Category: Culture

On Being a Luddite

Carriage HouseIf you say anything publicly critical of the Internet, there’s a good chance some technobrat on Twitter will call you a Luddite.  The simple irony is that the word Luddite in this case is being misused, which is something the would-be accuser might discover for himself were he to look it up on the Internet.  In this excellent article on Smithsonian’s website, for example, Richard Conniff confirms that we critics of Web utopianism are indeed following in the tradition of the original Luddites, who were highly proficient users of the machines they destroyed but critical of how those machines could be used to ill purpose by powerful interests.  If anything, the Luddite protest in 1811 by English textile-workers has more kinship with the spirit of Occupy Wall Street (coincidentally of 2011) than with technophobia.

Of course, it is in the nature of the English language for word meanings to change with use, so there’s nothing linguistically wrong with calling someone a Luddite who you believe to be anti-technology.  But the revisionist history inherent in this particular semantic shift is relevant because there is a great deal wrong with both the intent and the implications of this over-used and unexamined pejorative.

To scrutinize technologies from a broad perspective, including matters of law and policy, is anything but an endeavor toward an anti-progress agenda. To the contrary, policy sometimes promotes technological advancement to the scorn of one set of interests or constrains it to the frustration of another.  One need look no further than the brewing battle over gun regulation to see this in action right now. A high-capacity magazine is certainly a technological upgrade;  but to some Americans, it is a useless improvement except in the hands of professional soldiers or mass murderers, while to other Americans, access to this technology is a matter of civil liberty.  We see this all the time:  one man’s freedom is another’s industry run amok.  Either way, it’s a safe bet that no matter what policy emerges, neither position will be wholly satisfied.  Welcome to democracy.

A glance at the mundane technologies around us reveals that the advancement and adoption of progress almost always requires a balance among free enterprise, civil liberty, and regulatory policy.  Even something as innocuous as the CF lightbulb has raised libertarian hackles to near incandescence (yes, I went there) over the right to use whatever bulbs they want; but it’s a given that the vacuum filament variety will soon be phased out as a matter of both personal habit and public policy.  When color television was ready for mass consumption, the federal government instituted the standard we know as NTSC, which required the color signal transmit in a manner that owners of black and white TVs could receive it.  This was never the best quality the technology could have delivered — some engineers call it Never Twice Same Color — but it is an example of public policy constraining technology in order to avoid disenfranchising citizens from news and information based solely on their financial means. In case you’re just tuning in, that’s the government protecting free speech and access to it by keeping the technologists in check.

I was thinking about this balancing act while working on an old carriage house that sits on the property where I live.  As far as records show, this house belonged primarily to village doctors beginning in the early 19th century and up to at least the late 1960s, so  the presence of the carriage house is explained by the fact that its early, physician owners made house calls by horse and buggy.

Taking care of historic structures is an exercise in both the practical and the abstract. One must simultaneously consider past, present, and future in a way that is neither simple nor purely academic and sentimental. Fortunately for me, my best friend Craig is a professional conservator who works on historic buildings for the National Park Service; so unfortunately for him, this means I get his help wrangling with my old structures in exchange for beer.

Historic building conservators deal with philosophical questions as much as with the technical means of preservation; and the perennial question seems to be one of value (i.e. why something is preserved in the first place).  “Preserving old buildings for the sake of sentiment alone,” Craig says, “is like advocating technological progress solely for the sake of making something new.”  An apropos simile in this context.  What we preserve of the past implies the question of what we protect from the future. There is nothing inherently anti-progress about this question unless progress must exclusively mean to leap without looking.

Lining the ceiling of the ground floor of the carriage house are a number of ceramic knobs that were used in a wiring system known as Knob & Tube, outdated by the turn of the 20th century but still found in active use in some historic homes, much to the frustration of new buyers. It occurs to me that building code makes a pretty good example of public policy working hand-in-glove with technological advancement. K&T WiringWhile it isn’t a perfect system, the principle applies that soon after a more efficient, safer, better way to do something emerges, it becomes mandated by law. At the same time, we continue to learn by not entirely erasing the systems and structures that tell the stories of the past.

The last time I was personally called a Luddite was in reaction to my recent post about my kids and online piracy.  This is fairly typical of the techno-utopian response to those of us who believe systems like copyright remain something more than outdated ideas waiting to die like K&T wiring.  The more complex irony in this familiar ad hominem is that, just like puzzling the maintenance of a 150-year-old barn, we contemporary “Luddites” are actually taking a much more expansive view of the future than our detractors.  Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that, like our namesakes of 1811, we filmmakers, musicians, photographers, authors, designers, etc. are expert users of the technologies we’re not afraid to criticize.

Workspace of a Technophobe
Workspace of a Technophobe

What I’d tell my own kids about piracy. Why scarcity is a good thing.

Photo by Gaia Moments
Photo by Gaia Moments

The ongoing debate over copyright in the digital age is clouded by so many layers of new-age malarkey and overblown, political banner-waving that it’s easy to lose sight of the behavioral realities behind all the self-serving theories of bloggers, legal scholars, corporate interests, and futurists. Take a very common activity like watching movies online via torrents or other sites that enable free viewing (aka piracy).  My kids’ generation, growing up around this behavior as a norm, will hear words to describe this kind of movie viewing as contrarily theft or sharing.  What are they to make of it?  Certainly, I’ve taught them to share and not to steal.  For the sake of their cultural and psychological growth, however, I’d suggest for the purposes of discussion, that this kind of media overconsumption is, if nothing else, dumb.

For context, we need to admit that the majority of unlicensed, online movie viewing is done by young, middle-class, generally privileged Americans, who are watching mainstream, Hollywood-produced fare. Search for top movies viewed through torrent sites, for example, and you’ll find that the lists will comprise tentpole films produced by the big studios who represent the part of the industry most vilified for efforts to mitigate piracy. If that hypocrisy is not enough to raise your brows, though, the very nature of these films is then used as a justification for the pirate-enabled viewing in itself. We typically hear some combination of the following:  “So much of the mainstream stuff is junk that it doesn’t deserve to be paid for.  These films already make millions. I would never pay to see it anyway, so it’s not like they’re losing a sale.”  If my own kids presented me with these rationales, we’d have a serious talk because this is corrupt thinking no matter what the law, the technologists, or the economic theories say.

Consolidate these oft-repeated positions into the declarative, first person, and the stupid shines through a little clearer:  “I’m going to spend hours of my life watching movies I probably won’t like, but because I expect not to like them, I’m not going to pay for them.”  And as a kicker, “I am going to help put money in the pockets of the people who stole the movies in the first place.”  Bloggers like Mike Masnick will try to argue the new and bizarre economics of free media; and scholars like Mr. Lessig will argue that there is something intellectually or culturally constraining about “permission culture.” Then, these purely academic theories trickle down to the ears of my kids and their contemporaries, who translate it all into the aforementioned rationale. But as a parent living in the real world, what I’ve just heard my kids say is that they’re shoplifting cartons of potato chips at the corner store, which doesn’t matter because chips aren’t real food anyway.  Hence, my kids now have both a moral and a health problem.

With regard to movies (or any creative media) the first thing I’d tell my own children is that their lives are not at all enriched by watching scores of films they probably won’t like. To the contrary, when they make time for media consumption, they should develop a critical sense for what kind films might be worth the investment of their time and attention. What matters is not the fifty films they’ll forget within hours of viewing, but the five this year that will change their lives in some way. It doesn’t matter that the sale for the producers of the tentpole is zero whether my kid watches it through a torrent or doesn’t see it at all; what matters is making the decision that if it isn’t worth paying for, it probably isn’t worth the equally valuable resources of time and attention. In short, it’s not only okay to let some things go, you don’t really have a choice.

It is a valuable component of cultural experience for the individual to pay attention to what kind of art or media affects him and to seek out that which fulfills these emotional connections.  Nobody can watch, read, listen to, or experience everything; so there is not only nothing wrong with scarcity, it is an absolute necessity for an individual’s cultural development. Those who promote the idea of abundance as some sort of digital-age renaissance are not really contributing to a more enlightened, more cultured generation so much as they’re breeding a new crop of agitated media junkies. Remove for a moment the questions of legality or creators’ rights, and we’re still living in an era of media obesity and don’t yet know what this means for the future of culture in general.

Many of the filmmakers whose works have touched my life and the lives of my contemporaries were dead before the Internet was even built.  We somehow managed to experience their films without this technology and without in any way contributing to IP theft. Through pre-Internet experiences, I have seen motion pictures that I doubt my own children will ever know existed; and still, in over thirty years of loving this medium, I know that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of films that I will not see in my lifetime. This is true for my children as well, despite the overblown promise of technology to put “the world at their fingertips.” So, what I’ll tell my kids is simply this:  “You can’t consume it all, you shouldn’t try, and whatever is worth your time is also worth your money.”

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.