non-corporate news production could play a central role in manufacturing dissent. We are now faced with two contradictory value-production systems – one that manufactures consent and another that manufactures dissent. Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model of corporate media describes how the corporate news system effectively filters out messages that do not promote the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups.84 They argue that a series of censorship mechanisms are embedded in the institutional structure of corporate media. These censorship mechanisms are the economy of media ownership, the use of corporate and government sources, the influence of advertisers, and the ideological disciplining of journalists and media outlets (known as ‘flak’). Of great significance to the changing political economy of meaning production in capitalist societies is the inability of these censorship mechanisms to filter news material within the Internet. Obviously, with the arrival of the Internet, the economy of news production has changed. News production is no longer the sole domain of very large businesses controlled by very wealthy people. The Internet also permits aggressive fact checking of government and corporate sources, thus reducing their role in establishing credibility. The availability of alternative ‘eyewitness’ sources within online news also undermines the propaganda function of elite sources. Clearly, decommodified online news is not subject to the censoring influence of advertisers. Similarly, as online non-corporate news is substantially deinstitutionalized, the disciplining role of flak is also largely missing from the new value-production system. Collectively, the failure of institutionalized censorship mechanisms to operate within a deinstitutionalized news system further suggests that the process of manufacturing consent within capitalism will face increased resistance throughout this century. Paul Rutherford suggests that the dissent of the 1960s and 1970s was stifled and delegitimized through the use of ‘attack propaganda’ – attack advertising that trashed the left and marshalled public fear against radical change. He charts a series of significant obstacles that prevented any form of dissent from getting into commercial media: ‘What authority stifled was dissent: it sought to silence the voices of

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criticism and to render invisible their imagery. Increasingly, as the seventies marched on, the elites regained their command over the shape of the symbolic universe which constructed politics. That deprived Americans of one discourse of resistance.’85 Once again, authority is faced with growing public resistance but, unlike in the 1960s and 1970s, there exists a new means of voicing dissent, one that is capable of addressing audiences that measure in the millions. Silencing criticism and controlling the symbolic universe of media culture could prove far more difficult in this century than in the 1900s. Strategies will certainly be employed by commercial media to counter any erosion of its authority, legitimacy, trust, and audience share, but the success of any new strategies also remains to be seen. Gillmor hints at the possibility of an Orwellian strategy that would require non-corporate journalists to be licensed by ‘Big Media and Big Government.’86 But this dystopic scenario of totalizing control would be difficult to implement in a globalized network environment. In 1987 Dennis McQuail wrote of ‘a possible media future’ that would encourage interaction, self-expression, self-realization, the raising of consciousness, self-mobilization, deinstitutionalization, reduction of scale, and self-production of content ‘by means of technologies in the hands of individuals.’87 That future has arrived, leaving media theory to catch up to the new structure and economy of content production that is altogether foreign to the context in which classic statements of twentieth-century theory were formulated. Cultural theory derived from the twentieth century suffers a fatal flaw – it generally conceives of cultural production as hermetically sealed within the economic system. We see this in operation when Fredric Jameson concludes that the intensification of commodification obliterates the remaining margins of non-capitalized space.88 This position is representative of the tendency to describe commodification as a totalizing force (a tendency generally found within postmodernism and specifically seen in Jean Baudrillard’s writings).89 In other words, there is no escape from the market’s co-option of individual acts of resistance. Clearly, however, a non-market space for cultural production has opened up within the Internet. Perhaps it is because of a massive shift in the structure of the media system – but no parallel shift in models and theories – that we see theorists vigorously denying the Internet’s ability to remain free of the constraints of commercial media. The Internet clearly contradicts the operating logic of commercial media. This contradiction leads some interpreters to prematurely accept that the

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day will soon come when the Net is forced to conform to the dominant communication system and the will of the economy. We have never experienced a means of communication that has enabled such a high level of unconstrained expression, so surely history will prevail and the Internet will be normalized. Theoretical formulations derived from an era that utterly lacked anything like the Internet will only take us so far in conceptualizing its effects. To put it in Kuhnian terms, an anomaly has appeared that does not fit into existing theories, forcing a paradigm shift in the field.

CHAP TER 7

Utopic Capitalism, Global Resistance, and the New Public Sphere

Back in 1994, while working on a doctoral degree at the University of Ottawa, running a small publishing company, and driving my first marriage into the ground, I wrote a brief thought-piece called ‘The Internet, Electric Gaia and the Rise of the Uncensored Self.’ The popculture article described aspects of the Internet as a cultural system that I thought would ‘give birth to a new form of human behaviour and, with novel behaviour, a new form of human consciousness – the uncensored self.’1 I suggested that mass participation in uncensored mass communication was an inherently subversive activity. This book has been an attempt to flesh out the notion of cyberspace as intrinsically subversive, given the surrounding context of capitalism and its media system. The Internet is a field of unconstrained expression. It is a space within the centre of corporate media culture where personal expression is liberated from structural constraints and institutionalized modes of discourse. Unconstrained expression and uncensored selves are creating a new type of public space – one that is not subject to the suppression of public discourse and collective action that marked the 1900s. With a new type of public space comes a new type of public – one that is not merely a pawn within a controlled communication system. This new public is learning to evade and resist control, learning new methods of mass action, and developing new techniques of decommodified cultural production and group communication. Unconstrained expression, resistance, and the Internet’s archival capabilities (it is a memory system) have combined to create an alternative symbolic economy. This alternative economy of meaning substantially contradicts the meanings embedded within commercial

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media. Until now this combination of capabilities has never been part of a global communication system. Unconstrained expression, resistance, and memory distinguish the Internet as unique terrain for the production of culture. But there are limits to its subversive nature. As a cultural phenomenon, the Internet is neither the domain of unlimited resistance, nor is it the staging ground for an inevitable corporate takeover of public expression. While I have argued that the Internet expands the audience’s opportunities for resistance and evasion, I have been careful to avoid any utopic claims for the future. Internet cultural theory tends towards two extremes: the normalizing and the utopic. The normalizing extreme claims that cyberspace will eventually succumb to market forces and devolve into a hypercommercial field of marketplace propaganda. The utopic extreme claims that cyberspace is the key catalyst that will transform all aspects of existence and operate as a form of technologically induced enlightenment. Utopic thinking surrounds the Internet and is very much a part of its cultural roots. This class of theory fails to account for what the Internet is and ends up in the realm of futurology – what the Internet (and society) might become one day. One of the more sophisticated examples of utopic futurology is found in the writings of the French philosopher Pierre Lévy. Cyberspace, according to Lévy, is the catalyst that will perfect cultural and biological evolution and deliver control over our collective destiny. Behind his notion of cyberspace is a collection of claims about the direction of history. Lévy predicts the coming of ‘one planetwide civilisation based on the practice of collective intelligence in cyberspace.’2 He describes his approach as ‘a utopian one, based on a form of direct, computer-mediated democracy.’3 The scope of his vision is truly breathtaking. Through cyberspace and the techniques of collective intelligence we will ‘learn everything that is possible to learn ... To whomever can formulate a question, all will become visible.’4 New forms of cyberdemocracy will lead to one planetwide legal and governmental system wherein peace is established by a worldwide government, war is a thing of the past, intellectual property rights evaporate, and capitalism abandons its ‘industry of carnage.’5 Through cyberspace humanity will manage the minutiae of the biosphere (even down to the precise regulation of weather patterns), consciously pilot the biosphere’s evolution, and eventually take full control, directing evolution towards our own goals while maintaining the biosphere’s balance and diversity. Lévy’s interpretation of Internet culture mirrors his teleological

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notion of history. History progresses though various stages of communication systems and technologies to the point where a global brain emerges – a ‘conscious biobrainsphere ... a cosmic brain that will bloom like an infinite flower made of love.’6 It would make far more sense to read the history of communication and technology as contributing to a constant movement toward massive biological destruction and species genocide. Lévy’s penchant for metaphysics, Buddhist philosophy, and poetics leads him to insist that universal participation in cyberspace would lead to just laws and governance. Yet his claims that cyberdemocracy and technologically assisted intelligence are better than more mundane human forms of interaction operate as grand assumptions. Frédéric Vanderberghe also finds in Lévy a celebration of the capitalist economy. Vanderberghe accuses Lévy of embracing the management of consciousness by today’s economic system. Lévy celebrates the commodification of knowledge as seen in the merger between universities and the market and ‘notes with approval that the new economy produces no longer goods or things but humanity itself.’7 We see this when Lévy claims that there ‘won’t be any difference left between thinking and business. Money will reward the ideas that bring into existence the most fabulous future, the future that we will decide to buy.’8 Vanderberghe suggests that such an idea not only reflects capitalism but ‘also helps to perform it.’9 Mark Poster likewise accuses Lévy of accounting ‘far too little for the incursion into that technology by existing institutions such as the capitalist economy and the nation state.’10 Typically with the normalization thesis, Lévy’s ideas present no substantial challenge to existing power structures. ‘Cyberspace,’ says Lévy, ‘will not change power relations and economic inequalities.’11 Behind, or perhaps right out in front of, Lévy’s theory of cyberspace is a belief that evolution is a process of progressive cultural, technological, and moral improvement. For Lévy there is ‘one single evolutionary process, one single energy of life from the first cell to the collective intelligence of cyberspace.’12 Every advance in communication and interconnection has been a step closer to the emancipation of humanity, the realization of its full potential, and the revelation of its true nature. Lévy believes that the Internet will enhance human cognition and make us smarter and better. In the process, the social transformation he forecasts could resolve conflicts and produce a collective consciousness in which all humanity eagerly participates.

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Kevin Robins and Frank Webster describe Lévy’s theory as ‘radical techno-rhetoric with a social and communitarian political vision that is actually quite conventional and even conservative.’13 Lévy represents a ‘political philosophy of high-tech communitarianism’ that was prevalent throughout the 1990s (223). This period saw many writers attempt to reconcile capitalism with the more obviously liberating aspects of cyberspace. Politicians such as the former Canadian minister of Industry, John Manley, and the former American vice-president, Al Gore, along with corporate thought leaders such as Bill Gates embraced the idea of the Internet as part of a new social order. Lévy’s critics argue that his theory of Internet culture is consistent with the vision of the future that was propagated by representatives of capitalism. Here we find a correspondence between certain aspects of Internet theory and the social vision of the elite. By assuring that cyberspace is not a realm of anarchy and disorder, proponents of the normalization thesis perform an ideological function – resistance and the failure of content control within the Internet are under-represented and the need for order and fear of anarchy are appeased. Behind Lévy’s narrative of progress Robins and Webster see a technocultural discourse that promotes and legitimates the ‘prevailing ideology of globalisation.’14 They accuse Lévy of presenting a largely apolitical picture of the inevitability of globalization. His version of Internet culture sees the end of totalizing forces, such as those behind fascism and Nazism, and those feared within capitalism. He proposes that cyberspace will move humanity beyond such destructive totalizing forces and produce a new type of universality, a globally shared context of economy, law, meaning, and governance. ‘This universal,’ says Lévy, ‘provides access to a joyous participation in the global, to the actual collective intelligence of the species. Through it we participate more intensely in our living humanity.’15 Lévy does not hesitate to describe cyberspace in terms of its ‘spiritual aspects’ and its ‘ultimate goal.’16 Throughout his writings can be found the theme of salvation through the attainment of a higher level of being, one that leaves behind our ‘excessive desire for control’ (101). Salvation lies in discovering our proper mode of fulfilment, which happens to be Lévy’s notion of collective intelligence. This higher mode of cognition and interconnectivity is already practised online by a growing number of individuals and communities (every religion must have disciples). Cyberspace-induced collective intelligence is nothing less than ‘humanity’s mode of fulfilment’ – the creation of a greater mind (115). Collec-

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tive intelligence will form the ‘religion of the future.’ This religion will lead humanity to fulfilling its mission – ‘growing the world’s brain’ – and the world brain will eventually participate in a cosmic brain, ‘a huge intelligence awakening to itself.’17 Humanity becomes midwife to the birth of the universe’s own self-awareness. This critique of Lévy’s portrait of the future of cyberspace needs to be tempered with the recognition that his analysis of the present state of cyberspace largely corresponds to my own. Lévy also describes the Net as liberating public expression, creating a new type of public space and a new type of public, and increasing the diversity of information and opinions. Yet, where Lévy sees the Internet as evolving into a form of utopic capitalism, I would counter that the Net is far more subversive than collaborative. The Internet is subversive, and perhaps inherently so, not simply because of what it is, but also because of the context in which it appears – globalizing capitalism and corporate media. This context creates conditions of injustice and definitional control (the overdetermination of meaning). These conditions generate the impulse to resist while simultaneously reducing the legitimacy of dissent and muting the awareness of resistance within the audience. There are forces at work within the Internet that extend the reach of capitalism, but until we see a substantial reduction in online communicative freedoms the Internet will continue to play a significant role in facilitating resistance. Within capitalism, liberated expression has an intrinsically subversive quality. The Internet appears to be a new type of public sphere, one that is uniquely suited to the expression of resistance. This is particularly important given the strategies of cultural containment that have been used by commercial media to reassure the audience that capitalism and democracy are the tools of moral and cultural evolution.18 One of the key mechanisms of cultural containment is seen in commercial media’s portrayal of dissent as trivial, marginal, ineffective, allied with terrorism, and violent. Consider David Frum’s hysterical rant published in the National Post: ‘Disturbed personalities can be found in every society and in every culture. In the West, they tend to be drawn to the animal-rights movement, to anti-globalization, and to radical environmentalism.’19 This facile attempt to frame dissent as a function of abnormal psychology suggests that ‘disturbed personalities’ can also be found among the press corps. Commercial media played a crucial role in containing and delegitimating dissent in the 1960s and 1970s even as it diffused images of discontent.20 What remains to be seen is how cultural resistance will be

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managed and contained when a new type of public sphere within the Internet actively challenges the production of social meaning by commercial media. The new public sphere is different from the public sphere of the 1900s – it is no longer subject to the repression of events nor is it dominated by the corporate voice. It is easy to misread the Internet’s public spaces and portray them as succumbing to commercial colonization. Lee Slater’s analysis of the online public sphere repeats the basic tenets of the normalization thesis when he claims that ‘there has been a recognisable shift in the content, use, and structure of the Internet.’21 Slater sees business and government colonizing content, while a ‘form of enclosure is occurring whereby “small-holders” are being forced into the heavily populated, controlled, and regulated areas such as those provided by America Online and Microsoft Network’ (139). But as I have argued, enclosure has proved to be very difficult to achieve. Indeed, Microsoft has found the ISP business to be less than promising and is withdrawing from the dial-up Internet market. There is no real justification for claiming that Internet users are being ‘forced’ and corralled into proprietary networks, particularly in light of the large numbers of defections from AOL (Reuters reported that ‘AOL lost 688,000 subscribers [in the third quarter], or two million on a year over year basis’ in 2002–3).22 There is also little justification for doubting the sustainability of online radical and alternative media. Tamara Villarreal Ford and Genève Gil suggest that ‘a lack of financial support for projects providing alternative media on-line is increasingly a liability for Internet activists and their audiences.’23 Financing alternative media has always been difficult. Yet, if it were truly ‘increasingly a liability,’ then we would see a decrease in online alternative media; but exactly the opposite is the case. There is an unparalleled explosion in such media. Fears of enclosure and financial collapse are based on a misguided application of twentieth-century economic models to emerging paradigms of twenty-first-century cultural production. Noncorporate (and, to a great extent, non-market) cultural production shows no sign of diminishing, regardless of market forces and the wishful thinking of the elite. The notion that online expressive capabilities are diminishing is widespread. Diana Saco repeats this common assumption when she claims that commercial and government forces are at work ‘reshaping cyberspace in ways that foreclose opportunities for open access, diversified content, and public communication.’24 It is true that corporations

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and states are attempting to reduce communicative freedom within the Internet (one need only remember the failed attempt by the American government to censor wide areas of Internet speech via the Communications Decency Act of 1996). Yet here we must carefully distinguish between the ongoing attempt to suppress freedom within the Internet and the actual state of expressive freedom online. It is just as easy for an Internet user to say ‘fuck’ as it was back in 1989.25 Indeed, new publishing tools such as blogging software make it far easier to publish on the Web than ever before. As a site for social action and expressive freedom, the Internet remains largely unconstrained by mechanisms that regulate content within commercial media. Terrorism, Empire, and Global Capitalism The trajectory of capitalism provides considerable insight into how the Internet is evolving as a site for social action. In 1913 Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital described the political consequences of capitalism as continual growth in lawlessness and violence.26 Slightly less than a century later, Noam Chomsky described one of the great centres of democracy and capitalism, America, as ‘a leading terrorist state.’27 While many equate the economic system with democracy itself, and see the two forces of democracy and capitalism as morally superior systems, others equate these political and economic paradigms with the worst of moral bankruptcy, imperialism, biocide, and empire. When evaluating capitalism it must be kept in mind that history’s largest and most sophisticated propaganda system is constantly telling us that it is the only valid form of economic organization. Nothing is more disturbing and just plain wrong to the conservative point of view than Chomsky’s assessment that ‘[w]hat is called capitalism is basically a system of corporate mercantilism, with huge and largely unaccountable private tyrannies exercising vast control over the economy, political systems, and social and cultural life, operating in close cooperation with powerful states that intervene massively in the domestic economy and international society. That is dramatically true of the United States, contrary to much illusion.’28 Such a critique strikes at the heart of the dominant ideology and is widely rejected as the most vile of heresies. Consider the contrast between Chomsky’s condemnation of American political and economic aggression and Samuel P. Huntington’s

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thesis that ‘[a] world without U.S. primacy will be a world with more violence and disorder and less democratic and economic growth than a world where the United States continues to have more influence than any other country shaping global affairs. The sustained international primacy of the United States is central to the welfare and security of Americans and to the future of freedom, democracy, open economies, and international order in the world.’29 Huntington’s blatant promotion of a supposed American moral leadership is echoed in Matthew Fraser’s book Weapons of Mass Distraction.30 Fraser, the editor-in-chief of the Canadian National Post, offers a facile defence of America as ‘essentially a benevolent hegemon.’ The only dangers of America’s global domination ‘are to America itself.’ Fraser, along with the Post in general, argues that American cultural imperialism, which is propagated through its weapons of mass distraction (the corporate cultural industries), is ‘not only necessary for global stability, but also should be built up and deployed more assertively throughout the world. The world needs more MTV, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Madonna and Mickey Mouse.’31 Fraser’s trite punditry represents the steady diet of pro-market propaganda that is fed to the audience by corporate media. When Robert Wright informed readers of the New York Times that America is the ‘natural leader’ of a ‘moral revolution’ that is spread through the globalization of capitalism’s ‘economic liberty,’32 he is repeating the common-sense viewpoint of liberalism that equates globalization, capitalism, and American cultural colonization with enlightenment. There are countless other examples of how the commercial media propagates this highly popular myth. Thus, it comes as no surprise when antiglobalization groups, also known as the anti-capitalism movement, are framed as a form of terrorism by the state and within the corporate press. If we are to come to terms with the consequences of the Internet’s mode of unconstrained expression, it is vital that we penetrate the myths of common sense and corporate propaganda and fully comprehend the violence and destruction that is cloaked by cherished beliefs. As a result of their misreading of capitalism, free-market cheerleaders and digital-capitalism enthusiasts see a symbiotic relationship developing between the Internet and the economy. Believing that, on the whole, capitalism is a good thing (if not the best thing), they draw the general conclusion that adding the Internet to capitalism makes the economy an even better thing. But what if capitalism is the opposite of what common sense tells us it is? What if the legacy of capitalism and

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globalization is five centuries of increasing violence? I maintain that the much-reviled anti-capitalist movement provides considerable insight into the current state of the global economy, insight that in turn sheds light on how a field of unconstrained expression will be used for cultural production. While a complete description of the complaint against capitalism is beyond the scope of this book, the following will explore the outlines of the judgment rendered by the anti-capitalist movement and then consider the implications of the movement within an emerging public sphere. As a leading terrorist state, the United States exports violence and destruction through the economy it sustains and seeks to globalize (in this it is not alone, but it is certainly the prime actor in globalization). There are economic as well as political manifestations of terrorism. Thus, the left is becoming increasingly vocal in its condemnation of capitalism and its trajectory of globalization as a form of terrorism (or, at the very least, culpability in the production of terrorism). A typical statement of this equation is found in Jean Baudrillard’s essay ‘The Spirit of Terrorism.’ Here Baudrillard argues that terrorism is not directed simply toward America but toward the attempt to establish a global monopoly of power, which gives rise to ‘a proportional blowback of power.’33 This echoes Foucault’s insistence that whenever power is exercised there is likely to be resistance to it. Baudrillard describes the globe itself as resisting the hegemonic domination that globalizing capitalism attempts to establish. Jean-François Lyotard also uses the metaphor of terror to describe the control systems of Western civilization. The individual, Lyotard suggests, is bent to the will of the social system through the institutionalized exercise of psychological terror. The market system, with its technocratic institutions, effectively makes people want what the system needs and so gathers more power unto itself.34 As many others have also noted, the computerization of society feeds this process. Lyotard describes the computer as a potential ‘“dream” instrument for controlling and regulating the market system ... [I]t would inevitably involve the use of terror’ (67). He also notes that the same technology could enhance resistance. The analyses of Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Chomsky suggest that both capitalism and democracy can be understood as forms of terror that are increasing their level of violence against both indigenous and external populations. Such a perspective is helpful because it corrects the tendency to interpret the Internet audience as evolving into a predominantly collaborative force within

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capitalism. Understating the exercise and consequences of power results in the under-representation of the will to resist within the social order. The normative assumption, what could be called the ‘common sense’ view of globalizing capitalism, is that it is the best option available. Even Galbraith, vilified by conservatives, describes capitalism as ‘essentially a peaceful system.’35 Typically for the normative view, the Economist magazine frequently defends globalization as a great benefit to poor nations.36 Critics reply that benefits delivered to developing nations by transnational corporations are offset by a loss of self-determination, exploitative labour practices, and environmental degradation. What is certain is William K. Tabb’s observation that ‘[a]ny effort to control corporate greed and the social costs it imposes is characterised as illegitimate.’37 Those who oppose globalization of American interests are seen to be sympathetic with terrorists: ‘Robert Zoellick, the U.S. trade representative opined that opponents of corporate-led globalization might have “intellectual connections with” the terrorists.’38 To argue against the economic policy of the American government is to be in league with terrorists. This brings us to the heart of the Internet’s most probable long-term social effect. If the Internet remains an environment for unconstrained communicative action, it will be increasingly difficult to frame such dissent as illegitimate. Globalizing capitalism is comparable to terrorism because it is a process that is driven not by consent but through coercion. Under a cloak of quasi-democratic processes, international regulatory bodies, and trade agreements, capitalism spreads through coercion, ‘the coercion of weaker countries by more powerful countries, the coercion of workers by employers, and the uneven distribution of the gains from trade based on coercive exercise of economic, political, and military power.’39 While conservative economic, social, and political theory insists that, with time, all will work out for the better, at the grassroots level there is growing resistance to globalizing capitalism. The negative effects of economic expansion are growing (and perhaps beyond controlling). These effects are numerous but can be summarized: a dramatic growth in inequality and an equally dramatic growth in environmental destruction. These negative effects are occurring in the midst of a grossly unfair redistribution of wealth and power, which only further stimulates resistance and violence. There are sophisticated arguments to the contrary, but my purpose here is not to offer a point-by-point rebuttal to the conservative view.

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The key point, it seems to me, is the loss of control over corporate activity that has been inflicted upon the public. Deregulation, privatization, and the willingness of corporations to engage in the most grievous forms of behaviour have led to an economic system that no longer engages in any meaningful form of social contract. The trajectory of the economy mirrors trends within the media sector. An ever smaller number of firms dominate the global economy as they create market oligopolies. National governments suffer a loss of control over policy and corporate behaviour as transnational corporations move capital, labour, and production facilities to regions that promise the least amount of regulatory oversight. Corporations have responded to increased public resentment by implementing public-relations strategies designed to project an image of social responsibility (but only an image!). Increasingly, globalization becomes a rhetorical device used by the elite to explain what cannot be done. In a thousand different ways the public is told that ‘there is no alternative.’ Oddly enough, the more frequently the elite insist that there is no alternative to globalizing capitalism, that the free-market economy is the only path worth following, the more we see manifestations of resistance to empire. Resistance leads to consolidating power blocs, such as the European Union,40 and to increased collaboration between human rights, labour, environmental, and anarchist movements. Yet even as resistance consolidates and spreads, so also do repression and officially sanctioned violence increase. Some of the most widely noted after-effects of 9/11 are the assault on civil liberties, the placing of civil society on a permanent wartime footing, and the association of dissent with support for terrorism. To a certain degree these trends have been present since the close of the Second World War, but they substantially intensified after 9/11. In its fight against terrorism the state is increasingly resorting to the use of psychological terror to manage public opinion. What we are witnessing is a massive cultural divorce between the values and goals of the statecorporate power bloc and the public. The totalitarian trajectory of the empire of mind and growing resistance to all forms of empire suggest extreme caution before we paint a utopic picture of the future of capitalism and civil society. The nefarious intentions of transnational corporations and the willingness of the state to align itself with the goals of capital suggest that the immediate future holds forth the promise of an intensification of both oppression and resistance. While liberal social theory tends to see

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the Internet as a forum for renewed community, I suggest that we are headed towards an era of increased conflict and resistance. As the violence of globalizing capitalism and the resistance of the public increases, so also does a new architecture of knowledge spread with the adoption of the Internet. Given the surrounding context of the terrorism of capital, the Internet emerges as a unique location for an oppositional public sphere. Communicative Freedom and the New Public Sphere As with all things involving social action and the Internet, here again we encounter contradictory forces. The very same social system that developed the Internet and uses it for liberatory purposes also spreads globalizing capitalism through the Web. In Prometheus Wired Darin Barney argues that ‘the proliferation of network technology represents an acceleration of the logic and effects of capitalism in the practices and relationships of production, work, consumption and exchange.’ Characteristically for the normalization thesis, Barney insists that in the midst of all these changes, what does not change is ‘the fundamental power structure and relationships of capitalism itself.’ In other words, the world is changing but capitalism itself remains unchanged. Barney insists that computer networks are ‘an essentially conservative, not revolutionary, technology.’ They ‘bolster the already formidable control of capital over the means of power.’41 (Significantly, Barney cites McChesney in support of his thesis.) While I do not dispute the obvious, that computer networks aid the spread of globalizing capitalism, it must also be taken into account that the Internet aggressively destroys capitalism’s very basis for power. Barney’s radical scepticism does not account for the failure of capital’s control over the means to power. What is the key component of capitalism’s means to power over the social order if not the mind itself? The relationships of capital are first and foremost relationships of value and meaning. Capitalism’s power structure is embedded in a symbolic economy that is under assault within cyberspace. Barney’s passionate rhetoric asserts that individuals have no ‘effective control over the means to power,’ but here again he does not correctly identify what truly constitutes the means to power in the capitalist social order – the global flow of meaning (190). Globalizing capitalism uses the Internet to extend its domain, but even as it does so it decreases its ability to control the foundation of any empire – the hearts and minds of its sub-

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jects. It may be the ultimate irony of globalization that it inadvertently created an uncontrollable public sphere, which in any empire is a dire threat. Kellner echoes the thoughts of many when he notes that in ‘contemporary high-tech societies there is emerging a significant expansion and redefinition of the public sphere.’42 There is a line of thinking that rejects any notion of the ‘public’ and finds no cause for describing the Internet as a public sphere. Jodi Dean sees the Internet as a failed public sphere because she believes that the market dominates within its realm.43 Here we again encounter the consequences of false assumptions about marketplace dominance operating within the normalization thesis. Dean recognizes that the Web is a source of democratic potential, yet her overestimation of the normalizing character of cyberspace leads her to conclude that the Web is mainly a materialization of capitalist ideologies, that it ‘naturalizes’ the global market (168). Ultimately, Dean describes Internet communicative action as the ideological handmaiden of capitalism: ‘[T]he Web is communicative capitalism’s imaginary of uncontested yet competitive global flow’ (168). Yet, where she sees little more than communicative capitalism at work, I maintain that we find decommodified communication, de-repressed bodies, and expression (substantially, but not entirely) unconstrained by institutional censorship mechanisms. The public sphere’s new architecture has already produced copious examples of the Internet’s utility for progressive political struggle.44 The Internet, says Robert J. Klotz, ‘is a necessity for political participants.’45 Klotz concludes that the ‘evidence of substantial information dissemination and mobilization [through the Internet] is strong.’ In the run-up to the U.S. election of 2004, the use of the Internet to raise funds was widely noted by the press. As a political tool, the Internet also mobilizes people’s wallets. Enough time has passed to provide a reasonable degree of certainty concerning the political use of the Internet. It will continue to play a central role in responding to the systemic violence of an economy that evades public accountability. As Kellner notes, ‘[A]ll political struggle is already mediated by media, computer, and information technologies and will increasingly be so in the future.’46 The Internet is transforming into a highly politicized cultural environment. Perhaps owing to the prevalence of the normalization theory, or perhaps in response to the utopic hype of early Internet pioneers, there is a tendency to discount online activism. Robins and Webster sound hope-

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lessly out of touch with the grassroots activism taking place within the Internet when they claim that ‘[c]yberspace is a sequestered space, one that has lost touch with the world’s realities.’47 On the contrary, it seems to me that the Internet reveals reality to an extent never before experienced within corporate media culture and enables the audience to engage in very real-world struggles. Habermas also grossly misinterprets online communicative action when stating that ‘[t]he publics produced by the Internet remain closed off from one another like global villages.’48 Joseph Lockard, also either out of touch or out of date (1997), claims that ‘global cyberspace lends itself to an elite political voyeurism more readily than to effective activism.’49 Zygmunt Bauman makes a similar error when he claims that ‘there is little which the residents of cyberspace could talk about with those still hopelessly mired in the all-too-real physical space. Even less can they gain from that dialogue.’50 These comments strike me as the epitome of the tendency among some intellectuals to disparage grassroots communicative action within the Internet. One can only wonder what part of cyberspace Robins, Webster, Habermas, Lockard, and Bauman have surfed to arrive at such dismissive judgments. As a highly politicized culture of resistance, the Internet community defies all attempts to domesticate its non-market and anti-market predilections. Initial hopes that the Internet would become a location for intense retail activity, to the extent of extinguishing ‘brick and mortar’ stores, now look hopelessly naive. Instead of becoming the next great site for consumer activity and commercial propaganda, the Internet is proving to be one of capitalism’s greatest threats. The wide diversity of online activism, which ranges from the extreme right wing to the extreme left, highlights how oppositional cultures find a public space within the Internet. In contrast, there was little room for oppositional and revolutionary cultures in the commercialized public spaces of the 1900s. New forums and uses of media have an intimate connection with revolution. While the anti-capitalism movement does not as yet constitute a revolution, numerous crises under way within the global social order suggest that illuminating analogies can be made between the contemporary situation and the role of media in revolutionary processes. Jeremy D. Popkin’s overview of the relationship between media and revolutionary crises is particularly insightful. As many historians, sociologists, and media theorists have also observed, Popkin notes that revolutionary crises and dramatic changes in the modes of communi-

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cation go hand in hand.51 Grand McLuhanite theories that draw a direct causal line between new media and revolution are generally rejected by historians and media theorists as too simplistic. Historians themselves are sharply divided on the causal relationship between media and revolutionary change. No single model of media revolution is available that can be applied to social upheavals, but historical comparisons can be used to ‘stretch our imagination.’52 The French Revolution is an oft-cited example of the complexities of direct historical comparison. There is a general consensus that the French Revolution could not have occurred without a media revolution. This media revolution included many modes of communication, such as assemblies, clubs, newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, songs, and so forth. There was a ‘sudden and dramatic appearance of large numbers of new organs of political communication ... [a] tremendous acceleration in the rhythm of communication ... the appearance of new forms of narrative and rhetoric ... [and the] capacity of the printing press to unite the entire population of a large country in common political discussion’ (21–2). These changes in the public sphere invite comparison to the Internet’s multiplication of political discourse, speed, new forms of deinstitutionalized journalistic narrative, and large audiences. Still, Popkin cautions us against simplistic comparisons. The revolutionary crises of the past four centuries were products of societies that had one dominant mode of communication – the printing press. After the First World War the printing press no longer reigned supreme. It had to compete against new forms of broadcast media: ‘The notion of a single public sphere unified by a single system of mass media may no longer be applicable to modern societies, and any model of “media revolution” derived from the printing-press era is likely to prove outdated today’ (26). Yet what cannot be denied is that there is an intimate relationship between communicative freedom and revolution: ‘For better or worse, revolutions are moments when freedom can truly be acted out in the media.’53 With the global social order lurching from crisis to crisis, the legitimacy of the elite and the power bloc under sustained attack, and the online masses experiencing a degree of unparalleled communicative freedom, one can only wonder what lies ahead. As Popkin notes, this is not a matter of prediction, as media influence on the social order is wildly unpredictable, and it is not a matter of progress, as revolutionary ruptures do not necessarily entail progress. It may simply be a matter of collective imagination and hope.

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Postmodern theorists, such as Mark Poster, raise the spectre of fragmentation in the social order as heralding an end to mass upheavals: ‘Electronically mediated communication to some degree supplements existing forms of sociability but to another extent substitutes for them. New and unrecognisable modes of community are in the process of formation and it is difficult to discern exactly how these will contribute to or detract from postmodern politics. The image of people in the streets, from the Bastille in 1789, to the Sorbonne in 1968 and Tiananmen Square, Beijing in 1989 may be the images that will not be repeated in the forms of upheaval of the twenty-first century and beyond.’54 Yet thirteen years after Poster speculated about ‘the disintegrating impulses’ of the present media environment leading to the ‘impossibility of community,’ we witnessed the single largest global protest in human history (154). On 15 February 2003 as many as ten million people gathered in the streets of over six hundred different cities for a weekend of protest against American imperialism with hundreds of rallies and marches in up to sixty countries.55 That this protest was coordinated across the globe via the Internet suggests that the image of people massing in the streets in opposition to the power bloc is not about to be relegated to a fading paradigm of modernity. There is considerable rhetoric around the idea that the Internet will reinvigorate community. Nonetheless, the Internet’s ability to facilitate communicative action and collective protest cannot be easily dismissed. To his credit, seven years and thirty million new Internet users after he wrote the Mode of Information, Poster offered a more sophisticated analysis of the Internet’s political potential, one that recognized the Internet’s inherent capability of challenging elite authority.56 It must be kept in mind that I am not presenting the Internet as a force against which no regime can stand. Cautioning against ‘[w]hat is now widely perceived as the Internet’s innate power to bring about the collapse of authoritarian rule,’ Shanthi Kalathi and Taylor C. Boas’s analysis concludes that ‘the Internet is not inherently a threat to authoritarian rule.’57 But here it must be noted that the Internet’s integration into the social order of authoritarian regimes remains incomplete and is ongoing. In many authoritarian regimes opposition parties are unable to make extensive use of the Internet. This is bound to change with time. Obviously, the impact of the Internet will be unevenly distributed across the globe. Its use will be strongly conditioned by the social order in which it appears. These qualifications are

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repeated throughout the literature and are generally intended to correct the initial euphoric claims made throughout the 1990s. With the Internet’s trajectory as a field of intensified resistance, it is a mistake, typified in Lévy’s utopian notions, to see a reformed version of capitalism as destiny. A post-capitalist social order is also a possibility. The social order may undergo radical transformation if a new type of public sphere overwhelms the singularity of the corporate voice and reincorporates a multitude of opinions and voices. A post-capitalist social order becomes increasingly possible when the normative debate is expanded. If the corporate voice recedes within the collective mental landscape and becomes merely one among many voices, then the only limit to social order will prove to be the collective imagination itself. While I strongly disagree with his notion of the inevitable direction of our imagination, I do agree with Lévy here on the power of imagination. Throughout this book I have proposed that the Internet is expanding the normative debate. Yet others have raised the spectre of the Internet leading to a balkanization of the public sphere wherein people would only seek out information and online communities that reinforce their view of the world. In Republic.com Cass Sunstein argues that commercial media provides citizens with a diversity of opinions sufficient for a healthy democracy, whereas the Internet and other digital technologies will enable ‘perfect filtering’ of information. These filtering capabilities would in turn lead to excessive social fragmentation and ‘would undoubtedly produce a more balkanized society.58 Sunstein’s argument is tantamount to a defence of the necessary role of corporate media, which supposedly ensures that citizens are adequately informed. Turning the critical assessment of corporate media on its head, Sunstein makes the rather hysterical claim that it is not corporate media that threatens the democratic health of society, but the increase in the consumer’s ability to avoid mass media. It is hard to imagine how Sunstein can fear increased diversity and power of choice within the American media environment given the dismal failure of corporate media to provide a wide range of opinions in the aftermath of 9/11. Sunstein is working with a conservative model of American social order when he claims that Americans ‘have little reason to fear tyranny, and in many domains, we need more markets, and freer ones too.’59 The flood of books on the notion of a new American empire, the increase in Anti-Americanism throughout the globe, the actions of the Bush administration, the recent introduction of

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highly repressive legislation such as the Patriot Act – all this implies that Americans do have reason to fear tyranny. Also, when one of the greatest tyrannies facing the American population is the tyranny of uncontrolled market forces, Sunstein’s claim that Americans are in need of even freer markets is truly remarkable. Sunstein has clearly waded deep into the waters of neoconservatism. Sunstein’s argument relies on the false assumption that individuals will only seek out like-minded sources of information, and that we are headed for a media system that would enable perfect filtering of information. Yet there is substance behind the metaphor of ‘surfing’ the Web, wherein the individual moves across a dense field of interlinked sites and is exposed to chance encounters, random events, and heightened curiosity. Contrary to Sunstein’s overly confident claims about the ‘inevitable consequences’ of Internet use, the evidence that the Internet leads to balkanization, polarization of opinions, and social fragmentation is sparse, flawed, and contradictory. Particularly with the rise of the blogging phenomenon, there is extensive evidence of online discourse that argues and contests various points of views arising from both the mass media and the Internet itself.60 Online discourse reflects interaction between an extremely broad spectrum of opinions and ideological positions. The intense debates that are conducted within blogs strongly suggest that the Internet produces precisely the opposite of balkanization. It is simply amazing how often we encounter liberal theorists who propose notions of total control: Lessig and totalizing legal control; McChesney and totalizing market controls; Baudrillard and totalizing hyper-reality; and Sunstein’s notion of totalizing personal control over exposure to content (perfect filtering). Social theory is guilty of philosophical excess when the social system is described as existing without any significant means to resistance and evasion, when power is described as absolute, and when consequences are foreseen as inescapable and utterly dystopic. Too often we encounter the assumption that the powerful are soon to be all-powerful. The ideological framework of capitalism promotes these totalizing scenarios, which are best seen as part of an evolving mythology of an omnipotent empire (there are monotheistic notions deeply embedded within the cultural roots of capitalism that tend to infect social theory). But resistance is not futile. While globalizing capitalism has been largely undefeated in achieving its objectives,61 the one thing that remains beyond its reach is the colonization of the new wired public sphere of the Internet. It is the

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overall thesis of The Empire of Mind that this failure will not be overcome and therefore presents an Achilles heel – a possibly fatal flaw. It will require more than just unconstrained communicative freedom to rein in the worst abuses of capital, but without such a public sphere resistance would indeed be futile. Where commercial media has proven to be a weapon of mass distraction, the Internet may well turn into a weapon of mass insurrection.

Conclusion

I have argued that the Internet’s potential for radical social change is widely discounted. My argument is similar to the claims made by John D.H. Downing when he counters the notion that radical media are fading away. Downing suggests that the power of radical media is misperceived ‘because they are not stereotypical mainstream media.’1 Likewise, the Internet’s age of unconstrained expression and alternative media is widely seen as fading because it does not fit within the economy of corporate media. I do not deny that the communicative freedom of Internet users is under attack. Such freedom represents a substantial challenge to the power bloc and to capitalism, and thus will certainly be ‘ground zero’ for sustained struggle throughout this century. I also do not claim to foresee the outcome of this struggle. Modelling capitalism and democracy as mythic notions that conceal realities comparable to terrorism sheds light on the possibility that the outcome of a new online public sphere could well be far removed from the sanitized and utopic conceptions of digital capitalism that dominate the corporate press, political platforms, and liberal social theory. Claims that uncontrolled communicative freedom could facilitate the arrival of a post-capitalist society are likely to be poorly received. Such a claim is comparable to proposing the possibility of a post-Christian society (blasphemy and moral panic!). The first error of theory is to see capitalism as a reflection of the natural order and the second error is to see it as inevitable. Capitalism and democracy, in all their various forms, are neither natural nor our assured destiny. One need only look at the physical and social environment with eyes wide open to realize that neither is our dominant mode of social and economic organization equitable nor sustainable. New social orders are not merely a curious

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possibility – our need for them is quickly becoming a matter of survival. But is the Internet any match for the powerful forces that maintain and promote capitalism? Evaluating the Internet’s potential for radical social change involves far more than identifying short-term changes in thought and action. The study of media effects has been plagued by the difficulty of demonstrating an empirical connection between media content and audience behaviour. Downing’s caution on this issue is particularly pertinent: ‘[A] model of media influence that maintains a tight closeup on immediate consequences will fail to register accurately the significant long-term resonance of radical alternative media’ (31). The same could be said of the tactical uses of the Internet described herein. Barbie, McDonald’s, and corporate journalism are in no immediate danger from the Net. Yet a tight close-up on any one issue addressed by Internet activists has the potential to overlook the long-term significance of a massive shift in the structure of the public sphere. As long as the corporate voice dominates the landscape, new social movements will be dismissed in the face of the repeated (and delegitimating) insistence that there is no alternative. Yet there is no guarantee that power relations in the communication system will remain static. Dominant voices rise and fade throughout the historical record. Insisting that the corporate voice will continue to dominate the mental landscape is tantamount to proposing the end of history. The fundamental significance of the Internet lies in its production of an alternative symbolic economy and its expansion of the number of contenders that may participate in the normative debate. The cumulative effect of unconstrained expression and non-commercial cultural production may well be the production of a permanent alternative symbolic economy that is the essential foundation for the creation of new social orders. Modelling capitalism as a belief system and not understating the degree of violence that is inflicted upon the social order and the environment by capitalism are elements essential for interrogating the Internet as a new mode of cultural transmission and identifying its possible consequences.2 The more our cultural theories take into account the suppression of expression within capitalism, and the repressive nature of capitalism, the more will we be able to account for the inherently subversive quality of decommodified, deinstitutionalized, and globalized unconstrained expression within the social orders of empire. Critics could reply that by proposing that the Internet opens up the

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possibility for a post-capitalist society I have slid into the realm of utopic thinking that lies at the roots of Internet culture. Unconstrained communicative freedom holds no guarantee that such freedom will be used to pursue social justice. The Internet’s expansion of the normative debate is potentially as destructive as it is constructive. John Keane provides a cautionary note on this point: ‘The troubling fact is that freedom of communication is never a self-stabilising process. A pluralistic society marked by a multitude of opinions will never resemble one big happy family. Under extreme conditions, a quarrelling civil society can even bludgeon itself to death.’3 Robert W. Cox’s analysis of the contemporary political landscape also suggests caution before equating the rise of the Internet with an unfolding communitarian utopia. Cox notes that a counter-hegemonic challenge could just as likely be established by the extreme right: ‘The contemporary world is rife with racism and right-wing populism; a fascist revival is probably stronger now than at any time since the 1930s. These are as much popular movements as those usually classified as “new social movements.” Civil society is a terrain of struggle between reactionary and transformative forces.’4 What type of future we arrive at through the emerging online public sphere entirely depends upon what we do with it. Capitalism has pushed the globe to the brink of biospheric collapse; so much so that we now see the threat of extinction used as a rhetorical device for rallying support around the proposed colonization of Mars. Given the size and momentum of globalizing capitalism, what forces could possibly alter the trajectory of this holocaust? ‘The supreme challenge,’ suggests Cox, ‘is to build a counter-hegemonic formation’ (94). A new type of economy must be built upon a ‘radical reorienting of social values,’ but a new social order ‘will only be triggered by bottomup pressure of citizen activism’ (95). A reformed version of capitalism, or an entirely post-capitalist social order, requires a shared set of values – an alternative symbolic economy that would operate as a ‘counterhegemonic formation.’ It seems clear that the Internet is evolving into a counter-hegemonic media environment. Fundamental change, the type of change necessary to address the severity of capitalism’s holocaust, is unlikely to be accomplished through existing state or economic systems. As a new type of public sphere, the Internet on its own is hardly a match for the state-corporate alliance, but the Internet is not confined to digital bits, wires, and code. The Internet also extends deep into our collective mental landscape, deep into our individual minds, and deep into the real world of meatspace. The consequences of a net-

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worked, unconstrained public sphere extend far beyond the network and its immediate community of users. Can the capitalist system create a communication system that inadvertently spells the end of capitalism? Herbert I. Schiller reminds us that we must consider ‘the general role of technology not only as an instrument for effectuating cultural domination but as an embodiment of this very domination.’5 For Schiller, Chomsky, McChesney, and many others, the most likely role for the Internet in the near future will be the facilitation of cultural domination over the world information order on behalf of American firms and values.6 Yet it remains to be seen if the symbolic economy of cyberspace will simply reinforce cultural domination or continue to challenge the beliefs and values of capitalism. Obviously, at present the Internet is both collaborative and subversive. Herein I have argued that it is far more subversive than is generally perceived, and that it will continue to act in this way. To a considerable extent, the degree of expressive freedom among commercial media’s audience has not changed since its inception. The audience has an insignificant amount of expressive freedom within the corporate production of culture. Interactive television, video games, and so forth have not altered this. One could argue that instant messaging via cell phones has produced expressive capabilities within the user community. Early manifestations of analog video cameras did enhance expressive freedom, but can hardly be compared to the scale of the digital network that followed. Only with the rise of the Internet do we see a substantial change in the audience’s ability to produce and disseminate high-bandwidth, multimedia cultural products. This ability will not be easily removed; thus the argument for a stable state of online expressive freedom. For all the hysteria about the corporate takeover of the Internet since 1993, the online audience’s expressive capabilities have arguably expanded, and not contracted, during this period. Online expressive freedom is definitely under attack, but it is not diminished. Contrary to the normalization thesis, herein I have argued that the Internet has already achieved a stable state in so far as expressive freedoms are concerned. Only by appealing to the possible application of tyrannical measures, the elimination of competition within the market, the universal application of a regulatory legal regime, along with discounting resistance, evasion, and political mobilization, is it possible to theorize the erosion of expressive online freedoms. A number of objections could be raised that suggest diminished sig-

222 The Empire of Mind

nificance for non-commercial cultural production. One of the most widely repeated objections relies on a rather twisted notion of consumer preference – a notion that happens to correspond to business models within the content industry. The argument is made that consumers not only prefer corporate content, they also prefer to pay for it. The growth in revenues for pay-per-use appears to support this picture of consumer preference. Yet it would be a mistake to interpret the growth of online paid content as a threat to non-commercial content production. There is an increasing demand for paid content, and this demand will not disappear. Yet the demand for pay-per-use content does not diminish the significance of freely accessible content. Indeed, in most circumstances, ‘free’ will always have a competitive advantage over ‘fee.’ There has been considerable hope and cash invested in payper-use online content. Nonetheless, projections of market size and adoption trends within the online content industry are far from certain.7 As the Economist summarized the issue: ‘[T]he digital revolution has been a huge disappointment for the entertainment industry.’8 Analysing consumer preference and the trajectory of the online content market involves cutting through a considerable amount of industry hype. Consider the example of Robert Thompson’s news item in the National Post about pay-for-song services such as Apple’s iTunes. Thompson quoted Phil Leigh, described by the Wall Street Journal as ‘one of the top five stock pickers in the Internet sector.’9 Leigh assured business readers that free content services such as Kazaa are ‘no longer novel or cool’ (a highly suspect claim!).10 He suggested that the popularity of digital piracy will decline as users migrate to legal music sites. Read from the context of the business section in which it appears, Thompson’s article reassures investors that piracy will decline because consumers will prefer to pay for music that is otherwise freely available. Arguments about online consumer preferences tend to repeat the same myth that was seen throughout the business press during the Internet bubble of the late 1990s. Consumers, we were told, will prefer to pay for online content and services. This statement is true, but only to a certain extent, and it needs to be carefully qualified. Such arguments were indicative of a larger scandal within the stock market, typified by Merrill Lynch’s Internet analyst Henry Blodget, who was described in the pages of the New York Times as ‘the whiz-kid analyst who talked up weak tech stocks in public while sneering in private.’11 Blodget, who once made as much as $12 million (U.S.) a year as the golden boy of the Internet stock market, described his role in a private

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e-mail: ‘I don’t want to be a whore for fucking management ... We are losing people money and I don’t like it ... The whole idea that we are independent from banking is a big lie.’12 It later came to light that while he was publicly rating certain stocks highly, in his private e-mail he slammed the same stocks as a ‘dog,’ ‘piece of junk,’ and ‘POS’ (piece of shit).13 Reforming the relationship between stock analysts, brokerage houses, and their clients has become a major concern of regulators and has been the subject of considerable news coverage.14 Instead of questioning the assumptions and roles of their sources, the business press often ends up acting as a vehicle for sales messages to prospective clients. Within the context of business news, information can quickly be reduced to propaganda. As a result, the market often suffers at the hands of its own propaganda system. Along with self-interested notions of consumer preference that conveniently correspond to business goals, the argument is also made that content production will be dominated by the logic of market forces. We see this outlook at work when McChesney claims that market forces have ‘eliminated any chance’ of people developing viable Web sites for journalism and entertainment.15 Here he is clearly wrong. I maintain exactly the opposite. The one thing the Web has demonstrated from its beginning is that valuable, useful, informative, factual, scientific, scholarly, entertaining, and popular information and cultural products can be produced on the fringes and completely outside of an economy of market-based exchange. Every major corporation in the information and entertainment sector is intimately aware of and frustrated by noncommercial cultural production. Yet McChesney and many others suggest that eventually there will be little difference between Internet cultural production and corporate cultural production.16 For theorists caught in the grip of the normalization thesis, the impact of the Internet upon the social order remains concealed by their failure to account fully for a new mode of cultural production within capitalism. Claims that the Internet cannot provide a qualitatively different type of cultural content do not stand up to close inspection (or, for that matter, casual surfing). One must not lose sight of the market’s impact upon commercial content – the depoliticization of content and the embedding of system-maintaining values. Commercial content is not a direct reflection of the social order. It derives from a controlled production system that has a highly particular set of goals and values. The same goals and values do not necessarily reign over non-corporate cultural production. If they did, Mattel would have no work for its legions

224 The Empire of Mind

of lawyers. I maintain that the Internet will not provide us with a straightforward duplication of capitalism’s cultural material and values – thus the meaning and significance of an alternative symbolic economy. The Internet produces difference. Corporations have captured the dominant audience share among the online audience. Yet this says nothing of the social significance of cultural content produced outside of the corporate sector. The significance of the Internet cannot be interpreted solely through measuring popularity. Such a tactic overlooks the long-term impact of a growing alternative symbolic economy. Change may not come from the centre of cyberspace but from its margins. That which is different within the Internet is far more socially significant than that which is the same as commercial culture. Within the press the constant repetition of statistics indicating the dominance of online corporate properties reflects the tendency to value economic behaviour over non-commodified behaviour. The market and the corporate press have no choice but to promote the belief that market behaviour will dominate online life. McChesney also suggests that ‘just having a zillion amateur websites may not be all that impressive ... [O]ver 80 percent of all websites fail to show up on any search engines, making them virtually impossible to find, and the situation may only get worse.’17 Search engines are only one method among many for finding online material. The network of links among blogging sites, word of mouth, e-mail ‘pass-on,’ and opinion leaders within discussion groups also facilitates the discovery of non-corporate content. Furthermore, as an individual spends more time online, navigation skill – the ability to find stuff – increases. Subsequent generations are being raised in a social environment where the Internet is ubiquitous, which will also enhance their navigation skills. The Internet’s social networks play a substantial role in raising awareness of significant content and sites. Assuming that commercial search engines such as Google will hopelessly bias the use of the Web against non-commercial sites overlooks the enormous thirst for noncorporate cultural content within the online community. This is not a herd that can be led by the nose to corporate watering holes. Tools that only serve corporate content providers will be perceived as such and alternative search mechanisms will arise. As marketers well know, one of the most powerful forms of advertising remains word of mouth. In the Internet’s intensely interconnected environment ‘word of e-mail’ is a swift, powerful force. Another objection that could be raised argues that the Internet com-

Conclusion 225

munity is too small, too Western, and too elite to function as a substantial agent of change. It is entirely uncertain as to ‘who’ and ‘how many’ must participate in a networked, global communication system before substantial social change is seen. As Peter Dahlgren has observed, the impact of new social movements ‘can proportionally far exceed the actual extent of their memberships.’18 In the absence of solid empirical or theoretical models, arguments based upon the constantly shifting digital divide that separates the online community and its various social movements from the rest of the global population are far too tenuous to provide a reliable indication of the Internet’s probable social consequences. Equally problematic are claims that appropriation and countercultural expression are benign forms of resistance.19 This argument, which is widely seen within twentieth-century media theory, generally reflects the structural conditions of pre-Internet audiences, and may no longer hold true now that counter-cultural expression is endowed with a global means of dissemination and archival (memory) capabilities. Although there are substantial differences in media and social systems, contemporary counter-cultural expression may be transformed through a new media environment in much the same way that medieval heresies were transformed into substantial cultural forces through the ‘Gutenberg effect.’ While I realize this is a highly speculative assertion, what cannot be denied is that the structural conditions that control the production of meaning have changed in a most fundamental way. Thus, the social impact of appropriation and counter-cultural expression in the twentieth century provides little guidance for its probable impact within the digital, networked environment of the twenty-first century. Power relations and social dynamics that characterized the media system of an analog era cannot be projected onto the Internet age without discounting the degree of structural change that has occurred (which is precisely what is done by the normalization thesis). Writing in 1991, two years before the Internet appeared on the radar screen of the general population, Dahlgren ventured that alternative media ‘may be ascending.’20 Now it is quite clear that we are facing a new public sphere. The single biggest question facing the Internet is ‘Will it suffer a similar fate as the public sphere of the nineteenth century’s emerging bourgeois class?’ Where Habermas once described the refeudalization of the public sphere, will some future intellectual write an obituary for the new online public sphere? With Internet obituaries

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having been penned since 1993, it is tempting to assume that we are in the presence of an anomaly that will shortly be subject to capitalism’s definition of ‘normal.’ But the process may well work in reverse. Capitalism itself may be subject to ‘abnormalization’ through the Internet. The threat runs both ways through cyberspace. While I have been particularly severe in my criticism of McChesney’s interpretation of the Internet’s cultural production and trajectory, he is insightful on the matter of media concentration. Yet, as I have argued, state, market, and technology have been incapable of reversing the tide of online non-corporate cultural production and unconstrained expression. Simply because formidable forces desire to restrain online behaviour does not mean that a muted online community is destiny. Proposing that the collective will of corporations presents global society with a totalizing scenario only provides the market with an ideological service. Lessig and McChesney typify a tendency within the left to see the Internet as imminently succumbing to market-driven totalizing forces. Many believe that the Internet’s diversity of voices, opinions, and choices will be reduced as market forces erode free expression and independent content production. The Internet, it is thought, is moving away from heterogeneity and toward homogeneity. Fredric Jameson offers an interesting objection to the notion of the ‘possible obliteration of heterogeneity’: ‘[T]he more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic ... the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralyzed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.’21 When it accepts and reproduces the corporate sector’s own fantasy of a totalizing economic system, liberal theory acts as a collaborator with the market by suppressing the will to resist. The greatest failure of liberal theory is its frequently observed inability to conceive of a world beyond capitalism. Again, on this Jameson is insightful: ‘It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps due to some weakness in our imaginations.’22 Both scholarly and popular literature testify to a willingness to imagine a ‘new and improved’ digital capitalism, or (worse) a totalizing capitalism, while also testifying to a deficit in the number of theorists willing to imagine

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a post-capitalist future. Post-capitalism does not necessarily imply utopic or classless social orders. It may simply entail the absence of the tyranny of a monolithic mode of production. Online decommodified cultural production may provide the foundation for moving beyond the multiple crises of societies under the grip of market economies. Cultural analysis needs to walk a fine line between recognizing the very real threat of totalizing social forces and the counter-powers embedded within online expression and decommodified cultural production. The citizenry must be repeatedly warned that the alliance of state and market interests, operating through digital communication systems and a host of other administrative systems ‘are so powerful that they threaten a return to a closed world and a univocal society.’ This warning, penned by Henri-Jean Martin in The History and Power of Writing, is echoed throughout the critical literature. The social control that was established during the relatively technologically primitive era of the twentieth century pales in comparison to the potential power of thought management offered by the twenty-first century. Without the counter-balance of a strong public sphere, the digitization of media, currency, and information, along with the drive to replace real-world (physical) interaction with a world mediated by software and machines, could easily feed capitalism’s holocaust. ‘Much is at stake,’ declares Martin, for ‘any society that loses its liberty in the modern world runs the strong risk of not regaining it for a long time.’23 If the Internet fails to provide us with a relatively stable form of unconstrained expression and non-commercial cultural production, we will be left with little else to use in defending ourselves against the more abusive forms of capitalism. Capitalism must have an effective persuasion and propaganda system if it is to legitimate the gross disparity that is embedded in its property relations. What happens to the social order when meanings no longer function as private property should be of utmost concern to those who desire to preserve the current balance of power and wealth within capitalism. We must not lose sight of the class conflict that remains at the heart of capitalist social orders (an almost taboo subject within American social theory and corporate media). Pierre Bourdieu offers one of the more sophisticated descriptions of how the elite control cultural production and so maintain the position of the dominant class.24 The elite impose a dominant world view through the legitimating mechanisms of market economies. Intellectuals provide a key source of support for this process of ideological domination. Unfortu-

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nately, Bourdieu’s theory does not consider what would happen if a non-market mode of cultural production attained a measure of parity with the market. The spread of a global zone of decommodified cultural production implies an erosion of any legitimating processes that are embedded in the economic system. Anthropological studies of societies that do not use market-based institutions to control the flow of meaning may shed light on the new era of decommodified cultural production. The way in which collective knowledge is shared among the Dene sheds light on how the socialization process may change within capitalist societies exposed to online unconstrained expression and decommodified cultural production. Between 1969 and 1972 anthropologist Marie-Françoise Guédon conducted research in eastern Alaska among the Dene group knows as the Tetlin. As a young, unmarried female, Guédon discovered that she was being treated by the people of Tetlin as if she were a child just past puberty. Before Guédon could learn the ways of the adult Dene she first had to undergo a socialization process that would teach her how to be a Dene woman. This socialization process consisted of oral stories. In the same way that the stories and images of commercial media socialize gender identity and social practices, Guédon found that the Dene stories were a medium through which the Dene way of life was taught. These stories conveyed the contents of the Dene collective memory and reproduced Dene taboos, customs, and traditions. Whereas capitalist social orders localize collective knowledge within institutions, such as public education, the market economy (through the flow of commodities), and the commercial media system, the Dene localize their collective knowledge within specific landmarks or localities that give occasion for reciting a particular story. Guédon describes the ‘acquisition of intimate knowledge of the land’ as a paramount factor in her own socialization process: It was while walking (and navigating) the territory that one reads and rereads one’s personal history and the history of the whole community, always different, always renewed, and yet in richer details than in any printed book ... [T]he travellers, whether newcomers, children, or oldtimers, shared an immense pool of the most precious knowledge concerning animals of course, but also concerning all the non-human powers of the land and the atmosphere ... My instructors did not seem to separate the stories from the landscape – both were equally meaningful.25

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For the Dene, the technology that embodied their collective memory was the land itself. For the consumer and audience member of media culture, the primary technology of collective memory is commercial media. The Dene mode of communication can be described as an oral technology of memory- and knowledge-sharing rooted in the land. The universal participation in storytelling ensures that the Dene’s body of knowledge, their collective memory, is maintained and reproduced through time because knowledge is not confined to a few individuals.26 Everyone seeks knowledge and everyone is equally a source of knowledge: ‘Unilineal transmission from teacher to pupil is not typical of Dene learning ... [T]he Dene have access to a pool of knowledge from which everyone draws according to needs’ (51). In this way the Dene ensure that their common pool of knowledge is preserved and transmitted. The Dene collective memory, their common pool of knowledge, provides a metaphor for the Internet as a new technology of collective memory. The Internet gives its users equal access to a globalized pool of common knowledge. The intense cultural debate that has arisen in reaction to the growth of the Internet is a result of this democratization of access to knowledge. Capitalist social orders have censorship mechanisms that are embedded in social institutions and ‘protect’ various segments of the population from ‘dangerous’ information. The Internet has given rise to intense fears because it lacks the institutionalized control mechanisms that normally dictate who gets exposed to what knowledge. We are faced with a new mode of communication, a new technology of collective memory, that does not fit within the socialization processes of capitalism. The Dene frame their common pool of knowledge with a notion of individual responsibility for one’s thoughts. Among the Dene thoughts are assumed to shape reality. Thoughts are themselves a form of communication and therefore have consequences when heard and acted upon. Among the Dene, thoughts matter: ‘They mattered to the community, to the family, to the living things around us.’27 It is this notion of responsibility to the community for one’s thoughts that protects the integrity of the common pool of knowledge. Individual responsibility for one’s thoughts make institutionalized control and censorship of knowledge unnecessary. The Dene common pool of knowledge may provide a model of the Internet’s emerging social role. The Internet provides a globalized

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mental landscape where millions of users leave their stories and draw from the stories of others. The intense fears surrounding the Internet are a reaction to the lack of a cohesive notion of responsibility among users and the failure of institutionalized mechanisms of knowledge control to regulate online content. Thoughts can powerfully affect the social order, for thoughts, when communicated, become shared meanings and values that participate in the co-creation of social reality. Under capitalism commercial media and the elite bear the burden of responsibility for society’s shared values. In this new age of unconstrained expression individuals will need to learn collective responsibility for the thoughts they are disseminating and the social order this new technology of collective memory is creating. Not an easy task, but perhaps preferable to having dominant classes and economic processes dictate what values will shape society. Of course, it will take much more than just a new mode of cultural production to correct the deficiencies of market economies. Criticism alone will not dislodge the empire of mind. Intellectuals and knowledge workers, for example, are subject to a wide variety of institutionalized disciplining mechanisms. In an examination of the politics of American intellectual professions, Jeff Schmidt draws attention to extensive processes that indoctrinate professionals and ensure ideological obedience.28 This process is not totalizing, but the result is a general alignment of the individual to the needs of the institution. It must be emphasized that this socialization process and its ideological effect is widely confirmed in the critical literature across many disciplines. A decommodified mode of cultural production may seriously disrupt the socialization of the intellectual and the knowledge worker, and eventually do the same to the general population. But other institutional constraints that are deeply embedded within the social order will also have to change. Any discussion of the Internet and social change runs the risk of slipping into the realm of technological determinism. Herein I have repeatedly asserted that what we do with the Internet is strongly determined by the pre-existing (repressive) conditions established by capitalism. In other words, our collective use of the Internet is to a large measure a response to our lived experience of capitalism. Capitalism constrains action by providing a set of unevenly distributed communicative resources that are used to construct meaning and action. In this sense, we can reasonably speak of the structures of capitalism determining the scope of action. Mass-media society of the twentieth cen-

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tury enabled certain strategies of communicative action (most not available to the masses), while the Internet’s era of unconstrained expression has unleashed a new set of strategies. Thus, technological structures do determine possible courses of action, while simultaneously constraining other choices.29 Finally, any Canadian writing a book about empire risks being accused of anti-Americanism. I have noted that some American scholarship on Internet culture tends to suffer from a myopic frame of reference. This sort of scholarship overlooks the particularistic nature of American notions of free speech, the individual, the state, and the market and tends to universalize values that are highly specific to the United States. Differences in our values invariably lead to differences in how we map the terrain of Internet culture. It needs to be kept in mind that there is a growing gulf between Canadian and American social values,30 a gulf that should be celebrated and protected, for we need diversity in values in much the same way that we need diversity in the biosphere for a healthy existence. The best service Canadians provide to their southern neighbour is a constant critique of empire, both in self-defence and with America’s best interests in mind. No one wishes to see a good friend turn into a bully. It is quite possible that as unconstrained expression becomes a generalized expectation, individuals will be less willing over time to submit to the institutional containment of human creativity. Edward Sapir’s observation that capitalistic civilizations require individuals to sacrifice their own creative and emotional impulses stands as an important reminder that capitalism is based on extensive mechanisms of coercion.31 Capitalist social orders are highly disciplined societies. The unparalleled flood of decommodified cultural production within the Internet strongly suggests a breakdown in capitalism’s ability to channel individual productive activity into the utilitarian needs of the market economy. Capitalism and its empire of mind constitute a system that substantially determines thought and action, but it is neither omnipotent nor eternal. In the Internet age, resistance is not futile.

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Notes

Introduction 1 Doug Saunders, ‘America Über Alles?’ Globe and Mail, 14 February 2004, D8. 2 W. Russell Neuman, The Future of the Mass Audience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 110, 112. 3 James G. Webster and Patricia F. Phalen, The Mass Audience: Rediscovering the Dominant Model (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997). 4 Jay David Boiter, ‘Theory and Practice in New Media Studies,’ in G. Liestøl, A. Morrison, and T. Rasmussen, eds., Digital Media Revisited: Theoretical and Conceptual Innovation in Digital Domains (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 22. 5 Don Tapscott, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Internet Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998), 188. Tapscott writes: ‘The attitude of the Web is one of consumer control, but true to the N-Gen faith in tolerance, consumer control is not so much anti-corporate as it is extra corporate.’ 6 Manuel Castells, End of Millennium, vol. 3 of The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 390. 7 Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in HighTechnology Capitalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 10. 8 Of course, the existence of free digital products does not mean that there will be no market for the very same material. A freely available short film by Joe Nussbaum, George Lucas in Love, was at one time one of Amazon .com’s best sellers. It also outsold The Phantom Menace in the first month after the release of Phantom in American theatres. See Kenneth R. Carter, ‘Intellectual Property Concerns for Television Syndication Over the Internet,’ in E. Noam, J. Groebel, and D. Gerbarg, eds., Internet Television (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 155.

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Notes to pages 12–19

9 Ien Ang, Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World (London: Routledge, 1996), 172. 10 ‘Full Text: Bush’s National Security Strategy,’ New York Times, 20 September 2002. 11 Thomas L. Friedman, ‘Love Our Technology, Love Us,’ New York Times, 20 June 2004, sec. 4, 15. 12 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), xi. For an excellent collection of critical assessments of Empire, see Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean, eds., Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (London: Routledge, 2004). 13 Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). Also see Chalmers Johnson, BlowBack: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000). In Blowback Johnson argues that the neoconservative project of building an American empire has been largely successful, although it is beginning to reap what it has sown. Johnson notes what many others have observed, that many Americans are unaware of what their military and their economic policies have done to the rest of the world, and thus they do not understand why, after 9/11, there was ‘a widespread sense around the world that America had it coming’ (x). 14 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 137. 15 Liza Frulla, interviewed on The National, CBC TV, 21 July 2004. Such a clear statement of the obvious is so rare among politicians that I immediately jumped up for my pen and notebook to record what I had heard. 16 Robert W. McChesney, The Problem of the Media (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 18. 17 The piracy rate in the United States dropped by as much as 30% in early 2004 as a result of lawsuits against individual American music pirates. The decrease may turn out to be a temporary phenomenon. By February 2004, newspapers were reporting that American digital piracy rates were once again climbing. See Vitto Pilieci, ‘Too Legit to Quit,’ Ottawa Citizen, 19 February 2004, E1, E3–4. In April 2004, a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey suggested that a third of former music downloaders ceased pirating songs because of the RIAA lawsuits. Nonetheless, the number of individuals downloading music files increased from 18 to 23 million since an early Pew survey in December 2003. See Lee Rainie, Mary Madden, Dan Hess, and Graham Mudd, ‘Pew Internet Project and Comscore Media Metrix Data Memo’ (Washington: Pew Internet & American Life Project, 25 April 2004), http://www.pewinternet.org/reports. As I will argue in

Notes to pages 22–5 235 chapters 2 and 3, it is far too early to declare that digital piracy has been defeated. Piracy throughout the rest of the globe remains rampant. For example, India’s piracy rate for application software in 2003 was at 75%, while the operating-system piracy rate was 70%. See ‘Software Exports at $10.4 B in ’03: Report,’ Financial Express, 19 February 2004, http:// www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=52991. Shortterm regional declines in the overall rate of piracy may not necessarily indicate an end to the problem. Data will have to be collected and patterns tracked over several years before any victory against digital piracy can be claimed. Opinions on the future of digital piracy are sharply divided. Thus far the trend has been temporary reductions in piracy rates followed by sharp increases as new methods of file-sharing are developed and deployed. By the summer of 2004 newspapers were reporting a new stage in digital piracy. Student-run private networks were growing in response to more than 3000 recording-industry lawsuits against American digital pirates. 18 Of course, this observation was not unique to myself at the time. Michael Strangelove, How to Advertise on the Internet: An Introduction to Internet-Facilitated Marketing and Advertising (Ottawa, ON: Strangelove Internet Enterprises, 1994), 209. Chapter 1 1 Edward Jay Epstein, ‘Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?’ Atlantic, February 1982, 23–34. For a more complete history of the diamond industry, see Edward Jay Epstein’s The Rise and Fall of Diamonds: The Shattering of a Brilliant Illusion (Richmond Hill, ON: Simon & Schuster, 1982). 2 Cited in Sut Jhally, ‘Image-based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture,’ in G. Dines and J. Humez, eds., Gender, Race and Class in Media: A TextReader, 2nd ed. (London: Sage Publications, 2002), 249. 3 De Beers, ‘A Man’s Guide to Buying Diamonds,’ Time, 28 October 1996, 9. In the United States, the Christmas retail season generates 40% of annual diamond jewellery sales. The October insertion date for the De Beers ad probably reflects this purchasing trend, due in part to the preference for ‘popping the question’ during this pre-Christmas season. 4 John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose (Scarborough, ON: New American Library of Canada, 1975), 140. One of the more unique discussions of the production of needs in market economies is William Leiss’s The Limits to Satisfaction: An Essay on the Problem of Needs and Commodities (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976; repr. Montreal: McGill-

236

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Queen’s University Press, 1988). Leiss argues that market economies are inherently incapable of fully satisfying individual needs, and this in turn leads to the collective demand for ever greater levels of production in the never-ending quest for satisfaction. This also helps explain why capitalism has proved to be so destructive. The almost universal pursuit of increased levels of consumption ‘threatens to bring about environmental degradation of incalculable dimensions’ (115). John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 208. Economic materialism does not provide a complete explanation of the role of the engagement ring and the motives behind its purchase. There are certainly other factors involved, yet the role of the persuasion system and the De Beers diamond cartel cannot be dismissed. Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 163. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 5. The New Industrial State, 212. Although somewhat more successful, the same could also be said of the attempt to limit advertising by tobacco manufacturers. On this see William Leiss, ‘The Censorship of Commercial Speech, with Special Reference to Tobacco Product Advertising,’ in K. Petersen and A.C. Hutchinson, eds., Interpreting Censorship in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 101–28. Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 272. Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (London: Routledge, 1996), 3. Perhaps quite rightly, both Douglas and Galbraith have been accused of exaggerating the lack of a balanced treatment of consumer sovereignty by economists, although the intensely ideological nature of economic and marketing theory makes this a matter of debate. Nonetheless, there is a clear tendency to frame the issue of sovereignty in terms of a perfectly competitive market. Obviously, neither a perfect market nor absolute sovereignty exists, thus the matter is ultimately a question of degree. Also see note 15, below. Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose, 131. ‘Who’s Wearing the Trousers?’ Economist, 6 September 2001, 28. Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose, 66. On consumer sovereignty also see N. Craig Smith, ‘Capitalism and Consumer Sovereignty,’ chap. 1 in Morality and the Market: Consumer Pressure for Corporate Accountability (London: Routledge, 1990). Smith notes that discussion of consumer sovereignty is plagued by ideology. While no one can reasonably deny that a certain

Notes to pages 31–5 237

16 17

18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28

amount of free choice does exist, Smith concludes that ‘consumer sovereignty may not be as prevalent in practice as supposed’ (40). Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 207. Helen Irving, ‘Little Elves and Mind Control: Advertising and Its Critics,’ Australian Journal of Media and Culture 4, no. 2 (1991), http://www.mcc .murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/4.2/Irving.html. Monty Phan, ‘Forecaster: National Ad Spending to Reach $263B,’ Newsday, 23 June 2004. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 157. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton, ‘Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action,’ in B. Rosenberg and D.M. White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (New York: Free Press, 1957), 457– 8; originally published in Lyman Bryson, ed., The Communication of Ideas (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948), 95–118. Herbert I. Schiller, Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 106. William Severini Kowinski, The Malling of America: An Inside Look at the Great Consumer Paradise (New York: William Morrow, 1985). ‘The Case for Brands,’ Economist, 6 September 2001, 11. One of the most striking features of consumer culture during the twentieth century was the increase in exposure to commercial propaganda (sales messages) among the general population. Writing in 1963, the great adman David Ogilvy suggested that the average consumer sees 10,000 commercials a year; Confessions of an Advertising Man (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 131. Thirty-four years later, advertising critic Jean Kilbourne put the average yearly exposure to advertisements at 1,095,000; Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel (New York: Touchstone, 1999), 12. Schiller, Culture Inc., 128–9. Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle against Corporations (New York: Seven Story Press, 2000), 47. Robert W. McChesney, The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 13. Robert W. McChesney and Dan Schiller, ‘The Political Economy of International Communications: Foundations for the Emerging Global Debate about Media Ownership and Regulation,’ Technology, Business and Society Programme paper no. 11, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, October 2003, http://www.unrisd.org/unpublished_/tbs_/ chesney/content.htm.

238 Notes to pages 35–9 29 Ben M. Compaine, ‘Domination Fantasies,’ Reasononline, January 2004, http://www.reason.com/0401/fe.bc.domination.shtml. 30 Elizabeth Guider, ‘Media Congloms Muzzling Dissent,’ Variety, 5 September 2004. 31 Ben M. Compaine, ‘Conclusion: How Few Is Too Few?’ in B.M. Compaine, ed., Who Owns the Media? Concentration of Ownership in the Mass Communication Industry (New York: Harmony Books, 1979), 319–39. 32 Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 298. A measure of the doctrinal alignment of corporate media to privileged groups is the degree to which corporate journalists and opinion columnists will howl in derision whenever Chomsky’s notions are put forth or the concept of propaganda is asserted. 33 The definitive work on media concentration trends is Ben H. Bagdikian, The New Media Monopoly (New York: Beacon Press, 2004). Bagdikian has tracked media concentration trends since 1983. The number of corporations controlling most of the United States’ newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations, book publishers, and movie companies has shrunk from fifty to five. 34 Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Morrow, 1980). 35 Don Tapscott, The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996). 36 Don Tapscott, David Ticoll, and Alex Lowy, Digital Capital: Harnessing the Power of Business Webs (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000), 23. 37 Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 188–9. 38 Stephan Taylor, Sheena Smith, and Phil Lyon, ‘McDonaldization and Consumer Choice in the Future: An Illusion or the Next Marketing Revolution?’ in M. Alfino, J.S. Caputo, and R. Wynyard, eds., McDonaldization Revisited: Critical Essays on Consumer Culture (London: Praeger, 1998). 39 Ibid., 116. 40 Michael T. Fralix, ‘From Mass Production to Mass Customization,’ Journal of Textile and Apparel, Technology and Management 1, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 6. Also see Marcia Biederman, ‘A Bulge in Misses 8? Digital Scanners Resize America,’ New York Times, 27 November 2003, G8. The grand assumption behind the future of mass customization is that customers want a high level of involvement in the production process. 41 Gage Averill also argues that mass customization (flexible production) effectively exploits global markets and threatens to displace them with imported American brands and cultural goods. ‘Global Imaginings,’ in

Notes to pages 40–6 239

42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49

50

51

52 53

54 55 56

R. Ohmann, ed., Making and Selling Culture (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1996), 203–23. Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 218. Schiller, Culture Inc., 135–6. David Morley, ‘Theories of Consumption in Media Studies,’ in D. Miller, ed., Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies (London: Routledge, 1995), 313. Schiller, Culture Inc., 156. Martyn J. Lee, Consumer Culture Reborn: The Cultural Politics of Consumption (London: Routledge, 1993), 17. Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 271. Also see J.K. Galbraith, ‘The Dependence Effect,’ chap. 11 in The Affluent Society. Douglas and Isherwood, The World of Goods, 45. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (London: The Cresset Press, 1970), 212. For a biographical overview of the life and thought of Douglas, see Richard Fardon, Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography (London: Routledge, 1999). Harold A. Innis, Empire and Communications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950; repr., with foreword by Marshall McLuhan, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972). For more on the relationship between Innis and McLuhan, see Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 16–27. Also see the excellent summary of Innis’s work in James W. Carey, ‘Space, Time, and Communications: A Tribute to Harold Innis,’ chap. 6 in Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989; repr. London: Routledge, 1992). Douglas, Natural Symbols, 164. Douglas Kellner, ‘September 11, Terrorism, and Blowback,’ in N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln, eds., 9/11 in American Culture (Oxford: Altamira Press, 2003), 9–20. Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 16. Daniel Miller, ‘Consumption as the Vanguard of History: A Polemic by Way of an Introduction,’ in Miller, Acknowledging Consumption, 31. Miller, Material Culture, 215. Miller follows a common Marxist line of thought when he proposes that individuals appropriate the meaning of goods in the effort to replace alienating cultural forces with inalienable culture. Herein I am not proposing that such a thing as inalienable culture exists. Such an ideal state is problematic and only serves to muddy the water when theorizing about Internet culture.

240

Notes to pages 47–57

57 Ibid., 10. 58 Miller, ‘Consumption as the Vanguard of History,’ 30. 59 Herbert I. Schiller, ‘Digitized Capitalism: What Has Changed?’ in H. Tumber, ed., Media Power, Professionals and Policies (London: Routledge, 2000), 126. 60 E. Ann Kaplan, Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (London: Methuen, 1987), 144. 61 Bruce Little, ‘US Takes Out Recovery Insurance,’ Globe and Mail, 7 November 2002, B1. 62 Peter K. Lunt and Sonia M. Livingstone, Mass Consumption and Personal Identity: Everyday Economic Experience (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992), 9. 63 Grant McCracken, New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 88. 64 Lee, Consumer Culture Reborn, 49. 65 Colin Campbell, ‘The Sociology of Consumption,’ in Miller, Acknowledging Consumption, 116. 66 Douglas, Natural Symbols, 63. 67 Douglas and Isherwood, The World of Goods, 4. 68 Mary Douglas, Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1992), 152. 69 Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 17. 70 Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 16. 71 Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Post-Modernism and Beyond (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 37. 72 Douglas, Risk and Blame, 133. Chapter 2 1 ‘Tipping Hollywood the Black Spot,’ Economist, 28 August 2003, 59. 2 Alex Veiga, ‘Illegal Music Downloading Climbs,’ Associated Press, 15 January 2004. The jury is still out on the overall effect of lawsuits directed against individual users. Also see John Schwartz, ‘New Economy: In Survey, Fewer Are Sharing Files (or Admitting It),’ New York Times, 5 January 2004, C1; and ‘Upbeat,’ Economist, 30 October 2003, 45. The problem of accurately measuring piracy is now compounded by consumers’ unwillingness to admit to doing something that is the target of legal action. 3 Rita Trichur, ‘U.S., Dutch Courts Deal Blow to Music Industry,’ Ottawa Citizen, 20 December 2003, H3; and John Schwartz, ‘Court Limits Efforts to

Notes to pages 57–62 241

4 5

6 7 8 9

10

Unmask Music Swappers,’ New York Times, 20 December 2003, A1. Commenting on the recording industry’s failed attempt to sue twenty-nine Canadians for alleged music piracy in 2004, University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist noted that the court’s decisions strongly affirmed ‘that downloading music is perfectly lawful under Canadian copyright law.’ Geist also noted that the recording industry and the press continue to insist that the threat of legal action in Canada has resulted in less file-sharing activity. Yet ‘that so-called threat has in reality been a dismal failure in Canada.’ Michael Geist, ‘Music Industry Needs to Move On,’ letter to the editor, National Post, 30 August 2004, FP15. ‘Unexpected Harmony,’ Economist, 23 January 2003, 59–60. Stuart Haber et al., ‘If Piracy Is the Problem, Is DRM the Answer?’ in E. Becker, W. Buhse, D. Gunnewig, and N. Rump, eds., Digital Rights Management: Technological, Economic, Legal and Political Aspects (Berlin: Springer, 2003), 231. ‘Profits at Last,’ Economist, 31 December 2001, 91–2. See Jon Katz, ‘AOL Nation,’ Slashdot, 11 January 2000, http://slashdot.org/ features/00/01/10/1418231.shtml. Jeffery Simpson, ‘When Convergence Ruled the World,’ Globe and Mail, 3 August 2002, A13. Tyler Cowen, ‘Myth of the Media Giants,’ National Post, 6 January 2003, FP11. Dan and Mary Alice Shaver caution against drawing too many conclusions from early experiments in convergence strategies and also note that the economic benefits experienced thus far are limited. ‘The Impact of Concentration and Convergence on Managerial Efficiencies of Time and Cost,’ in A.B. Albarran and A. Arrese, eds., Time and Media Markets (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003), 61–79. See chapter 6 of Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002). Typically for the technophile futurist clan, Rheingold tends toward overstatement, but there is no denying that the pace of technological innovation could overwhelm any attempt at monopolization within the ISP market. Rheingold describes a variety of emerging communication technologies that can communicate directly to each other in ‘self-sufficient peer-to-peer networks,’ and that could render the corporateowned telecommunications backbone completely obsolete (150). Thus, while there is the possibility that control of the Internet’s backbone by an oligopolistic ISP market could eliminate online communicative freedom, there is also the possibility that the corporate backbone itself could become obsolete. Grassroots peer-to-peer wireless networks would certainly face regulatory and political hurdles. Major telecommunications corporations

242 Notes to pages 62–6

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12 13 14

15 16

17 18 19 20

21

would not sit idly by as grassroot network cooperatives launched a serious challenge to their market position. Haber et al., ‘If Piracy Is the Problem, Is DRM the Answer?’ 224. The authors also note that the benefits of DRM may outweigh its costs: ‘First there is the cost of building, deploying and maintaining a DRM infrastructure, which will eat into whatever unrealized revenues are recovered. Second ... DRM-protected content is economically less valuable than unprotected content. So deploying DRM will result in fewer sales of legitimate content, which also offset some of the revenues gained by decreasing piracy’ (232). See also Tobias Bauckhage, ‘The Basic Economic Theory of Copying,’ in Becker et al., Digital Rights Management, 234–49. See Tobias Hauser and Christian Wenz, ‘DRM Under Attack: Weaknesses in Existing Systems,’ in Becker et al., Digital Rights Management, 206–23. Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Stefan Bechtold, ‘The Present and Future of Digital Rights Management: Musings on Emerging Legal Problems,’ in Becker et al., Digital Rights Management, 653. Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, 206. David G. Post, ‘What Larry Doesn’t Get: A Libertarian Response to Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace,’ Stanford Law Review 52 (May 2000): 1439– 59, http://www.temple.edu/lawschool/dpost/Code.html. Lessig also underestimates the rate of adoption of open standards within the software industry and its role in deflating the market power of proprietary standards. The Internet has prompted the information technology industry to pursue open standards. Lessig’s argument that Microsoft will dominate the architecture of the Internet underestimates the degree to which the market must accommodate the consumer’s preference for open standards that invariably deliver greater freedom and flexibility. On this point see ‘The Fortune of the Commons,’ Economist, 8 May 2003, 60–1. Stephen Strauss, ‘Techies Challenge Microsoft,’ Globe and Mail, 13 January 2003, A10. John Markoff, ‘RealNetworks Accuses Microsoft of Restricting Competition,’ New York Times, 19 December 2003, C1. John Markoff, ‘Plaintiffs Say Microsoft Still Behaves Badly,’ New York Times, 17 January 2004, C2. The Economist notes that the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is known as the ‘piracy facilitation show.’ ‘Romancing the Disk,’ 5 February 2004. ‘Tipping Hollywood the Black Spot,’ 59. Spencer Cheng and Avni Rambhia

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28 29 30

31

likewise note that companies such as Sony find themselves on ‘two opposing sides of the table, owing to its [digital music] player and [music] label interests. Yet, a standard that alienates either one of the parties is doomed to obscurity.’ Sony must make players that people will use (and consumers are unlikely to embrace highly restrictive music technologies), yet they must also protect their own music properties. Throughout the entertainment and technology sector intellectual property owners’ desire for unbreakable DRM systems conflicts with the interests of companies that make digital music players, and the conflict is unlikely to be resolved. Not only does information want to be free, music and movies also want freedom. Furthermore, Cheng and Rambhia note, ‘[p]rotection offered by DRM systems is not and will never be absolute ... Any DRM system can be defeated.’ While Lessig argues for totalizing control, there are no systems available that could implement such a high level of control without seriously compromising revenue. ‘DRM and Standardization: Can DRM Be Standardized?’ in Becker et al., Digital Rights Management, 174, 177. Alan Goldstein, ‘Hollywood, Silicon Valley Divided Over Piracy Concerns,’ Dallas Morning News, 6 February 2002. Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, 211. Samuel V. LaSelva, ‘Pluralism and Hate: Freedom, Censorship and the Canadian Identity,’ in K. Petersen and A.C. Hutchinson, eds., Interpreting Censorship in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 48. Stuart Biegel, Beyond Our Control?: Confronting the Limits of Our Legal System in the Age of Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 344. Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 267–8. Rob Frieden, ‘The Potential for Scrutiny of Internet Peering Policies in Multilateral Forums,’ in B.M. Compaine and S. Greenstein, eds., Communications Policy in Transition: The Internet and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 164. Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 141. Rebecca Sausner, ‘AOL Adds Another Million Members,’ NewsFactor Network, 8 March 2001, http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/8025.html. Marjory S. Blumenthal and David D. Clark, ‘Rethinking the Design of the Internet: The End-to-End Arguments vs. the Brave New World,’ in Compaine and Greenstein, Communications Policy in Transition, 121. Saul Hansell, ‘Beyond War News, AOL’s Broadband Plan May Face a Struggle,’ New York Times, 24 March 2003, C8. New York Times national legal correspondent Adam Liptak summarized the situation as follows: ‘AOL has not

244

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33 34

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37 38

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40 41 42 43 44

Notes to pages 69–74

shown itself to be at all nimble in finding a way to make money from people who connect to the Internet at higher speeds.’ ‘You’ve Got Travail,’ New York Times, 18 January 2004, sec. 7, 12. Alex Goldman, ‘Top U.S. ISPs by Subscriber: How We Count,’ ISP-Planet, 20 May 2004, http://www.isp-planet.com/research/rankings/2004/ usa_insight_q12004.html. Biegel, Beyond Our Control? 193. The general failure of current attempts to control hacking sheds light on the improbability of significantly reducing digital piracy or implementing any totalizing regime over the Internet itself. ‘[I]t is still too early ... to determine whether more aggressive regulation and enforcement [directed at hacking] will achieve greater peace and security on the New Electronic Frontier. In fact, the anecdotal evidence covered by us ... suggests otherwise’; Bernadette H. Schell and John L. Dodge, The Hacking of America: Who’s Doing It, Why, and How (London: Quorum Books, 2002), 262. Contrary to widespread myths, largely propagated by the state and the commercial press, the authors also conclude that certain elements of hacker behaviour ‘represent a positive force’ (262). Wayne V. McIntosh and Cynthia L. Cates, ‘“Hard Travelin”: Free Speech in the Age of the Information Super Highway,’ in C. Toulouse and T.W. Luke, eds., The Politics of Cyberspace (London: Routledge 1998), 110. Edmund Lee, ‘Access Denied: Has the Carnegie Mellon Administration Started a New Age of Book Burning?’ Village Voice Educational Supplement, 15 August 1995, 14; quoted in McIntosh and Cates, ‘“Hard Travelin,”’ 84. Lessig, The Future of Ideas, 69. Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), xiv. For a more balanced view on international considerations in the formation of copyright and intellectual-property law, and the contradictory forces behind the formation of legal conventions, see Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 171. Lessig, The Future of Ideas, 268. Castells, The Internet Galaxy, 277. Alan Freeman, ‘Rocker Townshend Arrested in Porn Case,’ Globe and Mail, 14 January 2003, A3. Douglas Heingartner, ‘Software Piracy Is in Resurgence, with New Safe-

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guards Eroded by File Sharing,’ New York Times, 19 January 2004, C9. Losses from piracy are notoriously difficult to estimate. Anti-piracy groups such as the Business Software Alliance have been accused of inflating the economic losses from piracy. D. Ian Hopper, ‘Software Piracy Increases Worldwide,’ Associated Press, 10 June 2002. Biegel, Beyond Our Control? 313. Shujen Wang, Framing Piracy: Globalization and Film Distribution in Greater China (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). ‘Black Hole: The Shadow Economy,’ Economist, 28 August 1999, 59. Reuters, ‘Legal Setback for Vitamin Makers,’ National Post, 18 January 2003, FP4. For more on fraudulent marketing practices in the pharmaceutical industry, see Gardiner Harris, ‘Abbott to Pay $622 Million to Settle Inquiry into Marketing,’ New York Times, 27 June 2003, C1. Charles Gasparino, ‘Wall Street Settlement Faces Delay,’ Globe and Mail, 16 January 2003, B10. A complete list of recent episodes of corporate crime would fill many volumes. The latest scandal to appear during the writing of this book involved the entire U.S. mutual-fund industry. See ‘Seller Beware,’ Economist, 17 January 2004, 65. See Harry Glasbeek’s Wealth by Stealth: Corporate Crime, Corporate Law, and the Perversion of Democracy (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002). Glasbeek, a corporate law scholar, provides a stunning condemnation of the corporate sector’s undermining of the criminal code in both Canada and the United States. He describes how public policy and legal codes have been manipulated to the benefit of corporations and to the detriment of labour and public welfare. Stephen M. Rosoff, Henry N. Pontell, and Robert Tillman, Profit without Honor: White-Collar Crime and the Looting of America (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson / Prentice Hall, 2004), 526. Glasbeek, Wealth by Stealth, 172. Chapter 3

1 Steven E. Miller, Civilizing Cyberspace: Policy, Power, and the Information Superhighway (New York: ACM Press, 1996); Joseph Migga Kizza, Civilizing the Internet: Global Concerns and Efforts Toward Regulation (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1998). 2 Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow, ‘Across the Electronic Frontier,’ 10 July 1990, Electronic Frontier Foundation (Washington, DC), http:// www.eff.org/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/eff.html, quoted in

246 Notes to pages 80–4

3 4 5 6 7

8 9

10

11

12 13 14

Diana Saco, Cyber Democracy: Public Space and the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 187. Michael Margolis and David Resnick, Politics as Usual: The Cyberspace ‘Revolution’ (London: Sage Publications, 2000), 202. Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 309, 330. Margolis and Resnick, Politics as Usual, 4. E.M. Wood, ‘Modernity, Postmodernity or Capitalism?’ Review of International Political Economy 4, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 558. Robert W. McChesney, ‘So Much for the Magic of Technology and the Free Market,’ in A. Herman and T. Swiss, eds., The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2000), 33. Also see ‘Will the Internet Set Us Free?’ chap. 3 of R.W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 119–85. McChesney, ‘So Much for the Magic,’ 22. Canadian online retail sales during the Christmas season (a key indicator) in 2003 showed little or no growth over the same period a year earlier. The majority of online retail ventures were still losing money by the close of 2003. Online retail growth rates are uneven year to year and country to country (see also the following note). The U.S. online retail sector saw growth as high as 26% in 2003, for example. For most retailers, the Internet plays a much larger role as a marketing and communications medium. See Peter Brieger, ‘Online Comeback,’ National Post, 3 February 2004, FP6. ‘A Survey of E-Commerce: Shopping Around the Web,’ Economist, 26 February 2000, 1–54. By 2002 the number of adult Americans shopping online actually declined for the first time (45.1% in 2000, 50.9% in 2001, 39.7% in 2002). Compared to 2000, the average amount of money spent online also decreased. See Harlan Lebo, ‘The UCLA Internet Report: Surveying the Digital Future – Year Three,’ UCLA Center for Communication Policy, February 2003, 40, http://www.ccp.ucla.edu/pdf/UCLA-Internet-ReportYear-Three.pdf. Michael Wolff, ‘Stop Thief,’ New York Magazine, 3 March 2003, http:// www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/columns/medialife/ n_8384/index.html. ‘Profits at Last,’ Economist, 31 December 2001, 91. ‘Thrills and Spills,’ Economist, 7 October 2000, 14. Saul Hansell, ‘As Consumers Revolt, a Rush to Block Pop-Up Online Ads,’ New York Times, 19 January 2004, C1. Hansell writes: ‘20 percent to 25 percent of Web users have pop-up blocking enabled on their computers,

Notes to pages 84–5 247 double the rate a year ago ... The biggest potential impact will come this summer when Microsoft releases its Service Pack 2 for Windows XP, which will add a pop-up blocker and many other features to Internet Explorer.’ 15 Wolff, ‘Stop Thief.’ Eli Noam, professor of economics and finance at Columbia University, draws the same picture as Michael Wolff: [P]rices for content, network distribution and equipment are collapsing across a broad front. It seems to have become difficult to charge anything for information products and services. The music industry is unable to maintain prices. Online publishers cannot charge their readers, except for a few premium providers such as the FT. International phone call prices have dropped, and with internet telephony will move to near-zero. Web advertising prices have collapsed. Much of world and national news is provided for free. A lot of software is distributed or acquired gratis. Academic articles are being distributed online for free. TV and radio have always been free unless taxed. Even cable TV, at 20,000 programme hours a week, is available to viewers at a cost of a 1/10 of 1 cent per hour. Newspaper prices barely cover the physical cost of paper and delivery; the content is thrown in for free. All these are symptoms of a chronic price deflation that shows no sign of abating. It is a good deal for consumers, including those of developing countries, but it spells disaster for providers. The price for their information or distribution is dropping towards marginal cost, which is close to zero and typically does not cover full cost. No company can afford to do this for long. And the more efficient the information market becomes due to technology, the faster this process advances. ‘Market Failure in the Media Sector,’ Financial Times, 17 February 2004. 16 This 80% figure is also seen in an Economist article, ‘Ma Bell’s Convenience Store’ (27 June 1998, 62), and may never have been an accurate representation of surfing habits within AOL. It often appears in analyses of the Internet and represents a gross misunderstanding of the habits of the online audience and their use of proprietary content. Graham Meikle also quotes it in Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet (London: Routledge, 2002), 11. It is also quoted by Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 121. 17 See, e.g., David A. Vise, ‘SEC Probes AOL Tally of Members for Padding,’ Washington Post, 31 July 2003, E01. 18 Adam Liptak, ‘You’ve Got Travail,’ New York Times, 18 January 2004, sec. 7, 12. Liptak notes that the Post did not give into the legal threats. 19 It is difficult to ascertain exactly how much wealth evaporated in the wake

248

Notes to page 85

of the AOL Time Warner merger. Adam Liptak suggests that $200 billion (U.S.) worth of shareholder wealth disappeared. ‘The Making and Taking of AOL Time Warner,’ New York Times, 18 January 2004. The following books explore the events, CEOs, executives, and billionaires surrounding the failed merger: Alec Klein, Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003); Nina Munk, Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner (New York: HarperBusiness, 2004); Kara Swisher, There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future (New York: Crown Business, 2003). 20 Associated Press, ‘AOL to Subscribers: Don’t Leave!’ 3 February 2003, http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,57535,00.html. In 2002 AOL gained only 34.4% of the number of subscribers it had gained the previous year (3.7 million new subscribers in 2001, 1.2 million in 2002). Saul Hansell, ‘As Broadband Gains, the Internet’s Snails, Like AOL, Fall Back,’ New York Times, 3 February 2003, C1. From January to July 2003 the online giant saw 465,000 members defect for high-speed providers or discount online services; Phyllis Furman, ‘AOL Report to Show Online Defections,’ New York Daily News, 17 July 2003, http://www.nydailynews.com/ business/story/101404p-91791c.html. Based on the 465,000 subscribers AOL lost from January to July 2003, analysts were predicting that AOL would lose a total of 1.3 million of its 26 million U.S. subscribers. In the second half of the same year, 2 million more dial-up members defected from AOL; Rick Aristotle Munarriz, ‘AOL’s Name Blame Game,’ Motley Fool, 16 January 2004, http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2004/ mft04011601.htm. AOL has responded by aggressively advertising discount ISP services, but at the start of 2004 it was unknown how many new customers this would bring in. Analysts were forecasting modest growth rates between 6 and 10%, far lower than the heady days of the 1990s. 21 AOL is primarily a dial-up ISP and had a mere 650,000 broadband subscribers by the end of 2002. Analysts projected a possible gain of 2 million broadband subscribers by the end of 2004. AOL Time Warner does have an additional 2.6 million broadband subscribers within its Road Runner highspeed service, but this is not the AOL community and represents a branding and pricing problem for the corporation. AOL competes with Road Runner for market share and turf wars between AOL and Time Warner management are regarded as further complicating the problem. Here again we see how failure of operational effectiveness limits the attempt to establish a monopoly. See David A. Vise, ‘AOL Losing Speed Race to Road Runner,’ Washington Post, 12 February 2003, E01. Some analysts expected AOL

Notes to pages 86–91 249

22

23 24

25 26 27

28 29

30

31 32 33

34

to lose 4 million dial-up members during 2004, which would leave the ISP giant with 20 million U.S. members, down from 26.5 million in 2002. AOL was making modest gains in the broadband market during 2003. ‘AOL added a promising 340,000 new broadband accounts in last year’s third quarter’; Catherine Yang, ‘A Hard Corner for AOL to Turn,’ Business Week Online, 20 January 2004, http://www.businessweek.com/technology/ content/jan2004/tc20040120 _3250_tc055.htm. Judy Rebick, ‘AOL and Democracy on the Internet,’ CBC Front Page, 18 January 2000, http://cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/columns/rebick/ rebick000113.html. Ronald Bettig, ‘The Enclosure of Cyberspace,’ Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 14 June 1997: 151. David Resnick, ‘Politics of the Internet: The Normalization of the Internet,’ in C. Toulouse and T.W. Luke, eds., The Politics of Cyberspace: A New Political Science Reader (London: Routledge, 1998), 55. Mark Poster, What’s the Matter with the Internet? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 51. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, 183. Jonathon Cummings, Brian Butler, and Robert Kraut, ‘The Quality of Online Social Relationships,’ Communications of the ACM 45, no. 7 (2002): 103–8. See also Bonka Boneva, Robert Kraut, and David Frohlich, ‘Using Email for Personal Relationships: The Difference Gender Makes,’ American Behavioral Scientist 45, no. 3 (2001): 530–49. Marc A. Smith, ‘Invisible Crowds in Cyberspace,’ in M.A. Smith and P. Kollak, eds., Communities in Cyberspace (London: Routledge, 1999), 197. See Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollack, eds., Communities in Cyberspace (London: Routledge, 1999), and Mary Chayko, Connecting: How We Form Social Bonds and Communities in the Internet Age (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). Allan C. Hutchinson, ‘Sense and Censorship: Towards a Different Account of Expressive Freedom,’ in K. Petersen and A.C. Hutchinson, eds., Interpreting Censorship in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 396. Lovink, Dark Fiber, 335. CommerceNet, ‘Business Online,’ Research Bulletin 98, no. 17 (9 September 1998), http://www.commerce.net/research/reports/1998/98_17_b.html. John B. Horrigan and Lee Rainie, ‘The Broadband Difference: How Online Americans’ Behavior Changes with High-Speed Internet Connections at Home,’ Pew Research Center (Washington: Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2002), 2, http://www.pewinternet.org. Horrigan and Rainie, ‘The Broadband Difference,’ 3.

250 Notes to pages 92–6 35 Christopher May, The Information Society: A Sceptical View (Oxford: Polity Press, 2002), 43. 36 Peter Waterman, ‘A New World View: Globalization, Civil Society, and Solidarity,’ in S. Braman and A. Srebreny-Mohammadi, eds., Globalization, Communication and Transnational Civil Society (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1996), 50. 37 Shujen Wang, Framing Piracy: Globalization and Film Distribution in Greater China (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 2. 38 McChesney, ‘So Much for the Magic,’ 33. 39 Darin Barney, Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000), 123. 40 Poster, What’s the Matter with the Internet? 50. 41 McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, 183. McChesney’s claim of a depoliticized Internet culture is a far cry from the activity reflected in Peter Ludlow, ed., Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates and Pirate Utopias (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 42 Lovink, Dark Fiber, 338. 43 Resnick, ‘Politics of the Internet,’ 52. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, and it was introduced to the public through the NSCA Mosaic browser in March 1993, and then through Netscape in October 1994. Microsoft introduced the Internet Explorer browser in August 1995. Resnick speaks of the Web as pacifying the Internet, a claim that seemingly ignores the reality of the Internet’s history. As a user and close observer of the Internet since 1991, I have witnessed an increasingly active online community. Certainly, any activity that requires sitting in front of a computer screen will have passive elements to it. Nonetheless, each year that passes sees more innovation in how the Internet is used, and with each passing year we find new forms of cultural production and social interaction taking place over the Internet (and the Web). I do not deny that certain aspects of the Internet can be pacifying: the possible disengagement from direct political activity; the substitution of virtual relationships for normal ‘real-world’ relationships; the addiction to online games; and the general retreat from the natural world that is taking place throughout the realm of media culture. Still, the assertion that the overall impact of the Web is a passive one is a stunning misrepresentation of the online community. Resnick fails to account for the extremely high level of cultural production, and the exchange of digital cultural products, that is taking place online. One need only consider the recent Web-based blogging phenomenon to see the bizarre nature of his claim. 44 Barney, Prometheus Wired, 267.

Notes to pages 96–101

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45 McChesney, ‘So Much for the Magic,’ 33. Chapter 4 1 On 5 June 2003 Google.com indicated 856,000 occurrences of the word ‘boycott’ on the Web. Assuming that Google reaches (indexes) less than 20% of the entire Web at this time (a very safe assumption), this implies approximately 4,280,000 occurrences of ‘boycott.’ By 2 December 2003, Google returned 1,320,000 hits for the word ‘boycott,’ which implies approximately 6,600,000 occurrences throughout the Web. On 17 June 2004, Google returned 1,480,000 hits for ‘boycott,’ which implies approximately 7,400,000 occurrences throughout the Web. Although Google hit rates are a very crude means of measurement, over time we can clearly see a dramatic and constant increase in the use of certain words. Also significant is the way Google highlights the cultural concerns of the online community. By June 2004, the twenty top-listed hits returned with ‘boycott’ included the following: RIAA, Microsoft, spam, Nike, Delta Airlines, George W. Bush, Israeli goods, Gillette, and the World Bank. Much work needs to be done on developing empirical studies of various semantic fields within the Internet in ascertaining their relation to the concerns of consumer culture. There is reason to believe that there is a strong correlation between the frequency of a term’s occurrence within the Web, as measured by Google, and the cultural reality implied by its use. 2 Quoted in Deirdre Macken, ‘E-mail’s Grassroots Power Is Being Harnessed by Consumers and Mass Marketers Alike,’ Australian Financial Review, April 2001: 21–2, http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime -l-0104/msg00120.html. 3 Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein, Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1994), 4. 4 Rob Latham, Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 184. 5 Robert Adrian X, ‘Infobahn Blues,’ in A. and M. Kroker, eds., Digital Delirium (New York: St Martin’s, 1997), 85. 6 Howard Besser, ‘From Internet to Information Superhighway,’ in J. Brooks and I.A. Boal, eds., Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995), 63. 7 Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, ‘Cybernetic Capitalism: Information, Technology, Everyday Life,’ in V. Mosco and J. Wasko, eds., The Political Economy of Information (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 44–75.

252

Notes to pages 101–4

8 Frank Beacham, ‘Internet Loss,’ EXTRA! May–June 1996: 16, quoted in E.S. Herman and R.W. McChesney, The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism (London: Cassell, 1997), 134. 9 It is hard not to wonder what happens in this scenario to all the people who work at strip malls, shopping malls, department stores, supermarkets, retail chains, banks, and local shops. Frank Feather, FutureConsumer.Com: The Webvolution of Shopping to 2010 (Toronto: Warwick Publishing, 2000), 16. 10 The image of Bush wearing the ring of power can be located on the Internet using a search engine such as Google.com and searching for bush_ring.jpg or frodo_has_failed. For a different category of culture jamming (videos and Flash animation) see Bushflash.com, created by Web developer and animator Eric Blumrich. Blumrich received so many responses to his archive of anti-Bush movies that he appealed for help. The site reportedly received 70,000 viewers a month. A telling indicator of the state of cultural production within the Internet is seen in the site’s copyright notice (2003): This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material available in my efforts to advance understanding of the Bush Administration’s foreign and domestic policies. I believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Eric Blumrich, ‘Fair Use Policy,’ Bushflash Web site, http://bushflash.com/ legal.HTML. 11 At this time I was able to locate over fifty copies of this image (often given the file name debeers.jpg) on Web sites around the world using Google.com as well as retrieve it directly through peer-to-peer file exchange (Kaaza). Significantly, while the image was once rare, it now appears three times among the first twenty images returned under Google’s ‘Images’ search function when searching for the term ‘debeers.’ This is strong indication of the degree of subversion taking place among brands online. Obscene rearticulations of brands exist side by side with corporate material. 12 The site, http://www.illwillpress.com/sml.html, was created by a freelance illustration artist/cartoonist, Jonathan Ian Mathers, and functioned as his online resumé. Significantly (and not atypically), Mathers is simultaneously subverting a corporate brand and seeking work in ‘television, film, publishing, toy, and merchandising fields.’ E-mail also was used

Notes to pages 105–6 253

13 14

15

16

17

to spread word of numerous Web-based multimedia animations that targeted George W. Bush. See, for example, http://homepage.mac.com/ webmasterkai/kaicurry/gwbush/dishonestdub ya.html. This animation can also be located using a search engine such as Google.com to search for ‘dishonestdubya.html.’ ‘Description of the Media Foundation.’ Adbusters Web site, http:// www.adbusters.org/information/foundation. Kalle Lasn, ‘Meme Warfare: A Dispatch from the Forebrain of the Global Culture Jammer,’ Adbusters Web site, http://www.adbusters.org/ magazine/32/meme.html. Lasn’s tendency towards hyperbole and diatribe has been widely noted. He attempts to position culture jamming as a unifying set of practices that would lead to a broad-based movement, but this is unlikely to happen. His Adbusters magazine is innovative, but it also tends toward simplistic moralism. See also Åsa Wettergren, ‘Like Moths to a Flame – Culture Jamming as Global Spectacle,’ in A. Opel and D. Pompper, eds., Representing Resistance: Media, Civil Disobedience, and the Global Justice Movement (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 27–43. Wettergren notes the distinct moralizing and modernist tone of Lasn and Adbuster’s Media Foundation. Lasn clearly believes that he has a privileged grasp of objective truth. Umberto Eco, ‘Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare,’ trans. William Weaver, in H. Wolff and K.H. Wolff, eds., Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 144. Joseph D. Rumbo has analysed Adbusters magazine using a content analysis of nine issues. He found the magazine’s philosophy to be apolitical and anarchistic, reflecting ‘bourgeois libertarian influences.’ ‘The Case of Adbusters: “Culture Jamming” as an Act of Resistance against the Acritical Discourse of Mass Advertising,’ University of Notre Dame, Dept. of Sociology, Working Paper and Technical Report Series, no. 2000–06 (paper presented at annual meeting of the Pacific Sociological Association, San Diego, CA, March 2000), 17, http://www.nd.edu/~soc2/workpap/2000/ rumbo2.pdf. In May 2003, a search at Google.com for the phrase ‘culture jamming’ rendered 13,500 hits, ‘Naomi Klein’ 76,300 hits, ‘No Logo’ 131,000 hits, ‘Noam Chomsky’ 173,000 hits, ‘hegemony’ 270,000 hits, and ‘propaganda’ 2,450,000 hits. This type of word count is at best a crude measuring tool, yet it does provide a reflection of what is of interest to the Internet community. Regardless of the limitations of such a method for polling the mass mind, I have occasionally recorded Google hit counts herein to provide the reader with a crude benchmark for measuring the growth of a subject over time.

254 Notes to pages 107–11

18

19

20

21

22

For example, by June 2004 Google returned 4,500,000 hits for ‘propaganda,’ a dramatic increase within one year. Word counts generated by Google do provide an indication of the level of interest in a subject, but the number of hits in the above list is far lower than the actual number of times the words appears within the Internet. As with all search engines, Google searches less than 20% of the Net’s entire universe of content, and thus the number of ‘hits’ reported by Google can be multiplied by a factor of five to render a better picture of the actual number of times a word or phrase occurs within the Web. James Rorty, Our Master’s Voice (New York: John Day Co., 1934), 382, cited in Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Toronto: Vintage, 2000), 304–5. Early culture jams of advertisements that were published in Ballyhoo can be found online by searching the History Image Database at http://historyproject.ucdavis.edu. Another precursor to culture jamming is found in the French Situationist movement of the mid-1900s. The Situationists practised a technique called détournement – hijacking images and messages, placing them in a new context, and giving them a new meaning. See Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, ‘A User’s Guide to Détournement,’ trans. Ken Knabb, Les Lèvres Nues 8 (May 1956), http://www.bopsecrets.org/ SI/detourn.htm. Lynn Hunt, ‘Introduction: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500– 1800,’ in L. Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 10. See http://www.vanderzande.com/1971/mcdonalds.jpg. Other images can be found on the Web under the file names mcsexjpg, ronald_mcdildo .jpg, happymeal.jpg, and gotsperm.jpg. Two obscene culture jams of McDonald’s now appear among the first twenty images returned under Google’s ‘Images’ search function when searching for ‘mcdonalds.’ This is yet another indication of the degree of subversion of brands taking place online (see note 11 above). This culture jam may have been inspired by a recent appearance of ‘mad cow’ disease on a western Canadian farm (May 2003) and the ongoing sabre-rattling of Canada’s southern neighbour. The phrase ‘mad cowboy disease,’ a clear reference to President Bush, returned 924 hits on Google.com on 5 June 2003. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; repr., Canto Edition 1993), 154. Eisenstein’s analysis makes it very clear that printing did have contradictory effects. Even as Luther’s ideas took hold, a Catholic revival made use of printing for proselytizing. Nonetheless, four centuries later Protes-

Notes to pages 112–23

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26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35

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37 38 39

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tantism is still with us. Printing transformed all systems of belief; orthodoxy, scholasticism, mysticism, and heresy. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. in 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 182. ‘Sheen Slates “Bad” Bush,’ BBC News Online, 13 February 2001, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/1166696.stm. Lydia Miljan and Barry Cooper, ‘Censorship by Inadvertance? Selectivity in the Production of News,’ in K. Peterson and A. C. Hutchinson, eds., Interpreting Censorship in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 328. Jim Collins, Architectures of Excess: Cultural Life in the Information Age (London: Routledge, 1995), 8. John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (Concord, ON: House of Anansi Press, 1995). David Muggleton, Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 48. Collins, Architectures of Excess, 8. Kalle Lasn, Culture Jam: How to Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge – and Why We Must (New York: Quill/HarperCollins, 2000), xvi. Matt Hill, Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002), 28. See also John Fiske, ‘The Cultural Economy of Fandom,’ in L.A. Lewis, ed., The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (London: Routledge, 1992), 30–49. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 174. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), 25. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 26–7. Daniel G. McDonald and John W. Dimmick, ‘Time as a Niche Dimension: Competition between the Internet and Television,’ in A.B. Albarran and A. Arrese, eds., Time and Media Markets (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003), 29–48. Henry Jenkins, ‘The Poachers and Stormtroopers: Cultural Convergence in the Digital Age,’ http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/pub/ stormtroopers.htm. Ibid. Ibid. Henry Jenkins, ‘Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture,’ http://web.mit.edu/21fms/ www/faculty/henry3/starwars.html. Jenkins’s argument reads like an

256 Notes to pages 123–31

40

41 42 43 44

45

46

47 48 49 50 51

apology for fan communities: embrace the appropriative activity of fans, rein in the lawyers, hone your marketing strategies, and fandom will increase the value of your commercial-media products. Henry Jenkins, ‘Interactive Audiences?’ in D. Harries, ed., The New Media Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 166; also available as ‘Interactive Audiences? The “Collective Intelligence” of Media Fans,’ http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/ collective%20intelligence.html. Collins, Architectures of Excess, 139. Mary Douglas, ‘The Normative Debate and the Origins of Culture,’ in Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1992), 132. Ibid., 134. Cited in Mark Dery, ‘Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs,’ Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, no. 25 (Westfield, NJ: 1993), http:// www.levity.com/markdery/culturjam.html. This is one of the earliest descriptions of culture jamming. Also see Mark Dery, ‘The Empire of Signs,’ Adbusters 2, no. 4 (1993): 55–61. Douglas B. Holt, ‘Why Do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding,’ Journal of Consumer Research 29 (June 2002): 70–90. N. Craig Smith, Morality and the Market: Consumer Pressure for Corporate Accountability (London: Routledge, 1990), 41. Smith writes all too briefly of ‘the partisan character’ of the marketing discipline (296), a comment that easily applies to business schools and management disciplines in general. Of marketing programs, Smith notes that ‘the perspective is too often that of management for a discipline about the study of markets to advance’ (296). A survey of the literature used in undergraduate and masters programs within these disciplines quickly confirms the ideological nature of their curriculum. This is largely the result of the trade focus of departments that are geared to producing knowledge workers and management who will be able to function within the corporate sector. Holt, ‘Why Do Brands Cause Trouble?’ 82. Kristin Goff, ‘Fast-food Icon Lauded for “Healthy Living,”’ Ottawa Citizen, 20 November 2003, D1. ‘The Case for Brands,’ Economist, 6 September 2001, 11. ‘Two-faced Capitalism,’ Economist, 24 January 2004, 53. ‘Girona Declaration’ (signed document from a strategy session entitled Rio+10 and Beyond: Strategies against the Greenwash of Corporate Globalisation, March 2002, Girona, Spain), http://www.corpwatch.org/ campaigns/PCD.jsp?articleid=2610.

Notes to pages 131–6 257 52 Holt, ‘Why Do Brands Cause Trouble?’ 89. It is indicative of the state of the study of political consumerism and corporate social responsibility that ‘greenwashing’ (the equivalent of whitewashing a dirty façade to hide the dirt that lies beneath) merits only one paragraph in Michele Micheletti’s Political Virtue and Shopping: Individuals, Consumerism, and Collective Action (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 163–4. 53 Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 235. 54 Holt, ‘Why Do Brands Cause Trouble?’ 82. 55 Douglas B. Holt, ‘Deconstructing Consumer Resistance: How the Reification of Commodified Cultural Sovereignty Is Entailed in the Parasitic Postmodern Market,’ http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~ws132/ assignments/holtweb1.htm. Chapter 5 1 David Tetzlaff, ‘Yo-Ho-Ho and a Server of Warez,’ in A. Herman and T. Swiss, eds., The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2000), 110. See also Douglas Heingartner, ‘Software Piracy Is in Resurgence, With New Safeguards Eroded by File Sharing,’ New York Times, 19 January 2004, C9. 2 Two widely read overviews of the impact of commercial images on women’s self-perception are Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1991) and Jean Kilbourne, Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel (New York: Touchstone, 1999). 3 Rosemary J. Coombe and Andrew Herman, ‘Culture Wars on the Net: Trademarks, Consumer Politics and Corporate Accountability on the World Wide Web,’ South Atlantic Quarterly 98, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 919–47, http:// www.yorku.ca/rcoombe/publications/05–SAQ_100.4_Coombe.pdf. See also R.J. Coombe and A. Herman, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation and the Law (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); and R.J. Coombe and A. Herman, ‘Defending Toy Dolls and Maneuvering Toy Soldiers: Trademarks, Consumer Politics, and Corporate Accountability on the World Wide Web,’ paper presented at the conference ‘Trademark Wars,’ MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, 12 April 2001, http:// web.mit.edu/m-i-t/forums/trademark/index_paper.html. 4 Michael Strangelove, ‘Redefining the Limits to Thought within Media Culture: Collective Memory, Cyberspace, and the Subversion of Mass Media,’

258 Notes to pages 136–41

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PhD diss., University of Ottawa, 1998, http://www.strangelove.com/diss/ index.html. Richard Gruneau, ‘Introduction: Notes on Popular Cultures and Political Practices,’ in R.B. Gruneau, Popular Cultures and Political Practices (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1988), 14. See, e.g., Graham Meikle, Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet (London: Routledge, 2002); Liberty, ed., Liberating Cyberspace: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and the Internet (London: Pluto Press, 1999); Martha McCaughey and Michael D. Ayers, eds., Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2003); and Ludlow, ed., Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates and Pirate Utopias. Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in HighTechnology Capitalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 128. ‘Life in Plastic,’ Economist, 21 December 2002, 20. Coombe and Herman, ‘Defending Toy Dolls.’ These are the titles to various altered images and photographs of Barbie and Ken dolls, as found on the Internet. Liz, ‘What Naughty Barbie Are You?’ Liz and Cleo and Milán Web site, 16 December 2002, http://www.lizincorporated.com/quiz/archives/ 000247.html. The text next to an explicit image depicting anal sex entitled ‘Backdoor Barbie’ reads: ‘You come complete with easy to remove velcro panties, a bottle of lube, and a home HIV test. Enema and butt plug sold separately. Not recommended for children under age 6.’ This represents one type of consumer expression that Mattel is powerless to stop. Google delivered 827 hits for the phrase ‘Naughty Barbie’ and 92 hits for ‘Backdoor Barbie’ on 15 July 2003. Roy T. Wood, Wheelchair Rebecca (1999), 1 min., from Atom Films Web site, MPEG, http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/af/content/atom_412. Author and title unknown, http://andigraph.free.fr/barbie/ pagebarbieanime.htm. Mark Napier, The Distorted Barbie, http://detritus.net/projects/ barbie/barblist.htm. Ibid. Strangelove, ‘Redefining the Limits to Thought,’ 174. As of June 2003, Carol McCullough’s Barbie on the Cross could also be found at http://www .geocities.com/capitolhill/senate/3983/b_cross, and http://www .dailyrotten.com/today/dec/barbie.html. Another artist’s version of Barbie on a cross entitled Holy Barbie was found at http://www.thur.de/ eule/barbie/bilder/barbie.gif. In November 2003 I found a third copy of McCullough’s Barbie on the Cross at dailyrotten.com/today/dec/

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barbie.html. In the same month I also found a new artwork (watercolour and colour pencil) by Dean L. Norton, entitled RainbowBlight that includes a Barbie doll on a cross. Norton was not aware of McCullough’s work. See http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/2927495. Rosemary J. Coombe and Andrew Herman, ‘Trademarks, Property, and Propriety: The Moral Economy of Consumer Politics and Corporate Accountability on the World Wide Web,’ DePaul Law Review (Winter 2000): 601. See Steven M. Cordero, ‘Cocaine-Cola, the Velvet Elvis, and Anti-Barbie: Defending the Trademark and Publicity Rights to Cultural Icons,’ Fordham Intellectual Property, Media, and Entertainment Law Journal, Winter 1998, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/property/respect/antibarbie.html, and Alyson Lewis, ‘Playing Around with Barbie: Expanding Fair Use for Cultural Icons,’ Journal of Intellectual Property 1, no. 1 (Spring 1999), http://jip.kentlaw.edu/art/volume1/1-1-2.htm. Related papers from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School seminar, Intellectual Property in Cyberspace 2000 (February 2001), are found at http:// eon.law.harvard.edu/property. On the role of dolls in establishing notions of proper body size and beauty, see Roberto Olivardia and Harrison G. Pope, ‘Body Image Disturbance in Childhood and Adolescence,’ in D.J. Castle and K.A. Phillips, eds., Disorders of Body Image (Petersfield, UK: Wrightson Biomedical Publishing, 2002), 83–100. Anthropologist Beverley McNamara notes that anorexia is particularly prevalent in consumer cultures under the influence of commercial media. ‘Disordered Body Image: An Anthropological Perspective,’ in Castle and Phillips, Disorders of Body Image, 27. Douglas, Natural Symbols, vii. ‘The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco ruled last week that there isn’t anything the toy giant [Mattel] can do to stop a Utah artist from photographing the iconic doll wrapped in tortillas in an oven, fried in a wok and skewered on fondue forks. The court ruled the freespeech rights of photographer Tom Forsythe prevailed over Mattel’s trademarks and intellectual-property claims.’ Kimberly Edds, ‘Skewering Barbie’s Image in the Name of Art Is Fine by Court,’ Washington Post, 4 January 2004, A02. Douglas, Natural Symbols, 63. Hannah Tavares, ‘Reading Polynesian Barbie: Iterations of Race, Nation, and State,’ in M.W. Apple, ed., The State and the Politics of Knowledge (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003), 52. See also Jacqueline Urla and Terry Jennifer, ‘The Anthropology of Barbie: Unsettling Ideals of the Feminine Body in Popular Culture,’ in J. Urla and T. Jennifer, Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspec-

260 Notes to pages 147–53

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tives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 277–313. See Georges-Claude Guilbert, Madonna as Postmodern Myth: How One Star’s Self-Construction Rewrites Sex, Gender, Hollywood and the American Dream (London: McFarland and Co., 2002). John Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Methuen, 1987), 236. Alan Hyde, Bodies of Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). London Greenpeace has been active since the early 1970s and predates the better-known Greenpeace International. The two organizations are unconnected. ‘The McLibel Trial Story,’ McInformation Network, http:// www.mcspotlight.org/case/trial/story.html. ‘Big Mac’s Folly,’ Economist, 1 July 1995, 62. It is estimated that the trial cost McDonald’s $16 million in legal fees. The Economist referred to the trial as ‘an expensive public relations disaster’ back in 1995, more than one year before the trial came to an end (62). ‘The McLibel Trial Story.’ In his McLibel: Burger Culture on Trial (New York: New Press, 1997), John Vidal estimates an audience of fifteen million individuals had accessed the Web site during the trial (326), but the McSpotlight site claims far fewer visitors during this period (over 315,000 individuals between 16/2/96 and 31/ 5/97); see ‘McSpotlight Frequently Asked Questions,’ version 5, McInformation Network, June 2000, http://www.mcspotlight.org/campaigns/current/mcspotlight/faq.html. The difference between these two visitor counts may be due to Vidal counting Web page ‘hits’ as distinct visitors. ‘McSpotlight Frequently Asked Questions.’ Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle (London: Routledge, 2003), 47. ‘McSpotlight Frequently Asked Questions.’ Ibid. Ibid. A search for web pages that contained both of the terms ‘McDonald’s’ and ‘anti’ (under Google’s ‘Advanced Search, find all of the words’ field, which requires that pages returned must contain both ‘McDonald’s’ and ‘anti’) delivered 83,500 hits on 15 July 2003, 138,000 hits on 4 December 2003, 215,000 hits on 14 October 2004, and 663,000 hits on 5 April 2005. While a precise measurement of online anti-corporate expression will remain beyond reach, it appears that such expression is highly characteristic of non-commercial cultural production, and is growing rapidly. Kellner, Media Spectacle, 53. As with Barbie, McDonald’s plays a role in socializing the consumption patterns of young children. The Corporation’s confidential Operations Man-

Notes to pages 153–5 261

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ual describes the relationship between Ronald McDonald and children; ‘Ronald loves McDonald’s and McDonald’s food and so do children because they love Ronald. Remember, children exert a phenomenal influence when it comes to restaurant selection. This means you should do everything you can to appeal to children’s love for Ronald and McDonald’s.’ ‘The McLibel Trial Story.’ Bryan S. Turner notes that ‘[t]he response to McDonaldization among intellectuals has been typically hostile and critical, because it is associated with standardization and mediocrity.’ ‘McCitizens,’ in B. Smart, ed., Resisting McDonalization (London: Sage, 1999), 98. Kellner, ‘Theorizing/Resisting McDonaldization,’ 195. Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the American Meal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 246. Kellner, Media Spectacle, 50. John S. Caputo, ‘The Rhetoric of McDonaldization: A Social Semiotic Perspective,’ in M. Alfino, J.S. Caputo, and R. Wynyard, eds., McDonaldization Revisited: Critical Essays on Consumer Culture (London: Praeger, 1998), 49. George Ritzer, ‘Assessing the Resistance,’ in Smart, Resisting McDonaldization, 243. Here I am not interested in the debate over the appropriateness of Ritzer’s equation of McDonald’s with Weber’s sociological theory of instrumental rationalization. Ritzer’s theory has been criticized from a wide variety of perspectives in Resisting McDonaldization. Rightly or wrongly, within academic and popular culture McDonald’s is seen as an appropriate site for consumer resistance. The concern here is with how the Internet facilitates this resistance and evades the corporate control of expression. It is striking and noteworthy that Matthew Fraser’s defence of McDonald’s in his Weapons of Mass Distraction (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2003) fails to account for Ritzer’s thesis. Fraser’s ideologically loaded celebration of McDonald’s and all things American overlooks vast tracks of critical scholarship on the fast-food giant. In his failure to openly account for Ritzer’s critique, Fraser ignores the single best-selling book in the entire history of sociology – Ritzer’s The McDonaldization of Society. For Fraser, any negative social or environmental consequence that arises from the McDonald’s mode of industrial food production is irrelevant, any condemnation of its product illegitimate, because (as Fraser readily admits) the Corporation plays a key ideological role in projecting the soft cultural power of the American empire across the globe. Of course, others argue against Ritzer and claim that McDonaldization is declining. This mirrors the ongoing arguments over just how ‘active’ the audience is and to what extent consumers are resistant to the marketplace.

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46 Ritzer, ‘Assessing the Resistance,’ 245. Ritzer also discusses McDonaldization as a form of Holocaust in The McDonaldization of Society, New Century Edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2000), 26–8. On McFascism, see also Peter Beilharz, ‘McFascism? Reading Ritzer, Bauman and the Holocaust,’ in Smart, Resisting McDonaldization, 222–33. 47 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning the Holocaust and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977); and Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989). 48 Ritzer, ‘Assessing the Resistance,’ 254. 49 Douglas Kellner, ‘Theorizing/Resisting McDonaldization: A Multiperspectivist Approach,’ in Smart, Resisting McDonaldization, 195. 50 Martin Parker, ‘Nostalgia and Mass Culture: McDonaldization and Cultural Elitism,’ in Alfino et al., McDonaldization Revisited, 3. 51 For an example of this line of reasoning see Stephan Taylor, Sheena Smith, and Phil Lyon, ‘McDonaldization and Consumer Choice in the Future: An Illusion or the Next Marketing Revolution?’ in Alfino et al., McDonaldization Revisited, 106. 52 George Ritzer, ‘Some Thoughts on the Future of McDonaldization,’ in G. Ritzer, ed., McDonaldization: The Reader (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2002), 266. 53 Ritzer, ‘Assessing the Resistance,’ 254. 54 Deena Weinstein and Michael A. Weinstein, ‘McDonaldization Enframed,’ in Smart, Resisting McDonaldization, 60. 55 Richard Münch, ‘McDonaldized Culture: The End of Communication,’ in Smart, Resisting McDonaldization, 137. 56 Steven Miles, ‘McDonaldization and the Global Sports Store: Constructing Consumer Meanings in a Rationalized Society,’ in Alfino et al., McDonaldization Revisited, 65. 57 We may yet witness a series of interrelated crises due to mass patterns of behaviour guided by the marketplace that further highlight the flaws of a unconstrained economy (the ‘free’ market). The role of fast food and industrialized food production in the health crisis within North America is well known and is adding urgency to the issue of incomplete medical coverage among Americans. An aging population could well face a health crisis that is made far worse by a failure of the pension system, leaving many lowerand middle-class retirees bankrupt, diabetic, and worse. This series of looming crises highlights how capitalism, generally heralded as the most efficient means of producing wealth, does so by passing off the real costs of business into the future. The ongoing degradation of the environment due to the processes of production and consumption, along with the large-scale extinction of entire species are further indications of the real costs of capi-

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talism. Both the social order and the entire biosphere pays dearly for our ‘liberated’ way of life. Kathryn Hausbeck and Barbara G. Brents, ‘McDonaldization of the Sex Industries? The Business of Sex,’ in Ritzer, McDonaldization, 104. Robin Wynyard, ‘The Bunless Burger,’ in Alfino et al., McDonaldization Revisited, 165. Mark Alfino, ‘Postmodern Hamburgers: Taking a Postmodern Attitude toward McDonald’s,’ in Alfino et al., McDonaldization Revisited, 188. Douglas Kellner, ‘Foreword: McDonaldization and Its Discontents – Ritzer and His Critics,’ in Alfino et al., McDonaldization Revisited, vii. Thomas M. Jeannot, ‘The McCommodification of Society: Rationalization and Critical Theory,’ in Alfino et al., McDonaldization Revisited, 132. Geert Lovink, ‘The Art of Electronic Dialogue: Self-Interview as Introduction,’ in G. Lovink, ed., Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 7. Equally bizarre is Lovink’s claim that intellectuals within the online community need to ‘start building economic models for the distribution of content’ (10). Why the exchange of ideas must take place within some extension of capitalistic exchange is not explained. Lovink simply accepts that ideas must function as property and submit to an economic and legal regime within the Internet. George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life, rev. ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1996), 147. In contrast, the following two papers chart the use of culture jamming via e-mail in an attempt to ‘humanize’ and call into account the Nike Corporation: W. Lance Bennet, ‘Branded Political Communication: Lifestyle Politics, Logo Campaigns, and the Rise of Global Citizenship,’ in M. Micheletti, A. Follesdal, and D. Stolle, eds., Politics, Products and Markets: Exploring Political Consumerism Past and Present (London: Transaction Publishers, 2004), 101–25, also available at http://depts .washington.edu/gcp/pdf/brandpolcom.pdf; Jonah Peretti, ‘The Nike Sweatshop Email: Political Consumerism, Internet, and Culture Jamming,’ in Micheletti et al., Politics, Products and Markets, 127–42. Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). Barney, Prometheus Wired, 97. Chapter 6

1 For an overview of the state of empirical research on the social impact of the Internet, see Barry Wellman and Caroline Haythornthwaite, eds., The Internet in Everyday Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). Unfortunately, the issue

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of an alternative symbolic economy and its effect on opinion formation was not addressed. Robert W. McChesney, ‘The Titanic Sails On: Why the Internet Won’t Sink the Media Giants,’ in G. Dines and J.M. Humez, eds., Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text-Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2002) 678, http:// www.fair.org/extra/0003/aol-mcchesney.html. For similar sceptical views on the future of the Internet as a source for alternative news and expression, see Chris Shumway, ‘Media Consolidation, Journalism, and the False Promise of the Internet,’ Open Source Media, 25 May 2003, http:// www.opensource-media.org/html/academics/c_shumway.html; Jeff Chester, ‘The Death of the Internet,’ TomPaine.Com, 24 October 2002, http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/6600; Schiller, ‘Digitized Capitalism,’ 116–26; and James R. Beniger, ‘Who Shall Control Cyberspace?’ in L. Strate, R.L. Jacobson, and S.B. Gibson, eds., Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment, 2nd ed. (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2003), 59–68. McChesney, ‘The Titanic Sails On,’ 682. McChesney’s insistence on the necessity of market-based entertainment and journalism is all the more puzzling when you consider that most academic and scientific writing, editing, and refereeing is unpaid, as is most of the content production that takes place in the alternative and radical media, which is often done at a net loss to those involved. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, 175. For an overview of general issues surrounding online journalism, see Jim Hall, Online Journalism: A Critical Primer (London: Pluto Press, 2001); and Barrie Gunter, News and the Net (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003). McChesney, ‘The Titanic Sails On,’ 682. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, 178. McChesney, ‘The Titanic Sails On,’ 682. There is a tendency among theorists to underestimate the size of alternative media’s audience. ‘Brainstorm 2003: Many More Voices, One Ventriloquist?’ Fortune, 8 September 2003, http://www.fortune.com/fortune/brainstorm/ 0,15704,483495,00.html. While it is unclear exactly what Anne Moore meant by ‘unchecked media on places like the web,’ the context of the discussion – censorship of news by government and corporations – suggests she is referring to news outside of the normal corporate structure and beyond the control of either the market or government. Quoted by Dan Foley, ‘Media Expert Pessimistic about State of News,’ DenverPost.com, 18 January 2004, http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/ 0,1413,36~26~1893881,00.html. Ten years earlier, McChesney quoted Uni-

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versal president Frank Biondi as saying that media firms ‘don’t even think of the Internet as competition.’ This was before the rise of Napster, Kazaa, and peer-to-peer piracy. One suspects that the shareholders, managers, boards, presidents, and CEOs of every major film and music company think quite differently about the subject today. Herman and McChesney, The Global Media, 135. See Fair (www.fair.org), a U.S. national media watch group, for an example of extensive and well-documented online news criticism. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, 271. On the political economy of the American media system, the alliance between corporate journalism and business interests, and the failure of the policy-making process, see McChesney, The Problem of Media. Matt Welch, ‘Blogworld and Its Gravity,’ Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 2003, 22; http://www.cjr.org/issues/2003/5/ blog-welch.asp. For an overview of varieties of online journalism, see Mark Deuze, ‘The Internet and Its Journalisms, Part I: A Typology of Online Journalism,’ Online Journalism Review, 27 January 2003, http://www.ojr.org/ojr/future/ 1026407729.php; and Deuze, ‘Online Journalism: Modelling the First Generation of Newsmedia on the World Wide Web,’ First Monday 6, no. 10 (October 2001), http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue6_10/deuze/ index.html. Jay Hamilton, ‘The Inter-Not?’ M/C Reviews, 12 April 2000, http:// www.media-culture.org.au/reviews/features/politics/internot-c.html. There is considerable complexity in defining what constitutes alternative or radical media. For an overview of issues surrounding the definition of alternative and radical media, see Chris Atton, ‘Approaching Alternative Media: Theory and Methodology,’ paper presented to the International Communication Association pre-conference day ‘Our Media, Not Theirs,’ The American University, Washington, 24 May 2001; http://www .ourmedianet.org/eng/om2001/Chris%20AttonTX.pdf. For an overview of how this happened in the British press, see James Curran, ‘Capitalism and Control of the Press,’ chap. 3 in Media Power (London: Routledge, 2002). Curran argues that market forces, particularly the requirements of advertisers, deradicalized the British press and turned it into an entertainment-centred agent of conservatism. Before this transformation the radical press played a role in undermining support for private property and challenged the legitimacy of political and economic institutions. In the end the market proved to be a far more effective censor of the radical press than the state. Gerald J. Baldasty argues that similar forces

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were at work in the American context. See Baldasty, The Commercialization of the News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). Robert J. Samuelson, ‘The Limits of Media Power,’ Newsweek, 6 October 2003, 45. David Walker offered a critique of news from his perspective as a practising journalist in which he decried his industry’s lack of self-knowledge: ‘The academic literature of sociology, media studies or cognate disciplines nowadays goes almost entirely unread by journalists.’ ‘Newspaper Power: A Practitioner’s Account,’ in Tumber, Media Power, Professionals and Policies, 236–7. Ibid., 243. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, 62. What McChesney observes about Rupert Murdoch’s use of his media empire to promote pro-business and anti-labour opinions could also be said of Conrad Black and the Asper family. That media systems are owned and operated for the expressed purposes of influencing the public is also abundantly clear in the motives behind Al Gore’s efforts in 2003 to acquire a cable-television network so he could establish a media outlet with a liberal point of view. Jennifer Harper provided the following interpretation of Al Gore’s motives: ‘Vexed by the ratings success of Fox News Channel and conservative talk radio in the last 18 months, liberal power players have investigated creating their own broadcast vehicles this year to counter the Bush administration and shore up the Democratic spirit as the 2004 election approaches’; ‘Gore Said to Be Eyeing Own TV Network,’ Washington Times, 2 October 2003, http:// washingtontimes.com/national/20031001-101111-8005r.htm. Harper’s analysis may be close to the truth, but such a spin on the new network would be bad business. Thus, we see a Gore insider denying such intentions and providing the following counter-spin in the pages of the advertising industry masthead magazine, AdAge: ‘Liberal TV is dead on arrival ... You just can’t do it.’ Writing for AdAge, Richard Linnet informs readers that the new network ‘won’t be a liberal alternative to Fox News.’ Linnet notes that advertisers would be ‘wary of plunking down ads on a network aligned with a particular political party.’ Underlining the relationship between advertising and content, Linnet quotes an unnamed advertising sales executive as saying, ‘If there is any transparency [connection] to Gore, then it will be identified as a partisan operation, which will alienate advertisers.’ To further underline the point, Paul Rittenberg, senior vice-president of advertising and market research at Fox News, is quoted as saying, ‘The problem with being associated as liberal is that they [the network]

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wouldn’t be going in a direction that advertisers are really interested in.’ ‘New Al Gore TV Hopes to Avoid “Liberal” Label,’ AdAge.com, 13 October 2003, http://www.adage.com/news.cms?newsId=38939. Paul Krugman, ‘Citizen Conrad’s Friends,’ New York Times, 22 December 2003, A27. In a related article Jacques Steinberg and Geraldine Fabrikant write about ‘how friendships with the rich and often politically influential overlapped with business in Lord Black’s world.’ ‘Friendship and Business Blur in the World of a Media Baron,’ New York Times, 22 December 2003, A1. Christopher Dornan, ‘Peering Forward,’ in R. Giles and R.W. Synder, eds., What’s Next? Problems and Prospects of Journalism (London: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 149. Justin Lewis, The Ideological Octopus: An Exploration of Television and Its Audience (London: Routledge, 1991), 123. Roger Fowler, Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press (London: Routledge, 1991), 41. Charles Layton, ‘News Blackout,’ American Journalism Review, 2 December 2003, http://ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3500. Curran, Media Power, 165. Ien Ang takes issue with Curran’s critique of the active audience thesis in ‘In the Realm of Uncertainty: The Global Village and Capitalist Postmodernity,’ chap. 6 in Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World (London: Routledge, 1996), 162–80. Ang insists that ‘it is the failure of communication that we are to emphasize if we are to understand contemporary (postmodern) culture’ (167). She suggests that the ‘commonality of meaning cannot be taken for granted.’ Both are significant points and correspond to Mary Douglas’s observation that collective action is difficult and collectivities often fail. Clearly, this is ultimately a question of balance in how one approaches cultural analysis. Ang is certainly correct when she proposes that ‘communicative practices do not necessarily have to arrive at common meanings at all.’ Yet the postmodernist’s focus on indeterminacy must not lose sight of the annual expenditure of $750 billion in global television advertising that is intent on establishing the common meanings and common consumption practices that characterize global consumer culture. Such an enormous effort of persuasion cannot easily be dismissed as wasted money. Commonalities in the social order do exist, postmodernism notwithstanding. There is order amidst the chaos – no doubt in large part due to the tremendous deployment of capital intent on establishing profitable consumption patterns. Hanno Hardt, ‘Conflicts of Interest: Newsworkers, Media and Patronage Journalism,’ in Tumber, Media Power, Professionals and Policies, 217. James W. Carey, ‘American Journalism on, before, and after September 11,’

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in B. Zelizer and S. Allan, eds., Journalism after September 11 (London: Routledge, 2002), 89. Mary Anne Ostrom, ‘Net Plays Big Role in War News, Commentary,’ Mercury News, 28 February 2003, http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/ siliconvalley/5285029.htm. John B. Horrigan, ‘Online Communities: Networks That Nurture Longdistance Relationships and Local Ties’ (Washington: Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2001), 2, http://www.pewinternet.org/reports. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, 176. Ostrom, ‘Net Plays Big Role.’ On indie media also see Gal Beckman, ‘Edging Away from Anarchy,’ Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 2003: 27–30. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, 176. Maureen Ryan, ‘An Unlikely Source of Writing Talent: Blogs,’ Chicago Tribune Online Edition, 25 October 2003, http://www.chicagotribune.com/ news/showcase/chi-0310080091oct08.story. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, 62. Andre Mayer, ‘From Blogs to News, Internet Watcher Sees Web Maturing,’ Globe and Mail, 1 January 2003, B5. On 1 October 2003 Google.com delivered 109,000 hits for the phrase ‘news blog,’ 597,000 hits for ‘my blog,’ 9,680,000 for ‘weblog,’ and 16,800,000 for ‘blog.’ On 21 January 2004 these numbers increased to the following: 235,000 hits for ‘news blog,’ 1,600,000 for ‘my blog,’ 8,660,000 for ‘weblog,’ and 22,600,000 for ‘blog.’ On 21 June 2004 these numbers had increased further: 476,000 hits for ‘news blog,’ 1,940,000 for ‘my blog,’ 14,900,000 for ‘weblog,’ and 46,000,000 for ‘blog.’ Clearly, blogging is undergoing substantial growth. ‘Blogcount Estimate: 2.4 to 2.9 Million Weblogs,’ Blogcount, 23 June 2003, http://dijest.com/bc/2003_06_23_bc.html#105638688729256217. Like Web sites in general, many blogs become inactive shortly after they are created (as high as 25% within four months), so the total number of active blogs becomes something of an educated guess. The Web site Blogcount (www.dijest.com/bc), itself a blog, provides an ongoing discussion of blogging growth. In 2003, still early in the blogging phenomenon, 2% of Internet users created blogs, which in turn were read by 4% of the online community. See also the NITLE Blog Census at http://www.blogcensus.net. Welch, ‘Blogworld and Its Gravity,’ 24. For an extensive survey of issues raised by news blogs, and numerous examples of the attack on blogs by professional journalists, see the special issue on Web logs and journalism published by Harvard University’s Nieman Reports 57, no. 3 (Fall 2003), http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports.

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38 This analysis was conducted by the author on 20 October 2003. 39 Amy Langfield, ‘Net News Lethargy,’ Online Journalism Review, 3 April 2002, http://www.ojr.org/ojr/reviews/1017864558.php. 40 Carlos A. Valle, ‘Communication: International Debate and Communitybased Initiatives,’ in P. Lee ed., The Democratization of Communication (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), 207. 41 John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Trust Us, We’re Experts (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 2001). 42 Robert Fulford, ‘Bashing the U.S. Makes Us Feel Good All Over,’ National Post, 20 September 2003, A16. 43 See Charles Bernstein, My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 146, quoted in Joe Amato, ‘Endnotes for a Theory of Convergence,’ in A. Everett and J.T. Caldwell, eds., New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality (London: Routledge, 2003), 256. 44 ‘About Times Watch,’ TimesWatch.org, http://www.timeswatch.org/ about/welcome.asp. 45 Dan Gillmor, foreword to ‘We Media: How Audiences Are Shaping the Future of News and Information,’ by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis (Reston, VI: The Media Center at the American Press Institute, 2003), vi, http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia. 46 As of 6 November 2003. 47 Lee Rainie, Susannah Fox, and Deborah Fallows, ‘The Internet and the Iraq War: How Online Americans Have Used the Internet to Learn War News, Understand Events, and Promote Their Views’ (Washington: Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2003), 2, http://www.pewinternet.org/ reports. 48 Ibid., 8. 49 Joanne Jacobs, ‘War Blogging,’ j.j’s Journal, 26 March 2003, http:// joannejacobs.net/cgi-bin/archives/2003_03.html. Google returned 32,200 hits for the phrase ‘war blog’ on 5 February 2004, and 110,000 hits on 21 June 2004. 50 Monika Jensen-Stevenson, ‘Truth and Other Casualties,’ Globe and Mail, 27 November 2003, A17. 51 Fowler, Language in the News, 23. Also see Richard V. Ericson, Patricia M. Baranek, and Janet B.L. Chan, Visualizing Deviance: A Study of News Organization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). The authors make a point of critical importance to the study of non-corporate online news production when they note that commercial journalism ‘is concerned primarily with communications among elite authorized knowers’ (351). While the news encodes the attitudes of the elite, it also serves an audience largely

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composed of white, educated men whose privileged social position, according to John Fiske, ‘facilitates reading positions which are in alliance with the interests of the power-bloc rather than those of the people.’ ‘Popularity and the Politics of Information,’ in P. Dahlgren and C. Sparks, eds., Journalism and Popular Culture (London: Sage, 1992), 58. Media Tenor’s 2003 study of 392,374 news stories from American, British, German, and South African television during a 21-month period found that only 35,957 mentioned women. The study noted that ‘[w]omen and their day-to-day life alone do not seem news worth the news.’ Jennifer Harper, ‘Women Shorted by News Programs,’ Washington Times, 18 January 2004, http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040117-115051-1955r.htm. Rita Henley Jensen, ‘An Internet News Service Reports News and Views of Women,’ Nieman Reports 56 (2002): 72, http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/ reports/02-1NRspring/02-1NRspring.pdf. Fowler, Language in the News, 22. One instance of an official source declining an interview with a blogger was recorded by Kevin Werbach: ‘Recently Apple’s PR company refused an interview request made by Joe Clark, author of the NuBlog Weblog, on the grounds that he wasn’t properly credentialed’; ‘Triumph of the Weblogs,’ Edventure Web site 18 June 2001, http://www.edventure.com/ conversation/article.cfm?Counter=7444662. On the attempt to delegitimate online alternative news organizations, see also Joseph Farah, ‘Still Slamming WND,’ WorldNetDaily, 4 February 2004, http:// worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=36925. On the socially transformative value of the mundane, see Chris Atton, ‘The Mundane and Its Reproduction in Alternative Media,’ Journal of Mundane Behavior 2, no. 1 (February 2001), http://www.mundanebehavior.org/ issues/v2n1/atton.htm. Heather Gautney, ‘The Globalization of Violence in the 21st Century: Israel, Palestine, and the War on Terror,’ in S. Aronowitz and H. Gautney, eds., Implicating Empire: Globalization and Resistance in the 21st Century World Order (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 70. Ronald Leprohon, professor of Egyptology at the University of Toronto, suggests that ‘[b]ecause of struggles over oil, territory and Israel, Western powers need to promote an idea of Arab culture and Islam as primitive or irrational. With other cultures, there may not be the same fetishization, but then the stakes are not as high’; cited in Kamal Al-Solaylee, ‘News Flash: All Arabs Are Not Alike,’ Globe and Mail, 3 October 2001, R1. See also Edward Said, ‘The Clash of Ignorance,’ Nation, 22 October 2001; ‘Palestinians under Siege,’ London Review of Books 22, no. 24 (14 December 2001),

Notes to pages 182–4 271

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http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n24/said01_.html; ‘American Zionism – the Real Problem,’ Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, no. 500 (21–27 September 2001), http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2000/500/op2.htm; and On Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994). ‘Palestinian Deaths Aren’t Headline Material at the New York Times,’ Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), 12 April 2002, http://www.fair.org/ activism/nyt-israel-headlines.html. Unsigned editorial, ‘The Gazette Intifada,’ Canadian Association of Journalists, Winter 2002, http://www.caj.ca/mediamag/winter2002/opinion.html. See also Gully Cragg, ‘Corporate Censorship,’ Index on Censorship, 18 April 2002, http://www.indexonline.org/news/20020418_Canada.shtml. Cragg records the following quote from Bill Marsden, an investigative reporter for the Montreal Gazette: ‘They [CanWest] do not want to see any criticism of Israel. We do not run in our newspaper op-ed pieces that express criticism of Israel and what it is doing in the Middle East. We even had an incident where a fellow, a professor wrote an op-ed piece for us criticising the antiterrorism law and elements of civil rights. Now that professor happens to be a Muslim and happens to have an Arab name. We got a call from headquarters demanding to know why we had printed this.’ Robert Fisk, ‘Covering the Middle East: An Interview with Robert Fisk,’ Pacifica Radio, 23 May 2002, http://www.countercurrents.org/ pa-fisk010603.htm. Patricia Pearson, ‘See No Evil, No More,’ Globe and Mail, 19 April 2003, A19, http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPPrint/LAC/ 20030419/COPEARSON/TPComment. Atton, ‘Approaching Alternative Media,’ 2. Atton is quoting Dennis McQuail, Mass Communication Theory: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 1987), 88. He argues that alternative media are largely absent within the dominant theoretical traditions of media research. Classic Marxist analysis that suggests the possibility of anti-capitalist modes of production and the Gramscian notion of counter-hegemony both make space for a theoretical account of alternative and radical media. Yet ‘attempts to theorise and develop conceptual frameworks’ for these media forms are, Atton concludes, rare and ‘even sparser’ (1). Robert W. McChesney, ‘September 11 and the Structural Limitations of US Journalism,’ in Zelizer and Allan, Journalism after September 11, 91. Cited in Jesse J. DeConto, ‘American Media Called Instruments of War Propaganda,’ Portsmouth Herald Local News, 12 December 2002, http:// www.seacoastonline.com/2002news/12122002/news/2707.htm. McChesney, ‘September 11,’ 94.

272 Notes to pages 185–92 67 Douglas Kellner, ‘September 11, Terrorism, and Blowback,’ in N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln, eds., 9/11 in American Culture (Oxford: Altamira Press, 2003), 9. 68 Stuart Allan, ‘Reweaving the Internet: Online News of September 11,’ in Zelizer and Allan, Journalism after September 11, 120–1. 69 Ibid., 132. 70 Consider the example of YellowTimes.org, a non-corporate news site that was shut down twice, on 10 February 2003 and again on 24 March 2003. The site offers anti-war news and commentary and was still operating in 2004. 71 Dave Healy, ‘Cyberspace as Place: The Internet as Middle Landscape on the Electronic Frontier,’ in D. Porter, ed., Internet Culture (London: Routledge, 1997), 62; James A. Knapp, ‘Essayistic Messages: Internet Newsgroups as an Electronic Public Sphere,’ in Porter, Internet Culture, 194. 72 Lewis, The Ideological Octopus, 146. 73 Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang, ‘How Americans View the World: Media Images and Public Knowledge,’ in Tumber, Media Power, Professionals and Policies, 295–313. On the American knowledge deficit, Lang and Lang note that ‘most foreign news available to Americans has become essentially a home-grown product put together by the mainstream media with a content more or less in line with the policy needs of their government’ (229). Ian Hargreaves likewise observes that ‘the proportion of time devoted to international news by US television networks has fallen from 45 to 13 per cent. American newspapers are not much better, having cut the proportion of their editorial space devoted to foreign news from around 20 per cent to 2 per cent in the last two decades’; Journalism: Truth or Dare? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 97. While critical theory identifies a knowledge deficit among Americans, we find media organs no less than the New York Times reassuring the population that ‘Americans are the best-informed people in the history of the world’; Bob Herbert, ‘Change the Channel,’ New York Times, 19 December 2003, A39. 74 Ericson, Baranek, and Chan, Visualizing Deviance, 356. 75 Atton, ‘Approaching Alternative Media,’ 14. 76 Baldasty, The Commercialization of the News, 144. See also Ted Curtis Smythe, The Guilded Age of the Press, 1865–1900 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). 77 Stuart Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing “The Popular,”’ in R. Samuel, ed., People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge, 1981), 238, quoted in John Fiske, ‘Popularity and the Politics of Information,’ in Dahlgren and Sparks, Journalism and Popular Culture, 45. 78 Fiske, ‘Popularity and the Politics of Information,’ 45.

Notes to pages 194–7 273 79 McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, 183. 80 Schiller, ‘Digitized Capitalism,’ 125. Schiller, like so many left-wing media critics, repeatedly claims that the Internet is doomed: ‘The Internet itself is all too likely to be transformed into a commercial and pay-for-use system in the near future.’ Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis in America (London: Routledge, 1996), 116. McChesney makes a similar claim in his latest work The Problem of Media (2004): ‘The power of the oligopolistic market trumps the subversive potential of the [Internet’s] technology ... [T]he Internet is going hypercommercial’ (221). I am convinced that many liberal intellectuals, having devoted their lives to documenting the nefarious political economy of commercial media and the tragedy of American democracy, look to the Internet and see only an inevitable repeating of twentiethcentury communication history. This gross failure of liberal theory may be due to a combination of ignorance regarding the social facts of the Internet’s novel mode of cultural production (and, I suspect, a general lack of actual online experience among overworked intellectuals) and an inability to escape from the models of cultural production that were established in the previous century. 81 Beniger, ‘Who Shall Control Cyberspace?’ 68. 82 Douglas Rushkoff, ‘The Information Arms Race,’ in L. Strate, R.L. Jacobson, and S.B. Gibson, eds., Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment, 2nd ed. (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2003), 357. 83 Fiske, ‘Popularity and the Politics of Information,’ 47. 84 Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent. Another aspect of their propaganda model, the role of the communist threat, has been replaced by the threat of terrorism as a disciplining mechanism. To the extent that online news challenges the use of an ‘enemy’ as a disciplining mechanism, it will also erode the process of manufacturing consent. 85 Paul Rutherford, Endless Propaganda: The Advertising of Public Goods (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 66. 86 Gillmor, foreword to ‘We Media,’ vi. 87 McQuail, Mass Communication Theory, 88. 88 Fredric Jameson, ‘The Antinomies of Postmodernity,’ chap. 1 in The Seeds of Time. 89 On postmodernism’s overdetermination of reality, see the collection of essays edited by Douglas Kellner in Baudrillard: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994). The overdetermination of reality is one of the more widely critiqued aspects of postmodernist theory and needs to be set against postmodernists’ claims about the indeterminacy of meaning. Clearly, contradictions abound.

274 Notes to pages 199–201 Chapter 7 1 Michael Strangelove, ‘The Internet, Electric Gaia and the Rise of the Uncensored Self,’ Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine 1, no. 5 (1 September 1994): 11, http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1994/sep/self.html. 2 Pierre Lévy, ‘Collective Intelligence: A Civilization,’ trans. C. Bell, Crossings: eJournal of Art and Technology 1, no. 1 (June 2001), http://crossings.tcd.ie/ issues/1.1/Levy. 3 Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence, trans. R. Bononno (New York: Plenum Trade, 1997), 57. Lévy attempts to deflect the criticism that his ideas are utopic: ‘[A]sking if the idea of collective intelligence is utopian or realistic doesn’t really make much sense’ (Pierre Lévy, Cyberculture, trans. R. Bononno [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001], 250. Yet he does defend his concepts as representing an ‘achievable utopia’ (180). While Lévy may try to deflect criticism that his ideas are essentially utopic, it is quite clear that his interpreters see his theory as a form of utopic capitalism. See, for example, Ronald E. Day, The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History and Power (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001). 4 Pierre Lévy, ‘Meta Evolution,’ working paper, Department of Social Communications, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, 2001, http://www .mit.edu/~fca/levy/meta_evolution.html. 5 Lévy, ‘Collective Intelligence: A Civilization.’ 6 Lévy, ‘Meta Evolution.’ 7 Frédéric Vanderberghe, ‘From Media to Meditation Studies: An Introduction to the Work of Régis Debray and Pierre Lévy,’ CRICT Discussion Paper Series 2, no. 1 (July 2001): 32, http://www.brunel.ac.uk/depts/crict/ debray.pdf . 8 Pierre Lévy, L’intelligence collective: Pour une anthropologie du cyberespace (Paris: La Découverte, 1997), 100, quoted in Frédéric Vanderberghe, ‘From Media to Meditation Studies,’ 32. Vanderberghe argues that Lévy embraces ‘the prefabrication of consciousness by today’s post-industrial megacapitalism ... By directly plugging our minds into the collective mind, the internet sells all kinds of virtual experiences and thereby contributes to the expansion of consciousness. That the internet is commodifying the contents of consciousness and modifying directly our experiences, that is actually a good thing according to Lévy’ (32). Here Vanderberghe is clearly expressing the normalization thesis – ‘the internet is commodifying the contents of consciousness.’ 9 Vanderberghe, ‘From Media to Meditation Studies,’ 39.

Notes to pages 201–4 275 10 Cited in Mark Poster, ‘What’s Left: Materialist Responses to the Internet,’ Electronic Book Review 3 (17 September 2003), http://www .electronicbookreview.com. 11 Lévy, Cyberculture, 214. Lévy never really resolves the contradiction between his conservative claim that the Internet will not change power relations and his utopian forecast of a brave new world. This underscores the claim made by Robins and Webster (see below) that his theory, in the end, operates as a liberal justification for digital capitalism. Lévy’s belief that cyberspace will eliminate totalizing forces allows him to overcome any objections to the problem of power, capital, and ownership, but this is precisely where his theorizing slips into the realm of theology. 12 Lévy, ‘Meta Evolution.’ 13 Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, Times of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life (London: Routledge, 1999), 223. 14 Ibid., 225. 15 Lévy, Cyberculture, 101. In contrast, Richard C. Vincent accuses ‘the majority of communication scholars’ of selling an ‘extremely idealistic’ vision of universal access to and participation in the global communication network. Vincent notes that such visions of a ‘global’ and ‘universal’ future serve to obscure technological determinism and corporate interests. ‘The New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) in the Context of the Information Superhighway,’ in M. Bailie and D. Winseck, eds., Democratizing Perspectives on Information and Power (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1997), 403. 16 Lévy, Cyberculture, 111. 17 Lévy, ‘Meta Evolution.’ 18 See the collection of essays in Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin, The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict (London: Routledge, 1997). 19 David Frum, ‘Western Muslims Are on the Front Lines,’ National Post, 26 October 2002, A16. 20 Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 21 Lee Slater, ‘Democracy, New Social Movements, and the Internet: A Habermasian Analysis,’ in M. McCaughey and M.D. Ayers, eds., Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2003), 139. While Slater, along with numerous others, applies Habermas’s notion of the public sphere to the Internet, here I have chosen to focus on other issues. There is an extensive body of literature that applies Habermas’s theory to the analysis of the Internet. A search on Google for the term ‘Habermas’

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along with ‘Internet’ renders no less than 45,000 hits (15 December 2003). For an overview of liberal and radical models of the public sphere, see James Curran, ‘Rethinking the Media as a Public Sphere,’ in P. Dahlgren and C. Sparks, eds., Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere (London: Routledge, 1991), 27–57. Reuters, ‘AOL Debuts Lower-Priced Internet Service,’ 30 December 2003. One of the reasons AOL faces subscriber defections is price: ‘“At the end of the day, the AOL service just costs too much,” said Mark May, an analyst at Kaufman Brothers. “AOL has estimated 10 to 15 percent of the customers that called to disconnect cite price as a reason.”’ Tamara Villarreal Ford and Genève Gil, ‘Radical Internet Use,’ in John D.H. Downing, Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements (London: Sage, 2001), 211. Diana Saco, Cyber Democracy: Public Space and the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 192. Significantly, it may be becoming more difficult to use everyday expressions such as ‘fuck’ in commercial media. The expletive occurs regularly in mundane speech and is found not less than 1.7 billion times on the Web. Yet in 2004 ‘U.S. lawmakers introduced legislation to raise fines for incidents of foul language used on air to as much as $3 million.’ Reuters, ‘DAVOSFCC's Powell Sees Broad Support for Swear Word Ban,’ 22 January 2004, http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID= 418 5965. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1951). Noam Chomsky, 9/11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), 40. Kevin Doyle, ‘Interview with Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, Marxism, and Hope for the Future,’ in Ludlow, Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, 447–8. There needs to be a more serious exploration of how the Internet may evolve into a forum for the development of anarchy. Capitalist cheerleaders generally see anarchism as the most immoral of political options, and are frequently seen denying that the Internet promotes anarchy. To a certain degree this must be due to the desire to stave off any serious regulation of the Internet by government. Although the notion is not pursued herein, it might prove fruitful to explore the Internet as an expanding realm of anarchy. Lewis Call notes that anarchist political theory is often dismissed as infantile Leftism but is nonetheless an important element within postmodern theory. Postmodern Anarchism (New York: Lexington Books, 2002), 11. On anarchism and the Internet, see also Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Con-

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trol Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (New York: Basic Books, 2004). Samuel P. Huntington, ‘Why International Primacy Matters,’ International Security 17, no. 4 (Spring 1993): 83. See also Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). Matthew Fraser, Weapons of Mass Distraction: Soft Power and the Road to American Empire (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2003). Matthew Fraser, ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ National Post, 22 September 2003, A6. Robert Wright, ‘Two Years Later, A Thousand Years Ago,’ New York Times, 11 September 2003, A29. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Spirit of Terrorism,’ trans. R. Bloul, Le Monde, 2 November 2001, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillardthe-spirit-of-terrorism.html. It could be said that the Internet enhances the blowback that capitalism and empire generate within the global order. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 60–7. John Kenneth Galbraith, A Journey through Economic Time: A Firsthand View (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 204. See, for example, ‘Grinding the Poor,’ Economist, 27 September 2001, 10–13; ‘Sweatshop Wars,’ Economist, 25 February 1999, 62. William K. Tabb, ‘Race to the Bottom?’ in S. Aronowitz and H. Gautney, eds., Implicating Empire: Globalisation and Resistance in the 21st Century World Order (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 152. William K. Tabb, ‘The Two Wings of the Eagle,’ Monthly Review 55, no. 3 (July–August 2003), http://www.monthlyreview.org/0703tabb.htm. Tabb, ‘Race to the Bottom?’ 152. Stanley Aronowitz, ‘Global Capital and Its Opponents,’ in Aronowitz and Gautney, Implicating Empire, 179–95. Barney, Prometheus Wired, 188–9. Douglas Kellner, ‘Intellectuals, the New Public Spheres, and TechnoPolitics’ (December 1997), http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/ newDK/intell.htm. Robert W. McChesney does not see the Internet as evolving into a significant public sphere or a significant political forum. This he argued in 1997, and it appears that his opinion has not changed over time; ‘The Communication Revolution: The Market and the Prospect for Democracy,’ in Bailie and Winseck, Democratizing Perspectives on Information and Power, 70–2.

278 Notes to pages 211–13 43 Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 156. 44 For examples of the political use of the Internet, see Laura Gurak, Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace: The Online Protests over Lotus Marketplace and the Clipper Chip (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1997); Douglas Kellner, ‘Globalization, Technopolitics and Revolution,’ http://www .gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/GlobTPRev-Foran.htm; Liberty, ed., Liberating Cyberspace: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and the Internet (London: Pluto Press, 1999); McCaughey and Ayers, Cyberactivism; Graham Meikle, Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet (London: Routledge, 2002); and Paul A. Taylor, Hackers: Crime in the Digital Sublime (London: Routledge, 1999). 45 Robert J. Klotz, The Politics of Internet Communication (Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), xv. 46 Kellner, ‘Globalization, Technopolitics and Revolution.’ Likewise, Klotz concludes that ‘[t]he importance of its use in politics is growing’; The Politics of Internet Communication, 221. Clearly, this is now beyond dispute. 47 Robins and Webster, Times of the Technoculture, 226. 48 Jürgen Habermas, ‘The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship,’ trans. C. Cronin, Public Culture 10, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 397–416, quoted in Poster, What’s the Matter with the Internet? 116. Given the stature of Habermas, Poster is clearly disturbed by his ‘uninformed, offhand remarks’ that ‘reflect badly on a scholar like himself’ (116). These negative views of Internet activism and community, which are far from uncommon in the scholarly literature, may be the result of too little time spent surfing the Web and engaging in real-world political activity. The forthcoming generation of wired intellectuals, raised in the highly networked Internet era, may prove to be more appreciative of the real-world implications of online activism. To paraphrase Thomas Kuhn, sometimes it takes a younger generation to detect anomalies and pursue emerging paradigms. 49 Joseph Lockhard, ‘Progressive Politics, Electronic Individualism and the Myth of Virtual Community,’ in D. Porter, ed., Internet Culture (London: Routledge, 1997), 229. 50 Zygmunt Bauman, Europe of Strangers, Oxford, ESRC Transnational Communities Programme, Working Paper no. 3 (1998), 10, quoted in Robins and Webster, Times of the Technoculture, 226. 51 Jeremy D. Popkin, ‘Media and Revolutionary Crises,’ in J.D. Popkin, ed., Media and Revolution: Comparative Perspectives (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 12–30. Also see Jeremy D. Popkin and Jack R. Censer,

Notes to pages 213–16

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‘Lessons from a Symposium,’ in Popkin, Media and Revolution, 1–11. Popkin and Censer summarize the complexity and contradictory findings of the essays in this collection with the observation that ‘[t]he central issue at stake is simply the question of whether the media do in fact have a real influence on the unfolding of revolutionary crises’ (4). Popkin, ‘Media and Revolutionary Crises,’ 27. Popkin and Censer, ‘Lessons from a Symposium,’ 10. Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 154. David Graeber, ‘A Moment of Peace,’ In These Times, 18 February 2003, http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Bush-10-Million -Protest18feb03.htm. Mark Poster, ‘Cyberdemocracy, Internet and the Public Sphere,’ in Poster, Internet Culture, 201–17. Also see a revised version of this essay in Mark Poster, ‘CyberDemocracy: Internet as a Public Sphere,’ chap. 9 in What’s the Matter with the Internet? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Shanthi Kalathi and Taylor C. Boas, Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule (Washington, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003), 136. Cass Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 199. In his essay Sunstein refers to mass media as ‘general interest intermediaries’; it is quite clear that here he has corporate media in mind. Like so many theorists, Sunstein builds his case solely through references to the American Constitution, the First Amendment, and an entirely American notion of democracy and individual freedoms. The vast majority of American Internet theory strikes me as excessively bound by notions of freedom, the individual, and the state that are highly particular to American culture. Cass Sunstein, ‘Cass Sunstein Replies,’ Boston Review (Summer 2001): http: //bostonreview.net/BR26.3/sunstein2.html. For a response to Sunstein’s balkanization argument, see Daniel Kreiss, ‘Counterpublic Communication and Digital Media,’ Kreiss Web Site, http://www.stanford.edu/~dkreiss/Counterpublic.html. See also the excellent collection of responses to Sunstein at the Boston Review’s New Democracy Forum, under the heading ‘Is the Internet Good for Democracy?’ http://bostonreview.net/ndf.html#Internet. A notable exception was the defeat of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in October 1998. Gordon Laxer argues that success of the anti-MAI campaign owes a great deal to the Internet. ‘The Defeat of the

280 Notes to pages 218–21 Multilateral Agreement on Investment: National Movements Confront Globalism,’ in G. Laxer and S. Halperin, eds., Global Civil Society and Its Limits (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 169–88. Conclusion 1 John D.H. Downing, Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements (London: Sage, 2001), 27. 2 See also James Slevin, ‘Cultural Transmission and the Internet,’ chap. 3 in The Internet and Society (Oxford: Polity Press, 2000). As herein, Slevin also notes that the Internet ‘is radically transforming the nature of the public circulation of symbolic forms’ (76). Slevin draws on the work of John Thompson, who, like Mary Douglas, sees culture as mediated by symbols. 3 John Keane, ‘The Crisis of the Sovereign State,’ in M. Raboy and B. Dagenais, eds., Media, Crisis and Democracy: Mass Communication and the Disruption of the Social Order (London: Sage, 1992), 32. See also the discussion of social movements and the democratization of communication in Robert A. White, ‘Democratization of Communication as a Social Movement Process,’ in P. Lee, ed., The Democratization of Communication (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995). 4 Robert W. Cox, The Political Economy of a Plural World: Critical Reflections on Power, Morals and Civilization (London: Routledge, 2002), 92. 5 Herbert I. Schiller, Communication and Cultural Domination (White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976), 47. 6 See, for example, Schiller, ‘Digitized Capitalism,’ 116–26; and ‘Cultural Imperialism and Information Inequality,’ in G. Lovink, ed., Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 132–6. For a broader discussion of the Internet’s role in globalizing capitalism, see Jon Stratton, ‘Cyberspace and the Globalization of Culture,’ in D. Porter, ed., Internet Culture (London: Routledge, 1997), 253–75. Howard Rheingold represents a more typically populist interpretation of communication technologies, strongly influenced by the libertarian ‘Californian Ideology,’ of which Rheingold is regarded as a patron saint (along with McLuhan). Most of his later work focuses on the consumer use of new products. Like the work of other high-tech cheerleaders, such as Kevin Kelly, this type of journalistic sociology largely profiles emerging products and markets, with an added gloss of piecemeal social analysis. The individual is primarily positioned as a consumer who interacts with the world through communication technology, which in turn delivers a more laissezfaire market that enhances individual freedom and replaces the nation-

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state; see Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1993), and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002). On Rheingold, Kelly, Wired magazine, and the Californian Ideology, see Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, ‘The Californian Ideology,’ The Hypermedia Research Centre, http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-californianideology.html. This site also contains numerous informative critiques of Barbrook and Cameron. According to the Online Publishers Association (http://www.online -publishers.org), spending on paid content grew 23%, to $748 million (U.S.), in the first half of 2003; ‘by the end of 2002, one in ten online users in the U.S. were regularly paying for some form of content, and total content sales for the year reached $1.3 billion dollars. This is the second consecutive year in which paid content revenues registered an annual growth rate of nearly 100%.’ See ‘Online Paid Content: U.S. Market Spending Report,’ Online Publishers Association, September 2003, http://www.online-publishers .org/opa_paid_content_report_09222003.pdf.Jupiter Research projected that consumer spending on online content will grow by 20% annually between 2003 and 2007. The market for online content is highly fragmented, ‘making it difficult for any one company to collect a significant share of that spending’; Ryan Naraine, ‘Jupiter: Paid Content to Soar,’ Internet News, 24 March 2003, http://www.internetnews.com/stats/print.php/ 2168971. There is considerable uncertainty as to the online content market’s trajectory. For example, some expect news to evolve into a pay-per-use market, while others see ‘free’ as the model of the future; Krissah Williams, ‘Md. Journals May Become Free,’ Washington Post, 23 January 2004, E03. Obviously, the uptake of pay-per-use content will be much greater in the business information sector than in the consumer sector. Economist, E-trends: Making Sense of the Electronic Communications Revolution (London: Profile Books, 2001), xiii. Kris Hundley, ‘Digital Analyst Out at Raymond James,’ St. Petersburg Times, 29 August 2003, http://www.sptimes.com/2003/08/29/Business/ Digital_analyst_out_a. shtml. Robert Thompson, ‘Fees for a Song,’ National Post, 29 May 2003, FP9. Walter Kirn, ‘“American Sucker”: A Fool and His Money,’ New York Times, 25 January 2004, sec. 7, 7. See also Barrie McKenna, ‘Wall St. Settlement Praised as Milestone,’ Globe and Mail, 29 April 2003, B1. Tainted research is pervasive within the business sector. Having followed the Internet sector for over a decade now, I have no doubt that a lack of critical analysis, independent of vested interests, and the prevalence of twisted notions of consumer preferences are behind many failed ventures.

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Notes to pages 223–5

12 Nick Cohen, ‘Can’t Regulate, Won’t Regulate,’ New Statesman 15 (21 October 2002): 26. 13 Jacquie McNish, ‘E-mails Penetrate Closed Doors,’ Globe and Mail, 26 January 2004, B1. 14 From the American example of Enron to Italy’s Parmalat scandal, the problem of endemic corruption in the market remains far from an easy fix. In 2004 the attention turned to the mutual fund industry in the United States: ‘The mutual fund industry was hammered yesterday by the Securities and Exchange Commission for paying Wall Street brokerage firms to recommend their products – frequently without telling investors’; Paul Adams and Eileen Ambrose, ‘SEC Takes Mutual Fund Industry to Task,’ Baltimore Sun, 14 January 2004, http://www.sunspot.net/news. See also ‘Plenty of Crying Over Spilt Milk,’ Economist, 9 January 2004, 62. Robert J. Shiller, professor of economics at Yale University, and author of Irrational Exuberance, represents the conservative ‘a few bad apples’ interpretation of the market when he argues that these and other scandals ‘are evidence not of widespread corruption, but of the vigilance of US regulatory authorities.’ It comes as no surprise that this is also the normative view repeated within the financial press. For the conservative mind, the market is in need of only a minor fix and is otherwise doing quite well. ‘Comment: How Corrupt Are US Capital Markets?’ Pakistan Daily Times, 27 January 2004, http:// www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_2–1–2004_pg5_ 17. 15 McChesney, ‘The Titanic Sails On,’ 682. 16 To his credit, McChesney does note: ‘Were the control of cyberspace and communication to become the subject of political debate and struggle, all bets would be off concerning the Internet’s future.’ Significantly, this appears to have been written before the successful online protest against the American Communications Decency Act of 1996 (given the difference between a publication date and the actual writing and review process, which can be particularly long within academia). As it turned out, control of cyberspace is the subject of online and off-line political debate, and all bets are indeed off. Herman and McChesney, The Global Media, 135. 17 Ibid., 683. 18 Peter Dahlgren, Television and the Public Sphere: Citizenship, Democracy and the Media (London: Sage, 1995), 154. 19 This argument has been made in the context of television advertising. See Joseph D. Rumbo, ‘The Revolution Will Be Commodified: The Use of Countercultural Representations in Network Television Advertising,’ University of Notre Dame, Dept. of Sociology, Working Paper and Technical Report Series, no. 2000-05, paper presented at annual meeting of the North Central

Notes to pages 225–31

20

21 22 23

24

25

26

27 28

29

30

31

283

Sociological Association, Pittsburgh, 13–16 April 2000, http://www.nd .edu/~soc2/workpap/2000/rumbo1.pdf. Peter Dahlgren, ‘Introduction,’ in P. Dahlgren and C. Sparks, eds., Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere (London: Routledge, 1991), 15. It is unclear (and irrelevant) as to whether Dahlgren had the Internet in mind here. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 5–6. Jameson, The Seeds of Time, xii. Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, trans. L.G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); originally published as Histoire et pouvoirs de l’écrit (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1988). See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984); originally published as La Distinction, Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979). Marie-Françoise Guédon, ‘Dene Ways and the Ethnographer’s Culture,’ in D.E. Young and J.-G. Goulet, eds., Being Changed: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1994), 46–7. Guédon cites magical songs as the only exception to the common body of knowledge. The Dene do not conceive of knowledge as isolated information, ‘divorced from its application and its natural and social environment’ (51). For the Dene, knowledge is a relational process between the learner, the teacher, and the environment. Guédon, ‘Dene Ways,’ 56. Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). On determinism and the relationship between culture and social structure, see Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 85–8. Swidler suggests that ‘[c]ulture constrains action because people can most easily construct strategies of action for which they already have the cultural equipment’ (86). Herein I have suggested that capitalism provides the motive, while the Internet provides the means, for constructing strategies of unconstrained communicative action. On the growing gulf between Canadian and American social values, see Michael Adams, Sex in the Snow: Canadian Social Values at the End of the Millennium (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1997) and Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values (Toronto: Penguin Books, 2003). Edward Sapir, ‘Culture, Genuine and Spurious,’ in D.G. Mandelbaum, ed.,

284 Notes to page 231 Edward Sapir, Culture, Language and Personality: Selected Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 78–119. For early theoretical work on civilization and repression of the self, see Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Vintage Books, 1962). While Marcuse’s Freudian model of the self and society may be dated, his commentary on the constraints of civilization remain insightful.

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Name Index

Alfino, Mark, 158 Allan, Stuart, 183, 185, 186, 187 Ang, Ien, 12–13, 267n25 Asper, Izzy, 168, 182 Atton, Chris, 183, 190 Auletta, Ken, 164 Averill, Gage, 238 Bagdikian, Ben H., 35, 238n33 Baldasty, Gerald J., 191, 192 Baranek, Patricia M., 189 Barney, Darin, 93–4, 96, 97, 161, 210 Baudrillard, Jean, 53, 160, 161, 197, 207, 216 Bauman, Zygmunt, 155, 212 Beacham, Frank, 101 Bechtold, Stefan, 64 Bell, Roger, 150 Beniger, James R., 195 Berners-Lee, Tim, 250n43 Besser, Howard, 101 Bettig, Ronald, 86 Biegel, Stuart, 70 bin Laden, Osama, 104 Biondi, Frank, 265n9 Black, Conrad, 123, 167, 182, 266n19, 267n20

Blodget, Henry, 222 Blumenthal, Marjory S., 69 Blumrich, Eric, 252n10 Boas, Taylor C., 214 Boiter, Jay David, 5 Bourdieu, Pierre, 227–8 Brents, Barbara G., 158 Bush, George W., 13, 16, 23, 103, 104, 105, 112–13, 117, 184, 252nn10, 12, 254n21 Call, Lewis, 276n28 Campbell, Colin, 51 Caputo, John S., 154 Carey, James W., 171 Castells, Manuel, 8–9, 73 Censer, Jack R., 278n51 Chan, Janet B.L., 189 Cheng, Spencer, 242n21 Chomsky, Noam, 13, 37, 76, 168, 196, 205, 207, 238n32 Chrétien, Jean, 112 Clark, David D., 69 Collins, Jim, 114–15, 116, 117, 125 Compaine, Ben M., 35–6 Coombe, Rosemary J., 135–6 Cowen, Tyler, 60

314

Name Index

Cox, Robert W., 220 Cragg, Gully, 271n60 Curran, James, 169, 265n15, 267n25 Dahlgren, Peter, 225 Dean, Jodi, 160, 161, 211 de Certeau, Michel, 119 Dodge, John L., 244n34 Dornan, Christopher, 168 Douglas, Mary, 29, 44, 239n49; on body symbolism, 144–5; on collective action, 126–7, 267n25; on consumption, 42, 52, 236n12; on limits to expression, 51; on medium of expression, 43; on social order, 54–5, 146 Downing, John D.H., 218, 219 Drudge, Matt, 165 Ducros, Françoise, 112–13 Dyer-Witheford, Nick, 9, 136–7 Eco, Umberto, 105 Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., 111, 254n22 Eisner, Michael D., 66 Engels, Friedrich, 136 Ericson, Richard V., 189 Fabrikant, Geraldine, 267n20 Feather, Frank, 101 Ferguson, Niall, 13 Fisk, Robert, 182 Fiske, John, 192, 193, 195, 270n51 Ford, Tamara Villarreal, 204 Forsythe, Tom, 144, 259n19 Fowler, Roger, 168, 180, 181 Frank, Thomas, 131–2 Fraser, Matthew, 13, 206, 261n44 Frieden, Rob, 68 Friedman, Thomas L., 14 Frulla, Liza, 18

Frum, David, 203 Fulford, Robert, 176 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 17, 208; on consumer management, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 30–1, 41–2, 236n12; critique of, 47 Gates, Bill, 38, 94, 101, 202 Gautney, Heather, 181 Geist, Michael, 241n3 Gibson, William, 128 Gil, Genève, 204 Gillmore, Dan, 177, 197 Gore, A1, 202, 266n19 Guédon, Marie-Françoise, 228, 283n26 Habermas, Jürgen, 212, 225, 275n21, 278n48 Hall, Stuart, 192 Hamilton, Jay, 166 Hansell, Saul, 69, 246n14 Hardt, Hanno, 171 Hardt, Michael, 14–17 Hargreaves, Ian, 272n73 Harper, Jennifer, 266n19 Hausbeck, Kathryn, 158 Healy, Dave, 187 Heidegger, Martin, 155 Herbert, Bob, 272n73 Herman, Andrew, 135 Herman, Edward, S., 37, 196 Holt, Douglas B., 129–33 Hunt, Lynn, 108 Huntington, Samuel P., 205–6 Hutchinson, Allan C., 89 Hyde, Alan, 148 Ignatieff, Michael, 13 Innis, Harold A., 43–4, 239n51

Name Index Isaacson, Walter, 184 Isherwood, Baron, 29, 42, 52 Jacobs, Joanne, 179 Jameson, Fredric, 53, 197, 226 Jeannot, Thomas M., 159 Jenkins, Henry, 119–21, 123–4, 255n39 Jensen-Stevenson, Monika, 179 Johnson, Chalmers, 16–17, 37, 234n13 Kalathi, Shanthi, 214 Kaplan, E. Ann, 48 Katz, Jon, 186 Keane, John, 220 Kellner, Douglas, 53, 211; on American journalists, 185; on McDonald’s, 151, 153, 154, 156, 159 Kelly, Kevin, 280n6 Kilbourne, Jean, 237n24 Kizza, Joseph Migga, 79 Klein, Alec, 85 Klein, Naomi, 106 Klotz, Robert J., 211 Knapp, James A., 187 Kroker, Arthur, 100, 136 Krugman, Paul, 167 Kuhn, Thomas, 198, 278n48 Lang, Gladys Engel, 272n73 Lang, Kurt, 272n73 Lasn, Kalle, 105, 106, 118–19, 253n14 Latham, Rob, 101 Lazarsfeld, Paul F., 31, 32 Lee, Edmund, 72 Lee, Martyn J., 41, 50 Leigh, Phil, 222 Leiss, William, 235–6n4 Leprohon, Ronald, 270n58 Lessig, Lawrence, 19, 35, 64, 66, 68–9,

315

70, 72–3, 77, 124, 136, 216, 226, 242n16 Lévy, Pierre, 21, 200–3, 215, 274nn3, 8, 275n11 Lewis, Justin, 168, 188 Liptak, Adam, 243n31, 247n16 Livingstone, Sonia M., 49 Lockard, Joseph, 212 Lovink, Geert, 80, 89, 95, 136, 160, 161, 263n63 Lunt, Peter K., 49 Luxemburg, Rosa, 205 Lyotard, Jean-François, 207 Madonna, 76, 147, 206 Manley, John, 202 Marcuse, Herbert, 27, 284n31 Margolis, Michael, 80, 90 Markoff, John, 65 Marsden, Bill, 271n60 Martin, Henri-Jean, 227 Marx, Karl, 136 McChesney, Robert W.: on amateur Web sites, 224; on AOL, 85; on corporate journalism, 18, 183–5, 266n19; on depoliticized Net culture, 95, 136, 161, 210, 250n41, 273n80, 282n16; on identity, 96; on the Internet’s future, 93, 94, 194, 216, 226, 277n42; on media policy, 35; on non-commercial Internet use, 88; on online journalism, 162–4, 171–4, 175, 189, 223, 264n3; on war and the American press, 184–5 McCracken, Grant, 50 McCullough, Carol, 141, 258n16 McLuhan, Marshall, 44, 105, 128 McNamara, Beverley, 259n19 McQuail, Dennis, 197, 271n63

316 Meikle, Graham, 247n16 Merton, Robert K., 31, 32 Meyrowitz, Joshua, 184 Miles, Steven, 158 Miller, Daniel, 46–7, 239n56 Miller, Doug, 100 Miller, Jonathan, 69 Miller, Steven E., 79 Moore, Anne, 164, 264n8 Moore, Michael, 76 Morley, David, 41 Morris, Dave, 150, 151 Muggleton, David, 115 Münch, Richard, 158 Murdoch, Rupert, 167, 266n19 Napier, Mark, 139, 140, 142, 143 Negri, Antonio, 14–17 Neuman, W. Russell, 4, 5, 6 Nichols, John, 35 Noam, Eli, 247n15 Ogilvy, David, 237n24 Parker, Martin, 156 Pearson, Patricia, 182 Phalen, Patricia F., 5 Popkin, Jeremy D., 212–13, 278n51 Poster, Mark, 87–8, 94, 201, 214, 278n48 Powell, Michael, 35 Rambhia, Avni, 242n21 Rather, Dan, 184 Rebick, Judy, 86 Resnick, David, 80, 87, 88, 90, 96 Rheingold, Howard, 241n10, 280n6 Ritzer, George, 155, 156, 157, 160, 161, 261nn44, 45 Robertson, Michael, 64

Name Index Robins, Kevin, 101, 202, 211–12, 275n11 Rumbo, Joseph D., 253n16 Rushkoff, Douglas, 195 Rutherford, Paul, 196 Saco, Diana, 204 Samuelson, Robert J., 167–8 Sapir, Edward, 231 Saul, John Ralston, 115 Saunders, Doug, 3 Schell, Bernadette H., 244n34 Schiller, Dan, 68, 247n16 Schiller, Herbert I., 32, 33, 41, 81, 136; critique of, 34; on Internet’s future, 194–5, 221, 273n80 Schmidt, Jeff, 230 Shaver, Dan, 214n9 Shaver, Mary Alice, 214n9 Sheen, Martin, 113 Shiller, Robert J., 282n14 Shunn, William, 186 Slater, Lee, 204, 275n21 Slevin, James, 280n2 Smith, Marc A., 88 Smith, N. Craig, 129, 236n15, 256n46 Steel, Helen, 150, 155 Steinberg, Jacques, 267n20 Sunstein, Cass, 215–16, 279n58 Swidler, Ann, 283n29 Tabb, William K., 208 Tapscott, Don, 6, 38, 233n5 Tavares, Hannah, 146 Thompson, Robert, 222 Tolkien, J.R.R., 103 Toffler, Alvin, 38 Vanderberghe, Frédéric, 201, 274n8 Vidal, John, 260n30

Name Index Vincent, Richard C., 275n15 Walker, David, 167, 266n17 Wang, Shujen, 74, 92 Webster, Frank, 101, 202, 211–12, 275n11 Webster, James G., 5 Weinstein, Deena, 157 Weinstein, Michael A., 100, 157

317

Welch, Matt, 165, 175 Wolff, Michael, 84 Wright, Robert, 206 Wynyard, Robin, 158 X, Robert Adrian, 101 Zoellick, Robert, 208

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Subject Index

ABC, 4 active audience theory, 40–2, 169, 261n44, 267n25 Accumulation of Capital, The, 205 Adbusters (Web site and magazine), 46, 106–7, 253nn14, 16 Adbusters Media Foundation, 104 adbusting. See culture jamming advertisers: and AOL, 85; and Internet users, 58, 71, 79, 81, 84, 103; and the press (news), 164, 166, 181, 187, 191–2, 196; and self-regulation, 28; and viewing patterns 4, 266n19 advertising: altered images of, 103, 254n18; and America Online, 60; annual expenditure (U.S.), 31; anti-, 106–7; De Beers, 108, 235n3; and digital technologies, 4; disbelief in, 29; disgust with, 107; effectiveness of, 23–5, 27, 29–31, 33–4, 47, 147, 267n25; and embedded meanings, 50; and interpretive capabilities, 50; and journalistic standards, 164, 191; and market-dictated tastes, 116; McDonald’s, 149, 150, 152,

153, 154; mimicking, 109; modification of, 102–3, 107; and news, 164, 165, 188; online, 58, 79; popup, 84, 246n14; and presidential elections, 31; and radical change, 196; regulation of, 28; -supported Web sites, 7; systemic values of, 32; viral, 103; volume of, 34, 237n24; in washrooms, 108–9; and ‘word of e-mail,’ 224. See also branding AlterNet.org (Web site), 172 America. See United States America Online (AOL): in Canada, 70; as dominant archetype, 85, 86, 247n16; future of, 85, 243n31; growth rate of, 85, 248nn20, 21, 276n22; merger of, 59–61; and pop-up blockers, 84; and proprietary content, 60, 68–9, 86, 204; unorthodox accounting, 85. See also Time Warner anarchy, 202, 276n28 anorexia, 259n19 anti-Americanism, 18, 215, 231 anti-capitalist movement: framed as terrorism, 206; and the Internet, 21, 94, 128, 212; and the media, 212;

320 Subject Index and uncontrolled expression, 149, 152, 207. See also culture jamming anti-globalization: and brands, 125; and disturbed personalities, 203; and McDonald’s, 153; and terrorism, 208 AOL Time Warner. See America Online; Time Warner AOLTV, 85 Apple, 66, 222 appropriation: aggressive, 117; and artistic production, 105; and brand identity, 46, 108, 121, 125, 141, 143, 145; Campbell’s theory of, 51; and collective action, 143; Collins’s theory of, 114–17, 125; in corporate media, 118; and cultural authority, 115; and destructive intent, 124; failure of, 48; by fans, 118–22; Jenkins’s theory of, 120–1; Lee’s theory of, 50, 51; legal response to, 142–3; limits to, 50, 51; McCracken’s theory of, 50; and memory, 110; Miller’s theory of, 46, 239n56; motivation for, 117, 141; significance of, 48, 79, 94, 95, 116, 144, 225; of technique, 109; trajectory of, 73, 104, 105, 121, 138. See also culture jamming Aqua, 118, 144 Architecture of Excess, 114 AT&T, 61 audience: aggregated, 60, 81, 164; analog vs. digital, 121; and brand preference, 170; business, 6; of CNN, 184; and commercialization, 191; as content creators, 5, 6, 22; control of, 4, 34; critical dimension of, 26, 34, 105–6, 156, 168, 188, 193, 203; expressive freedom

among, 221; fragmented, 4, 12; forgetfulness of, 113; future of, 4–6, 80–1; interpretative capabilities of, 105, 119, 147; mass, 4–6, 10, 31, 59, 120, 123, 128; and meaning of commodities, 54; preferences of, 4, 41; share, 61, 164, 197; social amnesia of, 113; and systemic values, 32; trajectory of, 221. See also active audience theory audience, online: and America Online, 86, 247n16; attempt to control, 19, 60, 61, 63, 68, 71–2, 79, 82, 88, 101; autonomy of, 10–11, 21, 22, 58, 63, 87, 88, 194; as a collaborator, 6, 7, 8, 121–4, 207; and collective memory, 113, 229; and commercialization, 59, 101; communicative freedom of, 106; female voice within, 180; future of, 4, 61, 85, 121; and media effects, 219; myth of passified, 80–1, 91, 96, 211–12; oppositional position of, 193; preferences of, 69, 71, 81, 86, 163, 170, 176, 189; productive capabilities of, 5, 85, 86, 191, 194, 221; and resistance, 6, 8, 10, 136, 188, 193, 200, 212, 225; share, 88, 89, 171, 224; as social force, 63; stable state of, 20, 221; and systemic values, 32–3, 125, 135; trajectory of, 10; unconstrained, 10, 11, 22, 142 Avon, 140 Ayers, N.W., advertising agency, 24 Ballyhoo, 107, 128, 254n18 Barbie (dolls): case study of, 137–49; and consumer socialization, 140–1; as liberating, 146; and litigation, 118, 135, 137, 138, 139–40, 142–3,

Subject Index 259n21; parodies of, 138, 139, 258n11; Polynesian, 146; and unconstrained representation, 144, 149, 219. See also Distorted Barbie Barbie on the Cross, 138, 141, 146, 258n16 Barbie Liberation Organization, 139 Bay, The, 27 BBC, 186 BCE, 59 Bell, 61 Blogdex.net (Web site), 175 blogging: and balkanization, 216; and cultural production, 250n43; definition of, 124; and expressive freedom, 205; and fact checking, 177; growth rate of, 174, 268nn35, 36; and navigation skill, 224, and news, 174–5, 268n37; and war, 178–80 blowback, 207, 234n13, 277n33 Bodies of Law, 148 body: ideal notions of, 144–8; in legal thought, 148; master symbols of, 145; and online shopping, 102; redefinition of, 149 boycott, 100, 251n1 branded personality, 116 branding: and the American Dream, 154; anti-, 108, 128–9; as authentic cultural resources, 129–30; and Barbie, 141; and consumer empowerment, 29–30; and corporate environmentalism, 131; cultural authority of, 132–3; effectiveness of, 33; and false memory, 113; and fans, 119; mass customized, 39; and news, 170; and obscenity, 108 brands, subversion (erosion) of, 42–

321

3, 46, 87, 100, 107, 125, 143; Barbie, 138; corporate response to, 117; De Beers, 103, 252n11; McDonald’s, 151–2, 156, 254n20; via pornography, 108. See also culture jamming broadband: adoption rates of, 57, 85, 90–1; and cultural production, 91, 102, 109 Burger King, 39 business analysts. See consultants, high-tech business schools, 76, 129, 256n46 Business Software Alliance, 74, 245n44 Californian Ideology, 280n6 Canada: anti-competitive practices in, 77; attitude towards America within, 18; media activism in, 109; media concentration in, 38; normative debate within, 126; rate of piracy in, 57, 74, 241n3; speech laws of, 67 Canadian Institute of Child Health, 130 Canadian Tire, 46 CanWest Global Communications, 59, 182, 271n60 capitalism: abnormalization of, 226; Achilles heel of, 217; belief system of, 12, 20–1, 23–4, 26–8, 40–2, 53, 157, 219, 229; celebration of, 10; and coercion, 13, 27, 46, 208, 231; compassionate, 47; control of discourse within, 99, 126, 174, 195; cosmology of, 45, 95–6, 145, 156; as a cultural pattern, 55, 114, 146, 216; and cultural production, 11, 134; defining feature of contemporary, 110; dependency on persuasion,

322 Subject Index 28, 31, 42, 135, 193; and desire, 23, 33; deterministic, 49, 54, 230; digital, 21, 94, 102, 206, 218, 227, 275n11; early history of, 39–40, 49; economic rationalization within, 155; eroticization of identity within, 144; ethics of, 43, 45, 77, 115; as feudalism, 47; friction-free, 94; future of, 129, 157, 159, 209, 221; and gender, 9, 52; globalizing, 13, 14, 21, 203, 207, 208–10, 216, 220; hegemony of, 21, 96, 98, 194; as a holocaust, 7–8, 155, 220, 227; ideal social body of, 149; ideology of, 5, 27, 136, 157, 176; and imperial economics, 81, 88, 93; law of supply and demand, 91; logic of, 9, 11, 12, 25, 61, 62, 92, 115, 148, 159, 194, 223, 226, 235n4; master narrative of, 115; and meaning-production, 19, 21, 32, 33, 51, 92, 95, 99, 116, 128, 135, 143–4, 162, 196, 219; and media activism, 107; memory practices of, 114; opposition to, 27, 107; perfection of, 94; post-, 215, 218, 227; prestige of, 29, 206; property relations of, 92–3, 95, 96, 227; reform of, 130; safe from resistance, 131–2; self-interest within, 126; and social order, 12; sovereignty of, 117; success of, 24; surveillance within, 97; symbolic order of, 50, 146–7, 149; systemic values of, 32; trajectory of, 9, 38, 48, 70, 136, 201, 205, 208, 227, 262n57; totalizing, 12, 27, 78, 101, 197, 216, 226, 227, 230; underground economy, 76, 134; utopic, 21, 203, 209, 218, 274n3; and variety, 51; violence of, 46, 207–8, 210;

weakness of, 96. See also antiglobalization; communicative capitalism; globalization capitalist postmodernity, 13 catalogue shopping, 83 CBC, 126, 186 CBS, 4 censorship: within corporate media, 182, 196, 229; evasion of, 69, 141, 144, 186, 211, 229, 230; in the marketplace, 36, 176; self-, 141, 186 China, 10, 19; piracy in, 74, 75 Christianity, 111; post-, 218 Civilizing Cyberspace, 79 Civilizing the Internet, 79 civil society, 220 class: conflict, 227, end of, 137, 227; relations, 9; and values, 230; virtual, 100 CNN, 95, 172, 177; war coverage by, 184 code. See Internet: architecture of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, 72 collective intelligence, 200, 274n3; and online news, 177; and salvation, 202–3 commercial news. See news, commercial communication: anti-corporate, 108; architecture of, 9, 106, 111, 145, 195; bias, 43; compulsive, 5; countercultural, 225; de-institutionalized, 189, 190; diversity of, 5; failure of, 267n25; freedom of, 9, 21, 22, 61–2, 71–2, 78, 100; grassroots online, 160, 212; group conversation, 89, 93; guerrillas, 105, 109, 128; history of, 201; jurisprudence governing, 67; limits to, 145; maldistribution of speech power, 89; monopolies,

Subject Index 44; motive for, 5, 71, 110, 174; new structure of, 95, 112; non-hierarchical, 172; public, 36; restriction of, 64, 66, 99, 154; transnational noncommercial, 95. See also blogging; communicative capitalism communication (expression), unconstrained: anomaly of, 78, 198; anticapitalist, 94; and capitalism, 150; and commercial media, 87, 95, 159, 187; cumulative effect of, 219, 230; definition of, 22, 177; diminishing, 204; disparaged, 160–1; future of, 10; and identity, 96–7; and institutionalized discourse, 199; and insurrection, 217; limits to, 177; motive for, 193, 283n29; and the normalization thesis, 187, 198, 218; as permanent, 159; and the power bloc, 196, 218; and resistance, 217; and responsibility, 230; and social control, 89, 208; and socialization, 228, 231; and social justice, 220; state of, 205, 216, 226; as a threat, 164; threat to, 64, 66 Communications Decency Act, 205, 282n16 communicative capitalism, 160–1, 211 communism, 27 Conquest of Cool, The, 131 conservatives: and America’s selfperception, 14; and blogging, 177; and capitalism, 7, 8, 30, 36–7, 40, 205, 208, 282n14; and cultural imperialism, 18; and Internet use, 178, 189–90; and marketing theory, 129; and the media, 35, 189; and media power, 167, 180; and the National Post, 126

323

constitution, American: global expansion of, 16–17; and Internet architecture, 66–7 consultants, high-tech, 6, 36, 38, 86, 101, 281n11 consumer behaviour: and alienation, 46, 53; anti-corporate, 100, 149; and appropriation, 51, 128; and Barbie, 137, 141, 146; and blogging, 124; collaborative, 102; and commercial media, 12, 147; control of, 28, 40, 42, 57, 60–1, 65, 63, 70, 78; and cultural theory, 42–3; and diversity of goods, 47, 49; and early adopters, 123; engineering of, 27; and fans, 119; and individuality, 27; and interactivity, 71; and law, 56; management of, 6, 12, 23–4, 25, 26, 30, 38, 48, 125, 135; and news, 169; online, 6, 56–8, 71, 73, 74, 86, 87, 101; patterns of, 23, 25, 54, 132, 146; perpetuation of, 50; preference in, 7, 60, 66, 69, 71, 81, 84–5, 102, 158, 222–3, 242n16, 281n11; programmed, 38, 116; ritualized, 52–3; and romantic love, 25; and the symbolic economy, 21, 50; and wants, 19, 24, 26, 28, 29, 31, 33, 55, 154, 155, 157. See also advertising; boycott; branding; consumer resistance; consumer sovereignty; corporations: and consumer management consumer culture: Barbie’s role in, 138, 139, 146–7; and corporate meanings, 135; and fans, 119; Internet’s impact upon, 99, 102, 106, 136; postmodern, 129, 132; resistance within, 45–6, 48–9, 146, 153; triumph of, 49

324 Subject Index Consumer Culture Reborn, 41 consumer resistance: and Barbie, 139; and capitalism, 92; co-option of, 131; and diversity, 49; via e-mail, 102–4; expressive capabilities of, 104; extent of, 149, 152–3; Holt’s theory of, 129–32, and McDonald’s, 152–3; and meaning, 161; online, 100, 102, 104, 135, 151, 155, 160; role of, 155; as transformative, 135, 161 consumer sovereignty: Baudrillard on, 53; erosion of, 52, 107, 154, 157; established view of, 29–30, 40, 236n12, 236–7n15; Galbraith on, 23–4, 25–6, 28, 30; limits to, 30, 31, 38, 54, 155; marketplace as guarantor of, 129, 130; and McDonald’s, 156 consumption. See consumer behaviour content: and broadband, 90–1; compulsive creators of, 5, 93; and context, 190; control of, 61–2, 63, 66, 68, 71, 74, 82, 176, 230; and cultural transmission, 11; deflated pricing, 84, 247n15; depoliticization of, 223; and market forces, 80–1, 86, 164, 187–8, 192; mobility of online, 186; non-proprietary, 68–9; out-of-control, 20, 57, 58; pre-digital vs. digital, 96, 194; proprietary, 7, 60, 68–9, 222; providers, 21; regulation of, 36, 82; revenue from online, 83, 281n7; standardized production of, 175; transformation of, 59, and uncontrolled representation, 149 convergence: cultural, 10, 121–4; intensification of, 163; and intensified control, 59, 60–1; and the mass

audience, 120; and oligopoly, 226 conversation. See communication copyright, 92, 142: and Mattel, 140, 141; recording industry lawsuits, 57, 141, 241n3; revenues from, 75; rights over the meaning of, 135; subversion of, 87; total control of, 64 corporate media. See media, commercial corporate news. See news, commercial corporate speech: and appropriation, 142; authority of, 109; and the body, 148; coercion through, 44; and consumption choices, 54; and cultural production, 43; definition of, 33; and domination, 99; and goods, 47; hijacking of, 117; imperatives of, 34; and individual freedom, 48, 52, 99; and mundane discourse, 190; overemphasized, 53; omnipresent, 41, 110; response to, 28, 142, 106, 177; subversion of, 104, 108, 109, 114–15, 124, 125, 128, 143; and unsuppressed speech, 193; and values, 135 Corporation, The (documentary), 76 corporations: anti-democratic, 35, 209; competition between, 65–6; and consumer management, 12, 125; control of, 29–30, 38; convergence strategies of, 241n9; cultural authority of, 113, 115, 116, 117; culture of, 76; as dominant force, 95; ethics of, 61, 74, 76–7, 245nn49, 50, 51, 282n14; fear of, 59; hubris of, 69, 71; limits to control by, 57–8, 88, 99, 132–3, 136–7, 143; legal power of, 135, 152; media, 12, 18, 35, 56,

Subject Index 60, 165, 175, 185; and monopolization, 60, 64, 73, 86–7, 92; reputations of, 100, 113; social (civic) responsibility and, 129, 130–1, 257n52; social power of, 39–40, 47–8, 78; and social purpose, 26; superaggregation of, 47; and surveillance, 97 credit, 28, 49 cultural divorce, 11, 123, 154, 209 cultural imperialism, 18, 152, 206 cultural literacy, 125 cultural policy, 18 cultural production: anti-corporate, 107; and the audience, 121, 221; and capitalism, 73, 96, 110, 118, 134, 158, 197; and commodification, 9; corporate, 11; counterhegemonic, 189; and culture theory, 197; elite control of, 227; and fans, 120, 123; future of, 4; illegal forms of, 72; within the Internet (online), 20, 73, 88, 97, 99, 106, 114, 124, 134, 193, 200, 223; institutionalized, 22; monopolization of, 117, 127; and mundane conversation, 90; new mode of, 27, 94, 204, 230; and the normalization thesis, 95, 122; and the press, 21, 127, 190; private ownership of, 37; unconstrained, 10, 11, 73, and unconstrained expression, 207, 219, 227. See also production; production, non-commercial culture: academic, 160; appropriative, 117, 125; and Barbie, 139, 140, 146; and capitalism, 9, 19, 52, 121, 158; and the Catholic church, 122; commodification of, 101; constrained, 55, 126, 127, 146, 283n29;

325

and consumption, 42, 48, 53, 191; counter-, 48, 107, 109; cyber-, 80, 95; depoliticized, 95, 96; fan, 118, 119, 120, 123; folk, 115, 116; global, 18; inalienable, 46, 239n56; Internet, 20, 144, 151, 158, 200–1, 202, 212, 220, 231; local, 114, 126; market domination of, 32; mass, 115, 156; and meaning, 42–3, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137; media, 112, 121, 160, 197, 199, 212, 229; and media concentration, 35; print, 108; and property, 73; and television, 32; and the self, 12, 45; and shared categories, 126; youth, 6, 48, 115. See also consumer culture; cultural production; culture, corporate; culture, popular culture, corporate: conflict within, 61; constant exposure to, 32; and consumer behaviour, 60; kleptocratic, 76; and memory, 113; and news production, 176, 187; normative debate within, 160; and social order, 11. See also corporate culture; corporations culture, popular: and cultural literacy, 125; and culture jammers, 123; definition of, 115–16; and dominant ideology, 136; Internet’s impact upon, 194; and online news production, 192, 193; as site of meaning production 132–3 Culture Inc., 32 Culture Jam, 106 culture jamming: and alienation, 46; and brand erosion, 125; coined by (origins), 106; compared to blogging, 124; and cultural authority, 20; definition of, 104; and e-mail,

326 Subject Index 104, 263n64; as guerrilla warfare, 105; maturing, 106; and memory, 110, 113; motivation for, 110, 117– 19; and newspaper boxes, 109; pornographic character of, 107–8; practices, 107, 253n14; resurgence of, 110; seen negatively, 123–4; validation of, 142; volume of, 135; and youth culture, 6 customization, mass, 38–9, 47, 238nn40, 41 Cyber-Marx, 136 cyberspace. See Internet Dark Fiber, 80 Data Trash, 100 De Beers, 103, 105, 108, 235n3, 236n6, 252n11 decentralization, 38 definitional control: and Barbie, 140, 142, 143, 145; and capitalism, 11– 12, 53, 203; erosion of, 21, 137, 139, 144; expansion of, 40, 41, 47–8, 142; and McDonald’s, 153 democracy: American, 14, 17, 35; barriers to, 8, 18; and cultural policy, 44; cyber-, 200–1; as destiny, 44, 218; erosion of, 37; and mass communication, 44; and morality, 157; and myth, 10; semiotic, 147; social control within, 36; Web as source of, 211 Dene (the Tetlin), 228–9, 283n26 determinism: marketplace, 49–50, 81, 86, 87; technological, 44, 230–1, 275n11, 283n29. See also normalization thesis: and marketplace determinism détournement, 254n18 deviance: within corporations, 77;

online, 74; social construction of, 189 diamonds, 24–5, 26, 31, 53–4, 103, 135, 235n3, 236n6 digital currency, 47 digital divide, 225 digital piracy: anti-, 63, 66; and authorial meaning, 120; and consumer preference, 222; control of, 57–9, 66, 244n34; and distribution monopolies, 92; failure to control, 87; favourite targets of, 84; and investors, 59, 222; and law, 57, 58, 72, 240nn2, 3; lost revenue from, 245n44; as marketing strategy, 134, 242n16; and MP3 (digital music) players, 65–6; and nationalism, 74– 5; and normative Internet behaviour, 74; and the press, 20; and software code, 64; solutions to, 62, 72; status of private property, 56; volume of, 19, 56–8, 74, 234n17, 240n2. See also digital rights management digital rights management (DRM), 62–3, 75, 242nn11, 21 discontent, 9, 10 Disney, 66, 123, 154 dissent: Internet as tool for, 179, 186, 197; marginalized, 27, 40, 112, 124; media’s portrayal of, 203; and online news, 196; and print technology, 111–12; suppressed, 36, 100; and terrorism, 209. See also heresy Distorted Barbie, The (Web site), 139 diversity: and commercial news, 175–6, 186, 215; of content, 69; demand for, 175; of goods, 47, 49– 50, 146–7; of meaning, 50, 114–15;

Subject Index obliteration of, 226; of opinions, 36; in self-construction, 146; of values, 231 eBay, 58 economic system. See capitalism Economist: on Barbie, 137; on branding, 29–30, 33; on corporate ethics, 130; on globalization, 208; on online retail, 83, 222; on piracy, 66 economists, 29, 30, 31, 126, 236n12 education, 9–10 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 79 Electronic Intifida (Web site), 182 Electronic Iraq (Web site), 182 elites: ambivalence toward, 45; competing factions of, 8; discourse of, 89; and empire of mind, 17; and Internet theory, 202; legitimacy of, 213, 214; and national interests, 15, 16; and news, 126; and social control, 197, 227–8, 230 e-mail: as form of resistance, 102–4, 114; and group conversation, 88–9 empire: capitalism as, 3, 13, 17, 114, 188, 219; critique of, 231; and cultural transmission, 20; discourse of, 147; foundation of, 210; Hardt and Negri’s theory of, 14–17; and meaning, 114; omnipotent, 216. See also United States Empire (Hardt and Negri), 14 empire of mind: America as centre of, 18, 41, 73; control of imagination within, 93, 128; and culture jammers, 124; definition of, 17; dissent within, 21, 179, 230; and expressive freedom, 95; extent of, 19; Internet’s impact upon, 128, 136, 231; maintenance of, 13; and

327

marketing, 132; and postmodern conditions, 17; power of, 81; social conditioning within, 28, 42, 145; threat of, 18; and totalitarianism, 209 environment: degradation of, 9, 77, 219, 220, 235n4, 262n57; sustainability, 130–1 ethics: of empire, 14; of private property, 11. See also capitalism: ethics of; corporations: ethics of; deviance European Union, 209 evolution, 200, 201 expression. See communication fan culture: compared to culture jamming, 118–19, 123–4; definition of, 118 fans: collaborative, 123–4, 256n39; communities, 119–20; compared to poachers, 119, 120; consumption practices of, 119 fashion, 34, 52 FBI, 186 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 35, 168 feedback, 63, 177 First Amendment, 67–8, 87 flak, 196 Fox News, 177, 266n19 Framing Piracy, 74 Free Culture, 72, 73 free markets, 17, 35–6, 37, 40, 176, 209, 215–16, 262n57 French Revolution, 107, 213 Friends, 34, 54 fuck: as cultural indicator, 108, 205, 276n25 FutureConsumer.Com, 101

328 Subject Index Future of the Mass Audience, The, 4 gender: and Barbie, 137, 144, 146; and capitalism, 9; and colonial attitudes, 146–7; and commercial media, 52; and news production, 180; outlaw sexualities, 148 German Ideology, The, 136 Girona Declaration, 130–1 globalization: legitimization of, 202, 208; narrative of, 17; resistance to, 160; as rhetorical device, 209; trajectory of, 8; and violence, 207, 209. See also anti-globalization Globe and Mail, 109, 126 Google, 108, 224, 251n1, 253n17. See also search engines graffiti, 108–9 Growing Up Digital, 6 Gulf (Iraqi) War: 13, 16, 37, 103; and blogging, 178–9, 184 Gutenberg effect: definition of, 112; possibility of, 122–3, 225 Gutenberg press. See printing press hackers, 63, 70, 107, 244n34 happiness, 27 Happy Meal, 24, 50, 108, 157 hate speech, 67, 79 heresy, 20, 110–12, 122 high-speed access. See broadband History and Power of Writing, The, 227 Hollywood, 57, 75 identity: and advertising, 29; and the American dream, 154; and Barbie, 139–40, 146; brand, 87, 125; Canadian, 126; corporate, 97, 135; and corporate media, 127; and cultural products, 116, 127; and culture, 55;

of the elite, 97; female, 140, 144, 146; and legal power, 135; and the marketplace, 49, 118, 119, 129, 135; McDonald’s, 151, 154; and noncorporate news, 190; postmodern fragmentation of, 149; of the powerful, 96; and resistance, 135; sexual, 146 ideology: and the American dream, 154; and blogging, 124; Californian, 280n6; capitalist, 5, 27, 136, 157, 176; cohesiveness of, 114; of consumerism, 27; dominant, 36, 136, 205; economic, 36; free-market, 36; of globalization, 202; and intellectuals, 36; and marketing, 129, 256n46; marketplace, 160; of marketplace determinism, 81; and McDonald’s, 154; and the normalization thesis, 10, 202; of the sovereign consumer, 29 individualism, 9 information age, 8, 92, 114 information society, 92 instant messaging, 221 intellectual property: control of, 64, 75, 100; destruction of, 20, 21, 92–3, 104–5, 137, 142; and fans, 118; law, 12, 135, 244n39, 259n19; liberating, 143; and resistance, 161. See also digital rights management intellectuals, 36–7, 39, 73, 81, 156, 212, 230, 263n63, 273n80, 278n48; and economic critique, 27; privileged world of, 160 interactivity, 4, 7, 101 International Monetary Fund, 15 Internet: ‘abnormalization’ of, 96; anti-corporate sentiment within, 100, 128; architecture of, 56, 63–4,

Subject Index 66–70, 72, 242n16; ‘backbone’ of, 62, 72, 241n10; and balance of power, 120, 190, 192; balkanization of, 215–16; bias of, 43, 73; bubble, 39, 82, 102, 222; censorship of, 19, 186; commercialization of, 59, 63, 64, 68, 79, 82, 194; community, 10, 21, 63, 72, 124, 152, 210, 214; and consumer socialization, 45, 96, 99, 133, 137; contradictory effects of, 97, 210; counter-hegemonic, 220; and culture, 144, 151, 158, 200–1, 202, 212, 220, 231; and decommodified production, 27, 93, 94–5, 158, 195, 197–8; depoliticized, 95–6; dominant mode of use, 93; embryonic dynamics of, 124; empirical research on, 263n1; and fragmentation, 214; and friction, 94, 161; future of, 61, 63–4, 68, 70, 72, 73, 78, 81–2, 91, 226; golden age of, 80; gold rush, 58, 68, 82, 85, 86; holographic character of, 142; and intensification of appropriation, 117, 144; and law, 56, 58, 80, 136, 141, 148; and mass events, 185; and media monopolies, 98; and memory, 89, 96, 110, 112–14, 229–30; motivations for use of, 5, 71, 110; non-commercial use of, 20, 88; normative state of, 99; operating logic of, 91; parity with corporate media, 93, 170, 177; as a passive medium, 91, 96, 250n43; political use of, 80, 87, 211, 214, 220, 282n16; and post-capitalist society, 137; as a public sphere, 10, 21, 95, 101, 127, 216, 275n21; and ‘push’ technologies, 71; radical scepticism of, 96– 7, 101, 136, 160–1, 194–5, 204, 210,

329

212, 264n2, 273n80; regulation of, 70; and retail activity, 7, 58, 82–3, 93, 101–2, 212, 246nn9, 10; significance of, 110, 169, 201, 219, 224; and social control, 106, 176, 216; social functions of, 105, 114, 179; stable state of, 10, 77, 96, 99–100, 128, 221, 227; subterranean cultural environment of, 149; and subversion, 29, 31–2, 43, 113, 199, 203; and totalizing forces, 10, 19, 59, 64, 86, 128, 136, 197, 202, 216, 226, 227; uncontrolled expression within (uncensored), 22, 61, 150, 151, 159, 205; and utopic thinking, 200–3, 220. See also blogging; broadband; culture jamming; digital piracy; Internet service providers; journalism, online; Usenet Internet Business Journal, 59 Internet Explorer, 65, 250n43 Internet service providers (ISPs), 61, 62, 68–70, 82, 186, 241n10; subscriber defections, 85, 204. See also America Online Invention of Pornography, The, 108 investors, 59 Iraqi War. See Gulf (Iraqi) war Israelis, pro-Israeli media bias, 181–2, 271n60 iTunes, 222 journalism, online: and chauvinistic nationalism, 184; diversity of, 176; measurement of, 170; radical scepticism of, 163, 171. See also news, commercial (corporate); news, non-corporate journalists: amateur vs. professional, 165, 170, 171, 172; American vs.

330 Subject Index European, 184; autonomy of, 175; criticism of Israel among, 182; deradicalized, 187, 265n15; investigative, 173; and privileged sources, 181; socialization of, 171, 238n32, 266n17. See also news, commercial (corporate); news, non-corporate joy, 27 Kazaa, 57, 120, 138, 222 knowledge: and blogging, 174; and capitalism, 9, 36, 99; collective, 228; commodification of, 9, 201; and consumption, 25; democratization of, 229; and the Internet, 99, 210, 230; and news, 189; oral technology of, 229; postmodern condition of, 8; production of, 36 knowledge workers, 230 Latin Christendom, 111 law, 56; antitrust, 65, 72; Canadian vs. American, 67; and capitalism, 136; and domination, 148; evasion of, 37, 73–4, 142, 152; failure of, 56–8, 73, 138, 142, 144, 154, 240n2, 241n3; international norms of, 16; Internet case, 74; limits to, 70, 78, 143; and perfect control, 65, 72, 77; universalizing, 15. See also intellectual property London Greenpeace, 149, 151–2, 260n27 Lord of the Rings, 103 male gaze, 147 Manufacturing Consent, 37 Manufacturing Consent (documentary), 77

market economy. See capitalism marketing: and culture jamming, 128; ideology of, 256n46 marketing schools. See business schools marketplace. See capitalism marketplace of ideas, 35, 36 marriage, 24–5, 52, 148; postmodern fragmentation of, 149 Mass Audience, The, 5 mass behaviour: breakdown of, 115; dispute over, 54; in the marketplace, 23, 48, 50, 52; persistence of, 51, 132; and production, 134. See also audience, mass; consumer behaviour: patterns of mass customization, 39 mass society, 115 master narrative, 115 master symbols, 20, 97, 145; contradictory elements within, 147; destruction of, 146; McDonald’s as, 149, 151, 154, 155 Mattel, 118, 137–46, 152, 154, 223, 258n11, 259n19 McDonaldization, 115, 152; compared to the Holocaust, 155; consumer resistance to, 156, 159, 160; declining, 261n44; defence of, 158; definition of, 155 McDonaldization of Society, The, 155, 261n44 McDonald’s: academic critique of, 156–8; authenticity of, 130; case study of, 149–60; compared to the Holocaust, 155; defence of, 158, 261n44; and ethics, 152; moral critique of, 156–7; online criticism of, 153, 219, 254n20, 260n30; semantic field of, 46, 50, 108, 156; as stable

Subject Index category, 125, 151, 152; as symbol of America, 154, 206; as symbol of capitalism, 152 McLibel, 150, 151, 152, 260n27 McLibel: Two Worlds Collide (documentary), 151 McSpotlight (Web site), 150–1, 152, 153, 154, 260n30 meaning: alternative, 110, 111, 199; and appropriation, 48, 51–3, 87, 115, 119, 125; and Barbie, 140, 143– 5; and capitalism, 21, 23, 162, 210, 230; and commercial media, 24, 25, 117; and consumption, 42, 46, 50–3, 129; contest over, 9, 100, 105, 138; and culture, 43; destruction of, 20; diversity of, 115, 132; dominant, 106, 125, 167; fragmentation of, 154; indeterminacy of, 12, 267n25, 273n80; and interpretive freedom, 41–3, 50–4, 116–17; and law, 136, 143; and market power, 132; and McDonald’s, 150, 152; monopolization of, 133; oppositional, 128, 159; overdetermined, 146; and popular culture, 116; predefined, 24; preferred, 142, 147; as private property, 116, 135, 143, 227; proliferation of, 114, 115; as public property, 162; and resistance, 135, 161; and social conditioning, 145; subversion of, 43, 102, 104–6, 108, 118; surplus, 136; unconstrained flow of, 127, 144; uncontrolled, 95 meaning-production: and the advertising industry, 33; alternative, 162, 225; antagonistic, 99; and capitalism, 19, 51, 92, 114–15, 129–33, 135, 162; and commercial media, 147, 204; consolidation of, 32, 34, 132–3,

331

147, 162; and corporate news, 21; counter-hegemonic, 183; and limits to thought, 219; omnipresent, 32–3; political economy of, 196; and popular culture, 132, 159; and resistance, 92; and standardization of wants and beliefs, 19; structural conditions of, 225 media: Arab, 183; activism, 105, 107, 108, 128, 171–3; alternative (radical), 166, 183, 188, 190, 204, 218, 225, 264nn3, 7, 271n63; effects, 31, 37, 219; mass, 5, 6, 31, 32, 123; policy, 35; reform, 35 media, commercial (corporate): antidemocratic tendencies within, 35, 183; and awareness, 26, 31, 169; as barrier to change, 159, 197; censorship within, 176; challenge to power of, 87, 91, 112, 128; communicative freedom within, 106, 142, 144, 175–6; consolidation of, 34, 60, 82, 132, 163, 176; diversity in, 36, 175; early theory of, 31–2; episodic character of, 113; fear of the Internet within, 87, 164, 223, 264n9; hegemony of, 175; and interpretive freedom, 52; and mass distraction, 217; and normative debate, 127; operating logic of, 58, 91; overcontrolled, 71; political economy of, 34–8, 97, 185, 187–8; predigital world of, 93; preferred meanings within, 147; products, 32, 49, 116; and shared culture, 121–3, 132–3, 215, 229, 230; share of Internet’s audience, 89, 224; and social amnesia, 112–13; and social movements, 195, 203; and social order, 23, 145, 167; structural constraints of, 150;

332 Subject Index structural monopolies of, 122; trajectory of, 81 media, new: and appropriation, 105; and counter-hegemonic production, 5; early adopters of, 123; and market forces, 82; and the mass audience, 120; and revolution, 213 media concentration: denial of, 35, 37; extent of, 37, 81; increasing, 28, 30, 168, 238n33; social impact of, 44; trajectory of, 40 Media Monopoly, 35 Media Power, 169 memory: collective, 229; and cultural authority, 112–14, 188; and printing, 111–12; and resistance, 225. See also appropriation: and memory; Internet: and memory Merrill Lynch, 222 Mickey Mouse, 206 Microsoft, 84, 204, 206; anticompetitive behaviour of, 65, 72, 242n16 mind: monopoly over the, 93; structurally determined, 34, 96. See also empire of mind; thought Mode of Information, 214 Montreal Gazette, 182 movies, piracy of, 57, 75 MP3 players, 65–6 MTV, 48, 147, 206 music, copy-protected, 63 myth of liberal media, 35 Natural Symbols, 43, 145 Napster, 56, 57, 72, 73 ‘napsterization,’ 56 National Post, 109; bias of, 30, 59, 126, 168, 182, 206 NBC, 4 Net. See Internet

Netscape, 59, 250n43 networks: distribution, 62, 92; as instruments of control, 93–4, 96, 97; social, 99; wireless, 62, 241n10 news, commercial (corporate): business, 76, 82, 86, 222–3, 281n11; commercialization of, 191–2; and consumption trends, 12, 178; declining standards of, 174; defence of, 167–8; and deviance labelling, 189; and elite attitudes, 180, 184, 269n51; failure of, 37, 40; and gender disparity, 180, 269n52; hegemony of, 183; Internet’s impact upon, 174–7, 187; monopoly over representation by, 172; online, 164, 171; and the persuasion system, 34–5, 169; press releases and, 173; repression of events within, 181–2; systemic constraints of, 166, 187–8. See also blogging; journalism, online; journalists news, non-corporate: as counterhegemonic, 189; credibility of, 187; definition of, 165–6; deprofessionalized, 173, 188; diversity within, 175–6, 177; and postmodernism, 190; production scale of, 171–2; radical scepticism of, 163, 171; routine representation and, 169, 179; significance of, 164, 193, 196, 273n80; and theory of liberal pluralism, 183. See also blogging; journalism, online; journalists new social movements, 225 New York Times, 4; online critique of, 176–7; and support for war, 184 Nike, 38, 125, 132–3, 263n64 No Logo, 106

Subject Index normalization thesis: and America Online, 85; anthropological deficit of, 96–7; and broadband elite, 91; and communicative freedom, 99, 221; definition of, 10, 20, 80; flaws of, 86, 95, 201, 210; and habitual content production, 93; and homogenization, 187; ideological function of, 10, 202; and market hype, 82; and marketplace determinism, 81, 87, 94, 101, 161, 197–8, 211, 223, 274n3 normative debate: and balance of power, 95, 128; and Barbie, 139; definition of, 42, 54–5, 126; expanding, 127, 160, 188, 190, 215, 219, 220; and McDonald’s, 150 NoWarBlog.org (Web site), 178 One-Dimensional Man, 27 online news. See journalism, online; news, commercial (corporate); news, non-corporate online retail. See Internet: retail open systems, 62 Ottawa Citizen, 109 Ottawa Sun, 109 Palestinian Media Watch (PMWatch, Web site), 182 Palestinians, and U.S. media, 181–3 panopticon, 97, 98, 101 parchment, 43 Patriot Act, 216 pay-per-view (pay-per-use), 7, 58, 69, 71, 83–5, 91, 222, 281n7 PeaceBlogs.org (Web site), 178 peer-to-peer: and cultural production, 90, 91; ethics of, 120; growth

333

of, 56–7; unrestrained, 93, 138, 241n10. See also digital piracy Pentagon, 17, 37 perceptual bias, 145 Pew Internet and American Life Project, 90–1, 171, 178 piracy. See digital piracy plagiarism, 129 Playboy.com, 83 politics, popular, 195 Politics as Usual, 80 Polynesia, 146 pornography: and culture jamming, 104, 107; online, 83; as social criticism, 108 postmodernism: and empire 14–15, 16; end of, 157; fragmentation of categories within, 149; and indeterminacy, 12, 267n25, 273n80; and interpretive freedom, 51; and marketing theory, 38, 115, 129, 132; and resistance, 197 power: and active audience theory, 41; and America, 15, 16, 18, 207; and American media policy, 35, 44; and authoritarian rule, 214; balance of, 95, 89, 112, 120, 121, 194, 201, 208, 219, 227; and blogs, 179; of capitalism, 12, 21, 24, 27, 210; of choice, 215; code as regulatory, 64; and conservative media theory, 167; consumer, 30, 38, 39, 46–7, 48, 124, 130; corporate, 29, 38, 41, 47, 48, 72, 87, 131, 149; of corporate speech, 53; corruption of, 103; decentralization of, 38; denial of, 31, 168, 169; and economic models, 29, 30; of empire, 12, 14–15; and the entertainment and informational system, 34; expanding, 40; of

334 Subject Index imagination, 215; and the information age, 8; and journalism, 167, 169, 191; and law, 78, 135; male, 103, 105; market, 68, 87, 132–3, 176, 207; and mass customization, 39; means of, 210; and media, 87, 169, 218; military, 17, 18, 184; and mimicking technique, 109; of the mind, 8; and the online audience, 11; and oppositional meanings, 128; postmodern conditions of, 17; preservative, 111–12; and the public, 192; and resistance, 208, 209; soft, 15; speech, 89, 99, 100, 112, 227; and structural change, 225; and symbols, 145; systematic deployment of, 23; and totalizing scenarios, 216, 226; of viewers, 41. See also power bloc power bloc: and cultural production, 193, 270n51; definition of, 192; legitimacy of, 213; and public domain, 195; and unconstrained speech, 196, 218; values and goals of, 209 printing press: bias of, 4, 43; economy of, 82; and pornography, 108; and social control, 31; transformative effect of, 110–12, 122–3, 159, 213, 254n22 Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, The, 111 privacy, 97 Problem of the Media, The, 18 production: anti-capitalist mode of, 107, 122, 271n63; and behaviour management, 24; commercial mode of, 11; control of, 72; decommodified, 27, 94, 188; and fans, 120; mass, 38–9, 40; of needs, 24–5,

235n4; online, 20, 27; and oppression, 46; and progress, 26; scholarly, 36; symbolic, 17, 32–3; systemic analysis of, 158. See also cultural production; customization, mass production, non-commercial (noncorporate, non-market): and collective knowledge, 228–30; decommodified, 27, 43, 93, 94, 189, 195, 199; definition of, 11, 135; persistence of, 204, 221, 226; and public discourse, 89–90, 188; rate of, 94; re-evaluation of, 109; significance of, 20, 90, 95, 124; as social force, 195, 219, 227–8, 230, 231; thirst for, 224; variety of, 187, 223, 250n43 Prometheus Wired, 210 propaganda: and capitalism, 193; commercial 28–9, 30, 31, 45, 53, 237n24; and corporate social responsibility, 130–1; effectiveness of, 5, 7, 8, 27, 35, 108; future of, 195; Herman and Chomsky’s model of, 37, 168, 196, 273n80; and news, 19, 169, 170, 176, 183, 185, 188, 223 property rights: destruction of, 92; failure of, 88; hostility to, 161; and meaning, 135; restored, 73. See also capitalism: property relations of Protestant revolt, 111, 123 public opinion: destablization of, 162; and news, 167–9, 181; and terror, 209 public relations, 31, 62, 90, 113, 209; and news, 176, 180. See also McLibel public sphere: balkanization of, 215; corporate communications within, 28; and false claims, 154; future of,

Subject Index 218, 225–6; and the Internet, 10, 21, 95, 101, 127, 216, 275n21; monopolized, 127, 195; and news, 173; oppositional, 210; structural shift in, 95, 211, 213, 219; suppression of, 110, 204; unconstrained, 221 Quebecor, 59 race relations, 9 RealNetworks, 65 Reason, 35 Republic.com, 215 Republic of Letters, 90 reflexivity. See feedback repression, 27 resistance: and branding, 129–31; and commodification, 84, 197; consolidation of, 209; through consumption, 46; cultural, 54, 103; failure of, 80; and free choice, 40; futility of, 81, 98, 130, 157, 226; intensification of, 104, 189, 207, 209–10; Marxist theory of, 46, 159; postmodernist analysis of, 115; prevalence of, 81, 100, 154; and public expression, 187–8, 193; sources of, 9, 45, 74, 77, 136, 203; symbolic, 51; underestimation of, 101, 102, 122, 123, 208; in youth culture, 48. See also consumer resistance retail. See Internet: retail activity revolution, new media and, 212–13, 229n51 Rogers Communications, 59, 61 romantic love, 25 Ronald McDonald, 108, 261n38 satire, 187

335

search engines, 224. See also Google Sears Roebuck, 83 self: determination, 26, 36, 49, 51, 147, 208; construction, 144. See also identity ‘semiotic excess,’ 114 September 11, 2001 (9/11): aftereffects of, 209; and the American press, 37, 183, 184, 185, 215; and blowback, 234n13; Bush’s explanation of, 184; and culture jamming, 104; and online news, 171, 185–6 shunn.com (Web site), 186 Silicon Valley, 38, 100, 101 Simpsons, The, 117 Situationists, 254n18 Slashdot.org (Web site), 186 soft power, 15, 261n44 Sony, 63, 242n21 Sorrows of Empire, The, 16 sovereignty (state): new form of, 14; undermined, 9, 38, 73, 209. See also consumer sovereignty speech. See communication standardization, 12, 19, 52–3, 55; and McDonald’s 154, 155; and news, 175, 176 Starbucks, 46, 104, 125 Star Trek, 119, 137 stock-market bubble, 7, 82, 86, 102. See also Internet: bubble subscription services. See pay-perview subversion: and brands, 42–3, 46, 87, 100, 107, 125, 143; and the consumption imperative, 147; of copyright, 87; of corporate speech, 104, 108, 109, 114–15, 124, 125, 128, 143; via e-mail, 103–4; enhancement of, 96, 112; expressive freedom and,

336 Subject Index 89, 189; and the Internet, 29, 31–2, 43, 113–14, 136, 149, 199–200, 203, 221; of meaning, 108; via mimicking technique, 109–10; re-evaluation of, 109; and the symbolic economy, 136, 149, 159; and symbols, 104 subvertising. See culture jamming suffrage, 191 Super Bowl, 4, 66 symbolic economy: alternative, 20, 21, 181, 199, 220, 224; and blogging, 175; and consumer literacy, 125; counter-hegemonic, 188, 221; crisis within, 87, 142; and interpretive freedom, 147; market domination of, 132; and news, 170, 171, 187; permanent, 219; and property relations, 92, 96, 148; regulation of, 41, 92; subversion of, 136, 149, 159 symbols: and consumption, 51–2; cultural theory of, 145, 146–7; official vs. illegitimate, 144; and social order, 127, 149, 167; subversive, 104. See also master symbols technology: analog vs. digital, 82, 87, 92; and evasion, 84, 125; proliferation of, 115; and social control, 97, 122 technophile, 241n10 television: analog, 106; audience share of, 61, 62; and channel changing 4; and dominant world view, 115, 147; Internet compared to, 71, 101, 113; interactive, 4, 59, 85, 221; and leisure, 32; and piracy, 74; visual logic of, 89 terrorism: capitalism and, 208, 210,

218; press response to, 184–6; psychological, 207, 209; sources of, 13, 46, 205 Textual Poachers, 119, 120 Third Wave, The, 38 thought: autonomy of, 40; within capitalism, 8, 9, 11, 24, 26, 30, 45, 49, 54, 93, 155, 230, 231; colonized, 32; and commercial media, 26, 31, 169; and communication technology, 44; and consumption, 25, 48, 49, 53, 134; limits to, 8, 43–4, 47, 51, 52–4, 155, 219, 231; management of, 227; mass, 19; and media systems, 35; patterns of, 25, 101, 167; and responsibility, 229; and social change, 219, 230; standardization of, 12, 52, 53, 55 Time Warner: and competition, 65; criticism of, 60; merger with AOL, 59; operational effectiveness of, 60–1; significance of, 68, 85–6. See also America Online TimesWatch.org (Web site), 177 trademark. See copyright Truthlaidbear.com (sic) (Web site), 178 typographical fixity, 111 United States: business Web sites in, 90; complicity with terrorism, 186, 205, 207; cultural imperialism of, 206, 214, 221, 238n41; economic domination by, 75; election of 2004, 211, 266n19; as empire, 3, 13–19, 103, 234n13, 261n44; and the empire of mind, 18, 41, 73; exceptionalism of, 184; executive branch of, 44, 252n10; high-speed Internet use within, 90–1; as hypercommer-

Subject Index cial society, 19; knowledge deficit within, 188, 272n73; military, 16–18; moral leadership of, 14, 206; and online news consumption, 171, 178; opinion management within, 132, 183, 186, 208; particularistic values of, 231, 279n58; piracy rate in, 74; policymaking process, 35; political dissent in, 195; social values of, 67; triumphalism of, 81; tyranny and, 215–16. See also conservatives; constitution, American; empire Usenet, 88–9, 90, 138

337

Wal-Mart, 12, 39, 72, 132 Wall Street Journal (online), 83 Weapons of Mass Distraction, 206, 261n44 Web log. See blogging What’s the Matter with the Internet? 87 What’s Wrong with McDonald’s, 149, 150, 151 Women’s eNews (Web site), 180 World Bank, 15 World Trade Center. See September 11, 2001 World Wide Web (Web). See Internet Xbox, 64

video games, 4, 221 Vietnam War, 17

Yahoo, 84

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Digital Futures is a series of critical examinations of technological development and the transformation of contemporary society by technology. The concerns of the series are framed by the broader traditions of literature, humanities, politics, and the arts. Focusing on the ethical, political, and cultural implications of emergent technologies, the series looks at the future of technology through the ‘digital eye’ of the writer, new media artist, political theorist, social thinker, cultural historian, and humanities scholar. The series invites contributions to understanding the political and cultural context of contemporary technology and encourages ongoing creative conversations on the destiny of the wired world in all of its utopian promise and real perils. Series Editors: Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker Editorial Advisory Board: Taiaiake Alfred, University of Victoria Michael Dartnell, University of New Brunswick Ronale Deibert, University of Toronto Christopher Dewdney, York University Sara Diamond, Banff Centre for the Arts Sue Golding (Johnny de philo), University of Greenwich Pierre Levy, University of Ottawa Warren Magnusson, University of Victoria Lev Manovich, University of California, San Diego Marcos Novak, University of California, Los Angeles John O’Neill, York University Stephen Pfohl, Boston College Avital Ronell, New York University Brian Singer, York University Sandy Stone, University of Texas, Austin Andrew Wernick, Trent University Books in the Series: Arthur Kroker, The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism: Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Marx Neil Gerlach, The Genetic Imaginary: DNA in the Canadian Criminal Justice System Michael Strangelove, The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the AntiCapitalist Movement