This past Christmas season, I confessed to a vague unease about the quantity and caliber of the ads I was seeing. I'm fairly resistant to the babblings of the boob cube, but there was something about the MCI Worldcom ad, the CISCO ad, and the Microsoft ads that kept knawing at me, kept keeping me awake at night. In the post-christmas chaos I kind of lost it, and now, in a matter of a few days...
I finally put my finger down my throat and coughed up the word, the phrase, the theme, of marketing's vast meme machine.
Consumer
Yes, that was it. I kept hearing about this consumer thing, this creature that apparently I was supposed to resemble.
Now, when I visualize a "consumer", I think of something porcine, flat on its back, swallowing predigested pap directly from a tube, taking bandwidth intravenously, wrapped in diapers, glued to a television, with a credit card in one hand and a tv changer/mouse in the other. I believe there are those in government and business that would vastly prefer their citizens and customers to be exactly that.
"Microsoft contends that the Justice department should decide only whether or not Microsoft's policies have been good for consumers"
The word is everywhere. It's used so often that it's hard to think that any other term for a human being exists. "This was something we intended to do all along," said an MP3 industry source. "It's a good thing for consumers."So long as we accept this premise, it is quite possible that what these ads are telling us is right. That it is good that all our packets run over the systems of one company, with all the hardware built by one company, with all our software manufactured by one company, and our cars fueled by the gas provided by one company. It certainly would be a simpler world, wouldn't it?
As I read, and thought, and wandered the internet in search of the key to my malaise, the power of this single concept to frame the terms of debate started to jump out at me. On zdnet, cnet. on msnbc, on pbs, yes, even on slashdot.org, the story was the same. The Wall Street Journal swallowed the sales pitch long ago and regurgitates it daily.
The commercial media have lapped it up like lap dogs. Yep, that was it, this was the concept that had stuck in my craw.
I am a citizen, or denizen, if you will, of the internet. A netizen. I've lived here for a long time (since 1984 - remember what was supposed to happen then?). I'm tolerant of my neighbors, even the noisy ones that just moved in and insist on playing their music loud and putting up banner ads everywhere. It's my hope that those of you reading this are also citizens of the internet.
I'm a producer of things, I do not spend all my time "consuming". I play piano. I write code. I parody the government's crypto policy. I write articles and occasionally get paid for them. Just because I don't work for one of the big five, oops, four, companies that control 84% of the music in the United States does NOT put me in the catagory of a consumer. I can't believe you out there reading this spend all your time consuming, either.Do yourself a favor - everytime you see or hear the word "consumer" used in a sentence this week, substitute "citizen", and watch your attitudes change.
I am frustrated by the so called "Growth" of the internet.
Surely creating a national registry of people who don't want UCE (unsolicited commercial email) would be far more efficient than my continual replies of "REMOVE ME" in the subject or body fields to the 3-4 pieces of spam I get a day, yet this runs counter to my natural resistance to any sort of national anything. But, by god, there has got to be a better way.I've even heard the counter argument made: "Consumers demand choice". God damn it, so long as we limit the argument to "Consumers" it drops everything into a nicely formatted labeling system and reforms our thoughts in cookie cutter ways. Damn it, The People not only demand choice, we demand a right to choice, we demand a right to be heard..
It was my great, idealistic hope that back when the internet started to explode in 1994 or so that we would start to turn the great masses of "consumers", into, at the very least, users, and possibly, even citizens. We had a code of conduct, called Netequette, all worked out, and I think we naively assumed that our new members would adhere to this code of conduct. We had a belief in freedom, in democracy, in limitless discussion of all topics in search of the truth. I think we were blinded by our own light, and shielded from reality by the very government many of us claimed to despise.
H.L. Menckin said - "Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it, good and hard."
This Christmas I have been bombarded by ads touting the joys of monopolism. Nearly every worthwhile Internet entity has been swallowed up by commercial interests. USENET news is next to useless due to blind relentless spamming, and no matter where I go, even on the .org's, there's a banner ad.
Nowhere in this Blighted State's constitution does it mention Freedom and liberty for all... consumers. And I think that's the crux of it. As soon as we start artificial classes of people (examples, "the children", "the old", "the drivers", "the smokers") we start eroding the basic rights due a citizen of the coming new world order.
As the makers of the browsers themselves are swallowed up by companies who derive most of their revenue from advertising, I wonder, is it ever going to stop? I have to go into a flurry of denial every time I have to log into AOL. No, I don't want to buy that, no I don't want this service, no, no, no... if my television turned on in this way I would never watch a bloody thing. Netscape's Netcenter is turning into much of the same.
What was once my internet is rapidly becoming Frederic Pohl's vision in "The Merchant War", a world with its "citizens" are helplessly bombarded with full sensory advertising the moment they exit their houses and slammed with instantly addicting substances by passing ad factories on the street. A world where not being a consumer was a crime... The only place of refuge was Mars, where anti-commercialism was rampant. And the Chef's recommendation was:
The Perils of Bigness are not just inherent in the Microsoft case. The The AOL/Netscape and now Time/Warner deal, the Exxon/Mobile merger, and CISCO's near monopoly on the internet backbone business are all cause for alarm. Have we learned nothing in the 80 years since our last battles with monopolism? It's the crushing of the can-do spirit, the death of Horatio Alger, the rise of a new mis-information based feudalism.
Do free men and women benefit from their information channels being dominated by monopolistic entities? I think the question answers itself.
No. Not Ever.
What all the hoopla of the Microsoft investigation and the frantic attempts of the DVD-CCA and MPAA to stuff their pathetic encryption scheme back into the bottle brings home to me is:
That the role of the Justice Department, in this case and others, is not to judge what is good for the consumer, or the corporation, but to judge what is good for the American people.
I hope and pray that they will judge rightly.
"Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratification and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?" - Democracy in America, Volume 2.
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Mye Laande
