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Lowery Writes Open Letter to Artists

On the heels of the YouTube Music Awards, David Lowery, on his site The Trichordist, calls on artists to hold YouTube accountable for some of the content it allows on its site.  In particular, Lowery makes the point that it is young kids who tend to use YouTube for music more than almost any other service, and that for this reason alone, it’s worth addressing the monetization of rape videos, other violence against women, beheadings, hate group and terrorist recruitment videos, and animal torture videos.  By way of example, Lowery writes, “Would an artist host the Grammys if The Recording Academy  were in the business of distributing cat kicking videos? (That would never get past CBS’s standards and practices)”

As stated in my recent piece about Facebook briefly allowing the same beheading video Lowery refers to as still available on YouTube, users don’t seem to buy the First Amendment argument being made by internet companies eager to leave this kind of content on their pages. Artists have a long tradition of holding corporations accountable for this type of endorsement or profiteering; we’ll see who responds to Lowery’s plea.

So Full of Schmidt

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been rightly taken to task in this Vanity Fair article by Alyssa Bereznak for his recent declaration of outrage that the NSA has been spying on his company.  The collective spit-take could be heard clearly around the blogosphere.  Despite Schmidt’s own efforts to keep his private life private, the CEO is among the leading voices who will argue that your business is his business.  After all, if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t worry that Google might scan the contents of your GMail and try to match that up with some advertising or . . . whatever.  I’ve said it, and won’t stop saying it:  be as paranoid as you like about government surveillance, but ignoring corporate surveillance is unalloyed madness. Stay tuned for the military/information complex.

Tim Kreider is spot-on with “Slaves” OpEd

Author and cartoonist Tim Kreider neatly and wryly sums up everything you need to know about what’s wrong with the digital-age economy in this editorial that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times.  Kreider covers many bases, including a nod to the oft-overlooked factor in the economic calculus of the male author — that money is merely the conduit between the work of writing and getting a date.  So, this is just another aspect of real life that “new-model” cultists absolutely don’t understand.

In all seriousness, though, anybody who works professionally doing anything should read this OpEd, not merely for what it says about the devaluation of the creative worker, but for what it implies about the devaluation of all human endeavor.   What Kreider is really calling attention to is how the digital age has normalized the expectation that he, or any other artist, should be happy to work for free.  And it is that cultural shift that ought to concern everyone because the free-labor attitude may be coming to a job near you.

“Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again.”