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Hollywood should just…

In 1982, then president of the MPAA Jack Valenti said something really stupid; and today, pro-piracy pundits, some who weren’t even alive in 1982, rely heavily on the late man’s hyperbole to drive a wedge between creators and fans.  Valenti said in testimony before Congress, “The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.” It is clearly ridiculous to compare a machine that records and plays video tape to a serial killer, so Jack really left those of us who care about creator rights holding the PR bag with his choice of words.  But the real reason this quote is usually trotted out, as it is here in this piece from MIT Technology Review, is that Valenti was ostensibly wrong — that the VCR did not harm, and might even have helped, the motion picture business. This half-true assessment is then used as a segue to assert that piracy is the same thing, that Hollywood should just embrace yet another phase in technological evolution, adapt to it, and reap the benefits.

The fear that the somewhat cumbersome and visually unappealing VHS recorder would threaten the profitable distribution of mainstream motion pictures and television was clearly a misjudgment; but the error is a common one that occurs when just about anybody attempts to predict future human behavior based on the availability of a new technology. The earliest predictions of a “paperless society” as we all got online were soon punctuated by a substantial increase in printing. Likewise, VHS proved to be an opportunity as a new line of distribution rather than a threat as a means of amateur reproduction.

While tech-industry pundits and academics sneer at Valenti, they simultaneously presume to dabble in the same kind of prophecy, albeit regarding a technology and kind of consumerism that bears no resemblance to the era of the VCR, and about which we have more than a decade’s worth of evidence of its negative effects on the music industry. The prognostication is inherent in a worn-out refrain paraphrased thus: “The (blank) industry could make media piracy irrelevant if it simply made content more affordably and more flexibly available worldwide.”  And in a recent spate of scribblings, that blank is filled with the word Hollywood. Aside from the fact that the assertion sounds sillier every day against a backdrop of rapidly growing, legal distribution models, it also happens to be fundamentally obnoxious.

On the purely practical and realistic side, we have the final episode of Breaking Bad, which is reported to have been downloaded illegally about three million times. This is a head-scratcher for a show that is available for streaming via Netflix, which costs .26 cents a day.  But even if that were not possible, even if the filmed entertainment business were not very rapidly transforming to achieve symbiosis with viewer habits, there is something very negative about the cultural attitude fostered by these editorials and white papers; and this is that the oft-repeated imperative that creators must accept and adapt contains an implication that people have a right to entertainment.

Absent a social contract that governs transactional relationships, we don’t have a right to a damn thing.  I’m in the camp that believes every citizen in my country has a right to healthcare, but not to the extent that we can compel medical professionals to provide that care if we cannot also maintain a system that compensates them for their labor and expertise.  So, unless we’re envisioning a world in which very talented slaves are forced to make music, write books, or produce motion pictures, there is no humane way to insist that any creator or group of creators must furnish their products on demand, according to our whims and/or for free.

If I were to call up a contemporary author I like, let’s take Audrey Niffenegger who wrote The Time Traveler’s Wife, and say, “Audrey, I hear you’re writing a new novel.  I really love your work.  How about sending me the first fifty or so pages so I can check ‘em out and share them online on my blog?” When she refuses, shall I say that she’s not keeping up with technological reality?  That it costs her nothing to send me her pages digitally?  That I’m a really big fan and will promote her work through social media? In such a scenario, I’d deservedly find myself on the receiving end of a restraining order, but this kind of behavior is more or less what the pro-piracy crowd have been preaching to a whole generation of viewers and fans.

If a lone creator like an author has the right to distribute a work when she’s good and ready, and by whatever channels she chooses, then the same right applies to a limited group of creators, as in the case of those who make filmed entertainment. It’s too easy to lump all motion picture endeavors into a single entity called Hollywood, and then propose what that single entity ought to with itself.  And, of course, “Hollywood” has nothing to do per se with the diversity of films and shows out there, or with the ways in which these projects are produced or distributed.  Yet, no matter what methods apply, whether it’s a $100 million investment in a blockbuster or a $10,000 crowd-funded little movie, nobody has the right to say, “Give it to us now, or we’re just going to steal it.” More to the point, it is still possible that the long-term result of this attitude will be an even more rapid decline in professional film production than we have seen in music.  I say this because the bottom line is that the most popular programs and films are, not surprisingly, the most popular to download illegally; and these films and shows are bloody expensive to make.

Of course, underlying these assertions by piracy’s advocates are buzz-worthy, anecdotal observations by show creators and show-runners that illegal downloading has been beneficial to their programs, at least with regard to promotion.  This includes, most recently Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, who admits piracy has helped attract new fans to the series itself, and this echoes previously publicized sentiments from executives working on HBO’s Game of Thrones.  I think it goes without saying that free access to programs will spawn new fans and generate more buzz, but whether or not this will translate into supporting models that will sustain production of these shows is far from certain.  If the music industry is any indication, the answer is it won’t be pretty.  Meanwhile, as posted on this blog, a September study of the wealthiest regions of the world shows that piracy has only increased in concert with the availability of affordable, streaming options.  This suggests to me that there is a cultural factor at play, that there exists a sense of entitlement, a perceived right to entertainment.  And since we’re mucking about with predictions, I’m going to predict that no good can come of that conviction.

Headless in the Garden – Facebook & Free Speech

It turns out this is Free Speech Week, although I doubt this fact had anything to do with the timing of Facebook’s recent dustup over its decision to allow videos of beheadings on its pages. On Monday, it was reported that executives at Facebook had decided to lift a previously imposed ban on sharing videos that depict actual beheadings committed by terrorists and gangsters. The company almost immediately reversed this decision in response to what appears to have been universal revulsion by users. Of course, our disgust doesn’t mean sharing these videos is not a matter of free speech, but neither is it a First Amendment issue simply because Facebook says it is.  Regardless, the story raises some of the cultural and/or legal questions inherent in our relationship to social media, so it’s an interesting topic after we all agree that almost none of us wishes to see, let alone have our kids stumble upon, a video of someone being decapitated.

The first question it seems we grapple with is whether the company that owns a site like Facebook does or does not bear responsibility for the content we users post on its walls. In principle, if the site establishes any rules governing content at all — and they wouldn’t get far in most countries if they didn’t — then the very existence of said rules implies responsibility.  Facebook, for instance, does not allow nudity to be posted, and the reason is obvious; there are simply too many ways to run afoul of existing laws pertaining to obscenity or to sexuality and minors. Every teenager posting a naked selfie would be a legal entanglement for the company. Yet, it’s easy to wonder why it matters when minors are a mouseclick away from being exposed to every kind of pornography outside the walled garden of Facebook.  While executives at the company are not entirely wrong that protecting kids from exposure to horrific images is a job for parents, our voluntary presence and activity on the site is a bit like entering a shopping mall where the landlords are allowed to turn our interaction into revenue.  As such, it isn’t really public space.  If I put a bunch of violently offensive posters on the walls in my local shopping center, I could be arrested; but the mall owners could easily be sued if they chose to leave the posters up on the grounds that I was exercising my right of free expression.  This argument would never fly in physical space, and it doesn’t appear to work so well in virtual space either.

The attitude of most site owners tends toward a laissez faire approach to content shared or created by users; and this is legitimately understandable given the slippery nature of trying to define protected vs. restricted speech.  Still, I suspect the primary motivations are financial rather than ideological.  When one is in the business of monetizing traffic, it’s simply easier not to care what drives that traffic.  But when thousands or millions of users dog-pile onto some content or activity that is truly depraved, we do have to decide whether we’re okay with allowing the walled gardens of social media to become new Coliseums of grotesque spectacle.  From anecdotal observation, it seems most users are not okay with this and that they do want to hold site owners accountable.   When Caroline Criado-Perez campaigned in the U.K. for Jane Austen to appear on British bank notes, she received  a deluge of death and rape threats via Twitter. The company was ultimately forced to respond to public demand for greater capacity to report and mitigate abuses through the social network.

With regard to the decapitation videos, Facebook tried to play the pubic service card, claiming that people were sharing a particular beheading video “in order to condemn it, but one must ask to what end?  So we can put those pro-beheading folks in their place?  There is a persistent conceit that the Internet brings us realities from around the world that traditional news media does not deliver and that we are thus able to confront hard truths head-on and address them. Sometimes, this is the case, but often it’s just bullshit.  Nothing, for example, will happen as a result of 20,000 or 200,000 people watching a video of a gangster or a terrorist beheading someone except that a majority of viewers will wish they hadn’t seen it, and a small number of viewers  will anesthetize their senses to a medieval form of murder.  What possible social value would Facebook’s perhaps-too-insulated executives imagine coming from allowing these videos?  What is anyone meant to learn that would manifest as some action we might take?  Absent a good answer to those questions, one must conclude that the motivation is spectacle itself.

Certainly I believe free speech is the most sacred right to be preserved in a free society, and in order to protect this right, most of us understand that we must defend it absolutely even for expressions we find offensive.  It seems, however, that those who presume to lead in the digital age would expand this principle to include all transactions made through these technologies, even when there is technically no speaker and nothing being said.  This is perhaps a byproduct of labeling all user-provided substance with the generic content.  A rape-threat tweet or a poem are the same thing, measured only by the attention they attract.  It is comforting to see that plenty of so-called users have not quite bought this rationale.  So, Happy Free Speech Week!

Are Americans Dumber in the Information Age?

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders. … The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip.
– Ronald Reagan, The Guardian, 1989

The knowledge and power of the Information Age will be within reach not just of the few, but of every classroom, every library, every child. 
– Bill Clinton, Second Inaugural Address —

Remember the promise?  The most hardscrabble kid in America (in the world) will be able to reshape her destiny with the wealth of knowledge that will be freely available to her through the Internet. Tyrants will melt in the sunlight of so much information that every citizen will carry in the palm of his hand. Prosperity will be enjoyed by more people in more places than ever before.  And despite a great deal of statistical and anecdotal evidence to the contrary, technologists are still selling this same message.

CISCO currently runs a commercial about the near future of interconnectivity, envisioning a world that moves like a well-tailored suit to accommodate every human need or whim  — a place where an ambulance tells traffic lights to turn green en route to a hospital. How do we not raise an eyebrow at this image in particular while the US government was only recently shut down because we can’t all agree that every citizen has the right to be in that ambulance? How is it that we are more (or at least as) divided on so many basic issues?  Doesn’t everybody have the Internet? Yes. And unfortunately, it tells everyone exactly what he wants to hear.

About a week ago, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released the results of a two-year study that tested thousands of adults in 23 countries on basic skills in literacy, math, and use of technology.  Americans scored very poorly for a highly-developed nation, especially in the tech and math departments. Yellow journalists and humorists couldn’t resist the urge to offer variations on Americans being the dumbest people on Earth, but I like this more sober assessment by Sadhbh Walshe, writing for The Guardian, in which she focuses on wealth inequality as a very likely culprit in America’s score.  It’s really no surprise that people with money can afford better educations and, therefore, do better in life and continue to be people with money, who raise kids who will get better educations.  Ditto the cycle of poverty, poor education, and continued poverty for a growing number of Americans.

But what happened to the expectation that the Internet would help universalize education, or at least fill in the gaps for those less privileged?  We’ve had a whole generation grow up appended to these devices and their applications.  So, why do things seem to be getting worse, not only in education itself, but also with regard to overall prosperity? The internet industry will go to great lengths to protect the sanctity of the web from even the most imaginary threats to its design as a never-ending and unregulated bazaar, but the dreamy images in the advertising are a stark contrast with real human experience.  We buy the pitch about a 15-year-old girl in the slums of Detroit looking up astronomy data and becoming head of NASA, but we ignore the more typical reality that thousands of 15-year-old girls in middle-class suburbia are getting bullied online or being pressured to snap a few naked “selfies” or more likely just using these technologies to attend to the same, not-so-educational, matters that have long been the purview of teenage girls.  Meanwhile, that girl in the slums of Detroit has yet to benefit in any tangible way from the expansion of all this so-called innovation that, by nearly every measure, only seems to feed the economic cancer of our age — wealth consolidation.

In his new book, Who Owns the Future, Jaron Lanier compares the mortgage-backed securities crisis and media piracy in order to draw attention to the cultural trend that wants to tear down systems — Lanier calls these levees — claimed by one group or another to be barriers to prosperity.  “The Wall Street mogul and the young Pirate Party voter sang the same song,” writes Lanier. “All must be made fluid.  Even victims often cheered at the misfortunes of people who were similar to them.” The design of the digital age leads to wealth consolidation, and not even by capitalists like those of the early 20th century, who at least built infrastructure, but by hucksters who bundle worthless debts into phony securities or who trade in trafficking your family photos or an artist’s work without permission or payment.

When it comes to addressing the ill-effects of digital technology — whether it’s about media piracy or rape threats against a journalist or just the general diffusion of bad information — academics, lawyers, and hacktivists rush to the defense of the systems and their designs. Thus the conversation remains theoretical and cold while we continue to ignore the flesh-and-blood realities of everyday life.