In 1961, Newton Minnow, then-chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, accused television broadcasters of strip mining the public airwaves, creating a "vast wasteland" of vacuous commercial programming.
Flash forward to 2061. Welcome to the World Wide Web of the future, where AOLscape, YahooCities, and MicroBucks fight for your eyeballs with wide-screen video portals and product placements in your palmtop.
Marc Weiss, the founder of the Silicon Alley-based Web Lab, took up arms against that way-new wasteland last year. Building on his track record as the man who brought the vision of independent filmmakers to the home screen with the public-TV showcase POV, Weiss launched the Web Development Fund as a Web Lab project to nurture sites emphasizing community building and complex social issues.
For 12 years, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation gave substantial grants to Weiss' POV, allowing him to broadcast the kind of programming that changed lives -- like Marlon Riggs' Tongues Untied, a candid autobiography of a black gay man that outraged the religious right.
When Weiss went to the foundation to ask for US$600,000 for three years of Web Lab funding, however, he was turned down.
The rejection came as an unpleasant surprise. PBS Online is still in for $50,000 backing for the WDF, but now Weiss, who pilots the project from a crowded warren in Manhattan's SoHo district, will have to downscale this year's round of funding. That's bad news for over 200 aspiring Net visionaries pitching for WDF support.
One proposal outlines a visually inventive site that would teach kids about the ecological systems of the human body. Another lays the blueprints for an online forum to discuss the ethical implications of genetic research.
"This is a critical moment for Web Lab. We needed that money. The future of the WDF is up for grabs," he admits.
There's more at stake than the WDF. Weiss was hoping to use MacArthur backing to help get out Web Lab's message: Web sites can be cost-effective agents of change, streambeds for new kinds of discourse between individuals who might otherwise never have occasion to exchange ideas.
The problem is larger than one man's war.
The MacArthur Foundation has been a major player in bringing public-interest programming to the airwaves. When the Rockefeller Foundation put its old-money clout behind portable video, news gathering was reinvented for the age of on-the-spot reporting.
But even the big-ticket benefactors who have thrown their weight behind innovative and progressive programming in other media have been slow to embrace the digital revolution.
"All the scrappy Internet freaks who came in looking for community have laid the groundwork for e-commerce," observes Weiss. "But the Internet can't live by e-commerce alone. Who's going to fund the next wave of R&D?" One pool of potential angels, he suggests, are those already reaping windfalls in the digital domain.
Weiss points out that if Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Dell, Compaq, and Charles Schwab had put 1 percent of their after-tax profits for 1997 alone into a fund for socially beneficial Web sites, that fund would have been worth $135 million.
In the world of high-tech finance, $135 million is a footnote on a prospectus. A site as powerful as the WDF-funded Living with Suicide was put online for a mere $12,500.
Last year, the MacArthur Foundation gave a Los Angeles filmmaker $300,000 to make a documentary about war crimes in Yugoslavia for Frontline; earmarked $1.3 million for educational and international programming at National Public Radio; awarded poet Linda Bierds $320,000 for her "clear, efficient, and elegant verse"; and made Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web, a MacArthur fellow, for "pioneer[ing] a revolutionary communications system requiring minimal technical understanding."
Though the foundation has given money to organizations that have Web sites, organizations designed specifically to create socially potent applications for the Web are not on the list.
"We aren't supporting Web or Internet projects per se," says Tim Chen, the foundation's general program officer.
Chen says that although Weiss has a long-standing positive relationship with the foundation because of POV, most webmasters wouldn't have a prayer seeking funding for their sites.
"We haven't put up our periscope to go searching for those projects," Chen says. "It isn't a priority for us. It's like asking why we don't go fund in Greenland or Alaska."
Public affairs vice president Woody Wickham says the foundation's emphasis in the digital world has been on giving money to groups working to ensure universal access to the technology. The Center for Media Education landed a grant. The Media Access Project snared another.
Wickham holds a very high opinion of Weiss' first major online project, Regarding Vietnam.
"That site represented a case in point of how nuanced and humane exchange can occur in a medium that can be otherwise," Wickham said.
He wouldn't comment, however, on why the Web Lab proposal was nixed.
Calls to the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations for this article were not returned.
The Web Lab's struggles to bring some of its promising projects to fruition and keep them thriving are also cases in point, shedding light on the difficulty of finding and executing ideas on the scale of Weiss' ambitions for the new medium. Living with Suicide is clearly one of the most emotionally affecting personal testimonies on the Web. Reality Check, an in-house Web Lab project launched in November, has lived up to its potential, with more than 10,000 posts in its forums from those who feel alienated by the media meltdown around the White House sex scandal.
Another WDF initiative, however, the Dark Museum, may never see the light of day. Proposed as an online archive of "the toxic effects of the Cold War on American culture" by San Francisco writer and editor Bob Callahan, the Dark Museum foundered in disputes between Callahan, Silicon Alley designers Funny Garbage, and the Web Lab.
Funny Garbage founder Peter Girardi says his firm pulled out several months into the project because "there were too many cooks in the kitchen."
Co-owner J. J. Gifford says that, after months of testy phone calls back and forth, the Web Lab wouldn't grant Callahan and his designers enough autonomy to "get to the point where we could just start building something and let it evolve."
Gifford claims that while the Web Lab positions itself as a funding organization and a greenhouse of ideas, "they were styling themselves more as an editorial-control organization."
In a medium where turf wars flare daily between editorial, advertising, and business departments, it's not surprising that the Web Lab, in its attempt to carve out a new niche in online publishing, occasionally has trouble figuring out which hat to wear.
Privately, Weiss confesses that some of the other WDF projects -- such as Working Stiff, a webzine for exploring issues in the workplace -- weren't as successful in modeling new ways of interacting on the Web as he hoped they would be. Working Stiff has already ceased publication, a direct casualty of the MacArthur bid being turned down.
One group that backs up its pro-tech boosterism with hard cash is the New York-based John and Mary R. Markle Foundation. The Markle Foundation funded SeniorNet for a full decade, from its germination as an academic research project by Third Age founder Mary Furlong to its mature phase as a Web site and network of computer-learning centers for seniors all over the country.
In 1994, the foundation gave the RAND Corporation nearly $1 million to study the feasibility of providing universal access to email. Two years later, the foundation gave $315,000 to the Center for Governmental Studies to create the Democracy Network, an online voter information resource.
Program director Cathy Clark sees Net-targeted grant giving as a natural extension of the foundation's traditional role of supporting media that provide information access to groups that are often marginalized -- such as children and seniors. Former Markle Foundation president Lloyd Morrisett founded the Children's Television Workshop, producers of Sesame Street.
"When we first got involved in multimedia, everyone thought we were crazy, just crazy," she recalls. "But now, a lot of people at the foundations are getting curious about [the Internet]."
Like the Web Lab, the Markle Foundation is most interested in technology that changes the way people interact.
"We're not promoting the technology. We're promoting what people can do with the technology," Clark says.
Vice president of public affairs Julia Moffett affirms that online projects "will be a huge priority" in the years to come, under the guidance of Zoe Baird, the foundation's new president.
"Look for Baird to turn the foundation into a leading cyber-research group, new-media financing organization, and force in shaping the Internet culture with an eye toward the public interest," she says.
Whether that financing will take the form of blockbuster sums for costly efforts like the RAND study or Reinventing America -- a multiplayer game about the federal budget developed for Time-Warner's Pathfinder Network, backed with over a million Markle dollars -- or leaner, community-based online projects remains to be seen.
With 228 proposals in Weiss' database, there's a lot of public interest out there.
