Internet Inc.
Internet activities are one of the easiest ways to bring yourself to the attention of a) a mass audience and b) the people who have all the money. Whether you are tech guru Jason Calacanis or a troupe of actors performing skits for podcast in the hope that you’ll become viral, the internet is the way to reach people. If there’s one thing we can rely on, it’s the knack of capitalists to buy popular talent and put it to use making money.
So in one sense, the internet is essentially “X-Factor” gone global; we’re all debuting, we’re all performing for someone else. If we didn’t want anyone else to read what we write, to see our productions, to hear our podcasts, we wouldn’t make them or at least we wouldn’t publish them on the internet. We may not be playing directly to Simon Cowell or his equivalents, but if noticed by a bigshot, most of us would take a bow.
Southpark got picked up this way; a FOX network director spotted it, commissioned Trey Parker and Matt Stone to write something for a video christmas card (“A Very Crappy Christmas”) and it became a major hit on the internet. Subsequently FOX agreed to put the show into production. Subversive television, subversive viral videos and other forms of popular engagement are easily available online.
Subversion online, much like selling Che Guevara t-shirts, has become just another commodity – to be given away in order to generate advertising revenue. Exceptions exist only where the subversion – say a political weblog – is too small to generate income, or is already owned by a finance-possessing institution, such as a political party, or is run from donations – as LabourList.org claims to be.
Not to say that individual weblogs can’t compete with the big boys occasionally, but the sites we traditionally refer to in the US as being “grassroots” – say the Huffington Post – are invested in by banks to the tune of millions of dollars, or generate substantial advertising revenues, in the fashion of the Daily Kos. These sites offer a service to the ‘grassroots’, but will never be run by them.
As contributors grow, and commenting users increase, there’s also a point to be made that the political sharp edge of such sites is considerably dulled. If we take Membersnet as an example, there were a small number of active, well-informed writers there, intent on discussing politics (the purpose of the site, one assumes)…but their work often got buried by complete drivel from others who weren’t informed or political.
Editorial influence might have helped in that instance, but where editorial influence does exist – say at Liberal Conspiracy – there are different disadvantages. I happily write for LibCon as it is among the best the Left blogosphere has to offer, but I know any in-depth theoretical pieces on Marxism or critiques of capitalism are unlikely to get posted. Sunny prefers shorter, punchier, news-based pieces of writing.
Fair enough, it’s his blog. When called on to do its duty, such as over the HFE Bill, LibCon’s editorial group hasn’t been found wanting. The campaign against “pro-lifers” was impressive, and my interview with Sunny documents it to a degree. Much more remains to be done, however, if we’re to build a cohesive political movement – even one based on a “minimum programme” of changes that need to be made.
Exclusion of theory involves the elevation of “common sense”, the sort which permeates all of our thinking, oftentimes without us even realizing the ideological connotations. This is why I have long been an advocate of praxis: the combination of theory and practice, and especially the use of this combination in web-campaigning. Potentially, the Left New Media group could emerge as practitioners of praxis.
Advocating a democratic-centralist model of organisation; having an elected editorial board to organise and direct content; diversifying from merely comment pieces – which are as often as not reliant upon the prejudices of capitalist-run mass media – to reporting ourselves, being in the field with other socialists. These are the sort of things which I wanted to see, if we could acquire donations from sympathisers.
However charismatic the Prescott Express may be, and I secretly quite enjoy John’s down to earth style, the last thing we need are more bandwagons being built by the Party leadership and then rolled out to the members. This is equally the case with LabourList.org – and the section of the Party it comes from almost guarantees that the Left will be ridiculously underrepresented, in writers and commenters.
I’m afraid I don’t share Sunder Katwala’s approbation for the emergence of people like Alistair Campbell to blogging. Our party leadership has survived and continues to survive on the basis of the lowest form of Left politics: Tory bashing. Every email – the daily briefing to parliamentarians, letters from the cabinet to party members and so forth – is little more than “do X; if you don’t, the Tories will eat your children.”
A move into a (relatively) new medium doesn’t change that.
Though Sunny derides the idea in our interview, preferring news reporting – which is fair enough, I think we’re much more in need of an internal conversation about straight-forward, unabashed politics. The role of a new website should be first, to get stories from the front lines out to what Hazel Blears might call “the commentariat”; second, to talk about what this information means and what our solutions should be.
Third, our role should be assisting in the implementation of those solutions, as the New Media wing to a broader campaign. I have literally begged Owen Jones and other LRC members to keep us informed about the development of the new LRC response to the economic crisis. How much more powerful it could be if, as well as pulling in people to meetings and protests, we could talk individually to those people?
New Media offers the chance of a much deeper engagement – and, if done in concert with grassroots activism, it offers the potential to build the name and reputation of a site which can a) beat the Tories, b) be democratically run and c) acquire articles and thoughts from leading figures on the Left that won’t read like they’ve been written by some brainless zombie in the Labour Party’s PR department.
If the regulator of the internet is currently the market ethic, our retort should online be exactly what it is offline. Our point is not to succumb to the market ethic and to use it to make ourselves popular – either individually or as a group – it is to build an accountable campaign that will not “lead” an undifferentiated, non-participant mass, but will be of that mass – something which most sites, this one included, demonstrably fail at.
It’s the perennial dilemma of wanting to do something different without selling out. I studied Hollywood cinema at university and – in a way – exactly how the directors managed to make their art amidst the rank industrialism of the studios is a lesson in integrity for us all. Yes. Most of them suffered for their art as they compromised their narratives. But they worked against the grain and invented the happy ending – about as irrelevant a structure to the meaning of the whole as one could ever hope to get. And yet such inventions satisfied the moguls and the censors, despite their intrinsic irrelevance, and allowed these brave souls to tell their own stories up to the last ten minutes or so of their movies.
If I remember rightly, directors like John Ford went so far as to shoot the bare minimum of film possible so the editors had no choice but to edit the film he was looking to make.
Perhaps – in a more political context – what we need to consider is how to take a longer view, an archival view, of all that we do. How to preserve our conversations and search them in one place. Perhaps what we need is a learning and searching place – a website of permanence – which sucks into one coherent and timelined entity the arguments and discussions we are all beginning to conduct. To create not a post-modern narrative but an after-the-fact coherence out of the contributions of the many would indeed be an aggregator of considerable potential. I would suggest it be edited manually, with consideration, intelligence and a guiding committee behind it – but if we could access the technology and the resources required we could maybe even aggregate with algorithms.
Try getting a maths department at your favourite university interested in the idea.
Organic permanence is the key to growth in organisations. Acquiring knowledge and knowing how to share and build upon it is crucial.
If you want to build a consensus of the left which reaches out to more than the few, which in fact impinges on the lives of the many, you do need to create a landmark place which – one day – will serve to draw people historically.
If I’m lucky, I’ve maybe got another thirty or forty years on this planet. Why not think in decades rather than years? Then the ambition we would share could match the aspirations we currently dare not speak – or believe.
It’s just a thought.