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Web 2.0 has revolutionized the panorama of the information society: users have become information producers and the new web platforms have become relationship venues where new knowledge and ideas emerge. Also the new tools of social networking, social tagging, wikis and blogs enable new forms of social interaction, participation and cooperation. But…

Photo credit: Slate magazine

• Is this participation really democratic?
• Or is this a democracy paradox, where everyone can interact but the decision making places are all outside the net?
• Is the horizontal leveling of internet communications really an instrument of democracy?
• How would it be possible to transform these emotional and communication-oriented extensions in a real space connected with the physical world of true participation to decision-making?

I have gone out and asked to four people whose intellectual integrity and life vision the above questions: Howard Rheingold, John Blossom, Michel Bauwens, Sepp Hasslberger answer the above questions from four diverse individual viewpoints:

Howard Rheingold of Smartmobs.com

1. Is this participation really democratic?

   “Democratizing” means making access (to information, tools, policy-making discussions, elections, etc.) widely available. This, however, does not guarantee a healthy democracy.

   What if more people vote, but their picture of political candidates and their policies are distorted by sophisticated public relations tools and strategies?

   What if their educations are so poor that voters are unable to think critically about partisan claims?

   I am wary of projecting hopes onto the tools you mention — which truly have the potential to inform and involve more people in democratic decision-making — without paying attention to the less visible parts of the system I mention.

2. Or is this a democracy paradox, where everyone can interact but the decision making places are all outside the net?

   I am also wary of governance by instant voting. This is known as the “plebiscite” and can be very dangerous: a demagogue or a government can propagandize people into starting a war or adopting a policy without a process of deliberation.

   That’s why modern democracies are generally republics — citizens elect representatives who are expected to deliberate openly and transparently.

3. Is the horizontal leveling of internet communications really an instrument of democracy?

   It CAN be. But more than the technology is required. A healthy public sphere is essential — most people need to have sufficient education, freedom to criticize, well-trained critical faculties, and ample sources of accurate information.

4. How would it be possible to transform these emotional and communication-oriented extensions in a real space connected with the physical world of true participation to decision-making?

   Education!

Michel Bauwens of P2P Foundation

The first level is expression, and it is clear that in this context, the Web 2.0 is a resounding success.

And it’s importance should not be underestimated since historically, we can see that people with power have always tried to limit and control expression, so we should not be cynical about it.

I think that Web 2.0 generally goes beyond expression, and has also become an efficient tool for mobilization and collective action

But expression is not deliberation. Most Web 2.0 platforms are not very well suited for the kind of complex deliberation that would be needed to create a context for decision-making. I think these kinds of tools, which can integrate complexity, adequately filter for quality, and have a value conscious design approach that insure that a diversity of views are taking into account, are still too far between, but quite a few groups are working on it

The key in politics is not expression, nor expressing discontent or resistance, but actually transforming things. Collective action can change things, but still implies a separation between the ‘people’ and ‘representative institutions‘. It implies ‘we‘ are asking ‘them‘, to change their ways.

So I think the real revolution of peer to peer technologies is that it allows people not just expression, but actually a redesign of social processes.

For example, free software communities successfully embed their values in software, and so do the emerging open design communities that are now starting to tackle physical production itself. This is the next great frontier of peer production communities.

But equally crucial, and this is why I believe Lessig made the right decision in moving from Creative Commons to Open Politics, is that we actually start redesigning politics itself.

If you see sites like worldchanging.org, or p2pfoundation.net for that matter, it is rather easy to come to the conclusion that most solutions for contemporary problems already exist, but they are scattered in marginal groups.

At the same time, the current political and economic system seems almost completely oblivious to it, and so these crucial solutions do not seem to be able to scale. This is a sign of a profound disease and insufficiency of current democratic and representative regimes, that are in the hands of privileged elites, who hide their power through a lack of openness.

The big fight now is openness and transparency.

And as we create our own P2P alternatives, we still have to tackle the mainstream system, and since a direct approach seems impossible (simply changing one party by another with very similar standard policies), what we need is to redesign, reprogram the political process itself.

That’s the crucial task right now, and Web 2.0 is not sufficient for this, it’s merely a first step.

John Blossom of Shore.com

1. Is this participation really democratic?

   While not all social media tools are available to everyone in the world, by its nature people who have access to social media are participating in the most democratic form of political human expression.

   In the past the power of a political voice was determined by a person’s connection to powerful people, by their access to the media or a bullhorn or whatever other device amplified one voice over that of an electorate’s voice. In social media the opportunity for all voices to express themselves begins to become a reality.

   However, just because social media tools are being used for political expression doesn’t mean that the content being generated by social media is always “the voice of the people.”

   Oftentimes powerful individuals and organizations will hire surrogates to spread their opinions using social media tools, creating “astroturf” - content that’s supposed to look like “grass roots” opinion but which is in fact sponsored by a controlling interest.

   What I am noticing in this year’s U.S. election is that people are far more aware of the potential for astroturf content and challenging it more quickly and vocally.

   It’s also important to note the growth of media outlets that use social media tools but which have editorial staffs that enable them to operate much as any other media publication would. Just because you’re using the tools of social media doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re actually trying to be just one voice in the crowd.

   This is not to say that the powerful should not have a voice as well in social media. In a true democracy all people of all walks of life should have a voice in political discussions.

   But if democracy is a system which says that each person has one voice as well as one vote, then all of the people who have that right should have an equal opportunity to influence their peers through social media.

   Within that framework influential figures arise, leadership forms and actions are taken based on that influence, but the influence, endorsement and leadership is not presumed. Social media is a key venue in which such influence, endorsement and leadership is formed.

2. Or is this a democracy paradox, where everyone can interact but the decision making places are all outside the net?

   In my book Content Nation I am highlighting the importance of the coffee houses and the taverns of the American colonies in which influential political pamphlets such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense were discussed.

   The discussions in those gathering places and the passing of these pamphlets from one person to another was in effect the social media of that era. Without those influential discussions and the local thought leadership that emerged from them there would not have arisen the widespread convictions that led to the actions outside of the rooms in which these discussions took place.

   Democracy is a form of self-organizing government: one cannot form it until people have organized their thoughts as to how they would like to be represented.

   So while oftentimes the discussions in social media forums may appear to be as boistrous as any that one may encounter in a pub or a cafe, that boisterousness leads to the convictions to express oneself through democratic institutions.

   Social media can enable actual decision making - many services provide polling capabilities - but its primary value is to enable people to have the intellectual and emotional interchange necessary to make informed decisions in the democratic process or to inform our representatives of the true opinions of the electorate more efficiently.

   A simple analogy can be found in and about my home town. In the New England region of the U.S. many small towns still govern themselves via direct representation: the citizens of a town gather at appointed times to vote on town budgets and regulations and to discuss and to vote upon important issues. However, as some of these towns grew this form of government gave way to representative town meetings, in which citizens are called upon oftentimes to speak out on issues of public importance at town meetings but in which the elected representatives then are called upon to vote. Both are democratic functions, but in the representative town meeting the voice of the citizens is separate from the actual political action.

   It’s feasible over time that social media will enable us to return to more of a direct representation in democratic institutions, but for now I think that it is mostly about enabling people to influence the actions of elected officials and influencing how they are chosen.

3. Is the horizontal leveling of internet communications really an instrument of democracy

   The horizontal leveling of the internet can enable democratic views of the world and is without a doubt the most revolutionary invention for human communication since the spoken word.

   Once voice can decide to speak out and can gain a global audience virtually overnight, influencing political decision making both on a national and global level as well as at a local level, based solely on the influence and endorsement of their peers.

   The ability of any voice anywhere to influence the course of decision-making that impacts society is the foundation of democratic action. The corollary of that freedom, however, is that it takes democratic organization of all of the content generated by social media for people to become aware of such opinions.

   If millions of voices shout out but we hear from the same media-selected opinion-makers again and again then social media has done little good. This is where the traditional media outlets fail us oftentimes.

   It is good to have high-quality traditional media outlets, but social media outlets enable a far broader array of opinions and insights to surface by enabling a far broader array of influencers and leaders to arise through the combined endorsements of individuals. This allows the combing intellect and insight of countless people to factor in to democratic decision making.

4. How would it be possible to transform these emotional and communication-oriented extensions in a real space connected with the physical world of true partecipation to decision-making?

To bring it back to my discussion of New England town government, there is the long-term possibility that social media becomes a more direct instrument of governmental decision-making.

But even today social media is being extended into the political process directly. If you look at Barack Obama’s presidential campaign social media tools were an essential factor in organizing his campaign workers: enthusiasm for a political candidate was transformed into political action directly through social media. Obama’s record online campaign donations were another example of how social media breaks through into the real space.

People are using social media tools to organize people rapidly in local areas as well: weblogs were a crucial factor in our local elections in 2006 and social media tools have helped to change the course of several local political debates.

Our town’s First Selectman, a mayor by most people’s understanding, is a blogger! Finally I think that we’re seeing more and more use of venues such as Facebook to make people aware of political causes and to be organized to take real-world action. Hundreds of thousands of people who are passionate about a cause can be organized in a matter of a few days. That’s highly scalable political activism that just wasn’t there a few years ago.

We need the tools of social media to help us form our decision making, but it’s up to us to take action based on those experiences.

I trust and expect that the power of social media to enable such transformation of discussions in to action will catch the world by surprise in the months and years ahead.

I doubt that the discussions in coffee houses and taverns in colonial American were taken very seriously by those who were not a part of them. But then people decided to act upon those discussions.

So it will be with social media. People have no idea yet as to just how powerful a tool that it will become.

The courage of convictions is all that’s required to make that clear to the world. This happens again and again already in ways large and small, but some day soon the world will be aware that they are a nation of publishers, united in their ability to communicate to the world and to influence one another as citizens of the same.

Sepp Hasslberger of Health Supreme / Hasslberger.com

1. Is this participation really democratic?

   If democracy means participation, then web 2.0 is really democratic.

   Actually it can be even considered more democratic than what we are used to calling our “democratic society“, where participation is not invited. We are supposed to vote once every four-five years, and let the politicians get on with leading us wherever they wish. Not much of the original idea of democracy left there.

2. Or is this a democracy paradox, where everyone can interact but the decision making places are all outside the net?

   You could call it a paradox. Everyone can interact on the web, but for now, the decisions are made in other places. Just as I said, we elect politicians and are expected to let them do the leading.

   It would be much better if there were some connection between what the people want and what the politicians are doing. I could imagine that the web might be used to discuss and decide on actual things in politics, and the politicians take the message that has been “filtered out” and act in accordance with it.

   But this is only a phase of transition. Sooner or later, the web will gain an important role in politics, even to the extent where we no longer need politicians.

   If we can discuss and decide, all we need to implement decisions are administrators - local, regional, national, international - administrators to carry out the will of the people.

3. The horizontal leveling of internet communications is really an instrument of democracy?

   It should be and it could be, but right now, I think it isn’t.

   How would it be possible to transform these emotional and communication-oriented extensions in real space connected with the physical world of true participation to decision-making?

   There are several efforts that attempt to bring electronic voting and discussions into the political reality, so far with very limited success.

   To bring true participatory decision making, first of all, we’ll have to learn to take our share of responsibility. When there are decisions to be made, and this will be practically constantly, we must be willing to take time out from other efforts to get into the issues that are of interest to us, and participate in the process of maturing a consensus.

   At the same time, we need to link these decisions into the actual administration of things.

   It appears a huge step to take from where we are now, but things are in motion.

Originally written and prepared by Robin Good for Master New Media and first published on October 10th 2008 as “Is Web 2.0 Really Democratic?“

Beyond file-sharing, peer-to-peer is an alternative way of looking at work, live and the way we make money. Although mainstream media coverage of P2P has mostly focused its spotlights on the on-going debate around file-sharing and pirated media (music, movies, games), the social, economic, and political consequences of peer-to-peer go well beyond that narrow focus.

Michel Bauwens - Photo credit: Robin Good

The success of Wikipedia is a perfect example of how peer-to-peer collaboration extends well beyond the walls of pirated media. Wikipedia demonstrates that as a mode of production, peer-to-peer can succeed and even operate with efficiencies that closed systems cannot compete with.

Furthermore, p2p as a governance and economic model holds promises and solutions to problems that other models (including democracy and capitalism) are incapable of dealing with. As an economic model it can create new incentives to work. Rather than money being the driving force to create, as with capitalism, “voluntary passionate production” takes precedence.

Perhaps an even better example of how peer-to-peer can fundamentally affect (for the better) the world in which we live is the potential it has to alter our monetary system. The growing success of microlending and microlending institutions like Prosper has already demonstrated that even an entrenched social system like our financial system can benefit from becoming more distributed.

In this exclusive video interview with MasterNewMedia, Michel Bauwens, founder of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation, discusses some of the greater social effects of peer-to-peer.

Here are all the details:

Peer to Peer: Why P2P Is Better Than Capitalism

I think if you want to know what is wrong with capitalism and how peer-to-peer is an improvement over it, you have to look at the history of motivation and cooperation. Pre-modern societies were based on coercion / force - a slave had to give everything and serf had to give half or more of what was produced.

The dream of capitalism said that instead of forcing you, why don’t we create mutual self interest, so we will just exchange things of equal value with each other. In a way that is great progress because we go from external negative motivation (fear) to external positive motivation (money).

The problem with that is that if you don’t have money - if you don’t have positive motivation on the outside, you don’t do it. Also the problem is if you have a system based on self interest then no one looks at the other consequences. No one looks at pollution. And no one wants to do anything that is not paid.

Furthermore if you look at the way innovation works in a company you want to innovate and improve because you don’t want to be buried under competition. If you don’t have competition because it’s a monopoly for example, then you don’t improve. Look at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer… nothing really moved for 5-7 years because Netscape was dead.

Now think about a peer production like Mozilla Firefox. These people want to innovate not to be better than the other guy, but because they just want to make the best possible browser. Firefox doesn’t have to protect its property rights; anyone can make a plug-in. So Firefox is innovating all the time. It is moving all the time.

The genius of peer-to-peer is that it filters out negative outside motivation / positive outside motivation and focuses on internal motivation - voluntary passionate production. Your individual interest in improvement corresponds with the values of everyone within that organization. And the whole project is available to all of humanity via the network.

• When a for-profit institution competes with a for-benefit institution, the for-benefit institution like the Mozilla Foundation can draw on a community so the for-profit companies lose a competitive advantage. I think in those ways peer production is an improvement over for-profit production models.
• Similarly, if you have two for-profit companies competing, it is the one that opens up and invites user participation that will do better than the one that doesn’t. That means that for-profit companies are adopting peer-to-peer practices. If you take any two communities where one is locked and isolate while the other says we can collaborate with companies and cooperate with others (individuals, corporations) the second will have an advantage. What that points to is that peer production and for-profit are not antagonistic, they are complimentary in many ways.

But I would still argue that peer production is post capitalist because it is not about commodities, wage relationships, or about producing for the marketplace with commodities and exchange value.

So in many ways if you do that, part of you is already outside of the market. You are learning to do things differently and not just out of pure self interest.

Peer To Peer: The Economic Viability of Peer Production

Yes, I just think it’s an interesting proposal to think about. And the way I explain it is the following.

Right now we’re split. We have two sides of our lives:

• We have the side who has to survive… that has to make money and we engage in the formal economy, we get paid, we get a salary. But we also often very much work in an alienated way. We don’t do what we like, we have a boss we don’t like. All kinds of elements which make this not the perfect solution for many people.
• And then we have a surplus. And that surplus of intellect, of computers, of access to the networks, makes that, when we do not have to work for a living, More and more of us are engaging in our passions. And we produce what I call peer production, governors, and property.

Now what we notice today, I think increasingly, is that actually the part of us, our surplus, is more productive than when we are in the system.

Now, that should tell the system something. So the system can start thinking. Well actually when people… let’s assume they’re unemployed… so between jobs you fall in a kind of intermediate period when you’re jobless what before you used to think you’re worthless, you have no value.

Today I will argue maybe is exactly in those moments you actually produce the most value for society.

• So the first thing to do is create a system that at least allows people to move more easily from the market to the non-market. It’s kind of life-long career planning which allows people to say I want to engage with my passion and I can do that for a certain time and then I go back to the market.
• And I think as we mature in this… as we strengthen peer-to-peer, we discover that actually more and more value is created in the informal economy.
• At that moment I think we can start arguing for basic income because then it is
  no longer welfare. I am not just giving you money to help you. I’m actually recognizing a society that by the mere fact that you’re a citizen engaging in networks and producing value in common, you’re actually giving society crucial value and therefore I give you back what you give.

I don’t think we’re there yet. I think that maturation of peer production might actually lead to the situation where I don’t know, ten, twenty, thirty years from now, this becomes a really debatable issue.

Peer To Peer: The Potential For P2P To Unite The World

It does happen very rarely. Because most people today have an inner sense that openness is better than enclosure. You know when they hear about free software and open-source development actually most people recognize that it’s a good way of doing things. That if you want to cooperate you have to be open with each other.

So I think that actually peer-to-peer to has a potential unite many people that are politically opposed to each other because it has different values embedded. It has a freedom which liberals like and libertarians like. It has the equality aspect that people on the left like. It has a relation aspect that conservative people like, you know, being embedded in a community.

So what we have to do is look at the common interest of a group of people in advancing concretely the space for this to emerge. And not to overly politicize it and to a create kind of almost artificial oppositions.

Peer To Peer: How Peer Governance And Democracy Differ

I think there is a difference between peer governance and democracy, direct or indirect. I’ll try to explain it in the following way:

Think about the market. Think about hierarchy and think about democracy. Those are simply three different ways to allocate resources.

• The market says it’s all about the price. The effort will go to the most valuable thing to do.
• Hierarchy says we’re clever, because we know everything so we will organize production for you.
• And democracy says we have different groups with different interests so we’ll negotiate about who gets what.

Peer governance functions in the immaterial environment of intellectual cooperation over the networks. And you are basically self-aggregating your resources. So as long as you’re self-aggregating your resources, you don’t need any other way to aggregate your resources. You don’t need a market, you don’t need a hierarchy and you don’t need democracy. And the type of relations you have is I voluntary contributed to other projects, so do you. And you don’t pay me so why should I listen to you. So you need consensus. You need expertise. You need engagement and somehow and we see that it works that people can actually have very complex projects that are organized through peer governance. This is one side of the equation.

The other side of the equation is that in order to cooperate you have a number of fixed cost you need infrastructure of cooperation. You need servers. These servers are a renewable resource so you need a cost-recovery mechanism. So there you are in different domain. You actually need to allocate and protect resources. So what happens in peer production is in that environment people create nonprofits… the Mozilla Foundation, the Apache Foundation, Wikimedia Foundation. And they will manage the infrastructure of cooperation on behalf of the community. But because they have scarce resources, you need the democratic structure.

And so I would say overall a society is dealing not just with immaterial resources, but mostly with scarce material resources… with hunger, food, physical things. We still need democracy.

But to the degree that you did with intellectual cooperation, culture and knowledge, and open design, you are in peer governance. So what I think is happening is that… let’s say that this is the volume of democracy we have in society. This is the volume of peer governance. It is that the space of peer governance will grow but we’ll not totally replace the sphere of democracy. I think it’s impossible as long as we live in a material world.

Peer To Peer: Michel Bauwens’ Vision For the World

My dream is a world where more and more people can follow their passion… find meaning in their life… express themselves. And that more and more value is created that way.

In the current world we think that nature is infinite, and we think that we have to make things (intellectual, spiritual, cultural things) scarce artificially. My dream is that we turn that around. That we recognize that sharing is infinite and that nature is not infinite. And therefore change the way our civilization, our society runs. Based on that recognition.

I think once you start working peer-to-peer in your field, that you’re following your life’s dreams that you’re passionate about, then you don’t want to go back.

I think more and more people should have a chance than just a minority of people.

Peer To Peer: Why People Are Afraid Of P2P

I think it is the issue of expertise. The fear of dumbing down. The fear that if you broaden participation the people who know more will be lost in the masses. And I think the more hierarchical a society is, the more power experts have, and the more fear they have of losing it.

I think in some countries for example like in France they get more easily angry than in others. So, there’s this fear that if you open up that the people who know less will take power. And the quality of society will go down. And it’s a fear that I recognize.

I think peer-to-peer runs a danger in some circumstances of having that effect. I don’t think it’s inherent to peer-to-peer. I think it’s bad design, bad governance. That leads to those kind of processes. And now we have value-conscious design, a value-sensitive design that designs for diversity, for autonomy, for selection of excellence. And are the best processes to do that better than even other forms of social organization.

I think this fear is the same fear of democracy. When people started arguing that everybody had the right to vote. There was a very similar fear that democracy would bring the rule of the mob. Now we have had two-hundred years of democracy and democracy is far from perfect. But who wants to go back to an authoritarian state? Not many people want to go back.

It is the same thing with peer-to-peer. Once it’s there… once you’re used to it, when you have problems, you try to solve it in a peer-to-peer way. We don’t want to go back to the old systems.

Peer To Peer: How P2P Can Change Our Monetary System

I define peer-to-peer as a direct social production value by civil society.

And when you look at money, money is created by banks through their loans and it’s regulated by the central banks. One of the things that we also discovered in peer-to-peer is the importance of invisible architectures. The kind of protocol, the design rules that favours some kind of behavior and make other kinds of behavior difficult.

So I think that what this shows us is that these protocols of money today, interest-based money, is a protocol which drives infinite growth. Infinite growth in a finite system. So I think that this is not a good thing this kinda monetary system which is based on fighting for scarce resources. And so the scarcity for the people who need it. And then you have ninety-eight percent of the money which is floating around speculatively and creating one bubble after another. I don’t think this is a very good system.

Now how would a system like this change? Well of course the people who would profit from it are not gonna change it. So what if we create an open money system that we can manage ourselves. That we can choose a protocol from. And that virtual and physical communities can start using from the bottom up. I would say that’s one of the particular changes that could happen through peer-to-peer.

The other one is the following: to have peer-to-peer, you have access to your own resources. So today we have:

• Our brains
• A community of surplus
• Computers
• Access to the networks

Now, when machines start becoming miniaturized, we will have desktop manufacturing, personal fabricators, flexible manufacturing, multi-purpose machinery. All these trends point to capital becoming cheaper and more distributed.

When financing becomes more distributed, which is the point of social lending (like Prosper - the American system or Zopa - the English system). That means that people can get money from each other.

Then we have:

• Computers are distributed
• Machines are getting distributed
• Money is getting more distributed

What it does is it augments the peer-to-peer in society. So that peer-to-peer production can move from pure knowledge production to open design for machinery, to actually making things in a more peer-to-peer way. And finding the capital to do it as well.

All these are not changes that are happening over night. But I think the direction of change is in that direction. So in the next ten, twenty, thirty years, we’ll see more of these different steps taken up by different people and creating the basis for another type of society which I call the peer-to-peer society.

Peer To Peer And Alternative Currencies: Michel Bauwens’ View

Open money for me is a particular type of alternative currency which has the capacity to follow different rules.

The important thing is not to have an alternative currency which does the same thing as the old. The important thing is to have new rules for that currency. As long as they are local currencies, they can’t scale. So what I am thinking of are open money systems which are virtual (through the internet) and can therefore scale globally and be an interchange between different communities.

Peer To Peer: How P2P Can Continue to Grow

I think that the most important thing for peer-to-peer to grow is through example. And that is really what the Peer-to-Peer Foundation wants to do. We want to be an inter-networking platform, where people in the open and free, participatory, and community oriented movements (in whatever field they are) can publicize their efforts, can see who else is doing something similar and can share experiences.

And when people see that peer-to-peer ways of doing things are more efficient… are more pleasant… are more democratic, they will find more and more in common with it. So I think that we are at the very beginning of that revolution where people are beginning to see that.

Peer To Peer: The Relationship Between The People and The Technology

The engineers who created the internet did it for scientific research and for peer review and exchanging information amongst peers. And gradually as the internet became more and more popular then there were more and more centralized elements within it. Now this is true, and the Web, for example, is a client-server system. But I think the important thing is not to get blinded by technology.

It’s really about the people. Can you as individuals produce information, share it, distribute it? And can I as a user find it, take it, and use it? As long as those things are guaranteed we have peer-to-peer human relationships.

And of course we have to be careful about the technology. We have to look at it, we have to see who is in charge… who owns it, what the rules are, and we have to be careful about it. But we shouldn’t be blinded by the technology.

It’s really about enabling and empowering human participation. That’s the key. And sometimes what peer-to-peer does is in a pure way it might make systems less efficient. Take Napster, Napster was more efficient because it had a centralized database. But that made it vulnerable. So politically the file-sharing community was obliged to go more purely peer-to-peer not because it was technically superior but because they wanted a system that couldn’t be broken. That is a political decision.

You have to make a balance between going in a more pure peer-to-peer way and maybe having more redundancy, or going toward more efficiency with more centralized elements. But then they are more vulnerable to ownership and control. So this is a technical decision not a philosophical decision. You have to see what is happening concretely in order to make those decisions.

In general we have to have a preference for distributed systems because that is what allows people to be in charge of their own productive resources.

Originally shot and recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on October 8th 2008 as “Peer To Peer: Social, Political, and Economic Issues In A P2P World - A Video Interview with Michel Bauwens“.

About Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens (1958) is a Belgian integral philosopher and Peer-to-Peer theorist. He has worked as an internet consultant, information analyst for the United States Information Agency, information manager for British Petroleum (where he created one of the first virtual information centers), and is former editor-in-chief of the first European digital convergence magazine, the Dutch language Wave. With Frank Theys, he is the co-creator of a 3 hour documentary TechnoCalyps, an examination of the ‘metaphysics of technology’. He taught and edited two French language anthologies on the Anthropology of Digital Society.

Although a student of Ken Wilber’s integral theory for many years, he has recently become critical of aspects of the Wilber-Beck movement, and is a powerful voice for a non-authoritarian peer-to-peer based integral society.

Michel is the author of a number of on-line essays, including a seminal thesis Peer to Peer and Human Evolution, and is editor of P2P News

He now lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he created the Foundation for P2P Alternatives and maintains a blog.

He has taught courses on the anthropology of digital society to postgraduate students at ICHEC/St. Louis in Brussels, Belgium and related courses at Payap University and Chiang Mai University in Thailand.

I have been aware of left and right emispheres brain intelligence since the late 70’s, but nothing until now, has had an emotional and cognitive impact on me as big as this performance by Jill Bolte Taylor at the TED Conference this past February.

Jill Bolte Taylor, neuroscientist recounts her brain stroke story at TED 2008 - see the full video of her story in the rest of this article

Her story, her way of recounting it and the places, the thoughts and the emotions she has lived through in this unique journey, have allowed me as well to re-unite myself with experiences, memories and silent concepts I have experienced and carried with me for a long time.

And when reunited with them again… I have felt a strong warm embrace from within. Like a grandparent hugging you with true, unrestricted love.

The mental places and inner realities recounted by Jill are, as she realizes herself, indeed available to everyone. But finding the path to access them can be as hard as hiking a mountain.

The emotions she transpires and the vision she carries are fantastic eye-openers for anyone wanting to see the immense beauty, and unlimited space for creation and expansion that is indeed available to all of us.

A Stroke of Insight

“Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment.

This is a powerful story of recovery and awareness — of how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another. ”

(Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 18:44
Source: TED)

Full English Text Transcription

The Story

I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia. And as a sister and as a scientist, I wanted to understand, why is it that I can take my dreams, I can connect them to my reality, and I can make my dreams come true — what is it about my brother’s brain and his schizophrenia that he cannot connect his dreams to a common, shared reality, so they instead become delusions?

So I dedicated my career to research into the severe mental illnesses. And I moved from my home state of Indiana to Boston where I was working in the lab of Dr. Francine Benes, in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry. And in the lab, we were asking the question, What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals who would be diagnosed as normal control, as compared to the brains of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective, or bipolar disorder?

So we were essentially mapping the microcircuitry of the brain, which cells are communicating with which cells, with which chemicals, and then with what quantities of those chemicals. So there was a lot of meaning in my life because I was performing this kind of research during the day. But then in the evenings and on the weekends I traveled as an advocate for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

But on the morning of December 10 1996 I woke up to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own. A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain. And in the course of four hours I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman’s body.

If you’ve ever seen a human brain, it’s obvious that the two hemispheres are completely separate from one another. And I have brought for you a real human brain. [Thanks.]

The Human Brain

So, this is a real human brain. This is the front of the brain, the back of the brain with a spinal cord hanging down, and this is how it would be positioned inside of my head. And when you look at the brain, it’s obvious that the two cerebral cortices are completely separate from one another.

For those of you who understand computers, our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor. While our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. The two hemispheres do communicate with one another through the corpus collosum, which is made up of some 300 million axonal fibers. But other than that, the two hemispheres are completely separate.

Because they process information differently, each hemisphere thinks about different things, they care about different things, and dare I say, they have very different personalities.

Right Hemisphere

Our right hemisphere is all about this present moment. It’s all about right here right now. Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information in the form of energy streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems. And then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like. What this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like.

I am an energy being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, all we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect. We are whole. And we are beautiful.

Left Hemisphere

My left hemisphere is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past, and it’s all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment. And start picking details and more details and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information. Associates it with everything in the past we’ve ever learned and projects into the future all of our possibilities.

And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It’s that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world. It’s that little voice that says to me, “Hey, you gotta remember to pick up bananas on your way home, and eat ‘em in the morning.”

It’s that calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. But perhaps most important, it’s that little voice that says to me, “I am. I am.”

And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me “I am,” I become separate. I become a single solid individual separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you.

And this was the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke.

The Stroke Strikes

On the morning of the stroke, I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye. And it was the kind of pain, caustic pain, that you get when you bite into ice cream. And it just gripped me and then it released me. Then it just gripped me and then released me.

And it was very unusual for me to experience any kind of pain, so I thought OK, I’ll just start my normal routine.

So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio glider, which is a full-body exercise machine. And I’m jamming away on this thing, and I’m realizing that my hands looked like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. I thought “that’s very peculiar” and I looked down at my body and I thought, “whoa, I’m a weird-looking thing.”

And it was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality, where I’m the person on the machine having the experience, to some esoteric space where I’m witnessing myself having this experience.

And it was all every peculiar and my headache was just getting worse, so I get off the machine, and I’m walking across my living room floor, and I realize that everything inside of my body has slowed way down. And every step is very rigid and very deliberate.

There’s no fluidity to my pace, and there’s this constriction in my area of perceptions so I’m just focused on internal systems. And I’m standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower and I could actually hear the dialog inside of my body. I heard a little voice saying, “OK, you muscles, you gotta contract, you muscles you relax.”

And I lost my balance and I’m propped up against the wall. And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can’t define where I begin and where I end. Because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall.

And all I could detect was this energy. Energy. And I’m asking myself, “What is wrong with me, what is going on?”

The Stroke Experience

And in that moment, my brain chatter, my left hemisphere brain chatter went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button and — total silence.

And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.

Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online and it says to me, “Hey! we got a problem, we got a problem, we gotta get some help.” So it’s like, OK, OK, I got a problem, but then I immediately drifted right back out into the consciousness, and I affectionately referred to this space as La La Land. But it was beautiful there.

Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world.

So here I am in this space and any stress related to my, to my job, it was gone. And I felt lighter in my body. And imagine all of the relationships in the external world and the many stressors related to any of those, they were gone.

I felt a sense of peacefulness. And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage! I felt euphoria. Euphoria was beautiful — and then my left hemisphere comes online and it says “Hey! you’ve got to pay attention, we’ve got to get help,” and I’m thinking, “I got to get help, I gotta focus.” So I get out of the shower and I mechanically dress and I’m walking around my apartment, and I’m thinking, “I gotta get to work, I gotta get to work, can I drive? can I drive?”

And in that moment my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. And I realized, “Oh my gosh! I’m having a stroke! I’m having a stroke!” And the next thing my brain says to me is, “Wow! This is so cool. This is so cool. How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?”

And then it crosses my mind: “But I’m a very busy woman. I don’t have time for a stroke!” So I’m like, “OK, I can’t stop the stroke from happening so I’ll do this for a week or two, and then I’ll get back to my routine, OK.”

So I gotta call help, I gotta call work. I couldn’t remember the number at work, so I remembered, in my office I had a business card with my number on it. So I go in my business room, I pull out a 3-inch stack of business cards. And I’m looking at the card on top, and even though I could see clearly in my mind’s eye what my business card looked like, I couldn’t tell if this was my card or not, because all I could see were pixels. And the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background and the pixels of the symbols, and I just couldn’t tell. And I would wait for what I call a wave of clarity. And in that moment, I would be able to reattach to normal reality and I could tell, that’s not the card, that’s not the card, that’s not the card. It took me 45 minutes to get one inch down inside of that stack of cards.

In the meantime, for 45 minutes the hemorrhage is getting bigger in my left hemisphere.

I do not understand numbers, I do not understand the telephone, but it’s the only plan I have. So I take the phone pad and I put it right here, I’d take the business card, I’d put it right here, and I’m matching the shape of the squiggles on the card to the shape of the squiggles on the phone pad.

But then I would drift back out into La La Land, and not remember when I come back if I’d already dialed those numbers.

So I had to wield my paralyzed arm like a stump, and cover the numbers as I went along and pushed them, so that as I would come back to normal reality I’d be able to tell, yes, I’ve already dialed that number.

Eventually the whole number gets dialed, and I’m listening to the phone, and my colleague picks up the phone and he says to me, “Whoo woo wooo woo woo.” And I think to myself, “Oh my gosh, he sounds like a golden retriever!” And so I say to him, clear in my mind I say to him. “This is Jill! I need help!” And what comes out of my voice is, “Whoo woo wooo woo woo.” I’m thinking, “Oh my gosh, I sound like a golden retriever.” So I couldn’t know, I didn’t know that I couldn’t speak or understand language until I tried.

So he recognizes that I need help, and he gets me help. And a little while later, I am riding in an ambulance from one hospital across Boston to Mass General Hospital. And I curl up into a little fetal ball.

And just like a balloon with the last bit of air just, just right out of the balloon I felt my energy lift and I felt my spirit surrender.

And in that moment I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life. And either the doctors rescue my body and give me a second chance at life or this was perhaps my moment of transition.

Awakening

When I awoke later that afternoon I was shocked to discover that I was still alive.

When I felt my spirit surrender, I said goodbye to my life, and my mind is now suspended between two very opposite planes of reality.

Stimulation coming in through my sensory systems felt like pure pain. Light burned my brain like wildfire and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise and I just wanted to escape.

Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expensive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle.

And my spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Harmonic.

I remember thinking there’s no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.

But I realized “But I’m still alive! I’m still alive and I have found Nirvana. And if I have found Nirvana and I’m still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana.”

I picture a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace.

And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives. And it motivated my to recover.

Who Are We Then?

Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in and they removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball that was pushing on my language centers.

Here I am with my mama, who’s a true angel in my life. It took me eight years to completely recover.

So who are we?

We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds.

And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world.

Right here right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are — I am — the life force power of the universe, and the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is.

Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere. where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the “we” inside of me.

Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when?

I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be.

And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.

N.B.: Thanks to Suzy who shared with me this wonderful gift.

Originally first published by TED as “Stroke of insight: Jill Bolte Taylor on TED.com” on March 12th 2008

“Biology is war, in which only the fiercest survive. Businesses and nations succeed only by defeating and destroying and dominating competition. Politics is about your side winning at all costs.”

But there is a new narrative that is spreading across and that tells a new story, about how humans and other creatures have and could cooperate together in more efficient and effective ways.

“Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action — and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons.“

Here the video: Nineteen minutes of great learning. Recommended (to schools and university teachers above all).

And what Howard Rheingold exposes so well in this video is the unquestionable need for us, as a living species on this planet, to start studying, understanding and working around the technologies of cooperation and the economies of sharing that will take us to our next evolutionary step.

He sees the characterizing traits of such cooperation technologies to be defined by:

Easy to Use
Email, Blogs, Wikis

Enable Connections
Webs of Links, Markets are Conversations, Blogrolls create blogospheres

Open
no license needed to publish

Group Forming
eBay, Wikipedia, buddy lists

Self-Instructing
View source, Blog clients

Leverage Self-Interest
Google PageRank

“What forms of suffering could be alleviated and what forms of wealth could be created if we knew a little bit more about cooperation?” Howard asks.

What matters the most at this point is in fact only how much me and you are willing to contribute to this cooperative renaissance.

Only by becoming active actors in this new planetary collaborative effort we can put an optimistic signature on the future awaiting us.

“I don’t think that this transdisciplinary discourse is automatically going to happen…

…it is going to require effort.

So, I enlist you to help me get the cooperation project started.

“

Marketing is not all about selling. Marketing is also about communicating clearly and consistently what your product, service or you, are all about. This may and should include showing what you stand for, beyond your specific industry interests, as well as sharing your vision as an active participant in the greater game of life. And indeed, as we move forward in a society that is increasingly dependent on trust and reputation, it may be that values and ethics you hold will come to be valued more than niche know-how and tech expertise.

In the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, Israel has built over 600 kilometers of fence, of which, about 150 are made up of a huge concrete wall. Now, you can paint your own personal public message on the wall, while doing some tangible good to the locals.

Thanks to a new Dutch-Palestinian project called SendMessage, by donating €30, you can have the local sendmessage team spray paint the wall with your own custom message.

Within a few days you also receive three high resolution digital photos that document the action, the overall view and the final results.

Just like the Berlin wall, the West Bank wall has been built to to keep people apart, but now you can also use it to do some social marketing and to actually bring people together! Your message reminds Palestinians trapped inside the Wall they have not been forgotten.

Here my message on the wall:

Who is Behind This

This original idea was born at a icco.nl organized workshop in Ramallah, Palestine, where Dutch advertising pro’s worked with creative, young Palestinians. See www.palodutch.nl to find out more.

The initiative, now accessible at sendamessage.nl, is supported by www.icco.nl, www.feelslikefriday.com and by www.palodutch.nl. According to sendmessage.nl an independent board oversees and checks the activities of this registered charity Foundation, from Amsterdam, Holland. All financial matters are checked by an independent, registered financial controller and there is a public list of board members.

Where Does Your Money Go?

While a small part of your money stays in Holland, to cover the (minimal) costs of setting up and running ‘Sendamessage’, the larger part of it, it is sent to the Palestinian NGOs doing social work locally. They fund small social, cultural and educational projects with the money you and I send in.

More about this Wall

“

• Imagine you are Palestinian. Your family for generations has owned a hotel. Suddenly the hotel is on the other side of the Wall. So, in Israel. You have no permit to visit Israel. You can’t work in your own hotel anymore. The Wall kills business.
• Your husband (Palestinian) always had a permit to work in East Jerusalem. He lived with you and the kids, on the West bank, next door. The Wall now is in between. The husband is forced to live and stay in East Jerusalem. Or else: no job. The Wall tears families apart.
• Your family has 500 olive trees, which is enough to live from. But now the olive trees are behind the Wall. The only person allowed to cross the checkpoint and pick the olives is the 80 year old grandmother, since she is the official owner. The Wall ruins farmers.

Everyday stories in Palestine.

Your text on the Wall reminds Palestinians they have not been forgotten. It helps them keeping hope alive. That’s the message you are sending to them, whatever the words are.”

In short

1) You pay (€ 30), Palestinians spray

2) You get three high-res digital pictures by e-mail (a copy of the photos can also be sent to a friend)

3) You feel good.

More info:

• Sendmessage.nl
• The Wall on Wikipedia, English
• Comments from Btselem.org in Israel, on the other side of the Wall

Order your message on the wall now.

Last week the Federal Communications Commission voted three-to-two a new measure that would further increase media consolidation in the US.

Photo credit: Lev Dolgachov

The new rule pushed through thanks to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin eliminates a thirty-year old ban on companies seeking to own both a newspaper and television or radio station in the same city. Michael Copps was one of two FCC Commissioners to vote against the rule.

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps shows that there are still individuals who are open and willing to take the issue of increasing media consolidation, favoured and supported by US government, and show the sad and dire state this has reached when looked at from the eyes of those interested in providing more access to media to local information, minorities and small independent publishers.

In the speech he gave on December 18th (and which is reported integrally below (video and text) he said:

“Powerful companies are using political muscle to sneak through rule changes that let them profit at the expense of the public interest. They are seeking to improve their economic prospects by capturing a larger percentage of the news business in communities across the United States.“

But in his passionate 25 minute talk, he had many other interesting things to say. Some for example directly addressed at anyone wanting to further mix journalism and profitable business.

“As my own hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, put it in a letter to Joseph Pulitzer, “I have always been firmly persuaded that our newspapers cannot be edited in the interests of the general public from the counting room.”

And I think that applies to broadcast journalism, too.

This is not to say that good journalism is incompatible with making a profit. I believe that both interests can be balanced. I believe both interests must be balanced.

But when TV and radio stations are no longer required by law to serve their local communities and are owned by huge national corporations dedicated to cutting costs through economies of scale, it should come as no surprise that, in essence, viewers and listeners have become the products that broadcasters sell to advertisers.

And that’s you and me I’m talking about.“

I really find Michael Copps speech a breath of fresh air I had been missing for a while. Wether you are American or not, I think it is an act of personal duty for any serious online independent publisher, to go and listen to what this gentleman had to say.

Here is video and text transcript (thanks to Democracy Now!)

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps on the FCC’s Vote to Rewrite the Nation’s Media Ownership Rules

Introduction - The Story

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission voted three-to-two on party lines to approve a measure that would increase media consolidation.

The new approved rule was pushed through by FCC Chair Kevin Martin. This new rule lifts a thirty-year-old ban on companies seeking to own both a newspaper and television or radio station in the same city.

The reaction against the vote has been swift. Close to 200,000 people have signed an open letter urging Congress to overturn the December 18th vote. Less than twenty-four hours after the vote, Democratic Congressmember Jay Inslee and Republican Congressmember Dave Reichert introduced the Media Ownership Act of 2007, that would overturn the new rules by the FCC.

It was Bush-appointed FCC Chair Kevin Martin, now just forty-one years old, who rammed through the rule changes. He’s served President Bush well. As deputy general counsel for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000, he was active during the Florida recount. Before that, he worked for Kenneth Starr at the Office of Independent Counsel during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Rumor has it he may run for governor of his native North Carolina. His wife, Cathie Martin, was a spokeswoman for Vice President Dick Cheney in the midst of the scandal around the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. She now works on Bush’s communications staff.

Here below is the speech of one of the two dissident FCC commissioners, Michael Copps.

Copps has been fighting media consolidation since he was appointed to the FCC in 2001. He is a former history professor. He called the vote a Christmas gift to corporations.

An Illogical Scenario

Full text transcript by Democracy Now!

MICHAEL COPPS: I had an opportunity to read a little bit of George Orwell the other day, and it was good preparation for getting ready to deal with this particular item. I think it would do him proud.

We claim to be giving the news industry a shot in the arm, but the real effect is going to be to reduce total newsgathering.

We shed big crocodile tears for the financial plight of newspapers, yet the truth is that newspaper profits are about double the S&P 500 average. We pat ourselves on the back for holding six field hearings across the United States, yet today’s decision cites not a single word from the thousands of Americans who waited in long lines for an open mike to testify before us.

We say we have closed loopholes, yet we are introducing new ones.

We say we’re guided by public comment, yet the majority’s decision is overwhelmingly opposed by the public, as demonstrated in our record and in public opinion surveys.

We claim the mantle of scientific research, even as the experts say we’ve asked the wrong questions, used the wrong data, and reached the wrong conclusions.

I am not the only one disturbed by this illogical scenario.

The Questions Are the Same

Congress and the American people have done everything but march down here to storm to Southwest D.C. and physically shake some sense into us.

Everywhere we go, the questions are the same: Why are we rushing to encourage more media merger frenzy, when we haven’t addressed the demonstrated harms caused by previous media merger frenzy?

Women and minorities own low single-digit percentages of America’s broadcast outlets, and big consolidated media continues to slam the door in their faces. It’s going to take some major policy changes and a coordinated strategy to fix that. Don’t look for that from this Commission.

Instead, we are told to be content with baby steps to help women and minorities, but the fine print shows that the real beneficiaries will be small businesses owned by white men.

So even as it becomes abundantly clear that the real cause of the disenfranchisement of women and minorities is media consolidation, we give the green light to a new round of—yes, you guessed it—media consolidation.

Who Gets Killed When Big Media Comes to Town?

Local news, local music and local groups so often get shunted aside when big media comes to town.

Commissioner Adelstein and I have heard the plaintive voices of thousands of citizens all across this land of ours in dozens of town meetings and public forums, from newscasters fired by chain owners with corporate headquarters thousands of miles away to local musicians and artists denied airtime because of big media’s homogenization of our music and our culture, from minorities reeling from the way big media ignores their issues and caricatures them as people to women saying the only way to redress their grievances is to give them a shot to compete for use of the people’s airwaves, from public interest advocates fighting valiantly for a return of localism and diversity to small independent broadcasters who fight an uphill battle to preserve their independence.

It will require tough rules of the road to redress our localism and diversity gaps, too. Do you see any such rules like that being passed today?

It’s Time for Americans to Understand What Is Going On

To the idea that license holders should give the American people high quality programming in return for free use of the public airwaves, the majority answers that we need more study of problems that have been documented and studied to death for a decade and more.

Today’s outcome is the same old same old: one more time, we’re running the fast-break for our big media friends and the four corner stall for the public interest.

It’s time for the American people to understand the game that is being played here.

The Story Never Being Told

Big media doesn’t want to tell the full story, of course, but I have heard first-hand from editorial page editors who have told me they can cover any story, save one—media consolidation—and that they have been instructed to stay away from that one. That’s a story for another day, perhaps.

Today’s story is a decision by the majority unconnected to good policy and not even incidentally concerned with encouraging media to make our democracy stronger.

We’re not concerned with gathering valid data, conducting good research or following the facts where they lead us.

Santa’s Present for Big Media

Our motivations are less Olympian and our methodology far simpler: We generously ask big media to sit on Santa’s knee, tell us what it wants for Christmas, and then push through whatever of those wishes are politically and practically feasible.

No test to see if anyone’s been naughty or nice.

Just another big shiny present for the favored few who already own an FCC license—and a lump of coal for the rest of us.

Happy holidays!

How the new Media Consolidation Sausage is Made

If you need convincing of just how non-expertly this expert agency has been acting lately, you could not have a better example than the formulation of the cross-ownership rule that the majority will adopt today.

I know it’s a little detailed to see how the sausage is made, but it’s worth a look.

On November 2, 2007, with just a week’s notice, the FCC announced that it would hold its final media ownership hearing in Seattle.

Despite the minimal warning, 1,100 citizens turned out to give intelligent and impassioned testimony on how they believed the agency should write its media ownership rules. Little did they know that the fix was already in, and that the now infamous New York Times op-ed was in the works announcing a highly detailed cross-ownership proposal.

Put bluntly, those Commissioners and staff who flew out to Seattle, sixteen witnesses, the Governor, the State Attorney General and all the other public officials who came, plus the 1,100 Seattle residents who had chosen to spend their Friday night waiting in line to testify were, as Representative Jay Inslee put it, treated like “chumps.”

Their comments were not going to be part of the agency’s formulation of a draft rule; it was just for show, to claim that the public had been given a chance to participate. The agency has treated the public like children allowed to visit the cockpit in an airliner—you know, when you go up there with your little kid, and you’re not actually allowed to fly the plane, but they’re permitted for a brief, false moment to imagine that they are.

The New York Times op-ed appeared on November 13, the next business day after the Seattle meeting.

That same day, a unilateral public notice was issued, providing just twenty-eight days for people to comment on the specific proposal, with no opportunity for replies. The agency received over 300 comments from scholars, concerned citizens, public interest advocates, and industry associations, the overwhelming majority of which condemned the plan.

But little did these commenters know that on November 28, two weeks before their comments were even due, the draft order on newspaper-broadcast cross ownership had already been circulated.

Once again, public commenters were treated as unwitting and unwilling participants in a Kabuki theater.

Then, last night at 9:44 p.m., just a little more than twelve hours before the vote was scheduled to be held and long after the sunshine period had begun, a significantly revised version of the order was circulated.

Among other changes, the item now granted all sorts of permanent new waivers and provided a significantly altered new justification for the twenty-market limit.

But the revised draft mysteriously deleted the existing discussion of the “four factors” to be considered by the FCC this morning in examining whether a proposed combination was in the public interest. And in its place, the new draft simply contained the cryptic words “[Revised discussion to come].” That’s what we got last night at 9:44.

And although my colleagues and I were not apprised of the revisions, USA Today fared better, because it apparently got an interview that enabled it to present the Chairman’s latest thinking. Maybe we really are the Federal Newspaper Commission.

Finally, at 1:57 this morning, we received a new version of the proposed test for allowing more newspaper-broadcast combinations.

I cannot claim that I fully appreciate the test’s finer points, given the lateness of the hour and the fact that there was no time afforded to parse the finer points of the new rule. But this much is clear: the new version keeps the old loopholes and includes two new ones.

Finally, finally, as I walked out of the office at 11:15 this morning, we received a revised paragraph on the details of the “four factors.” And forgive me if I am unable to speak expertly about what they mean to the substance of this decision.

Not The Way To Do Things

This is not the way to do rational, fact-based, and public interest-minded policymaking.

It’s actually a great illustration of why administrative agencies are required to operate under the constraints of administrative process, and the problems that occur when they ignore that duty.

At the end of the day, process matters. Public comment matters. Taking the time to do things right matters.

A rule reached through a slipshod process and capped by a mad rush to the finish line will, purely on the merits, simply not pass the red face test. Not with Congress. Not with the courts. Not with the American people.

The True Meaning of Independence

It’s worth stepping back for a moment from all the detail here to look at the fundamental rationale behind today’s terrible decision.

Newspapers need all the help they can get, we are told.

A merger with a broadcast station in the same city will give them access to a revenue stream that will let them better fulfill their newsgathering mission.

At the same time, we’re also assured, our rules will require “independent news judgment” (at least among consolidators outside the top twenty markets).

In other words, we can have our cake and eat it, too: the economic benefits of consolidation without the reduction of voices that one would ordinarily expect when two news entities combine.

But how on earth can this be?

To begin with, to the extent that the two merged entities are truly “independent,” then there won’t be the cost savings that were supposed to justify the merger in the first place. On the other hand, if independence merely means maintaining two organizational charts for the same newsroom, then we won’t have any more reporters on the ground keeping an eye on government. Either way, we can’t have our cake and eat it, too.

What Is really Happening Is Simple

In the final analysis, the real winners today are businesses that are in many cases quite healthy, and the real losers are going to be all of us who depend on the news media to learn what’s happening in our communities and keeping an eye on local government.

Despite all the talk you may hear today about the threat to newspapers from the internet and new technologies, today’s order actually deals with something quite old-fashioned.

Powerful companies are using political muscle to sneak through rule changes that let them profit at the expense of the public interest. They are seeking to improve their economic prospects by capturing a larger percentage of the news business in communities across the United States.

The Real Story

Let’s get beyond the weeds of corporate jockeying and inking up our rubber stamps for a new round of media consolidation to look for a moment at what we’re not doing today.

That’s the real story, I think, that the important issues of minority and female ownership and broadcast localism and how they are being short-changed by today’s rush to judgment.

First, on minority and female ownership, racial and ethnic minorities make up 33% of America’s population. They own a scant 3% of all full-power commercial television stations. And that number is plummeting.

Free Press recently released a study showing that during just the past year the number of minority-owned full-power commercial TV stations declined by eight-and-a-half percent, and the number of African American-owned stations—get this—decreased by nearly 60%. It’s almost inconceivable that this shameful state of affairs could be getting worse, yet here we are.

In most places there is something approaching unanimity that this has to change.

Broadcasters, citizens and members of Congress, and every leading civil rights organization agree that the status quo is not acceptable.

Each of my colleagues has recognized, I think, that paltry levels of minority and female ownership are a reality, which makes today’s decision all the more disappointing. There was a real opportunity here to do something meaningful today after years of neglect, and we blew it.

How It Should Have Been

It didn’t have to be this way. I proposed both a process and a solution.

We should have started by getting an accurate account of minority and female ownership. That’s the one that the Congressional Research Service and the Government Accountability Office both just found that we do not have at the FCC.

The fact that we don’t even know how many minority and female owners there are is indicative of how low this issue is on the FCC’s list of priorities.

We also should have convened an independent panel, like proposed by Commissioner Adelstein, and endorsed by many, that would have reviewed all of the proposals before us, prioritized them and made recommendations for implementation.

We could have completed this process in ninety days or less and then would have been ready to act.

Why Are The Fish Dying Downstream?

Today’s item ignores the pleas of the minority community to adopt a definition of “Eligible Entity” that could actually help their plight. Instead, the majority directs their policies at general “small businesses,” a decision that groups like Rainbow/PUSH and the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters assert will do little or nothing for minority owners.

Similarly, MMTC and the Diversity and Competition Supporters conclude that they would rather have no package at all than one that includes this definition.

Lack of a viable definition poisons the headwaters. So should we wonder why the fish are dying downstream?

My Fear Now

So while I can certainly support the few positive changes in this item that do not depend on the definitional issue, such as the adoption of a clear non-discrimination rule, these are overshadowed by the truly wasted opportunity to give potential minority and female owners a seat at the table they have been waiting for and have deserved for so very long.

My fear now is that with cross-ownership done, the attentions of this Commission will turn elsewhere.

On localism, at the same time that we have shamefully ignored the need to encourage media ownership by women and minorities, we have witnessed a dramatic deterioration of the public interest performance of many of our licensees.

We have witnessed the number of statehouse and city hall reporters declining decade after decade, despite an explosion in state and local lobbying. The number of channels have indeed multiplied, but there is far less local programming and reporting being produced.

Are you interested in hearing about local politics from the evening news? About 8% of such broadcasts contain any local political coverage at all, including races for the House of Representatives, and that was during the thirty days before the last presidential election.

Interested in how TV reinforces stereotypes? Consider that the local news is four times more likely to show a mug shot during a crime story if the suspect is black rather than white.

Loss of Localism and Independent Publishers

The loss of localism impacts our music and entertainment, too.

Just this morning, I had an email from a musician who took a trip of several hundred miles and heard the same songs played on the car radio everywhere he traveled.

Local artists, independent creative artists and small businesses are paying a frightful price in lost opportunity.

Big consolidated media dampens local and regional creativity, and that begins, my friends, to mess around pretty seriously with the genius that is America.

Travesty in Disguise

It’s a travesty. We allow the nation’s broadcasters to use half a trillion dollars of the people’s spectrum—for free.

In return, we require that they serve the public interest: devoting at least some airtime for worthy programs that inform viewers, support local arts and culture, and educate our children—in other words, that aspire to something beyond just minimizing costs and maximizing revenue.

What the FCC Should Really Do

Once upon a time, the FCC actually enforced this bargain by requiring a thorough review of a licensee’s performance every three years before renewing the license. But during decades of market absolutism, we pared that down to “postcard renewal,” a rubber stamp every eight years with no substantive review.

So, to begin with, the FCC needs to reinvigorate the license-renewal process.

We need to look at a station’s record every three or four years. I’m disappointed that the majority has so cavalierly dismissed this idea. And we should be actually looking at the record. Did the station show original programs on local civic affairs? Did it broadcast political meetings?

In an era where too many owners live thousands of miles away from the communities that they allegedly serve, do these owners meet regularly with local leaders and the public to receive feedback?

Why don’t we make sure that’s done before we vote to allow more media consolidation?

Why More Media Consolidation?

In 2004, the Commission opened up a notice of inquiry to consider ways to improve localism by better enforcing the quid pro quo between the nation’s broadcasters and the public.

The notice addressed many of the questions raised by earlier dormant proceedings dating from years before.

Today’s localism notice asks more questions and tees up some very meritorious ideas, but again my question: why the rush to vote more consolidation now, consolidation that has been the bane of localism, and why put off systematic actions to redress the harms consolidation has inflicted?

The FCC Cart is Ahead of the Horse

Our FCC cart is ahead of our horse. Before allowing Big Media to get even bigger—and to start the predictable cycle of layoffs and downsizing that is the inevitable result of, indeed the economic rationale for, many types of mergers—we should be enforcing clear obligations for each and every FCC licensee.

Those who look for substantive action on these important issues concerning localism and minorities will look in vain.

Once the majority works its way on cross-ownership, I’m not optimistic about prospects for future action on these fronts.

We’re told that we cannot deal with localism and minority ownership because that would require delay. But these questions have been before the Commission for a decade, and they have been ignored year after year.

These issues could have been—should have been—teed up ten years ago. We begged for that in 2003, when we sailed off on the calamitous rules proposed by Chairman Powell and pushed through in another mad rush to judgment.

Don’t tell me it can’t be done. It should have been done years ago. And we had the chance again this time around.

Now, because of a situation not of Commissioner Adelstein’s or my making, we are accused of delaying just because we want to make things better before the majority makes them worse.

Final Conclusions

When I think about where the FCC has been and where it is today, two final conclusions:

First, the consolidation we have seen so far and the decision to treat broadcasting as just another business has not produced a media system that does a better job of serving most Americans.

Quite the opposite is true.

Rather than reviving the news business, it has led to less localism, less diversity of opinion, less serious political coverage, fewer jobs for journalists, and the list goes on.

Second, I think we have learned that the purest form of commercialism and high-quality news make very uneasy bedfellows.

As my own hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, put it in a letter to Joseph Pulitzer, “I have always been firmly persuaded that our newspapers cannot be edited in the interests of the general public from the counting room.”

And I think that applies to broadcast journalism, too.

This is not to say that good journalism is incompatible with making a profit. I believe that both interests can be balanced. I believe both interests must be balanced.

But when TV and radio stations are no longer required by law to serve their local communities and are owned by huge national corporations dedicated to cutting costs through economies of scale, it should come as no surprise that, in essence, viewers and listeners have become the products that broadcasters sell to advertisers.

And that’s you and me I’m talking about.

Media Democracy Headed in the Wrong Direction

We could have been—should have been—here today lauding the best efforts of government to reverse these trends and to promote a media environment that actually strengthens American democracy rather than weakens it. Instead, we are marking not just a lost opportunity but the allowance of new rules that head media democracy in exactly the wrong direction.

I take great comfort from the conclusion of another critic of the current media system, Walter Cronkite, who said, “America is a powerful and prosperous nation. We certainly should insist upon, and can afford to sustain, a media system of which we can be proud.”

So now it’s up to the rest of us.

The situation isn’t going to repair itself. Big media is not going to repair it. This Commission is apparently not going to repair it.

But the people and their elected representatives and attentive courts can repair it.

A Little Romance with the Public Interest

Last time the Commission went down this road, the majority heard and felt the outrage of millions of citizens and Congress and then the court.

Today’s decision is just as dismissive of good process as that earlier one, just as unconcerned with what people have said, just as heedless of the advice of our oversight committees and many other members of Congress, and just as stubborn—perhaps more stubborn—because this time it knows, or should know, what’s coming.

Last time a lot of insiders were surprised by the country’s reaction. This time they should be forewarned.

I hope, I really hope, that today’s majority decision will be consigned to the fate it deserves and that one day in the not-too-distant future we can look back upon it as an aberration from which we eventually recovered.

We have had a dangerous, decades-long flirtation with media consolidation. I would welcome a little romance with the public interest for a change.

Thank you.

- end of transcript -

Original transcript and Introduction (The Story section) thanks to Democracy Now!.

Get downloadable Real Video stream and .mp3 audio files of this speech.

Related Democracy Now! Stories

• Amy Goodman: The FCC’s Christmas Gift to Big Media
• StopBigMedia.com
• FCC Commissioners Adelstein and Copps Decry Proposals to Ease Caps on Media Consolidation (11/1/2007)
• FCC Chair Kevin Martin Refuses to Delay Vote on Proposed Rewrite of Media Ownership Rules (12/17/2007)

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