By Andrew Levy

On Thursday, July 20, among the palm trees, assorted flowers and other greenery in the garden of El Rio, one of the Mission District's favorite party bars, five panelists representing several of the top organizations, Web sites and leaders in the progressive media world shared their ideas about the future of the Internet in the chill San Francisco evening air. And believe me, by 8:30 p.m. it was so chilly that the moderator, Larry Bensky, looked at the crowd of approximately 100 shivering in their Polartec vests, a half-dozen of whom were waiting in line for the microphone, and suggested we call it a night, move inside and continue the conversation over drinks. We did.

"Internet 2010," a panel of media-issues editors and activists, was organized by myself in cooperation with Andrea Buffa, executive director of Media Alliance, the San Francisco training and resource center for media workers, political activists and community organizations. Danny Schechter, executive editor of MediaChannel, was joined on the panel by Brooke Biggs, producer and editor-in-chief of Mojo Wire; Davey D of www.daveyd.com and www.rapstation.com; Lisa Gray Garcia, editor of Poor Magazine and Poor News Network; and three computer performance artists/media activists calling themselves Los Cybrids: Cybrid puto #1 (John Leaños), Cybrid puto #2 (René Garcia) and Cybrid #3 (Praba Pilar). Larry Bensky currently hosts KPFA's "Sunday Salon" and is a professor of broadcasting and journalism at Cal State Hayward and Stanford University.

Three major themes on the future and culture of the Net and progressive media emerged that night: 1) the marginalization of race and real-world economics in Internet journalism created by the influence of the info-entertainment genre offered up by the dot-coms and corporate-media spin-meisters; 2) a questioning of the assumptions made by progressive organizations whose use of the word "we" too often serves to flatten and generalize Internet diversity, coalition building and community; 3) the culpability of progressive organizations on the Web in inadvertently furthering capitalist globalization and class warfare.

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De-Mobilization Of Free Expression?

In September 1993 there were 152 Web sites on the World Wide Web. Today, there are millions of sites with content ranging from homepages of people's pets to vast retail enterprises; from online branches of global media powers to grassroots publications made possible by the Net. With that scenario as backdrop, the panelists were asked for their thoughts on the following questions: What will the Internet look like in 2010? What should it look like? And how can nonprofit and/or independent organizations be free of corporate controls? Free of corporate capital, how does one fight corporate attempts to control the architecture of the Internet with alternative models to keep the Internet open, interactive and supportive of free expression?

(If one harbors doubts that corporations are investing, intensively, in mechanisms to monitor, respond to, squelch, and literally delete from the Web so-called "anticorporate activism," i.e., to punish the free speech of the consumer, citizen, disgruntled Protestant, or what have you, have a look at a new product from Dallas-based eWatch sold through a public relations agency called Edelman Interactive and PR Newswire. As reporter Marcia Stepanek reports in "Now Companies Can Track Down Their Cyber-Critics," Business Week Online (July 7, 2000), "companies can now monitor what people do or say on the Web and respond." How does this new product work? eWatch calls the technique "info-cleansing," reports Stepanek. "We can neutralize the information appearing online, identifying the perpetrators behind uncomplimentary postings and rogue Web sites," the company's online promo material says. Then they can "remove offending messages from where they appear in cyberspace." Rogue Web sites? As Stepanek warns, "being personally targeted for a cyber reeducation campaign, or worse" by cyber PR flaks sounds "like a PR crisis just waiting to happen.")

MediaChannel's Danny Schechter began the evening's debate by expanding upon Larry Bensky's opening remarks concerning transnational conglomerates' domination of broadcasting and cable mediums and their incursions into Internet space. He described how the conglomerates further the commercialization of public space, the decline of journalism, the denigration of ideas of public service and the debasing of political culture. Danny focused his last five minutes on describing how MediaChannel, in partnership with OneWorld, was created in answer to these trends. With an international affiliate base of 470 (and growing) media-issues, activist and arts organizations, a database of global media organizations and liaisons with media-watch groups, university journalism departments, professional organizations, anti-censorship monitors, trade publications and others, MediaChannel is meant to inform and inspire social debate about the state of our media today — to amplify all of our voices. MediaChannel presents international perspectives on structures and trends in media rather than on personalities and corporate personnel shifts. Danny's last word: Organize.

Wealthy, White, And Western

Brooke Biggs of Mother Jones' online magazine Mojo Wire spoke with emotion about the uncertainty and awareness of obstacles with which she personally accepts the challenges of the Internet economy and her wish to get the news to a readership that she believes is hungry for alternative views and information unavailable in the mainstream media. The obstacles are large. As Brooke reminded the audience, only two percent of the world population now has Internet access. They are, for the most part, wealthy, white and Western. Given the present so-called digital divide, the task is to find ways to help the excluded voices be heard. Suggesting that it's impossible to know which way the wind will blow, she nevertheless offered the evening's audience a very positive and hopeful model, i.e., the corporations do not own the Internet. It's too vast, changing and unpredictable. And she believes that ultimately it will be the audience, the readers, that will decide what survives, what will be deemed most valuable, not the PR marketers, try as they will. When asked by Larry what she would like to see happen at Mojo Wire ten years hence, Brooke answered: more collaborations with other progressive publications, more sharing of aggregate content, more grassroots initiatives to renew and mobilize critically intelligent debates and actions in local communities. In Brooke's words: "People are listening today, more people will be listening tomorrow."

Not A Substitute For Communicating With People

Davey D exhorted the El Rio crowd not to build any kind of communication around things one didn't control, e.g., don't get censored by accepting advertisements from companies that would censor your content. (One need only remember Gloria Steinem's devastating description of the pressure advertisers put upon Ms. Magazine in its original incarnation to understand the significance of Davey D's warning.) Instead, he urged, build Web sites around things that reflect one's self. Only by remaining loyal to one's personal sense of ethics, integrity and purpose, by not approaching entertainment, news and its commerce as a fast track to becoming an Internet millionaire, can we make the Internet what Davey D believes it should be — free and freely accessible. At the same time, Davey D did acknowledge the importance of taking care of business and taking care of oneself. How? Simple, really — carefully pick and choose sponsors. Those parties holding the biggest investment wallets may not have your best interests at heart. Davey also found common ground with Danny Schechter's emphasis on organizing with sympathetic individuals and groups to further one's social and political goals. He reminded everyone that the Internet should never be mistaken as communication in itself; it is merely one tool of communication. Davey argued that it's more important to talk with people face to face in one's neighborhoods and extended communities. E-mails are fine, but the physical presence of other people while sharing one's thoughts and feelings is irreplaceable. Committing time to listening to others in person is how progressive coalitions and media are built.

Mass Anointment Of The Poor

I remember a discussion several years ago that took place on the SUNY Buffalo poetics e-mail discussion list. Unfortunately, I was not a participant on the list at that time, as the Humanities Department at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where I was teaching on a Mellon Fellowship, was not equipped with Internet connections, nor could I afford the computer equipment necessary to get online myself. However, one of my IIT colleagues reported to me that an excited discussion by poets about the potential of the Internet to liberate and democratize the world was getting a lot of buzz. I thought I'd better check in. Assisted by my friend, I forwarded a message to the list questioning the utopian fantasy upon which the premise of an inclusive democratization of the world's people by way of the Internet was based. Among several notions and facts, I mentioned that planetary democracy was unlikely to be achieved by even the most well-intended use of any one technology. Further, the problem was a straight and simple one: access. (Although this conversation took place approximately seven years ago, the limits to access continue today.) Over 90 percent of the world's population is not participating in the Internet dialogue for the simple reason that they don't yet have access to telephones or telephone lines, let alone computers. Given that situation, the politics underwriting Utopia on the World Wide Web seemed naïve at best. The Web is largely the province of the affluent and educated.

The fourth panelist to speak, Lisa Gray Garcia, from Poor News Network, spoke eloquently and with force from the position of those people excluded by the globalization of the Internet economy due to poverty, race and homelessness. A former homeless person herself, Lisa spoke of the real-world difficulties in obtaining the means to represent one's voice when struggling on a daily, minute-by-minute basis to acquire enough money for food and occasional shelter. In the lives of the poor and homeless the Internet is an extreme luxury — the province of the elite. Therefore, she argued, the poor are those most in need of the tools that will allow them to speak out in a public forum, to have their voices and perspectives heard in a medium — the Internet — that might counteract the commercialization found on the broadcast networks and in the major papers, which have as a matter of course excluded the disenfranchised, the poor, the homeless and people of color, except to portray them as criminal and beyond "rehabilitation." Lisa's parting shot to the assembled: "Give us a G4!"

The Internet Should Not Exist

"Get the fuck off the Web!" John Leaños, a.k.a. Cybrid puto #1, represented the performance and activist group Los Cybrids at the panel table. Standing close by was René Garcia, a.k.a. Cybrid puto #2, sporting a black leather coat, shirt and tie, dark sunglasses and an enormous wig of black curly hair, and equipped with a headset microphone and metal briefcase reminiscent of the virus-carrying case in Terry Gilliam's "Twelve Monkeys." Hovering, then aggressively striding through the crowd was Cybrid puta #3 (Praba Pilar), also equipped with headset, transparent candy-colored cellular phone and black curly wig of impressive proportion. The Los Cybrids trio, in a thoughtfully choreographed and deliberately stagy manner, turned toward their fellow progressive panelists with this statement, more-or-less: We can't believe what we're hearing. The Internet, the Web, is the number-one tool in the arsenal of capitalist globalization. Why is a group of progressive journalists and activists wasting time talking about how they can get on the Internet and protect it against corporate domination? The Internet is the first step in the pacification of all resistance, cultural and aesthetic, economic, journalistic, activist and all combinations thereof, Los Cybrids warned. By championing work on the Internet, progressives are acting as the first agents of gentrification (similar to the initial wave of artists who settled Soho in New York City twenty-five years ago so that it might become the shopping center for a hip and affluent international shopping class a generation later) for international conglomerates only interested in their stockholders returns and CEO's stock-options package.

Their message was delivered in a deadpan style both ironic and impassioned. Their critique of rampant globalization proclaimed that "the Internet should not exist!" Their remedy? The implantation of bacteria (not viruses) that would destroy the hardware upon which the entire Internet depends, while leaving individuals' PCs unharmed. In other words, progressives need to organize to dismantle the Internet, not promote their work on it. Los Cybrids were certainly a welcome entertainment, but also served as serious provocateurs rather than negators of their fellow panelists' ideas. The most obvious flaw in their argument, particularly in light of the experience shared by Lisa Gray Garcia, is that their position, although correct in many ways, is also, as Lisa was quick to point out, elitist — not dissimilar to the United States saying to so-called third world countries: "Say, you can't cut down your forests and develop an industrial base because it'll contribute to the further degradation of the world's environment, depleting natural resources "we" need to sustain our standard of living. Sorry. You're too late. Better luck next time. Need any military hardware? We'll give you a loan."

Mediated Media Activists

Is the Internet a viable, non-viable or mediated version of activism? What emerged in the end was that, while there is no unanimous solution, there was agreement on the problems — and that without action, focus and coalition building, the promise and the public space of the Net are at risk. Now, if you haven't already, take a few minutes and look at some of the streaming video clips above. Then, if you have time, please take a look at MediaChannel's Affiliate Directory to see who's doing what, where, and how you can be involved.

Many thanks to the panelists and to the co-sponsors of Internet 2010: Alternet, Freedom Archives, Independent Press Association, Institute for Global Communications (IGC), Mother Jones Magazine, Poor Magazine, Project Censored, and Whispered Media. Giants all.

A special thank you to Mary Ellen Churchill, video producer, editor and film engineer for videotaping the event, and to Kali Boyce, audio engineer and publisher of the new trip-hop site Ektrip.com for tape-recording the panel talks.

Thanks also to Whispered Media for the after-party at the LAB and to the folks at El Rio.

- Andrew Levy (andrew@mediachannel.org, MediaChannel affiliate manager, is a poet and essayist (his titles can be found at www.spdbooks.org) and co-editor of the journal Crayon.

- Doug George (doug@mediachannel.org, MediaChannel production designer, was the multimedia producer for this feature.