[iDC] The People Formerly Known as the Employers

[Brian Holmes]

Mark Deuze wrote:

> For all the brilliance of those advocating a more democrative media  
> system, there is generally nothing in their analyses that acknowledges  
> this erosion of power, this wholesale redistribution of agency away  
> from those who tend to crave only one thing: creative and editorial  
> autonomy. No matter how excited I can get about user-generated content  
> and the collective intelligence of cyberspace, this power shift erodes  
> the very foundation of the way we know (and thus interact with) the  
> world, and our ability to truly function in it autonomously, and on  
> our own terms.
> 
> Perhaps we should take this analysis even further: the only way we can  
> live in the world as this power shift continues, is to rely  
> exclusively on our own terms. This in turn inevitably leads to mass  
> solipsism and paranoia - as the only truth we can still believe in has  
> to be strictly our own, and nothing or nobody can (or should) still be  
> trusted. It is the perfect storm.

The above (from quite a good essay, eminently worth reading) depicts a 
single case of an organizational mode more broadly known as 
neoliberalism. Since the 1970s, neoliberal management has operated 
across all sectors of industry and enterprise by stripping businesses 
down to the managerial core and outsourcing as much labor as possible. 
That allows for a huge simplification of the balance-sheet: no health 
insurance, no retirement, no sick or pregnant or aging employees to take 
care of... As many people have pointed out over recent years (though 
there is always a need for each person involved to discover this) there 
is a strong parallel between the language used to justify such 
downsizing-and-outsourcing, and the aspirations of individuals to 
greater freedom, openness, flat hierarchies, etc. However, in the 
crucial case of the press and the televised news, I think it is 
important not to attribute this change to the desires of people for 
emancipation. The message you then send out would be this: you poor 
deluded bloggers, citizen-journalists, members of NGOs, etc., you have 
destroyed the one thing that kept us all free and autonomous: the good 
old (corporate) media. Hmmm, I am afraid very few people will accept 
such a message!

Instead there needs to be an investigation into the historical pattern 
of social change and corporate restructuring which has led to this 
situation, not only in the media, but across the different walks of 
professional life and in government as well. I think that the driving 
force has been a new managerialism oriented toward short-term profit, 
under intense pressure to perform on the stock market for all kinds of 
reasons (because the board pushes for higher shareholder value, because 
the corporation needs to raise more capital, because the managers 
themselves are shareholders, because a higher stock-market value 
produces more profit in a merger, etc). It is the combination, or 
really, the co-evolution between this managerial model and the broad 
aspirations of individuals to greater autonomy that has produced the 
neoliberal society we now live in, not just in the USA but across much 
of the world. And it is a perfect storm, quite a threatening one, I very 
much agree with that conclusion. The clever management of peoples' 
desires for freedom has produced a social predicament.

Now, there has been one big problem: throughout the eighties and 
nineties, as this storm gathered, where were the professional 
journalists to report about it? Where were the academics to elaborate 
these themes in the universities? Where were the union organizers to 
develop new labor strategies? Where were the politicians to make these 
problems public? Unfortunately, in my experience there were only 
isolated instances of breakthroughs in these different key categories. 
Most of the work has been done by individuals (organic intellectuals, 
free radicals or whatever you want to call them) collaborating with 
social movements and using networked media for organizing and 
transmission. Even if there are only a few David Harveys or Pierre 
Bourdieus, still academia comes off comparatively well in this process. 
The professional media has been a lot less impressive. Throughout the 
Bush years, until 2006, you had only the comedy shows that put up any 
resistance! Otherwise people simply had to look to the networked media. 
Now, that may not be entirely true, and it would be interesting to hear 
the list of shining stars as seen from the side of media professionals. 
In my own experience, living in France, I tended to get interesting 
professional media from the BBC (because I could download it!) and 
sometimes from French cinema and radio. A particularly good example are 
the films of Adam Curtis, such as "The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream 
of Freedom." The important point I am trying to make is that the blame 
game might not be the best one to play. We are facing a social 
predicament, it involves many complex forces, it can only be resolved by 
finding new structures for the production and distribution of what you 
might call politically actionable knowledge about society. And that is 
worth working on, whatever your position in this society may be!

Personally I've been doing so for years, as one of those hapless 
bloggers, networked protesters and citizen-journalists (or citizen 
art-critics). Perhaps there are a certain number of us who have been 
able to put something in their analysis that acknowledges the deliberate 
reduction of autonomy and agency under neoliberal management. Though it 
was written in 2001 and has been read by many many people, I am still 
gonna give a link here to my text on The Flexible Personality, because 
it applies in detail to the situation described in the above essay by 
Mark Deuze:

http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/holmes/en

best to all,

Brian

http://brianholmes.wordpress.com