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By Root 1428 0

as the commercial with which MCI sponsored the 1994 Orange Bowl proclaimed, “the universe is information,” the new semisovereign of this universe is the class of information and communication specialists who make, own, and control the software of our global civilization—the books, movies, computer programs, magazines, videos, theme parks, advertising pages, songs, software, newspapers, and television programs. Ted Turner and Jane Fonda are this new age’s model couple, while creators like Disney CEO Michael Eisner and filmmaker Steven Spielberg and superagent Michael Ovitz and communications czar Michael Malone are its true captains of industry. What they control are not the artifacts (the cassette tapes or bound manuscripts or arcade game machines or celluloid that may belong to diverse “American” or “Japanese” multinationals) but the actual words and pictures and sounds and tastes that make up the ideational/affective realm by which our physical world of material things is interpreted, controlled, and directed. The very idea of what constitutes a product putatively serving a “need” is up for grabs—subject to their imagination—and those who work the infotainment telesector, in the absence of conscious political will, will inevitably become its default heirs. They may neither actively seek nor even passively wish to exercise power, but inevitably they will have it.

I see no conspirators here, no stealth tyrants using information to secure hegemony. This is rather a politics of inadvertence and unintended consequences in which the seemingly innocuous market quest for fun, creativity, and profits puts whole cultures in harm’s way and undermines autonomy in individuals and nations alike. As reality catches up to science fiction, the literary metaphors committed by cyberspace fiction writers look ever less hyperbolic: “First,” writes Pat Cadigan in the cyberspace novel Synners, “you see video. Then you wear video. Then you eat video. Then you be [sic] video.”8 The players understand the economic stakes of seeing, wearing, eating, and being video well enough, which is why Hollywood as the home of Columbia Pictures outranks Tokyo, the home of Columbia’s parent company Sony, so that (as we shall see in some detail below) though Sony moved mountains to acquire CBS Records in 1988 and Columbia Pictures in 1989 for a total of nearly $7 billion, they purchased what they cannot possess.

Sony hoped to control and profit from what was being played in its Walkman and Watchman products on which it had built its early economic empire, but the film always owns the camera even when the camera pays for and houses the film. The crux is the live-action images, not the metal-cold, plastic-smooth hardware. McWorld’s software underbelly is Hollyworld and it digests those who think they are swallowing it up. Tokyo can buy but will never own Hollywood. American director Robert Altman predicts that “the Japanese will disappear from Hollywood. They infused a lot of money in here. They’ll eventually sell that interest out. The Japanese have been made kind of fools of here, and I think they’re beginning to get it. They say they don’t have any artistic or cultural inputs. So what are they doing here? They’re just bankers, and they’re being treated like that, and eventually they won’t like it.”9 They don’t. In 1995 Matsushita sold MCA back to a North American firm (Edgar Bronfman’s Seagram). Whether Japanese money stays or goes, it will only be able to lease and take a profit from American pop culture: it can neither create it nor replace it; nor would it wish to do so. To the French, the ideological implications of American hegemony in the infotainment domain are not so subtle: “Of course the U.S. movie industry is a big business,” says Marin Karmitz, a French film producer, “but behind the industrial aspect, there is also an ideological one. Sound and pictures have always been used for propaganda, and the real battle at the moment is over who is going to be allowed to control the world’s images, and so sell a certain lifestyle, a certain culture, certain