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Gore's Revenge Why Internet Activism is the Bush Administrations Nightmare |
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During the 2000 general election season, then-Governor Bush made a great deal of Al Gore's penchant for exaggeration. He reserved particular disdain for the former Vice-President's role in the development of the Internet, stating (quite correctly) that Gore had not "invented" it, and implying (with far more dubious legitimacy) that the Vice-President had improperly embellished on his importance in the network's emergence. Whether or not Al Gore overstated the significance of his part in the Internet's development, there can be no question that he played a major role in fostering the expansion in terms of both promotion and resources -- particularly in permitting use of computer hubs that formed the backbone of the early network -- towards the development of what we now call the Internet. Surely, even if Bush does not realize this, the genuinely intelligent and well-informed members of his administration (Rove, Cheney, and Ashcroft, among others) must be aware of the truth. And it must gall them. As traditional media bares its corporate-funded throat to the administration, alternate Internet news sources flourish like wildfire. As talk radio pundits scream for the blood of Tim Robbins and the Dixie Chicks, blogs sprout like grass in a fertile field. When Congress was surrendering its powers to the executive branch, activist groups were forming and growing, gaining strength and numbers with each outrage against liberty and justice. It must be maddening. It is certainly frustrating. It explains quite clearly why the attack on Internet use is particularly vituperative. Laws like the DMCA, the "Child Protection Act," and mandatory library filtering, that work to limit our ability to communicate and organize, can be traced to this impulse. Unsurprisingly, none of it is working. Surely, some constraints on Internet use -- particularly web use -- are coming into play. In truth, this is not all bad. Predators who hunt children to satisfy their own hungers are somewhere between leeches and viruses as life forms. Nevertheless, the corporatization of the Internet has not hurt its value to political activists in the least. The record-shattering demonstrations in the days leading up to the Iraq conquest would certainly have been smaller without the Internet. How much smaller we will never know, but one thing is clear: the protestors, the iconoclasts, and the rebels of the world are no longer isolated. A vast, flexible unity has arisen, one that exalts the variety of its members rather than denigrating it, and given a voice to the voiceless in an unprecedented way. More recently, this power has formed the heart of the Dean Insurgency, giving power to a man who was once a minor candidate and a voice to the outraged millions who have awakened to Rove's agenda. They -- we -- have realized how "compassionate" Bush's policies truly are, and Dean's Internet activism has created a meta-organization unprecedented in political history. Ironically, the model follows the classic Republican ideal -- local organizations working towards a greater goal, with minimal direction and oversight from a central authority that doesn't bog the locals down in mandated minutiae. This one simple mechanism allows the disenfranchised to circumvent mass media and mass propaganda, bypassing ABC for BBC or (in a more extreme case) Fox News for Alternet. Censorship, even if it's as effective as the self-censorship of the big outlets, becomes irrelevant when Information Clearinghouse drops the bombshell that the "spontaneous" toppling of Saddam's statue was in fact orchestrated with the help of Ahmed Chalabi's Free Iraqi Forces. Equally important is the record it provides of the facts, one that can be pointed to when the truth is denied. Should an attack pundit claim that the "left" or the "right" is making things up for its own benefit, the savvy web surfer can simply rebut with a URL. Google is only the most popular of many search engines that have made spin so vulnerable to facts. Certainly, the howling screeds of a thousand Limbaughs writ small have also been fired into the digital universe, but the Internet is far too expansive for any number of screaming pseudo-conservative parrots (or any other group of clamorous, radical idealogues, for that matter) to overwhelm with rhetoric. The major administrative tactic now, as many have noticed, is simply to not acknowledge the "off-message" data at all. It simply isn't discussed; reporters who refuse to play by this rule are banished in effect or in truth. That doesn't work either. The vast interconnected nature of web-based activism means that these stories travel like wildfire, and before long millions have heard what the Powers That Wannabe want silenced. The most powerful example of this has been in the Administration's efforts to retroactively change the stated purpose of the invasion. Routinely, their spin is explosively deconstructed by tremendous lists of quotes, for example (from a Working for Change article by the incomparable Molly Ivins):
Of course, there's still one problem: getting the message out beyond the Internet and our various cliques. A massive campaign of disinformation has succeeded with depressingly spectacular results. Nevertheless, controlling a nation's information is no longer as easy as cracking down on a few newspapers and broadcasters. If there's one thing that we have learned from the proliferation of people exercising their freedom of the press, it's that the old net pioneers' adage "information wants to be free" is alive and well. Al, wherever you are, thanks -- and I hope you're smiling. You can rest assured that wherever Rove is, the Net has him reaching for his antacid. (/) Roland X http://rolandx.blogspot.com/ |
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