What are these guys going on about saying that computers and technology and globalisation are bringing about a new fascism, taking control away from people and giving it to multinational companies?.
The really amazing thing about the Net and the Web (from this point of view) is that it is made of text. That is good old text. Much as the Powers That Be (Murdoch, McDonalds, the banks, AOL, TVoids in general) try to pretend that the web is about images (which they can handle) it persists in being about text, the symbolic system for the rest of us.
Text (unless perhaps you have a really weird sort of autism) has to be processed though your minds as pretty obvious symbols. You have to take them in, turn them into the stuff of your thought, and think about them again. The translation of text to words means you have to analyse them. The process is inherently under the intentional control of the reader. Someone reading a book doesn't just take it in, they consciously interact with it. You can't lie back and let it swamp you. You can get to be a good enough reader so that if you see some text the ideas in it leap into your mind without you realising you have read them (I remember cycling along once and suddenly thinking of the song "Help me Rhonda"- then noticing a few moments later that the van in front of me was owned by a company from the Rhondda...) but to be that good at it you have to have spent years learning how. And you are always in control, you don't read the Bible, or a poetry anthology, or Stephen King, or a textbook in the same way.
Pictures aren't like that. You symbolise them in your mind (of course you do, you don't have heaps of paint in your brain) but you don't usually consciously translate those symbols. Most people don't think about how they think with pictures. It is much easier to use images to sneak ideas into people's minds without them noticing. A symbolic structure of images can be used to control the minds of the masses - whether it is the iconography and stained-glass windows of the Roman Church, or the mandalas of Buddhism, or anti-semitic Nazi cartoons along with their red cloth and black leather S&M military camp. Any drawing is an act of interpretation (that's why they make biology students do them) but most people don't know how it is done
Words - real spoken words - are intermediate here. We are used to trusting words, we are surrounded by words from the moment our mothers start babbling to us as babies or our fathers start telling us bedtime stories. So we are vulnerable to them, especially when ritualised and repeated, poetry, plays, songs, speeches, liturgy. But we also have some control over them. Almost everybody can speak and most people can speak pretty well, at least about things they care about and have some feeling of control over (the stereotyped tongue-tied unemotional husband will often be bloody eloquent down the pub, talking about cars, or football, or office gossip, or leeks, or trade unions, or railway trains, or group theory, or the Byzantine Empire - something they have some control over. Domestic life is still constructed as a female sphere and men mostly don't really think they control it, they just have to find a way to get along that their wives will tolerate - which doesn't help much when the women don't feel they control it either) but on the whole people can speak when they need to and they can choose words to achieve effect and they recognise others choosing those words.
If that wasn't the case why did every poor teenager in the country who could beg, borrow or steal the cash for a prepaid mobile 'phone went out and get one the week they came out? Us middle-class, middle-aged office-workers didn't bother for years.
It was a cliche of the 1960s and 1970s that we were moving from a world of text to a world of pictures, where culture was mediated through film and TV. But no-one can say that now. The Internet has restored writing to its central place. Web pages - for all they look like pictures and the people who design them may think of them as pictures - are, like all other software, essentially writing. The Age of the Nerd is the age of the careful intellectual, the writer, not the age of the touchy-feely artist (who is probably still getting all the girls though).
This Net revolution is a revolution, of a small sort, mostly affecting middle-class office workers so far. It will probably get through to everybody sooner or later. But when it does it will enfranchise them. Not all of them. We're not talking about democracy here (when did we ever see one of those?) but the size of the oligarchy. In the days of oral language, before words and pictures, political control was, I assume, at the most exercised over populations of a few hundred or a few thousand. But the franchise, in the real sense of those who have a voice, was probably pretty wide. The days of images, from pagan idols to Christian icons, from Roman coins to stained-glass windows, were the days of states and empires with tiny franchises, the rule by the few over the many (though with old-time text-based Christianity and Islam bubbling under). Print, famously, changed that (though it is still working its way through Islam). England was first, Protestant and Parliamentary, the real franchise extended to, oh, hundreds of thousands of people. Some of them even had the vote. From pamphlets to political parties, the poetry of Shakespeare to public schools, the not longer quite so few ruled over them many by writing and reading. Briefly, in the 20th century, it all seemed to go wrong. Mass-produced images allowed mass-produced politics and the cinema and the radio enabled fascism, Soviet so-called communism and the profitably tasteless banality of McLifeStyle. Orwell didn't get it wrong when he had compulsory TV in 1984, but restricted text to a privileged and frightened few.
But, with any luck, that is all over. When even a child has access to the means of production, manipulation and preservation of words as text, in a way that the printers of the 18th century couldn't have dreamed of, then the world is about to change.
Read text. You know it Makes Sense. Anyway, the special effects are better.
PS - I lied about the date - well, not really lied I had these ideas before (honest, most of them) then but I didn't write it all down till January 2000.