This sort of communications system could not exist in this country without incredible economic and political implications. If every television set could communicate with every other television set in this country, telephones would become obsolete. Videocassettes alone will cripple Hollywood even more than it is crippled now. In political terms, the decentralization of television will lend itself to countless aspects of daily life: communities will be defined more by issue, interests, or vocations than by geography. And on a personal level, total access to communication systems like this would enable each person to have more control over his life.

Of course the cultural radicals and technoanarchists who make up the alternate television movement operate in a context far different from the sort of things they envision. Indeed, operating in a vacuum-that is, off the air-they are reversing the hardware-first, software-second pattern that has characterized the development of the television networks. Since the programming by groups like Raindance, People's Video Theatre and Videofreex, three New York City groups who make up a loosely formed alliance, does not appear on the public screens, they can operate with much greater freedom and they have literally to take their cameras and TV sets to the people.

This, the taking of the equipment to the people, has been the means and content of much of the programming to come out of these three groups. Using a common technological base-the porta-pak of the Sony AV series with half-inch black and white rapes-as almost all people who are active in the alternate television movement do, the People's Video Theatre has been loading their equipment in mobile vans and going out in the streets to fulfill the six objectives they cite in Radical Software:

1) to become a model for other video theatres;

2) to provide the people of the community a means of exposing their goods, services and ideas;

3) to introduce and develop video journalism;

4) to provide a public video studio which can be used by acting groups, dancers, therapists, political figures, etc.;

5) to stimulate community dialogue through a live forum;

6) to establish a video library.

In trying to fulfill these objectives most of the programming of PVT has been characterized by the abandonment of the stilted, formalistic interviewer approach used by network journalists. The result is that the people who do the talking-the minister of the Young Lords who gives a guided tour of the El Barrio, the observers and participants in the New York Women's Liberation March,-feel less constricted and are able to abandon the on-stage, false media personality that network television inflicts upon them. In one PVT sequence, a black shines the shoes of a white man. "I'll tell you one thing," he says and looks up at his well-dressed customer, "the people who are on top, always end up stepping on the people who are down."

Most of the other radical video groups cover a broader range of material than does PVT. Raindance, as well as groups like San Francisco's Mobile Muck Truck and New Year's Global Village, covers both culturally and politically radical events.

FOR THE MOST PART, the best work done by groups in the alternate television movement is of the sort that cannot be translated into the print medium. The only opportunity for public viewing of their work is when about thirty people gather in the small downtown Manhattan studios every two or three weeks. But most of the video groups are not in show business. A lot of the work that has been done-work with the FCC-cannot be seen at all. And potentially the most exciting things will not happen until the airwaves are really free for public use.

The greatest advantage of the people who make up the alternate television movement is that their goals and tactics are the same: they want to create a system that will move information better and more fairly than the present one, and in order to do that they will have to know how to use the present information system better. The battle with the corporations is more than a simple economic one, it is one of information systems. The television industry has long controlled the airwaves simply because it controlled the hardware and it was able to use that hardware to convince the public that its system was best, that "pay-TV" (CATV) was bad. Now the networks find themselves still in control of the hardware, but not the information system; and they are finally skating on thin ice.