THE DECLINE

OF THE LOCAL MEDIA IN AMSTERDAM

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Amsterdam has always been a model for tactical media makers all over the world, ever since the heyday of the cable pi-
rates in the early eighties. The story of the gradual decline of this Utopia is unfortunately less well known. In my view the
onset to this decline had already begun when the city council decided to close down the cable network for illegal trans-
missions. | have always wondered about the ease with which they got away with it, claiming that some of the pirates
broadcaster feature films from Hollywood, which had not even been released in the Netherlands yet and so damaging the
interests of the movie theaters. | didn't believe a word of it then and | still don't. The real reason of course was a political
‘one. There were two pirate stations operating on a non-commercial basis, the Vrije Keyser (which as a radio station exists
to the present day) and PKP-TV, later Rabotnik TV, of which | was one of the founders. The Vrije Keyser was the television
station of the squatters movement and as such it was probably a nuisance, if not more, in the eyes of the authorities.
Rabotnik TV was a conglomerate of young media-activists and art school students, which was much more related to the
cultural underground of Amsterdam at the time, although we also actively supported one of the parties in the municipal
election of 1982. Both the party and the television station were part of an acceleration of cultural activities in the early
eighties, which had been heavily influenced by punk. We called ourselves ‘ether-dissidents’, not only to distinguish our-
selves from our pirate colleagues, but also to make it clear that we did not want to belong to the famous Dutch consensus-
culture.

For a while we were pretty successful. We even got letters from people in retirement homes, who said that they were happy
to be witnessing what the youth were into. But suddenly it was all over. Out of the blue (it seemed) access the cable net-
work was shut off. Somewhere someone had pulled a plug or turned a switch. Then we noticed to our surprise that we were
actually the only ones who could not broadcast. All the other stations (except the Vrije Keyser, but this was not their night)
were still there. The next day we discovered that we were excluded on the basis of a special order by the mayor himself.
He was fearing riots in the streets because of the immanent eviction of one of the bigger squats in town and therefore he
had decided that he would curb us. Only one week later the other pirates followed, and only then the story of the unre-
leased films was given as an excuse (we never transmitted films). All this serves to illustrate my conviction that local
media can make a difference, provided that they are really free.

After the pirate episode it took the city council two years to establish a body, called SALTO, to govern the ‘open’ channels
for local radio and television in Amsterdam. Formally an independent foundation, in reality SALTO operates under strict su-
pervision of the city council. Although the Dutch constitution prohibits preliminary censorship, they can refuse anything
beforehand on the basis of pretty vague rules. And now they have decided to give the once-flourishing local media-culture
a final blow by inventing a so-called ‘horizontal’ programming structure, which has effectively fragmented the solid blocks
of broadcasting time that some of the local stations used to have. At the same time one of the most vital and inspiring live
programs on local television, De Hoeksteen, was killed by an ‘organisational readjustment’ (see the story by Raul
Marroquin). | cannot help but see all this as the final chapter of a very effective strategy of gradual annihilation of the
thriving counterculture that existed in Amsterdam through a large part of the eighties, of which Rabotnik TV and the Vrije
Keyser were exponents. Where the city center used to bustle with energy and autonomous art-spaces, concert halls and
cafes were found on almost every corner, nowadays you have to go beyond the fringes of Amsterdam to glimpse even a tiny
spark of it. So much for the much vaunted tolerance of our consensus-model. It is just a very clever system which has ef-
fectively marginalized whole chunks of society and culture without encountering any real opposition.

"Wee HA ee Sy Tee