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Pirate Movement is Dead, Long Live the Cause?

So, I stumbled across this TorrentFreak post by The Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde, in which he not only concedes that the “pirate movement” is dead but also exhorts the faithful to get over it and find new ways to further the “cause.”  Writes Sunde:

You’ve all heard it. The “pirate movement” is dead, diminishing and what not. But ignore that. What are the causes that we talk about here? Freedom of information, freedom of speech, surveillance, state corruption, corporate overlords, control of our infrastructure, the right to access education and culture, plenty. Are these discussions dead? No. But are we moving anywhere with them? I’m afraid not.

I’ll stop short of saying The Pirate Bay is to any of these causes as the Weather Underground was to the anti-war movement, but only because the Swedish trio didn’t set off any bombs.   My colleagues and I talk a lot about the casualties of piracy — the authors and artists, the labor force that supports creative works, the macro-economic losses, and the folly of rationalization posing as reason — but Sunde raises an interesting point that is usually a parenthetical note in these conversations.  And that’s the belittling of otherwise perfectly good causes worthy of real energy and attention.

Of course, each of the issues to which Sunde refers must be defined in order to give any movement direction other than centripetal griping; but that delta notwithstanding, if Sunde and his fans are indeed committed to any of his stated concerns, perhaps the post-mortem assessment on the “movement” ought to begin with the premise that the “service” provided by The Pirate Bay and similar sites is not anything like a foundation for social change. Forget that digital theft of popular media is illegal, immoral, and rude; it’s also far too pedestrian to serve as a catalyst for political action that would effectively contend with a thorny problem like surveillance or ascend such lofty heights as universal education.

In the past, I’ve made snarky statements like this:  some American teenager illegally downloading a Thor movie is not how one speaks truth to power.  But there’s a second part to this, which is the potential damage to political will and intelligence that would occur if millions of young people actually think otherwise.  What a fabulous way to breed a namby-pamby generation of whiners that no corporate or government power would ever have to take seriously.  Fortunately, I don’t really think the millions of committed users of pirate sites around the world ascribe that kind of significance to the act. Yes, Sunde paid lip service to this idealism in defense of TPB; and the bizarrely convoluted Rick Falkvinge founded a whole pirate party; and a smattering of followers buzzed about for a bit. But then, people can make a religion out of an old gym sock and a kazoo given the right conditions. In what way could the “movement” aspect of piracy not be DOA?  Writes Sunde:

“So fuck the ‘pirate movement’. Rename it, re-brand it, do whatever you want. Just fucking don’t be a pirate. Be something more awesome. Be a world citizen that cares about the same topics. Join other parties and make them understand the topics at hand. Infiltrate them. Cooperate and have people join all the parties in your nation, make sure they all agree. Be a fucking undercover ninja for all I care. Just don’t sing songs about pirate booty, looting and shit.”

I don’t know, Peter, maybe media piracy is just about ripping people off, and political action on complex issues is something else? As such, I wonder who he is addressing in this post.  I’d love to read the mission statement for No-Longer-the-Pirate Movement 2.0, but it’s naive to think that millions of people who just want free stuff on their computers have ever been a political base.

Avanti popolo!

Is Speech Preserved by More Speech Alone? – Part I

“The more speech the merrier,” was the central argument made by Justice Scalia in writing the majority opinion on Citizens United, but that case suggests, at least to many of us, that the mechanism of the speech matters a great deal. Yes, in many ways, money can be speech; but at the same time, I think Scalia conjured an illusion of more, which obscures the practical reality that the SCOTUS ruling ultimately provides a bigger voice for a privileged minority.  So, what about speech delivered via the mechanisms of social media and other networked communications? Nobody can argue that there is more of it. But does placing too much emphasis on volume alone risk overlooking the complex, even occasionally painful, ways in which speech, as we define it in the U.S., is preserved?

“The value of intellectual freedom is far from self-evident,” writes George Packer in his New Yorker editorial Speech Crisis.  “It’s hardly natural to defend the rights of one person over the feelings of a group; to put up with all the trouble that comes with free minds and free expression; to stand beside the very people who repel you.” Even among free nations, the United States is unique in policy and in its sustained public support for the absoluteness of speech.  But as networked communications alter our relationship to speech, new social dynamics emerge that can produce as many new forms of censorship as new forms of expression.  Quoting Packer again, he cites Joel Simon thus:

“Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, argues in his book ‘The New Censorship’ that the explosion of data in digital media keeps us from seeing how extensively information is controlled. ‘Repression and violence against journalists is at record levels,’ he writes, ‘and press freedom is in decline.’”

Interestingly, Packer begins his article with the description of a brutal murder of a Bangladeshi blogger, but his main thesis is a warning against the pitfalls of self-censorship, even here in the tolerant United States. Quoting Packer again:

“But, in some ways, an even greater danger than violence or jail is the internal mute button known as self-censorship. Once it’s activated, governments and armed groups don’t have to bother with threats. Here self-censorship is on the rise out of people’s fear of being pilloried on social media. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has been masterful at creating an atmosphere in which there are no clear rules, so that intellectuals and artists stifle themselves in order not to run afoul of vague laws and even vaguer social pressure.”

Packer’s assertion that self-censorship is “on the rise out of people’s fear of being pilloried on social media” exemplifies why I would caution against overemphasizing volume of speech in order to insure its universality as a right.  Personally, I believe that only when we uphold the right of the minority speaker above the majority’s capacity to silence that speaker, is speech as a right actually sustained.  Yes, this means American Nazis were given permission to march through the Jewish Village of Skokie, and it means Fred Phelps repeatedly made a public performance out of disrespect for grieving military families.  But such examples, when filtered through populist media like Twitter, seem to confuse support of the minority voice with unwavering tolerance of the offensive; the two are not necessarily intertwined. The offensive can also be the silencing mob.

Take the chronic occurrence of rape and death themes that flare up like herpes on Twitter when a woman says something a particular group of men doesn’t like. Setting aside actual threats, which are already criminal, wishing for sexual assault upon someone is offensive yet protected speech.  We the majority of ordinary citizens must, in the name of speech, tolerate the minority of apes, who have nothing better to do than tweet “I hope somebody rapes you,” to Ashley Judd because she dissed their basketball team or Emma Watson because she commented on women’s rights. But while speech defendants rush to make this point clear in these instances, we don’t seem to pay much attention to the potential or actual self-censorship of the original speaker.   Naturally, if the speaker is a celebrity, she has resources that inoculate and empower her to speak back, but not every individual with something to say is so blessed; and one consequence of this round-the-clock, global speech-a-thon we call the Internet is that it can certainly make almost anyone famous or infamous for a day.  Thus, one of the pitfalls of placing too much faith in more speech as a preservative of speech istelf is that both the dynamics and the economics of social media foster new types of crowds and new types of minority speakers. And the only real difference between a crowd and a mob is whether you’re with it or against it.

Meanwhile, the notion of tolerance itself, the basic idea that the health of speech depends on allowing or even embracing unpalatable ideas, seems to be changing online and in our national dialogue.  Paradoxically, from quarters like academia, one hears the refrain of what sounds like a new orthodoxy of “tolerance,” which is of course a form of censorship.  More on that in Part II.

Like’s Labour’s Lost – Facebook Advertising

Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye,
Not uttered by based sale of chapmen’s tongues.

So, like, what’s a Like worth anyway?  I mean a Facebook Like.  Well, for starters, like, Facebook is valued at like more than 120 times its earnings, so, like, the concept “value” is like, y’know, hard to define. Likes are indeed currency, though good luck trying to figure out the exchange rate.  For most of us, a Like is just a casual, and usually literal, means of expressing appreciation among friends.  Like the new baby pics, Like that smart or funny comment you made, Like that you wished me good luck or Happy Birthday, and so on.  And while all that Liking does yield data for Facebook, which is fed into the box of dark magic that conjures what may or may not be useful market research in the social media age; Likes for business, organization, or cause promotion are another matter altogether.  And you know this because if you create a Facebook page for one of these things, Facebook will immediately let you know that you can broaden your exposure by paying for Facebook advertising.

There’s a classic advertiser’s quote, often attributed to David Ogilvy (though maybe not correctly), that says, “I know half my advertising budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half.”  Waste is the advertiser’s dilemma; nobody wants to spend money advertising to people who will never be customers, and the best traditional solutions to this have been based in demographics and broad market research, which trades in old-school likes (e.g. consumers who like football also like beer).   The advertiser of a sports car, for instance, can’t entirely avoid waste, but he can put commercials against programs known to be watched by his most likely customers based on market research.

The Internet is supposed to do better than that for advertisers. Rather than spray-and-pray sports car ads at men in a target demo, the hope has been that the advertiser can reach Steve, who is actively looking for a sports car right now. Much of the design of the Internet as we know it is built with an aim to achieve this goal and not whatever altruistic, social progress is being spun in the PR departments of social media giants.  One irony, to me anyway, is that I actually find Facebook to be a largely positive social network, which is not where it derives its market valuation; yet, I am very skeptical of its worth as an advertising network, which is where it derives market valuation.  I won’t lie:  I’ve enjoyed connecting with old friends, making new friends, keeping up with people, and kibitzing on Facebook; but I bet I’m not alone in saying that I am probably less brand aware today than I ever was in the days when I only had one screen in my life and a limited number of channels.

If anything, I find the obvious advertising on Facebook is either utterly missable or utterly obnoxious.  The only times ads have caught my attention on the network have been negative attention.  For instance, when Facebook tells me that a friend “Likes” a certain big corporation (e.g. Sam Likes Bank of America), it only attracts because I know it isn’t true, and I find myself wondering a) where Facebook gets the nerve to say this?  b) what idiot thinks this is good marketing for BofA? and c) what am I endorsing that I don’t know about?  Similarly, I’m sure we all notice that Facebook will very quickly feature ads for items we browsed online within minutes of said browsing, and maybe this is an effective sale closer sometimes, but certainly not if it’s an item we just bought. In this case, the ad just elicits a well-deserved sneer.

So, in the pursuit of “Steve,” that real customer, I often wonder whether these rather ham-handed efforts do not represent the new “waste” in advertising, particularly in light  of what has surely been lost in recent years, which is consumer relationships built on brand identity.  In the 1990s, advertisers were still very much talking about relationships, but today, it seems the word is engagement, meaning interactions through social media.  And believe me, I honestly think there are a million smart ways to build relationships through these platforms, but it’s not clear that there is much value to the Facebook Like.

The owner of a business, organization, or cause page on Facebook can purchase Likes through two mechanisms — one supposedly above board, the other not so much.  Paying for Facebook ads is the legit, and at least somewhat organic, way to attract valid, engaged interest in a page.  The not so kosher approach is to buy clicks through a third party that simply pays foreign labor in what are called “Click Farms” to sit and click on things at a rate of about $1 per 1000 clicks.  (I know, it’s a job that just screams innovation and prosperity, right?)  But this is how many a Facebook page acquires tens of thousands of Likes, which are less than worthless in the pursuit of engaged prospective customers, readers, or supporters of your cause.

Unfortunately, according to Derek Muller, creator and host of the YouTube science and tech series Veritasium, buying Facebook ads seems to generate roughly the same worthless pile of Likes as buying third-party Likes.  In fact, Muller explains that, based on the way Facebook algorithms test and then broaden the reach of posts in response to apparent engagement, having tens of thousands of bogus Likes actually reduces exposure to people who are legitimately interested in your page. The reason Muller gives for the Facebook ad buy attracting just as many fake Likes is that Click Farmers actually click on stuff for free (i.e. pages they haven’t been paid to click on) in order to hide their identities in the vast confusion of clicks throughout the network.  In short, so that nobody notices a sudden Like spike on one particular page from, say, the Philippines.  Muller doesn’t accuse Facebook of intentionally selling fake Likes, and this is probably fair; but I still wonder what a real Like is really worth.

I recommend watching the video.  Muller is very entertaining, and the whole series looks great.  Had I first seen it on Facebook, I like totally would have Liked it.