1. First proposition: the development of the Internet is a remarkably successful instance of participatory design. Several related factors described by Janet Abate in her recent history of the Internet seemed to have been crucial to making its formation participatory: a decentralized network structure; design modularity so different groups could contribute different elements; a horizontal social structure, with informal decision making by consensus; building the Internet out of open source (that is non-proprietary) software; and finally, those who built the Internet practiced a liberal and libertarian ethos of inclusion and free speech.
2. Second proposition: that it is not just computer scientists, like those who invented the Internet, who scheme to participate in software design: in the 1980s there emerges into popular culture the figure of cyberpunk hacker. I read the cyberpunk hacker made popular by novels like Gibson's Neuromancer and Stephenson's Snow Crash, as one who finds a way to participate in the design, disruption and redirection of the software environment, even though he or she has been excluded from the design team.
3. Finally, the struggle for personal and communal control of media is not a new story, though it has been given new urgency by the opportunities and dangers digitalization; instead the effort to be participants in the design of one's media sphere is as old as culture, and is organized (especially in the United States) by two complementary ideas: the idea that "media determines" culture versus the claim to media freedom.

The thesis that media determine culture is reactivated whenever a new media form comes into use. In one flavor of this thesis, it is insisted that the content of media (such as the novel's presentation of sex; or film's presentation of violence) induces a dangerous imitation in novel readers or film spectators; in the second form of this thesis it is said that the form of a medium, as it produces a particular somatic and cognitive practice, imposes certain effects (writing will enfeeble the memory (Plato); television may bring a global village(McLuhan)). Histories of media have noted the tendency of Americans to embrace an optimistic version of the media determinism thesis: the notion that the coming mutation in media forms will solve human problems resistant to social and political negotiation (Czitrom). Perhaps this reflects the historical influence of a radically different idea about media: the claim to freedom of expression as it is enshrined in the 1st Amendment and performed at the inaugural moment of our nation, with the Declaration of Independence. Media determinism and media freedom imply diametrically opposed concepts of the media subject (both the target and user of media). Is the media subject passive and vulnerable, a tabula rasa receiving the impress of meanings determined by a powerful media system? [Image 1: Debord] Or is the media subject vigorous and independent (Milton), agile and creatively appropriative (Birmingham school), and thus constantly rewriting what is read, rewording what is heard, projecting a revision of what is shown.[DeCerteau, Barthes]

I do not understand media determinism or media freedom as conceptually coherent theories susceptible of proof or disproof, nor as two world-views one might choose between. Instead I understand them as a response to the increasing range and power of modern media technologies and institutions of media; they have become part of our common sense (Gramsci), the warp and woof of our interminable discourse about media. In addition these two positions are recurrently performed within the forms of modern media culture: novels like Don Quixote, Pamela and Madame Bovary engage the thesis that novel reading reprograms readers (Warner, 1998); films like Meet John Doe, Face in the Crowd, The Candidate, and Network take as their subject the heroic rebellion of individuals who wage war against a media system, try to make it a tool of self-expression, but often find themselves implicated in the media system's dubious practices. (fuller reading of Meet John Doe is on Web page)

I read last year's hit s/f film The Matrix as an allegory of the cultural effects of digitalization. Philip K. Dick has argued that the generic game of science fiction consists in starting with the world as we know it, effecting a single consequential dislocation, and then pursuing its ramifications, as it transforms the given world. The Matrix (1999, Wachowski brothers) explores the implications of the following question: what if everything humans experience could be digitalized? Not just alphabetic code, sound, and images (as we see happening everywhere around us), but other sensory signals like smell, taste, touch, silent thought, body image, and everything else necessary for humans to feel that they are living ordinary experience. Then we would have a simulation as "real" as the "real world." Because the digital basis of that world would be transparent to its inhabitants, humans would not know that their entire reality was in fact a species of media, a digital simulation. Those who constructed such a simulated world and embedded humans within it would have unprecedented design control. This is the moment of maximum determination by media, but that idea spawns an equally radical idea of freedom. If an individual could crack the code upon which it is based, and hack her or his way into that media simulation, then that individual might play by an entirely new set of rules-evading the laws proper to that simulation, for example, gravitation, inertia, the law of the conservation of matter, etc. In the Wachowski brothers 1999 film, The Matrix, the "matrix" is the name for the digital simulation that traps the film's protagonist Neo, played by Keanu Reeves; the small team of resistance fighters that hacks their way into the matrix so as to rescue Neo is led by Morpheus, played by Laurence Fishburne.

Given the centrality of code to the system that enslaves mankind, it is appropriate that Neo is a hacker who also works for a major software company. But we never really see him sitting at his computer and hacking. This is not just because it would produce boring visuals. In this film Neo's hacking of the matrix is accomplished with Kung-fu and success depends upon learning to have faith in his body. [This translation of a software war into kung-fu has many effects: it means that being tough, hard, and cool-wearing sleek sun glasses and bad black clothes, and having excellent muscle tone-becomes signs of inner spiritual strength; the world made of code also justifies the extreme violence of killing innocent policemen and rationalizes the gravity defying battle moves of Trinity and Neo. But I think there is another reason to translate the hacker into an action hero. For humans menaced with a bad engulfment by digitalization, these very physical battles, with the wounds they entail, become a way to reinvest the human body with centrality. However, these bodies are also enhanced with the good effects of digitalization so they are light, fast, and unencumbered by the weight of reality and its laws. This kind of body becomes a testament to a bold new freedom. Looked at within the long history of films that worry the takeover of culture by media, The Matrix intensifies both the determinism of media and the freedom claimed for the media subject.]

It is easy to dismiss the exaggerations of the dystopian scenario of s/f films like The Matrix, or cyberpunk novels like Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. However the way these imaginative texts represent control of the individual by the system is not very far from the warnings sounded by Andrew Shapiro and Lawrence Lessig in their recent books. For example, the "control revolution" brought by the Internet pushes Shapiro toward a paradox also addressed by Lessig: personal control of media intensifies potential control by media. Both authors argue that the wrong kind of digitalization-for example by retreating from the open source principles of the first Internet- could change the game in fateful ways. One can hear a dystopian s/f discourse at work in Andrew Shapiro's account of the stakes in the way we manage the new digital network: "The challenge is to ensure that we do not become 'automatons who live under the illusion of being self-willing individuals.'"(186) Sounds to me like life in the matrix. Lately, the most rational public policy discourse shades into the Manichean struggle of good and evil so central to science fiction.

The Matrix helps to explain the appeal of the other hit of 1999, Napster.com. [In this country the story has been told and retold: how a Northeastern College dropout named Sean Fanning designed the Napster peer to peer program that has shaken the media conglomerates to their very core…] You may not buy into the romance of the cyber-punk hacker, but from my informal questioning of avid Napster users, I have concluded that Napster's appeal does not just consist in the music being free. After all, to take possession of MP3 files entails the considerable costs of a computer, a network connection, and often a CD burner as well. What is most attractive to Napster adepts is the way this new technology changes the listener to music into a user who can both "read" and "write" music as code. The Matrix helps to explain the cultural allure of this shift. Like the hovercraft Nebuchanessar, Napster broadcasts its "pirate signal" into a media sphere controlled by others; Napster mobilizes the speed, flexibility, and agile immateriality of digital code moving along broadband networks; Napster gives each of its users a vicarious sense of being part of a rebellion against the "evil empire" of music conglomerates-those who would keep users enslaved to a commodity system of expensive copyrighted material objects. Napster suggests how the global information network gives users unprecedented power over popular culture, one only dreamed of by British cultural studies.

Napster is the last in a long line of technologies of inscription central to the development of the Internet. [Inscription or writing is the most direct way a way the media subject or user becomes a producer, a participant in making media.] Thus, if one looks at the history of the Internet (Abate) one finds over and over again that the breakthrough successes have been those that enabled users to win agency through technologies of inscription: email on the Arpanet; listservs on the Internet; web page composition on the World Wide Web; real time chat on AOL; and, finally Napster's peer to peer file sharing. The commercialization of the Web, and the movement on-line of the entertainment industry most often works in the opposite direction: all too often it seeks to turn users into consumers and return the "delivery of content" to the broadcast models and commodity forms it knows and likes so well. Those outside the profit-making sector-for example, the university, in its alliance with government, had a central role in inventing the Internet as an open source system supportive of valuable forms of digital literacy. We need to think through the terms for an Internet policy that resists those commercial projects that would (dangers)

• reduce interactivity to one-click shopping,
• erect toll booths and kiosks the encumber navigation,
• change open source code systems into proprietary ones,
• restrict free speech and invade privacy, and
• turn active readers and writers back into much less active reader-consumers.

1. the development of the Internet is a remarkably successful instance of participatory design.
2. the cyberpunk hacker is one who finds a way to participate in the design, disruption and redirection of the software environment, even though he or she has been excluded from the "design team."
3. since the invention of writing there has been a contest between the idea that "media determines" culture versus the claim to media freedom: these ideas have become part of our common sense (Gramsci), the warp and woof of our interminable discourse about media.

The Matrix (1999, Wachowski brothers) explores the implications of the following question: what if everything humans experience could be digitalized? Those who constructed a digitally simulated world and embedded humans within it would have unprecedented design control over humans.

In The Matrix the hero's hacking of the matrix is accomplished with Kung-fu and success depends upon learning to have faith in his body.

Dystopian warnings about how we manage the new digital network: "The challenge is to ensure that we do not become 'automatons who live under the illusion of being self-willing individuals.'" Andrew Shapiro

Napster gives each of its users a vicarious sense of being part of a rebellion against the "evil empire" of music conglomerates The Internet and the centrality of inscription: Inscription, or writing, is the most direct way a way the media subject or user becomes a producer, a participant in making media.