From: The Cassette Mythos, Autonomedia 1990
The point I wish to stress about the possibilities and potentials of the recent boom in home taping is how it fits into an expansion of all information technologies and the availability and use of these forms of communication. An underlying question to all this is: How does this reflect the transformations occurring in our society as the Industrial Age comes to a painful end? Home recording studios fit neatly into a pattern that includes video, cable television, copying machines and home computers. All of these technologies have the potential to undermine the dominant media force that leans toward consumerism and maintenance of the status quo (though as yet this potential has hardly even been recognized). We will all have to become familiar with these technologies if we wish to safeguard their possibilities of strengthening democratization and decentralization. And home recording plays a special role because of the importance of music and the oral tradition to societies and cultures around the earth.
One of the basic facts that these home communications technologies will make obvious is that knowledge, information and music cannot be copyrighted in the old sense, or controlled in the present sense. Theoretically, anybody can have access (though this is obviously not the case now – a fact we must confront). Because of this, it is imperative that we take advantage of these means of expression now, before they are taken from us. In the future, we will find that the equipment will come still cheaper, and perhaps in forms we’ve never dreamed of, thus expanding the possibilities even further. The effect these expanding alternative forms of decentralized mass communication will have on our society cannot be precisely predicted, but it is certain to be great. It seems to be a natural feature of the evolution of humanity that we become increasingly information-based; and it is possible to foresee this network of new systems of communication becoming in essence the new nervous system of the collective human race. This analogy to a biological function is natural: the growth is organic in nature and we as individual units are comparable to cells in the larger organism.
Home recording and production, and the developing network of distribution, can and must do more than simply wrest control of the music industry from corporate interests. This goal in itself is a formidable task, but not as formidable as it might first seem, in an area where technologies are often more revolutionary than people. And this is precisely how the machines have their effect, seeping into the subconscious and our daily lives. Cassette culture goes a long way towards removing the aura of elitism and expertise that surrounds music-making in modern culture. It is empowering, and that is why the powers that be want so much to control it, reminding us that this truly is an important form of political and social expression. Let none of us forget it.
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