Digital Be-In 12: Live Netcast

Photo by Dave de la Vega

Welcome to the Media Revolution!
Archive of emcee Galen Brandt's introduction to the event

"You say you want a revolution
Well you know
We all want to change the world…."
And that’s why you’re here, right??

Welcome one and all to the coolest cybercultural gathering on the planet – the twelfth annual Digital Be-In, that’s Digital Be-In 12!!

It’s a one-night, all-night exhibition, exposition, expose, cybershowcase, concert venue, networking nexus and late night dance party – so let the celebration begin!

It all really began on January 14, 1967, in Golden Gate Park, when 30,000 people showed up, turned on, tuned in and dropped out into "A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In." Oracle publisher and Be-In co-organizer Allen Cohen, who’s here with us tonight, called it a necessary meeting of minds, focusing the key ideas of the 60’s counterculture: personal power, decentralization, ecological awareness, consciousness expansion. That culture questioned authority, shaped its own alternative underground media

--including Cohen’s rainbow-hued Oracle newspaper, on sale tonight in a beautiful four-color reprint edition -- and spawned a revolution in music, art and technology that put the media revolution, via the personal computer, right on your desktop.

Now here we are at the dawn of a new millennium, and where has all the power gone? Into the media, that’s where. According to telecommunications expert Joseph Pelton, thanks to the miracle of satellites and fiber optics, we can send each other the entire Encyclopedia Britannica complete with illustrations in just three seconds. That’s a lot of information.

And noted author and social entrepreneur Duane Elgin, also here with us tonight, whose books include the bestselling classic Voluntary Simplicity and the new Promise Ahead: A Vision of Hope and Action for Humanity's Future, notes that over 99% of American homes have a television, more than have a refrigerator or even a toilet. We may pee outside and eat takeout, but we watch TV, and we watch it on average four hours a day. Television is our primary window on the world, our global brain, our central nervous system, our planetary consciousness. We see 25,000 TV commercials a year, and they tell us buy!! Desire!! Consume!! Consume more!!! And we’re buying. Meanwhile the planet is dying and so is our soul.

And who owns all this TV??? Well, according to adbusters. com, six United States mega-corporations have got it pretty much locked up. That’s General Electric, Westinghouse/CBS, Viacom International, Disney, Time-Warner, and News Corporation/Fox Networks to be precise. Worldwide, that means 85% of print, TV, radio, and related web-media is in the hands of Conglomeration.com.
And that’s not all they own. General Electric, for example, number one on the list, produces nuclear power equipment, turbines for nuclear reactors…and military hardware.

And with all that power comes the power of the image to shape not just our way of seeing, but our very way of being. As Richard Nixon said, "Nothing is real until it’s been on television." So on September 11, 2001, we see an airplane slam into a building again and again and again until we have a whole new way of thinking about 911. And then we get a flood of flag-waving, drum-beating jpegs and slogans -- "America Under Attack," "Operation Noble Eagle," "America At War,"….image after image of fear and rage and revenge. Is it real…or is it TV??
That’s why we’re here tonight to launch a Media rEvolution: a cry for all of us to grab the tools at hand and take back the power of the media and use it, together, to evolve our global consciousness.

How we gonna do it?

By becoming aware of how the mass media is owned, controlled and biased by the New World Order of big corporations and big government
By choosing alternative media as our source of news, so we can reprogram our reality as a planet

By taking action – using the tools of evolution and rEvolution – tools like email, mailing lists, web based publishing – to talk to each other, tell each other our stories, our hopes, our positive dreams for the future – to wake each other up before it’s too late.

You got that? Awareness….alternatives….action – that’s the media rEvolution, and it’s in your hands, there for the taking and shaping.
As Lynn Twist, a founding executive of the Hunger Project, notes: "With the communications revolution come opportunities to learn deeper truths – that we are inner-connected and inter-connected…so we can live the truth that we are each other."

Read those alternative newspapers! Listen to those micro-radio broadcasters, check out the independent TV networks and filmmakers! Surf the web – check out adbusters.com, mediarev.org, matrixmasters.com, and above all, write, film, publish, speak, think for yourself!!

As author Ken Wilber writes: "Spirit will move through circuits of fiber optics as well as through flesh and blood, and all that will be natural, and normal and alive, and from within that global network the new voices of transcendence will begin to attract those sensitive to the Divine."

Asks Duane Elgin: "How we can mobilize our "social brain" on behalf of our survival as a species?" How can we take back the most precious environmental right we possess as citizens – the right to use our media to build a shared consciousness, a consciousness that can enable a new level of understanding and consensus to emerge in support of a human future in harmony with the Earth?

I’m asking you: open your heart, your mind, your spirit, and remember not the words of George Bush, but rather of educational warrior David Traub: "We must create media that fosters health, knowledge, self-esteem, friends, hope, love, spirit. We must create technology that enables humanness."

I ask you: what does this humanizing technology, this heart-opening media, look and sound like? I say it looks like what my friend the poet Dan Duncan calls "love in the face of fear."I ask you: what does this humanizing technology, this heart-opening media, look and sound like? I say it looks like what my friend the poet Dan Duncan calls "love in the face of fear."

So check out mediarev.org and get involved, because this media rEvolution needs you. Here’s what Be-In founder and Executive Producer Michael Gosney has to say about it: "It takes vision, invention, care and determination to develop revolutionary new media products and services, and this development process is a shared responsibility of all us producers and users… As societies, as an emerging global culture - as a species - we deserve to evolve. We must evolve, let's face it, or this little planet is doomed. Our media systems are our cultural DNA, and the sooner we realize that the incredible power we have given to commercial and political institutions is ours to use, the sooner we can begin implementing the code of a broader and deeper human reality. Let's get to work!"

The choice is yours, my friends.

"You say you got a real solution
Well you know
We’d all love to see the plan…."
….starting tonight!!

And remember, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra: "They say it can’t be done, but that doesn’t always work out."
Thank you, and welcome to the Media revolution and Digital Be-In 12!

--Galen Brandt

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