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MAKING CONTACT

Transcript: #23-00 Technocracy: The Political Dimension of Technology
June 7, 2000

Program description, guest contact information and audio files at http://www.radioproject.org/archive/2000/0023.html

Phillip Babich: This week on Making Contact....

Jerry Mander: The very creature that we're battling against, which is the global corporation, exists because of the instrument that we say is democratic. Now, we've got to straighten that out in our minds.

Andrew Kimbrell: While we were worried about the ownership of the means of production, we forgot about the politics of the means of production themselves. We forgot that technology has a politics. One of the most pernicious habits of thought, pieces of propaganda that we hear all the time is, "technology is neutral." I'm here to tell you, technology is never neutral.

Phillip Babich: The Internet and computer technology have been very helpful in campaigns against corporations and international financial institutions. But, is technology a remedy for an absence of democracy? On this program we take a look at the politics of technology. I'm Phillip Babich -- your host this week on Making Contact -- an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas and important information.

If there's any doubt that daily life is becoming interwoven with technology, take a look at what the computer, electronics, and telecommunications industries have in store for us in the not-so-distant future. Over the past year, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Philips, Sony, 3Com and other companies have been unveiling at trade shows new lines of Internet-ready household appliances -- everything from coffee makers to dishwashers connected to the World Wide Web. Each item would be able to report malfunctions virtually instantaneously to its manufacturer. And, manufacturers could transmit software upgrades or service information directly to these appliances.

Other companies are promoting toilets that transmit urine analyses to medical care providers...or, video cameras that detect anxiety and then trigger a computer screen to provide entertainment. To some, the fusion of technology and domesticity may seem like a wellspring of convenience, even a natural outgrowth of the Internet, which has been widely hailed -- across the political spectrum -- as a democratizing force. But, as the world becomes evermore "connected," who is really benefiting? Jerry Mander, president of the International Forum on Globalization, says that the Internet is better serving corporations than people.

Jerry Mander: These global telecommunications technologies are the ultimate in providing the ability for global corporations to reach into the brains and minds and hearts and feeling and imagery of an entire world, homogenize those images, do it everywhere in the world at the same time. In the case of the Internet, getting everybody experiencing life in the same way, gathering information in the same way, all within a commercialized corporate framework. And, in the end all this is revealed, this great democratizing power that we hoped for, is revealed as a centralizing hegemonic, corporatizing, commercializing, anti-democratic set of instruments.

Phillip Babich: The commercializing impact of the Internet may not be as apparent as, say, television. The average American watches over 4 hours of television daily and views 23,000 commercials annually. Nonetheless, says Mander, corporations convey commercial imagery and values with comparable force through the Internet, just more subtly.

Jerry Mander: Because it's a tool that -- it doesn't come in the form of commercial imagery, but increasingly, commercial imagery is a part of the Internet. And increasingly it's dominated by a few if the same corporations that also dominate broadcast television. We're talking about Time Warner and AOL. The mergers between these corporations, of course, are creating the situation where you get ... an extremely few corporations, I'm talking about four or five corporations which are basically going to have control of television, Internet communications, music, film, the entire cultural product of the planet. And you know that they are not going to be operating that in the interest of democratizing information, or providing context for information that would enable people to really express freedom and protest, and so on. They're doing that in order to get bigger and make more money. And it's proceeding without any effective opposition.

Phillip Babich: But that may begin to change. As part of its series of teach-ins in Washington, DC, in April 2000, during the World Bank and International Monetary Fund Spring meetings, the International Forum on Globalization held a panel discussion on technology and corporate priorities. It was titled: "The Technological Dimension: Globalization of Corporate Communications & Military Technologies." According to the IFG panel, communications technologies and the Internet, "have become the crucial infrastructure for the globalization of corporate commercial and political power." That infrastructure is now dominated by nine multinational conglomerates, including the planned AOL/Time Warner. One of the panelists, was Bob McChesney, author of "Rich Media, Poor Democracy."

Robert McChesney: It's very important to understand that the rise of the global commercial media system, dominated by a handful of corporations, is a mandatory and necessary part of the global media neo-liberal economic project. It's not just a coincidence that they happened at the same time. It's not a fluke. It's a mandatory part. For several reasons, but a couple I'll just point out about the top. One: you need to have a global commercial media market to establish global markets for consumer goods. That means advertising over television. That's a relatively recent phenomena. That's the hallmark, in fact, to this emerging global media system that I'm going to be talking about. Secondly: global commercial media is ideal at spreading a certain type of consumer ideology that's highly conducive to the type of world that's being built in the name of neoliberalism and globalization. Now this is going back 20 years, if you were to look at the media system in any particular nation, say, in 1980, the way you would understand it would be to look at who owns the newspapers, who owns the magazines, how is the television and radio system structured. And then after you understand the lay of the land within a particular country, what you would do is you would look at how they imported movies, or TV shows, music or books, and then you sort of have a feel for any given country's media system. Well, today we see a fundamental shift. Now, to understand the media system in any particular country, you start by understanding the global system, its logic and dynamics, and then you make variants for each country, how they veer off that path. But the dominant thing you must understand to begin with, is this global media system that has emerged in the past 20 years, it's rapidly developing as we speak now, and it's a key part, as I said, of the neoliberal and globalization project.

Now the one aspect of the globalization of commercial media that gets a lot of emphasis, is the nation of technology, that it's technology driven. That all of a sudden we have satellites and digital communication that makes rapid transmission of data and media across the world much less expensive and much easier. Now there's an element of truth to that, but it really misses the core phenomena of what's going on, which is part of the neo-liberal project, which is been a deregulation of ownership restrictions and requirements -- public service requirements on media across the world in various nations, opening up the possibility for capitalists to move in and get larger and larger and larger, in ways that simply were illegal 10 or 20 years ago in the United States as well as most nations in the world. The central battleground where this war is taking place, where this transformation has occurred, has been in television. Television, 20 years ago, was largely a two or three channel operation in most countries, often times state run, sometimes non-commercial. Now, all over the world, television is a multi-channel cable or satellite operation with scores of channels available, almost all of which are partially, or in total, by a relative handful of transnational corporations who support themselves by selling advertising.

Now let's talk briefly about who these guys are. Let's name some names and give you a sense of what the system looks like: You've got General Electric, which owns NBC; Time Warner, which is now part of AOL/Time Warner; News Corporation, which is Rupert Murdoch's operation; The Disney Company; and CBS, which is now in the process of being bought out by VIACOM, so VIACOM/CBS. In addition to those five companies, the only ones you need to add to those to get what I call the first tier of global media giants are the German company Bertelsmann; AT&T, which is the largest cable company in the United States; Sony, which has major film and music interests in the United States and globally; Seagrams, the drinks manufacturer which also has film studios and massive music and tourist interests.

And what distinguishes these nine companies -- these five and the other four I mentioned, is that they operate globally in their conglomerates. And by conglomerates, what I mean is, they tend to be dominant players not just in one thinking. They don't just make movies or books, or television shows, or make music, but they are dominant players in every sector. And among these five companies and the other four I mentioned, we have all the major Hollywood film studies, all the U.S. television networks, the four companies that now sell 90 percent of the music in the world, you have most of the book publishers (or a significant percentage of them) in the United States, and in the world, for that matter. I mean you've really got the guts of much of the production of our culture in the hands of these nine companies. As tight-knit as this is, with just nine massive firms that sit atop it, it doesn't give you the full sense of just how interconnected these companies are.

One of the things these large companies have learned -- I guess I've got a secret I want to tell you -- Bill Gates asked me not to tell anyone this, but I'm going to let it out of the bag: You've probably heard this rumor that capitalism is based on competition? Have you heard that one? (laughter) That's a doozy. Well the fact of the matter is, capitalism is based on crushing competition. The less competition you have, the lower the risk, the more profit you make. Only a moron capitalist wants more competition. That's ridiculous. Well, these nine companies are of the smart brand of capitalist, that's the kind who make a lot of money. So what they do in addition to having these massive empires and largely noncompetitive oligopolistic markets, is that when they go into new ventures, what they attempt to do is to partner up with potential competition before they go into it. It's called an Equity Joint Venture. And if you go through the nine largest media firms in the world, these transnationals, they have at least one joint-venture seven of the other eight. Someone like Rupert Murdoch has numerous joint ventures with all of them. And it creates a very different dynamic. The head of -- John Malone -- the founder of TCI, which was sold to AT&T, said, "Well, it's hard to get angry to your competition any more because you compete in one market and you're partners in another market." It's a small group of people. So I mean this is the point. It's a tight-knit club, of massive appropriations, owner by billionaires, in service primarily to Madison Avenue and upper class consumers.

Phillip Babich: Bob McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy.

Stephanie Welch: You're listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Product. If you'd like to get in touch with us, we'll be giving out our toll-free number at the end of this broadcast.

Phillip Babich: So, what are the values behind what McChesney termed "consumer ideology?" Jerry Mander...

Jerry Mander: The values are that you can trust corporations who rationalize how life should be lived, that you can trust Western lifestyle and culture as the preferred and best of all cultures, that all other cultures are to be viewed even by themselves as secondary and inferior, and that the best way to live, is to live life through commodity accumulation, and to be part of that system.

Mark Crispin Miller: Advertising is not just a celebration of the commodity, as that which will cure all ills and solve all problems. It isn't only that.

Phillip Babich: Mark Crispin Miller is a professor of media studies at New York University and director of the Project on Media Ownership.

Mark Crispin Miller: It is a propaganda on behalf of a certain world order. It is a celebration of a certain life style. It is a celebration of a certain grotesque caricature of individualism, that is "you come first, you're more important than anyone else." It is a constant temptation to enjoy a great vicarious experience of empowerment, but that empowerment is understood in very limited terms. It has no political meaning. Power, as advertising represents it, means being drop dead gorgeous, cool as ice, indifferent to other sufferings, perfectly self-interested, always good-looking, always strangely enough, fit and gorgeous despite all the crap you're eating and drinking.

Phillip Babich: Miller adds that endless repetition of an exaggerated sense of individualism found in commercial media can spark violent tendencies.

Mark Crispin Miller: It is only that you're going to see a lot of sadistic portrayed in a cavalier or even an ironic way. It isn't just that. It's that you are constantly being told: "You are the center of the universe. You come first, and life ought to be lived as if you were the perfect car, speeding down an endless highway, no impediments, no stop lights, no baggage, no other passengers. It's just you, baby. You are your Toyota. Right? You don't have to stop. Anyone who tries to stop you should be waxed, should be killed immediately, run them down, kill them, f*@% them right?" So, in the real world, where things are increasingly complicated, where there are long lines, you know, where you have to wait for your flight, or you can't have a job, or you don't know how to get to work, it seems to me that that's a kind of recipe for explosive rage. So I would say that relationship between media and violence, which has been amply documented by social scientists, has to be understood still more subtly.

Phillip Babich: Undoubtedly, the Internet and communications technologies were important tools in mobilizing widespread opposition to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Spring 2000 and the World Trade Organization in Seattle at the end of 1999. Extensively using websites and email, opposition groups and activists disseminated vital information to educate and energize many others. But, if one listens to corporate views on technology, bright enthusiasm for the Internet could become very dim indeed. Take the words of Joe Cobb of the conservative Heritage Foundation, for instance: "Probably, Globalization could have been stopped a few years ago, but technology has made it inevitable."

Jerry Mander: Corporations have glommed on to that technology to a much higher degree even than the Left has. The Left loves the Internet and computers and is trying to use it as much as possible, but corporations are in more places with better technology, and functioning seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and the Internet and communications technologies are really making possible the activities of corporations on a global scale. We wouldn't have the global corporations of today if we didn't have those technologies. I think Joe Cobb was saying that. He says once you have that, there's sort of no going back. Of course we don't buy that, because if you can develop enough steam and enough awareness, I think you can turned that around even with technologies like that.

Phillip Babich: Speaking about the Internet, it's widely hailed across the political spectrum as a democratizing force, and I wonder what your assessment is on that?

Jerry Mander: I strongly disagree with that. Global corporations are using it with a far greater speed, a far greater scale. They are able to move resources around at the touch of a key in a way that they never were able to before. And when they move their resources around instantaneously, that way, real things happen. Forests get cut down, countries' currencies are undermined. Tremendous political events take place. In my view, eventually we will see the Internet as the greatest centralizing instrument ever. And it's an illusion to believe that it's going to serve democratizing purposes because I strongly think it may benefit us, but it's benefiting the corporate side more than it's benefiting us. And it's going to centralize global power at a much faster and a much more extreme rate than at present.

Phillip Babich: Mander makes it clear that he's not advocating a wholesale abandonment of technology, but a greater understanding of the relationships between corporate power and technology. As an example, Mander points to the five-year moratorium on so-called e-commerce taxes passed by the U.S. Congress on May 10, 2000.

Jerry Mander: It's the boondoggle of boondoggles. It's the greatest corporate boondoggle ever, if you figure it out. Now when that happens globally, there are entire parts of the world, where the entire commercial activity is small scale retail. Neighborhood stores, neighborhood shops, individual livelihoods, small businesses of all kinds, are going to be wiped out globally. You know, India, China, a lot of parts of Europe, you know, the small scale activity that has kept people alive all this time, all that's going to move into virtual e-commerce and into the hands of global corporations, so it's just like a tremendous power grab. And the fact that we don't have a critique of technology that we can apply to this, the fact that we're not suspicious of technology on the Left, the fact that we don't go around figuring out the implications of new technology when they come along, has made us vulnerable and ineffective when it comes to blocking something like e-commerce which is going to do us tremendous harm, in the long run.

Phillip Babich: But we're told by Bill Clinton and other supporters of the new economy that such tax-free e-commerce is going to create jobs and allow for all the new budding entrepreneurs to create their websites and make millions of dollars. Isn't that a great thing?

Jerry Mander: Well, maybe for Bill Clinton's friends it's a great thing, but I don't think it's a great thing for the people we care the most about.

Phillip Babich: And is it even happening, anyway?

Jerry Mander: Well, I mean it'll create some kind of jobs. I mean, e-commerce businesses, as they operate, they use stuff, and people make the stuff. Calling it the "new economy", you brought up the new economy, it's an interesting term, because my feeling is that the new economy is the term that they're starting to us more and more, to substitute for the term globalization. With globalization, I believe, we succeeded in staining that term in Seattle, and since. And now, the "new economy" somehow has a fresher sound to it, and hasn't been stained. That's what I think we ought to try to do as soon as possible. But, I think that economy will give some people jobs, but they're are the people who are trained to function in the high tech arena, and I they are based upon global operation which will not have the kind of employment scale... In fact, already before this, Bill Clinton talked, when he was selling NAFTA and the GATT to us, that this was going to produce a gigantic improvement in the job situation around the world, and so on. And since then we see the consolidation of corporate power globally, unlike we're even had before, where the 200 largest corporations in the world now account for 30 percent of global economic activity. But they employ one-half of one percent of the global work force. If they've been doing that for expansion of jobs, that's baloney. Because as these corporations get bigger and bigger, they achieve economies of scale, they eliminate competition, they use high technology on other machines, even in the third world context, where there used to be workers doing stuff. And the job situation goes down, not up, globally. And I think as these corporations get bigger and bigger, and consolidations proceed even more than they presently are, consolidation always causes a loss of jobs.

Andrew Kimbrell: While we were worried about the ownership of the means of production, we forgot about the politics of the means of production themselves. We forgot that technology has a politics.

Phillip Babich: Andy Kimbrell is executive director of the International Center for Technology Assessment

Andrew Kimbrell: One of the most pernicious habits of thought, pieces of propaganda that we hear all the time is, "technology is neutral." I'm here to tell you, technology is never neutral. Technology always represents power, power over something, from the hammer to the nuclear bomb. The question is, is that power appropriate, and what changes is what that power make occur, wherever that technology goes.

Phillip Babich: As an example, Kimbrell points to the technical, scientific, monetary, and bureaucratic requirements for constructing a nuclear power plant.

Andrew Kimbrell: When you get a nuclear power plant, what kind of society you gonna get? Let's count it up. One that requires huge capital investments, exhausts its resources, you have a military elite, you have a scientific elite, you have massive bureaucracies, right? For safety, for energy dissemination, you've got a technologized elitist society. But what about the citizen, all right, what about you and me? Because not only does this impose a techno-logical and totalitarian infrastructure on a society dominated by military elites, scientific elites and bureaucracies, it completely disempowers the citizen. You have no power. Ethics 101, can you take responsibility for this technology? No. Can it be responsive to you? No. And when you build your entire society out of these technologies, it's ludicrous to call yourself a democracy.

Phillip Babich: Meanwhile, the level of U.S. military spending on technology is reaching outerspace proportions, quite literally. Randall Forsberg is executive director of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies.

Randall Forsberg: The United States has a budget for military research and development for developing new weapons and new military equipment for intelligence and control. The budget just for developing, not for producing, not for the soldiers in training and putting them out in the field, just for investigating, testing, engineering and developing new military weapons -- is as large as the next largest entire military budget of any country in the world. That's why the United States monopolizes the development of new military technology. This was true during the cold war, apart from the budget of the former Soviet Union. The United States was always developing military technology that was 10 or 20 years in advance of what other countries could do. But the end of the cold war has allowed the United States even more than it did before, to selectively release and market pieces of military technology. We keep some of it -- only we get it. A few countries here and there, really good allies, with really big rewards going to the U.S., can get a piece or another piece. Many other countries get lower level technology, and some can not get any at all. Because of the economies of scale, because the U.S. military budget is about 10 times as large as the next military budget, the United States has been able to out-compete all other countries in producing and selling weapons on a global market, running other countries effectively out of business. Right now the European arms industries are in the process of consolidating and becoming a single -- over the next few years -- a single integrated arms business.

I spend a lot of time talking to people in the military, economists and political scientists in Europe who study these matters, and I've come away with a confirmation of something I suspected, but now I've heard it from their lips. When I say, "Why is Europe developing a consolidated arms industry? For what reason are you producing weapons now that the Soviet Union is no more, there's no more Warsaw pact, there's no more East Germany, there are no military threats of a large scale in Europe?, the answer I get over and over again is, "Well, if we don't produce weapons, the United States will be the only country that does, and we'll have to buy them from you, and we're damned if we're gonna do that!"

Phillip Babich: According to Forsberg, 95% of U.S. military spending goes toward maintaining and producing weapons for use overseas. She adds that the U.S. military -- now operating with a budget of about $300 billion dollars -- acts as a global enforcer of U.S. economic interests, a technological threat rivaled by no other.

Randall Forsberg: This military system is an invisible and insidious monopoly, precisely because people don't know these facts. It's not in your supermarket, it's not on your living room television, it's not in your daily paper, it's not in your lives at all. And so there is no protest, there is no objection. And yet it's like the skeleton or maybe a suit of armor. It's kind of the binding structure of the international system that keeps people around the world marching lock step forward in an archaic set of values, instead of looking at human needs. This is a system that can be changed, but it can only be changed from the bottom up. It can only be changed when people refuse to tolerate this any longer.

Phillip Babich: That's it for this edition of Making Contact: a look at the politics of technology. Thanks for listening. And, special thanks this week to Lynn Gerry for recorded portions.

Laura Livoti is our managing director; Peggy Law is executive director; associate producer is Stephanie Welch; senior advisor, Norman Solomon; national producer, David Barsamian; Women's Desk coordinator, Lisa Rudman; Prison Desk coordinator, Eli Rosenblatt; production assistant, Shereen Meraji; archivist, Din Abdullah; and I'm your host and managing producer, Phillip Babich.

If you want more information about the subject of this week's program, call the National Radio Project, at 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts. You can also go to our website at www.radioproject.org. Making Contact is an independent production. We're committed to providing a forum for voices and opinions not often heard in the mass media. If you have suggestions for future programs, we'd like to hear from you. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter Trio. 'Bye for now.