McKenzie Wark on Sun, 9 Mar 97 21:29 MET |
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nettime: the property problem |
Whenever Fortue magazine comes out with its 'Fortune 500' issue, i always grab it and look up all of the media companies i know. The first thing you notice is that not many make the first 50. And the next thing you realise is that there is no relation between how 'big' a company is in terms of media coverage and its actual capitalisation. The measures Fortune offer for the latter are of course pretty crude, but its interesting all the same. Microsoft, from memory, scapes in at about No. 300. The big players in the list with a stake in the media and communications are the phone companies and the big media conglomerates. So you look down the list and there's AT&T, a bunch of 'baby bells', Disney, Time Warner, etc. Only News Corp is missing, being registered still in a little town called Adelaide, Australia. All these companies have changed a lot over the last 10 years. They mostly came from a background in one of what i call the stock, flow and vector components of the media business. Phone companies were mostly about vectors -- they had the pipes. The movie companies were mostly about flows -- they had the content coming out day by day. So were the news companies. Both realised there was money in information stocks about 10 years ago, and started buying up archives of data that have permananet value. Ted Turner pioneered that one. Now most media companies of any significance have a mix, and use each component as leverage in relation to the others. Whoever controls the vectors can, with the limits of the regulatory framework, decide who gets to make money off their flows. An News Corp discovered when its news channel was locked out of the New York news market. Or, be like Disney -- based mainly in stocks and flows. Around which you wrap the best known brand name *on the planet*. Three things characterise this business. 1. It is highly unstable still. 2. quasi-monopolistic (monopsonistic) behaviour is the rule. 3. the regulatory framework matters. So you get a bunch of giant companies who spend a great deal of their time 1. reassuing investors about how great they are 2. suing each other and 3. arguing before the FCC and every other regulatory forum, representing their interests (see 1 and 2) as concordant with the general interest. This explains why media business is so high profile in the media itself. Media about media become one of the states in the battles between quasi-monopoly interests. At the level of reassuring ones customers and investors of the wisdow of one's latest play, and of the folly of those of other companies. Its a way of repositioning the brand at a time when the products behind the brand change all the time. And of course, for the media industry ruling class, being seen to be leading the industry is one way to lead an industry that no one actually knows how to lead. I mention all this for a couple of reasons. The first is to put Wired in context. Credit where credit is due: Wired figured out how to make itself useful to the marketing needs of media companies across the board. Not just as a place to sell product, but also as a place in which to position the company, and its leading lights, and as a platform from which to speak about the general interest in terms of one's particular interest -- as a way of having a somewhat obtuse public conversation about the regulatory changes which, in Wired's heyday, where on the agenda. Like everybody else in business, media companies believe in the free market everywhere *except* where it touches on their own interests. There they would rather hang on to any advantages currently wrung from the regulatory environment, thank you very much. How many voices do you here raised in favour of lifting restrictions on foreign ownership of broadcasting assets in America? If you want a free market, that's one of the absolutely necessary steps towwards it. Meanwhile NBC took up a suit against News Corp on the grounds that it wasn't an American company -- and quickly lost interest in this when it worked as a bargaining tool to get NBC programming onto News owned satellite TV in Asia.... The 'Wired ideology', in short, is a flag of convenience under which quasi- monopoly firms sometimes traffic, but usually not. It has the advantage of adhering the self interest of small fry like the rest of us to some of the larger goals of quasi-monopoly media business, but it has the disadvantage of actually raising the classic radical demands of the property owning middle classes: freedom, justice and right. Finally, what i want to suggest is that neither the machinations of quasi-monopoly media nor the 'Wired ideology' are as interesting or as important as the kind of bottom-up negotiation of conventions of fair trading that have been going on now on the net for 20 years. The Well's 'you own your own your own words' policy is a nice example. Inside the larger and more unwieldy frameworks of law and regulation, little micro-conventions flourish. People buy and sell, swap and trade information, and decide what's fair and what isn't. A language for talking about such things emerges, as do demands about what ought to be made law. All of which is pretty much a late 20th century analogue to the fights that happened in England in the 17th century about intellectual property, at a time when intellectual property first emerged as an issue, on the back of the publishing trade. Its a topic for another netletter. Look at the Statute of Anne, at the institutionalisation of patent, and the quite different recognition of the natural right that inheres in authorship -- all of which pop out of the expansion of the printing trade. Its no accident either that people like Samuel Johnson led the fight for recognition of a property right, as he was one of the first examples of the independent media worker with a financial interest in his own product and its value in the market. The irony about the 'Wired ideology' is that it cut two ways. It was, as I said, a convenient ideology of the minute for media business at a particular moment. But it also raised from the ghosts of the archive ideas about right and property that no one except media lawyers have talked about much for many many years. As Marx would say, the form of property creates and expresses kinds of class and class conflict. Only what Marx missed was that in the creation of *intellectual* property, a new class emerged that was neither an owner of capital, nor land, yet which owned something more than its own labour -- the intellectual class, owners and disposers of intellectual property. A class whose interests, in relation to big business as more like those of small land owners or the 'petit bourgeois' of property owners than the workers. Big business tends to accumulate interests in land, capital *and* intellectual property, so all of the subordinate property owning classes end up in an ambivalent relation to it. That ambivalence i think you find, less in what Wired explicitly says, but in how its readership responds to it. As perveyor of an ideology caught in the contradictions of a form of property we all love to hate. But Wired was quite right in raising the question of how the small- owner of intellectual property ought to construct her/his interests politically. It did so by reaching into the stock of traditional American images and ideas. As Marx once said, new political movements tend to borrow the wardrobe of old ones. So the French revolution was fought out in drag, as Roman politics. Likewise, Wired encouraged another kind of revolutionary drag, that of the declaration of independence. This of course simply doesn't work with the international readership of Wired, but in which one suspects Wired as litle interest. Its a parochial product, not a global one. What didn't quite get wholly on the agenda via Wired was all the dimensions of the problem, from the point of view of intellectual property small-holders (like me). Our class interest, our relations to monopoly business, our relations among ourselves, our relations to the regulatory environment, our relations to the 'information poor'. All of which needs to be considered together, as the interests of the information small-holder are not the same as those of the media businesses, but they are not the same as those of the information poor on all points either. We are an ambivalent class. To further complicate things, conflicts and alliances with the petty bureaucracy and with small capital are really what take up most of our time. Like every ambivalent class, and like every class with ambitions, the information class talks a lot about the general interest, and claims to represent the general interest. Of course no one else is foolish enough to believe us. What is not talked about at all clearly is class interest. What does information want? It does not want to be free. Other than in the sense of free from monopoly strangleholds and bottlenecks. What do we want? Who might this 'we' be? McKenzie Wark netletter #11 New York, 9th March 1997 ______________________________________ McKenzie Wark http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/~mwark Visiting Professor, American Studies Program, New York University "We no longer have origins we have terminals" -- * distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission * <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, * collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets * more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body * URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de