Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (59 page)

For women, it’s going to be an incredible home-shopping thing: like, you’re sitting there watching some model, and she shows you some ridiculous object, and you figure, “Well, I’d better have that or my kid won’t grow up properly”—and now it’s
interactive
, you know, so you can just push a button and they’ll send it right over to your house. That’s the interaction for women. For men, the example they gave was of watching the Superbowl, which every red-blooded male is supposed to do. Well, today it’s passive: you just sit there and watch the gladiators fighting. But with the new technology, it’s going to be
interactive
. So what they suggest is, while the team’s in its huddle getting instructions from the coach about the next play, everyone in the audience—you know, the entire male population that’s alive—is going to be asked to make their own decision about it: like, should it be a pass, or a run, or a kick or something. And then after the play is run (which is going on completely independently of this, of course) they’ll flash on the screen what people thought the coach should have done—that’s going to be the interaction for men.

And that’s probably the way it’s going to go in general: it’ll be used as another technique for control and manipulation, and for keeping people in their roles as mindless consumers of things they don’t really want. Sure—why should the people who own the society do things any differently?

But of course, none of these technologies
have
to be used like that—again, it just depends who ends up controlling them. I mean, if the general public ever ended up controlling them, they could be used quite differently. For example, these information-processing systems could be used as methods by which working people could come to control their own workplaces without the need for managers and bosses—so every person in the workplace could have all the information they need in order to make all the decisions themselves, in real time, when it counts. Well, in that kind of circumstance, the same technology would be a highly democratizing device—in fact, it would help eliminate the core of the whole system of authority and domination. But obviously it’s not just going to develop like that on its own—people will have to organize and fight to make that sort of thing ever happen, in fact fight very strenuously for it.

As to the effects of all of this on activism, I think it’s a complicated story. I think we can be certain that there’s a lot of thinking going on about whether to even allow things like the Internet to exist—because from the point of view of power, it’s just too democratic: it’s very hard to control what’s in it, and who can gain access to it. For example, I have a daughter living in Nicaragua, and during the U.S. contra war in the 1980s it was impossible to telephone or send letters there. The only way I could stay in contact with her was through the ARPAnet, which is basically a Pentagon computer system I was able to get access to through M.I.T.—so we were corresponding thanks to the Pentagon. Well, that’s the kind of thing that happens on the Internet, and a lot of powerful people obviously don’t like that aspect of it.

And they don’t like the fact that you can get the text of the G.A.T.T. [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] treaty, and the latest news that doesn’t appear in the U.S. newspapers, and so on—in fact, if you look around on the Internet, you can find virtually everything I talk about somewhere in there. And on some issues, like say, East Timor, it’s also been an invaluable political organizing tool—because most of the information about what happened there was simply silenced by the U.S. press for years and years. Well, those are all bad things from the perspective of private power, and they surely would like to stop that side of it.

On the other hand, it has a number of other advantages for power. For one thing, it diverts people, it atomizes people. When you’re sitting in front of your tube, you’re alone. I mean, there’s something about human beings that just makes face-to-face contact very different from banging around on a computer terminal and getting some noise coming back—that’s very impersonal, and it breaks down human relations. Well, that’s obviously a good result from the point of view of people with power—because it’s extremely important to drive human sentiments out of people if you just want them to be passive and obedient and under control. So if you can eliminate things like face-to-face contact and direct interaction, and just turn people into what’s caricatured as kind of an M.I.T. nerd—you know, somebody who’s got antennae coming out of his head, and is wired into his computer all the time—that’s a real advantage, because then you’ve made them more inhuman, and therefore more controllable.

Another thing I’ve found is that there’s a kind of degraded character to e-mail messages. People are just too casual about them—they send you any half-baked idea they haven’t even thought through yet, whenever the impulse hits them. And the result is, it ends up being a tremendous burden even to
read
everything that comes across, let alone to answer it—so that can easily end up being all you do with your time. And people do put
huge
numbers of hours into it. In fact, there are friends of mine whose quality of work I think is seriously declining, because of their overwhelming involvement in e-mail interactions. It’s extremely seductive just to sit at the computer screen and bang at it all day.

Furthermore, I think there are still other aspects to it which are very threatening to popular movements. For instance, one thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of activists have been dropping subscriptions to left journals recently. Why? Because they can get them through the Internet. Now, see, if I was in the C.I.A. or something, right now I’d be saying, “Look, let’s encourage this—it’s true it has the negative effect of allowing people to get more information, but it also has the positive effect of destroying alternative institutions. So let’s let it go on—because when all these people stop paying their subscriptions to, I don’t know,
Z Magazine
or something, that is going to destroy those institutions, and that’s going to separate and fragment the left even more, and maybe even destroy it.”

Well, I doubt that anybody in the C.I.A. has this much brains, but if they had enough brains, I think they would just want the whole thing to go on, because it’s probably going to destroy the dissident organizations—and it’ll destroy them because we’re so anti-social that we don’t even see the
point
of supporting popular institutions. Remember, even if you’re an activist on the left, what you’ve constantly been taught from childhood, and what you’ve still got ingrained in your head is: “I’m just out for myself, and therefore if I can get the information for nothing, why should I help to build an institution?” Well, that’s obviously a very anti-social attitude—but you find it’s very hard to break out of: we’ve just got it. So there are a number of aspects to these technologies that are highly dangerous, in my view—and I hope people will soon start to recognize and resist those aspects of them.

“Free Trade” Agreements

M
AN
: You mentioned that people with power probably don’t like it that the G.A.T.T. treaty got onto the Internet. It just emphasized for me how these international trade agreements are being forced on us, and yet nobody even knows what they’re about. I’m wondering what you think of that?

Well, plenty of people know what they’re about—there are plenty of people working for big corporations who know what the G.A.T.T. treaty is about, for example. But you’re right, the general population here doesn’t have the slightest idea about it—I mean, overwhelmingly the general population of the United States hasn’t even
heard
of G.A.T.T., and certainly they don’t know what its likely effects are going to be. [G.A.T.T. was first established in 1947, but the “Uruguay Round” of negotiations to modify it concluded in December 1993; the treaty then was signed in April 1994.]

What do I think of that? I think it’s ridiculous—grotesque, in fact. Look, G.A.T.T. is something of major significance. The idea that it’s going to be rammed through Congress on a fast track without public discussion just shows that anything resembling democracy in the United States has completely collapsed. So whatever one thinks about G.A.T.T., at least it should be a topic for the general public to become informed about, and to investigate, and to look at, and think about carefully. That much is easy.

If you ask what should
happen
in that public discussion—well, if that public discussion ever comes along, I’ll be glad to say what I think. And what I think is in fact mixed. It’s like N.A.F.T.A.: I don’t know of anyone who was opposed to a North American trade agreement in principle—the question was,
what kind
?
  ¹⁸
So before N.A.F.T.A. got passed [in 1993], mainstream groups like the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment—can’t get more centrist than that—came out with very sharp and intelligent critiques of the Executive version of N.A.F.T.A., the one that finally went through. And they pointed out that in fact N.A.F.T.A. was designed to be an
investor rights
agreement, not a “free trade” agreement—and that it was going to drive the economies of each of the three participating countries [the U.S., Canada and Mexico] down towards a kind of low-wage, low-growth equilibrium; they didn’t say it of course, but it’ll also be a
high-profit
equilibrium. And they suggested very constructive alternatives.
  ¹⁹

Well, those sorts of constructive critiques never even entered the mainstream discussion about N.A.F.T.A. here: all you ever heard in the media was, “Crazy jingoists don’t like Mexican workers.”

The same was true of the American labor movement: its proposals were nothing like what was constantly being denounced in the press with virtually 100 percent uniformity.
  ²⁰
The Labor Advisory Committee, for example —which by law is required to give its opinion on these things, but was illegally cut out of the discussion—came out with quite a constructive report on N.A.F.T.A.: it wasn’t against
an
agreement, it was against
that
agreement. In fact, the story of the Labor Advisory Committee report tells you a lot about the way that N.A.F.T.A. was passed in the U.S., a lot about American democracy.

Twenty years ago, Congress enacted a Trade Act requiring that before any trade-related legislation or treaty is passed, there has to be consultation with a “Labor Advisory Committee” they set up which is based in the unions, such as they are. That’s by law: the Labor Advisory Committee has to give an analysis and a critique of any American trade-related issue, so obviously that would include N.A.F.T.A.
  ²¹
Well, the Labor Advisory Committee was informed by the Clinton White House that their report was due on September 9th; they were not given an inkling of what was in the treaty until September
8th
—so obviously they couldn’t even convene to meet. Then on top of that, they weren’t even given the whole text of the treaty—it’s this huge treaty, hundreds and hundreds of pages.

But somehow they did manage to write a response to it anyway, and it was a very angry response—both because of the utter contempt for democracy revealed by these maneuvers, but also because from the glimmerings of what they could get out of N.A.F.T.A. when they sort of flipped through it for a couple of hours, it was obvious that this thing was just going to have a
devastating
effect on American labor, and probably also a devastating effect on Mexican labor too, though of course it will be highly beneficial to American investors, and probably also to Mexican investors.
  ²²
It’s also certain to have a highly destructive effect on the environment—because its laws supersede federal and state legislation. So obviously there are really major issues here, crucially important issues, which in a functioning democracy would have been the subject of intensive public consideration and debate.

Actually, if you looked closely, even N.A.F.T.A.’s
advocates
conceded that it was probably going to harm the majority of the populations of the three countries. For instance, its advocates in the United States were saying, “It’s really good, it’ll only harm semi-skilled workers”—footnote: 70 percent of the workforce.
  ²³
As a matter of fact, after N.A.F.T.A. was safely passed, the
New York Times
did their first analysis of its predicted effects in the New York region: it was a very upbeat article talking about how terrific it was going to be for corporate lawyers and P.R. firms and so on. And then there was a footnote there as well. It said, well,
everyone
can’t gain, there’ll also be some losers: “women, blacks, Hispanics, and semi-skilled labor”—in other words, most of the people of New York.
  ²⁴
But you can’t have everything. And those were the
advocates
.

In fact, it’s kind of striking that about a day or two after N.A.F.T.A. was passed, the Senate approved the most onerous crime bill in U.S. history [the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act], which the House then made even worse. Now, I don’t know if that was just a symbolic coincidence or what—but it makes sense. I mean, N.A.F.T.A. was clearly going to have the effect of reducing wages for probably three-quarters of the American population, and it’s going to make a lot more of the population superfluous from the point of view of profits—so the Crime Bill just will take care of a lot of them, by throwing them in jail.

Okay, that’s N.A.F.T.A.—what about G.A.T.T.? Well, in India, for example, there were hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating in the streets about some of the G.A.T.T. provisions—which
they
know about. I mean, we may be very ignorant about it in the United States, but people in the Third World know a lot about G.A.T.T.: Indian peasants understand what’s being done to them, even if people here don’t, which is why G.A.T.T. has to be passed virtually at gunpoint in countries like India.
  ²⁵