Communication concerning the legal proceedings against the authors of "Telestreet: A Non-Regulated Imaginative Machine"

Translated by Brian Whitener

Franco Berardi Bifo, Marco Jacquemet, Giancarlo Vitali

On March 30, the Judge of Instruction of Padua decided the complaint presented by the president of Mediaset, Fedele Confalonieri, against the authors of “Telestreet: A Non-Regulated Imaginative Machine” in favor of the defendants and with this ended a libelous attempt to silence a voice of dissent.

However, it is now necessary to begin a process of radical transformation of the communication system in which the thousands of media activists, who have maintained the free and open channels of communication in a country asphyxiated by a mafia monopoly and servile conformism, should play a central role. In the difficult electoral debate that is now developing, the center-left collation, paralyzed by its incoherent program, has not been capable of presenting a single proposal for the transformation of the communication system.

This is troubling because the fate of Italian democracy, as it has been in the past, will be decided in the terrain of communication. When the center-left had the opportunity to legislate on this issue in 1996-2001, they lacked the courage necessary to realize a proposal and left intact the monstrous kombinat of economic and media power that in 2001 grabbed political power and began the forced march to the demolition of political and social democracy. The center-left has a grave responsibility for not having done anything to dismantle the media domination of the kombinat, which was born illegally. However, things cannot continue like this. If the center-left collation comes to power in the next few months, the problem of communicative democracy should be the first order of business.

We can’t forget that modern constitutions (in particular the Italian) were written before the diffusion of electronic media, which have so profoundly changed the modes of social communication and of the formation of opinion. But the necessary innovation will not come from the parties, who until now have not demonstrated their knowledge of a logic other than that of repartitioning. However, it could come from those who, despite the almost complete occupation of the space of social communication by kombinat Mediaset, have continued experimenting with forms of communicative concatenation and have assumed the role of criticizing and of providing grassroots information.

Beginning in 2002, Telestreet has worked with the idea of a networkind and proliferating television, evading the influences of economic and advertising power. From here should begin any legislative initiative that wants to do more than put band aids on the disaster, occasioned by the mafia’s control of the communicative system by means of a parti-cratic intervention (a new repartitioning of the RAI) or that would not leave things as they are or worse. Communication can’t be the property of large economic groups nor can it be a bureaucratic system of the State. But in order to begin the process of transformation it is necessary to displace the economic resources of those that have excluded those resources from the community with the innumerable groups of auto-organizing communication who have kept alive hope.

[see also: Mediaset against Telestreet]

Franco Berardi aka Bifo

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Marco Jacquemet

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Giancarlo Vitali

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Brian Whitener (translation)

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