Dawn of the Prankster

About two weeks ago, some disgruntled friends shared a story about Urban Outfitters apparently marketing a faded and blood-stained-looking Kent State college sweatshirt. Then, in a follow-up story reported by Jordan Sargent in Gawker, an email sent by the retailer’s CEO Dick Haynes explains that the sweatshirt shown in their marketing materials was not representative of a new, purposely designed line of clothing but was a legitimately vintage item purchased at a Rose Bowl flea market and that the red stains on the shirt are not in fact blood. The photo of the Kent State sweatshirt, according to the email, was being used to promote a new line of faded looks being offered by UO. Assuming Mr. Haynes is telling the truth about the sweatshirt (and there is no reason to think he isn’t), the story is a pretty good example of so much that is wrong with marketing in the digital age. In short, does the campaign reveal stupidity or ignorance? And at what point do such distinctions cease to matter? Do the economics of the Internet expect everyone to become a prankster in order to win?

As Sargent rightly implies, the marketing team at Urban Outfitters almost certainly knew they were courting negative reactions by using the image of this sweatshirt because in the age of social media, controversy can be a great way to get campaigns to go viral. Still, it is not yet clear that “any press is good press” is a universally wise tactic for all brands. Certainly, a brand can align itself on the side of certain issues, which can be a great link to customers whose values correspond with the brand. But in the bizarre dynamics of social media, even a hater becomes an evangelist of sorts when he/she shares a story for the purpose of denouncing it. If the story or campaign offends ten thousand people but appeals to one thousand customers, cha ching. Not only does this achieve market penetration for pennies, but the people who hate your brand did your selling for you for free. That said, this can be dangerous territory for a brand looking to build customer relationships over time. Being a shock-jock can backfire. More importantly, brands and their marketing campaigns are themselves creators of culture and thus feed public consciousness, which is part of why I believe our reaction is so strong against this apparent trivializing of the Kent State shootings. It becomes a form of revisionist history, which brings us to the question of ignorance in this story.

Jordan Sargent raises the possibility with regard to this sweatshirt campaign that “…various people involved in the transaction were too young to even realize the implications of selling a Kent State sweatshirt that looked like it was bloodstained” This may be true, and if so, it is yet another unfortunate phenomenon of our times. Despite the fact that we treated the dawn of Internet access as a great boon to education, we do seem to encounter frequent examples of digital natives achieving adulthood woefully ignorant of some rather significant cultural icons and events. That anyone in the United States might enter the workforce, let alone in a communications role, without ever hearing of the 1970 shootings at Kent State is both extraordinary and, at this point, not the least bit surprising. In fact, I personally wondered many years ago whether or not a glut of data (which is not necessarily information) might result in a decline in general cultural literacy.

It was the late 1990s, and I was creative director on a photo shoot in New York. The photographer and I were joking around, making references to the Marx Brothers, and our comments were sailing over the heads of the models and assistants who were a good decade or so younger. Who doesn’t know The Marx Brothers, I thought? Their films were hardly contemporary when I was growing up; they were 40 years old. Driving home from the shoot, I wondered if the volume and rate at which we were increasingly consuming sounds, words, and images might not have a deleterious effect on long-term memory of important cultural and historical items. Add to this the ease with which information can be manipulated through the web, coincident with a general distrust of traditional news sources, along with marketers willing to gin up controversy to sell tee shirts, and you get a digital age Tower of Babel.

Perhaps one of the worst phenomena to manifest from all this is that it feeds moral absolutism, which believes the ends justify the means. For a business owner, those ends might be selling some product, but in the world of civic affairs, this psychology produces more serious results. We’ve occasionally seen hacktivists identifying as Anonymous meddling self-righteously in politics or in events like the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and they’re free to make a mess of things once in a while because they can’t be held accountable. It is the same psychology that produces the bottom-feeders at Reddit and 4Chan who would share stolen nude celebrity photos and produce rape and death imagery of Emma Watson in response to her speech at the UN on feminism. But, interestingly enough, it is also the same psychology that produced a bizarre attempt to attack 4Chan.

In case you missed it, a site was created called emmawatsonyournext.com, which was purported to be the work of anonymous users at 4Chan and appeared to be hosting a countdown to the distribution of revealing photos of the actress. But according to this story by Rich McCormick in The Verge, the countdown site was in fact a hoax and PR ploy designed to drive traffic toward a campaign to take down the 4Chan site for its exploitation of women. Now, I personally don’t care if 4Chan disappears; it is of no value to anyone, and the only people who spend time on the site are either losers or FBI agents. But this hoax of a campaign against the site is likewise exploitative of Miss Watson and the values of feminism, and even if its rather murky ends are anti-misogynist, its means are unacceptable. Coincidentally, according to McCormick, it was Redditors who apparently identified the companies behind the hoax.

“Some Reddit users were able to sniff out the hoax before its countdown expired, and linked the company behind it to FoxWeekly, a site that plagiarizes from other news sources to solicit views and Facebook likes, and Swenzy, a company that sells followers, likes, and views.”

BUT . . .

According to other sources like The Huffington Post, the organization behind the Emma Watson leak hoax is called Rantic Marketing, except that there doesn’t appear to be any such company because, writes James Cook for Business Insider, “Rantic Marketing is a fake company run by a gang of prolific internet spammers used to quickly capitalize on internet trends for page views.”

So…

I guess what I’m driving at is that the Internet can be kind of a cesspool of idiocy, self-aggrandized hackers, and exploitative opportunists all filtered through the manipulative algorithms of social media’s walled gardens. And I think the truth is that, even as adults, we are not innately good curators or editors of the fragments of information with which we choose to be bombarded. If nothing else, who has the time? When I think about the digital native generation growing up in this environment, it’s hard not to wonder if the biggest hoax of all might not be credited to whichever prankster first called this “the information age.”

Thoughts on Leaked Steubenville Video

In response to the tragedy in Newtown, CT the idea was raised by news commentators and in the blogosphere that the names of people who commit heinous crimes should be de-publicized in order to deny them even a posthumous fame we believe to be a constituent of their twisted motives. It is hard to imagine, though, that even if we could instantaneously erase the names of these sociopaths, that this would really serve as a deterrent to crimes born in psyches we cannot understand in the first place.

I find myself thinking about the subjects of infamy, depravity, and justice since watching the video released last week in which teenage boys jokingly boast about an alleged multiple rape of a sixteen year-old girl in Steubenville, OH. The video was accessed and released to the public by a group or individual identified on Twitter as KnightSec, who claims alliance with the hacktivist group Anonymous. KnightSec exposed the video on the grounds that officials in Steubenville have been papering over the case because the accused assailants are members of the very popular football team in this small, working-class community. This is a familiar and easy-to-grasp narrative, one that might even be true; and although I believe KnightSec is acting in a good-faith effort to see justice done, the case in general, including the release of the video, raises some disturbing and challenging questions unique to our digital times.

According to CNN, one of the difficulties in the case, even if we give local law enforcement and prosecutors the benefit of every doubt, is that much of the evidence so far amounts to teenagers referring to criminal behavior via digital and social media. Reports indicate that even the victim herself was unconscious during the alleged assaults and cannot serve as a witness to her own abuse. There is even a report that the victim text messaged the accused saying, “I know you didn’t rape me.” Rape cases are often hard enough to prosecute, and this one appears to be complexly warped by the bizarre world of communications in which we now live — one where depraved speech is so common among certain users of social media, that it is very hard to tell who is merely presenting himself as a pig and who is referring to actual events in real life. Certainly, this would not be the first time a bunch of jocks assaulted a defenseless girl; and it would not be the first time teenagers used social media to brag about their own hideous behavior; but it also wouldn’t be the first time teenagers produced comments, photos, and videos that exaggerate or distort actual events for no other reason than that’s how some people behave in cyberspace.

Even the kid featured in the video released by KnightSec is not one of those presently accused in the alleged assault; and while I would like to see him and his friends marched out to the woodshed for their lack of humanity, it’s hard to get past the fact that in the video, he’s behaving exactly like an Internet troll. In fact, his similes are frankly so childishly dorky that what we’re watching could be the blabbering of an accomplice, a witness, or pathetically enough, a wannabe. If you think the idea of a wannabe rapist is farfetched, let’s go back to October for a moment . . .

Before Gawker outed super-troll Michael Brutsch (aka Violentacrez), the senior staff at Reddit saw no problem with the enormous volume of this man’s posts glorifying sexual assault of teenage girls. To the contrary, Brutsch was rewarded with what the Internet troll wants most — attention. And because Violentacrez yielded literally tens of thousands of followers, Reddit even rewarded Brutsch with a statuette for his popularity. Is there a connection between Brutsch and the kid in the Steubenville video? I think there is, and it comes back to the notion of infamy.

In the age of social media, attention is currency; and negative attention is not necessarily of lesser value than positive attention. Hence, this raises just one of the questions as to the value of the kind of net vigilantism, however well intentioned, conducted by KnighSec in this case. In order for there to be a video to expose, the video had to be shot in the first place and then loaded onto a storage device somewhere that could be hacked. Hence the choice by these boys to memorialize and save a record of this offensive and imbecilic monologue suggests at least an instinctive desire for attention. In this context, then, does releasing the video to the public potentially satisfy a dysfunctional wish for infamy among these kids? If we would contemplate erasing the name of the already-dead Newtown shooter, what about giving fifteen minutes of fame to this morally-bankrupt teenager, who may face no consequences of any kind in this matter? More broadly, as we shake our heads and think, “How can these kids behave like this?” are we missing subtleties in the design of our technologies that reward cruelty through mob acceptance? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that this video is not an anomaly among teenagers, and I know that misogynistic themes are very common in shadowy regions of social media that many parents may not know exist.

Of course, there is another way to look at incidents like Steubenville. Perhaps this kind of case is no more common than it was twenty years ago; and thanks to social media, we are able as a whole society to confront these incidents more frankly and to demand both justice and solutions. It is hard not to feel, though, that human depravity is lately on the rise. Perhaps this perception is an illusion itself, one borne of the constancy of our communications technology and, hence, the universal competition for attention.

We hope, of course, that officials in Ohio are able to parse the gibberish from the evidence, that the facts of this case will see justice served, and that above all, the girl in question receive whatever support, comfort, and help she needs. But whether the dumb kid in the leaked video is implicating himself in an attack or just shooting his mouth off, the confusion I believe should serve as instructive in this utopian, free-speech bonanza of the digital age — that words have a tendency to correspond to actions, if not by the speaker, then by somebody who’s listening.

Turning Down the Noise

One of the things I truly love about the Internet’s influence on human psychology is that there seems to be something about the act of typing publicly in real-time that makes so many of us into armchair experts on just about any subject we choose. This is particularly striking when it comes to complex legal matters, and if you are unfortunate enough to find yourself engaged in a “discussion” about copyright, you will invariably encounter invocations of the Constitution and proclamations of reason from people who are not legal professionals of any kind, let alone intellectual property law. Whenever I hear someone use the terms “copyright maximalist” or “copyright monopoly,” it reminds me of social conservatives who use the term “activist judges” to sweep away some legal principle that doesn’t square with their personal agendas.

Several months ago, Registrar of Copyrights Maria Pallante made a statement in an interview that was not only innocuous, but also happened to be correct. She said that “Copyright is for the author first and the nation second.” Silicon Valley’s Representative Zoe Lofgren, however, decided to take Pallante to task in a Congressional hearing; and TechDirt editor Mike Masnick got his righteous knickers in a twist over the whole non-issue. Masnick posted several articles blasting Pallante and provoking reader comments from some of the great armchair, Constitutional scholars of our times (no doubt, you’d know them by their avatars). One of these experts posed the following question, which is probably more telling than any of the ham-handed legal opinions put forth: “In this climate, is it still a realistic expectation to ask the public to allow artists to be full time artists?” If I read that statement out of context, I’d assume it came from a conservative politician who transparently disapproves of the NEA, and opaquely hates all us wierdo, liberal, artsy elitists. In other words, “Get a real job. You can write books, make movies, compose music as a hobby.” And, yes, this is the vision of technocrats and their supporters.

I try very hard not to presume any more legal expertise than the average citizen who hasn’t been to law school. As an exercise in logic, however, I find it impossible to see how the one-sentence clause in the Constitution on copyright could function in any other way than that described by Pallante — i.e. that creative work won’t benefit the public until it first benefits the creator(s); and both history and the rulings of numerous courts bear this out. But don’t take my word for it.

For anyone who is truly interested in dispassionate, professional, and well-written analysis of copyright fundamentals, it is hard to find a better source than Terry Hart, a young lawyer with a specialty in intellectual property law, who hosts the blog Copyhype, named by the ABA Journal as one of the top 100 legal blogs in the U.S. For example, I recommend Terry’s recent post on this this no-so-controversial statement by Maria Pallante.

People like Representative Lofgren and Mike Masnick have an axe to grind for a specific industry, and people like me and others who speak out from the point of view of creators can get more than a little emotional, especially when we encounter sentiments like the one above asking whether the “public should allow” us to make creative work a profession. So, I think it’s important, and frankly calming, to step away from the shouting and read the work of someone like Terry from time to time.

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