what capital wants

mute #8, 08.97

A schematic representation of the key currents and dynamics of McKenzie Wark's article
What Does Capital Want?: Corporate Desire and the Infobahn Fantasy, reproduced below.

WHAT DOES CAPITAL WANT?:
CORPORATE DESIRE AND THE INFOBAHN FANTASY

McKenzie Wark
mwark@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au

Dateline: London 19th January 1997: 'Prodigal son returns to
Apple corps' reads the headline in the Guardian Weekly. Its a
no more than usually unimaginative header for a story that's
been told and retold all over the world. Steve Jobs has returned
to Apple with the purchase of his Next complany for a reported
US$400 million. The pictures show Jobs on stage with Apple
chairman Gil Amelio.

As the trade papers reported with somewhat more
thoroughness than the newswires, Apple's San Francisco trade
fair stage show, where the Jobs deal was announced, was long
on spectacle and short on technical detail. The strategy for the
development of the operating system boiled down to a slide
showing a blue and a yellow box, with an arrow from one to
the other. Somewhat more effort seemed to go into stage
managing the video clips from the science fiction film
Independence Day and a walk-on guest appearance by actor
Jeff Goldblum.

So what's going on here? Business as usual. The selling of
desire. Apple is going all out to retain the love of its loyal
customers, developers, stock holders and institutional investors,
reinvigorating the faith in the greap leap from the blue to the
yellow box.

Business and technology -- its supposed to be hard stuff,
impervious to the tools of pointyheaded intellectuals, to our
'critique'. But look what's really at stake here, as Apple tries to
sell itself a future. Nothing but smoke and mirrors, words and
images, and above all desire -- Apple's desire to be desired, and
thus know itself and be itself and grow in our love. Didn't Hegel
have something to say about that?

And so, we come to the question where art meets money: what
does capital want? I want to try to answer it, not by speaking
of this immediate future, the one into which all our desires
project themselves without certainty. I want to wind back the
clock a bit, and look at the desires of a slightly earlier moment
in net history -- the great infobahn bubble of the early '90s.
For the net has a history, and I think there's as much to learn
about the net from its history, as from science fiction.

PROJECTING THE FANTASY

Dateline: Washington 14th October 1993: The Bell Atlantic
telephone company announced a US$23 billion deal to buy
America's largest cable TV operator, Tele-Communications Inc
and its cable programming company Liberty Media. The
merger would create the 6th largest corporation in the country.
By combining TCI's 25% of the cable TV market with Bell
Atlantic's telephone services, the merger would produce a
company with a wire to the home of 42% of American
households. This is the biggest merger proposed so far aimed at
positioning companies for the development of the 'information
superhighway'. This is a concept attributed to American Vice
President Al Gore, that describes the ambition to build a
communications network carrying voice, video and computer
data, to homes as well as businesses. The merger plan will
attract close scrutiny from the Federal Communications
Commission and the Justice Department, concerned about
monopoly pricing practices and corporate collusion
respectively.

The value of this deal would be variously reported, from $23bn
(Korporaal, 1993) to $33bn (Mandese, 1994), but with a rhetoric
invariably the same: Bell Atlantic and TCI shall build between
them an 'information superhighway'. Following a Washington
policy wonk fashion, I will henceforth abbreviate this strange
object of desire to 'infobahn' for short. What is in a name?
Quite a lot, as we shall see.

The scale of the proposed merger, "one of the largest
acquisitions in American history", put the infobahn firmly on
the information mediascape of business news. Ray Smith,
chairman and CEO of Bell Atlantic Corp was the man of the
moment. The business mediascape is often populated by heroic
action figures: "He leapfrogged cable industry visionaries like
Ted Turner and John Malone in the process and turned a low-
intensity battle to create telecommunications services into an
all-out war that borders on brinkmanship." (Deagon, 1994a)
But there are perhaps more interesting stories to tell than the
ones that the business and professional press makes up as it
goes along. And I should know -- I've made up my own stories
about the infobahn for The Australian, rather cynical and
critical ones. (Wark, 1994a; 1994b) This present essay is an
extension, even more cynical and critical, of those perverse
versions of the fantasy. It does what I cannot do in the press:
examine the role of that press itself in creating the substance, if
it can be called that, of these corporate desires.

The infobahn emerges as a fantasy to fill a certain void, a
certain faltering of the "animal spirits" of capitals' desire.
Without an object of desire, capital cannot invest itself in the
world it finds around itself. As Michael Eisner, CEO of Walt
Disney says about this infobahn thing: "I don't get it, so we are
not investing in it." (Deagon, 1994b) Without investing in that
world, it cannot remake itself. It becomes, as they say, 'mature'
-- a short step away from death. The information age has been
ageing for quite a long time now.

As Bob James, Group General Manager of Strategic
Development at Telecom explained it to the Sydney Morning
Herald computer pages editor Gareth Powell, telecoms the
world over will contract if they think that their business is just
POTS (plain old telephone services), because: "It starts to
become a commodity when you can buy it from a wide range
of suppliers." So telecoms have to think about new services and
new infrastructure to run new services. According to James, "On
average, television is used for three hours a day, the telephone
for 30 minutes. Television needs two megabits a second
compared to the telephone which needs only 64 kilobits."
(Powell, 1994a) So while telecoms would love to offer services
that soak up some of that TV watching time, this involves
considerably more bandwidth, and that sort of bandwidth is
still not so cheap to deliver. Or as Ray Smith, Bell Atlantic CEO
puts it about the TCI deal: "Basically, both cable and telephone
businesses are mature businesses with mature technologies,
customers and product lines. We have reached the limits of our
original franchise but believe we have tremendous opportunity
to find new ones if we can reinvent ourselves around a new
marketplace with a whole new set of requirements." (Deagon,
1994a) A sort of transcendental logic lurks here, either mature
companies resurrect themselves to answer a new desire -- or
they die.

Of course the Bell Atlantic deal was not meant to be, and its
unravelling nearly putting paid to the information
superhighway fantasy as the yarn spun to a standstill. "The
breakup of the Bell Atlantic / Tele-Communications Inc deal is
still sending shock waves throughout the business world..."
writes the Advertising Age, and yet the story quotes the result of
online discussions that publication sponsored through its
involvement in the commercial online system Prodigy, neatly
showing off its own interest in electronic media at the same
time as it dampens expectations.

CAPITAL, SEDUCTION & DEATH

The Bell Atlantic/TCI deal wasn't exactly unprecedented -- 1993
saw a spurt of investment in cable and wireless networks. MCI
loudly and proudly publicised plans for a $20bn consortium to
build an information superhighway. It also earmarked $2bn for
a plan to offer local service, and compete with the regional
phone companies. (Flaherty, 1994) Quite a few corporate
speculations and projections had used the infobahn rhetoric
before. What made the Bell Atlantic announcement different
was the sheer size of it. The amount of money hooked to the
rhetoric had an ontological property -- it announced that the
infobahn was now a far more probable future reality than it
had previously appeared, even when backed by the authority
of the vice president.

It is a unique feature of the culture of capital that corporate
identities are in the long run premised on the desireability of
the future being *different* from the past. Companies are
validated by their ability to incorporate into themselves and
themselves into an image of a different future. A future others
accept as a projection of a desireable and posessable future
terrain. The company that successfully 'husbands' this image to
grow and proliferate has to simultaneously possess it for itself
and arouse the desire of others for it. What does the
corporation want? It wants the future to desire it. It desires the
desire of the other. And it wants its rivals, its dependents, its
patrons to desire its desire. This is the basic structure of fantasy,
(Zizek, 1989, pp87-129) but as it exists in the historical romance
that has become 'late capitalism'. (Jameson, 1991, 1-55)

Irony is the wetnurse of history. Marx said that capital is a
culture where "...all that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred
is profaned....". (Marx, 1978, p70) It became a culture that
thrives on revolutionising itself, and revolutionising us, its
agents, rather than the other way around. The desires invested
in futures that have now passed deflate into corporate
stagnation, impotence, death -- or worst, merger as the junior,
'passive' partner in a hostile 'takeover'. The other side to this
historical form of 'radical negativity' (Zizek, 1989, p5) is the
corporation's positive projection of the fantasy of its own
desire, posited in terms of a future. As Zizek says, "desire is not
something given in advance, but something that has to be
constructed -- it is precisely the role of fantasy to give the
coordinates of the subject's desire, to specify its object, to locate
the position of the subject in it." (Zizek, 1991, p6) Even when the
subject in question is the legally incorporated collective subject
of the company, its object of desire a flow of revenue and its
location mapped on a spreadsheet projection into the future,
marked off in accounting quarters.

The enormous growth in desktop media, presentation graphics
and the like is the symptom of an investment in this positive
ontology, where capital reinvents itself as a more general,
collective fantasy. A fantasy meant to counter the spectre of
Marx and Schumpeter's (1981) bleak vision of capital as radical
negativity and endless death. Capital has created a new theatre
of operations for itself, in which it fantasises its future and
organises its desires. (Ross, 1991, 169-183) This is postmodern
capital, thrusting itself into the future, in bad faith and indeed
false consciousness, rather than being burned up by an
inability to outrun its own past.

SCORING

Investment confidence is not just about the 'hard' numbers, it is
about the ability to imagine a sphere of (relatively)
unrestrained action. One of the functions of the business media
is a sort of locker room boy's talk that tries to talk up this very
possibility of making it, unencumbered, to the profit zone of
'blue sky.' "Two things that have just happened in the US
indicate that the world is on the threshold of a new
communications era." (Gray, 1994) Commentator Robert Gray
calls the play from the March 1994 corporate press releases:
Viacom has beat Barry Diller's QVC to Paramount, buying it for
$10 million; that software firm Oracle has allied itself with Bell
Atlantic and a collection of smaller firms, including Apple and
the Washington Post. The point of the first score is that Viacom
now joins News Corp and Time Warner in the league of "mega-
media groups." The second announces an all-star line-up for
what we are meant to believe is the big league playing field for
the future conflicts of capital investment -- interactive
television.

By April 1994 the pundits are less sure of themselves. A less
attractive future becomes a more common prognosis. Three
events punctured the bull run on the future of the infobahn
that Ray Smith raised to the level of a media feeding frenzy.
Besides the collapse of his $20-odd billion Bell Atlantic / TCI
merger, there was the collapse of $4.9bn Southwestern Bell/Cox
Enterprises deal and a federal judge's rejection of $12.6bn AT&T
/ McCaw Cellular deal. "Corporate executives and media
moguls are gnashing their teeth over the regulatory climate in
Washington after the scuttling of a second deal" editorialises a
Reuters reporter after the Southwestern Cox nil-all playoff.
(Kelley, 1994) What she means is that these deals have no value
unless the telecoms can fly free of federal regulation, and there
are not enough encouraging signs that they will have a free
hand to keep the merger mania afloat. Southwestern Bell called
off plans for a $4.9bn cable TV partnership with Cox
Enterprises, and blamed it on the tighter rules on cable rates
imposed by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). "I
don't care what the FCC says, I think this is all attributable to
the FCC's second cable rate rollback. It has sent a signal to the
marketplace that the FCC and the Clinton Administration are
going to be regulating this industry with a heavy hand," the
Advertising Age quotes one Ms Jessica Reif, an analyst with
Openheimer and Co. (Mandese, 1994) The FCC made it clear to
cable operators, with two mandatory cuts to basic cable fees,
that it would not tolerate monopoly pricing practices. This put
pressure on the asking price the cable companies demanded of
the telecoms in the merger deal negotiations.

The state-managed referent that ultimately sets the value of
these firms is the regulated monopoly price that cable firms
can charge for 'basic cable' services. While rhetorically,
'deregulated' and 'free' markets are usually taken to be
synonymous, they are not. The cable and telecom companies
want to be freed from regulation, but they do not want
competition -- they want to be free to extract monopoly rent
prices. The possibility that they might cement alliances
organised around a new fantasy promising benefits for all, and
in the process weaken the regulatory net was an attractive play
in the corporate sport of seduction. It just did't quite come off.

ANTAGONISM AND FANTASY

Part of the problem with monopoly strategies in
communications is that while it may appear to be desirable for
an individual company to achieve something approaching
monopoly power, this may be contrary to the interests of
capital as a whole. The rhetoric of 'deregulation' may well
mean the attempt by a monopoly to free itself from state
imposed limits to its power. The rhetoric of 'competition' more
likely reflects the desire of other companies to substitute
another mechanism of control should the pressure to relax
[end of sentence missing]

It also created a quite surreal notion of where and what exactly
a market is. The United States was divided up into 161 Local
Access and Transport Areas (LATAs). The local independent
phone companies and the new-born baby Bells are only
allowed to carry traffic within a LATA, even if there are several
in the area where they are a franchised monopoly service. The
traffic between LATAs is carried by long distance carriers, such
as AT&T, MCI or Sprint. These are names familiar to any
American TV viewer, as their 'competition' for the long
distance traffic seems to revolve less around the complex ever
changing confetti of price plans as around elaborate and
stylish TV ads. These, ironically enough, are taken as evidence
that a 'market' is in operation, when of course they mean the
opposite. As Fred Block (1990, p60) points out, advertising is
premised on an imperfection in the market. Lacking the
information to make a rational comparison between phone
companies, one is left with little choice but to go with the one
that put that cute little child actor from The Piano in an ad just
after she won her academy award.

MARKET INTELLECTUALS

An interesting dimension to the deregulatory mood of the 1980s
was the way in which the social science academies and think
tanks became a key theatre of operation, and one in which
notions of economic rationality achieved via the market
overtook models of technological rationality through
engineering cybernetic information systems. Its no accident
that the Bell labs contributed to information theory. Its where
Claude Shannon worked out an index of the ratio of noise to
signal for a given bandwidth. Between them the centralised,
bureaucratised theatres of operation that are a private
monopoly or a military apparatus were amenable to the
ideologies of operations analysis, systems analysis, cybernetics
and information science spawned by the unprecedented
logistics problems of world war two and developed in novel
intellectual theatres of operation like the Macey Foundation's
Cybernetics Group (Heims, 1991) or the RAND corporation
sponsored by the air force (Kaplan, 1983). As in the first war,
the second war was a foretaste and a catalyst for the logistical
operations of the giant bureaucracies of the corporations,
which uses logistical techniques combined with communications
and computing technologies to take many aspects of the
production cycle out of the market.

The eclipse of technical by market rationality is most likely best
seen in a Gramscian light. (Gramsci, 1971, pp55-90) Its not that
the free marketeers were 'right', its that they narrated a future
field of action for a rising coincidence of social forces. To some
corporate strategists, the proliferation of alternate vectoral
technologies and the rise of the intensive vector of computing
promised to take the development of capital beyond its rigidly
bureaucratic phase of Fordist mass production and
consumption. (Aglietta, 1979) The desire to pursue distinctive
communication and information strategies turned corporations
against the AT&T monopoly, and the notion of a market rather
than an administratively rational form of information covered
this desire.

The last area in which the relatively stable regime that runs
from the consolidation of AT&T to the 1982 break-up came
apart was in the challenge to the restrictions placed on AT&T in
the area of electronic publishing. Ironically AT&T argued that
its long distance monopoly had already been undermined by
MCI and Sprint, and so the argument that it should be kept out
of electronic services because of its monopoly position no
longer held. The courts agreed.

The regional baby Bell companies, like Bell Atlantic, presently
expect the restrictions on electronic services will be lifted for
them also. Deals like the Bell Atlantic/TCI merger only make
sense if the combined matrix of vectors can also serve as the
conduit for expanded services. Ray Smith's pronouncements on
the future of Bell Atlantic were basically a bet that restrictions
would be lifted before the massive infobahn investment is
completed. This is where it gets interesting.

THE OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE

As an object of desire, the infobahn has to display two quite
contradictory attributes. It has to have socially desirable
qualities, and it has to have them as a matter of course, as a
consequence of its basic contours, such that it will not require
regulation, and indeed can appear to be at its most socially
desirable when it is not regulated. On the other hand, it has to
pay off. It has to shake its moneymaker for the stockholders
and screen jockeys with their hands on the bonds that are
going to fund the projects and who are trading the stocks of the
companies that talk up this new object of both public and
privatised desire. (Wark, 1994d)

Two clouds appear on this sky blue horizon. The first is that
other sectors of capital may not see the quasi-monopoly
behaviour of unregulated media companies, who are both
service providers and common carriers for the services
marketed by others, as in their interests. An Electronic Times
editorial cautions:
"the danger facing the electronics industry is that the immense
potential of the information superhighway will be highjacked
by the US telecom companies fighting old battles. The local
companies want unrestricted access to the long distance market,
without reciprocation, and the long distance operators want
access to the local market, again without equal access." (Anon,
1994a)
Only by calling the phone market something else -- an
information superhighway, and arguing that it has benefits for
employment, growth, productivity, as well as social and
cultural benefits, they are evading a history of US experience
with monopoly service providers which indicates otherwise.
Newspaper journalists might pick up the infobahn as an object
of desire, but the specialised press, with a firmer grasp of the
interests of its readers, was and is more sanguine.

Then of course, there's the public interest. That tireless
debunker of corporate visions, Herbert Schiller describes the
infobahn as
"... a blueprint for corporate domination with the public
interest given short shrift....Stunning corporate mergers and
acquisitions among telephone, computer, cable and
entertainment companies, each of them already dominant in
their field, are preparing the way for what could be -- failing
growing public protest -- an unprecedented corporate
enclosure of national social and cultural space.... Can public
benefits be expected when the structure is erected on a
privately built base? ..." (Schiller, 1993)

The infobahn boosters want to make sure that the firms
monopolising the present vectors also monopolise the next
generation of vectors. But they will not be able to raise the
money to develop really extensive new infrastructure unless
they can be sure of capturing a significant flow of income from
any new services the new vector matrix generates. They cannot
do that with one hand tied behind their back in the form of the
separation of the vector field into distinctly regulated fields by
the Communications Act, the FCC and anti-trust law. If the
infobahn is going to be the future vector matrix of big business,
like the telegraph, telephone and television before it, then the
monopoly firms needs a wider field of action, preferably a
maintenance of their legislated monopolies as sources of stable
revenue for the development of vast new infrastructure. And so
they would like us to believe that enhanced economic
competitiveness, community spirit, public debate and
educational opportunity will somehow flow naturally from the
technology itself. Hence the vision of the 'information
superhighway' and all the fantasies of freedom of movement
that the metaphor suggests -- for anyone who has a car at
least, meaning anyone with a modicum of personal and
political power who's views might matter in constructing a
hegemonic bloc of interest around the thing.

THE VISION THING

The man who is generally credited with coming up with the
rhetorical strategy for forming an image of just such a hybrid
object of desire is former senator, now Vice President Al Gore.

Here is Vice President Gore telling parables to the National
Press Club:
"I'd like to start by talking about an incident from the past.
There is a lot of romance surrounding the sinking of the Titanic
91 years ago. But when you strip the romance away, a tragic
story emerges that tells us a lot about human beings -- and
telecommunications. Why did the ship that couldn't be sunk
steam full speed into an ice field? For in the last few hours
before the Titanic collided, other ships were sending messages
like this one from the Mesaba: "Lat42N to 41.25 Long 49W to
Long 50.30W. Saw much heavy pack ice and great number
large icebergs also field ice." And why, when the Titanic
operators sent distress signal after distress signal did so few
ships respond? The answer is that -- as the investigations
proved -- the wireless business then was just that, a business.
Operators had no obligation to remain on duty. They were to
do what was profitable. When the day's work was done -- often
the lucrative transmissions from wealthy passengers --
operators shut off their sets and went to sleep. In fact, when the
last ice warnings were sent, the Titanic operators were too
involved sending those private messages from wealthy
passengers to take them. And when they sent the distress signals
operators on the other ships were in bed. Distress signals
couldn't be heard, in other words, because the airwaves were
chaos -- willy-nilly transmissions without regulation. The
Titanic wound up two miles under the surface of the North
Atlantic in part because people hadn't realised that radio was
not just a curiosity but a way to save lives. Ironically, that
tragedy that resulted in the first efforts to regulate the airwaves.
Why did government get involved? Because there are certain
public needs that outweigh private interests." (Gore, 1993)

As far as I'm aware, this is not a widely reported instance of
Gorespeak, but it neatly encapsulates the problem of an
infobahn run by quasi-monopolies in a deregulated
environment. Gore's rhetoric here seems to me an instance of
what I'd call 'Breen's Law'. (Breen, 1994) In my reading, Breen's
Law states that the opportunity for policy increases in direct
proportion to the perceived gap between the use value and the
exchange value outcomes of a given communication regime. I
say perceived, for it is not use value that is at stake here, but
the sign of use value, as indeed it is not exchange value that is
at stake, in the first instance, but the sign of exchange value.
Policy is as much the management of the simulacra of divergent
values as capital is the management of the indexes of futurity.
(cf Baudrillard, 1988, pp124-125) The opportunity for policy
presents itself when, and only when, there is a divergence
between the signs. But while the opportunity for policy is here,
putting together a hegemonic bloc incorporating enough
interests to sustain it is another matter. One that requires a little
more than a video presentation or a press release -- it calls for
the staging of the spectacle of a public media event.

THE SPECTACLE OF THE SPECTACLE

At a meeting with 30 executives from interested companies for a
'summit' sponsored by the the Academy of Television Arts and
Sciences in January 1994, Al Gore offered a 'new deal'. Provided
they pipe access to schools, libraries and hospitals, infobahn
barons were offered the prospect of a lessening of the
regulatory net. (May, 1994; McAvoy, 1994) He proposed a single
new regulatory agency for all the players in the convergence,
removing the rules that keep local telephone, long distance
telephone and cable TV companies from competing with in
each other's area of business. The Administration would
authorise the FCC to reduce regulation and enable smaller
players into the phone and cable markets, but big players are
supposedly to be blocked from using their quasi-monopoly
positions to gain more market leverage. In place of the separate
regulatory regimes for cable and telephony, a new regulatory
category will be created that offers communication companies
exemption from local and state regulation in return for a
commitment to universal service. Rate regulation will continue,
however, until sufficient 'competition' is established to prevent
monopoly pricing.

That was in essence the fantasy Gore tabled for the
communications future, and it mostly got good press. "The
communications industry reacted warmly to White House plans
for legislation intended to speed up the arrival of the
information superhighway" -- that's what went over the
Reuter's wire, accompanied by quotes from a selection of
corporate stars. Jeffrey Katzenberg, chairman of Walt Disney
Studios: "Its full of the promise and hope Hollywood needs in
terms of a level playing field as this new universe evolves."
Robert Kavner, CEO of AT&T's multimedia products and services
group: "We support local telephone companies entering the
long distance market, but we only support it after it is proven
their are no bottlenecks." Scott Sassa, president of Turner
entertainment group: "It is important in terms of competition
inside the country and outside the country. Entertainment is the
second largest surplus export in the country and I don't think
defence is going to grow any more." (Miller, 1994)

The Advertising Age likewise quoted well those with well
quottng stocks: Alan Kay, a fellow of Apple Computer: "This is
the biggest thing since the invention of the printing press."
Richard Notebaert, Ameritech Corp, a regional Bell Co.:
"Creating the superhighway is the easy part, but creating the
kinds of services that consumers will use again and again,
that's where mistakes will be made and where we will find
some 'roadkill' along the way." (Deagon, 1994b) In sum,
'universal service' becomes the much reduced public interest
component of the fantasy, and 'free market' off sets the fears of
those outside the claustrophobic world of the telephone
monopolies and their ancient infighting. But will it fly? And if
it does, who benefits?

CYBERHYPE FOR ALL!

It seems like every week there's a new bit of jargon being
hyped about communications. We've had cyberspace, virtual
reality, multimedia, video-on-demand and now the infobahns.
Typically, Gareth Powell wrote in May: "We are starting to ease
away from information superhighway... Now all the talk is
about the Internet network." (Powell, 1994b) It gets harder and
harder to pick the trends from the hype, and indeed the
clearest trend in communications is that the growth industry is
none of the above, but is rather the expanded production of
hype about all of the above. You can run a very lucrative
consultancy or corporate conference about new media hype.
Everyone knows there's a lucrative new market in here
somewhere.

New categories of investment opportunity create new categories
of consultants, pundits and experts, or old ones seeking to
demonstrate an ability to intuit in a new theatre of operations.
So they put together surveys and position papers and put out
press releases to boost them and their creators into the media
landscape. It must have been a good day for Metavision when
The Financial Review quoted "local analyst Susan Pyke" with
the stunning observation that "the crucial question of what
services people will choose to pay for is as yet unanswered."
(Meredith, 1994)

INEFFABLE DESIRE

The crucial question for business is, as always, the desire of the
other -- the customer. "What does the customer want?' might
be the slogan of a Lacanian theory of the business of desire and
the desire of business. (Zizek, 1989) And of course, where the
other of the other is concerned, the gaping hole of the real that
business fills with its fantasies, is: 'What does the market
want?', for the market is also the catch-all phrase for the real
as defined by the business of desire and the desire of business. It
is the historical form of the unknowable, ineffable real that
lurks beyond the imaginary and symbolic ways we know
ourselves and imagine ourselves as others see us -- as buyers
and sellers of our time and that of others.

The real too has an historical form, woven out of the vectors of
telegraph, telephone, television, into a vast and unknowable
matrix that business plans, audience surveys and policy reviews
cover over with a symbolic order upon which we can imagine
ourselves and act. A symbolic order that drags both our
fractured identities and even the real itself into its ceaselessly
project of accumulation and supersession.

And so the consultants weave a web of words over the void: The
Advertising Age quotes Andersen Consulting "of New York" with
a calculation that the amount of time consumers currently
spend on activities that might migrate to the infobahn is only
about 3.5 hours per day. Assuming that no more than 30
million households have such services available to them by
1998, that's a market of about $15m. "But an important part of
the pilot tests will be the need to demonstrate what is the
elasticity of that curve and what people are willing to spend
per hour on new activities." (Mandese, 1994) Meaning that if it
merely replaces existing consumption, there's no blue sky here.
The infobahn needs to create new desires, not merely replace
them, or it will not arouse the desires of investors in its
projections. It will not persuade us on the big question: what
does the market want?

One of the elements most in need of fabrication for this fantasy
to succeed is to produce some statistic or survey to paper over
the "black hole" of the indifference of the 'audience'.
(Baudrillard, 1993) There has to be a horde of 'early adopters'
out there, who will stir up desire for the new information
landscape offered by broadband services. The rub is that our
Titanic information engines just don't seem to be
communicating to the public what is looming up ahead. Or at
least, that's what the surveys say...: An Advertising Age survey
of 1000 people finds that only 19.1% are aware of the concept of
interactive media. Young people and the affluent are the two
demographic groups interested in the new media. (Fawcett,
1994) Reuters reports that A survey of 800 respondents
conducted by Peter D Hart Research Associates for MCI finds
that the majority said that what appealed to them about
interactive television was home access to library resources and
education courses.(Miller, 1994) And that: A poll by Louis Harris
and Associates found that 66% had not seen, heard or read
anything about the information superhighway. (Anon, 1994b)

The powers of the telegraph cannot inform those of us who
experience everyday life within late capitalism what its would-
be leading forces of development wish to persuade us to want,
and hence call into being by our desires. But it can pretty
efficiently let business know, through the business
communications vector, that the public information vector
doesn't inform. The FIND/SVP consulting firm got its plug on
the wire announcing that the information superhighway made
its list of top 10 business concerns for the first quarter of '94,
along with telecommuting, gourmet pizza, alternative medicine
and Mexico. (Leedy, 1994) Cold comfort for anyone who wants
to believe the present communications vectors can inform the
public well enough for it to either (a) make a rational decision
as a body of citizens about its information futures, or (b) be
seized by the desire for the infobahn that can will it into being.

No wonder the interested parties are spending their public
relations money elsewhere. With two major telecommunications
bills before congress, corporate lobbyists stepped up their
campaign, spending $69m in the effort, according to PC World.
The Markey-Fields bill would allow cable TV and phone
companies to compete against each other, while the Brook-
Dingell bill would open long distance calls and electronic
publishing to local phone companies. (Anon 1994c) No prizes
for guessing what fantasies of desire are embedded in those
bills.

End notes available at
http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/~mwark
Its filed in the Warchive under Media Information Australia.