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  A FEW WEEKS AGO, some six hundred thousand citizens of the global economy reached into their mailboxes and pulled out a document inviting them to help set the course of world culture in the twenty-first century. The 270-page booklet, entitled "AOL Time Warner Merger Joint Proxy Statement-Prospectus," advises America Online and Time Warner shareholders of their right to vote for or against the historic merger, in person or by proxy, at special meetings to be held this Friday, June 23, in New York City and Vienna, Virginia. Smart recipients immediately stuffed this momentous document into plastic comic-book sleeves against the day when, auctioned off on eBay, a clean copy might just about pay for the remodeling of some great-great-grandchild’s upstairs bathroom. Others no less thoughtfully filed it away among the coffee grounds and Pop Tart wrappers of that morning’s breakfast. But a few wayward souls, lacking more productive occupation, actually sat down to give the thing a once-over. And for their pains they were treated to a humbling vision: a glimpse of democracy as it could be -- as perhaps it will be -- once we let go the last shreds of our increasingly fictional political systems and accept the worldwide corporate stewardship that is our fast-approaching fate.

"VOTE NOW," the back cover of the prospectus suggests in seventy-two-point, starkly serifed type. The front cover takes a coyer approach, placing at its focal point a dignified gray-and-white rendering of the world-famous Bugs Bunny, Time Warner’s flagship intellectual property, reaching out to shake hands with AOL’s nearest equivalent, the Haringesque little humanoid known to millions by no name in particular but more or less recognizable as the Instant Messenger guy. Presumably this image of cartoon brotherhood will warm the hearts of some stockholders, particularly those aged eight and under. But frankly, its suggestion of unholy interspecies conjugation was enough to convince me, proud owner of twenty shares of AOL, to immediately mark my proxy ballot AGAINST and mail my twenty votes off posthaste.

And boy did that feel good. Even if it did mean squat. "Your vote is very important, no matter how many shares you own," AOL chief exec Steve Case and Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin personally assure their friend the stockholder in the signed letter that opens the prospectus. Translation: "If there were a chance in hell that you, the unruly individual investor, could stop this deal, it would never have come to a ballot. Besides, if you were really against it, you would have sold your shares like everybody else did back in January, after the deal was announced. But you didn’t, did you? We didn’t think so. Now run along and play with your stock ticker; we’ve got markets to strangle here."

Yet despite, or perhaps because of, its essential emptiness, there’s a crisply thrilling clarity to this corporate version of democracy that’s missing in the shaggy old-fashioned kind. Sure, in a free society you and I can bitch and moan all we want about the evils of culture-industry consolidation. We can publish articles quoting fellow bitchers and moaners like Robert McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy, who has called the AOL-Time Warner merger "the last nail in the coffin for anyone who believed that the Internet is the last stronghold of media competition." And when some regulatory body makes vaguely threatening noises about the merger -- as the European Union did this week, announcing a four-month probe into possible anticompetitive consequences of the deal -- we can wonder if our small contribution to the public conversation helped in some distant, butterflylike way to prod the government into something resembling action.

But why sit through all that yammering and doubt when we can just drop a postage-paid ballot in the mail and be absolutely confident our voice makes no substantial difference? Why endure the nagging suspicion that our vote counts only as much as the cash that backs it up when we can know for certain that it does, participating in a system that treats the purchase of votes not as a dirty little secret but as a fundamental principle?

Why not embrace today the democracy of tomorrow? I certainly intend to. When my twenty proxy votes go pissing up a rope at 10 A.M. on Friday at the Sheraton Premiere in Vienna, I plan to be watching via the live Internet broadcast AOL is thoughtfully providing. Of course, it won’t be the same as sitting in the audience and having the slightest chance to make a real argument or raise an actual ruckus. But then that’s sort of the point, isn’t it?

Julian Dibbell writes a monthly column for FEED on technological obsessions. He lives in South Bend, Indiana.

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