Category: Digital Culture

Tim Kreider is spot-on with “Slaves” OpEd

Author and cartoonist Tim Kreider neatly and wryly sums up everything you need to know about what’s wrong with the digital-age economy in this editorial that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times.  Kreider covers many bases, including a nod to the oft-overlooked factor in the economic calculus of the male author — that money is merely the conduit between the work of writing and getting a date.  So, this is just another aspect of real life that “new-model” cultists absolutely don’t understand.

In all seriousness, though, anybody who works professionally doing anything should read this OpEd, not merely for what it says about the devaluation of the creative worker, but for what it implies about the devaluation of all human endeavor.   What Kreider is really calling attention to is how the digital age has normalized the expectation that he, or any other artist, should be happy to work for free.  And it is that cultural shift that ought to concern everyone because the free-labor attitude may be coming to a job near you.

“Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again.”  

Hollywood should just…

In 1982, then president of the MPAA Jack Valenti said something really stupid; and today, pro-piracy pundits, some who weren’t even alive in 1982, rely heavily on the late man’s hyperbole to drive a wedge between creators and fans.  Valenti said in testimony before Congress, “The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.” It is clearly ridiculous to compare a machine that records and plays video tape to a serial killer, so Jack really left those of us who care about creator rights holding the PR bag with his choice of words.  But the real reason this quote is usually trotted out, as it is here in this piece from MIT Technology Review, is that Valenti was ostensibly wrong — that the VCR did not harm, and might even have helped, the motion picture business. This half-true assessment is then used as a segue to assert that piracy is the same thing, that Hollywood should just embrace yet another phase in technological evolution, adapt to it, and reap the benefits.

The fear that the somewhat cumbersome and visually unappealing VHS recorder would threaten the profitable distribution of mainstream motion pictures and television was clearly a misjudgment; but the error is a common one that occurs when just about anybody attempts to predict future human behavior based on the availability of a new technology. The earliest predictions of a “paperless society” as we all got online were soon punctuated by a substantial increase in printing. Likewise, VHS proved to be an opportunity as a new line of distribution rather than a threat as a means of amateur reproduction.

While tech-industry pundits and academics sneer at Valenti, they simultaneously presume to dabble in the same kind of prophecy, albeit regarding a technology and kind of consumerism that bears no resemblance to the era of the VCR, and about which we have more than a decade’s worth of evidence of its negative effects on the music industry. The prognostication is inherent in a worn-out refrain paraphrased thus: “The (blank) industry could make media piracy irrelevant if it simply made content more affordably and more flexibly available worldwide.”  And in a recent spate of scribblings, that blank is filled with the word Hollywood. Aside from the fact that the assertion sounds sillier every day against a backdrop of rapidly growing, legal distribution models, it also happens to be fundamentally obnoxious.

On the purely practical and realistic side, we have the final episode of Breaking Bad, which is reported to have been downloaded illegally about three million times. This is a head-scratcher for a show that is available for streaming via Netflix, which costs .26 cents a day.  But even if that were not possible, even if the filmed entertainment business were not very rapidly transforming to achieve symbiosis with viewer habits, there is something very negative about the cultural attitude fostered by these editorials and white papers; and this is that the oft-repeated imperative that creators must accept and adapt contains an implication that people have a right to entertainment.

Absent a social contract that governs transactional relationships, we don’t have a right to a damn thing.  I’m in the camp that believes every citizen in my country has a right to healthcare, but not to the extent that we can compel medical professionals to provide that care if we cannot also maintain a system that compensates them for their labor and expertise.  So, unless we’re envisioning a world in which very talented slaves are forced to make music, write books, or produce motion pictures, there is no humane way to insist that any creator or group of creators must furnish their products on demand, according to our whims and/or for free.

If I were to call up a contemporary author I like, let’s take Audrey Niffenegger who wrote The Time Traveler’s Wife, and say, “Audrey, I hear you’re writing a new novel.  I really love your work.  How about sending me the first fifty or so pages so I can check ‘em out and share them online on my blog?” When she refuses, shall I say that she’s not keeping up with technological reality?  That it costs her nothing to send me her pages digitally?  That I’m a really big fan and will promote her work through social media? In such a scenario, I’d deservedly find myself on the receiving end of a restraining order, but this kind of behavior is more or less what the pro-piracy crowd have been preaching to a whole generation of viewers and fans.

If a lone creator like an author has the right to distribute a work when she’s good and ready, and by whatever channels she chooses, then the same right applies to a limited group of creators, as in the case of those who make filmed entertainment. It’s too easy to lump all motion picture endeavors into a single entity called Hollywood, and then propose what that single entity ought to with itself.  And, of course, “Hollywood” has nothing to do per se with the diversity of films and shows out there, or with the ways in which these projects are produced or distributed.  Yet, no matter what methods apply, whether it’s a $100 million investment in a blockbuster or a $10,000 crowd-funded little movie, nobody has the right to say, “Give it to us now, or we’re just going to steal it.” More to the point, it is still possible that the long-term result of this attitude will be an even more rapid decline in professional film production than we have seen in music.  I say this because the bottom line is that the most popular programs and films are, not surprisingly, the most popular to download illegally; and these films and shows are bloody expensive to make.

Of course, underlying these assertions by piracy’s advocates are buzz-worthy, anecdotal observations by show creators and show-runners that illegal downloading has been beneficial to their programs, at least with regard to promotion.  This includes, most recently Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, who admits piracy has helped attract new fans to the series itself, and this echoes previously publicized sentiments from executives working on HBO’s Game of Thrones.  I think it goes without saying that free access to programs will spawn new fans and generate more buzz, but whether or not this will translate into supporting models that will sustain production of these shows is far from certain.  If the music industry is any indication, the answer is it won’t be pretty.  Meanwhile, as posted on this blog, a September study of the wealthiest regions of the world shows that piracy has only increased in concert with the availability of affordable, streaming options.  This suggests to me that there is a cultural factor at play, that there exists a sense of entitlement, a perceived right to entertainment.  And since we’re mucking about with predictions, I’m going to predict that no good can come of that conviction.

Headless in the Garden – Facebook & Free Speech

It turns out this is Free Speech Week, although I doubt this fact had anything to do with the timing of Facebook’s recent dustup over its decision to allow videos of beheadings on its pages. On Monday, it was reported that executives at Facebook had decided to lift a previously imposed ban on sharing videos that depict actual beheadings committed by terrorists and gangsters. The company almost immediately reversed this decision in response to what appears to have been universal revulsion by users. Of course, our disgust doesn’t mean sharing these videos is not a matter of free speech, but neither is it a First Amendment issue simply because Facebook says it is.  Regardless, the story raises some of the cultural and/or legal questions inherent in our relationship to social media, so it’s an interesting topic after we all agree that almost none of us wishes to see, let alone have our kids stumble upon, a video of someone being decapitated.

The first question it seems we grapple with is whether the company that owns a site like Facebook does or does not bear responsibility for the content we users post on its walls. In principle, if the site establishes any rules governing content at all — and they wouldn’t get far in most countries if they didn’t — then the very existence of said rules implies responsibility.  Facebook, for instance, does not allow nudity to be posted, and the reason is obvious; there are simply too many ways to run afoul of existing laws pertaining to obscenity or to sexuality and minors. Every teenager posting a naked selfie would be a legal entanglement for the company. Yet, it’s easy to wonder why it matters when minors are a mouseclick away from being exposed to every kind of pornography outside the walled garden of Facebook.  While executives at the company are not entirely wrong that protecting kids from exposure to horrific images is a job for parents, our voluntary presence and activity on the site is a bit like entering a shopping mall where the landlords are allowed to turn our interaction into revenue.  As such, it isn’t really public space.  If I put a bunch of violently offensive posters on the walls in my local shopping center, I could be arrested; but the mall owners could easily be sued if they chose to leave the posters up on the grounds that I was exercising my right of free expression.  This argument would never fly in physical space, and it doesn’t appear to work so well in virtual space either.

The attitude of most site owners tends toward a laissez faire approach to content shared or created by users; and this is legitimately understandable given the slippery nature of trying to define protected vs. restricted speech.  Still, I suspect the primary motivations are financial rather than ideological.  When one is in the business of monetizing traffic, it’s simply easier not to care what drives that traffic.  But when thousands or millions of users dog-pile onto some content or activity that is truly depraved, we do have to decide whether we’re okay with allowing the walled gardens of social media to become new Coliseums of grotesque spectacle.  From anecdotal observation, it seems most users are not okay with this and that they do want to hold site owners accountable.   When Caroline Criado-Perez campaigned in the U.K. for Jane Austen to appear on British bank notes, she received  a deluge of death and rape threats via Twitter. The company was ultimately forced to respond to public demand for greater capacity to report and mitigate abuses through the social network.

With regard to the decapitation videos, Facebook tried to play the pubic service card, claiming that people were sharing a particular beheading video “in order to condemn it, but one must ask to what end?  So we can put those pro-beheading folks in their place?  There is a persistent conceit that the Internet brings us realities from around the world that traditional news media does not deliver and that we are thus able to confront hard truths head-on and address them. Sometimes, this is the case, but often it’s just bullshit.  Nothing, for example, will happen as a result of 20,000 or 200,000 people watching a video of a gangster or a terrorist beheading someone except that a majority of viewers will wish they hadn’t seen it, and a small number of viewers  will anesthetize their senses to a medieval form of murder.  What possible social value would Facebook’s perhaps-too-insulated executives imagine coming from allowing these videos?  What is anyone meant to learn that would manifest as some action we might take?  Absent a good answer to those questions, one must conclude that the motivation is spectacle itself.

Certainly I believe free speech is the most sacred right to be preserved in a free society, and in order to protect this right, most of us understand that we must defend it absolutely even for expressions we find offensive.  It seems, however, that those who presume to lead in the digital age would expand this principle to include all transactions made through these technologies, even when there is technically no speaker and nothing being said.  This is perhaps a byproduct of labeling all user-provided substance with the generic content.  A rape-threat tweet or a poem are the same thing, measured only by the attention they attract.  It is comforting to see that plenty of so-called users have not quite bought this rationale.  So, Happy Free Speech Week!