Netherlands Telecom bought XS4ALL
CYBER-LIBERALS GET RICH
The Amsterdam provider xs4all misrepresented itself in Europe as socially involved and critical: that made money, for its founders. Liberalism and business go together: cyber-liberalism and cyber-business also.
KPN Telecom (the privatised Netherlands Telecom) has bought the Belgian and Netherlands xs4all companies. Ex-hacker founders Rob Gonggrijp and Felipe Rodriquez are now millionaires. In its Press statement, xs4all says it will remain "socially motivated". As long as the image is marketable, no doubt. In fact the company used its "alternative" image, to employ people at low salaries, especially in the difficult start-up period. The market position it built up, can now be turned into "stockholder value", by selling the company to KPN.
This is what the hypocrite Gonggrijp said about KPN Telecom in an interview in February 1995:
"The most important thing about hacking is the 'mindframe' you have when looking around you..... Was it only because there's a lot of things wrong with the technology we trust so much. When the Dutch Telecoms bring a new invention on the market, like the digital telephone guide last month, we are the first to show the flaws in the system. You would never get this kind of information from big corporations. Never, never take what is written in the users manual for granted is another of our paroles. Hack it. And only then you'll know how secure it is. I myself always take a look at where the weak points of a system might be. The whole world around us is fast changing into systems. It is important that we learn to think about it for ourselves, and not to trust blindly that small self-appointed elite that allegedly knows-it-all."
Now he has sold xs4all to the same Telecom, to the same elite he once criticised. He has become a member of that same elite: in his libertarian political views, he always was. All businessman are liberals, cyber-businessmen are cyber-liberals. The provider xs4all emerged from the Amsterdam hackers club Hacktic. Like similar groups in Europe, it attracted libertarians (anti-statist free-market ideologists) and techno-liberals. Hacktic and the social-liberal cultural centre De Balie also set up the first telecity project in Europe, De Digitale Stad. All pro-Internet politics in the Netherlands has been explicitly liberal, and often libertarian. So it is not surprising, that people who promote a free-market model of cyberspace, turn out to be greedy businessmen. Indeed, Internet as hyperliberalism: every day it looks more true.
A clever businessman like Felipe Rodriquez can make a profit out of, for instance, left-wing anti-censorship campaigns. De Digitale Stad is now a semi-commercial portal site. In fact most of the digital cities in Europe are commercial portal sites: yet only three years ago digerati claimed, that they would revive urban democracy. The artists provider and Nettime host Desk.nl now designs "millennium e-cards" for insurance companies. A "virtual community" now means: a list of potential customers. Last years cyber-theory is this years marketing tool: no concept within cyberspace has not been commercialised.
This trend will continue, all over Europe. The electronic space will become more commercial, more monopolised, and more restricted in content by market forces. Power will be more centralised, and inequality will increase. More people will get low-paid jobs in call-center and help-desk work, the wealth of a few shareholders will increase dramatically. Just as in the non-electronic space of the free market. The surprise is, that anyone still believes that the electronic equivalent is idealistic, or progressive, or liberating, or egalitarian. There is nothing good about the Internet. It is wrong in itself, and it always was. It also attracts greedy, right-wing hypocrites, just like the free market. Ex-hacker millionaires are good proof of that.