Category: Digital Culture

In response to Caitlin Dewey re. TPB

Photo by GlobalIP
Photo by GlobalIP

Dear Caitlin Dewey:

I have read some really dumb, cloying, and earnestly written ideological gibberish in the past three years,  but you have reset the bar with your recent love letter to online piracy.  To be clear, I am confident that piracy itself is a serious problem for both culture and the economy, but this particular disease is nothing compared to the metastasized cancer that has scrambled brains like yours into believing that piracy is actually about something.  You write, “See, the Pirate Bay is as much an idea and an orientation to entrainment media as it is/was a torrent-tracking site.”  Really?  Are you so culturally illiterate that you don’t know a cheap sales pitch when you hear one?  The boys of TPB are not the first thieves in history to justify their crimes by claiming to be leading the world toward some New Jerusalem.  And being a sucker for that message is more socially toxic than the piracy itself.  If you’re going to pirate media, then have the intellectual honesty to say “I’m stealing and I don’t care.”  And then shut up about it.

Piracy isn’t an idea or an ideology or a principle.  It’s a cheap, tawdry, and frankly sexist (note the ads) enterprise of lazy opportunists who profit from other people’s hard and real work.  Profit is why the Pirate Bay and sites like it have existed; and consuming media for free is why people use these sites.  It doesn’t take a degree in psychology to understand either the “buy” or the “sell” side of these transactions, which make pirate sites profitable; but if pundits like you would at least spare us your banner-waving social revolutionary horse shit, then perhaps actual thought might survive this digital slaughter bench of reason that seems to flip your proverbial kilt.

Again, you write:  “But even if TPB doesn’t return, the politics and the conventions it advanced — that content should be free, and if you torrent, they can be! — will be very difficult to eradicate.”

That’s positively adorable, like something a child might write, especially the way your ebullience almost masks the lack of subject/verb agreement.*  But that’s the thing, Caitlin, writing is work, and good writing is hard work.  And so is making music, television shows, and motion pictures.  And it is not in fact the Internet “created by The Pirate Bay” that enables you to jump on this facile bandwagon and spill out a few hundred words for The Washington Post.  In truth, you are able to get up in the morning, buy yourself a latte, and have at it with your keyboard because you live in a society in which free people are rewarded for their labor by compensation.  And that fundamental, economic principle has a hell of a lot more to do with the freedom you claim to love than does your petulant desire to watch Game of Thrones without bloody well paying for it.

 *NOTE:  To be fair, Dewey’s error is a singular antecedent with plural pronoun, which sounds like subject/verb disagreement but isn’t quite.  See, good writing is hard work.  Thanks to one reader for noticing.

Sony Hack Should Give Us Pause

No matter who or what is behind the hack on Sony Pictures, it’s really bad.  The lead theory, though it begs many questions, is that the North Korean government initiated the attack and subsequent mass data dump of sensitive information along with five unreleased feature films.  The rationale I heard proposed this morning on NPR is that the attack might be retaliation against Sony for the premise of a Seth Rogan vehicle called The Interview, in which a pair of hapless reporters who’ve gained access to Kim Jong-un are asked by the CIA to assassinate the North Korean leader.  Not known for their taste in screwball comedy, the North Koreans issued a statement calling the film itself an act of terrorism, and then Sony got hacked.

Some of the data released by the hacker(s) is of dubious value.  Like the email exchange between Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal and the CEO Kazuo Hirai of Sony Corporation about the manner in which Kim Jong-un’s head is depicted exploding at the end of the film.  The exchange, thanks to Rogen’s responses, is a little bit funny, though I don’t think Sony Corp weighing in on this one project is a particularly intriguing revelation from the leak.  No doubt, the headline is worth a few thousand clicks, so what the hell.

Other data released by the hacker(s) is not so innocuous.  A lot of it was highly sensitive material, including emails, marketing plans, and payment processing information pertaining to both famous and not-so-famous people who have worked for the studio.  According to multiple reports, sensitive information such as social security numbers may have been compromised for individuals who have worked for the studio anytime in the last ten years, thus creating a bait ball that would be attractive to any sharks out there looking for opportunities to conduct identity theft.  And just in time for holiday shopping!

The Sony hack ought to be disconcerting to, well, anybody who has ever worked for any company either as an employee or a contractor.  If that’s not you, no worries. While this attack may indeed have come from North Korea, it as admittedly hard to say whether that scenario is better or worse than if it were committed by an entity like Wikileaks or just some highly-skilled teenager with a random beef against Sony.  It’s a bit like trying to parse the difference between an act of terrorism in the name of Islamic jihad and an act of terrorism in the name of just being the local sociopath. After all, the digital age has spawned quite a few home-grown anarchists who like to arbitrarily vent their self-righteousness on large corporations. They’re smart enough to encode a major security breech, but too stupid to realize they’re jeopardizing the security of regular folks like freelance contractors who’ve done jobs like build sets or haul cables for Sony projects. If this same kind of hack, for instance, had targeted GM, I suspect it would be the lead story on cable news.

What concerns me about this story is that, whether the perpetrator of a hack like this is a rogue state like North Korea or a lone hacktivist, the real casualty of all this remote-control retaliation might be free speech.  Consider this:  the likelihood that any movie producers, especially major ones, are going to produce any films mocking the prophet Mohammed is actually very low.  I’m not saying we’re in need of such a thing, but I bring it up because the calculus applied in considering a lampoon of Mohammed includes serious consideration that one might incite real violence perpetrated by extremists who’ve proven they posses nothing we call humanity.  And that’s not good for free speech in a pure sense, though such assessments are made all the time with regard to potentially hazardous material.  Still, the Sony attack reveals that in our increasingly interconnected world, we are all potentially vulnerable to forces that would silence one form of criticism or another.  After all, it’s almost de rigueur now that if a woman publicly expresses a feminist thought, she’s going to receive death and rape threats through social media; and some of these incidents have included release of information that has led to real-world stalking and physical assaults.

If the investigation proves that Sony’s attacker really was the government of North Korea in retaliation for the film The Interview, that’s a fairly impressive amount of damage being done by an otherwise largely impotent state.  Will it make producers and executives skittish about green-lighting certain material in the future that might garner a similar attack?  If so, where does that logic lead when some of the most skilled code-writers in the world live right here in the U.S., some of them working in very large, very wealthy corporations?  What if Seth Rogen’s next picture shows Mark Zuckerberg’s head exploding?  (Really, Seth, what if?)  Because my personal gut feel is that this was not the work of North Korea but was more likely someone with a personal gripe or a generalized love of vandalism.  Is it farfetched, therefore, to imagine someone within, say, Zuck’s world exposing Rogen and/or his colleagues to a similar retaliatory assault on their privacy and, by extension, their security?  Maybe.  But a great deal of evidence suggests that the moral barriers which prevent people from committing violence or vandalism or classic forms of extortion appear to break down somewhat when the weapons are a keyboard a few lines of code.

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.