Internet in France: A Ruling Class Losing Media Protection
Posted by Mike E on December 13, 2009
The radical left media strategies have usually had two legs: Producing newspapers that almost no one read, and staging gimmicky attempts to “break into” the official mass media.
Now the Internet has carved new alternative channels of information reaching millions of people. This is redefining how ideas circulate — producing horizontal and global connections that are not easily controlled or censored. And there is a scrambling at the very highest levels of the state and society to recapture control, and to even grasp the full impact of what is happening.
The following article (from the New York Times Dec. 13) describes how the “French political class” has been historically protected by the official media — in a cultural conspiracy that treated the dignity of French rulers as a matter of national survival.
Suddenly the internet publicizes raucous discussions and youtube videos that capture the racism and rudeness of French ministers. Their angry response includes persecuting and attempting to criminalize even simple, anonymous typically-disrespectful online chat.
A remarkable and even hilarious quote from that piece:
“I find we’re entering a strange society,” said Henri Guaino, one of Mr. Sarkozy’s closest counselors, speaking on French radio in September. “We can no longer say anything, we can no longer do anything. It’s absolute transparency — it’s the beginnings of totalitarianism!”
Throughout the twentieth century, it seemed like mass media were in a one-way crunch of centralization, commodification and control. As radio and TV emerged (and local newspapers declined) the publicly shared arena of ideas and news became more and more monopolized. To stand on that public stage required being “responsible” — i.e. acceptable to the ruling class assumptions of acceptable politics. All kinds of voices were more and more marginalized — simply by being excluded from that electronic stage.
For revolutionaries this has been daunting. There was a constant problem of “how to break into the news” — how to be heard by a population that got more and more of its information from TV news shows and corporate marketing networks. How to get radical films distributed, how to get radical bands signed and promoted, how to get radical events covered by reporters, how to get radical experts to be interviewed, how to get mass audiences for the radical press — these have been questions with few answers. Occasional break-outs happened, but the system was largely and increasingly effective at marginalization.
And then came the Internet…
To state what is obvious but not yet will well understood: there has been an explosion of uncontrolled connectivity that has radically opened access to ideas and audiences. Youtube, social networking, easily uploaded digital media, independent music promotion, informational subcultures, twitter, online radio, and much more… When major events happen, there is a flood of horizontally shared information and opinion that simply bypass the previous poobahs of coroprate news (and, in some countries, government censor). Unexpected items go viral in ways that rival a top spot on prime time TV.
The fact that abusive teachers screaming at kids are now vividly exposed on student blogs and youtube videos is only one example of the impact of this — another is that within the left, small cliques have been unable to keep their own followers insulated from exposure and polemics.
These technologies are still emerging, their impact is just barely starting to be felt, and a whole array of opportunities are posed and will be increasingly posed.
This NYT article documents the extreme discomfort and dislocation that social media are causing a ruling class. But it can be multiplied across the globe (China?! Iranian protests!? Flash mobs?!) There is a bleed of both information and bullshit that no one (certainly not governments or corporations) can currently control.
It is the first hint of relief for radical movements who (previously) were confined to impotent underground media (largely unread newspapers) or gimmicky attempts to break into the mainstream coverage. Now there are uncontrolled channels springing up unplanned and unheralded, and there are attempts by the powerful to respond (and control).
So far we (as revolutionaries) have largely only dabbled in this world — “putting up” articles (as if the internet was just an online newspaper), or circulating our favorites (as if we were just ordinary participants within the social networking). There are only beginnings of online revolutionary television and radical radio. There is a burning need for aggressive and creative thinking on how to be on the bleeding edge of this.
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As Web Challenges French Leaders, They Push Back
By SCOTT SAYARE (NYT)
PARIS — Dominique Broueilh is an unlikely cyberdelinquent, much less a political dissident. But earlier this year, Ms. Broueilh, 50, a homemaker and mother of three, found herself the target of a police investigation and a lawsuit from a French cabinet official because of a comment she had posted online.
Ms. Broueilh had come upon a video of the official, Nadine Morano, the secretary of state for the family, caught in a seeming untruth regarding her presence at a 2007 conference. “Oh, the liar,” Ms. Broueilh wrote, under a pseudonym, in comments below the clip.
The judicial police called in May on a weekday afternoon.
“I said to myself, ‘This must be a joke, it’s not possible,’ ” Ms. Broueilh recounted in a telephone interview from her home in St.-Paul-lès-Dax, south of Bordeaux. “It’s ridiculous, after all.”
The police said Ms. Morano, a combative politician and one of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s closest allies, had subpoenaed Ms. Broueilh’s Internet protocol address, obtained her identity and brought suit against her for “public insult toward a member of the ministry,” an offense punishable by a fine of up to $18,000.
Ms. Broueilh’s is not an isolated case. Accustomed to a certain deference from citizens and the news media, members of France’s political elite have been caught off guard by the cruder sensibilities and tabloid flavor of the online world. They have mounted a broad counteroffensive.
Politicians here have filed lawsuits like Ms. Morano’s, organized in-house Internet surveillance teams — Mr. Sarkozy receives a nightly report detailing the day’s online chatter — and roundly denounced the Web as a breeding ground for disinformation.
“The Internet is a danger for democracy,” said Jean-François Copé, parliamentary chief for the governing party, the Union for a Popular Movement, in a recent radio interview.
More than anything, perhaps, the Internet has proved to be an exasperating source of embarrassment for this country’s ruling class. In particular, a stream of widely popular online videos has repeatedly exposed French politicians at their least stately, including an apparently inebriated Ms. Morano — she has had more Web-based troubles than most — bumping and grinding with youthful male supporters.
Mr. Sarkozy was caught rebuking an ungrateful citizen; the interior minister cracked what may have been a racist joke; and the immigration minister, Éric Besson, grinning, made an obscene gesture to a cameraman. The clips have enthralled a French public accustomed to dignified leaders of a certain solemn good manners.
“It’s changing the relationship between the politician and his fellow citizen,” said Frédéric Dabi, a French commentator and public opinion director at the polling agency Ifop. The Internet is “desanctifying” a once untouchable political class, according to Mr. Dabi, who said, “We now have politicians who are scared.”
“I find we’re entering a strange society,” said Henri Guaino, one of Mr. Sarkozy’s closest counselors, speaking on French radio in September. “We can no longer say anything, we can no longer do anything. It’s absolute transparency — it’s the beginnings of totalitarianism!” His comments came amid an uproar over the online video involving the interior minister, Brice Hortefeux, one of Mr. Sarkozy’s closest friends.
Posted to the Web site of the newspaper Le Monde, the clip shows a dapper Mr. Hortefeux mingling with supporters at a political retreat. Referring to a young Arab man who appears with him in the frame, he says: “There always has to be one. When there’s one, it’s O.K. It’s when there are a lot of them that there are problems.”
The video, shot by a film crew from the French Senate’s official television channel — they initially declined to broadcast it — brought accusations of racism and calls for Mr. Hortefeux’s resignation. Fellow ministers and political allies sprang to his defense, claiming the sequence’s Internet origins rendered it suspect, at best.
Last year, Mr. Sarkozy was himself caught in an Internet scandal, now infamous, after a camera crew filmed him snapping at a man who refused to shake his hand. His phrase — loosely and politely translated as “Get out of here, you idiot!” — quickly became a French cultural staple. First posted to the Web site of the newspaper Le Parisien, the video remains the site’s most-viewed clip more than a year and a half later.
After that episode, rivals accused Mr. Sarkozy of denigrating the nation’s highest office. Government officials deplored the Internet’s intrusion into an affair that, they said, ought never to have been made public.
That indignation is hardly surprising. The French news media, like others in Europe, have long granted the political elite a number of journalistic accommodations, including the right to make prepublication revisions to interviews. In an interview soon after the handshaking incident, Le Parisien quoted a still nettled Mr. Sarkozy as saying, “I would have done better not to respond.” The paper later disclosed that presidential aides had inserted his expression of regret after the fact.
“We used to feel that politicians were to be protected,” said Daniel Carton, 59, a political journalist who has become an outspoken critic of what he calls complicity between French reporters and public officials.
“We kept these stories for ourselves,” he said, “to liven up dinner parties.”
With the advent of the Internet, however, the news media have shown a growing willingness to expose French leaders’ missteps. In particular, journalists have begun to break with one long-held unspoken rule: that everything uttered by a public official, with the exception of official pronouncements, is to remain off limits.
“What we call ‘the off’ is disappearing,” said Mr. Dabi, the political analyst. “Now it’s like what they say in American TV crime dramas: ‘Anything you say can be used against you.’ ”
But by all accounts, French politicians have yet to change their behavior. And the embarrassing videos and disparaging commentaries continue to crop up.
“The Internet does not accept this arrogance,” said Azouz Begag, a sociologist and a minister under former President Jacques Chirac. “The Internet, it’s political revenge.”
As for Ms. Morano and Ms. Broueilh, the family affairs secretary dropped her lawsuit after it gained nationwide attention. It had spurred a torrent of online screeds, widespread derision and a rash of critical comments beneath the video in question — “Oh, the liar” popular among them. Ms. Morano declined to comment on the matter.
“For the comments I left, she went too far,” Ms. Broueilh said.
“The facts are there,” she said. “But I’ll tell you, I don’t leave my opinion on online videos anymore.”
web-radios said
Nice Post, I confirm that in France, politicians i’ll soon be in trubble with internet :)
nando said
I think we need to develop our political work along three questions:
1) How do we develop a mass audience for truly revolutionary politics? I think that means substantive analysis and “exposure hot on the heels of events” — i.e. an “Iskra project” updated for very new times.
2) How do we use social networking to develop forms of organization, mobilization, mutual education, and common purpose? The argument that “you can’t organize on the internet” is fifteen years out of date. Future organizations that exist offline will (generally) first drawn together from online networks and connections.
3) How do we circumvent the Internet’s “data transparency” character? We need a new security culture. The argument that “you can’t preserve privacy online” is wrong and self-defeating. A movement without secrets is a movement that can’t help bring about serious radical change.
(There have been some early experiments in this, including the PGP movement, Indymedia’s server protections, and even the RCP’s paleo-forms of secrecy. And we need to critically sum up those kinds of experiences — in order to forge something new.)
The radical left has been impotent — sidelined by the mechanisms, culture, media, politics of a “post modern” period. The problem includes both the relative privileges of U.S. society and the political summations after the “fall of the wall” — but we can’t reduce our problem to either of those things. Both of those things are “overcomable” — with an appropriate approach to conjuncture and mass line. A big part of that is grasping the opportunity that the new media afford to the creation and collective evolution of dynamic globally-dispersed political subcultures.
Ben Seattle said
Deus Ex Machina:
A mortar in the hands of Spartacus
(and the promise of information war)
The comments by Mike and Nando are thoughtful and perceptive.
My favorite movie is Spartacus. Near the end, in the final battle scene, the army of slaves is surrounded by three Roman armies. We all know how it ends. No large-scale revolt of slaves in the ancient world ended successfully. The movie had a strong influence on me when I first saw it at a young age. It was my first exposure to class politics and it helped prepare me for the time, later in life, when I decided I was a revolutionary.
If you saw the movie, you will remember this scene. You wanted the slaves to win. I used to fantasize, after watching it as a kid, how things might have been different if the army of slaves, faced with the endless ranks of Roman soldiers marching in precise formations, had possession of a few modern weapons. Maybe a couple of mortars.
The endless rows of Roman soldiers would have fallen down en masse; and what was left would have scattered like so many cockroaches when you turn on the kitchen light in a cheap apartment.
Of course, that is fantasy. We are materialists. We deal with the world as it is, not with dreams of sudden and near-infinite power handed to us at the last minute by god [1]. And, we all know that, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
All the same, it has occurred to me that activists in the 21st century have been born at a good time. Modern technology, economics, cuture and politics are now putting into their hands weapons that (it will probably be clear fifty years from now) will be more powerful in human affairs than the thousands of smart-bombs and nuclear missles in the hands of the imperialists.
The impact of the the revolution in communications (ie: the internet and an expanding array of cheap and easy-to-use hardware devices) on politics, from the time that the web emerged into mass use 15 years ago, has so far been relatively minor. It has influenced the news cycle and decided elections in a few countries. It has been useful in the organization of a few large mass actions. And it has had a certain impact on the nature of activist organization. My conclusion, however, is that what we have seen so far represents only a tease; only a small hint of a power immense beyond human imagination. In the long run, as decade rolls after decade, the revolution in communications will, so to speak, release ever-increasing amounts of oxygen onto the fires of the class struggle and set the stage for an eventual explosion of stellar magnitude.
That’s my introduction. Reader who know my work are familar with my views on this topic.
Nando raises three issues (paraphrased below) related to practical use of the internet by revolutionary activists today:
(1) How do we develop a mass audience for truly revolutionary politics? Is there a modern-day project that would be analogous to the newspaper (ie: “Iskra”) that Lenin proposed as a means to unite and train activists in Russia?
(2) How do we use social networks to organize activists around common projects?
(3) Can we develop a security culture to deal with the fact that the “political transparency” that is emerging as a fact of modern life also means that the bourgeois state will find it easy to keep track of us for that day in the future when it decides to suppress the progressive movements by the methods (ie: mass arrests, torture, execution and secret death squads) that have long been used in developing countries?
Mike and Nando ask good questions. As a student of these issues, I don’t have all the answers, but may be able to shed a little light. Hopefully what follows is not all nonsense.
The key idea central to all three of these questions concerns how we will make effective and skilled use of the emerging revolution in communications. I can give my view in a single sentence: We need to create an open, self-moving community united around a program of information war.
Since this may sound vague or strange to many readers I should attempt to clarify:
(1) I use the phrase “information war” to describe a struggle of ideas organized on a mass scale.
(2) I believe that this struggle of ideas should be centered around the specific goal of mobilizing the working class to bring an end to the existing system of bourgeois class rule. This does not mean that this goal will be the only idea worth struggling over because there are thousands of worthwhile issues in which there will be a struggle of ideas. Rather, this means that the specific goal of ending bourgeois class rule is the central idea that will tie everything else together .
(3) An “open, self-moving community” means a community that is open to activists and not tightly controlled, from the top-down, in a paternalistic way by a small circle of activists.
If our central task is the creation of a community based on information war — then how does this relate to the three questions posed by Nando?
The first two questions relate to the kinds of projects that will unite an emerging community of revolutionary activists. I believe the central project will eventually be a revolutionary news service. This would eventually have a large mass audience. But there are many kinds of smaller projects that would be easier to do to gain practical experience.
Nando specifically asks how we can attract/develop a mass audience for genuinely revolutionary politics. This raises the question of the nature of genuinely revolutionary politics. To me this means class politics , but I do not believe that is the prevailing view here. Readers who are interested in my views on this can look at my reply to Selucha in the Kasama threads forum at:
http://z11.invisionfree.com/Kasama_Threads/index.php?showtopic=983
I will also add my observation that the community here is, to a large degree, organized along paternalistic lines. Readers who are interested in this observation of mine and the reasons for it may want to read the criticism of Kasama that is part of the “conscious forces” essay in my annual report. The bottom line is that activists will work as part of a community when they believe they have a stake in it; when they believe that they can participate in the community without arbitrary and unnecessary interference with their efforts.
The third question raised by Nando concerns the need for a security culture.
This is actually the easiest question to understand.
There are two distinct reasons to have a security culture:
(1) To minimize harassment
To minimize harassment of activists by local police, employers, landlords and racist or neo-nazi gangs.
(2) Concerns for severe repression in the future
The second reason concerns likely future efforts by the state to decapitate the revolutionary movement.
These are two different issues.
The first issue is relatively easy to deal with. Standard internet security measures (ie: such as using pseudonymns and seperate email accounts for political and personal work) are usually sufficient to minimize harassment.
The possibility of severe repression in the future is different because homeland security can easily trace our ip addresses and get our identities from our internet service providers.
My conclusion on this topic is that we should “make hay while the sun shines”. In other words, while conditions exist which allow us to legally organize a revolution mass movement without getting arrested, tortured or executed–we should certainly do so. It is the creation and development of a such a revolutionary movement that will best be able to protect us in the future or possibly even be strong enough to prevent arrests, torture and executions in the future.
Of course we can make it more difficult for the state to hunt us down and kill us in the future by not using the internet today to organize communities of struggle. But in such a case we are undermining our effectiveness today in order to attempt to protect ourselves tomorrow. That is not a formula for victory.
There is also a kind of foolish fetish for organizational secrecy that undermines organizing today. The idea is to keep secret the disagreements between members of an activist or revolutionary organization. The problem with this–is that it hurts our movement more than it helps. In the long run, all the most important contradictions will only be correctly resolved with help and assistance from many independent activists who will intervene with the weight of their experience and voice to help resolve the contradictions.
I have made this post too long already. Readers who are interested can check out my website which lists articles where I go into many of these topics at greater length.
– Ben Seattle
http://struggle.net/ben/
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Note:
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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina
patrick said
Nando,
Anarchitexts, which was published by Autonomedia a while back, might have some useful material for summing up what radicals and revolutionaries have done with communications technology over the past 15 years or so. A lot of the projects/groups described in it aren’t explicitly political, and some are pretty openly reformist. But it might be a useful place to start.
http://www.autonomedia.org/node/51