freequency thezine #5

Sure, there were pirates during the radio and TV age, some of the most famous being in Italy where pirate DJs would drive around in vans broadcasting in different areas of the city to avoid detection by the authorities. These were people that were able to infiltrate the “closed” radio and TV channels that were reserved for “official” broadcasters: broadcasters that bought licenses from the state, or in some cases by the states themselves. I say “official” because governments, which are supposedly charged with allocating public resources fairly, restricted the public from using the airwaves except for a few local “public access” stations that were severely underfunded and never allowed any national broadcasting rights.

The internet changed all that, the internet, following Pierre Levy’s theory of Superlanguage, has made the inevitable jump to a many-to-many communication scheme. Levy believes that communication began as a one-to-one act, which then became one-to-many (TV and radio age), and has finally arrived at a many-to-many structure where groups of people are able to communicate to other groups of people without the need of an intermediary. Obviously the intermediaries are not happy with this arrangement!

This previous information dispersal system, that of the TV, was ideal for vetting news that governments and corporations didn’t want in the public sphere. And since all countries were doing this vetting, there was no chance of getting any real news from outside of the country; unless it came from spies!

Way back in 1993, I was first connected to the internet and in 1995 I bought my first Kodak webcam for $89!

I was still in highschool and my friends and I were chatting with complete strangers in countries like Korea. The internet was our playground, yet we still played a lot sports outside. We were going to poorly made websites to learn how to make things like fake IDs (in the US you can’t drink until you are 21!).

We were amateur hackers. We made a web radio station for five people to hear us checking to see if they could hear us. We learned more about the outside world than we ever imagined possible and we didn’t think twice about having our IP addresses traced.

There were no boundaries! It was the beginning of Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity.

Slowly some barriers began to spring up. ISP’s began doing the dirty work of the same governments and corporations that kept TV and radio broadcasting out of the hands of the public.

They began imposing the same structure, the only structure they understand, onto something they couldn’t even begin to comprehend. It’s like trying to put up a dam to separate the Atlantic ocean, but I see it more as divide et impera.

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