Category: Digital Culture

Paying Attention to the Echo Chamber at CES Copyright Panel Discussion

“The Pirate Bay is speech.” This is a quote from one of the gurus perched on the mountaintop of techno-utopianism, John Perry Barlow, who appeared yesterday as a member of a panel discussion held at CES2013 in Las Vegas.

The subject of the discussion was “A pro-artist/pro-innovation approach to copyright,” although the panel did not include anyone representing any counterpoint from contemporary artists, and the conversation was typically vague on what exactly these folks mean by “innovation.” According to moderator Declan McCullugh, a reporter for CNet, an invitation to join the panel was declined by the MPAA; and I suppose that could be considered an effort toward balance, although I think it’s a little like saying, “We’re here to talk auto manufacturing, and the president of Ford doesn’t want to be a straw man, so we didn’t bother to invite any of a zillion other people who make a living actually building cars.” To his credit, McCullugh was mildly deprecating about the one-sided, anti-copyright love fest he was hosting — there’s not much to moderate when everyone agrees with one another — but that doesn’t mean the discussion failed to reveal anything of interest.

The full panel included:

  • John Perry Barlow – Co-Founder , Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF
  • Wilson Holmes – Co-Director , Fight for the Future
  • Mike Masnick – CEO and Founder , TechDirt
  • Hank Shocklee – Founder and CEO, Shocklee Entertainment
  • Gigi Sohn – Co-Founder and President, Public Knowledge
  • (And surprise panelist) Derek Khanna

Of course, had the panel included an independent filmmaker, a small record label producer, a photographer, or an independent musician, the conversation might have been forced to settle down from its lofty heights and overused talking points poking “the content industry” into the nuts and bolts of everyday realities faced by middle and working-class creators. But the petty challenges of middle-class individuals seem to be of little concern to these folks, who believe they’re on a mission to bring about a brave new world. Gigi Sohn stated that any kind of new anti-piracy legislation, were it to dare raise its head in the post-SOPA landscape of net snipers like Public Knowledge, ought to be “grounded in reality.” It’s hard not to laugh at this in light of the fear-mongering exaggerations promoted by her organization and others about SOPA, but beyond that, reality is by definition something different from the the Internet. As such, I’m grateful to Barlow for making one of the few declarative statements that gets right to the reality underlying much of the noise on these issues.

We could set aside all the nit-picky squabbling over dollars lost and earned by big corporations, all the petty complaints about occasional, improper takedowns, all of Lawrence Lessig’s celebration of remix culture and Derek Khanna’s vague references to innovation, and make a decision as a society as to whether or not Barlow’s statement, “The Pirate Bay is speech,” is correct.

Taking a conservative point of view, law is what we as a society agree is immutable (e.g. murder will probably remain illegal), and anything beyond that is up for discussion and maybe shouldn’t be law. Before we could have a discussion about a new approach to copyright, then, we’d have to decide what, if anything, is immutable. Either Barlow is right that an enterprise like The Pirate Bay, which (let’s not mince words) makes its revenues by exploiting the works and investments of other people, is protected by free speech, or he’s wrong. This is a decision the next generation, one that is used to getting entertainment media for free, has to make; and I believe that if they make the expedient decision that Barlow is right, that they and their kids will pay dearly in the future. And the price could be more than the loss of creative culture.

I think it’s safe to say that, before we were on the Internet, before everything could become sharable data, that nobody would rationally have argued that selling bootleg CDs out of a car trunk would be an act protected by free speech. That being the case, the philosophical/legal question is, “What’s really changed?” The techno-utopian says we have to expand our definition of speech on the grounds that, in the digital age, it is all too easy to chill speech; but they fail to acknowledge that they’re standing on a theoretical peak with slippery slopes on all sides. If we define everything as speech, then it’s true that any restrictions of any kind in the digital world can be said to chill speech. The slippery slope in the other direction, though, is that if the business of The Pirate Bay really is speech, then so is a site or a link that promotes human trafficking. As a matter of pure reason, what’s the difference? In real life, both enterprises involve the exploitation of actual human beings (albeit one more grave than the other); but in cyberspace, both enterprises are just benign data, right? Either we will choose to define boundaries going forward, or we will not; and I am not alone in believing the consequences of that decision will become very real within a couple of decades.

Techno-utopians like the ones on yesterday’s panel like to refer to the horrors of a grandmother having her video taken down, either purposely or by accident, from YouTube and then imply that each of these anomalous incidents moves us one step closer toward authoritarian rule. In response to the comparatively benign deprivation of having a video removed from the Web, these folks would have us hyper-extend speech to the inclusion of real physical and economic harm. As I have argued before, this is like legalizing homicide in order to make sure no one is ever again wrongfully sent to death row. If we can negotiate the gravity of such flaws in our legal framework, surely we can get past a few wrongful yet survivable takedowns on the web.

Ostensibly, this panel discussion was about a copyright system that’s good for artists and innovators; but Barlow’s foundational statement puts the artists, who historically test the power of free speech to profound cultural effect, on par with common thieves who dilute both the cultural and economic value of the works they steal. And the implications could be far more serious than what happens to music and movies. To quote Chris Ruen from his new book Freeloading, in which he unknowingly echoes the name of this blog: “But behind free content’s superficial illusion of more lies a long-term reality of less. Sooner or later, it is something we all have to pay for.” Looking beyond the Web’s ability to expand sharing of entertainment media, I believe that price could be something far more dear than money.

Thoughts on Leaked Steubenville Video

steubenville videoIn response to the tragedy in Newtown, CT the idea was raised by news commentators and in the blogosphere that the names of people who commit heinous crimes should be de-publicized in order to deny them even a posthumous fame we believe to be a constituent of their twisted motives. It is hard to imagine, though, that even if we could instantaneously erase the names of these sociopaths, that this would really serve as a deterrent to crimes born in psyches we cannot understand in the first place.

I find myself thinking about the subjects of infamy, depravity, and justice since watching the video released last week in which teenage boys jokingly boast about an alleged multiple rape of a sixteen year-old girl in Steubenville, OH.  The video was accessed and released to the public by a group or individual identified on Twitter as KnightSec, who claims alliance with the hacktivist group Anonymous. KnightSec exposed the video on the grounds that officials in Steubenville have been papering over the case because the accused assailants are members of the very popular football team in this small, working-class community.  This is a familiar and easy-to-grasp narrative, one that might even be true; and although I believe KnightSec is acting in a good-faith effort to see justice done, the case in general, including the release of the video, raises some disturbing and challenging questions unique to our digital times.

According to CNN, one of the difficulties in the case, even if we give local law enforcement and prosecutors the benefit of every doubt, is that much of the evidence so far amounts to teenagers referring to criminal behavior via digital and social media. Reports indicate that even the victim herself was unconscious during the alleged assaults and cannot serve as a witness to her own abuse.  There is even a report that the victim text messaged the accused saying, “I know you didn’t rape me.”  Rape cases are often hard enough to prosecute, and this one appears to be complexly warped by the bizarre world of communications in which we now live — one where depraved speech is so common among certain users of social media, that it is very hard to tell who is merely presenting himself as a pig and who is referring to actual events in real life.  Certainly, this would not be the first time a bunch of jocks assaulted a defenseless girl; and it would not be the first time teenagers used social media to brag about their own hideous behavior; but it also wouldn’t be the first time teenagers produced comments, photos, and videos that exaggerate or distort actual events for no other reason than that’s how some people behave in cyberspace.

Even the kid featured in the video released by KnightSec is not one of those presently accused in the alleged assault; and while I would like to see him and his friends marched out to the woodshed for their lack of humanity, it’s hard to get past the fact that in the video, he’s behaving exactly like an Internet troll. In fact, his similes are frankly so childishly dorky that what we’re watching could be the blabbering of an accomplice, a witness, or pathetically enough, a wannabe.  If you think the idea of a wannabe rapist is farfetched, let’s go back to October for a moment . . .

Before Gawker outed super-troll Michael Brutsch (aka Violentacrez), the senior staff at Reddit saw no problem with the enormous volume of this man’s posts glorifying sexual assault of teenage girls. To the contrary, Brutsch was rewarded with what the Internet troll wants most — attention.  And because Violentacrez yielded literally tens of thousands of followers, Reddit even rewarded Brutsch with a statuette for his popularity. Is there a connection between Brutsch and the kid in the Steubenville video?  I think there is, and it comes back to the notion of infamy.

In the age of social media, attention is currency; and negative attention is not necessarily of lesser value than positive attention. Hence, this raises just one of the questions as to the value of the kind of net vigilantism, however well intentioned, conducted by KnighSec in this case. In order for there to be a video to expose, the video had to be shot in the first place and then loaded onto a storage device somewhere that could be hacked.  Hence the choice by these boys to memorialize and save a record of this offensive and imbecilic monologue suggests at least an instinctive desire for attention. In this context, then, does releasing the video to the public potentially satisfy a dysfunctional wish for infamy among these kids? If we would contemplate erasing the name of the already-dead Newtown shooter, what about giving fifteen minutes of fame to this morally-bankrupt teenager, who may face no consequences of any kind in this matter? More broadly, as we shake our heads and think, “How can these kids behave like this?”  are we missing subtleties in the design of our technologies that reward cruelty through mob acceptance?  I don’t know the answer, but I do know that this video is not an anomaly among teenagers, and I know that misogynistic themes are very common in shadowy regions of social media that many parents may not know exist.

Of course, there is another way to look at incidents like Steubenville.  Perhaps this kind of case is no more common than it was twenty years ago; and thanks to social media, we are able as a whole society to confront these incidents more frankly and to demand both justice and solutions. It is hard not to feel, though, that human depravity is lately on the rise.  Perhaps this perception is an illusion itself, one borne of the constancy of our communications technology and, hence, the universal competition for attention.

We hope, of course, that officials in Ohio are able to parse the gibberish from the evidence, that the facts of this case will see justice served, and that above all, the girl in question receive whatever support, comfort, and help she needs.  But whether the dumb kid in the leaked video is implicating himself in an attack or just shooting his mouth off, the confusion I believe should serve as instructive in this utopian, free-speech bonanza of the digital age — that words have a tendency to correspond to actions, if not by the speaker, then by somebody who’s listening.

Local Journalism with Parry Teasdale (Podcast)

Running a Small Town Paper in the Digital Age

As 2012 was coming to a close, I decided to have a chat with our local Editor-in-Chief of The Columbia Paper, which serves a small, rural community in the Hudson Valley.  In addition to being the founder and editor of this paper, Teasdale was also part of a new media vanguard in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when portable video cameras were just becoming available to ordinary citizens.  I visited Parry at his newspaper office in Ghent, where we talked about journalism, video, and our relationship to information.

Visit The Columbia Paper.

Check out Parry Teasdale’s book, Videofreex.