Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  West German biases and aggressive commerce combine to undermine both dissident and traditional East German culture. In the summer of 1990, shortly after the elections and only six months after the collapse of the East German regime, reporters called to the little town of Kommlitz near Leipzig discovered a vast bibliobonfire. Ten million books had been torched, including volumes by such dissident authors as Christa Wolf, Stefan Heym, Hermann Kant, and Anna Seghers—not as an act of political repression but in a kind of instant and terminal remaindering of a stock of books that publishers did not wish to deal with. The old books were cheap and serious. The new are expensive and frivolous. New stores in the east carry more Stephen King than Stefan Heym, and prefer travel guides, tax advice, and language texts to classical authors. Books that could once be had for $4 now cost $30 (a month’s rent in the former East Germany).18

  In place of the radical broadsides and political magazines published by samizdat writers, the new western-owned magazines avoid political subjects altogether. Lubos Beniak, the editor of Mlady Svet, a Czech weekly, describes changes that are common throughout central Europe: “People are sick of politics. They want to be entertained, they want snappy journalism, they even want trash.”19 Hungary’s most prestigious radical paper, Reform, with a circulation of over 400,000, was purchased by Rupert Murdoch in 1990. In 1992, its editor Peter Toke admitted: “It was exciting under the Communists, and it was easier because it was obvious what to attack. Since the revolution we’ve been in an identity crisis, and Mr. Murdoch is not happy at all.” New German editors are looking for “readable rock critics, witty headlines, good crossword puzzles … classified advertisements.”20 That should placate Mr. Murdoch.

  The persistence of the East-West rift within Germany along with the costs privatization has imposed on the East, where official unemployment rates hover at 16 percent and the real rate is above 30 percent, is of grave concern. So are plummeting birth rates, even more precipitous than those of Russia. In eastern Germany between 1989 and 1993, the rate per thousand people fell 60 percent while mortality rates surged, leading demographer Nicholas Eberstadt to warn that the transition from a planned economy to a liberal market order entails “far-reaching, often traumatic adjustments.”21 Yet these grim statistics do not tell the whole story. Privatization will eventually improve industrial output, and markets will offer those who never had goods the chance to get them. Reunification will gradually impose a reality that resentment cannot resist. But what the German case suggests is exactly what the Russian case establishes: that McWorld’s markets, tied here to the West German political and economic leviathan, have not and probably cannot produce a democratic civil society; indeed, in East Germany, they helped destroy one in its infancy. McWorld is the problem, not the solution.

  19

  Securing Global Democracy in the

  World of McWorld

  THE EVIDENCE FROM Russia and Germany highlights the shortcomings of markets as vessels of democratization, but markets are only part of the story. McWorld has also brought with it technological innovations in the infotainment telesector that are less inimical to democracy. The old Baconian dictum that knowledge is power and that through science we can command the world, the belief that the improvement of men’s minds and the improvement of his lot are finally the very same thing, was at the heart of the Enlightenment’s conviction that reason embodied in science and technology could liberate the human race from prejudice, ignorance, and injustice—could eventually liberate all women and men and democratize their social institutions. Walter B. Wriston is only the latest of a host of Enlightenment-infused panglossian futurologists from Condorcet to Alvin Toffler who have composed odes to the emancipatory, democratic powers of the startling new technologies that drive McWorld and have transformed capitalism from a system that serves needs into a system that creates and manipulates them. In The Twilight of Sovereignty, Wriston calls his final chapter “Power to the People.” Apparently believing his own mythology, he goes on to argue that “the information age is rapidly giving the power to the people …” speeding us along on “our journey toward more human freedom.”1

  To be sure, technology’s mandarins are correct in seeing improved information and communication as indispensable to improving democracy. From the time of the Greeks, who believed Prometheus’s theft of fire from the Gods lit the way to human civilization (if also to tragedy), technical gadgets have been made to support democratization. In ancient Athens, small machines that randomized the selection of white and black balls were used for jury selection. During the Renaissance (as Bacon noticed), movable type, gunpowder, and the compass transformed society by democratizing literacy (when everyone could read, neither priests nor princes could maintain their monopoly over the sovereign word); by equalizing combat (the aristocratic knight’s armor was no longer a guarantee of domination over the common man, now that everyman had his musket); and by opening up a new world of exploration to all (navigation offered everyman an exit visa from indentured servitude and political persecution). In the fullness of time, long after Bacon was dead, radio and television and finally mass-produced computers offered an ongoing technically enhanced democratization of the Word that spread literacy and political knowledge and strengthened the competence and will of the well-established democratic electorates.

  In the same tradition, the proposed information superhighway can potentially offer to every woman and man on the globe access to endless data banks and worldwide opinion exchange. Electronic bulletin boards can link like-minded individuals around their common interests and offer formats for community debates among those lacking common values. Video teleconference capabilities allow local town meetings to interact with similar meetings across a region, a nation, or the world, breaking down the parochialism of face-to-face interaction without sacrificing its personalism. Interactive television transforms a passive medium aimed at complacent consumers of entertainment and advertising into an active theater of social discourse and political feedback, opening up the possibility of universal multichoice-vote-at-home referenda. Satellite dishes the size of a dinner plate put a global ear at the disposal of peoples imprisoned in the most despotic regimes, and have proved their worth in places like China and Iran where, despite an official government ban, they continue to spread—and as they do, to spread unfettered images to information-starved consumers.2

  In combination, these technologies potentially enhance lateral communication among citizens, open access to information by all, and furnish citizens with communication links across distances that once precluded direct democracy or, indeed, interaction of any kind. If the scale of ancient democracy was bounded by the territory a man could cross on foot in a day on his way to the assembly, telecommunications at the speed of light turn the entire globe into a wired town of potential neighbors—McLuhan’s global village. Of course, if democracy is to be understood as deliberative and participatory activity on the part of responsible citizens, it must resist the innovative forms of demagoguery that accompany innovative technology. Home voting via interactive television could further privatize politics and replace deliberative debate in public with the unconsidered instant expression of private prejudices. Democracy calls not only for votes but for good reasons, not only for an opinion but for a rational argument on its behalf. Talk radio and scream television have already depreciated our political currency, and newer technologies are as likely to reinforce as to impede the trend if not subjected to the test of deliberative competence.

  Futuristic idealism must then be treated with a certain skepticism. The history of science and technology is at best a history of ambivalence. In each of the instances explored here, we can speak only of potentiality, not of actuality. The double edge of technology’s sword has been well known to us at least since Mary Shelley first told the story of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, and our technologies today possess potentialities as monstrous as any she imagined.

  Telecommunications technology has the capability for st
rengthening civil society, but it also has a capacity for unprecedented surveillance and can be used to impede and manipulate as well as to access information. Left to the market, which is where McWorld leaves technology, monsters may end up with a free and mightily profitable reign. As we have already noticed, the market has no particular interest in the civic possibilities of technology—unless they can generate a respectable profit (generally they cannot). When profitability is the primary object, technological innovation is likely to reinforce extant inequalities, making the resource-and-income-poor information-poor as well. Computer literacy has become as important as language literacy and numeracy in the job market, and is likely to be vital to civic literacy as well. The division of labor into symbolic analysis workers and more traditional durable goods and service sector workers has actually accelerated the growth of social inequality in America.

  Robert Reich has drawn a disturbing American portrait in which privileged information/communication workers increasingly withdraw public support from the larger society. His grim analysis portrays them moving to insular suburbs and buying private recreational, schooling, security, and sanitation services for their own gated communities, which the public at large cannot afford. They are then positioned to refuse to pay taxes for the declining public services they no longer need. Their withdrawal (Reich labels it the politics of secession) leaves the poor poorer, the public sector broke, and society ever more riven by economic disparities.3 A similar pattern of “secession” by the new symbolic elites can be discerned on a global scale where elite nations secede from their global public responsibilities as fast as elite professionals secede from their public responsibilities within elite nations. The Third World becomes a series of urban ghettos within every First World society as well as a series of poor nation ghettos within international society. The “restructuring” of the global economy to meet the demands of the new age information/entertainment sector further reinforces the boundaries between the privileged and the rest.

  Even when we set social and class issues aside, the market in technology can have untoward consequences. Technology can as easily become an instrument of repression as of liberation. Thoreau worried about how easily we become the “tools of our tools;” the new tools of the post-Gutenberg age of electronics confirm his fear. Interactive television is a powerful surveillance instrument: as consumers tell shopping networks what they want to buy and tell banks how to dispense their cash and tell pollsters what they think about abortion, those receiving the information gain access to an extensive catalog of knowledge about the private habits, attitudes, and behaviors of consumers. This information may in turn be used to reshape those habits and attitudes in ways that favor producers and sellers massaging the marketplace. The current antiregulatory fever means that the new information banks being compiled from interaction and surveillance are subject neither to government scrutiny nor to limitation or control (such as a sunset provision that would periodically destroy all information). The Federal Communications Act of 1934 promised to “encourage the larger and more effective use of radio in the public interest,” but the multiplication of broadcast channels across the electronic spectrum has led the government to withdraw its regulatory presence.

  Fred Friendly has been calling for an “electronic bill of rights” for a number of years, but government has been moving in the opposite direction, with the Clinton administration, despite its apparent belief in open access, committed to letting the market make the moves with a minimum of regulation. The “public airwaves” are still auctioned off to private vendors who sell them back at exorbitant rates to the public during election campaigns—increasing the costs of democracy and the dependence of elections on money at the very moment when government has backed away from regulation. The 1984 Cable Act gives local franchisers (cities and towns) rather than the federal or state government control over cable, in effect abandoning it to market forces that have shown scant regard for public needs.4 In 1994, Senator Inouye introduced a bill into Congress directing the Federal Communications Commission to require the “reservation for public uses of capacity on telecommunications networks.” His aim was to guarantee the public some voice in development of the Information Superhighway. His bill received little press attention and expired without action at the end of the 103rd Congress. Fear of government has incapacitated the public’s only agent in diverting the new technologies into public channels. The model of Channel One, a classroom network (started by Whittle Communications and now controlled by K-III Corporation) that extorts classroom advertising time from needy schools in return for desperately wanted hardware, suggests that the public is likely to be served by the new technologies only in as far as someone can make serious money off it.5

  It may be a cause of satisfaction, as Walter Wriston insists, that nowadays it is the citizen who is watching Big Brother and not the other way around. To be sure, in most post-Communist societies, as in our own market societies, Big Brother is no longer watching you; but neither is he watching those who are watching you, and even adversaries of regulation may find reason to be disturbed by that omission. If the classical liberal question used to be who will police the police, the pertinent liberal question in today’s McWorld ought to be who will watch those who are watching us? Who will prevent the media from controlling their clients and consumers? Who will act in lieu of a government that has demurred from representing the public’s interests?

  There would perhaps be less cause for concern if technology and telecommunication markets were truly diversified and competitive. But as we have seen, the conglomeration of companies focused on programming, information, communication, and entertainment suggests that government’s erstwhile big brother has been dwarfed today by Ma Bell and her overgrown babies, who are currently buying up the cable market and trying to purchase entertainment and software production companies as fast as they can. Their aim is to stay competitive with infotainment companies like Time Warner. Thus US West bought a significant minority interest (along with Toshiba and C. Itoh) in Warner Brothers film studio and Home Box Office only to have Time Warner acquire Cablevision ($2.2 billion) and Houston Industries ($2.3 billion) in 1995, and thereby regain control. The harder the American government tries to stay out of the development of a free market information highway, the harder corporate multinationals are trying to get in; and if they cannot effect a total takeover of the digital thoroughfare, they aspire at least to gain control of its gateways and tollbooths.

  Democrats should not be the Luddites Jihad’s anxious tribal warriors have become; they cannot afford to make technology and modernity enemies of self-determination and liberty. Technology is a neutral tool: allied to democracy it can enhance civic communication and expand citizen literacy. Left to markets, it is likely to augment McWorld’s least worthy imperatives, including surveillance over and manipulation of opinion, and the cultivation of artificial needs rooted in lifestyle “choices” unconnected to real economic, civic, or spiritual needs.

  Not so long ago, the prescient historian J. G. A. Pocock suggested that

  [today we find] ourselves in a post-industrial and post-modern world in which more and more of us were consumers of information and fewer and fewer of us producers or possessors of anything, including our own identities. When a world of persons, actions, and things becomes a world of persons, actions, and linguistic or electronic constructs that have no authors, it clearly becomes easier for the things—grown much more powerful because they are no longer real—to multiply and take charge, controlling, and determining persons and actions that no longer control, determine or even produce them.6

  The world Pocock describes is McWorld—what Neil Postman, another savvy critic of the tyranny of technology over its makers, calls technopoly. Technopoly suggests “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.”7 Postman is not a technological determinist and recognizes that technology can be both friend and enemy. But liberated from our common democr
atic choices and left to the market, we are more likely to confront the enemy than the friend. Which is perhaps why John Pocock thinks the key to living in the postindustrial, postmodern world is finding “means of affirming that we are citizens … that we are persons and associating with other persons to have voice and action in the making of our worlds.”8

  Many who are skeptical of McWorld have assailed in particular its pervasive materialism. These include traditionalist advocates of the moral Jihad against the West’s consumer culture, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or his more militant Islamic brethren as well as some of Jihad’s harshest critics like Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has blamed the temptations of tribalism on the West’s “permissive cornucopia” that breeds materialist self-gratification and a “dominant cultural reality” defined by the “dynamic escalation of desire for sensual and material pleasure.”9 American kids from small towns in the farm belt with ears cocked to the siren song of urban shopping districts and suburban malls hundreds of miles away are no different than Russian veterans of communism succumbing to the insistent commercial jingles that come tumbling from their new Japanese TVs. “My dad won’t even let us get MTV,” complains a teen from Nebraska, whose friends “see the shopping mall as the great hangout of the rest of the nation, and they don’t have one.”10 So, the kid from Nebraska and the kid from Smolensk end up in L.A. or St. Petersburg where whatever distinct culture that may have attached to their youth is stripped away and replaced with the videology of a McWorld utterly indifferent to diversity or democracy.