NetAid purports to be using new technology for the common good of humankind. Who doesn't want to end poverty, refugee crisis and relieve debts for the weakest in the global village? In reality the function of NetAid is quite a different one. Nowhere is any mention of the causes and reasons for the abyssmal situation of the world today, and therefor there are no remedies on offer apart from "charity".

Have a look at netaid.org for a project that in fact radically defies the emancipatory communist possiblility of the internet. Instead of "narrow-casting", the organisers of this extravaganza have seized the momentum by turning the net into a "broad-cast" medium, a top-down transmission of "information", just like television. This should remind us that there is not just one tendency towards a flattening of the pyramid, a democratisation of the technological means of divulging and distributing data, but that there is always an interest in turning it back into MASS MEDIA.

This hierarchical system is far from dead, and big business and politics are keen on maintaining it. NetAid of course is the usual mixture of relaunch-pads for careers long gone consisting of increasingly ageing rock stars playing their old hits again in an attempt to defy history (Bowie's trying to look like he's 20). At the same time the idiocy of what is being kept in place is stupefying, and that's exactly part of the design.

Of course NetAid is only one aspect, take the MTV movie awards for example, a scripted ceremony, stuck at age 13, celebrities and would-bes clapping at each other like a Stalinist party conference (or a Third Way party conference for that matter). A presenter who should gain some weight announcing the award for the "best dramatic pause", how funny. Robbie Williams in tones "Because we know we're gonna fade away" shortly after, as a stack of harmonisers doesn't manage to make his voice sound good.

Everywhere in mainstream culture we find a remarkable (and shameless) display of imbeciles. If there was Roman grandeur in classical Hollywood, then this is the garbage dump behind McDonalds. As if there had never been any good movies. As if there had never been music with integrity. Of course, NetAid was a charity event, so have your credit card ready when Annie Lennox gives you the low-down on injustice. These supposedly 'critical' positions are integrated in the spectacular system which has to cover all angles and easily adopts far more 'radical' approaches as long as they're marketable (Courtney Love, Chemical Brothers, Alec Empire - all of them purveyors of "radical chic" marketed by major corporations).

To try and beat them on their own terrain would be a mistake, the mass media is a recuperation and annihilation machine and its idiocy is an integral if not calculated part, certainly a logical conclusion. A logical conclusion is also that in such an environment there is no 'authentic' expression, of 'art' or anything else. Add N to X supply us with the most incredible quote (from Grooves magazine) as they deplore the 'emptiness' of electronic dance music and declare that rock'n'roll was at least "TRYING TO BE REAL".

This grotesque use of language would be deplorable if it wasn't elucidating. Or is there an Unreal Media Dimension that i don't know of, full of 'artists' struggling to get out?

At the same time the mass media is still almost entirely unable to grasp collective agency in cultural processes, and desparately tries to single out individual artists because they need a isolated actor presentable in their sorry discourse. Sadly sometimes the underground still functions as a stepping stone for some people with aspirations in a career in the spectacle, they only deserve our contempt.

Mediation is inescapable, I mediate, datacide mediates, C8 does, so I'm not proposing a naive utopia of authentic communication, but i am proposing to boycott the structures that are organising information in the name of Capital and the State and create more of our own networks of information, knowledge and practice, and improve, use and support the ones that are already in place.