Folk Revolution

Posted on August 12, 2003 in Blogging Crosstalk

Joseph Duemer of Reading and Writing speaks to the question of what anarchy is in relation to weblogging here and now:

The word anarchy has been much abused. Popularly, anarchy is thought to denote disorder, chaos & the breakdown of civil society. Historically, however, anarchy has denoted attempts to organize social relations on democratic & egalitarian principles. Anarchism, then, is not the absence of social order, but the attempt to create social order anew in every moment, in every decision.

That’s pretty much my take on the term, too, which when you trace its origins means “without leaders”.

Joseph, like myself, writes in a tradition where the individual is beholden to no one but himself in the creation of his writing. Both of us have watched as commerce has eroded the place of the artist as developed since the time of William Blake who printed at his own expense a series of books which challenged lithographers, painters, and poets to see their work in a new way. Two hundred years later, we still shudder when we view these works of art. I hope that two hundred years from now, when people read our weblogs, they shudder as some of us point them off in new ways. This can only happen in a free world where standards and orders aren’t handed down from a self-appointed Olympian aristocracy but only in a place where there is a democratic exchange and room left for dissenters not merely to have puny voices, but to thrive.

Duemer mentions himself, Shelley Powers and Teresa Nielsen Hayden as voices in the movement of those who want to prevent reducing the InterNet to a tool for institutions and commerce. We haven’t arrived at the point where radio and television are nowadays, where the bulk of the people who use it have been converted into passive pawns for receiving commercials and the political propaganda of the few (despite the fact that the airwaves are community property which is loaned and rented under the conditions of public access, not fenced off as a paradise for a few), but that day may come.

Since coming to network communications in 1988, I’ve used the term “folk revolution” to describe what I think this medium best represents. Now anyone can get an account, buy space on a hard drive, and begin being like William Blake, using the combined arts of html programming, writing, and photography to attempt to bring a shudder to the spines of the broader reading public. Not long ago were the days when you stood a good chance of actually having your web site read by anyone browsing the net. Since that time, however, we’ve run into a situation more like that in broadcasting where the largest voices aren’t necessarilly the most eloquent or thought-provoking: attention is given to those who can plaster their website URLs all over television, radio, and the billboards where we bake in automobiles listening to a gabby, safe talk show host reiterate the values of the system of commerce that pays him.

Here and there, free radio has survived, largely through careful legal planning such as that which saved KPFA from the machinations of the Pacifica national board a few years back. Need we resort to such protections? It would not, I think, hurt us to take steps to ensure that some Genghis Khan of commerce, academia, or politics cannot slip into our free kingdom here and deny us space for our views and access to the onramps and offramps of the information superhighway.

Another threat that Joseph perceives is the inevitable rise of an elite which strives to standardize our online exchanges so as to “mainstream” us into yet another media serving the interests of business and academia (as well as establish themselves as authorities whose views cannot be countered by new voices). Joseph likens BloggerCon to writing conferences where all the voices speak as de facto champions of the publishing status quo, which they have sold out to and which they perpetuate through their words and cooperation. There’s not much we can do about these groups — freedom means that people can organize what they like — but we, too, can organize and diffuse this attempt by Mount Sinoids to chip their own ideas of how we should interact into stone for future generations to follow.

Folk revolution is the term I use to name the potential which I think the Internet offers. I remain committed to this world where each of us may decide for ourselves the rules by which we interact with others. There is no “tragedy of the electronic commons” where too much information floods into our heads because we allowed too many people to release too many cows into cyberspace. What we most have to fear, I think, are enclosures made on our minds by those who think they know better than we do what the Web needs to be. Panic about “the mob” threatens to turn the Internet into a medium very much like the other media where large amounts of money control what we see on television, hear on the radio, and see on billboards as we rumble through heavy traffic, filling our ears with the views and political propaganda of those who reduce all intercourse to money.

It’s time for we wired Blakes to realize that we must defend our independence from attempts to turn blogging into just another means for marketing products and discussing in safety freeze-dried academic platitudes. We must take steps to secure access for ourselves and for our children. And we should struggle to speak up even when we’re not invited into the conversations that even now attempt to shape the InterNet into a place that is less friendly to those of us who have no credentials except our experience. The Net is our access to ideas and we, too, have them. Though we can and should do nothing against those who want to ordain themselves as the Net’s priesthood, we can refuse to be governed by them and take steps now to ensure that the words of extraordinary ordinary people will continue to make those who blunder into our sites shudder. Folk revolution is a process, a state of being, and a value that is worth preserving. In two hundred years, when readers of that day look back at all the Blakes who arise in this age, I hope they shudder from reading our strange visions and I hope they can continue to write strange visions of their own which, in time, will make a people of yet another time think against the prevailing winds of their age.

I want a world where even rants, bad poetry freely posted, personal punditry, and pictures of cats can ripple forth from the fall of the smallest pebble to lick the edges of the big pond and make the reeds along the shore tremble.