Born and raised in Doncaster, England, I was pulled from school when I was aged 11 and taught at home by my mother, who battled education authorities to do so. This anti-establishment education meant I was barely able to scrape by through further education and into higher education, with supporting statements from Doncaster College media tutors who felt I had a fairly unique understanding of their subject, leading me to be accepted onto a three-year media degree at Barnsley College, dropping out with just a few months left in order to go travelling a bit, work for Rotherham Council as a youth and community worker, and eventually set up my own not-for-profit media projects, and I ended up screening my guerrilla documentaries in different countries, and delivering talks about the related issues.

One such speaking engagement was at the University of Huddersfield, where Bruce Hanlin, lecturer in journalism and media, invited me to give a talk to his students because, he told me, “Your ‘alternative’ and varied way into the media might look more realistic at a time when the established media are in retreat and job opportunities at a virtual standstill.” In the talk, I touched on topics such as journalistic integrity in an era of elitism in journalism, and how the BBC’s cloak of “impartiality” protects it in suppressing voices of dissent – after all, as Desmond Tutu said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” But importantly, it was interesting to me that, for this talk, I was seen as part of the “alternative” media, but very telling that Hanlin also used the term “established” media. I think this can be useful.

As part of my development of SilenceBreaker Media, I have worked with numerous volunteers, often students, and one I recently met talked about her media research looking at both the weaponisation of the media and the victimisation of the media – as a reflection of the current climate. I found this interesting.

Another talk I gave was as a brand-new Fellow of the School for Social Entrepreneurs, where rather than discuss what SilenceBreaker Media would be as a not-for-profit entity, I instead told two stories from my area as examples of the need for “alternative” media: the BBC’s manipulation of footage that falsely portrayed striking coal miners in a negative light in 1985, and The Sun’s coverage of the Hillsborough disaster that told lies about the Liverpool FC fans, 96 of whom died. Both of these examples of deliberately misleading media narratives demonstrate acts of propaganda for authoritarian brutality. Noam Chomsky once stated that “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.” With The Sun newspaper essentially banned from the city of Liverpool and readership in decline nationally, trust in the BBC has decreased as well.

And so the research of that student I met with becomes particularly pertinent, because the weaponisation of the media and the victimisation of the media have become linked. As faith in “established” media has fallen, authoritarian world leaders like U.S. President Donald Trump and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson have exploited this and in turn complained about “fake” news – calling an exposè or a story “fake” because they just happened to disagree with it, or because it challenges their authority itself. This gaslighting has left the public confused, and more vulnerable to further misinformation – for example, the supposed saviour of social media itself for dissemination of information has been controlled by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, on which, in the run-up to the recent U.K. general election, a staggering 88% of Conservative Party posts were “misleading.” (Facebook did ban one of their ads, but only because it infringed the BBC’s intellectual property rights.)

Aside from the data-mining, advertising revenue-raising, private corporate social media models of the likes of Facebook and Twitter, the mass media in general is in the hands of very exclusive interests: just 5 companies dominate around 80% of British news media – Guardian Media Group, Telegraph Media Group, Reach, Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, and the Rothermeres’ Daily Mail and General Trust, the latter three of which dominate more than 80% of the newspaper market specifically, and the latter two of which have been notoriously right-wing historically (though none of the above, by any stretch, are even remotely left-wing in any way, shape, or form); Murdoch was an ardent supporter of Bush, Blair, and the invasion of Iraq, for example, while the Rothermere family had their newspapers back the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, and their editorial narrative hasn’t shifted much at all since.

It’s wrong, then, to refer to this elite group of establishment interests as “mainstream” since they aren’t accountable to the general public and don’t represent them or even their views. Taxing the rich; increased workers’ rights; rent controls; free university tuition; universal healthcare; a Green New Deal; de-privatisation of key industries…too often – in polls too numerous to cite in their entirety here – such policies have proven popular with the general population in both the U.K. and the U.S. while the mass media messaging suggested the exact opposite. In 2016, polls showed that the British public were actually quite keen on socialism, and this was reflected by the 2017 U.K. general election results, which saw the biggest swing to the Labour Party since just after the Second World War and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s policies themselves remained incredibly popular.

This is why David Edwards and David Cromwell of Media Lens have often questioned the term “mainstream” when referring to this mass media. As Bruce Hanlin suggested in what might well have been an off-the-cuff remark to me, “establishment” media might be a more fitting tag. Because it isn’t just the corporations in control of much of the media that have retained a right-wing stance – as I suggested in my speech at the School for Social Entrepreneurs, the BBC have been just as guilty as The Sun, if more high-brow and fact-checked. But as we’ve seen from Orgreave, these facts can be cherry-picked, with plenty more omitted, to serve an establishment agenda – and when the job of a journalist is so immensely class-exclusive, it becomes inevitable that the voice of the working class mass majority in the country go unheard.

Both state-controlled and corporate-controlled media, then, are part of the establishment. They are the “establishment” media. So this suggests that, rather than accepting a counter to this as merely “alternative” and quirky – destined to be on the fringe – we instead need to represent the mainstream of the working class mass majority and become “anti-establishment” media. But how do we do this? What should anti-establishment media look like? And how would we define it?

First, we have to start by analysing the inherent traits of establishment media that lead it to failing us today.

These mass media institutions are either led by the state, or by corporations (or, arguably, both). A counter to this must feature a quality of public ownership. As seen with the union movement clashing with Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks – a “progressive” media company funded by advertising and venture capitalists in addition to donations and subscriptions – a private media model is immediately at odds with the anti-capitalist cause. A good anti-establishment media model would be free from the profit motive as well as state funding or ownership. A not-for-profit co-operative model would be an ideal way of ensuring this, with a commitment to such ownership encoded within its articles of association.

A related issue here is that even with a co-operative model, there is a risk that relying on traditional journalists from similar backgrounds will offer similar narratives as found in establishment media anyway – and, as seen with, for example, Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar laughing along with jokes about Jeremy Corbyn on TV shows and writing for The Guardian (a leading thorn in Corbyn’s side), there is a risk that journalists will still see such a co-op as a stepping stone to seeking opportunities with establishment media anyway. This is, of course, difficult to avoid, apart from perhaps offering a public declaration of intent to the contrary of such careerist manoeuvrings – contributing to a genuine culture of anti-establishment media that, at best, deters the careerist in the first place, and at worst, scuppers their quest for success in establishment media through association.

In addition to the journalists providing the work, though, there is also the issue that a co-operative model still does not protect the journalism itself from being co-opted by capitalist interests that could realign editorial narratives. If there’s one thing you can say about capitalism, it’s that it is highly adaptable: capitalism actually quite likes co-ops, and has co-opted many of them to still exist within the capitalist economy. And the survival of our planet as we know it, and the people who live on it, depends entirely on the unquestionable, unashamed, unequivocal commitment to ending capitalism. Time is running out. We must be “mainstream.” We must capture the zeitgeist that is the desire for a post-capitalist world.

This is what we’re trying to take on board as we move SilenceBreaker Media forward. What began as a not-for-profit limited company ten years ago – only to understandably take a backseat to the immensely successful FreeTech Project – is free once again to offer the above-mentioned solutions on offer in combating establishment media. The idea is to develop quality content committed to anti-capitalism, with a building pool of writers, and SilenceBreaker Media remaining donation-led to cover costs as a not-for-profit organisation until such a time as the writers’ pool is large enough and successful enough to enable it to formally become a media co-op.

I hope you will support us on this journey, mapped out in a way that sets us apart from almost every other media group out there – whether it be “mainstream” or “alternative.” We are committed to bringing you anti-establishment (and, yes, anti-capitalist) media in the weeks, months, and hopefully years, to come.

A community educator and lifelong anti-capitalist activist, Jay Baker (he/him) is the founder of SilenceBreaker Media and has written, produced, and directed documentaries in addition to writing for numerous newspapers, magazines, zines, and websites. His own website is at dukeofhardrock.com.

There is no such thing as a good and emancipatory technology that cannot be co-opted and perverted into a power of capital. – David Harvey

Working for a technology organisation, Libre Digital, which SilenceBreaker Media is part of, you might think that it’s strange I have included the quote above, especially given the important work The FreeTech Project has done in reducing social isolation and loneliness via technology – with technology a means to an end, rather than the end itself. However, importantly, what David Harvey is referring to is the power of capital, as a process, to adapt and co-opt, with this process central to our current political economy. We can only realise the true emancipatory power of technology once we overcome the contradictions of capitalism and the power of capital. Importantly, by capital, we are referring to the following David Harvey Marxist definition:

For Harvey capital is a process in which money is employed to make more money usually through the exploitation of labor power. Harvey claims that money, land, real estate, or plant and equipment that are not being used productively are not capital.

It was recently announced that Amazon, one of the wealthiest technology companies in the world, with their CEO and founder the richest man in the world, pulled out of their second headquarters deal in New York City. I discussed this proposed deal in a previous SilenceBreaker Media article:

You only have to look at how much state money has been thrown at Amazon in the US as they searched for their second headquarters to see how important the state has been for supporting capital, financial interests and the market. Richard Wolff discusses this in detail, referring to how Amazon invited all US States to bid and ‘compete’ to be the location. Key to Amazon splitting its second headquarters was the overwhelming response and attractive bids from the States, with Amazon deciding to have their headquarters in New York City, New York and Crystal City, Virginia with the total estimated cost for the headquarters standing at $10.5 billion and crucially subsidies given by the two states and cities amounting to an estimated $5.5 billion.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or ‘AOC’), a Democratic (Socialist) U.S Representative for the 14th Congressional District of New York, inspiring people across the World with her dynamic and principled approach to politics, was central to leading the revolt against Amazon coming to Long Island City, with her tweeting for instance:

Concerns regarding gentrification and people being unable to afford housing were key to people’s worries about the move. This is based on what has happened in Seattle, the main headquarters of Amazon:

In Seattle, rents have risen 39.8 percent in the past five years (in New York, rents had started to level off in many areas, and even decrease in some last year). In Seattle, as in New York, people of color have been threatened: the black population in Seattle’s historically black neighborhood Central District has shrunk, and some highly-skilled workers from countries like India who were once courted by tech companies were stuck in a visa backlog…Long Island City in particular was already undergoing rapid development and gentrification—it was dubbed the fastest-growing neighborhood in the country—and the Amazon deal immediately had an impact: Interest in local real estate spiked in the first couple of weeks in November, and, according to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon employees were laying claim to condos prior to the official announcement. Some reports suggested housing prices jumped before the move was public, too.

Land, wealth, power and property rights are all important when considering technology and its co-option by capital. Laurie Macfarlane wrote a great article looking at the “discrepancy between high levels of wealth and low levels of productivity” with this discussion relating to the importance of property rights:

The measure of wealth used by the OECD is ‘mean net wealth per household’. This is the value of all of the assets in a country, minus all debts. Assets can be physical, such as buildings and machinery, financial, such as shares and bonds, or intangible, such as intellectual property rights. But something can only become an asset once it has become property – something that can be alienated, priced, bought and sold. What is considered as property has varied across different jurisdictions and time periods, and is intimately bound up with the evolution of power and class relations…The lesson here is that aggregate wealth is not simply a reflection of the process of accumulation, as theory tends to imply. It is also a reflection of the boundaries of what can and cannot be alienated, priced, bought and sold, and the power dynamics that underpin them.

Importantly, Macfarlane, citing healthcare and pensions as examples, shows that a country that removes the profit motive and commodification of key services – which access to technology (especially the internet) should be considered as being – and therefore socialises these services, such as health care, education and energy, would look less wealthy according to this definition:

Because these benefits are non-monetary and accrue to everyone, they are not reflected in any asset prices and are not recorded as “wealth” in the national accounts… The way that we measure national wealth is therefore skewed towards commodification and privatisation, and against socialisation and universal provision.

Value is central to the concept of wealth:

The amount of wealth does not just depend on the number of assets that are accumulated – it also depends on the value of these assets. The value of assets can go up and down over time, otherwise known as capital gains and losses.

It is important to consider the structural and ideological power central to value and wealth, with ownership central to this and productive capacity not having any central influence:

For example, rules that favour capitalists and landlords over workers and tenants, such as repressive trade union legislation and weak tenants’ rights, increase returns on capital and land. All else being equal, this will translate into higher stock and property prices, which will increase measured wealth. In contrast, rules that favour workers and tenants, such as minimum wage laws and rent controls, reduce returns on capital and land. This in turn will translate into lower stock and property prices, and lower paper wealth. Importantly, in both scenarios the productive capacity of the economy is unchanged…..While future returns to capital and land get capitalised into stock and property prices, future returns to labour – wages – do not get capitalised into asset prices. This is because unlike physical and financial assets, people do not have an “asset price”. They cannot become property.

Intellectual property rights have been central to the success of ‘Silicon Valley’, a technology hub in the southern San Francisco Bay Area of California, as technology has “facilitated the further concentration of wealth and power.” As brilliantly explained by Wendy Liu, Silicon Valley needs to be replaced, not reformed, with democratic ownership and the role of capital central to this:

The Silicon Valley model of technological development is structurally flawed. It can’t simply be tweaked in a more socially beneficial direction, because it was never intended to be useful for all of society in the first place. At its core, it was always a class project, meant to advance the interests of capital. The founders and investors and engineers who dutifully keep the engines running may not deliberately be reinforcing class divides, but functionally, they are carrying out technological development in a way that enables capitalism’s desire for endless accumulation. Consequently, fixing the problems with the tech industry requires revisiting the economic assumptions that underpin it.

Despite laissez-faire liberal state theory, David Harvey argues that the state has a central role in neoliberal systems:

In neo-liberalism it is accepted that the state play an active role in promoting technological changes and endless capital accumulation through the promotion of commodification and monetisation of everything along with the formation of powerful institutions (such as Central Banks and the International Monetary Fund) and the rebuilding of mental conceptions of the world in favor of neoliberal freedoms.

This is clear to see with the Amazon deal, where states were keen to throw money at one of the richest companies in the world to attract jobs without any clear conditions and through a lack of accountability, with this reflecting a general pattern of state aid for corporations:

According to The New York Times, American cities and states spend roughly $90 billion a year in cash and tax incentives to attract companies like Amazon. Because Amazon required each city to sign a nondisclosure agreement, citizens may never know what their elected officials offered the company.

Furthermore, AOC’s and others’ concerns related to Amazon as an organisation, given that it isn’t exactly a company with a very good track record when it comes to respecting rights of people that structurally have less power:

The company itself is rife with dubious practices. Its structure is set up such that other businesses are made to become dependent on its operations, feeding a litany of antitrust concerns and erecting a quiet monopoly. And it has been accused many times of bad labor practices, undermining unionizing efforts, and even participating with ICE to deport undocumented workers.

This obviously helps when it comes to increasing the value of assets, as discussed above, linking in with the concept of structural and ideological power. No wonder rich people are chucking money towards billboards attacking AOC for the collapse of the Amazon deal.

Technology was championed as having the potential to create a decentralised, bottom up, empowered, community driven society, but we have instead seen the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few very rich people. That isn’t to say technology itself is a bad thing. Technology has the power to be revolutionary. But we have to challenge the social, political, economic and ideological power structures that make this difficult to break through, where a very few rich people control some of the most powerful communication mediums in the world: Twitter and Facebook are prime examples. That involves challenging the power and role of capital as a process, it means re-examining the concept of value, wealth, and also challenging the concept of private property that is so key to such inequality and power divides. Democratic ownership of technology is key for this, and needs to be part of our counter-power structures.

Jane Watkinson (she/her) is an anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist and vegan interested in Marxism, social ecology, sociology, revolutionary humanism, and studying radical social, economic, and political theory and how this can be applied in practice. She is a freelance researcher working in the community sector. Her LinkTree is here.