Syndicate: [Fwd: <<strategies>> anarchists steal award]

[martha rosler <navva@earthlink.net>]

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>Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 15:55:09 -0400
>From: DeeDee Halleck <dhalleck@weber.ucsd.edu>
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>From: <evan@protest.net>
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>Subject: Re: <<strategies>> anarchists steal award
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>I Stole The Webby News Award
>The Webby Awards are a celebration of corporate domination over the
>internet. The whole purpose is to take a popularly created participatory
>and democratic medium and laude the work of people who are squeeze profit
>out of it. Sure there are some categories such as activism, the arts, and
>weird, but the focus, in their rhetoric and during the ceremonies, are the
>profit hungry dot com's.
>
>I stole the webby award in the news category to protest the corporate
>domination over the news media both in the traditional and online mediums.
>When I got up to the stage I placed a copy of Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing
>Consent on the podium, grabbed the news award, and yelled "Fuck the
>corporate media!" in to the microphone. Unfortunately they had already
>turned off the podium microphone speakers and only the online audience
>heard my message. With the award in hand I ran back down the stage and
>tried to leave the opera house. One of the webby security guards grabbed
>the award out of my hands as I pushed through the doors. He said something
>like "oh no you don't" and I didn't feel like fighting over, and breaking,
>the spring so I gave it back to him. He ran it back down the hall and gave
>it to winning news corporado.
>
>Let me say that it wasn't an official 'stunt' and the webby people really
>didn't like my action. They apparently do like my website, protest.net, as
>it's been nominated for the activism award both times they've had the
>category.
>
>Some other higher up in the webby hierarchy came over to chew me out for
>"messing up their well planned event" and that they'd had to get the
>inside.com guy to fly out at the last minute from New York. After hanging
>out in the back of the theater for a while, not thinking it wise to walk
>back up to my third row seat, the security guards found me and tried to
>kick me out. They said "that was not cool, not cool." I wanted to see more
>of the ceremony, maybe get people's reactions to my action, so I pled that
>I was a nominee and that worked, they let me stay. They said something
>about how if I'd be ANYTHING other than a nominee they'd kick me out. I
>highly doubt that if I'd been a corporate sponsor they'd even threaten to
>kick me out, but that's what he said.
>
>I ran in to one of the judges in the hall, who I'd been talking to before.
>He again went off about how hard they worked to pull of this highly
>scripted event and I was messing it up for everybody. When I quipped that
>Webbies even have a tradition of disruption and I hadn't even thrown the
>webby at the audience like jodi.org had, he said "well that was a long
>time ago." Implying that things had changed, now at the webbies. Jodi.org
>had called them "greedy corporate bastards" back in 1999, and they still
>are greedy corporate bastards. Only now they're whining about the dot bomb
>deflating their portfolios.
>
>The webby awards have celebrated sites that pioneer the breaking down the
>wall between advertisers and news content such as amazon, inside.com, cnn,
>beliefnet, babycenter and many others. This is the wrong direction to take
>our collective technological development. We have a choice, either we can
>use this amazing new medium to become a truly popular mass medium where
>everybody has a voice or we can use it to drive hyper consumerism and
>friction free capitalism. For example, the technical achievement award
>went to Microsoft Windows Update and not projects that have been both
>major technical achievements and fulfill the internet's potential as a
>libratory medium. I see such projects as FreeNet, Ogg Vorbis, Gnutella,
>Apache, *BSD, and Linux itself as all being much more important technical
>achievements. MWU is a clever way for Microsoft to send you bug fixes!
>Bugs they created and bugs that are a result of their top heavy corporate
>development model.
>
>When the television, radio, and cable were introduced there was a struggle
>between people who wanted to use the medium for the common good and people
>who wanted to use the medium for profit and to reproduce the conditions of
>inequality and domination. The question was, do we use this new technology
>to reduce social, economic, and information inequality, or do we use it to
>create a new class of wealthy. This struggle has played out across the
>world. In the US we have the most corporate and profit driven society and
>our media systems have been shaped to reflect and reproduce those values.
>Quickly we saw the rhetoric of the 'information superhighway' be replace
>with the ecommerce gold rush. The internet is a creation our society, like
>all communications mediums it is communal property.  We must not let the
>internet go the way of the newspaper, radio, television, and cable. The
>communications commons must not be partitioned and sold for private
>profit.
>
>Perhaps this collapse of the hyper inflated internet stocks will help us
>take the internet back from the VC's, dot commers, marketing spin
>miesters, and ecommerce biz dev stiff's. This is a medium that can allow
>us to radically change the balance of information power. Foucault said
>"Power is not possessed, rather is exercised." We must exercise our power
>as creators of technology, consumers of news and culture, people who are
>willing to think critically about the world to fight for the liberation of
>our internet.
>
>DotCom's Burn: The Internet Lives Free!
>
>
>
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