Category: Digital Culture

Contrasts in Culture

I’ve written about this subject before, but a recurring, underlying theme that pits the powers of Silicon Valley against all types of producers of creative works is the premise that the digital age is all about abundance in contrast to a pre-internet epoch of scarcity.  To read some of the purpler prose on the subject, one would think the early 90s was the start of a true renaissance after a long dark age. The premise oft repeated in the blogosphere, on social media, even in congressional hearings is that legal frameworks like copyright principally empower big corporations to unfairly and greedily control the distribution of works, thereby starving a world seeking rich experiences and knowledge.

On the subject of purple prose, European Pirate Party Founder Rick Falkvinge offers yet another prophecy of the imminent demise of what he likes to call the “copyright monopoly” as a mechanism of not only corporate greed but American imperialism.  Blasting fair trade as a sham to sustain the undeserved wealth of producers of intellectual property, Falkvinge typically glosses over the fact that the vast libraries of content he would see unbound will simply stop being replenished by the producers once trade is removed from the equation.  Citing the possible and intriguing emergence of legally autonomous startup zones in Central America, Falkvinge continues to preach his sermon that all it takes is one nation to stand up to the copyright monopoly, and the whole edifice will crumble.  Fine.  Then what?  The assumption made by utopian and self-serving idols like Falkvinge is that the world’s knowledge and creative works will flow to the people and slake their intellectual thirst.

Indeed, the internet could theoretically lead a billion more horses to water, but the VC money says that a lot of those horses still prefer a bowl of high-fructose punch when it comes down to it. To express this by crude example, before making a plea that “all the world’s books need to be made freely available to all the world,” consider for instance that on YouTube, poet Maya Angelou reciting “And Still I Rise” is inching toward one million views after being up for six years while “Girl Gets Butt Hole Tattoo” boasts over seven million views across a few channels that posted the clip just about a year ago. I’m not judgin’, I’m just sayin’.

But how is culture and information really doing relative to the more, shall we say, intellectually accessible content out there? Hard to say for sure, but for fun, my assistant and I cracked open the office whiskey and got onto the website information service Alexa for a couple of hours just to get a snapshot comparing a bunch of sites. For instance, Wikipedia is the sixth most visited site in the world, and we can assume anyone who goes there is in fact seeking information, but the encyclopedia’s bounce rate (the rate at which people leave a site after landing on it) is a little more than twice that of celebrity gossip site perezhilton.com, so take that for what it’s worth as a measure of user interest.

We sampled over 40 sites, including a handful I would describe as intellectual (ubu.com); informative (nytimes.com); diversionary (peopleofwalmart.com); and knuckle-dragging (4chan.org). The rankings shift a bit whether we’re looking at US or Global popularity, but just from this random sampling, it looks to me as though general numbskullery is more than holding its own amid the huddled masses purportedly yearning to read Fitzgerald and Maugham for free.  For instance, 4chan.org, which a teenage girl once described to me as the “armpit of the Internet,” ranks 347th in the U.S., and 4th in this data set for average time on site.  Compare this to gutenberg.org, with which we most associate “making the world’s books available” and trails at a distant 3,864th in the U.S.

Admittedly, these numbers don’t paint a diverse picture of all activity on the web, and there is certainly an abundance of quality material out there; but there is no reason to assume that flooding the pipes with even more presently protected works will have any particular effect on consumer demand for the enlightened material utopians like Falkvinge keep predicting.  Meanwhile, no matter what people’s tastes, desires, or diversions may be, the most learned among us still has limited time to consume all that is presently available.  If anything, I would argue that the expansion of digital access has driven many of us to seek out filters and winnow the types of content with which we spend quality time. This may be why it’s a fairly safe investment to keep funding web businesses based solely on attracting momentary double-takes with bits of social flotsam than it is to build one based on high-minded content. The brutal reality is that tearing down copyrights wouldn’t make people want to read more, but it would certainly  harm the incentives for new authors to write more. No worries though.  This would  only leave more time for the next generation to watch more butt hole tattoo videos.

site ranks.001

Alabama Kicker Cade Foster Gets Death Tweets

It’s almost de rigueur at this point.  Somebody pisses off a group of people who reach for their keyboards and let slip the doggerel of wrath in the form of assault by Twitter.  This holiday weekend, the target of death threats was Alabama football kicker Cade Foster and family, following his poor performance in the Iron Bowl against Auburn.  Foster wasn’t even the kicker who missed the final 57-yard field goal attempt, impressively caught and run back 109 yards for a game winning touchdown by Auburn’s Chris Davis.  According to reports, it was Foster’s three missed attempts earlier in the game that predicated tweets instructing Foster to die, kill himself, hoping his mother gets raped, etc.  By Sunday, however, I think it’s fair to say the “system” worked as fellow team members, fans, and just users in general rallied in a show of support for Foster that more than outweighed the attacks and seems to have quickly silenced the reactionary authors of the nasty tweets.

It’s easy to ask the question as to whether or not social media like Twitter helps bring out people’s worst natures, and I have certainly criticized this kind of behavior in the past; but the trend itself begs the question whether or not it has any socially redeeming value.  In this episode of the Freakonomics podcast, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt propose the idea that “virtual mayhem might reduce actual mayhem” by giving particularly young men 1) something to do; and 2) a means to vent their latent rage.  Specifically, the Freakonomics partners are talking about video games, suggesting that if adolescent and 20-something males are occupied with anything (like babies with busy-boxes) they simply don’t have as much time or incentive to get into trouble.  Turning to the topic of online behavior, however, Dubner proposes the same net social gain that real violence might be diminished by letting people rant even violently online.  Levitt counters, though, that online rants can be as hurtful as some physical violence (in fact they have led to physical violence) and he suggests that in virtual space these behaviors usually persist and consume real discourse in contrast to a heckler in a live audience who is more likely to be told to sit down.

I’m glad to see that in the case of Cade Foster, the audience seems to have told the hecklers to sit down.

Thanksgiving and Techno-Exceptionalism

As Thanksgiving weekend comes to a close, thoughts turn to the subject of American exceptionalism, seeded by those zealous pilgrims who set out from England to establish their New Jerusalem on the American continent. I don’t mean the supposedly freedom-seeking, mythological caricatures with the dumb hats the kids are told about in school, but the flesh-and-blood puritans whose presumptively divine chosen-ness still reverberates in American political rhetoric to this day.

If you are unfamiliar with historian Sarah Vowell, I recommend her book The Wordy Shipmates in either text or audio form on this subject. Vowell is dry to the point of coarse, and with a childlike reading voice reminiscent of Linus from the Peanuts cartoons, she recounts a tale that seeks to balance the nobility and brutality of the puritan adventure as embodied in John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, who set out for the American continent in 1630 on the flagship Arbella.

“The only thing more dangerous than an idea, is a belief…” begins Vowell, as she proceeds in Chapter One to connect John Cotton’s Old Testament-inspired send off of the puritans to the recurring theme of divine permission which is an oft-implied justification for America’s semi-imperial role in the world.  “The New Testament is to the puritans what the blues was to the Rolling Stones,” writes Vowell, referring in particular to Matthew 5:14 whence comes the many references to the United States as a “city on a hill.”  Or as Ronald Reagan said, “A shining city on a hill.”

I agree with Vowell that belief can be very dangerous because it’s hard for large populations to subscribe to any orthodoxy without someone getting hurt. Consider then that the orthodox view of the digital age is that technology will set us free, particularly social media, if we simply enter into a covenant with its commandments (see Terms of Service). Consider further the evangelism of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who preaches the open flow of information as though, like the word of God, it can only bring about universal enlightenment and tear down the tyranny of nation-states (and also make Google wealthier and more powerful, but let’s not worry about that now).

In an older post, I criticized an excerpt from Schmidt’s book, co-authored with Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age:  Reshaping the Future of People, Nations, and Business, which warns against balkanization of the internet.  While it is right from our perspective to hope for repressive societies like China or Iran to become less so, I think it is over simplistic to believe that information technology alone must inevitably breed democratic reform like John Winthrop believed his flock of New Israelites would fruitfully multiply out of Boston Harbor. Turns out human history is more complex than that — that “information” isn’t  even information because one man’s truth is another’s heterodoxy.

As reported recently here by Bloomberg, Schmidt proclaimed, “We can end government censorship in a decade.  The solution to government surveillance is to encrypt everything.”  On one hand, Schmidt is referring again to societies like China where real suppression of information and speech exists, and he offers what again sounds like an oversimplified proposal that encrypted communications will magically seed democratic reform in China, as though the long, complex history of the Chinese people simply didn’t exist. It’s a form of techno-exceptionalism reminiscent of crusaders or pilgrims or missionaries, who presume to bring “the word” to cultures whose frames of reference are misunderstood or ignored. Take for instance the political power of Vladimir Putin and the hideous trend toward mistreatment of homosexuals in Russia. These crimes don’t persist due to a lack of information, but because Putin enjoys massive support from a base within the Russian Orthodox Church.  Tyranny is most often not the result of populations who live in ignorance, but rather the result of populations who freely choose to follow tyrants.

In his prediction about encryption, Schmidt is of course playing to the sentiments of Americans and other westerners who feel our intelligence community has run amok, and that we’re all now under the government microscope slipping toward a police state.  In either case, Schmidt implies that if we simply put our faith in technology companies to provide technological panaceas like encryption, we will not only become a freer America, but a freer world. It’s a message that might play well among a generation of nascent technophiles who have good reason to be frustrated by existing systems of governance, but it’s also big business SOP — a populist-sounding idea that serves a corporate bottom line.

In much the same way the English puritans felt Christianity had been bastardized by the Church of England, and worse by Rome, it is not unreasonable I think to say that many Americans believe democracy could be made “more pure” through technology. It’s a tempting notion, but it is a transfer of power that may be more insidious than it sounds. Schmidt, of course, makes no mention of what tech companies themselves might be allowed to do in ten years with our encrypted communications, although it is certainly true that at this moment, the content of your Gmail is scanned in order to deliver “relevant” ads to your online experience. But this is merely an annoying hypocrisy compared to the potentially regressive world view Schmidt is projecting.

Ultimately, I don’t think Schmidt is just talking about eradicating “government surveillance” but about eradicating the concept of government as we know it and starting over as techno-Israelites destined to cross the event horizon of the singularity, as unsure of our fate as the puritans sailing across the Atlantic.  Why?  Because his prediction cannot come true without shifting our faith from human oversight to computer oversight; and human oversight is the foundation of our republic.

You might counter that, sure, orthodoxy can be dangerous, but those 17th century puritans seeded a whole nation; but I’d point out that the America you probably love — the America that produces rock-n-roll and pluralism and Hunter Thompson and even Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin — owes more to the free-trading, tolerant Dutch of New Amsterdam than the devout and utopian New Englanders. The point is that our functioning, democratic republic is an exceptional and very rare thing predicated on no single belief or mechanism; and we should be truly thankful every year that it continues to exist for all its imperfections. Yes, it feels dysfunctional much of the time, and I will argue that’s because it’s still human. And just as we get together at this time of year with friends and relatives with whom we may find fault or argue, we maintain the ritual because, for better or worse, we’re family.  By the same token, I prefer to put my faith in other humans to address a problem like surveillance overreach than I would subscribe to the blind hope that some corporation’s algorithm will flawlessly look out for our best interests.

Happy Holidays.