The leaders who promise to take the countries of the South into the First World by an act of magic that will turn us all into prosperous subjects of the kingdom of waste ought to be tried for fraud and as accessories to a crime. For fraud because they promise the impossible; if we all consumed like those who are squeezing the earth dry, we’d have no world left. And as accessories to a crime because the lifestyle they promote—the huge orgasm of delirious consumption they call happiness—sickens our bodies, poisons our souls, and leaves us without the home the world wished to become long before it existed.
CRASH COURSE ON INCOMMUNICATIONS
War is the continuation of television by other means. So General Karl von Clausewitz might say if he were to come back to life after a century and a half and start channel surfing. Real reality imitates virtual reality, which imitates real reality in a world that sweats violence from every pore. Violence begets violence, as we all know, but it also begets profits for the industry that turns violence into merchandise, then sells it as spectacle.
The ends no longer need to justify the means. Today the means, the means of mass communication, justify the ends of a system of power that imposes its values on the entire planet. A handful of giant corporations are in charge of the world’s Ministry of Education. Never have so many been held incommunicado by so few.
IS THE RIGHT OF FREE EXPRESSION THE RIGHT TO LISTEN?
In the sixteenth century, several theologians of the Catholic Church justified the Conquest of America in the name of communication. Jus communicationis: the conquistadors spoke, the Indians listened. War turned out to be both inevitable and just, since the Indians pretended to be deaf. Their right to communicate was the right to obey. At the end of the twentieth century, that rape of America is still called an “encounter,” and we still use the term “communication” for the monologues of the powerful.
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Tell Me Your Secrets/1
Malaysia recently revamped its communications network. A Japanese company was to do the work, but at the last minute the U.S. giant AT&T suddenly undercut its offer and snatched the deal away. AT&T won the contract thanks to the good offices of the NSA, the National Security Agency, which tracked down and deciphered the Japanese bid.
The NSA, a U.S. spy agency with a budget four times that of the CIA, has the technology to record every word transmitted by telephone, fax, or e-mail in any part of the world. It can intercept up to two million conversations per minute. The NSA’s real mission is to maintain U.S. economic and political control over the planet, but national security and the struggle against terrorism are its formal covers. Its eavesdropping systems allow it to track every message that has anything to do with criminal organizations as dangerous as, for example, Greenpeace or Amnesty International.
All these facts came out in March 1998 when the European Parliament published an official report entitled, “Evaluation of the Technologies of Political Control.”
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Tell Me Your Secrets/2
How does a modern company communicate with its real customers? By means of virtual customers, programmed by computer.
The British supermarket chain Sainsbury has worked up a mathematical model to simulate the movements and sentiments of its shoppers. The computer screen shows the virtual customer walking down the aisles amid shopping carts, revealing his or her tastes and fears, family commitments and personal needs, social position and ambitions. It can also measure the impact of advertising and discounts, the influence of store hours on the flow of customers, and the importance of the location of merchandise.
That’s how they study buying behavior and that’s how they design sales strategies: virtual media to multiply real profits.
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Around the world spins a ring of satellites filled with millions and millions of words and images that come from the earth and are returned to it. Marvelous gadgets the size of your fingernail receive, process, and transmit at the speed of light messages that half a century ago would have required thirty tons of machinery. Miracles of technoscience in these technotimes: the most fortunate members of our media-mad society can now enjoy their vacations at the beach picking up the cell phone, receiving e-mail, checking the beeper, reading faxes, responding to messages on the answering machine by leaving messages on other answering machines, shopping by computer, and spending their free time playing video games or watching tiny portable TVs. In its awesome rise and dizzying flight, communications technology displays almighty powers. At midnight the computer kisses the forehead of Bill Gates, and at dawn he wakes up as the richest man in the world. Now on the market is a computer with a built-in microphone so you can talk to it. In cyberspace’s Celestial City, the computer marries the telephone and the television, and all of humanity is invited to the baptism of their astonishing children.
The emerging cybercommunity takes refuge in virtual reality, while real communities are transformed into an immense desert filled with people, each of whom lights a candle to his own saint, each of whom is encased in his own bubble. Forty years ago, according to polls, six out of ten North Americans trusted most people. But the trust index is down: today it’s only four out of ten. This sort of progress just promotes separation. The more relations between people get demonized—they’ll give you AIDS, or take away your job, or ransack your house—the more relations with machines get sacralized. The communications industry, that most dynamic sector of the world economy, sells abracadabras that open the doors to a new era in human history. But this so-well-communicated world looks too much like a kingdom of loners and the mute.
The dominant means of communication lie in a few hands that are always becoming fewer, and usually serve a system that reduces human relations to mutual use and mutual fear. The Internet galaxy has opened unexpected and valuable opportunities for alternative expression, allowing many voices that are not the echoes of power to broadcast their messages. But access to the information superhighway is still the privilege of developed countries, where 95 percent of users reside, and commercial advertising is doing its all to turn the Internet into the Businessnet. This new medium for freedom of communication is also a new medium for freedom of commerce. On the virtual planet there’s no risk of meeting up with customs officers or governments crazed with delusions of independence. In the middle of 1997, when advertising already occupied far more space on the Internet than educational material, the president of the United States ventured that every country in the world should keep the sale of goods and services by Internet duty-free, and from that point on, this issue has been high on the U.S. agenda in international organizations.
Control of cyberspace depends on telephone lines, and it’s no accident that the privatizing wave of recent years has yanked the phones out of the public’s hands around the world and given them over to the great communications conglomerates. Foreign phone companies have received far more U.S. investment than any other sector, while the concentration of capital has forged ahead at a gallop. Up to the middle of 1998, eight megacompanies dominated the phone trade in the United States; in just a week, these were reduced to five.
Television, the movie industry, the mass-circulation press, the great publishing houses and record companies, and the biggest radio stations, too, are all marching double-time toward monopoly. The global mass media have set the price of freedom of expression in the clouds; the opinioned, who have the right to listen, are ever more numerous, while the opinionators, who have the right to make themselves heard, are ever fewer. In the years following World War II, independent media still provided broad coverage of news, opinion, and the creative adventures that reveal and nourish cultural diversity. By 1980, the devouring of medium-sized and small companies had put most of the planetary market under the control of fifty corporations. Since then, independence and diversity have become rarer than a green dog.
According to producer Jerry Isenberg, the erosion of independent television in the United States over the past tw
enty years has been overwhelming. Independent companies used to supply between 30 and 50 percent of what was seen on the small screen; today the figure is barely 10 percent. Also revealing are the world’s advertising statistics: currently, half of all the money the world spends on advertising goes down the throat of only ten conglomerates that produce and distribute everything you can imagine involving images, words, and music.
Over the past five years the biggest U.S. communications companies doubled their international sales: General Electric, Disney/ABC, Time Warner/CNN, Viacom, Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), and Microsoft, Bill Gates’s baby, which rules the software market and has successfully broken into cable TV and TV production. These giants exercise oligopolistic power, which they share globally with the Murdoch empire, Sony of Japan, Bertelsmann of Germany, and one or two more. Among them they’ve woven a global spider’s web, their interests linked like so many knotted threads. Although these mastodons of communication pretend to compete, and sometimes even come to blows or exchange insults to satisfy the spectators, at the moment of truth the spectacle ends and they calmly carve up the planet.
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The Globalized Hero
Secret Agent 007 no longer works for the British crown. Today James Bond is a sandwich-board man for many companies from many countries. Every scene in his 1997 film, Tomorrow Never Dies, is an advertisement. The infallible Bond checks his Omega watch, talks on an Ericsson cell phone, leaps from a rooftop onto the roof of a Heineken beer truck, flees in a BMW rented from Avis, pays with a Visa card, drinks Dom Pérignon champagne, undresses women previously dressed by Armani and Gucci and coiffed by L’Oréal, and fights an opponent in Kenzo attire.
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By grace of cybernetic providence, Bill Gates amassed a sudden fortune equivalent to the entire annual budget of Argentina. In the middle of 1998, the United States government charged Microsoft with using monopolistic methods to crush its competitors. Some time previously, the federal government had put together a similar suit against IBM; after thirteen years of back-and-forth, the matter was left in murky waters. Judicial law can’t do much when faced with economic law, and capitalism brings on the concentration of power as inevitably as winter brings on the cold. The antitrust laws that once threatened the kings of oil and steel are unlikely ever to imperil the planetary machinery that sets the stage for the most dangerous of despotisms, that which acts on the heart and conscience of all humanity.
Technological diversity is said to be democratic diversity. Technology places images, words, and music within the reach of all, as never before. But this marvel becomes a dirty trick if private monopoly ends up imposing a one-image, one-word, one-tune dictatorship. Even taking into account the exceptions—and fortunately there are exceptions and they aren’t so few—this diversity tends to offer us thousands of ways of choosing between the same and the same. As Argentine journalist Ezequiel Fernández-Moores said of the news: “We’re told about everything, but we don’t find out a thing.”
Although the structures of power have become more international and it’s difficult to distinguish any borders, to say that the United States sits at the center of the nervous system of contemporary communications wouldn’t be a sin of primitive anti-imperialism. U.S. companies rule in film and TV, in information and computers. The world, an immense Wild West, begs to be won. For the United States, the global reach of its mass messages is a matter of state. The governments of the South tend to think of culture as playing a decorative function, but the tenants of the White House, at least on this matter, aren’t the least bit stupid. Every president knows that the political importance of the culture industry is at least as great as its economic value, great as that is. For years, to give an example, the government has used diplomatic pressure to promote Hollywood’s products, which never err on the side of diplomacy, in countries that attempt to protect their own national film industries.
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Exemplary Lives/4
Admirers and enemies concur: his main virtue is his lack of scruples. They also appreciate his capacity for extermination, essential for success in today’s world. Busting unions and devouring competitors, Rupert Murdoch arose from nowhere to become a magnate of world communications. His meteoric career began when he inherited a newspaper in far-off Australia. Today he is the owner of 130 dailies in several countries, including the venerable Times of London and the English tabloids that in their glory days reported on who slept last night with Princess Diana. This modeler of minds and consoler of souls made the world’s biggest investment in satellite communications technology and controls one of the largest television networks on the planet. He also owns the Fox movie studios and HarperCollins publishing house, where he published several masterworks of world literature, including those of his friends Margaret Thatcher and Newt Gingrich.
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Over half of Hollywood’s earnings already comes from foreign markets, sales that grow spectacularly year by year, while the Oscars attract a universal viewership comparable only to that drawn by soccer’s World Cup or the Olympics. The powers that be are no dummies; they know that imperial power largely rests on the unfettered spread of emotion, on illusions of success, symbols of strength, orders to consume, and elegies to violence. In the film Close to Eden by Nikita Mikhalkov, the peasants of Mongolia dance to rock music, smoke Marlboros, wear Donald Duck hats, and surround themselves with images of Sylvester Stallone as Rambo. That other great master of the art of pulverizing your neighbor, the Terminator, is the character most admired by the children of the world: a 1997 UNESCO poll taken simultaneously in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America found that nine out of ten children identified with that musclebound purveyor of violence played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In the global village of the mediated universe, all continents flow together and all centuries occur at once. “We are from here and from everywhere at the same time, which is to say, from nowhere,” says Alain Touraine about television. “Images, always attractive to the public, juxtapose gas station jockeys and camels, Coca-Cola and Andean villages, blue jeans and an imposing castle.” Believing themselves condemned to choose between copying and casting themselves adrift, many local cultures, off-balance, torn loose, fading away, take refuge in the past. With desperate frequency, cultures seek shelter in religious fundamentalism or other absolute truths; they propose a return to times gone by, the more puritanical the better, as if there were no other response to overpowering modernity than intolerance and nostalgia.
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The Spectacle
A criminal trial was the most successful product sold by U.S. television in 1995. The trial of former athlete O. J. Simpson, charged with two murders, filled the networks’ programming hours with innumerable episodes that won the fervent allegiance of the television audience.
Crime as spectacle: every one of the trial’s many actors played a role, and acting, good or bad, was more important than the guilt or innocence of the defendant, the validity of the charges, the propriety of the investigation, or the truth of the testimony. In his free time, the judge instructed other judges in the secret arts of playing a convincing judge on camera.
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The Cold War has been left behind. Without it, the so-called free world has lost its magical justification for a holy crusade against the totalitarianism that until a short while ago ruled the countries of the East. Yet it grows more evident every day that communications manipulated by a handful of giants can be just as totalitarian as communications monopolized by the state. We are all obliged to accept freedom of expression as freedom of business. Culture is reduced to entertainment, and entertainment is a brilliant global enterprise. Life is reduced to spectacle, and spectacle is a source of economic and political power. News is reduced to advertising, and advertising rules.
Two out of three human beings live in the so-called Third World, but two out of three correspondents of the biggest news agencies work in Europe and the United States. What happened to
the free flow of information and the respect for diversity enshrined in international treaties and praised in the speeches of political leaders? Most of the news the world receives comes from and is directed at a minority of humanity—understandably so from the point of view of the commercial operations that sell news and collect the lion’s share of their revenue in Europe and the United States. It’s a monologue by the North. Other regions and countries get little or no attention, except in the case of war or catastrophe, and then the journalists covering the story often don’t speak the language or have the least idea of local history or culture. News tends to be dubious and sometimes plainly, simply wrong. The South is condemned to look at itself through the eyes of those who scorn it.
In the early eighties, UNESCO proposed an initiative based on the truth that news is not a simple commodity but a social right and that the communications media should bear responsibilities commensurate with the educational purpose they serve. UNESCO set out to create an independent international news agency working from the countries that suffer the indifference of the factories of information and opinion. Even though the proposal was framed in ambiguous and cautious terms, the U.S. government thundered furiously against such an attack on freedom of information. What business did UNESCO have sticking its nose into matters pertaining to the living forces of the market? The United States walked out of UNESCO, slamming the door, as did Great Britain, which tends to act as if it were a colony of the country that was once its colony. At that point the idea of promoting international news unhampered by political or commercial interests was shelved. Any attempt to gain independence, timid as it may be, threatens the international division of labor by which a handful of people actively produce news and opinion and the rest of us passively consume it.