[Nettime-bold] L is for Law

[McKenzie Wark <mw35@nyu.edu>]

L is for LAW / 9th September 2001
McKenzie Wark

Nothing signals the changing structure of the ruling class more 
than the legal constraints within which it agrees to operate. For 
decades media corporations have been obliged to work within 
regulatory limits that conform to the interests of capital as a whole. 
Now they are breaking free of those fetters. 

For all its talk about diversity and democracy, capital's real interest 
in limiting the growth of media conglomerates lies in preventing 
them from emerging as a separate power with the ability to 
influence the direction of commodified life in a direction more 
amenable to the commodification of information, and the 
subordination not only of the whole of life, but of other kinds of 
commodification to the rule of information.

Three judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the District 
of Columbia have recently declared that they don't see the 
justification for limiting television networks to reaching a mere 
35% of American households. Nor do they see why a cable 
company ought not to own a television station broadcasting to the 
same customers. 

The judges are coming around to the views of the networks and 
cable corps, who argued before the court, as one report put it, that 
such regulations "violate their First Amendment rights to reach an 
unlimited audience."

While this may appear as a travesty of the Constitution's meaning 
and intention, perhaps it merely points to a contradiction that 
arises out of it. The protection of free speech was meant to protect 
those who have something to say. Now it is construed to mean the 
protection of those who own the means by which all speech finds 
its listeners. It was simply not in the 18th century heads of the 
Great White Men who wrote the Constitution that a separation 
would arise between the producers of original speech and those 
who profit by it. 

The regulatory framework within which American media currently 
operates stems from a time when the 20th century ruling class did 
indeed recognise a distinction between the author of an idea and 
the owner of a television network. The former were to be free to 
speak as they please, knowing full well that this right doesn't 
amount to much when the means of communication are in 
corporate hands. But the latter are to be put under strict 
constraints. Capital feared the owners of the means of 
communication more than the producers of incendiary ideas.

What is clear is that capital is no longer solely in charge. The state 
represents an unstable compromise between capital and a rising 
new interest: the vectoral class. The vectoralists which profits by 
the ownership and control of intellectual property in all its forms, 
but in particular, the means of communication -- the vectors of wire 
and frequency. 

Just as capital struggled against landed interested and 
agricultural production, so the vectoral class struggles against 
capital. Each is based in turn on distinct forms of property -- land, 
capital, intellectual property, and each in turn clamours for a 
rewriting of the law in its favour. But where the struggle between 
landed interests and capital produced a violent civil war, the 
struggle between capitalist and vectoralist interests produces 
merely an oblique trace in those few media vectors not under 
monopoly control already.

The difficulty for capital is that having struggled to overcome the 
state's hostility to monopoly and its trust-busting instincts, it finds 
the same logic used by a rising class competitor. What the TV 
networks, the cable companies and Microsoft have in common is 
a desire to create for themselves monopoly or quasi-monopoly 
positions in the marketplace for information. They are using as 
their weapon the anti-regulation arguments pioneered by capital.

This is hardly an outcome amenable to capital, which finds both 
the manufacture and sale of things dependent on the owners of 
information. Just as landed interested resented their dependence 
on capital caused by the mechanisation of agriculture, so too the 
capitalist interest resents its dependence on the vector caused by 
a rising dependence on information. 

On every front, the law comes increasingly to reflect a new interest, 
an interest in the consolidation of intellectual property as the legal 
means for a new form of class domination. A class domination 
dependent on the abstractions of intellectual property, sanctioned 
by law, which insinuates itself into all aspects of commodified life. 

This emerging regime speaks in the name of the producers of 
ideas, but is really designed for the benefit of the owners of ideas. 
The vectoralist class is nothing but a parasite upon the creativity of 
intellectual life. 
 

A HACKER MANIFESTO
http://www.feelergauge.net/projects/hackermanifesto/version_2.0/

INDEX TO THIS FABULOUS WORLD
http://www.fineartforum.org/Backissues/Vol_15/faf_v15_n09/text/fe
ature.html

NOTES
Stephen Labaton, 'Court Weighs Easing Limits On Big Media', 
New York Times, 8th September 2001, http://www.nytimes.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We no longer have roots, we have aerials. 
~~~~~~~~~~ McKenzie Wark ~~~~~~~~~



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