Category: Culture

Is Tech Populism Stifling the Potential of the Internet?

Last week, the ITIF (Information Technology & Innovation Foundation) hosted a panel discussion on a theme familiar to readers of this blog. The title of the discussion, based on a report of the same name, was How Tech Populism is Undermining Innovation. The lead author of that report and host of the conversation, ITIF president, Robert D. Atkinson stated that it is time for tech populism to be replaced by tech progressivism, the thesis being that debate over most, if not all, issues pertaining to the digital age — from SOPA to NetNeutrality — is governed not by dialogue grounded in a rational search for sound policy, but by wild, emotionally-charged, populist spin that disguises individual selfishness in a cloak of insincere public interest. To quote the report:

“Populism draws its strength from individuals’ fears, misunderstandings, or distrust, appealing to the prejudices of crowds and relying on demagoguery, distortion, and groupthink. Tech populists focus on maximizing self-interest and personal freedom, even if it comes at the expense of broader public interests. While tech populists are not necessarily anti-technology, many perversely oppose certain technologies because they do not trust societal institutions to establish or enforce reasonable controls over their use. The populist view is that elites, especially big business and big government, will prevent useful rules from being established—or, if those rules are established, will find ways to bypass them at the expense of the broader public. They distrust the private sector because they believe corporations are driven purely by profit, and they distrust the public sector because they believe government is ineffectual and overbearing. As a result, they decry even the most pragmatic of policy solutions.”

Variations on the theme of tech populism have been part of this blog since its launch, but I wanted to address one set of comments from panelist Elliot Maxwell, Chairman of e-Maxwell and Associates. To paraphrase, Maxwell described the ITIF report as a caricature of one side in the debate on tech issues, raising the subject of balance, saying that all parties are responsible for rejecting rhetoric and hype in favor of reasoned debate based on facts. Fair enough, but by way of example, he cited scientific studies funded by the NIH and what he described as unsupported exaggerations made by the scientific publishing community over the long-term effects on research if these studies were made publicly available for free.

I cannot comment on what was or was not said by publishers and/or what data Maxwell reviewed to conclude that the publishers were guilty of hyperbole. I also don’t want to get too bogged down in that specific squabble and lose sight of the larger point about leveraging populist sentiment to generalize away nuanced and complex issues. For instance, even with regard to scientific works produced with public dollars, Maxwell is glossing over the role of publishers in making those works available in a manner most useful for their intended readers. To quote the introduction from a published paper by Adam Mossoff of the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property at George Mason University of Law:

This paper fills a gap in the literature by providing the more complete policy, legal and economic context for evaluating scholarly publishing. It details for the first time the $100s millions in ex ante investments in infrastructure, skilled labor, and other resources required to create, publish, distribute and maintain scholarly articles on the Internet and in other digital formats.

As I say, this post is not really about this specific issue, but Mossoff’s 41-page paper titled How Copyright Drives Innovation in Scholarly Publishing demonstrates that there is complexity in the relationship between scholarly works and the copyright incentive in producing quality, peer-reviewed publication of those works. From Mossoff again:

“Copyright provides the necessary incentives for scholarly publishers to create, invest in, and sustain the business models that make possible the dissemination of reliable, high-quality, standardized, networked, and accessible research that meets the differing expectations of readers in a wide-ranging variety of academic disciplines and fields of research.”

And this seems to be the point being made by the ITIF — the populist, sentimental notion (i.e. all publicly-funded research should be automatically published online for free) oversimplifies a process in the short term whereby society may well lose something in the long term. And this is a subtle but insidious component of populism: that we must always entertain the idea that there are two equal sides to any argument even though this is not always the case. In fact, the populist view is usually the more generalized or simplified argument demanding that the opposing view must “play fair” despite the fact that the latter is often much more complex and nuanced.

To that point, Maxwell segued from his NIH example to broadly promote the positive aspects of “sharing” online, even referring to media like motion pictures that he swept into his larger theme that all parties are responsible for reasoned debate. He acknowledged that populist attitudes about behaviors like “file sharing” may in fact be selfish in nature, but he then implied that the opposing views are likewise selfish because there is usually a profit motive at stake. That might sound fair, but is it?

What Maxwell seemed to be saying is that the shoplifter is selfish but that so is the shop owner because his interest is making money; so these competing, yet equally selfish interests should be balanced, and the shop owner is responsible for contributing to a reasonable debate on the subject. But even if the shop owner were to exaggerate the damage caused by the theft of a single candy bar and rend his garments in a ridiculous display of feigned agony, this would in no way lend credence to the underlying rationale supporting the interest of the shoplifter. And the logic (or lack thereof) does not change if we scale the example to Hollywood and movie piracy. Yet, this is what the debate often sounds like. Just because populist sentiment wants to call piracy “file sharing” so that it sounds friendly and humanist and socially beneficial, that does not mean rational people are obligated to treat this rhetoric with the respect due to a legitimate, progressive proposal. But in a populist climate as we have today, there is little distinction between a public policy proposal and raw self-interest. To quote the ITIF report:

“Populists support weakening copyright protections because they focus almost exclusively on how they personally benefit from weaker laws, ignoring the tangible, economic harms brought by copyright infringement.”

Of course, contemporary populism, which I do believe has been amplified by social media, is affecting issues far more acute than copyright. As a simple but useful example, Popular Science, in October of 2013, discontinued comments on its website because discussion on its pages disintegrated rapidly (as they so often do) into social, political, or religious arguments, none of which further the interest of science. Science does not care if you personally feel threatened by Darwin, but if you do, boy does the populist Internet have places for you to express those gripes with likeminded scaredy cats. See, I just offended people who believe that there are two sides to an evolution debate, and that’s because even entertaining the idea that a debate exists at all is a useless, regressive aberration of the notion of “fairness” that has been distorted by populism, which itself has been intensified by social media.

Of course, the irony in citing this particular example (and I’ve raised this point before) is that the tech populist cheers for an unfettered Internet on the premise that “information and culture” must flow freely to enrich society, yet this view fails to recognize that the same populism simultaneously produces school boards that will insist evolutionary biology be taught alongside “intelligent design.” In other words, there is no reason to assume populism can only produce progress. Quite often it does not.

Consider that contemporary populism is why we’re suddenly having “debate” in this country over so-called religious freedom laws. These are, I have to say, a bizarre twist on the idea that “freedom” must now extend to the right to persecute, disrespect, or mistreat an individual who does not conform to the orthodoxy of another individual. The logic is circular, one that says, “Telling me not to discriminate against that guy infringes my right of religious worship.” This is the narcissistic psychology that occurs when one’s sense of “fairness” becomes warped by the gravitational force of one’s ego. And this same narcissism is the primary ingredient in tech populism as well. The rhetoric of Internet freedom claims to serve public interest, but it is often just self-interest that, when aggregated by social media, will produce fleeting moments of apparent consensus. And far too often, consensus swarms around information that is reported inaccurately.

In my home state of California, some nut job introduced a ballot measure that would effectively create an American Taliban, granting legal authority to anyone who wants to kill gay people. The ballot measure won’t go anywhere, and sadly, neither will psychos with heinous ideas; but the outlandishness of this example is why I’ve never really liked the fact that anyone with a ballpoint pen can potentially get a measure on the state ballot. And that’s kind of how I feel about the Internet right now as a tool for democratic, social, and economic progress. It could become all those things, but not if it remains a populist Wild West, largely run by just a handful of companies that figured out how to monetize the madness itself posing as debate. From the conclusion of the ITIF report:

“Tech progressivism offers a path forward for both parties. Policymakers should embrace government regulation to provide community benefits, but narrowly craft rules to mitigate specific harms. They should respect the power of markets and the innovativeness of the private sector by engaging in light-touch regulation so as to not stall much-needed innovation. And they should evaluate technology issues holistically and objectively to develop pragmatic policy solutions. By adopting the tenets of tech progressivism, policymakers can encourage innovation, productivity and broad-based growth, while also protecting individual rights, fostering a free and open Internet for all, and advancing the public good.”

All Content Creators Should Watch Porn

Yeah, that was a shameless use of a headline with a hook; but since you took the bait, here’s the switch. I don’t literally mean to say that all content creators need to watch pornography (that’s up to them), but I do mean that professional content creators might want to look at a business dynamic that has occurred in the porn industry. It’s technically legal. It’s reminiscent of the YouTube business model. And it produces exactly the opposite result creators have hoped would be made possible by the Internet.

Let’s review …

Both content producers and digital-age optimists will repeat the premise that the Internet is a catalyst for democratization. In theory, a creator of anything can manage her own destiny because traditional “gatekeepers” no longer hold the only keys to distribution. And it is true that we can all self-publish just like I’m doing now with this blog. But when produced works are popular enough to be the foundation of a business, the prospect of independent entrepreneurism can become an irrelevant technicality in contrast to the market forces and practices that foster financial success on the Web. I have proposed in other posts that democratization for small and mid-sized producers may be illusory because the same cheap means of distribution available to authors of works also provide the mechanisms for predatory companies to exert monopolistic control over an entire industry. It all begins with piracy driving down value, lowering wages, shrinking markets, and even limiting creativity in certain media and genres.

But what happened to porn?

Needless to say, “free” porn abounds on the Internet, and most of the video content is hosted on sites known generically as “tube sites” for the way they mimic YouTube, including enabling users to upload video clips. (And in this context, we’re only comparing clips uploaded to YouTube by users who do not have rights to the material.) But the similarities between these tube sites and YouTube are not merely technological. Historically, at least some of the material hosted on porn tube sites is there by permission, a collection of older clips that had exhausted their primary release windows and were used to drive traffic, primarily to paid subscription sites. In fact, the presence of ads linking to producer/distributors might give any viewer the impression that the tube site is a by-permission enterprise designed by “the industry” to use limited free clips as loss-leaders to sell subscriptions to newer and “premium” material. And this is true — or truish. Because what isn’t apparent to the user is that the lion’s share of the tube sites and the producing entities behind those banner ads are all owned by just one company, today called MindGeek, previously called Manwin. As porn star, entrepreneur, and occasional writer Stoya explains on her blog, Manwin first consolidated the major tube sites and then …

“ … used their traffic to sell ad space to those same production companies they enabled theft from. Production companies paid a lot for banners. Manwin then began buying the companies they had helped devalue, including Digital Playground—the company I was contracted to for a number of years. I believe the worst sorts of capitalists would consider Manwin’s behavior a win of the highest order.”

Naturally, any site that allows users to upload clips, will “unintentioinally” host infringing material, just like YouTube does millions of times each day. And just like YouTube, these sites remain within legal boundaries thanks to safe harbors in the DMCA and because they will comply with takedown notices (though not necessarily with any haste) sent by rights holders. When discussing this particular dynamic in the non-porn world of content, the debate usually becomes somewhat academic, with one side saying that the DMCA is outdated and useless for rights holders and the other side arguing some variation on the theme that “site owners can’t police the Internet” and the DMCA is sacrosanct because it protects free speech. But setting aside the theoretical legal debate, the business reality enabled by these dynamics created a monopoly. At present, as I understand it, most of the performers and performer/producers in the U.S. porn industry have contracts with this one company. David Auerbach, writing for Slate, says the following:

“MindGeek has become the porn monopoly, putting industry members in the paradoxical position of working for the very company that profits from the piracy of their work. The MindGeek hydra exerts so much force that people in the online-porn industry are scared to talk about it for fear of blacklisting. And MindGeek’s dominance should serve as a cautionary tale of the dangers of consolidating production and distribution in a single monopolistic owner.”

Creators of all stripes should notice that MindGeek, even though it now has an interest in paid subscription sites, does not take down its own tube sites which regularly infringe its own works. And if anyone thinks this is about high-minded populist ideas like “sharing” or “cultural diffusion,” pass me that pipe because this is just hardball business; it’s how monopolies are made. It may seem counter-intuitive to own a distribution franchise that infringes one’s own production franchise, but as the monopoly that owns the whole shebang (wrong word choice here?), MindGeek makes money from all revenue streams and can use “self-piracy” to exert downward pressure on wages or fees paid to contractors producing the work. Put another way, any producer/distributor in such a position can use infringing even its own works as a check valve against market value increasing to the point where it has to pay performers or labor higher wages. It’s a bit like Rockefeller owning the ore mine and the shipping company that carried the ore. To quote Auerbach again:

“ … industry workers have been in the difficult situation of seeing their work pirated on sites owned by the same company that pays them—imagine if Warner Brothers also owned the Pirate Bay.”

One need not expend much imagination there as Internet companies continue to enter the production business. What content creators need to understand is that MindGeek was able to attain its monopoly status by employing very similar tactics used by YouTube. Because in the time it takes a site owner to comply with thousands or even millions of takedowns, two important things are happening: 1) the site owner builds a pile of working capital; and 2) the market value of the material in question is driven down. Thus, thanks to outdated remedies and safe-harbors in the DMCA, a site owner with enough scale and capital is poised to first drive the value of works down and then take the next logical step to become an owner, or the owner, of production. And right there is why a frisson goes up my spine every time some well-meaning indie artist says the Internet is the future of production. “The distributor doesn’t necessarily need to make content that generates adequate money for the content producers, as long as it generates money somehow,” writes David Auerbach. And that is the economic model that becomes an existential threat to creators no matter what other debate we want to have about copyright law, free speech, or certainly how anyone feels about pornography.

Now, because pornography lends itself to being exploited in unique ways (e.g. by spammers), it is necessary to make clear that the manner in which porn tube sites play shell game with DMCA are different and seem to be more complexly insidious than the way YouTube does it. For instance, I spoke to Nate Glass, founder of TakedownPiracy.com, who offers the following example:

“Unlike YouTube, when Mindgeek suspends your account, they don’t remove all of the videos uploaded by that person. They just move all your other videos into their in-house ‘Unknown’ account so the videos can still generate them ad dollars. You can only imagine how inviting this is for spammers who use pirated video to promote their stupid ‘enlarge your penis overnight’ garbage.”

As stated, it is technically true that a creator of works is able to self-produce, self-promote, self-distribute, and generate revenue directly from her/his fans. In theory, this should produce a diversity of works, linking fans with their individual tastes; and as is so often the case, pornography appears to be in the vanguard testing this theory. Recently, Stoya and her partners launched an independent, pay-per-scene, site called TrenchcoatX. Offering specific styles of “curated smut,” as the site says, customers can buy short films or episodes for $3.99 each. By all appearances, TrenchcoatX contains the basic elements of the model people are referring to when they talk about democratization in the digital age. But whether or not this model can compete with free content on actual pirate sites or free content on tube sites that play fast-and-loose with infringement is another matter.

In the blog post cited above, Stoya offers her own perspectives on unlicensed use of her material, saying she’d prefer people use torrents than tube sites and is mostly okay with “sharing” her works if they’re attributed and not monetized. That’s for her to decide just as it is for any owner of any material. I understand where Stoya is coming from, though she may be overlooking the presence of traditional piracy as an underlying force giving the tube sites leverage in the first place. It is exactly the same force that puts Spotify and Pandora in a strong negotiating position when offering abysmal rates to creators of musical works. Ditto YouTube’s Music Key deal.

But this article isn’t about railing against piracy or MindGeek or even YouTube per se. What’s intriguing to me about the porn industry story is that by the early 1990s, it seems the industry had transformed from a highly-exploitative, male-dominated business into a more diverse, entrepreneurial, and woman-shared (if not led) enterprise. And it is certainly interesting, to say nothing of disconcerting, that the only catalyst required to swing the pendulum from entrepreneurial to monopolistic was the so-called democratizing power of the Internet.

The Care & Feeding of Digital Natives

On the day my first child was born in New York City in 1993, my wife told me she was kept awake that night by all the sirens.  These wails that most New Yorkers instinctively ignore suddenly had new meaning; they became a chorus singing the refrain of all the terrible things that can happen to a person.  I suspect most new parents are familiar with this initial moment of terror, the foreverness of the child;  and it doesn’t take long to see a future when you will not always be there to protect him from the hazardous world, or even from himself.  It is a very brief interval between embracing a newborn and the realization that your whole job as a parent will be a strategically organized process of letting go.  And when the hopes and fears that come with that understanding collide with the riot of theories, advice, toys, foods, classes, and gadgets all promising to help give one’s children competitive advantages in life, contemporary parents can become paralyzed by the anxiety that they’re doing everything wrong or militant in their confidence that they are doing everything right.

While that baby was just beginning to crawl around the apartment, a new sound, less melodious than sirens, was added to our lives.  The dial-up modem I’d bought squealed and scratched out its staticky attempts to connect to AmericaOnline. After several loud and dissonant failures, my wife asked what the hell I was doing.  “Trying to get online,” I said.

“Why?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet,” I replied.  And maybe I’m still trying to answer that question. But no matter what, the boy on the floor and the siblings who followed would be identified in the lingo of marketing and demographics as “digital natives,” and we were their parents.

With each new development in the range of products, apps, games, and content, comes a smattering of editorials asking the same fundamental  questions about how to monitor and/or regulate the role of technology in the lives of our children.  These articles typically focus on topics like Internet safety for teens or limits on “screen time” for younger children; and nearly all the articles I’ve read in this vein cite statistics indicating that parents of digital natives are not nearly involved enough in their children’s digital lives.  This is probably true, though there are so many factors that affect parental involvement in any aspect of their kids’ lives that I’m not going to open that can of sociological worms in this article.

Of course, we not only have to deal with the matter of our kids’ use of technologies, but also our own use, especially any technologies through which we interact with our kids.  As mentioned, we parents have been bombarded with “new” ideas in childcare for over 20 years, and it can be a little crazy-making. And for all the stereotypes about millennials appended to their devices, we Gen-Xers ought to cop to the fact that we were the early adopters of all these gadgets we then handed to our children.  It’s our parents who still have AOL email accounts, who raised us in a world without bike helmets and who had one book by a guy named Spock (not that Spock) on the subject of childcare. We new parents of the late 80s and early 90s have been the consumers of billions of dollars in “solutions” to make our kids smarter, stronger, and just get them into a damned NYC pre-school.  So, when it comes to tech innovations, we are culturally primed to reverse the adage and believe that invention is the mother of necessity.  There’s an app that makes my kid eat broccoli?? Download that puppy!!

Okay, maybe it’s not quite that crazy yet, but consider this TV spot for Dropcam by Nest. It features a precocious toddler adorably resigned to the installation of a home surveillance camera that will now catch him engaging in his favorite, destructive shenanigans. Never mind the fact that any child as committed to catastrophe as this boy is going to disable the Dropcam the day it arrives; but more importantly, child surveillance of this kind is a damn weird way to market this product.  Then again, Nest is owned by Google, and Google moves in mysterious ways.

Comedian Bill Maher rightly mocked this commercial on his blog, describing it as a great way to prepare your child to live in a surveillance state. I also think Maher is on target when he concludes, “But if kids never have a moment when no one is watching, how are they ever supposed to develop character?”  This refers back to the aforementioned job of the parent, which is to let go in stages.  In short, if parents envision using Dropcam as it is literally portrayed in this spot — to monitor their kids rather than show them age-appropriate trust, they probably need to rearrange their priorities and set aside whatever it is they’re doing instead of raising the child.  This is one of those moments when technology is offering a solution looking for a problem that, if employed, probably creates a brand new problem.

But I doubt the spot is meant to be taken so literally. I think the commercial probably wants to imply the more likely scenario in which the Dropcam captures that adorable child moment you might otherwise have missed. Plus, according to the online marketing materials, if you subscribe to the optional cloud storage for your video clips, you can choose to share any serendipitous cuteness on social media.  And there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, though it is unquestionably a step closer toward normalizing 24/7, 360˚ self-surveillance, which is not without potential hazards.  Considering the incidents of hacked data, Facebook surveillance, Smart TVs accidentally listening to us, the ability of hackers to surreptitiously enable webcams, and Google reading G-Mail, how comfortable are we with the idea of filling our homes with networked web-cams continuously sending video to cloud servers owned by Google or any other company with a vested interest in data mining?

Of course, the primary reason to employ home video surveillance is security, and there are certainly attractive qualities to networked monitoring systems that are remotely viewable and controllable. But it remains to be seen, as these technologies evolve, whether consumers will feel the security and convenience benefits outweigh the security risks involved. And as the oldest digital natives are just becoming parents themselves, it will be interesting to see if their adoption of “smart home” technologies is as innate as their adoption of other networked devices.  No matter what, I hope they don’t raise their kids in an atmosphere of surveillance as this TV commercial implies. Because the implications of that are anything but adorable.