Dialogue: Weaving a web of paranoia

The difference between mass media and the internet, it seems to me, is the difference between the conference and the tea break.

You know what happens in the tea break. Like-minded people form knots of private conversation more or less on the topic of the day. It is usually more earnest, more remarkable, more categorical and less cautious than anything said in the public address.

In fact, it is not uncommon to engage an upcoming speaker in the tea break and wonder if you will hear quite such bald assertions when he gets on to the platform. Invariably you don't.

The reason, pretty obviously, is that when something is said or written to a general audience it is more likely to be challenged. When it is said over the tea cups or the chatlines, dissenters will quietly drift away to a more amenable site.

For example, I argued here last week that businesspeople do not make particularly sound investment decisions when taken out of the private sector and put in charge of public money. I cited Infrastructure Auckland, which intends to buy a railway. That, said the board's chairman, John Robertson, in a letter published yesterday, was "a gross error of fact."

By law Infrastructure Auckland could not own public transport assets. Its role was to consider an application from the regional council and the four city councils for $40 million of the $65 million needed to buy Tranz Rail's lease on some of the key rail corridors in the region. The board, he added, supported the councils' approach.

Gross error of fact? He who holds the purse makes the crucial decision. But the point is, he challenged the piece. I wonder if anyone would have bothered, or even noticed, had it been posted on a website of opposition to the deal.

The web has become a powerful medium of global protest against the free movement of international investment and trade. But it is not a mass medium in the sense that its bulletins (except those that carry the name of a news service) are intended for people of all points of view.

Simon Upton, MP, announcing his retirement this week, said the internet had finally enabled him to find his political voice (or audience, perhaps).

Freely conceding he had never been very good at communicating with the public at large, he believed that in recent years his internet newsletter, Upton-On-Line, had enabled him to reach media and voters. I wonder.

There is a network of intense but one-sided political conversations going on outside the auditorium now and they would struggle to stand up in the public arena.

Mass media are making valiant attempts to translate the rhetoric of the streets of Seattle, Washington, London and, lately, Melbourne for public consumption. But even a convenient label for the movement is proving hard to find. It is something of a throwback to the 1960s, when the term "Anti-Vietnam" did not quite cover the political philosophy of the counter-culture.

The adherents didn't like capitalism but they didn't much like communism, either. Socialism was too tame, and the academic label "post-materialism" excited few. In the end, the most complete description I ever heard of the political mindset of the 1960s was, "anti-anti-communism."

This time, the news agencies have settled on the label "anti-capitalist," which probably will do. The range of antagonism seems to go beyond free trade and investment. The target of disruption at Melbourne was the World Economic Forum, which is a moving feast of thinkers and luminaries in business, politics, science, technology and anything else that investors can see on the global horizon.

Sue Bradford, in an article on this page on Tuesday, explained why she went to Melbourne and tried to stop capitalists talking about such things.

The conference would give the world's wealthiest people unparalleled access to global decision-makers and governments, she wrote. They would probably discuss how "free trade" (her quotes) and a "global economy" could be advanced.

There were 500 billionaires in the world whose combined income was roughly equal to the combined income of the poorest half of all people on the planet. She listed several more factoids of that kind. It is the sort of intelligence they share on websites. What does it mean really?

"Despite the talk about improved prosperity for everyone in the world," she wrote, "we should not forget it was the 1000 richest who were invited to attend." Perhaps realising that logic loses a general audience, she tried some sweet reason.

"Neither the Green Party nor I have a problem with people making profit from work or enterprise. We realise New Zealand is a trading nation and that some trade is essential to our economic prosperity. However, we also recognise that there are limited resources on Earth and if a small group of people own or control big chunks of it, there is less for everybody else."

That's the nub of it, right there. The old finite wealth fixation lies at the root of anti-capitalism. It is a deep, intuitive belief and it is absolutely, totally, wildly wrong.

There are more known resources and far more wealth in the world now than there was when we were first heard of the limits of growth. There is as much wealth in the world as homo sapiens have the wit to make. The web is generating new forms of it. Pity it is also propagating paranoia.