The Economics of Community at KPFA and Pacifica

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,
A particularly strong cry has come from Doug Henwood trying to get the
grassroots organizations forming the LSB movement to define 'community'.  As
a coincidence the Economists ran an appropriate article to begin such a
complex discussion.  I'll simply put it that the labor process in radio is
being transformed by a business force in capitalism.  The transition is
toward 'Smart Radio'.  The article in the Economist describes from the
capitalist perspective what they want to happen.

http://www.economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3084475

Spectrum policy
On the same wavelength
Aug 12th 2004 | SAN FRANCISCO
>From The Economist print edition

..."
Slicing up the airwaves

For decades after Guglielmo Marconi invented the radio in 1897, the only way
to send multiple radio signals at the same time was by transmitting them at
different wavelengths. Radio receivers were dumb devices-copper coils,
essentially-and if two signals came in on the same wavelength, the result
was noise. So when America passed the Radio Act in 1927 and the
Communications Act in 1934, and other countries followed with similar
legislation, the reigning wisdom was that governments had to chop up the
radio-frequency spectrum and give exclusive privileges in each band to avoid
chaos: radio required central planning.

The next major change in this understanding came in 1959, when Ronald Coase,
later a Nobel laureate in economics, argued that the market was far better
than governments at allocating the scarce resource of electromagnetic
spectrum, and that auctioning spectrum to the highest bidder was therefore
superior to simply giving licenses away. This fitted well with the Zeitgeist
of the following decades, when economists such as Milton Friedman and
Friedrich von Hayek won Nobel prizes for similar arguments in other areas of
life. Starting in 1995, governments in America and Europe began selling
spectrum by auction. Telecoms companies were the biggest buyers, mortgaging
their balance sheets to get airwaves for a new generation of cellular
services.
"...

Doyle,
The historical structure of radio was specific to a kind of broadcast, one
to many.  The work process was based upon the scarcity of spectrum, and with
smart radio spectrum turns into an abundance.  Berkeley being a tech center
had a close relationship to the rise of digital technology and this
permeated the listeners at Berkeley's KPFA.  The idea of listeners as a
community is old at KPFA, but the social grassroots movement that the LSB
represents is a specific rise of participation on a larger scale that
exactly represents the shift toward an abundant radio product.

This restructuring of the labor process toward 'smart radio' produces a
divide in the labor force analogous to the industrial workers versus the
trade workers we saw culminate in the 1930's with a new labor movement.  The
workers can always be pitted against each other, but the left being skilled
at seeing the workers as not segments but a whole community fought to forge
a new labor movement based upon the united demands of all workers.

The transformation of intellectual work processes toward such things as
smart radio presents a challenge to traditional segmentation of radio,
movies, music, etc commercial media and how intellectual property is
defined.  The word community as we might think of it is a pop culture
mentality is likely to be transformed by exactly the shift away from a
regime of scarcity toward a regime of overproduction and surplus.

The remarkable thing about the grassroots movement that the LSB represents
was its' power to depose such major media celebrities as Marc Cooper in Los
Angeles despite the inchoate and often fractious beginnings of this
movement.  In many ways the current dispute is another level of the whole
radio community continuing a heartfelt debate about where things are going
and an effort to protect all sides against the ravages of capitalist
transformation of the work place against all workers interests.

An amazing source of analysis of exactly the economic effect of community
transformation of information processing is Clay Shirky's site.  He has
numerous essays detailing why some approaches work, and others don't.  Why a
communal process continually tears apart otherwise conventional business
plans that the largest corporations have for this new market source of
wealth.

In the meantime the working class of the Bay Area sensing a new world
opening to their benefit the brain power have leapt to the many aspects of
this process with energy and new ideas.  This is the community that formed
LSB and it will only grow stronger more resilient over time as this
transformation takes hold globally.

I quote here a friend from the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) commenting on
this debate which I received today, William Loughborough,

I think one of the main things about access is summed up by the notion of
"user" as "author". Though the idea of several billion broadcasters is a
radical departure from the tradition of "top-down" communication, it is now
well within our grasp to truly connect - as Tim Berners-Lee's mantra says
"It's a Web not a tree". This is a way to break the mold of centralized
repositories of knowledge/wealth/power with hierarchically structured
permissions for their use and actually democratize the planet via
everyone/anywhere/anytime communication using OUR network.

Doyle,
This is the statement of a revolutionary and that is our feeling also.  We
are on the barricades to fight for the globalization of the community into a
single commune of a new type.

thanks,
Doyle Saylor