VERRRY INTERESTING...

Dick Pountain/14 May 1999/Idealog 58

It's said there's an ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times!" Actually it's been said by me at least twice before (possibly even in this very column) but what the heck, our times are getting so interesting that I'll trot it out again. On the one hand we are dropping bombs on a foreign capital, without having declared war, and having told our enemy in advance that we'd rather no-one were killed if at all possible, please. On the other hand, a disgruntled MI6 agent has posted a list of all our spies (including perhaps some in the capital we're bombing) on the Internet. On the third hand (remember this is the realm of Kali we are talking about) AT&T has just bought a large chunk of the US cable industry, and Microsoft just bought a chunk of their chunk; BSkyB has been forced into a fire-sale of digital TV after barely six months; BT is moving into games consoles; in short, as one newspaper's business column described it, we are 'entering the endgame' of the struggle for corporate control of the world's digital communication media.

Several interesting themes unite all these interesting phenomena, but one that stands out in particular is the ongoing battle between those who want all information to be free, and those who want to own it, regulate it - and charge money for it. For example the bombing raids over Serbia sparked bitter arguments about news management, with the BBC and other press accused by the government of harping too much on NATO's mistakes - such as the rendering more interesting of the Chinese embassy - and hence giving succour to Milosevic's propaganda machine. Now this is a theme I've mentioned here before, but it's one that I will be returning to again and again, for two quite personal reasons: first, I make my living by writing and publishing which means I have a vested interest in getting paid for the words that I produce; but second, I've also been deeply concerned with combatting censorship and the free dissemination of information. You have probably spotted the deliberate mistake, namely that these two positions contradict one another totally, and you are right. The only consolation is that I'm not alone in this contradiction - in fact our whole industry is being crucified upon it. This was neatly captured by Michael Wolff in 'Burn Rate', his entertaining account of the gold-rush in US Internet stocks: 'Take a computer, send information through it - hell, send all the information ever recorded through it...How will you convince people to pay you more than you're spending? If the universe of information is now free, who will pay for your insights, wit, pith and truth?'

Who indeed? I know who is paying me to write this particular piece of pith, and that ultimately is you dear reader (thanks, by the way), but let's be honest, were someone to invent a magic photocopier that would copy this magazine as fast and as cheaply as my PC copies this text file, the temptation to save yourself £2.99 would be well-nigh irresistible (which is of course what happens when you try to publish magazines on the web alone). We are touching here on the most fundamental matters of all, which is to say human society and its basis in property relations.

Let's imagine some scenarios that might reconcile my contradictory impulses. For example there is Slave World, where giant corporations own everybody and everything - I am literally chained to a desk and forced to write in time to drumbeats relayed over the Tannoy. Or there is Gift World, where money has been abolished and everything is free, and I write only what I want, when I want, and show it to whomsoever I want - and hope someone gives me a sandwich in return because I am getting quite peckish. Or there is Market World, somewhere between these two extremes, where I write because I am getting peckish, and I expect to receive the going rate for my words with which to purchase a sandwich - that looks rather like the world we live in. In Market World you have to own the copyright to what you write or someone else will eat your sandwich. (That doesn't mean you have to own it for 75 years the way Disney Corporation would like - see Real World Law this issue).

Few of us want Slave World (which is ostensibly why we are dropping those bombs) but many people on the Internet behave and talk as if they want to live in Gift World. I've been through that once already, back in the late sixties with the underground press (we didn't have the net then, just IBM golf-ball typesetters and 30-days credit with a printer). Before that it was called anarchism - from Kropotkin and Bakunin through to the CNT in the Spanish civil war - and it always foundered on the same misconception, namely that the alternative to the rule of law is freedom. In the real world, regrettably, the alternative to the rule of law turns out to be rule by the biggest, meanest, most sociopathic bastard. We will be lucky enough even to stay in Market world, given the alarming tendency of the net to reduce profit margins to almost zero - this doesn't actually lead into Gift World, but rather to one where, interestingly enough, the only people who can make any money are the ones who own the wire.