Thomas Muir - transported to Australia![[Tom Paine, 1737 - 1809]](paine.gif)
Digital Revolutionary? So states the cover of the first UK edition of WIRED magazine. Another example of the Information SuperHypeway or a genuine effort to understand the implications of the phenomenal expansion of electronic media via the Internet?
As it happens, the appearance of WIRED has coincided with a revival of interest in the radical Paine, author of "Common Sense" and the "Rights of Man", and a leading contributor to the ideas which resulted in the American and French Revolutions. Within the British Isles, Paine was regarded as their spokesperson by the artisans and workers. In Ireland, his radicalism was instrumental in winning large sections of Ulster's Dissenter and Presbyterian population to the cause of Irish independence.
Perhaps leaning on the new biography of Paine by John Keane, a WIRED writer makes the observation that Paine's role in promoting political freedom and a radical agenda was inextricably linked to the technological development of a mass production printing press, new press freedoms (particularly in revolutionary America) and increasing levels of literacy. WIRED then makes the acute link that the development of the Internet will have as great an impact on our lives as did the technical and social development's of Paine's period.
Paine was not just a wordsmith with a penchant for radical politics - his books were the catalyst for the American Revolution and he took the revolutionary side in the War of Independence, fighting alongside George Washington.
As defenders of the poor and the weak against the wealthy and the mighty, the trade union movement should never forget Paine's part in creating a coherent agenda for pre-capitalist British radicalism: he fought for universal suffrage, the rights of government employees to form trade unions (what would he have made of GCHQ!), he opposed the great, powerful structures of church, state, finance and monarchy, he stood for national self-determination, equal rights for women and opposition to slavery. So hated was he by the Establishment that even owning or distributing his books were major offences.
Thomas Muir - transported to AustraliaThe radical Scottish lawyer Thomas Muir was sentenced to 14 years transportation to Botany Bay for the principal offences of recommending Paine's writings and for allowing a fraternal speaker from the the United Irishmen to address the Friends of the People Society convention in Edinburgh in December 1792. The trial judge, Lord Braxfield, told the jury that "Mr Muir might have known that no attention could be paid to such a rabble [of ignorant weavers]. What right had they to representation?" That was what Paine railed against.
In Britain and Ireland, this was a period of anti-democratic witch hunts. In a later Scottish trial, one of Muir's co-thinkers complained that the word "reformer" was being used pejoratively. To back up his case, he argued that Jesus Christ was a "reformer". Braxfield retorted "Muckle ye make o' that: he was hanget!"
William Blake - warned Paine of dangerPaine himself was indicted by the government for "seditious libel", a charge liable to the death penalty. He escaped to France only due to the timely intervention of his friend, the poet William Blake, who warned him to stay away from his house or face being killed. Ironically, Paine the radical only narrowly avoided the guillotine himself after falling out with the revolutionary government. Outlawed in his own land, he took up the invitation from Thomas Jefferson and returned to the United States in 1802, where he lived out his final unhappy years.
Paine remains an icon for liberty, freedom of expression and human rights. Many of his concepts were later taken up by republican democrats and socialists. Many of his ideas are relevant today, and perhaps we should take a fresh look at Paine and examine the power relationships which Paine exposed and condemned.
WIRED has revisited Paine and, understandably, made him an icon for the radical wing of the Infobahn users. After all, as the Internet grows (apparently doubling the number of users each year, allegedly 40 million), the technology will become an essential medium for information dissemination and debate. While the wealthy corporations may have the greatest control over information, the Internet has independently developed a counterculture of free exchange of information. And it's fast: reports of bombings in South Africa or atrocities in Chechnya have appeared first on the Internet, long before the conventional media have picked up the stories.
This is a phenomenon which the trade unions and the left ignore at their peril. In the United States, most labor unions operate on the Internet and have their own World Wide Web pages. Things are a bit slower in the UK, although the Labour Party now has one, as does the Trade Union Congress. The public service union UNISON was the first UK union to develop a Web page in 1995, soon followed by others including the Communication Workers Union of which I am a member.
Access to the Internet is not cheap and it is very much the plaything of the North - north America, northern Europe and the North's outposts in Australasia. However, as a result of deliberate government policies, every United States school is now wired in, and has full access to the Internet. Large numbers of information workers use E-Mail and the Internet as part of their daily routine. It is becoming a way of life for millions.
Some of its content is downright weird (there is a newsgroup about racoons, and racoon related items!) - after all most of it comes from the US. Some of it is very right wing, and some is downright awful.
But there is gold to found in the Net and its World Wide Web. Wired is convinced that Paine would be a Net surfer, "a citizen of the new culture, issuing fervent harangues from http://www.commonsense.com. He would be cyber-hellraiser, a Net-fiend." I hope so.
Copyright Donald MacDonald 1995. This article may be freely reproduced on condition that acknowledgement is made, and that it is not published for commercial reasons.
Donald MacDonald can be e-mailed via Netmail on CWUNet, the Union's own electronic bulletin board, or as donald.macdonald@btinternet.com