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If you worry about protecting free speech, want to make your own decisions about culture, respect the right of artists to create and profit from their own work, support the idea of the young having any rights at all, or fear the devastating impact America's mega-corporations can have on creative freedom and choice, then boycott Wal-Mart stores and urge everyone you know to do the same.
Wal-Mart, the single largest seller of pop music in America - it sold 52 million CDs last year - is forcing the removal of songs, changes in cover designs, and alterations of lyrics its executives find objectionable or offensive. It's forcing studios to make tamer, safer films as well. Artists who disagree with particular Wal-Mart notions of morality are being deprived of revenue and having their livelihoods threatened.
One example: The chain's stores, according to The New York Times, refused to carry Sheryl Crow's new album because of a lyric that accused the chain of selling guns to children. When Crow refused to remove it, she lost an estimated 10 percent of her album's potential sales.
Wal-Mart won't sell CDs with explicit rap lyrics or sexual references, but is happy to carry rifles, knives, handcuffs, and handgun ammunition.
Since Wal-Mart refuses to carry any CDs with a "parental advisory" label, artists and record labels say they're under increasing pressure to sanitize their work. Music industry and film executives and producers say these policies are forcing both industries to substantially alter their content.
Last year, the fight over the Communications Decency Act politicized much of Web culture. But the CDA was always a largely toothless and symbolic political gesture. As offensive as it was, it was unenforceable as well as unconstitutional.
But the threat to the free movement of ideas and artistic expression by companies like Wal-Mart is far greater. And it's already here.
As these companies inevitably move to commercialize the Internet, their noxious efforts to censor culture and speech will post a much more serious threat to the idea that information wants to be free than the CDA ever could have done.
Wal-Mart stores are mostly in rural and suburban communities. Kids there are especially at the mercy of their efforts to dictate what wholesome culture is, as chains like Wal-Mart drive out smaller music outlets that actually care about music and know something about it.
Chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble have moved aggressively into the book business, but one difference is that they are experienced book retailers, and have shown little interest in censoring books or altering their content. Wal-Mart is a discount retailer with no knowledge or experience in fields like books or music. And no respect for notions of individual choice or creativity.
In all of popular culture, there's almost no entity more dangerous than a powerful corporation with a political agenda. They tend to suck up all the space around them, and force the makers of all creative products to pander to them.
The technology and political ideology of the Web is the best available means to combat this arrogant expansion of power by a corporation that presumes to know what moral and cultural choices its customers - and indirectly, the rest of us - should have.
Web culture can work in several ways to take on Wal-Mart and other corporations that are growing obscenely powerful and threaten both freedom of commerce and freedom of ideas.
The Net is the best means of spreading the message that Wal-Mart's entertainment-retailing policies are offensive and unacceptable. Wal-Mart stores should be boycotted until and unless the company guarantees to respect the free movement of ideas and the right of consumers - even younger ones - to make their own choices about morals and values. And to clearly label altered editorial products.
Music and video companies can be encouraged to retail products directly off of Web sites, so that consumers can buy original, unaltered, and uncensored versions.
Music and movie lovers, libertarians, liberals who believe in free speech, and conservatives who believe in maintaining individual liberty can - if they are of a mind - get together and picket Wal-Mart stores, and try and let parents know the company is making familial decisions for them and their children, mislabeling products it sells, and taking upon itself the cultural policing of the country.
The Web can sell uncensored CDs. It is still our least censorable medium. Rather than cave in to Wal-Mart, record companies can show some spunk, defend their artists, and make money as well via the miracle of digital sales.
The bookseller site Amazon.com has demonstrated that commercial products can be sold online. A musical equivalent could end-run chains like Wal-Mart and make this kind of censorship unprofitable as well as impossible, and could advance the idea of the Web as a source of creative products.
Third, legislators and members of Congress should be emailed, snailmailed, or phoned and urged to support legislation that would force Wal-Mart to clearly label CDs and videos that have been altered, often without the permission or the knowledge of the artist.
While you're at it, mailto:letters@wal-mart.com email Wal-Mart's president and tell him what you think.
Through newsgroups, Web sites and mailing lists, isolated teenagers and others should be supported if they wish to find the actual lyrics of songs, especially of songs and videos banned by Wal-Mart because the company's purchasers don't like them. Children have been victimized by media, politicians, and many parents for years - and had their culture branded "stupid" or "offensive." The Web culture should become the first medium to support them and their rights to control more of their culture themselves.
Net culture is routinely branded as isolating, arrogant, narcissistic, and apathetic, and is struggling to find issues around which it can coalesce as a community. The CDA was the first one. This is a good nominee for the second. The notion that information wants to be free - the primary ideology of the Net - should be fought off-line as well as online.
The young - especially those far from sophisticated urban centers - have the right to access the work of artists they like as it was created. Parents have the right to make their own moral judgments about what is appropriate for their children. Artists have the right to have their work stand or fall on its merits.
Wal-Mart shouldn't be allowed to set the country's cultural agenda.
