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>> 113 4 Self-Colonizing eEurope The Information Society Merges onto the Information Superhighway Information Society Merges onto Info Superhighway The 2002 award winning German film ½ Miete, or ½ the Rent follows a computer hacker in his thirties named Peter as he “unplugs”—that is, he makes the conscious decision to live his life off-line.1 The film’s opening shot characterizes this hacker’s home life in ways similar to American films like WarGames and the Matrix. The main character’s apartment is disheveled, with empty food containers and dirty clothing strewn about. Near the onset of the film, the hacker emerges from his darkened computer room overjoyed that he finally finished his long-term project, a computer virus. To his horror, Peter discovers that while he was working, his girlfriend has died in the bathtub under ambiguous circumstances: maybe she accidentally overdosed or maybe she committed suicide. In his ensuing panic, he goes to the train station and boards a train without knowing its destination. He lights a cigarette and sits dazed until his cellular telephone rings and frightens him. Instead of answering, Peter flips the phone over, removes the data chip from the back, and burns the chip with his cigarette. In this moment, Peter literally and symbolically destroys his means of digital communication and deliberately unplugs from telecommunication networks. In his words, “I am no longer reachable.”2 In an overwrought, dramatically climactic scene, Peter flings his laptop into the Rhine River. In American films about the internet in the 1990s or early 2000s, characters did not typically decide to unplug.3 Instead, as discussed previously, the main characters almost always battled with evil forces over control of the internet, ultimately using the technology as a weapon with which to defeat their foes. In American film, “winning” meant mastery of the internet, not avoidance or rejection. Although American films far out-sell German films in Germany (and elsewhere), and ½ Miete was by no means a blockbuster even in Germany, this alternative representation converged with those in the German press. This convergence suggests the internet was “thinkable” in 114 > 115 the failure of European policymakers to put a particularly European stamp on internet regulation. It charts the European Union’s eventual adoption of the free-market capitalist approach to the internet developed in the United States. Although in the 1980s and early 1990s, Europeans imagined the internet as fitting into the established regulatory systems for radio and television, this notion became increasingly less viable in the late 1990s. The importance of national beliefs, cultures, values, and historical experiences to the policymaking process diminished in general in the European Union during this period. As a result, deregulatory laws began to emerge that released member-states’ national hold on media.7 The turn of the century brought the E.U.’s eEurope 2005 Project, the nail in the proverbial coffin for statist internet policy in Europe.8 In short, the European telecommunication market was increasingly liberalized and privatized, meaning that what was once controlled by the state—including broadcasting—increasingly became the domain of private enterprise. This policy reallocation was produced by and helped generate a discursive shift. What was imagined as a national “public utility” was reconfigured as an inherently global “capitalist space.” The adoption of the eEurope 2005 Project—including the endorsement of American-style unsubsidized corporations and hands-off government instead of European-style statist traditions—suggested that the internet functioned as a trans-Atlantic cultural carrier of advanced capitalism. However, this is not a story of limitless U.S. power because, as Ithiel de Sola Pool has argued, to acknowledge U.S. dominance is not necessarily to argue imperialism.9 Thus, while recognizing American economic and cultural power, this chapter does not argue that an American invader intentionally overpowered the European Union. Instead, Europe was an actor that willingly adopted attractive cultural, political, and economic models in a manner resembling what Reinhold Wagnleitner terms “self-colonization.”10 Policymakers presented the adoption of a U.S. economic internet model as mostly beneficial to Europe and not due to an overt exertion of U.S. power. Further, the European Union attempted to engage U.S. economic tactics in order to make the internet in Europe less statist, but no less European. Ultimately the European Union’s goal—to create a European space online or a public place for its people to interact—did not change in the shift detailed in this chapter. What changed was the path to...

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