There's a lot to be said for "going into the desert," if you ask me... I don't agree with this Noble guy on a lot of points, but some food for thought nonetheless... --Charles
MIT Professor Noam Chomsky makes the point that if you serve power, power rewards you with respectability. If you work to undermine power, whether by political analysis or moral critique, you are "reviled, imprisoned, driven into the desert." "It's as close to a historical truism as you can find," Chomsky says. Let's test Chomsky's theory of power and respectability with the case of David Noble. Noble is a historian of corporate control over our lives and institutions -- from technology to universities. Forces of Production (Knopf, 1984), for example, is a detailed history of the automation of the metalworking industry. In that book, Noble shows how technology, in its design and deployment, reflects class and power relations between workers and owners. Noble started out his academic career in 1978 at MIT. His first book, America by Design (Knopf, 1977), focused on the rise of the science-based industries, the electrical and chemical industry, and how universities essentially became corporate research centers for these new industries. Noble believed that corporations should be kept off of university campuses. In the late 1970s, he wrote a series of articles for the Nation magazine, including two classics, "Ivory Tower Goes Plastic" and "Business Goes Back to College." Then in the early 1980s, Noble wrote a series of articles in praise of Luddism for the now defunct journal Democracy. (That series has since been pulled together in book form (Progress Without People, Between the Lines Press, Toronto, 1995). In addition, while at MIT, he teamed up with Ralph Nader and Al Meyerhoff and started an organization called the National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest. MIT, a model of education in the corporate interest, was not pleased. In 1983, MIT fired Noble. "It was a political firing," Noble told us. "I sued MIT in 1986." After five years of litigation, Noble forced MIT to make public the documents shedding light on the firing. "I got all of the documents and turned them over to the American Historical Association, which then reviewed them for a year and then condemned MIT for the firing," Noble said. Next stop: Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian wanted Noble to be a curator for an exhibit on automated technology. Noble went to Washington for two years and produced an exhibit highly critical of technology. He includes a hammer used by the Luddites in the 1800s to smash machines in England. George Lucas donates robots R2D2 and C3PO from the first Star Wars movie. Noble calls the exhibit "Automation Madness: Boys and Their Toys," in which he documents a history of resistance to automation beginning in the 1800s. Not what the Smithsonian had in mind. They too fired Noble. Most people think that the Smithsonian is a public institution. It started out that way, but has slowly been taken over by big corporate interests. When Noble arrived at the Smithsonian in 1983, he figured he would have a budget to work on projects. No such luck. "What I had to do was go out and hustle -- to the National Association of Manufacturers, to the Chamber of Commerce, to various companies, to get money to put on exhibits," Noble said. "At that time, the fundraiser for the National Museum of American History was the wife of the president of the National Association of Manufacturers." Noble then spent five years at Drexel -- protected with tenure -- and then headed North to the University of York at Toronto, where he is also protected by tenure. Noble doesn't use e-mail or the Internet, but last year after The Nation magazine turned down an article he wrote called "Digital Diploma Mills," he published it and two subsequent pieces on the Internet <communication.ucsd.edu/dl>. The articles describe how corporations are using digital technologies to gain control over university course content. He believes that the Internet can be a useful way to disseminate information, but not to teach students. "You can't educate over the Internet, because education is an interpersonal process," he says. And he laughs when asked whether the Internet will level the playing field between activists and their corporate adversaries. "Have you noticed that -- any leveling the playing field?" he asked incredulously "Wake me when it is over. It is a joke." "The key thing about organizing is trust," he says. "You have to have relations with people, especially if you are asking people to put themselves on the line in any way. There is no real way of establishing that over the Internet." Whether Noble continues to get into trouble with the masters of the Internet or universities, depends on whether he changes course mid-life and decides he wants some respect from the powers that be. Looks like Chomsky is right again. Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor. Focus on the Corporation is a weekly column written by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman. Please feel free to forward the column to friends or repost the column on other lists. If you would like to post the column on a web site or publish it in print format, we ask that you first contact us ([EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Focus on the Corporation is distributed to individuals on the listserve [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe to corp-focus, send an e-mail message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following all in one line: subscribe corp-focus <your name> (no period). Focus on the Corporation columns are posted on the Multinational Monitor web site <www.essential.org/monitor>. Postings on corp-focus are limited to the columns. 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