Category: Politics

Dear Rick II – Response to Rick Falkvinge on Legalizing Child Porn

Dear Rick:

Yesterday, I opened up on you without actually taking the time to refute your positions or points. Honestly, it’s tough to read that many words, disagree with every one of them, and know quite where to begin.  I know you said you would respond, but then GoDaddy sites were down for many hours.  In the interim, I took the time to write a more analytical response to your article, lest anyone think I’m merely reacting to the nature of child porn itself.  As I said in my open letter, I think many of the fallacies in the article speak for themselves, but let’s take look at its three main assertions:

1. The ban [on child porn] prevents catching/jailing child molesters.

Your support for this premise, which you write in the present tense, is to leap immediately to a very obscure hypothetical situation ten years in the future.  Never mind the fact that your scenario has a one-in-many-million chance of happening; but even in the event that an innocent citizen inadvertently records a child molestation while wearing his Google glass, you are merely speculating that this witness would be treated as a criminal. By this argument, if I found a tape in my neighbor’s trash that turned out to be child pornography and brought the tape to the police, you insist that they would charge me with possession.

Sure, this could happen if the police are corrupt or inept, but it is certainly not the intent of the law. Moreover, when technological or societal change really does demand amendment to the law, it happens. Writing a statute that exonerates your as yet imaginary, inadvertent witness/recorder of a crime involving a naked child seems like an afternoon’s work for a decent law clerk.

Far more serious than your purely hypothetical (and frankly paranoid) example is the very real tragedy that people languish in prison right now who have been wrongfully convicted of homicide.  As terrible as that is, I’m confident we will never legalize murder in order to right these miscarriages of justice.

 2.  The laws brand a whole generation as sex offenders

You state:   “Our current laws treat the video of a seven-year-old being brutally raped, on one hand, and two seventeen-year-olds who have eyes for nothing in the world but each other making consensual passionate love, on the other hand, as the exact same thing. This is mind-bogglingly odd.”

That would indeed be mind-bogglingly odd if it were true — or had subject/verb agreement seeing as a video itself cannot be charged with a crime.  Suppose a priest rapes a seven year-old altar boy and the act is caught on surveillance video.  The priest has committed a crime for sure, but is the owner of the building guilty of possession of child pornography, even when he marches that tape straight into the authorities as he should? All smoke, mirrors, and Google glass aside, this is basically what you’re saying, and it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

As for your 17 year-old lovers, the age of consent in Sweden I believe is 15, and the age of consent in the U.S. ranges from state to state between 15 and 17. So these kids are free to make “consensual passionate love,” as you put it; although at that age, there’s a decent chance it’s awkward, brief, and bit bumbly to be honest.  Still, you’re really painting this picture as a provocative intro to get us to focus on criminalizing the teenager who photographs him/herself naked and presumably shares those photos via telecom.  You state that criminalizing this behavior both equates the act with serious molestation against young children and makes teens feel bad about their bodies.  Again, nothing you’re saying makes sense to me as either an experienced parent or as a citizen with a working knowledge of the law.

In the first instance, the teen in possession of photos of him/herself can be charged in various states in the U.S. with misdemeanors, ordered to engage in counseling, etc. They will not face penalties equal to those of an adult convicted of physical child abuse. You’re guilty of the same associative argument you criticize with your “jaywalking-and-murder” example.  You’re lumping it all together for dramatic effect, but what you’re saying just ain’t so.

Regardless of legality, the act is very dangerous and very stupid; and it is not proscribing the self-photography that makes teens feel bad about their bodies.  When teens feel bad about their bodies, it’s because they’re teens, who have been feeling self-conscious long before technology gave them new toys to play with. A teen who chooses to exhibit him or herself naked via digital communication might be due for a serious discussion with an adult about self-worth and self-preservation.  It’s not about criminalizing the kids to appease some prudish authority — I’m a parent and couldn’t be further from the religious nuts you refer to in your article —  it’s about helping them take care of themselves, which includes protecting them from their own ignorance about the world, about child predators, about putting something out into the digital universe that they can never get back.

 3. The free speech war is won/lost at the battle of child porn.

At last, we get to something approximating your real goal, I believe.  This statement reminds me of another one from the protectmarriage.com website, active during the Prop8 fight to ban same-sex marriage.  I may be paraphrasing slightly as the site is currently down.  They stated:

 “While abortion is a foundational issue, we see marriage as a survival issue.” 

Interesting language, if you think about it.  Like you, these Protectors of Marriage also imagine an ideological war to be won or lost on the basis of a single law that taps into people’s emotions.  And just as they claim to be fighting for the religious soul of America, you claim to be fighting for the soul of free speech itself.  Both of you, of course, are guilty of ignorance in your premises and gross exaggeration in your purposes.  They believe American law is fundamentally more religious than it is; and you believe free speech is truly in jeopardy.

I happen to believe very strongly that the secular laws we write in a free and democratic society are, at their best, a unified declaration of our humanity without requiring religious doctrine. That which we protect and that which we abhor, as expressed through the rule of law, actually does matter a great deal.  But in a very similar way to our Christian zealots, Rick, you fabricate wedge issues in order to draw oblique lines toward dangerous conclusions about the very notion of law itself. To be blunt, I believe you are a technocrat who envisions a world in which technology either obviates the need for law or demands that the law bend beyond reason to accommodate technology’s endless vicissitudes.

In truth, you may be less like the American Christian zealot in your use of child porn here than you are like Ronald Reagan using flag burning as a distraction from your real agenda.  You knew you would draw fire for appearing to be pro-child pornography, and I am reasonably confident that you do not in reality advocate harming children, so perhaps your real mission has more to do with this statement:

“There is a reason the copyright industry loves child pornography.  This reason. It opens the door to censorship.”

This is your party platform, Rick, isn’t it? If so, I think you should be more transparent about it, champion of transparency that you are. Certainly, more straight talk would afford you more opportunity for concision in your writing, and what you’re saying is really pretty simple:  “Copyright is censorship.”  And, of course, if that’s what you truly believe, it’s no wonder you see censorship everywhere you look.

I happen to find your position naive, fallacious, and destructive for some of the reasons I mention above about law and humanity. You believe those of us who would defend copyright don’t understand the Internet, but the truth is you don’t understand copyright. What you want to call censorship is in fact one of the strongest statements my country makes about the importance and the value of a single voice.  Go ahead and blast media oligopolies and their lobbyists all you like.  It’s not my role to defend everything they produce, say, or do.  But as an artist, a big mouth, an atheist, and a liberal; I’m willing to bet I care a hell of a lot more about our First Amendment than you do, and I truly resent when amateurs misuse it.

Open Letter to Rick Falkvinge

Dear Rick:

When I wrote a criticism last week of your incomprehensible TED video, in which you  vaguely stump for the Swedish Pirate Party, I had no idea that you were about to produce an article that so beautifully exemplifies the depraved extremes to which you and your kind will go to protect your cherished technology.  In your BLOTTR article, you insist that child pornography must inevitably be, as you say, “re-legalized” in order to first, accommodate technological changes (you refer to Google Glasses); and second, hedge against censorship in general.

In truth, your unforgivably longwinded article would require an even more unforgivably longwinded response were I to criticize it point by point; but I’m sure most rational readers will be able to understand it’s legal and humanistic fallacies as long as they have even the slightest memory of high school civics.  For a pirate, you’re not much of a sailor on the sea of reason, it seems. As in your TED video, you yaw about on a rudderless ship, spilling gibberish and actual lies through those oversized scuppers in your principles.

If it sounds like I’m taking this personally, it’s because I am; and so should any other adult who understands that exploiting children is (I know this a word you don’t like) wrong. Sometimes, Richard, the utter wrongness of an act is sufficient reason to make it illegal, even if the laws themselves are imperfect. If human civilization demands that we seek every opportunity to stop the exploitation of children in any form, then your technology be damned.  Let it conform to humanity’s needs or let it fail.  But, of course, you’ve made a career out of promoting exploitation in another form — that of artists and craftspeople who actually work for a living — so it should be little surprise that your first concern is for your toys and not our children.

Photo by Thomas Bedenk.

Funny that you point to CNN coverage of Operation Desert Storm as a seminal moment because I do too, but from exactly the opposite perspective.  That war, which put CNN on the map and, therefore, validated 24-hour news, transformed news reporting forever and not necessarily for the better. It meant that news would compete with entertainment and then become entertainment, which is precisely what happened, all to the benefit of side-show politicians such as yourself.  As one real journalist I know put it so well during that time, “It’s all presentation and no information.” It is a perfect example of what I mean by The Illusion of More, and suddenly you so neatly personify this myopia gazing at the world through those Google-colored glasses of yours.

I predict your fifteen minutes are nearly up, Rick. See what you can do to avoid further damage, while you’re here.

Ciao!

DN

Talking TED – Ideas for Scaring

Consider this:  instead of an entrenched government fabricating an Orwellian state of fear in order to limit civil liberties, that it is in fact self-proclaimed rebels crying “freedom” who are using this very tactic to foster an agenda that is more destructive than the world they claim to oppose.

It’s true that this website launched with an article praising a TEDx video and the spirit it evokes, but it must be said that not everyone who preaches before the altar of those iconic letters is necessarily promoting an idea worth sharing.  In particular, this video starring Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party proves my favorite of Twain’s observations — that all one needs in life for success is confidence and ignorance. Falkvinge’s pride in his party’s acquisition of seats in the European Parliament shows us just how far one can passionately evangelize a truly bad idea.

We see a lot of this in U.S., of course.  Todd Akin’s now infamous statement about “legitimate rape” not causing pregnancy was not merely the raving of one man, but an extension of language that’s been part of GOP talking points for years, attempting to stratify degrees of sexual assault vis a vis the question of abortion.  In other words, I’m not impressed with dumb ideas just because they achieve a measure of popularity somewhere; the number of seats the Pirate Party has in the European Parliament is not by itself proof of anything.

In fact, as the title and content of this particular talk make clear, it is meant more as a primer on how to turn protest into policy than as a stump for the Pirate Party platform; but Falkvinge as mentor does leave out the fact that he possesses that secret, Twainian ingredient — an ego blind to the fallacy of his reasoning. I challenge anyone to watch the first eight minutes of this video and tell us how Falkvinge’s overview of his mission has any more syllogistic integrity than one of Glenn Beck’s blackboard extravaganzas. Take for example his abrupt reference to Mubarak shutting down the Internet during the uprising in Egypt, which he then follows with a ham-handed segue to democratic nations where he claims, “the crackdown is the same but the excuse is different. In the West it’s terrorism, organized crime, and pornography in various forms.”  In other words, if the FBI investigates a terror cell or a drug or child pornography ring  (which really do exist), it’s the same thing as Mubarak turning off the Internet to squelch political dissent.

Even stranger is Falkvinge’s references to privacy. He cites the sanctity of traditional mail (which he doesn’t mention is protected by law as exclusive property) followed by vague allusions to government “wiretapping” of our digital communications. At best, this is laughable in the age of social media when the majority of our communications are not only public, but are of less than no interest to the likes of Interpol and the NSA.  In truth, if privacy is your concern, you’d be wiser to ask what Google and Facebook are doing with the information you give them voluntarily, but Falkvinge isn’t interested in pesky realities; he’s more interested in painting a picture of a generation gap through scare tactics.

In fact, given the thesis of his presentation, it’s telling that in eight minutes worth of preamble, Falkvinge doesn’t openly state the biggest plank in the platform of a party that would call itself “Pirate,” namely the belief that mass copyright infringement is a form of free speech. But then, that would be making an argument, which is open to counter-argument.  It’s so much more effective to draw fuzzy lines between dictators and democratic leaders and to make vague references to governments spying on private citizens.

Above all, what I find most offensive and dysfunctional about this video in particular and pirate parties in general is the implication that the youth of democratic societies ought to be more concerned with perceived threats to the liberties they already enjoy than with wielding those liberties to greater purpose. Specifically, at about the 4:30 mark, Falkvinge cites an unspecified “survey” that 17 year-olds no longer place the environment and sustainability at the top of their concerns, but instead are more focused on issues of free speech and openness.

Assuming this unnamed study is accurate, I propose that unless those kids are in Russia or Iran, they’re due for a reality check.  Proclaiming free speech advocacy in a democratic society is roughly as bold as saying one is pro air; and oddly enough, there are more enemies of air than there are of speech.  So, perhaps the environment and sustainability ought to resume their place at the top of the next generation’s agenda.

If we are to take Falkvinge’s hyperbole seriously, then we must conclude that he and his party affiliates, were they to speak more plainly, would have us believe that stopping some American college kid from torrent-streaming Hangover II  would make him a victim of a human rights violation.  This is more than an insult to real victims of human rights violations, it is an abdication of our responsibility as the fortunate citizens of free societies.  Rather than use our voices to speak on behalf of those who suffer real abuses, the Pirate Party would have us whinging over the prospect of paying for entertainment.  Falkvinge mentions that his political movement was born in a bar, and it seems to me that it ought to have died in the sober light of day like so many notions that look good under the influence.