original really pioneering persons who are involved with the implications of expanding multimedia communication and how that communication system might be able to serve the interest of the mass of the population  at a meeting of the association of cable access producers seven o'clock this evening this very evening when the program airs and that's at two hundred and forty one west thirty six st one and all citizens and supporters of public access and the people are invited to consider coming but that said welcome very much thank you share just a little bit and we do want to very early on get into maybe we could combine the two into a slideshow thing that you have that represent forget that he was really a literature professor all yeah absolutely harold and and but anyway so one of the things is in terms of scheduling and so forth i know you you goodman vald with paper tiger and  deep dish network and that sort of thing and you've got a base here and for reasons of structuring the program and so forth you brought in some slides or something like yeah the st slide is majorly already in the control room then bring up the slides was there who is no longer with us but that is where the offices of paper tiger and deep dish are separate offices and we would not be able to do the the problem is independent producers can't really rely on the market we need city we need public support and the support that paper tiger and deep dish part of it is being able to be in that view are seven or eight of our famous scrolls that we when we used to be down on rd street we couldn't afford the character generator and half the time it wouldn't work so we made our own titles and rolled them always been in the corner of the people being able to do stuff and create a way and also to do something that actually shows that it's handmade yeah it's not that it's not some kind of magic that by somebody you can go to the next of we would begin every show by saying do you know where your brains are and you could go to the next slide and i think it's this is our wonderful vests that we made during the st gulf war tiger we used to always give the budget so the card there says what the budget of the show was which included in those days we had to pay jim slavek for renting that space or no he was have live show and then when i was there when they could ever jam could have a thing where people could actually call in on the telephone absolutely and they're sitting there in the stairs sitting there and the thing is that well we could do it now we're on the air and everything but we don't have anybody in the chair and so he said cable television for and they had the crew all there and everything ready to go up one hundred and twenty five i don't think i didn't want to get out of the limousine well the thing is that those that st studio the one on  street we had to rent we had to pay for the cameras and so paper tiger we used to shoot with what we're talking a paper tiger started in eighty one dollars but we had done some programs i did a program in people and but we have always had to pay for that studio but that's what's great about m n n and m n n would not be here without the activism of paper tiger and fair fairness and accuracy but it was just coming seriously into being there had been the sloan commission report is that cable television the medium of abundance which is really a really interesting study that influenced it and there was import from civil society and the cable industry came after about one thousand nine hundred and seventy to recognise a certain payback responsibility to the community and the form of a setting aside some of their net of tax earnings for paid and then there was george ston but a lot of people think it's dying but actually there are places that are getting better and better and i'm really happy to hear it's not necessarily a dying i think that the ones who succeed  are the ones where they're really understanding the new technology and working together to train people to use to use you tube actually as people would like to post their stuff on you tube but every but not everybody knows how to do it and it access studios can be a place where the new technology and the cable technology stations i think there is some real potential for public access to actually be involved with the with the new technology and i hope i'm hoping that that will happen here in  manhattan the the one thing is that it really needs to have very strong facilitation people who work with with the producers and help them make their shows  changing all the time and we need to have make sure that the staff of public access are people who really encourage and educate and outreach to communities who aren't using the media and that's why we're we were very does a group of us who are very discouraged have been discouraged that so partly because of the there was a lag in time before the economy there are a lot of things going on with a lot of things but it was mostly time warner trying to get out of their obligations well that's something i would i think it's worth talking about or something because i seem to have the day after this program that we air will be as payback to the community for access to the market i guess and everything and so two percent of that goes to bloomberg here in new york mr bloomberg the mayor bloomberg and sorrow and then two percent goes to the education in new york university new york columbia rules is one percent is for public access that's where we are you know that they operating funds and the capital costs are met by payments from the cable industry that they have over the decades long agreed to and have provided so they can provide hearsay m and in they can provide facilities for production and now distribution tapping into and linking up with the cyber things programming that is now being able to be you know we were in the world and all of the costs involved with it including operating costs can be met these payments so the producers can produce without ever having to think  know you don't want to but if the reason that though that that the funds come are set aside like that is because it's really rent for the the public it's actually the public right away it's not you can't you know a citizen can't just come up and string up a wire on one of the telephone pole the specially with the storms and yeah you know it's very tricky yeah so so that the that space is is is not is scarce it's like can't put have too many cables but in exchange for that using that they they have control over the wire coming in and it's only right that people actually have the ability to have the kinds of material they were doing that he had no obligation to do anything about the people being able to produce programming they want of the stars of the time in order ready for nasa and the stars remember on that the stars of the time that would get this captive public airwaves and it is it's not the the air doesn't belong to c b s and that use of the airwaves that there should be a return for the people also  what one thing that there were times in which there were organizations that were promoting more public use more more public more so that for example when a station would go up for renu well their licenses were only for four or five years and those have been extended and extended so now i think it's you get a license for a like fifteen years or twenty and it is very rare that anything is done to exactly but you know who fought it was one person was chris choice remember her i jumped he was our one of the founders of rd world newsre ok and there was a station and philadelphia that didn't have any minority people workers they didn't have any people on the set they had and she really responding to the diversity of the city so they actually had to do certain amount of my own already programming on on that channel it is early that hold and yeah know it was before that i think and i can't remember what come to me maybe but anyway he was a major and he used to welcome as he was chairman of the f c c and he was very favorably disposed toward the id new it came from public access a lot of people would say if you come from public access we don't want to hear from you we want to hear from somebody who's got the information or c b s or b or the established media because who cares a century what the people think the people are there to be fed ads that will buy cornflakes rather than say and that's all they have no reason to have any input because we have the stars and the stars are the ones that are going to attract the viewers and we're going to be able to sell more form cornflakes than him and that's the attitude of the media toward but there are people within the cable industry used to go to the national cable television and associations meetings all the time there are a lot of people it's huge there's all kinds of different kinds of people all the way from being counters who are just looking at the bottom line to some more visionary and there are some people within there who can see the value of that i can remember going down after having met with garo gerald levin he had just been happy as a lark at home box office he had put up killed learning and they could link all the joyce and poets and things like that maybe a couple of bankers are loyal prover but we could do that and he says a good idea where we put the intellectual leadership to inform the whole world citizenry so we can get spaceship earth on a good course and all that kind of idealistic thinking he said what do you think i'm thinking of bringing the house of representatives and he said what do you think you've got a number we had a cup of coffee is going to be cable is going to be satellite deliver is going to be public affairs and call it c span and he was fighting brian lamb to develop c span he was just thinking of the idea that we were both thinking over and everything and he got that goal and he had a hard time getting the house and a hell of a time to send it and so we're going to see span is now the crown jewel of the cable industry if the cable industry is going to say anything to the public about what they're doing to serve that they will point to c span and they've supported c span overwhelmingly they can send enough money to and to get programming done and it's a major source of intellectual programming is you understand i think the same thing could be applied because there are people within cable as in any organization they're not all just green shaded bureaucrats trying to get another shopping channel there are people who believe in who could believe in access to democratic access cable much less the general citizenry because it's called democracy that that would support public access rather than grudgingly be made to well you know one thing is that our value alone p r value if it gets to be were they count that the jewel in their crown the because that that they they can push through whatever bills they want but i wanted to ask you if you remember talking about the old days if you remember that there was a group called public interest satellite corporation  can robert horwitz yes i do and their idea was that every satellite think they should have a pope blick interest channel and that there should be part of the served just like you have part of the channels on the cable that comes to the city there should be those channels reserved on the trans myself and people from the consumer's federation which is the lobbying arm of the consumers union we work and we we work for about three or four years to get this is so see where their ads because the way the law the regulation written it says four to seven percent have to be public interest well guess which percent they chose  universities the university of washington has a channel through the university of california has one of those channels and that's actually out of san diego which is where i was and i removed and i pushed them to try to do that and but when we were lobbying to get that we tried to get the universities to help us because the funding we had to hire a lobbyist yad to have an office yeah i was very good in washington or no yeah absolutely it was that part of the it was a it was a are is it was office at the federation consumer federation o a deal once in a while but i'm working just in the deep end it started in eighty six and we're going to pay for it just similar to what happened with public access in the city where we had to pay for the deal at st but then once we lobbied and got the space we were able to have a transponder the dish network you're a member and you get a program but if you got to somebody you had some money or so and it was about eight hundred dollars an hour to get a  channel on a transponder and you could do it and they used to have to take the tape to empire state building and you get that need after take type up a notice to send out about eight days before it's going to air type up this notice get it printed get it because this is not the right thing it looks like a good party i'd like to have looks really good and that definitely looks like let's not be on the d v d so josh you could just stop it and come back to us when you can because came out in the seventy's sort of trying to be that there was some good hippie there were some really good stuff so things are moving fast and all we have to keep up with is all the things that are going cyber right everything is moving to the cell phone i mean things are trends you're getting video on the cell phone has advanced so phones and so where they hello and t v is going it's not hyperbolic the changes it's going it's going exponential now i think he said there's more and more and more bandwidth is becoming available all the time they're always struggling to try and monetize it to get some money our economic systems are not able to deal with an abundant future that's emerging in all kinds of dimensions werd period of qualitative transformation the guys requires that our collective wisdom and political system and institutional structures are not allowing us to realize we have weapons that have become species lethal after two hundred thousand years of extended consciousness and word of time a qualitative transformation that our systems are not able to handle in terms of what the future allows in the liberating kind of way but also is reifying outdated notions of political and social organization and so forth do you think we're at a time a qualitative transformation in an evolutionary sense of the of the evolutionary process including the extension of that consciousness that human but conscious it is comparable of in or from inner places to make the tools and technology that make the environment other than in the in the like sense is the lot of most of the creatures in the evolutionary process are we in a period of liberation or possible of the hope the hope the whole development of conscious evolution of understanding in this universe or how do we stand or is this just another period that will pass well i don't know it but i think we're stuck with  what we got but i i think one thing that we've got to really learn from is some of these things that these young people are doing with through some of the general assembly me a little bit and i'm learning how to do this yes try to there's like we're learning from them like we're learning everything else from them but i think that they're there so it's very exciting to think of there's there's a kind of equity there in the unprecedented and i think it hopefully it'll it'll spill over into things like manhattan neighborhood network and yeah i mean hope that we can have much more responsible governance of them and then right now the way we we are the we need to make sure that people wonderful website that paper tiger and there you see i mean paper tiger is been able to exist for thirty years because of having that kind of open structure yeah allows people to dissipate and it's very transparent just like in their st days we published our budget i think that we should publish the m n n budget i think we should make  the structures of our public institutions as transparent as possible and something like columbia university or n y u even though those are private into they are nonprofit and we should he he questions their whole and my you is planning you know george stoney is now living in these n y u building and they want to put three more buildings higher in the middle of those other building and i don't understand myself why anybody would go to a university anymore when you've got access to all of the world's information where you can autodidactic to include a knowledge base for yourself that is just on president and to listen to somebody ego tripping on their area of specialization it's called scholarship they've divided and conquered the intellectual community by everything is so specialized nobody's thinking systems nobody is thinking in terms of the broader picture because they're all specialized out and it's just gotten more and more divide and conquer the whole intellectual enterprise so the universities are sort of irrelevant it seems to me they're not producing anything all the king horses and all the king's men and all the trillions of dollars that go into war it is called education in order to get a bunch of people who are ready to be responding to an authority figure something like that to fit into it is now not  or twelve minutes so you could play it for twelve minutes if they get it but we don't want to but anyway that's my thought and we haven't got any conference they have not come up with yet what we need at this crucial moment and understanding technology we very well may have transcended in this process at the level of cave religion like the weapons became qualitatively new a qualitative really new collective capability of our technologically augmented capability to provide life coming to the end of the human experience and it's never brought up in those kind of qualitative terms and so that's the thing that bothers me i'm very afraid we're just going to cut off the evolution of consciousness two hundred thousand years by clinging to outdated institutions that are being reified by our political and intellectual leadership bought off tenure looking after and all that kind of stuff and we don't have any vision that's going to be possibly able to stablish media they're just looking for the stars and reify in the outdated is going to come from public access probably well not anywhere else and the sister institutions like lafayette and things like that is where  the information is going to come and the general society can support that absolutely harold i mean i feel that there is something to me that people  the real problem is a passive video people to just let all this happen and what is what is so powerful about public access is that you can make your own and that you run if you take control of your own media now people are doing that with the internet but not everybody is it's like that to me is is one reason that we need public access even with the new technology as like the support that's coming and there should be a link in actually in the to understand there is more the world's going multimedia and i must say i think that it's great that m n n now has a lot of their channels on the internet i want is really neat and they've got the french are going to us and then the franchise then has a view our executive director as now of you ten years into the technological future so then what can that mean we're going to go all high def what's going to happen and then this should end there's three thousand of these across the country and i think it would be really good at the cable industry could come to support public access as a as a an addendum to the that that would be if we had a a rational system but unfortunately look they we don't have a rational system i mean you have a situation where eighteen t and time warner are were working overtime to try to get state laws that undercut public access instead of supporting instead of realizing that that's one of the few things people turn on their t v to watch it's one of the few ways that they can year there's been many surveys that ask people what they want and they'll say they want to know about what's happening in their own town well that is used as a sort of sensationalist you know i think reality t v was partly was a reaction against this sort of dramatize shows that they have on best academic minds instead of trying to get it through to the astaire i don't think there's much hope for the established media to come up with anything they'll come up with thing nova comes up with things you can get some education for work but in terms of real educational systems thinking i don't think is going to come out even p b s is not going to come out of that they're reifying the outdated institutions so if you've got occupy and occupiers going to try it's just breathing on air now i mean i don't really  everything as you understand but and then what we'll see what happens mayfair is well right i don't don't hold your breath because it's long term and they're going you notice what they're doing and i really respect them for that they're not going to listen to the ladies issues or the black issues or the sopranos years or the individual ises they're going horizontal and they're going horizontal and they're going horizontal and they're going horizontal and it's not occupy wall street is not occupy new york is not occupy america is occupy the world and the whole world has a system that is not adequate to what the future requires and now allows in the liberating context that's going to come from certain intellectual quarters that ought to be joining into that and the way of that will be getting out and the only place where you see anything at this moment in occupy is here you don't see anything in the status meter or they're saying who are you going to vote for and they're going to slip right back into mr bloomberg says he's go thirty three mad one thousand man army the police to occupy the occupy movement and kill it and kill it and put it out of the you know what are you complaining about everything's in control were in control the same old thing but that public access realm including the internet is where the intellectual stop will start emerging not just going to be people talking to local issues it's going to be the intellectual leadership that is being able to lead on to that is going to emerge and what i'm saying that's where the action will be what they want to get public access to i mean you have a situation unlike in brooklyn where the borough president pretty much control things and see things in a way and then you do have some people like you and some people george stoney and people pioneer that and there are intellectual leadership they shouldn't be wasting their time in the established media  early had to finding their place in public access we can build let it works the distribution of programming that is comprehensive is intellectual in looking at the big picture rather than being divided and conquered by those who say just do yeah but what i'm trying to say is the place where you can do it in public access you can do it you don't even have to be thinking about money because the money is paid you've got three thousand of them in a backbone of public access is support and are you going to be and not everybody is corrupt there are people who are corrupt shortsighted in everything but in the cable industry or in the communications industry there are people who are actually able to understand i've seen people of go mars and other police occupy wall street is really real and it's really really it's not just a thing to be co opted as the people are because they're small minded people all over the place doesn't mean you have to comport to that you have to establish a place where the real voices can start coming and talking serious that i think been very harold that's why the police are going after the press people now yeah because they don't want the press people that would support by and so they're trying to keep them as far away as protected by the treasury and the candidates and so we're you can't go and put up with him because that's right and they can arrest you they're laying the predicate for a police state because they don't have a vision they should be vision should be coming that is incorporated and i think there's more hope for the occupy thing than anybody in my says exist a bunch of disorganized they're going they're going they're looking for the systems understanding and the people who have that we should be mr pinker and other people we blow the whole world up and they've got to actually what's going on in japan now is for taste of things to come well dana anyway they i was just in oregon and they