Free radios meeting in Naples January 16-18


Assaulting the airwaves

(let's fight for radio and information rights in Italy)

Between 1975 and 1975, thanks to the liberalization of the airwaves, several independent and free radios were born in Italy. Experiences which were born thanks to frequency occupation and which were for the most part acknowledged by the authorities that assigned frequencies. Some of them still exist and play an important role in information in the political debate in the movements, and are structures that guarantee freeedom and pluralism, creative expression and information in Italy. Since that time till the end of the 90's just sporadic and happy experiences, born by movements and students' occupations, followed the same path. Recently, thanks to the diffusion of new technologies, there's the chance to use new ways of communication, avoiding red tapes and legal problems. Not just ways that stay on written pages, but ways that find their own voice: streaming! At the end of the the 90's web radios start to stream. With web broadcasting former radio experiences on airwaves found a bigger diffusion, and at the same time, local groups, which couldn't have any chance to broadcast on the airwaves, had the chance to send their signal. New technologies also made a change creating new networks between new and old experiences.

hydrarchist writes this from the cover page of the pamphlet P2P Fightsharing produced by the WSIS We Seize! group in Rome.

Seizing -- You Can't Beat the Feeling!

The WSIS positions itself as an opportunity to develop a common vision of an 'information society' and bundles with it a series of promises; a just world; more transparent government; bridging of digital divides. An examination of the material propositions, trade agreeement (WTO, FTAA) realpolitik, and the positions of market dominance and social misery left untouched, and unmentioned, tell a different story.

As communications networks spread information becomes central to both production and the organization of social institutions. But rather than making life easier, informationalization supplements and intensifies production and labor. Spiralling demand for productivity imposes close-quarters labor surveillance; dockers’ movements tracked as they move palettes around a warehouse; the waitress whose orders are memorized and who must balance her float exactly at the end of the shift; the temporary worker assigned to a new data entry office or call center every couple of days. Benefits of digitalization accrue principally to those who have the capital resources and power to capture them, and the fight over the laws regulating the digital sphere is a struggle over the destination of this wealth between global regions and social classes.