Some words about words: We like, as a concept, Hakim Bey's description of a "hierarchy of Media," in which mediating technologies are measured by their degrees of alienation. According to this "imaginal scale," which posits a duality of imagination versus mediation, television and computer screens are more mediating than books or even periodicals, because the consumer is forced into sedentary postion in front of screens just to participate. Radio, conversely, is regarded as less mediating than electronic screens, because the listener is still free to move, to engage in other creative activities, and radio does not, by definition, demand the surrender of eyesight or imagination from the listener.
We also acknowledge that every individual's "hierarchy of media" may differ; one person's mediation can be another person's tool. The current situation is such that one person's "virtual community," for all its illusions and mediations, may, in fact, be less alienating than the "actual community" around him and her in Daily Life. However, we don't buy the technological snake-oil that trumpets the virtual world as therefore real or enough. Such individual exceptions, where one set of alienations are escaped through another, rather, point to what others have called the poverty of everyday life in a Media Age.
And what about this Medium? 29 Pamphlets, letters, books, newspapers and magazines are, at least, non-electronic objects that allow mobility on the part of the reader. However, it must be stressed, this factor alone does not satisfy our desires to reclaim the immediacy of Free Speech. The State of Print Media is one of the "states" we desperately seek to overthrow.
We wish to expose the "state" of "alternative media," in particular the devolution of "alternative weekly" newspapers and other "alternative media" to their current impotence as creative grids of expression. 30
We offer this challenge not only to "alternative weeklies," but to all organizations and networks which claim "alternative" status in the Media (including the "alternative music" market which is currently the rage in the rock-and-roll art form).
To "organizers" and "activists" who believe in seizing, but not destroying, these grids of expression: Let a thousand flowers bloom, but don't attempt to mediate our revolt. An immedia project does not join "coalitions" of organizations -- we work as individuals only and we can strike anywhere. We are weary of meetings, conferences and letterheads that claim the status of "alternative media." We see marginal difference between the current tyrants and those "outsiders" who wish to replace them, yet without having developed languages, strategies and tactics -- or a sense of urgency -- to subvert and overturn the Mediating process itself.
All newspapers and magazines that rely on advertising for revenue have fallen into the same trap: the necessity to expand "readership" among "market niches" with expendable cash. The racket at the "alternative" press is identical to that of the "mainstream" press: to rent our attentions to advertisers, while boosting the number of upper-income consumers who subscribe to or read the periodical.
Our counter-vision of print media is severe, and, we are often reminded, threatening to the editorial class that currently controls the presses.
The press, "alternative" and other, places ultimate domain over all written word in the hands of editors, not the writers whose names appear over the stories and articles. We seek to reverse that process, restoring artistic freedom to its rightful place.
The system by which editors mediate the creativity of writers is backwards: a writer ought to have final say over what appears under his and her name. "Refusal of Mediation" in the printed word thus includes refusal to write for editors. This strategy of refusal does not altogether eliminate the techniques (or even the technicians) of editing -- rather, it contains the seeds for their resurrection in this way: an editor who acknowledges the writer's final say over his and her words -- and acts to assure the preservation of that Free Speech -- will embody the new kind of creativity-friendly editor; the immediator.
We stress that any role of immediator is not something that can be licensed or codified. We use it playfully, in satire of how roles will tend to colonize even efforts against them. Immediating ought to be more like a valued manner of human relations between individuals; collaboration is our substitute for alienating specialization.
But as creative writers know, an incompetent "immediator" can be less useful to a specific project than a competent editor. When it comes to certain literary projects, there may always be a process of figuring out: who can immediate?
We might, for purposes of imagining, envision the dawn of a post-editorial era; a time, perhaps not far away, when literary freedom is aided by technicians of editing and not thwarted by them, by their "styles" or by their formats. Perhaps we might consider borrowing from the less specialized, less alienating, process by which some indigenous tribes recognized certain individuals to be shamans, those proverbial "medicine men," or, in perhaps the most positive sense of the word, mediums. (Editors, we remind, don't currently generate such respect for their craft.) The healer's recognition as such was measured by the effects of his and her deeds; did the patients feel better or not?
Similarly, the immediators of print will be recognized by one factor only; whether writers agree that their actions actually immediated, or facilitated, without overly formatting, our creativity. (Paul Goodman, in his pioneering essay, "Format and Empty Speech," offered this helpful definition: "By 'format' I mean imposing on the literary process a style that is extrinsic to it.") Anyway, these so-called immediators may be mere fantasy; our current landscape is a techno-Bosnia of over-mediation.
The editorial class is, understandably, reluctant to give up the illusory power it has to mediate and control the works of writers. We do not know of a single major periodical which currently allows any writer unmediated speech. (A crack in this system, which we plot to exploit, is the great expense to publishers whose media organizations have become top-heavy with editorial managers.)
Even the "stars" of journalism are over-mediated eunuchs under the current system, chasing deadlines and consenting to over-mediation in order to be published.
The over-mediation of the written word has also enveloped the book publishing industry -- very few writers have won the right to control their own words even in books. Most book authors may not even choose their own titles! That job is left to the marketeers. The reading public must be made more aware of this pervasive censorship-by-format-and-marketing that plagues the entire publishing industry.
Only when a critical mass of writers begins to refuse mediation in publishing ventures will the editorial class begin to consider that a better deal is mandatory.
One possible tactic, under discussion in New York City, is the publication of an "Immediate Press," a newspaper with no advertising, and where writers and artists retain full editorial control over their creative words. The financial costs of launching such a newspaper on a weekly or calendrical basis are staggering: it may be that creation of a pilot issue or issues is the best short-term tactic we can hope for until greater resources are appropriated for this revolt. (Besides, it suits our pleasure to untie our efforts from the Gregorian knot of measured time and its deadline-driven ideology known as "working for the weekend." We prefer to speak only when we have something to say.)
Writers must begin to actualize our illusory power of word. We do not have to accept a system by which our words are edited, twisted and transformed to suit the market needs of periodicals. We intend, rather, to emphasize the content of what is written -- and to restore its primacy in the editorial process.
We anticipate that the early phases of this strategy-of-refusal will constitute a fiscal hardship for refusers until the point where we reach our "critical mass." But we writers are behind the curve; our lateness to an immedia revolt necessitates a swifter response. However, the moment that just one major periodical allows just one writer to publish his or her words, unmediated, and to state that victory within the unmediated text, the Berlin Wall of Mediation will begin to crumble. For what self-respecting writer would allow his or her words to be changed if he or she concluded that such compromise was not necessary?
Over-mediation is not a law of nature; it runs counter to the inherent chaos within the natural world.
Writers must understand our true power, unrealized, over the editorial and curatorial classes. These editors and mediators, many of whom wish to be considered "writers" themselves, are very dependent upon their self-image as members of the Media. Their meddling stance is fueled by our acquiescence to their rules-of-mediation; many a writer complains about format, while acting as a doormat. We ought to be kicking down the doors instead.
As writers, we already have the power to expose this fiction: an editor is not a writer. An editor or mediator is not even, necessarily, a creative person, and is not entitled, not even by title, to the illusory status afforded by the public to creative artists. In sum, we are already using our power as writers and creative people to demote the spectacular status of editors and mediators among our colleagues, among creative people in all grids, and among audiences. (We didn't invent this 'hierarchy of status' conferred on writers and artists, nor do we intend to preserve its elitist structure, but we will use it to discredit and demote editorial mediators and curators who traffic in it.)
First we kill the editors! And that kind of guillotine requires a kind of "auto-sacrifice," or self-revolution, by individual members of the editorial class. The editor who first acknowledges and acts upon this tactic of de-mediating the printed word will, we predict, set off a chain-reaction of immediacy in the field of publishing. That individual, as Thomas Paine wrote of the Winter Soldier, "deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."
Power is never handed over; it is taken. We suffer no illusion that editors are eager to give up their mediating power. And so we will go outside the current grids of mediated expression, those governed by technologies of advertising and market niches, to create a literary terrain outside of the Spectacle of mediation. As creative writers build the New Immedia outside of the boundaries of the Old Media, the current structures will feel the loss of our labor. Let us remember that the printed word is suffering from competition by electronic media -- the publishing industry faces desperation already: it is weak an vulnerable to our assault.
We will not continue the charade by which the printed word is, under the current rituals of "journalism," portrayed as more "pure" or romantic than electronic media. Publishing and print journalism are rackets of commodity as much as television or computer Media. But because the written word holds potential as a more immediate form of expression and communication, we view its reclamation as a priority tactic, and as a pragmatic opportunity.
29. Obviously, the reference to "this medium" is to printed text on paper, the only form in which this essay existed for five years.
30. For an example of how "alternative" publications can and do begin to behave like the enemy, and discredit the entire "alternative" genre in the process, see our Spring 2002 White Paper on Ethics Problems at Alternet: http://www.narconews.com/hazenstory1.html
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