First published in FEED, 05/00.

Content may not be king, but it was certainly making headlines last week. From the “content that should have been distributed but wasn’t” department, Time Warner’s spectacularly ill-fated removal of ABC from its cable delivery lineup ended up cutting off content essential to the orderly workings of America — Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? Meanwhile, from the “content that shouldn’t have been distributed but was” department, Spyder’s use of a loosely controlled medium spread content damaging to the orderly workings of America and everywhere else — the ILOVEYOU virus. Taken together, these events are making one message increasingly obvious: The power of corporations to make decisions about distribution is falling, and the power of individuals as media channels in their own right is rising.

The week started off with Time Warner’s effort to show Disney who was the boss, by dropping ABC from its cable lineup. The boss turned out to be Disney, because owning the delivery channel doesn’t give Time Warner half the negotiating leverage the cable owners at Time Warner thought it did. Time Warner was foolish to cut off ABC during sweeps month, when Disney had legal recourse, but their real miscalculation was assuming that owning the cable meant owning the customer. What had ABC back on the air and Time Warner bribing its customers with a thirty-day rebate was the fact that Americans resent any attempt to interfere with the delivery of content, legal issues or no. Indeed, the aftermath saw Peter Vallone of the NY City Council holding forth on the right of Americans to watch television. It is easy to mock this attitude, but Vallone has a point: People have become accustomed to constantly rising media access, from three channels to 150 in a generation, with the attendant rise in user access to new kinds of content. Any attempt to reintroduce artificial scarcity by limiting this access now creates so much blind fury that television might as well be ranked alongside water and electricity as utilities. The week ended as badly for Time Warner as it began, because even though their executives glumly refused to promise never to hold their viewers hostage as a negotiating tactic, their inability to face the wrath of their own paying customers had been exposed for all the world to see.

Meanwhile, halfway round the world, further proof of individual leverage over media distribution was mounting. The ILOVEYOU virus struck Thursday morning, and in less than twenty-four hours had spread further than the Melissa virus had in its entire life. The press immediately began looking for the human culprit, but largely missed the back story: The real difference between ILOVEYOU and Melissa was not the ability of Outlook to launch programs from within email, a security hole unchanged since last year. The real difference was the delivery channel itself — the number and interconnectedness of e-mail users — that makes ILOVEYOU more of a media virus than a computer virus. The lesson of a virus that starts in the Philippines and ends up flooding desktops from London to Los Angeles in a few hours is that while email may not be a mass medium, that reaches millions at the same time, it has become a massive one, reaching tens of millions in mere hours, one user at a time. With even a handful of globally superconnected individuals, the transmission rates for e-mail are growing exponentially, with no end in sight, either for viruses or legitimate material. The humble practice of forwarding e-mail, which has anointed The Onion, Mahir, and the Dancing Baby as pop-culture icons, has now crossed one of those invisible thresholds that makes it a new kind of force — e-mail as a media channel more global than CNN. As the world grows more connected, the idea that individuals are simply media consumers looks increasingly absurd — anyone with an email address is in fact a media channel, and in light of ILOVEYOU’s success as a distribution medium, we may have to revise that six degrees of separation thing downwards a little.

Both Time Warner’s failure and ILOVEYOUs success spread the bad news to several parties: TV cable companies, of course, but also cable ISPs, who hope to use their leverage over delivery to hold Internet content hostage; the creators of WAP, who hope to erect permanent tollbooths between the Internet and the mobile phone without enraging their subscribers; governments who hoped to control their citizens’ access to “the media” before e-mail turned out to be a media channel as well; and everyone who owns copyrighted material, for whom e-mail attachments threaten to create hundreds of millions of small leaks in copyright protection. (At least Napster has a business address.) There is a fear, shared by all these parties, that decisions about distribution — who gets to see what, when — will pass out of the hands of governments and corporations and into the hands of individuals. Given the enormity of the vested interests at stake, this scenario is still at the outside edges of the imaginable. But when companies that own the pipes can’t get any leverage over their users, and when users with access to e-mail can participate in a system whose ubiquity has been so dramatically illustrated, the scenario goes from unthinkable to merely unlikely.