Name : Patrice Riemens Time : 13:00 - 14:30 (De Balie Salon) Subject: Mr. President Date : Sunday 21 January 1996 |
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Yet Another "Typically Italian" Grandiose Scheme?
Within Europe, Italy is widely perceived as a special case indeed. Mafia, corruption, a black economy and a bloated, ineffective government are things that come immediately to mind, though Italy has also a long history of successful social struggles and is now teeming with activities and initiatives of a teeming grass root sector. For us net-activists, the Italian scene is one of the most fascinating world-wide, and we were pleased to welcome many representatives from various BBSes etc. at the Next Five Minutes conference. Nonetheless, the higher levels of Italian politics remain opaque, and sometimes murky to the extreme. Silvio Berlusconi, the media and financial magnate who won the elections of March 1994 on a platform of far-reaching change ("The Second Republic") - but only to become unceremoniously ditched by reality merely a year later - is certainly the shadiest hi-level operator in the Italian black box. The respected Milanese journalist Giovanni Ruggeri came to us - a packed audience in one of De Balie's auditoriums - to shed some light on the Berlusconi phenomenon. And related to Berlusconi, albeit more in its mode of operation than in actual, documented linkages, is the growing Internet empire of Sardinia-based entrepreneur Nicola Grauso, who has been hailed recently in WIRED's columns as a kind of cyber-age reincarnation of Machiavelli's The Prince. Media activist Alessandro Ludovico, from Bari, was with us to talk about the other, less admirable side of Video On Line (the strange name of Grauso's enterprise). The complexity of the subject made it unavoidable for both speakers to address the audience in Italian. This apparent disadvantage was turned into a bonus by the brilliant translation work of Sid of Shake Edizioni in Milan, which made up for the extra time by the density of information it conveyed. Everybody has good and fairly obvious reasons to suspect Mr. Berlusconi of being a unmitigated villain. Signor Ruggeri however, provided a first hand, detailed, methodical, and at times extremely funny account of his rise to power from a small-time real estate developer into a business tycoon and media magnate. Save for the juicy details of this 20 years long surprisingly smooth ascent into financial and political power, the big enigma is of course who backed him in the first place, and to what purpose? The answer is that it was a combination of Mafia, big business and state interests of the kind epitomized by the infamous Masonic P2 lodge, which dominated Italy's politics for decades after WWII. And with regard to the radical breakthrough Berlusconi was supposed to bring about in the old order, such a background seems to provide a perfect illustration of the hallowed principle "Big changes are the only method if you really want everything to stay the same" (Tancredi in Lampedusa's "The Gurepard"). The question remaining, however, is why Berlusconi's "media-coup" (Paul Virilio) failed in the end to take durable hold. Or was change for the sake of change, and the temporary, but in many aspects, decisive, diversion it provided, enough to his ultimate controllers? People interested in the issue must read Ruggeri's two books on the subject, even at the cost of mastering Italian:
What Berlusconi did to the media, and especially television, Signore Grauso (not invited for the Next Five Minutes conference!) is poised to do to the Italian Internet. This scene is up to now a fairly underdeveloped affair, and mainly the realm of the scientific community and of a constellation of more or less anarchist BBSes. Here the question that springs to mind is: are the two media moguls somehow linked, and/or do they have the same backers. Mysterious (and therefore suspect?) as Mr. Grauso's financial background are, Alessandro Ludovico stated that both suppositions remain largely unproven for the moment. It is even quite possible that the answer would be negative in both cases. What is true however, and frightening enough, is that Grauso's plans with Video On Line show every fixture of a monopoly in the making, and that it promises to put next to all existing independent Internet providers out of business as soon as it attains a sufficiently dense, Italy-wide coverage. Video on Line boasted to achieve precisely that by the end of 1995. But just as with Mr. Berlusconi's political Juggernaut, VOL's machine got stuck somewhere along the way. And a visit to its over stretched web-site suggests it's not getting anywhere these days either (admittedly not an uncommon occurrence in the over-hyped Internet (real)world). As regards to Grauso's links with Berlusconi, "Il Cavaliere" seems to have posted one of his trusted lieutenants in Cagliari, to monitor Video On Line's progress. With Nicholas Negroponte's own son Dmitri in residence, this makes VOL a closely watched operation. But where will it go from here: total domination, not only of the Italian Internet, but more important still, of that of a large number of 'peripheral' countries - VOL's "arc of expansion" stretches from Argentina to West and North Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe and beyond - which up to now have been neglected by the on-line majors? Or will it be yet another "typically Italian" grandiose scheme, which starts on operatic footing only to end up in a meek whisper after a while? Stay tuned! Patrice Riemens (patrice@xs4all.nl), Oxford, February 2 1996. |
