The Meme Machine

Ecologist, The, April, 2000 by Kalle Lasn

Rules of incorporation will be rewritten so that shareholders assume partial liability for the companies they own. They will reap the rewards when the going is good, but they will share the responsibility when the company they own becomes criminally liable.

This one simple mindshift in the way we think about shareholders will transform stock markets. Fewer shares will be traded. Instead of simply choosing the biggest cash cows, shareholders will carefully investigate the backgrounds of the companies they are about to sink their money into. They'll buy into resource companies with good environmental records. They'll stay away from multinationals that use child workers or break labour laws overseas. In other words, shareholders will be 'grounded' -- forced to take responsibility. Stock markets will cease to be gambling casinos. Our whole business culture will heave.

METAMEME 2: MEDIA CARTA

'Every human being has the "right to communicate" -- to receive and impart information through any medium.'

In 1995, Adbusters Media Foundation (the non-profit organisation I co-founded) launched a legal action against the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) for refusing to sell us airtime for our social marketing TV messages (see Adbusters TV Slots, video review, page 54). The case wound its way through the courts until the Supreme Court of Canada threw it out in 1998. We are now trying to take the case to the World Court, or the UN Commission on Human Rights, under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which says, in part: 'Everyone has the right[ldots] to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any medium regardless of frontiers'.

Earlier eras had their critical human rights battles. In our information age, we have to fight for a new human right -- one many of us assumed we already had -- the right to communicate. We must fight for potent, practical mechanisms for citizen access to the airwaves. I like the idea of a 'Two-minute Media Revolution' in which government regulatory bodies who grant broadcast licences are obliged to give two minutes out of every broadcast hour back to the people for citizen use (the 15-, 30- and 60-second messages would be chosen on a first-come first-served basis from among those who wish to speak).

Antitrust lawsuits can also be an effective way to break up media megacorporations. If enough fed-up citizens demanded a freer, more diverse cultural environment, our governments could be pressured to go after companies like AOL Time Warner, News Corporation and Disney and limit the number of TV stations, newspapers and radio stations each is allowed to own. The ultimate goal, of course, is to break the commercial monopoly of TV and create a free marketplace of ideas where competing memes and visions of the future battle it out every night on prime time.

Media Carta is the great human rights battle of our time: a great personal, intellectual, social, cultural and legal test. At stake is our ability to create a democratic culture from the bottom up, instead of having it spoon-fed to us top-down by a corporate-owned and corporate-operated media.