Rights in Cyberspace
Speech by Gomma - Decoder magazine Italy
"New Visions" panel, Glasgow
I come from what could be called the province of the empire, and I've seen the
dynamics of the technological transformation from a particular point of view that is particularly
stimulating. After all, maybe, it's true what was said by the science
fiction writer, Richard Kadrey: "Nothing interesting happens at the center.
Everything interesting happens at the edges." In Italy, like an ugly Orwellian dream,
Silvio Berlusconi, the owner of six television networks, became the prime minister.
Someone could suspect that the Italian people have been transformed into a mass of
television Zombies. In reality, the situation is not so simple, and it seems to be more
dangerous than that of having a dictator from a cathode tube. That which has changed in
Italy could happen in any country where modernity is adapted and passed on with its own
crushing strength. The result of the political spectacle expresses the radical economic
transformation of Italian society over the last 15 years. In fact, it has passed from an
economic phase in which fordist factories had a central role in a productive situation of
fragmentation, based on so-called autonomous workers who have a distinct economic outline,
and a higher developed micro-management, diffused in the zones that were already developed
in the previous economic phase. Therefore, this determined a global change of values, now
turned into instances of desolidarization. This is where the failure of the traditional
leftist parties fit in; they abandoned the main principles of work into the hands of the
right, without knowing how they could have channeled the energies toward a democratic
transformation of modern society.
People needed signals for the future, and that no one was giving it to them. And
what happened is simple: on the edge of a completely transformed landscape, the
capitalists who were more innovative, exactly like those who manage the television media,
proposing the values of the future. Throughout a year Italy has changed into a country
more Japanese than Japan, driven by a political corporation that promises over a million
jobs, the solution of the economical crisis and the mythical bridge over the Sicilian
channel. And in the spectacle of politics, incredibly everyone seems to believe. Everyone
is content in believing in something and everyone is believing in a virtual future.
Is it a nightmare? No, it's a challenge. And every good cyberpunk loves
challenges. And it probably would be better if the leftist parties also loved challenges.
My observatory is a publishing cooperative, called
ShaKe, in which I work and
experiment 12 hours a day. We publish a magazine called Decoder, we have an objective of
publishing 8 books and 2 videos per year. We manage a BBS with around a thousand users and
a computer network with 18 nodes. We organize multimedia installations, and parties that
we call media-parties, in which the objective is to put technology like computers,
videocams and anything that works over telephone lines, at the disposal of the people
coming to the party. This programme is called "All technology to the people". In
a country with the largest concentration of commercial television in the world, our latest
project is to participate in the construction of community television in
Milano, and to
construct a network of similar experiences that are being born in Italy. Our objective is
to give cultural instruments for the survival in the post-industrial phase, and the
production of a social sense that crosses the use of the new media. The ShaKe cooperative
has become in a brief time and with great surprise a point of reference not only for the Italian
digital underground, but also for many people who work in the field of informatics
and information. For example journalists of informatic magazines, who can't write their
reviews on what they really think of hardware and software because the journals they work
for will lose advertisement money; television operators, frustrated
by years of
14-hour-a-day work, producing useless TV programmes;
programmers/peones, paid two pounds
an hour, who have lost the sense of life. This is happening all over the world with
experiences like ours. This seems particularly
important. All of this scene, in which the
ShaKe belongs too, some people called it cyberpunk, or social-hacking, the edge,
media-activism, but the best definitions seems to be that of culture jamming.
"Jamming is CB slang for the illegal practice
of interrupting radio
broadcast or conversation between fellows hams with lip farts and obscenities. Culture
jamming, by contrast, is directed against an ever more intrusive, instrumental
technoculture whose operant mode is the manufacture of consent through the manipulation of
symbols. CJ is an elastic category and accommodates
a multitude of subcultural practices.
Outlaw computer hacking with the intent of exposing institutional
wrongdoing, pirate TV and
radio broadcasting, non conventional artists, in a word all the people who are attempting
to reclaim the public space ceded to the chimeras of Hollywood, to restore a sense of
equilibrium to a society sickened by the vertiginous whirl of TV culture."
In addition, culture jamming formed an area of intellectuals and operators, of
thinkers and experimenters who see the underground positively. This is the first time
since the 60's that a young counterculture has moved this close to the requests of the
society in general, from the world of work and from the production of the sense. In the
70's and 80's the counterculture was separated from the civil society by its own need, but
this has brought ghettoisation. In the 90's is mutated radically. And it assists a great
creative phase united with the want of a transformation of the existing circumstances.
This is happened for a series of reasons. Probably Hakim Bey was right in his book TAZ
when he said that since 1899 there has not been a square centimeter of territory that
isn't submitted to by some kind of national sovereignty
and this fact has determined the
end of the possibilities to find a zone on the planet where we can go and install our
utopia. This process that Bey calls the closure of the map or the end of the frontier, has
blocked our capacity to imagine new potentials for thought and action. But modern times
and the dynamics of productions has created a new frontier, a new place where we can give
life to our dreams: the electronic frontier or cyberspace: "this is the place where a
telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside our actual phone, the plastic device
on our desk. Not inside the other person's phone, in some other city. It's the place
between the phones. The indefinite place out there, where two human beings actually meet
and communicate. Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of the glowing computer
screen. This dark electric netherworld has become a vast flowering electronic landscape.
Since the 1960s the world of the telephone has crossbred itself with computers and
television, and though there is still no substance to cyberspace, nothing you can handle,
it has a strange kind of physicality now. It makes good sense today to talk of cyberspace
as a place all its own."
In this new territory, like it was in the Far West, the law when it exists isn't
very clear and often only the strongest survives. Like this the deviance and crime seem to
be necessary in a paradoxical situation where the largest potential number of access to
the means of information in reality corresponds to a great lack in the sharing of
communication. The breaking of the hypothetical rules of cyberspace was used like a symbolic
element to demonstrate that we will not have to support the rules imposed by the
media for all of our lives. And the frustrated
white collars which I spoke earlier were in
reality the first to consider the hackers as the heroes
of a new era. But, the most
important thing is that the digital deviance and the transgression in the way to use new
media have opened to opportunities for everyone for more demo and access. I believe,
actually, despite the criminalizing campaign of the media, that the most interesting side
is the problem that these creative crimes put into the sphere of civil rights. I believe
that the digital underground or the culture jammers must take responsibility
today to
give the world that is waiting, a signal or a sign of maturity. I think that now is the
moment to fight for the recognization of our rights to have a stable structure for the
transmission, the access, and the conservation of the information of social relevance. In
the electronic we have no need of martyrs, like how hackers often become. I recall that
European Community made a new law, on the duplication of software and computer crimes in
general, that favors the corporations and limits our freedom in cyberspace. I believe
this historical moment is the right moment to affirm the new fundamental
right of man,
similar to the right of having a house or a job, but in relation to information.
The most important point is now the affirmation
of our nomadic identity against
the ancient concept of nationality. We must state our identity as travelers
of cyberspace
fighting for the constitution of an International Public Network that enables digital
transmission between diverse countries, putting anyone into communication with
anyone who
wants to communicate any kind of information that isn't commercial. These structures have
to be paied for by the government to guarantee access that cost nothing or at a very low
price. The guarantee of low cost access is also a guarantee of democracy but, at the
moment in Europe the access to Internet is too limited by the bureaucracy
or from the high
costs. We also need to fight for the social use of the channels of communications, like
ISDN lines, that will permit transporting enormous quantities of information without high
costs of installation. An International Public Network that would utilize ISDN could give
us the opportunities in an instant, to construct editorial projects or videos with contributors
from all over the world.
The new represented by information technology consists of the fact that the
information is totally digitalizable and easily conserved and transmitted. Besides, its use
is plastic and multimedial. As the nature of information is mutated, so the laws, the
norms and the rights that rule the whole sector must change. The approach given by the new
international laws was, on the contrary, based on rules of a gutemberghian concept. We
observed the European law assimilate to the American
law, created by the pressure of the
software corporation that enormously limit the possibility of the use of the information
even if this possibility is intrinsic
to the digital media. So we have to fight to affirm
the right to copy for individual usage, to stress the social use, and the exchange of
information without any kind of frontier or limit. In reality, the current laws don't
guarantee the correct economical acknowledgement
to the independent
subjects that work with
the diverse product of communications. In fact
these laws essentially protect the rights of
the large trusts and major companies. It's important to recall for the people who still
believe that there is a chance of another American
gold rush, that this experience could
only happen in brief periods of capitalism, and was generally finished during the 30's.
Bill Gates and Microsoft confirm this kind of analysis: in 1981 the game was over and the
experimentation with a "basic for the people" programming was absorbed by big
capital. We want ask for the decriminalization of copying and we want to rouse an exchange
in the process of the construction of the information between free an equal subjects. In
the same time, we want to facilitate and protect shareware programmers that had their
products stolen and patented by big companies.
The right to copy allows to realize strategies of psychic survival in front of
the society of the spectacle and concretely
affirming that the right to information is an
ontological right of the social human being in this era. So we propose the construction of
public libraries of images where we can copy any kind of visual material, with the
possibility of manipulating it into any form. These libraries of images could be located
in special sections of libraries, or they could have a seat in Internet and be accessible
from any part of the world. According to the American
associations, like the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, that are working at this moment on the problem, we want it to be
guaranteed furthermore the most complete privacy of the electronic mail and of the general
communicative exchange by using programs of encryption
like PGP. We refuse options like
the Clipper chip, that would without doubt give space for abuse from the government. We
ask for the abolition for every form of censorship regarding the exchange of information
in general, and the electronic communication in particular, considering
this as a direct
expression of the personal opinion of every citizen.
These are our proposals, but it will not be easy to realize them. If from one
side the process of subsumption of the individual creativity has still not reached its
apex, from the other side the same proposals could represent some objective limits and
obstacles for our experiences. The contradictions regarding the actual management
of the
knowledge will explode at the moment in which these limits will be felt by a majority of
the operators in the communication field. So our future is still not clear and nothing is
certain. We are only at the beginning of a long process that still not disclosed in a
complete manner. We can look from the window or accept the challenge
of modern times and
put ourselves in continuos discussion also in respect to our own identity and live an
adventure that menaces to destroy that we have and everything that we are. We choose to
accept the risk of the second hypothesis, and with optimism we are already on our way.
