Interview with Noam Chomsky on Internet, Society and Activism

The Internet, as a recently emerged technology raises several important questions for social activists. First, we must consider the history of other technologies, such as the radio, print and television. These technologies were once new, and also had the potential to be forces of liberation, but that is not how they turned out. The same is true with the Internet, today. Secondly, the Internet, by itself will not organize people and form communities.

The question on many people’s minds is will the internet be a democratizing force connecting people around the world or will it be commercialized providing corporations a new ways to create needs for unwanted products. This is one of the big issues. In fact, it's kind of reminiscent of what happened with radio in the 1920s and '30s. When radio came along, it was like the Internet today. It was a fixed resource it was obviously going to be government regulated. People of the day began asking: would the radio be devoted to the public interest, and be essentially a democratizing instrument, or would it be turned over to private power, and commercialized?

Groups, (church groups, labour unions were ex extremely weak and split then, & some student groups), but it was a very weak civil society, and it had been a very repressive period just after Wilson's red scare, which had just smashed up the whole society. There were people who tried to organise to get radio to become a kind of a public interest phenomenon; but they were just totally smashed. I mean it was completely commercialized, it was handed over under the pretext it was democratic, cos if you give it to the big corporations then it's pure democracy. So radio in the US became almost exclusively commercialised - they were allowed a student radio station which reached three blocks or something. Now the rest of the world went the other way, almost everywhere else it became public. Which means it was as free as the society is - you know never very free but at least to whatever extent people can affect what a government does, which is something after all - to that extent radio was a public good. In the US, the opposite. Now when TV came along in the US it wasn't even a battle. By then business dominance was so overwhelming that the question never even arose. It became purely private. In the 1960s they allowed public radio and tv but in an interesting way. [The] public could act to some extent through the parliamentary institutions, and congress had imposed some conditions on public interest requirements on the big networks, which means they had to spend two percent of their time at 3am Sunday allowing a community group on...or something...and then every year they had to file reports to the federal communications commission saying, 'yeah here is the way we met our responsibility', which was mainly a nuisance as far as CBS was concerned. Actually I knew someone who worked in one of their offices and she told me they had to spend all sorts of time lying about what they were doing and it was a pain in the neck. At some point they realised it would be better to just get the burden off their heads and allow a marginal public system which would be very poorly funded and marginalised and under state corporate control anyway, and then they wouldn't even have to pretend any longer, and that's pretty much how those two modes of communications turned out.

There was a struggle over it. The public interest groups, church groups, and labour unions who wanted the radio to be a public interest entity, but essentially they lost. It was totally commercialized. And the United States, I think, was alone in the world in that respect. Every other country went the other way. When television came along, again the US split from the rest of the world, but it wasn't even an issue this time; business just took it over, period.

We're now facing a similar question with the Internet, and which way it goes is crucial to the future of society. It could turn out to be a democratizing force, with public participation, or it could end up being a mechanism for corporate propaganda, creating artificial wants, enabling us to buy things faster and so on. If people and communities do not act quickly to counter the push by corporation to control the future of the Internet then it is likely going to be the latter, just because of the balance of forces.

I think the way the technology is likely to go is unpredictable... if I had to make a guess, my guess would be a corporate take-over It does not have to turn out to a commercialized tool for corporate control and propaganda. It could be very a significant instrument in promoting human rights and social justice. The future of the Internet is something that people ought to fight about, because it does not have to turn out to be mostly negative. The Pentagon is not going to give people as a gift a technique for free communication which can undermine the major media; if its going to turn out that way it will be because of struggle like any other victory for freedom.

and that to the extent that it's so far tax payer supported and it's a government institution or whatever people call it, in fact it's a military installation/system at base and they are letting it go, and the reason they are letting it go is cos they are not concerned about the positive effects it has, because they probably feel, maybe correctly, that it's overwhelmed by the negative effects...and these are things people have to achieve - they are not going to be given as gifts...like

There is no technology which is inherently democratic or no technology which is inherently oppressive for that matter, technology is usually a fairly neutral thing. The technology doesn't care really whether it's used for oppression or liberation, it's how people use it.

As late as about 1994, people like say, Bill Gates, had no interest in the Internet. He wouldn't even go to conferences about it, because he didn't see a way to make a profit from it. Now it's being handed over to private corporations, and they tell you pretty much what they want to do. They want to take large parts of the Internet and cut it out of the public domain altogether, turn it into intranets, which are fenced off with firewalls, and used simply for internal corporate operations.

They want to control access, and that's a large part of Microsoft's efforts: control access in such a way that people who access the Internet will be guided to things that *they* want, like home marketing service, or diversion, or something or other. If you really know exactly what you want to find, and have enough information and energy, you may be able to find what you want. But they want to make that as difficult as possible. And that's perfectly natural. If you were on the board of directors of Microsoft, sure, that's what you'd try to do.

Well, you know, these things don't ‘have’ to happen. The public institution created a public entity that can be kept under public control. But that is going to mean a lot of hard work at every level, from Congress down to local organizations, unions, other citizens' groups which will struggle against it in all the usual ways.

Like everything else, it's a question of choice. The Internet, after all, was a public creation. The public didn't know about it - those things don't happen democratically - but for about 30 years the Internet was developed - the initiatives, the ideas, the funding, the risks - that was almost entirely within the state sector. The US has a very dynamic state sector in the economy, covered often by the Pentagon or something else, and within that sector the Internet was developed, the Pentagon, the National Science Foundation, the universities, private corporation - but usually under government contract - and some others. The Web, for example, was created in an international laboratory, the IAUG Physics laboratory in Geneva. These largely public creations were then handed over as a huge gift to private corporations, just few years ago, 1995. How they were handed over nobody even knows. The decision is very hard to disentangle. Nobody has really found out much about it. Once the system is handed to private power, they will naturally try to use it in their own way. One media analyst, Norman Solomon, just did a statistical count of reference to the Internet in the major media over the past decade and he found that up until about 1995, a large majority of them referred to the Internet as an "information superhighway," and since 1995 overwhelmingly they describe in terms of "e-commerce." Now that's a change and a shift from a publicly based institution to a privately based institution. The Internet retains its capacity to be used independently, in ways of the kind you describe. Seattle organizing was a case in point. The organizing a couple of years earlier against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment was substantially Internet-based. The same is true elsewhere. The overthrow of the Suharto government in Indonesia, in which students had a big role, was assisted materially by electronic Internet organising, internal to Indonesia around the concentrated power centres. There are plenty of other examples. So it has a liberating potential, there's no doubt of it. On the other hand the corporate structures who are taking it over want to prevent it. They want it to be used in quite a different way. They would like it to be used to subjugate people and separate them from one another. They're pretty frank about it. To quote the public relations industry, they want to focus people's attention on the more superficial things in life, like fashionable consumption, to satisfy what are called invented wants, created wants. Anyone who is alive knows that a good part of your life is devoted, essentially subjected, to such efforts, from infancy, when advertising aimed at children begins. So that's a major effort. There will also surely be efforts to make it difficult for people to use the Internet in ways that are subversive of concentrated power. So access to the Internet is through a small number of portals, entry points, and those are by now controlled by major corporations, like AOL-Warner, and they're not going to make life easy for people who want to, say, organise for Seattle. They're going to try to make it hard. They probably can't make it impossible. The nature of the system is such that you can't - maybe its technically unfeasible even to block any such use, but you can surely make it difficult, by distributing fast and slow channels, by leading people through particular paths. There's all kinds of techniques that can be used to make it extremely hard to use the free resources of the Internet in ways other than those intended by the corporate owners. In fact you could say the same about the print media. I mean its not illegal in the United States and Canada for you, say, to publish a newspaper to compete with Conrad Black. You're legally entitled to do it. But the organisation and structure of the system is such that, in effect, you can't. The effort will certainly be to turn the Internet in that direction as well. Whether that succeeds is matter of choice. For example there's no principled reason surely why this enormous gift of the public to private power can't be rescinded.

The present influence of technology and global public information networks - the technology of the so-called information revolution, on the mass media power is a double-edge sword and you can already see the competing/conflicting tendencies developing. Up until now it has been a monopoly of relatively privileged sectors, of people who have access to computers in universities and so on. For example, in the academic world it became a useful way of communicating scientific results, but in activism it has been used fairly efficiently in distributing information and setting up interconnections.

The same is true of cable TV for example, theoretically you can have dozens of cable television channels, and in fact, in the US there are laws that require the major corporations to fund independent cable stations. Well the net effect is that virtually nothing happens and the reason is because [of] the distribution for resources, energy and organisation, so what you are saying is theoretically true. But the way it works out in practice is a reflection of the state of activism and organisation and resource allocation and so on. Incidentally the public nets where everyone is talking to one another have, in my opinion, the same degraded character as the individual e-mail messages; people are just too casual in what comes across...the effect is you often get good things, but buried...the quality of what people are doing is actually declining because of their intense involvement in these e-mail interactions which are have such an overwhelming character when you get involved in them. And it's kind of seductive, not personally for me, but I know people get seduced by the computer and sitting there banging around at it. It has a negative potential and a certain positive potential, but I think it's a double edged sword

There are numerous positive consequences of new technology such as the Internet for grassroots organizing. For example, IGC Internet with PeaceNet, EcoNet, WomensNet and Anti-racismNet strategically uses the Internet by providing relevant information, action alerts and specialist Bulletin Boards where groups with particular interests and concerns interact and discuss all sorts of things. Z magazine, an independent left journal has a Z bulletin board which activists can subscribe to. They are now bringing in the readership from around the world, and on some issues, such as East Timor, it has been an invaluable organizing tool. It has enabled organizers to disseminate information about issues that would not normally be picked up by the mainstream media. For example, information about East Timor is coming from Australia where a few people control the media. With the Internet such information is spread quickly, bypassing the mainstream media. Events such as the Dili massacre are quickly made known using the Internet.

There are, however, several downsides to the Internet. One aspect which is hard to quantify, but I see it very clearly myself, is the de-personalized and isolating nature of communication using the Internet. I am deluged with email. I believe that this is a reflection of the fact that global society is very atomized and people feel very much alone. People think they are the only person who thinks in a particular way. Society has become so atomized, broken down and de-personalized that people have lost the normal bonds of association and communication. People turn to email and chat room to gain a sense of community belonging.

A major concern is the plan by the corporate world to take over the Internet and use it as a technique of domination and control. In fact I recall reading an article in maybe the Wall Street Journal or somewhere which described the great potential of this system and they gave two examples to illustrate their point; one for the female market and one for the male market. Of course the ideal was to have every human being spend every spare moment alone in front of the tube and now it's interactive! So for women they will be watching some model advertising some crazy product which no sane human being would want, but with enough PR aura around, and since it's interactive they can have home delivery in ten minutes. For men, they said every red blooded American male is supposed to be watching the super bowl. Now it's just passive and you watch the super bowl and drink beer with your buddies, and so on, but with interactivity what we can do is, before the coach sends in the next play, everyone in the audience can be asked to punch in what they think it ought to be. So they are participating, and then after the play is called they can flash on the screen 43% said it should have been a kick instead of a pass...or something, so there you have it something terrific for men and women. And this was not intended as a caricature; that's exactly the kind of thing they have in mind and you can see it make sense ...if I were a PR guy working for Warner Communications that's just what I'd be working on. Those guys have billions of $ that they can put into this, and the whole technology including the Internet can go in this direction or it can go any other direction. Incidentally the whole thing is simply reliving things that have gone on with earlier communication technologies and it's well worth having a look at what happened. Some very clever left type academics and media people have charted the course of radio in US since the 20s. In the US things took quite a different course from the rest of the world in the 1920s, the United States is a very business run society with a very high class business community. Like vulgar Marxists with all the values reversed, their stuff reads like Maoist tracks have the time just change the words around.

That there will be such efforts is completely predictable. There's no point blinding ourselves to elementary reality. Though whether they succeed or not depends on the forms that popular struggle takes. Going back to Seattle, we should not be misled. I'm sure you know this. People didn't just show up spontaneously on the streets of Seattle. That was due to years of intensive educational and organizing efforts, mostly at the local level, which finally kind of crystallized in Seattle. Now that's the way things are done.