However, there is a trend, we think, that is escaping the experts‹that the "consumer" is breaking free of the "programming" dictated for her/him, and choosing to learn, read, play, write, feel, think and buy for him/herself. There is a quiet rebellion taking place amongst those who have un-plugged their TV's, as they find community, both online, and in the cafés, co-ops, and in other alternatives to the video blur. Nobody's fools, they refuse to be fodder for the ratings wars.

The broadcast 'network' and its associated violence, game shows, cops & terrorists, soft porn, paranoia & politicians is a macro-filtered and micro-focused view of a multi-faceted and many dimensional world. While global newsnets like CNN are a beginning, our ability to get an overview of the picture is dependent on the editorial prejudices of the privy suite. It is dangerous in a complex world for the sovereign citizens of the most powerful states on the planet to be informed and directed by hidden forces that control the means of mass communication.

The real network is a pretty good sample of the real world as seen through the eyes of real observers "on the scene." While most of these "viewers" are not tutored in journalistic style and form, there is a gritty authenticity to their perceptions, and, while none makes any pretense of "objectivity", this surely is a more honest forum than that of the pseudo-objective persona on the evening news, whose every word is tested for suitability by the lowest-common-denominator mathematics of the marketplace.

This marketplace, so often venerated by the materialist philosophy of the age, is not so much the final arbiter of taste and quality as the ultimate challenge to it. While its numbers dictate the massive trends of mega-consumption, there are niche and specialty 'econo-systems' that thrive on bucking those trends, and by setting their sights on other goals.

Buckminster Fuller said that a system must have a boundary which defines the elements within it from those without. In this "diverse-distributed" economy, the system is the micro-market, eventually the individual. The boundary is the distance between individuals, and the outside is the material world. Internal values and preferences are becoming the driving forces in human interaction. Going and gone are those external authorities which dictate the parameters of action and thought.

The planet wide nature of the internet allows for a convergence of views, which vary widely across the full spectrum of human experience.You can always find both sides of an issue. If anything, the Net is most threatening to those close-minded types who, in the interest of protecting their own turf, would rather believe that no-one should be allowed to think thoughts which range beyond their own limited belief systems. As somebody said about the FCC the other day, "...they will be roadkill on the Information Highway."

It is the nature of the future to offer unlimited possibility to those with active and free imaginations. The future belongs to those who dare to begin living it today. Dour intolerance, intentional ignorance and small minded idiocy are all that stand in our way. Let the butterfly unfurl her wings.

all text copyright © 1995 Peter Fraterdeus