Sustainability, the Produser Class, and Limitations of Mere Access

V2V functions as a storage and distribution mechanism within a broader schema of an autonomous communications infrastructure. Combined with wireless mesh networks (1) and low power terrestrial transmission (a la Telestreet) (2) such a system can provide a basic outlet for communication without state endowment. This emerged despite rather than because legal and media policies advanced by the state. Instead it has been commodity competition to provide the basis for such a system - PC manufacturers and telecom competitors trying to sell surplus bandwidth and hardware.

This possibility should give us pause to evaluate current proposals made to attenuate conditions of media concentration, and specifically the legalize of pirate television in the framework of community access television. Token concessions in this direction by the funding of community access type "open channels". Such programmes have existed in Germany, Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden since the 1980s, usually funded by some percentage of the license (1% in Germany) fee or a flat sum (5 million in the Netherlands). Despite the existence of nearly 2000 such stations in the United States - financed by local cable franchises contracts - they have not slowed the immiseration of the public sphere. Cost limitations keep these initiatives marginalized, specifically: (i) lack of funds to pay people to work full-time on the production of programs, particularly those which do not follow common-garden political genre formats which are a likely by-product of other activities. (ii) inferior visibility compared to media outlets that invest huge sums in promotion, environment-saturation etc. which they can do because of their advertising budgets (and sales and licensing revenue of course).

Autonomous media projects remain stuck in chronic financial insustainability - thriving for some years before lack of resources takes its toll. At this point one of three things happens. Either they professionalise, accepting standard market practices [Liberation, Tageszeitung, the Village Voice], become dependent on institutional support [via arts councils or EU funded programs] which have consequences for the political content, or simply disappear. The modern cultural worker in many ways epitomizes the typical casualized figure: multi-skilled, mobile, short-term or freelance contracts. Likewise independent media projects themselves are precarious, ephemeral, dependent on the contribution of voluntary labour (self-exploitation or necessary virtuosity?) and small amounts of borrowed or collective fixed capital. Thus media and communication workers are confronted with two unyielding material challenges: the need to finance their own personal self-reproduction and the cash needed to ensure their projects survival. Where can it come from?

Zombie Scarcities in the Era of Abundance Ratings, however unscientific their manufacture, determine advertising revenues. Strangely this premise is not sustained in the criticism of the media itself. Rather than an annex to the world of entertainment, television and celebrity, advertising occupies a determinant position in the world of cultural production - 50% of RAI's revenues (approx 2.2bn) in 2000. Mediaset is simply an advertising business that operates television stations to this end (2.4 bn in 2002). Access to viewers', or users', attention and the chance to influence desires is the 'commodity' that has value and is traded (3). Exposure to advertising comprises a loss of autonomy even where we subjectively 'socialise' many the messages received. More pertinently, maintenance of a fictitious scarcity in broadcast spectrum so as to preserve these advertising markets guides legal regulation. In addition we are asked to pay for the pleasure of this imposition in the form of a television license: 'l'abbonamento' (4).

Initially the license was defended as a means of financing audiovisual production without the constant intrusion of advertising. This was the BBC 'Reithian' model championed by those who envisioned TV as an instrument for education, opposed to practice in the US where attainment of advertising revenues determined viability. In Italy the license fee has existed since 1954 and is currently around 100 euros for the estimated 20 million households - a notional total of 2 billion euros. The 'subscription' - in fact involuntary and blind to consumption of RAI's output - provides no respite from advertising - users get taxed for owning a television as well as having their attention sold to the marketeers of consumer desire.

Reclaim the Media - Abolish RAI The distinction between "professionals" assembling programming and "passive" users consuming ads to perpetrate the model has no technical basis. Our society is permeated by communications networks where media production equipment is diffuse, the digital output shareable - as regards modification, distribution and transmission - and the costs of coordination low, that TV need no longer be the domain of specialists. The barrier to this decentralization remains the question of the wage, of how the media producer can feed herself.

By RAI's admission nearly 20% currently refuse to pay the license. Let's practice and advocate allocation directly by users to people working as cultural producers whom they regard as producing pleasurable or useful things, moments or knowledge. Instead of a centralized information apparatus we would have a diffuse and variegated output, independent editors assembling the results thematically and according to sensibility, interest, perversion or prejudice. Assuming that people's satisfaction can find unexpected expressions means leaving the form - individual, collective, formal - to reflect the manifold character of diffuse social creativity and dissatisfaction. Potential recipents then would include investigative journalists, painters, film-makers, 16 year old punks, fanzine publishers, software programmers, handmade book printers, street poster designers, all types of dancers and clowns, neighborhood theatre troope's, breakfast radio presenters, local and national news teams etc. Instead of a centralized information apparatus we would have a diffuse and variegated output, independent editors assembling the results thematically and according to sensibility, interest, perversion or prejudice.

RAI and Mediaset can battle it out for the advertising.The pretense that RAI functions as an independent observatory and producer of non-commercially determined programming is a joke. The sum of the usual clientelism and lottizzazione. In fact, as every Italian knows, the notion of impartiality in RAI rests on the fact that different political rackets control the stations. The dire nature of Berlusconia should not force us to succumb to the project of Restoration advanced by the pathetic 'opposition'.

'Free' Production and the Universal Income Media producers inhabit precarious circumstances and their abilities are subordinated - the practice of their craft is not self-determined. Their jobs lack benefits and guarantees, are prone to periods of un/under-employment and often have no formal workplace organization. A guaranteed income would address these problems which are not general rather than unique to cultural work and provides a space for collective recognition. Repurposing the license may be somewhat corporatist but is immediately feasible. It can also provide the basis for an independent communications sphere capable of challenging the endemic corruption, bringing news of struggle and articulating the language for new social relations. --------------

(1) See for example the various projects at http://www.locustworld.com/

(2) On this subject see: http://www.telestreet.it/

(3) See on this "Pay For Play", Salon, 14 March 2001, http://dir.salon.com/ent/feature/2001/03/14/payola/index.html

(4) The private system's analogue to the license fee is arguably the charge for Pay TV, where the same perverse logic of paying the provider in order for them to sell your attention is executed. One useful response exploiting the infrastructure of 'mere access' is the decryption and retransmission in the clear of such programming. See: Anon, Telestreet Rome -Giving Sky the 'Boot', at http://slash.autonomedia.org