Section E of...

The Medium is

The Middleman

For a Revolution

Against Media

First Published January 1, 1997

With Immedia Summer 2002 Updated Author's Notes

by Al Giordano

Did You Miss the New Introduction?...

The Masses vs. The Media

or the first three sections?...

The Medium Is The Middleman

and

Three Immediate Questions

and...

Twelve Immediate Inquiries:

I. Unnecessary Labor & the Broken Promises of Technology

II. Technological Imprinting,

III. The Political Illusion

Today:

IV. Refusing to be Mediated

and, V. The Cyber-Dilemma

IV. Refusing to be Mediated

At present, Media Workers are quite defensive and thin-skinned when information surfaces that threatens to burst their own illusions about themselves and their role in society and the economy. They are ever on guard against members who will not keep the dirty little secret of their own illusory power. (This inquiry, to say the least, narrows my own "market niche" as a writer. these ideas, and my passion for them, place me very far, I acknowledge, outside of Media as career.) The Media is overpopulated by a new class of individuals who have, in essence, the Souls of Middlemen; having lost the creative edge themselves, their sole reason-for-being is to mediate other people's creativity.

And yet, there is (I can think of ) no revolt, except for one with a battle cry of "refuse to be mediated," 19 that can successfully resist the co-optation process that has diffused social movements so effectively in the late 20th Century.

Refusing mediation is a near-impossible goal in total. However, the process of refusal in creative endeavors holds promise as a successful tactic: once adopted by a critical mass of writers, artists, musicians, performers, craftspersons and creative individuals (a broad term we define in more detail later in this text), an "immedia" movement begins to establish some spectacular terrain from which it can launch ideas, concepts and language. The goal of this new language is to destabilize and begin to dismantle the techno-trance by which the Media holds the public in its illusions. 20

Some strains of this "artistic resistance" have already established terrain in the form of the Do-It-Yourself -- or D.I.Y. -- movement among self-producing musicians that emerged out of punk rock, and in the "zine" phenomenon of self-publishing (we are, though, disappointed by the lack of immedia consciousness or aspiration to be found in most publications of the "punk zine" genre, especially the "fan zine" phenomenon which, paradoxically, genuflects at the altar of consumer products). Still, an ethic of distrust toward Middlemen in the music industry has spread to many talents, accomplished and accomplishing, within the music world.

Similar thrusts have been witnessed in the visual and performing arts, indeed, one of our findings while conducting our "immarket research" is that some visual artists and cartoonists have been confronting and subverting the mediations of galleries, museums and the curatorial classes for some time already. In this, they (and also some theatrical artists) have developed street tactics for their grids of expression that may apply to others.

Visual and performing artists have thus found and created, at least temporarily, cracks of irony in theMediating systems (i.e. the bypassing of galleries and curators via the internet; or the funding of street art through a gallery sale). We're not suggesting a refusal that is so absolute and rigid that it denies the truth that everyone must eat; mutant times call for mutant tools. However, we issue a provocation: Visual and perfoming artists, like creative people in all other grids, have not yet coalesced to break the walls of ink and electrons erected by the news and entertainment Media; this frontier awaits your visionary attention. And does not an "artist" live for the frontier?

Literary and journalistic artists, in fact, are way behind the curve in this effort. In part, that's because written and spoken word are so reliant on language -- and language is what the Media controls best.

The one area where written word appears to have shaken off the shackles of mediation and censorship is the Internet -- where tens of millions of individuals are presently pouring much of their creativity. This appearance of Free Speech has been strengthened by efforts to control speech in cyberspace; as if mere legislation confirms the existence of what it opposes. But "Free Cyberspace" is a myth, regardless of whether or not governments leave the Internet uncensored. 21

V. The Cyber-Dilemma

For those of us who were raised on television (a one-way screen to which we could not talk back) the Internet seemed to be a kind of liberation: a two-way screen to which we could indeed reply. And cyberspace, like the telephone through which it exists, carried practical advantages for communication with other individuals and subculture in an alienating world.

The sheer joy at being able to "talk back" to our technological media has fueled a kind of religious enthusiasm about cyberspace in specific, "New Media" in general, and in technology overall.

Writers, in particular, have embraced the "editor-free" environment of cyberspace and its e-mail, conferencing and web opportunities, as a grand blessing upon literature. But in doing so, we have ignored, to our peril, the ways in which the Internet, like all Media, over-mediates us.

First and foremost, is the cyber-screen's demand that we remain in sedentary position -- seated in front of computers -- to participate.

Second, is the increased capacity for surveillance offered to institutions and individuals by cyberspace.

Third, there is the delicate question of labor: We thought that cyberspace was better for us than television because of its interactive components. But at some point the realization creeps in: Television, for all its irritations, at least is not a work station.

Dr. Gary Greenberg, in his book, The Self on the Shelf: Recovery Books and the Good Life (1994, SUNY press) examined the question, "What kind of self is being helped, and what kind of help is being offered to it by these self-help books?" A similar question must be asked about Internet technology: what kind of self is being processed through these screens?

To labor at a computer screen for eight hours a day is profoundly alienating; it breeds anti-social attitudes by isolating individuals from human contact. Alienated labor is nothing new. What has emerged, though, in the past 40 years of Western Culture, is a new kind of citizen: the alienated consumer. He and she live life vicariously through Screens that keep him and her alienated not only from others, but from him and herself. Participation in cyberspace requires the invention of a "new persona" -- one dimensional, as everything else on the computer screen -- that the participant comes to believe is himself or herself. But it is only a representation, severely limited by both technology and self-censorship imposed by the limits to the mind and body that one must acquiesce to in order to be part of the "cyber-revolution." This is not to say that without the Media's screens the modern man and woman would not suffer alienations. We are saying, instead, that the Screen calcifies alienation so as to render it unmanageable; an absolute power over Daily Life.

The TV generation lived life vicariously through actors and cartoon heroes on a screen. The cyber-generation, in a new twist, makes the representation of the participant into the hero. But that protagonist is no less alienated from the whole person within than those played by actors and actresses who never meet their audience face-to-face. Because of the shrouded nature of this self-detachment, the cyberprotagonist, in fact, is more alienated.

We're now faced with an emerging new class of technologically literate individuals who, to attain those skills, have sacrificed large chunks of lived human experience. Media workers, long from the "educated" classes, have never quite been in touch with the public. New technologies have widened this chasm: the individuality once displayed by some Media workers now is roadkill on the Information Highway. The "Free Speech Class" has hardened into a fixed, stationary entity, even while its individual members who staff the omnipresent Media technologies move from job to job. And this over-alienated "cyber caste" now encompasses most members of the news and entertainment media, which has consequences for us all.


Author's Updated Notes About this Section:

19. The battle cry of "refuse to be mediated" has proved very difficult for me, individually, and for Narco News. On the one hand, we have freed ourselves from the pressures of advertisers, editors and other undue influences. This has been one of the successes -- and, indeed, appeals -- of Narco News. On the other hand, some self-criticism is necessary. Narco News has only marginally succeeded in "making a better show outside the screen," as stated on a previous page. It has certainly "made a better show" INSIDE of the screen -- and to the extent we make ourselves and our readers more dependent, not less, on the Internet, we have mixed feelings about this outcome.

20. I repeat: The all-important task of repealing the prohibition on drugs -- the first-tier goal of Narco News, as expressed in our Opening Statement of April 18, 2000 -- may not be possible unless the power of the commercial media to block this necessary sea-change is weakened. In order to weaken that illigitimate power, we must begin to drag the media off its own turf and onto ours, the realm of daily life. An Immedia Project is thus being reborn with the creation of a two-tiered strategy of continuing to agitate, here, inside the screen with this transgressive concept of Authentic Journalism about the "War on Drugs" from Latin America, while, simultaneously, creating a space outside of the Internet and media that acts upon them by creating real news that nobody will be able to resist reporting and creative souls everywhere will hopefully find this challenge as irresistable as we do. More on all this in a moment...

21. Here is where the rubber hits the road (and why I have resisted, until now, posting this document on the Internet): There is indeed an inherent contradiction or paradox in the critique offered by "The Medium is the Middleman" toward cyberspace and the use of said cyberworld to distribute it. I'm not going to get into arguments with anybody over this: It is what it is. "Mutant Times Call for Mutant Tools." Perhaps, in the five years since 1997, the fundamentalism of cyber-enthusiasm has waned enough that the ideas can be considered on their merits without a lot of defensive hysteria of the kind that it provoked during the dot.com boom. (Perhaps, now, during the dot.com bust, the ideas expressed have been sufficiently bolstered by the real life experience of this technology; one can hope.)

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Next: VI. Free Speech and Free

Speakership, and, VII. Middlemen

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Mutant Times Call for Mutant Tools