Re: The Crisis at KPFA and Pacifica

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,
Louis Proyect writes,
My eyes tend to glaze over when one of these accusations or
counter-accusations shows up on my radar screen. Unlike debates on the
left, I find that Pacifica squabbles tend to be couched in highly personal
terms, which is no surprise given the fact that the stations are
collections of deeply atomized and often antagonistic "personalities" who
often have no experience working in a mass movement. When your whole
mission in life is to draw some listeners into your own particular passion,
whether it is bluegrass music or who killed JFK, it is unlikely that you
will see the big picture. Trying to move the station forward is a little
like herding cats, I suppose.

Doyle,
The primary issue is community involvement.  The LSB's are an expression of
that current with the KPFA community and Pacifica.  I think the underlying
economic force is the old radio model of one to many broadcasting, and the
newer internet based technology.  The community seems on some levels to be
like a herd of cats I suppose.  But this is not about what you imply here.
The nature of brainwork is changing.  Brain work is heading away from
broadcast hosted shows because the scarcity of the period of media
production is coming to an end.  And a communal process of information
production is rising in the global culture.

LP,
Key to the success of WBAI in this period was strong leadership, coming
especially from Samori who died of a heart attack largely accountable to
running such a fractious station. After his death, things fell apart
rapidly.

Doyle,
KPFA could use a general manager now, but strong leadership is not the point
in the situation.  The labor process is changing with time.  Communal work
processes are on the rise as opposed to the historical media processes.  In
that way a cultural change as big as the Chinese Cultural revolution is
about to seize the planet.  All forms of information production based upon
the one to many model going back to the Guttenberg press are in a decline as
communal (networked computing, distributed computing, on-demand computing)
arise.  Communal information is tied to a massive increase in information
production and how to structure that over-production in a communal way.  I
don't see how you define leadership here.  What exactly in a technical
computing sense are we really talking about?

The MIT economists refer to the new work regime as face-to-face.  Do you
understand to what they refer?  If the work process in computing media is
derived from the primitive of face to face information work, exactly how is
a leader going to fit into that?

I'll give you some books to read.  "Narrative Theory and the Cognitive
Sciences" edited by David Herman, Center for Language and Information at
Stanford 2003.  In particular the chapter by Mark Turner page 117 called
Double-scope Stories, chapt 5.  In which the general movement in Linguistics
is being applied to the concept of building information based upon ordinary
human thinking.

"Semantic Cognition, A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach", Rogers,
and McClelland, MIT press 2004, in which on-demand computing takes on
language exchange mediated by distributed computing environments.
Essentially how classification can be addressed between people using
computer tools in real time.  That means when I look at the car and I say
the car I am using a tool intermediately to classify information.  For
example this would lead to a unified speech framework planet wide.

"Rough-Neural Computing, Techniques for Computing with Words", Pal,
Polkowski, Skowron (eds), Springer, 2004.  Similarly looking at distributed
computing doing classification work like the brain in an ordinary
environment where words are mediated by computing.

LP,
The biggest problem at WBAI and other Pacifica stations, I assume, is a
lack of professionalism.

Doyle,
No, there is workers fault line based upon two types of brainwork.  One to
many broadcasting cannot do certain kinds of brainwork.  That regime is in
decline.  It is cousin to the earliest printing press.  The rising form of
work is face to face brainwork.  It is communal in nature, and of a new
type.  For example the current internet is flourishing because it nascently
is about the elements of face to face brainwork, that printing can't do
well.

There is no fundamental conflict between workers here.  These tendencies can
be united into a single global communal workers movement.  One to many brain
work will remain for a long time.  However communal brainwork is
overwhelmingly important to the future of the planet and is where the
movement will establish new intellectual tools to fight capitalism.
thanks,
Doyle