Category: Culture

What’s at the bottom of the Pandora box?

Once again, Pandora internet radio is attempting to use an act of Congress to lower the royalties it pays artists, and once again, musicians are speaking out against both the tactics and the two-faced approach being taken by CEO Tim Westergren to pay lip service to his respect for artists while sticking his already well-greased palm into their back pockets.  The members of Pink Floyd wrote an open letter to other musicians to beware Pandora’s recent “outreach” toward artists, and David Lowery famously got to the nuts and bolts of the matter by posting a royalty statement revealing that 1.1 million plays of one of his songs on Pandora earned him $16.89.  Opening up Pandora’s box, if you will, raises many issues, including the overarching question as to just how well digital-age models, at their best, are working for artists.  But while we’re still mid torrent issuing from Pandora, one question too often overlooked is where the songs come from in the first place. It’s been said before, but the generation raised on round-the-clock, free access to entertainment really may be as disconnected from the production of that entertainment as many of us through modern convenience became disconnected from the production of food. Perhaps, as we see a renaissance in understanding farming and other food production, a similar awareness might take place with regard to the creative works that feed the soul.

In this New York Times article, author/musician Wesley Stace describes his experience collaborating with poet Paul Muldoon to teach a class in songwriting to students at Princeton.  Stace poses the question as to whether or not songs (and by implication other art) can be produced on demand like any other homework assignment, leaving open the more whimsical question of being struck by one’s muse. While reading, I could not help but think of the famous Brill Building, that songwriting factory of the 1950s whence came many of rock-n-roll’s most famous hits.   Stace concludes that, yes, songwriting is a craft like any other, and that it has a process that can be taught and learned and accomplished, even by students with little background in creative writing or music.  By leading their students to delve into emotion in this otherwise intellectual setting, Stace and Muldoon found the results both prolific and astounding.  “I wish I’d written, or could write, some of the songs I heard on these Tuesday afternoons; sometimes it felt like my sole qualification to teach the course was that I was old and experienced,” writes Stace.

One might conclude from the article that “anyone can write a song,” and Stace would probably agree up to a point.  The 24/7 coffeehouse known as YouTube has certainly helped  feed this notion that “we are all authors” now, which in turn spawns the illusion that songs and other works are of lesser value today than they were 15-20 years ago. But to quote Stace, “Songwriting is a skill — best practiced, easily improved. If you exercise regularly, keeping fit becomes easier and less unpleasant, until it becomes a habit.”  In other words, it’s work.  And what makes the songs you and I want to hear over and over again is a combination of, yes, luck in the form of possessing raw, unique talents, and then a ceaseless investment of work, often by many people.

My Pandora stations include both a Camper Van Beethoven and a Pink Floyd, and if you ever heard me play “Comfortably Numb” on the six string, you would need no further proof that we are not all musicians.  But when we consider the combination of both effort and circumstance that yields just this one song about an experience most of us will never have, yet so many of us can understand, we should recognize that it is rare and therefore valuable.  In fact, not unlike the story of Pandora’s Box, the album The Wall itself concludes with destruction and then the sound of an accordion playing like a solitary flower growing though the gray rubble, and the voice of Roger Waters reciting a eulogy with just a tinge of hope.  I know for sure that I need Pink Floyd in my life and that I don’t need Pandora to get it. So, that’s what’s at the bottom of the box.

TEDPrattles “Piracy” by Jean-Philippe Vergne

In this TEDTalk, Jean-Philippe Vergne spends sixteen minutes proving one thing:  that piracy is the wrong word for mass, digital copyright infringement.  Those who operate torrent and similar sites should never have been called pirates, a word charged with romance and all too easily embraced as a badge of honor and charming rebelliousness. Never mind the fact that even this romantic image of the traditional pirate is entirely based in fiction, there is nothing nearly so intriguing or sympathetic about the digital “pirate,” and the word allows people like Vergne to distract audiences with charming half-truths about high-seas buccaneers and privateers of the colonial 18th century.  Not that I care in this context, but he even gets his naval history wrong in the “documentary” he shows midway through his presentation.  I know a marketing video when I see one.

In fact, if we want to play the “compare to real piracy” game, let’s do it honestly and more thoroughly.  I say a Somali pirate, as dangerous a criminal as he may be, is arguably more deserving of our sympathy than a torrent site owner.  The former is most likely a displaced fisherman who has turned to piracy in an act of economic desperation; the latter is a spoiled, middle-class punk who could get a job with his programming skills but chooses instead to turn the labor and investments of honest workers into his personal cash machine. As a moral comparison, this is a no-brainer.

Those we call pirates in the digital-age sense should instead be called exploiters, which is less catchy and more accurately descriptive of what these enterprises do, which is to exploit the work of others for profit and without permission.  Had this been the kind of language used from the beginning, I doubt for instance, we would see the rise of the European Exploiter Party, and jokers like Vergne wouldn’t have the opportunity to saunter on stage wearing cute eye patches (the props that go with the concept of exploitation are far less dashing).  So, let’s stop behaving like children, shall we?  Because after the purely semantic, and utterly pointless, comparison between digital theft and high-seas piracy, there is still the matter of a massive, criminal enterprise savaging honest, middle-class labor — and it’s not cute no matter what we choose to call it.

Our Inner Troll

troll

One of my favorite observations by David Foster Wallace is about television, which he describes as essentially “watching furniture.”  As a recovered-TV-junkie (20+ years clean), I have long appreciated the sentiment; however, by contrast, the detachment involved in old-school TV viewing may be healthier for some than the two-way mirrors we use in our wired lives. Our screens of many sizes are not only private windows through which we can choose to view the world as we wish to see it, but they are also personal projectors through which we can reveal ourselves as we wish to be seen or even allow us to hide behind masks so that our latent monsters can roam free. These devices are not merely physical extensions of our hands but can be metaphysical extensions of our identities.

I joked with a friend who described herself on Facebook Chat as “moaning her head off” that she probably means “moaning her thumbs off,” complaining as she was via iPhone; but this isn’t entirely a joke, is it?  We might rekindle Descarte’s mind/body question to ask the new mind/body/gadget question. And would we conclude, I tweet therefore I am?

To what extent the id/gadget relationship presents itself must of course vary from individual to individual. Although we can probably assume that the association is strongest within the generation who’ve grown up alongside these devices and the social dynamics they’re programmed to foster, it is also true that some of the most extreme manifestations of this psychological shift are in no way restricted to the young.  Super-troll Michael Brutsch (aka Violentacrez), who was outed by Gawker in October of 2012, is a man in his mid-50s, who spent hours of his time moderating misogynistic and pedophiliac threads on Reddit; and he is cited as a prime example in this video from the series of original projects from Academic Earth entitled The Psychology of the Internet Toll.

One of the contributors to this video, a man named Jack Collins, contacted me directly and asked that I consider sharing it on this blog, and I do think it offers interesting food for thought on the mechanisms by which two forces that appear contradictory — anonymity and a desire for attention — actually conjoin through social media to spawn the ugliest of behaviors.  What matters of course is not merely exposing extreme examples like Brutsch and labeling the disorders at play, but rather asking ourselves to what extent we are all made a bit more troll-like (I would say narcissistic) through these media and devices.  To quote Jaron Lanier, “It would be nice to believe that there is only a minute troll population living among us.  But in fact, a great many people have experienced being drawn into nasty exchanges online. Everyone who has experienced that has been introduced to his or her inner troll.”

Beyond the value of personal introspection on our own behaviors, I believe the McLuhan question as to what extent the medium becomes the message is particularly relevant when we consider the influence of these media on our political process and the ways in which certain dissociative trends can be unhealthy for democracy. To Lanier’s point about getting “drawn into nasty exchanges online,” how many of those exchanges are about politics? By my reckoning, quite a few. So, the question becomes whether or not this new form of public debate is really fulfilling its promise to add nuance or is instead homogenizing discourse because its mechanisms too often call upon the voices of our lesser angels, who fail to listen, learn, or empathize. And well beyond the matter of us getting a little bitchy on Facebook is the question as to the role of social media in what appears to be a rise in narcissistic behaviors in general.

In my last essay, I wrote about balancing free speech rights between recipients and disseminators because it seems as though the internet itself wants to assert the rights of recipients as somehow more important than those of disseminators.  This would be consistent with an ego that has begun to merge with its appended machine to the extent that whatever that machine may provide is perceived as an entitlement.  Through these devices (which by the way are destined to become wearable), is it possible that we cultivate a visceral association with words, pictures, and sounds to the extent that the body itself comes to expect all content to be a natural right like air is to lungs?  If so, this might explain why, at a certain point, the ego no longer recognizes the right of the other who may be harmed by one’s consumption of said content. This would explain not only the grotesque behaviors of a Michael Brutsch and his Reddit followers, but even the more subtle forms of everyday narcissism, including the ability to rationalize choices like media piracy in the name of an insidious notion called “permissionless culture.”

Popularized by scholars like Lawrence Lessig, “permissionless  culture” is assumed to mean that the permission being ignored or rejected is that of a corporate or government authority — some entity we feel should not even have the right to grant permission in the first place.  Unfortunately, the problem being overlooked is that we may indeed be fostering a permission-free culture — one that ignores individual permission from one another, and it is that permission that is the basis of all civil rights. If you don’t think there might be a relationship between ideas like “permissionless culture” and the rise in a phenomenon people are calling “rape culture,” I would recommend a visit to several of the threads on 4Chan.org, where frat-boy style narcissism is both medium and message in the service of what we might call a Cartesian circle jerk.

With its population of anonymous, young males engaged primarily in a less-violent version of Brtutsch’s misogyny, 4Chan is no obscure anomaly, but is in fact one of the nebulae whence political action originates on issues pertaining to free speech and the internet, and it is the site where the hacktivists known as Anonymous got their start.  In his book Freeloading, Chris Ruen even cites 4Chan as one source of the early efforts to stop the SOPA bill, the relevance not being SOPA itself, but the discomforting consideration that my thoughtful, progressive friends and colleagues were to some extent influenced by a lot of teenage neanderthals.  This raises a question about all politics pertaining to the digital age with regard to identifying who exactly are those defenders of the web often referred to as the “internet community?”

Of course we all use the internet and have Facebook pages and some other social media accounts, but are we all part of the internet community?  Typically, this reference is used broadly in news media to describe influential bloggers, activists, or site owners who speak out for the health of the internet on a regular basis and with consistent messages. But every community has its thought leaders and its base, who do much of the disseminating, distilling, and even wrongly interpreting the messages of the thought leaders.  I suspect the base of the internet community is actually quite small, despite its power to influence through viral media, and that it is also demographically very narrow.

Specifically, I suspect that the base of the internet community just might be a fraternity of economically privileged 15-34 year-old males, who are the first generation of guinea pigs in the mind/body/gadget experiment. If this is true, and the politics of digital life are in fact dispersed through what may be a clique of narcissists, this can produce a dramatic change in the social contract on which democratic freedom is based. In light of the fact that, economically, the internet appears to spawn more consolidated, personal wealth while yielding very little middle-class opportunity, paying attention to our collective inner troll may be more important than we think.