Author: David Newhoff

David is an author, communications professional, and copyright advocate. After more than 20 years providing creative services and consulting in corporate communications, he shifted his attention to law and policy, beginning with advocacy of copyright and the value of creative professionals to America’s economy, core principles, and culture.

Kim Dotcom & the Illusion of Freedom

I’m still stuck on the following dependent clause:  “In a dramatic series of tweets,…”

I can’t help it. That’s just funny.  Because for me personally, the verb tweet will never quite convey the kind of gravity that begs for an adjective like dramatic.  But that’s just my personal taste for what Roy Blount Jr. calls “sonicy” in discussing the correlation between the sound of words and their meanings.  Nevertheless, “In a dramatic series of tweets,” writes Kaveh Waddell for National Journal, the infamous Kim Dotcom declared himself “HIlary’s worst nightmare” with his vow to establish a foothold for his New Zealand Internet Party here in the United States – a party that has yet to gain an actual foothold in New Zealand, by the way.

One might think that Dotcom’s status as a fugitive from U.S. justice, continuing to fight extradition for mass intellectual property infringement, racketeering, and a few other charges, would preclude his laying the groundwork for a new political party in this country, but we do live in strange, some might say psychotic, times, so never say never.  At least never say never about what Dotcom represents to some people.  I think it’s safe to say that Kim Schmidtz himself has no future in American politics in any literal sense and is unlikely to be Hilary’s “biggest nightmare,” if Mrs. Clinton decides to run in 2016, but this particular corpulent criminal still spews a rhetoric that resonates with young and understandably frustrated American citizens.  And by rhetoric I mean an echo chamber from which there is no escape.

I know what the Green Party is, but what the hell is the Internet Party? It makes as much sense to me as the Paved Sidewalk Party. The “internet” is a work of infrastructure.  The current manner in which the internet is used is not the only way in which it could have been or can be used or might be used in the future. In fact, the design and economics of Web 2.0 are in many ways an aberration of the visions of some of the web’s early pioneers.  The internet had its roots in sharing information among colleagues, in openness, and in building a better world through information, but that is not quite the internet we have today.  The internet we have today belongs to a handful of corporate owners, who more than a decade ago, traded in any lofty visions they might have had for the wealth derived from advertising and the power derived by designing the most sophisticated, yet ironically voluntary, surveillance state in global history.

Kim Dotcom himself may be a joke (let’s hope so), but the rhetoric he coughs up, the rhetoric still being shouted from Silicon Valley is in reality just the cosmic background noise of long-exploded dreams of the digital pioneers who no longer influence the evolution of the web we are using. I believe that many people are desperate for new answers, fed up with government both left and right, and continue to buy this premise that “a free and open internet,” the central plank of any Internet Party, is essential for a more progressive, less authoritarian future.  But who defines what a “free and open internet” is?  Should such a political party become manifest in the U.S., that definition will surely come from the financial backers of that party, and they will be the same plutocrats whom we empower and enrich with every tweet, text, status update, and agreement to their terms of service we don’t bother to read.

The EFF’s Maria Sutton yesterday wrote yet another post asserting that the DMCA, the legal mechanism used to request takedowns of material that infringes copyright is the quickest and easiest way for “state officials to censor online speech.”  Hmm.  The documentary film  Terms and Conditions May Apply highlights three or four cases in which citizens were subjected to, shall we say, unfortunate encounters with various authorities resulting from innocuous posts and searches online.  The lesson is that privacy is dead, any of us can be un-anonymized, and companies like Google and Facebook are not only profiting from all our voluntary data sharing but are the surveillance database for the government agencies we’re supposed to be concerned about.  People like Maria Sutton write articles about videos on YouTube being taken down, even temporarily, as though to imply that this kind of “censorship” is the leading edge of a slippery slope.  But anyone who thinks this way doesn’t realize we’re already in the middle of the avalanche. A free and open internet my ass.  Sutton even cites one anecdote of a takedown in Saudi Arabia without any acknowledgement that free speech in that country has a long way to go past its murderous history before we need to worry about the temporary removal of some videos from YouTube.  People get shot for speaking their minds, and speech somehow survives.  And in the U.S., where speech is everything, our overvaluation of these social media toys, as though speech itself depends on their unfettered existence, is probably the fastest way to bring about the end of free speech because it’s not a one-way street.  These platforms enable us to, as my son says, “spy on ourselves.”

And the real irony of this misguided premise — that it’s those bastard copyright holders who foster censorship — is that intellectual property rights are about the only thing left that Google, Facebook, et al can’t quite get their hands on.  We’ve already ceded privacy and potentially some rather more serious expectations of civil liberty.  After all, there is no legal guarantee of privacy, and by volunteering information through social media, we actually waive our 4th Amendment rights with regard to government use of that data.  But intellectual property law remains.  It says that what I author belongs to me, and you can’t have it unless I say so.  Kim Dotcom made millions breaking that law and called it “freedom,” and the tech billionaires who would back an “internet party” would like to see those laws gone.  They’ll tell you it’s for the good of society.  I say, it’s because it’s the only form of speech left for them to steal.

Ferguson & the Case of John v Sam

When I think about Ferguson, I can’t help but think about the story of the Boston Massacre and how often history repeats itself.  That incident, which was no massacre, led to the trial of the British soldiers who fired into the crowd and who faced hanging if found guilty.  Of course, it wasn’t the soldiers themselves who were really on trial, but the larger crime of British occupation and policy itself.  John Adams recognized the difference and, because he believed in the rule of law, successfully defended the individual soldiers who had not themselves committed a criminal act.  Then, of course, Adams went on to argue the cause of rebellion and a war for independence from the tyranny that put those soldiers in Boston in the first place.

In a similar way, I think it’s fair to say that the Ferguson story and our reaction to it is not ultimately about Michael Brown and Officer Wilson.  The evidence we have available may or may not have supported an indictment of Wilson himself, though investigation continues that may yet reveal new evidence regarding events of that day. In the meantime, isn’t the most important issue that, like Adams, we need to make a distinction between the rule of law regarding any one case and the larger indictment we seek against a greater, institutionalized injustice?  By far too many accounts, predominantly black neighborhoods in the U.S. resemble Boston in 1775 with a uniformed, occupying force on patrol, making second-class citizens out of residents just trying to live their lives. And with the correspondent militarization of civilian police forces, this can only aggravate already dangerous circumstances.

I am continually dismayed by the state of race relations in the U.S. nearly fifty years after the death of Martin Luther King; and this regressive trend is a force that indeed begs for revolution, though preferably one without bloodshed. It is interesting, though, how often we Americans need to decide whether to follow the path of John Adams or that of his second cousin Samuel.  Because Sam Adams was frankly a bit of a nut, so hell-bent on revolution that he didn’t care much about nuance like truth or fairness or the rule of law. He was a shameless propagandist, responsible for commissioning the famous but inaccurate sketch of the “Boston Massacre,” reprinted ever since in American school textbooks — the one depicting soldiers firing down upon cowering colonial citizens.  He was a member of the real Tea Party, a mob that tortured a relatively minor British official — a customs officer — with a tar-and-feather “Yankee Jacket” before they dumped all that tea into Boston Harbor.  Sam was a patriot, but he was also one of the goons who might break the window of some shopkeeper, who bore little or no responsibility for the injustice of The Crown.

Today, we have social media, which can be a great way to rely on friends we respect to curate and share worthwhile information and editorials on subjects as emotionally raw as the Ferguson story.  But forums like Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr also challenge us to choose between our John Adams side and our Sam Adams side.  The photographic meme or provocative update allows our inner Sam to reduce general outrage or sorrow into a fragment of ephemeral propaganda; and maybe this is a healthy outlet, but I do wonder if on some level it does not also stifle the more contemplative and more valuable capacity of our inner John.  After all, sustainable change has never been authored or led by the Sams of the world.  We may drink Sam Adams’s eponymous beer this holiday, but the toast should go to John.

It is certainly clear that social media produces a lot of armchair experts in all fields from tort law to ballistics, leading to kitchen-table theories about what Officer Wilson could have done differently or what Mike Brown did or did not do that day.  But to what extent all this speculative noise gets us even one step closer to Dr. King’s dream is a very tough question to answer. So, as we head into the long, holiday weekend and millions of American televisions switch from Ferguson to football, and families stoke arguments with their relatives over this case, it is pretty hard to see the progress being made. It simply isn’t enough to change our profile pictures and share a few editorials, including this one.  I don’t presume to know exactly what is necessary, but if all we do is click, share, and move on, then the only people left taking tangible action are the goons setting things on fire.

Wishing everyone a peaceful and hopeful Thanksgiving.

Ayn Rand Didn’t Mean a Technocracy

Ayn Rand

It is a matter of record that many of the most powerful entrepreneurs and VCs of Silicon Valley espouse a distinctly libertarian point of view tinged with shades of Ayn Rand, or at least a half-assed reading of her works.  And this confluence should not be overlooked, if for no other reason than, at least for the moment, what feels like our inexorable march toward a technocracy is being led by a very small group of very young men.

I have opined to friends and colleagues that the last people who should ever read Ayn Rand’s novels, let alone be required to read them, are teenage boys.  No creature that horny and that neophyte in basic literacy should ever be exposed to her particular brand of social philosophy until it is mature enough to realize that, for instance, her masterwork Atlas Shrugged is essentially an unforgivably verbose, adult comic book.  Like The Justice League meets The Story of O, part of the narrative of this undeservedly influential novel is one in which the heroine lives out her rape fantasies with a series of increasingly powerful wizards.

Each of the wizards — all brilliant and good-looking men — are flattering caricatures of 20th century Robber Barons, as if Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Carnegie were all dashing, philosophical, and scientific rather than cunning, ruthless, and lucky.  The subplot of Dagney Taggart’s sexual metamorphosis portrays her as a figure who must earn the right through her journey toward ideological enlightenment to finally deserve to be ravished by the man with the biggest machine.  In this sense, Taggart’s sexual “awakening” parallels the overarching implication in the novel that society itself must earn the right for John Galt to return messianic with his intrinsic technology.  All of the action is of course interspersed  with endless and repetitive monologues that might be boiled down to three words — communism is bad.

So, no, we should not assign this novel to adolescent boys, most especially if those boys reveal themselves to be prodigies in a technological field and are, therefore, more apt to imagine themselves possessing the power to “turn off the machine of the world.”  Such comparisons to Galt were made after the blackout of certain websites in protest of SOPA/PIPA. And although the world did, and certainly could, carry on without Wikipedia, it is worth noting that its founder Jimmy Wales considers himself an Objectivist, which is the social philosophy of Rand and her inner circle of thinkers and sex partners.  Of course, it’s hard to imagine many enterprises that would inspire one of the author’s smoky sneers more than Wikipedia might.  Free?  For the greater good?  Managed by a collective?  As I say, Rand leaves almost no English word unused in her excoriation of such ideas.  But this is typical of most people who claim to adhere to a particular philosophy; from traditional religion to vegetarianism, they tend to cherry pick the bits they like and leave out the bits they don’t like or don’t understand.

Visualize the present lifestyles many of Silicon Valley’s boy geniuses, and the parallels with Atlas Shrugged require little imagination.  These contemporary wizards have science and technology, they have extraordinary wealth, and they have private planes they land in their very own magic valley where they construct work spaces, social clubs, and even transportation systems that allow them to exist entirely separate from the population around them.  And like John Galt and those chosen to live in his secret valley, the consistently articulated message from these real-life wizards is that society needs them, and we would be self-destructive to restrain their “genius” no matter where it may lead.  Of course, the fictional Galt had invented a machine that would produce an endless supply of energy while many a real-world Internet entrepreneur has invented a means to waste an endless amount of time; but that’s just life’s way of producing an endless amount of irony.

Needless to say, I am no Ayn Rand fan; I think she was mad as a hatter, desperately in need of an editor, and doesn’t really deserve the philosophical pedestal on which she has been placed.  But one value often overlooked by both her fans and her haters, in industry or in politics, and one she often wrote about quite beautifully, was the notion that a person’s work is irrevocably his own. Be it a technological device, an architectural design, a new formulation for steel, a novel, or a symphony, a person’s work was his or her property; and any other person or entity which sought to profit from or restrain the creator’s right to exploit that work was what she called a “looter.”  And nothing was lower in her view.

While many interpreters of Rand associate her with social Darwinism, I think she makes clear that she doesn’t revile the average citizen but rather reviles the theft of human capacity and theft of genius.  Thus, her characters are caricatures of genius breaking restraints on their abilities, but if you pay attention to the passage in Atlas Shrugged once Dagney arrives in the secret valley, you’ll notice that even the ubermenschen who have formed their own society still honor the boundaries of one another’s individual sovereignty.  They so utterly reject the idea of the collective, that they will not do even the slightest deed as a favor; all interactions and transactions are a form of trade.  And a less jaded reading of this is that all individuals, not just the John Galts of the world, own the sovereignty and dignity produced by their labor.  And that is not a wholly inhuman idea, which is why I’m not surprised it is so often missed by boys who probably didn’t read very carefully.

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