Douglas Rushkoff
Online
Bill Clinton’s impeachment, if and when it comes, will not herald a crisis of Constitution but a crisis of media. Brilliant exploitation of television may have won this president his office, but he must blame his downfall on an inability to resist the impact of another, newer medium: the Internet.
Indeed, the moment that secured Clinton’s first bid for the presidency against incumbent George Bush was a perfectly executed TV talk show manoeuvre. During the famous “Oprah-style” debate, a black woman questioned Bush about his personal relationship to the experiences of the impoverished. He didn’t understand the question.
Clinton seized on the opportunity to demonstrate his comfort with real Americans and their chosen media forum. He spoke directly with the woman, sharing her pain, and crossing so far into the audience that the TV cameras had to shoot him from behind. He broke the invisible “fourth wall” of the TV set and walked into our homes. By contrast, Bush nervously checked his wristwatch, as if to wish for an end to the show.
Similarly, Clinton’s media handiwork during earlier scandals was always aimed at the sensibility of the television audience. His 60 Minutes appearance with wife Hillary, to name just one, was so successful at defusing the Jennifer Flowers affair that it became the default publications strategy for sex offenders from Michael Jackson to Marv Albert: go on TV with the missus.
Clinton’s campaigns before and during his presidency were specifically pre-Internet in design. While Ross Perot campaigned for “teledemocracy” and “virtual town halls”, Clinton played the sax on late-night TV and jogged for the camera.
His interactive media policies, on the other hand, have been characterised by censorship, embargos on encryption technology and invasion of privacy. This is the president of “V-chips” (devices to filter violent TV) and federal “back doors” to decipher privately encrypted data. He aimed to deprive us of our secrets, and exposed his own in the process.
That such anti-privacy policies should come to bite Clinton in the ass is a computer hacker’s dream come true. The surveillance machine this president was so ready to build – yet so unable to comprehend – has targeted and locked on his own indiscretions as quickly and tenaciously as it could have on any of ours.
Neither Clinton nor his once co-operative cohorts in the mainstream entertainment industry’s “news” magazines had any inkling that the Internet would upstage their consensus coverage and ultimately thwart their ability to regulate what news content was fit to print. Matt Drudge’s Web scandal sheet broke the Monica Lewinsky story while editors at Time and Newsweek were sorting out the ramifications of revealing their crony’s escapades. (Just a few weeks earlier, Clinton had graced Time magazine’s star-studded 75th Anniversary Gala in New York, garnering the glossy some much-needed exposure.) How dare they bite the hand that feeds them?
Only Drudge could publish the details of Clinton’s intern-stimulation-via-tobacco- prosthesis – that is, until Newt Gingrich and his boys released the entire Starr report on the Internet. The report itself, by depicting the graphic realities of pre- and post- ejaculatory presidential performance, would have been outlawed by the computer decency Act. (Come to think of it, maybe that’s why this administration supported the Act.)
But worse for Clinton, an Internet society does not value what made the president so powerful on the tube. Since the days of Richard Nixon, Watergate and Vietnam, politicians have learned how to prevent TV from eroding public support for questionable policies and behaviour. Spin doctors mastered the art of humanising offenders, blurring the facts, and stalling until no one cares anymore. Dedicated to TV-style crisis management, Clinton ordered polls to decide whether to tell the truth about Lewinsky, as if adjusting his ongoing performance to an ever-present applause meter.
But where TV promoted the theatrical humanity of our lawmakers, the Net doses politics with truth serum. It erodes the walls that any of us erect to stave off revelation of the facts. The way to grow powerful in an Internet society is to make yourself vulnerable by telling the truth. Besides, in an electronic society, the truth will come out eventually, anyway.
I’ve been in Europe for the past month, and endured the ridicule of many who see this episode as the latest relapse of American Puritanism – along the same lines as our banning smoking in public. “Why can’t you Americans leave room for error?” they want to know.”
It’s because the Net forces an extreme, binary sort of honesty. There is no grey – only truth and lies, and a tangible drive towards weeding out hypocrisy. And it’s possible that the contorted pose in which we’ve found ourselves – a humiliating self- abuse in full view of the rest of the world – should not be understood as a perverse witch- hunt but rather a crucial if clumsy groping for ethical progress. It’s the process through which we decide just how willing we are to be guided by the principles we say we believe in, now that we have the media tools to enforce them.
Yes, John F Kennedy and Thomas Jefferson probably engaged in equally lurid behaviour and even more heinous forms of cover-up. But that was before the Internet. c Douglas Rushkoff
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