Monday 17 September 2012

Old man to internet: 'Get off my lawn!' (or, why it's pointless to control the internet, and the generation gap that stops people understanding this)

Back in the unspecifically-dated olden days, censoring the media was easy. There wasn't much media, for starters. The only books published were either the King James Bible, or books about the King James Bible. Any radical newspapers being distributed could be burned, and their editors hung, or just priced out the market by raising the tax people had to pay to print them. Easy.

Today, though - not so easy. You haven't got some uppity peasant running off copies of his Leveller pamphlets in his hut - now it's the internet. Trying to subdue the internet is like playing one of those whack-a-mole games, but when you knock one down it just stays there, while ten more spring up purely out of spite. You've no chance.

And yet people still try. Just this week, the lawyers of the British Royal family moved to stop the publication of nude photos of Kate Middleton, which were already seen in France after magazine Closer published them there. Already an Italian newspaper has stated it's intention to do so, as did the Irish Daily Star. Several American magazines have followed suit.

The Queen herself could burn the printing presses of these magazines to the ground, it doesn't matter - they're on the internet. They've been scanned on to blogs and Twitter accounts. If you want to see blurry pictures of what might be Kate Middleton's possible boobs, just Google it. Moving to stop the publication just generates a bit of publicity for the magazine that has the injunction against it.*

And today Pakistan's prime minister Raja Pervez ordered access to YouTube in his country to be blocked, to stop people seeing 'Innocence of Muslims', the film connected to the rioting and attacking of embassies across the Middle East and North Africa. Sure, it's possible to block YouTube, but the information would get out anyway. For one thing, YouTube isn't the only video-hosting site. Secondly, if someone has downloaded a copy, they can disperse it at will. Plus, it is out there - that the video exists is inflammatory enough.**

People believe, erroneously, that the internet can be tamed - for better or worse, it cannot. British right-wing paper The Daily Express, I believe, is running a campaign to purge the internet of porn. It's like purging a sandwich of bread. They might just be trying to protect children from hardcore porn, but this is equally a task without an end. Presumably the campaign has the support of its readers - a newspaper only ever runs campaigns it knows it will get the support the readership - who are 99% ageing Christian Tory/Ukip-voters, who are likely to have never used the internet, and don't understand quite how the it works.

Similarly, when the super-injunction of footballer Ryan Giggs was made pointless by the details being revealed on Twitter, he tried to sue everyone on Twitter who had tweeted it. Everyone. Presumably his lawyers said 'Yeah, we can do that. Just make sure you keep paying us, and we'll look into it' and high-fived each other when he left the room.

What I find most interesting about this is that there exists a generation gap between those who 'get' the internet and those who don't. My generation (I'm twenty) grew up with the internet - we, and those younger than us, are the ones that get it. I'm generalising, but it is the older age groups that don't understand. 'They' don't use it as much as 'we' do. This excellent article by now-defunct communist-propaganda-machine Deterritorial Support Group notes the use of Goatse as a modern-day industrial sabotage. The argument is thus: Goatse, and shock-memes like it, have been reappropriated as in-jokes by those who understand them (like a group of friends watching the same obscure TV show and using it's jokes as their own makeshift language). They then skip this into designs and popular culture, effectively subverting logos from the inside. DSG argue this is a form of post-Fordism industrial sabotage simply because it is now the only way to rebel within the workplace while still being able to remain employed there. When a production factory was the de-facto destination of the working classes, sabotage could take on a different, physical form. What if you 'accidently' left a screw out of every tenth car you worked on? There are numerous stories of workers in Eastern European bomb factories who, while being made to work by the occupying Nazi army, purposely forgot to put explosives in some of the bombs so that they would do less harm when eventually dropped on Britain.

Now that the working landscape has changed (from a production to a consumption society, as Baudrillard argued), the nature of industrial sabotage has changed with it. People now subvert mainstream logos with anti-mainstream sources.

 Above: the logo for Hungry House. What makes me think of Goatse, and the DSG article - the forks look like hands, and why would you have two forks? A knife and fork would look better.

Whether this subversion is intended or not is debatable - what is most noticeable is the change cultural differences that make the internet a source of confusion to one group and so easy to use to another. People who try to control the internet - the naked celebrity pictures, the extremist material, the child pornography, the free media content - are like that old man shouting at kids to 'get off my lawn!'. The kids will continue to run over his garden - mainly because it annoys him. He doesn't understand the sheer pointless joy that the kids get, the thrill of defying authority in some. And to them, he just looks foolish.



*A side note here: I can't be the first person to point out the hypocrisy of British newspapers in the way they have treated this incident. They claim it to be an invasion of privacy - it is, but they exist in a culture where privacy is something to be swept aside in the pursuit of a story. They hack phones, send paparazzi to hound drunk celebrities, relentlessly press rape victims for information if they think it will get them an extra reader or two. The Daily Mail covered the story by stretching a single word, 'grotesque', over it's front page, but it could equally have been a label for the contents of the paper itself.

 **Another side note: This doesn't even cover the myriad reasons behind the rioting - the idea that people in Middle Eastern countries have only just found something to hate America for is laughable. And the violence is more prominent in countries which do not have a higher Muslim population, but were more heavily involved in the Arab Spring. Certainly, the violence seems to have been provoked by the video, but, like how lat summer's rioting in England was sparked by the shooting of Mark Duggan by police, the anger that drove it, and the reasons that lead it to continue, were various. The view of the media that the 'Innocence of Muslims' is the sole reason behind the violence is a continuation of the highly-flawed and dangerous discourse that all Middle Eastern countries are roughly the same, and that each has problems that can be dealt with in much the same way.

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