Compare & Contrast

Here’s one way the Web is being used by a group of young artists in collaboration with one of the “evil”  big media companies:

backstory 1

 MTVu created a challenge campaign called “Against Our Will,” asking students to submit creative concepts to highlight the problems of modern-day slavery.  The winning entry came from students at James Madison university and grew into an online, multi-media project called The Backstory, combining music, interpretive dance, story-telling, and an RPG-style interface to help viewers understand various human trafficking scenarios that could be happening in their communities. Collaborators on the project include rapper Talib Kweli and dancers from Ailey II, with choreography by Troy Powell and music by Kenna.

Backstory DanceI watched several of the pieces on The Backstory, and there really is something extraordinary that takes place when a concept or message is synthesized through artistic media.  I already pay attention to trafficking stories on a regular basis and have read or watched plenty of documentary video or news segments that convey real and horrific anecdotes about the victims of modern slavery; but seeing the familiar themes transformed into a shadowplay expressed by these exceptional dancers creates a tension between beauty and horror that leaves a unique and lasting impression. It’s not that we should turn away from the cold facts of the documentary forms, but I do think our psyches have natural defenses against staring too long into the real face of depravity; and one thing that art does so well is to build new routes past these defenses to reach our empathic instinct for response.

So, this is what artists do when they decide to lend their talents to fight for freedom — not a perceived, complacent, or academic idea of freedom, but real freedom from real bondage, real abuse, and real murder.  By contrast, it seems to me that too many self-appointed “defenders of the Web” presume to bestow upon every hacker and content exploiter the honorific titles freedom fighter, innovator, or cultural game changer.  The hypocrisy would be funny if it weren’t so serious.

Presently, people like David Lowery, Ellen Seidler, and Chris Castle are focused on mainstream advertisers whose banner ads appear on torrent and other infringing sites, and this is certainly an important issue.  But in the contextual question at to whether or not these sites are about freedom and culture, or using the Web to its best purposes, let’s take a look at what appears to be the majority of advertising on some top torrents.

Kickass KingsHere’s Kickass Torrents, which is listed in the #3 spot by TorrentFreak among the 10 Most Popular of 2012.  Of course, #2 Torrentz is actually a meta-search site, making Kickass the functional #2 behind The Pirate Bay, which supposedly has over two billion page views per month. I purposely chose a page for downloading Oscar winner The King’s Speech, picking a film a little more high-brow than the most popular stuff just to see if it has any effect on ad service; but the reality is that most of what appears on any page on Kickass will be a banner that looks like this:

KA BANNER

It’s one variation or another on themes designed to titillate the 18-24 year-old male, which is the majority demographic using torrents.  The link in the middle reads:  10 Disgraceful Intimate Acts 87% of Girls Regularly Do!

So, just to review before we go any further, The Backstory is just one example of how artists will use the Web to fight the exploitation of women, whereas I’m about ten seconds into my browsing Kickass Torrents before being invited to think of women as 87% sluts.  But where does this ad lead?

If you click on the link, you won’t actually find any research on women who regularly do something “disgraceful and intimate,” but you will be about two clicks away in almost any direction from landing within the reach of a snake-oil business called The Tao of Badass.  This is a kind of self-help program comprised of books, DVDs, a blog, etc. that claim to teach any man how to get women — not how to have a better relationship or find love, just how to get lots and lots of really hot women in the sack using the “techniques” you can only learn from The Tao of Badass.

tao of badass

Now, it’s a given that the majority of torrent users won’t click on any of these banners, but out of let’s say a very conservative three billion page views per quarter, that one half of one percent are men desperate enough to believe they can learn techniques to become real ladykillers.  That’s 15 million potential customers for Tao of Badass.  And let’s say only one percent of these suckers buy the 10 DVD set for the “discount” rate of $47.  That would be over $7 million in sales for Badass Ventures, Inc. based in San Carlos, CA.

What’s interesting about the mechanics here is that Tao of Badass is not an overt advertiser on the pages of Kickass Torrents.  It just happens to be the default recipient of the lion’s share of generically produced house-ad traffic.  And guess whose books and videos are not available for free download on the Kickass sites? Smell funny in here yet?

But let’s move on to an even more relevant contrast to The Backstory…

MLP Asian

Welcome to The Pirate Bay, where a large portion of the ads are like this one:  We Got Asian Schoolgirls, in this case appearing next to a list of episodes of My Little Pony. Now, I understand that particular show isn’t just for little girls, but we’ll leave the phenomenon of the Brony for another conversation. Suffice to say that these ads generally lead to one version or another of a page promoting a “dating service,” which is generally not about dating so much as international matchmaking.  These services connect western men with women in Asia, Russia, Ukraine, etc. So, far, the reviews on these services seem mixed.  I haven’t seen any reports connecting these legal (if a little sleazy) matchmaking services with sex tourism, which is a different enterprise known to involve trafficked sex workers.

At worst, it seems that these sites and services are generally designed to string men along while extracting as much money as possible from them. It doesn’t appear that many happy marriages come about in this way.  And here’s a fun example that you have to love:  the top service and the one most likely to be linked to The Pirate Bay, Anastasia Date, supposedly charges up to $8 per email between the user and the apparently interested woman on the other side of the world.

So, let’s review again. . .

The Pirate Bay provides stolen, free media that users are too cheap to pay for, but  the site is littered with ads designed to entice some of those users to cough up eight bucks an email to correspond with Olga in Odessa, who might actually be Brad in Bangor, Maine (Bangor is where Anastasia International, Inc. is located).  Is it getting creepy in here, or is it just me?

There is no question the Web is very often used as a tool to exercise free expression in unprecedented ways and from nearly any voice.  But when the leaders of that industry presume to claim that our criticism of sites like Kickass Torrents or The Pirate Bay is tantamount to chilling the same right of speech being exercised by the artists behind a project like The Backstory, how does all reason not veer into the abyss of ordinary ignorance?

Think File Sharing is Sticking it to The Man? Really?

puppetshareBack in the Napster days, I had an assistant named Greg, who remains one of the sweetest guys I’ve ever been lucky enough to call a friend. I remember giving him a hard time one afternoon when I realized he was using the file sharing app to download music.  With a slightly self-aware grin he said to me, “Yeah, but you gotta stick it to The Man,” to which I replied, “Greg, if I can teach you anything, it’s that Mick Jagger is not The Man.”

Of course, many of us know the history of events that unfolded since that time, and I would certainly be among those who say that mistakes made by the recording industry were profoundly unhelpful in the process of migrating entertainment into the digital age.  But that doesn’t entirely explain or excuse the dysfunction which still blinds “file sharers” to the fact that the people being harmed by piracy are indeed the artists and the skilled workers who support those artists.

I spent nearly 20 years providing freelance, creative services in the often bizarre and obfuscating lingo of corporate communications, which is to say I’ve listened to a lot of bullshit.  And when it comes to the various ways people talk about digital copyright infringement, the amount of bullshit is of Augean proportions.  First clue:  when corporate agents describe something that’s really very simple in terms that make it sound visionary, you’re wading knee-deep into it. Thankfully, independent musician David Lowery has brought a bulldozer to the party called The Trichordist.

Lowery of the bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, co-founded this artists’ rights blog, which has a solid track record for getting to the point.  For instance, this week, the site posted a list of 50 major advertisers who have ads appearing on websites whose sole enterprise is unlicensed access to entertainment media (i.e. “dedicated to infringement”).  Aside from the fact that it’s just plain surreal to see Tom Waits “sponsored” by an ad for WeightWatchers, it takes about half a caffeinated brain cell to recognize that the entire business model is what we normally call wrong.  I know this is a word that makes many digital age millennials uncomfortable, but that’s just too bad because this is big boy school, and Professor Lowery is saying something very serious, but also very easy to understand. This is about large, American corporations supporting and legitimizing the exploitation of American workers.

I’ll say it again without equivocation. These sites are in the business of exploiting workers. Period. Don’t let’s get distracted by the fact that copies of files don’t cost anything to produce or distribute or that you think WMG is evil or you don’t like the RIAA.  That’s all that bullshit again, and it has nothing to do with the way in which these sites generate revenue. All that “free” media represent hours or years or even decades of labor, either by one person or by hundreds of people. This labor is very often done for compensation that is paid incrementally after the work is complete — sometimes years after in the case of, say, a screenwriter whose residuals over a decade might represent a portion of her income.

Fortunately, The Trichordist has bulldozed past the moral ambiguity of the user, the self-serving and vague politics of the Web industry, and the functional roadblocks of the technologists right to the money that goes into the pockets of the exploiters. It’s AT&T, it’s Ford, it’s American Express, it’s CitiBank, and so on. This is a B2B problem. Money from American businesses is supporting offshore, illegal operations that exploit American workers in other businesses.  It really doesn’t get more basic than that.

I know my friend at The Cynical Musician would agree that exploiting labor without permission or compensation is what we call slavery, so if we buy fair-trade goods or think twice about who assembles our iPods, we shouldn’t pat ourselves on the backs if we’re also regular users of these sites. The techno-utopians will say, “There are always winners and losers through transformation.” That’s fine, I guess, but then let’s stop all the prattle about new models, shall we? There’s nothing new about theft or exploitation; they are as old as human history and they reek, whether the tools of the exploiters are guns, whips, or keyboards. Moreover, the end-game in this trend is a dilution of the value of the individual voice of the creator, who will (and we’ve already seen this happen) become more dependent on corporate patronage to make a living.  That means art whose primary purpose is to support a brand, which is a functional, if not a legal, limit on free speech.

I would challenge the defender of “file sharing” to read the list on The Trichordist site and convince himself that by downloading unlicensed media he’s “sticking it to The Man.” The truth is the ardent file sharer is a corporate puppet that has no idea which companies are pulling its strings.

On Being a Luddite

Carriage HouseIf you say anything publicly critical of the Internet, there’s a good chance some technobrat on Twitter will call you a Luddite.  The simple irony is that the word Luddite in this case is being misused, which is something the would-be accuser might discover for himself were he to look it up on the Internet.  In this excellent article on Smithsonian’s website, for example, Richard Conniff confirms that we critics of Web utopianism are indeed following in the tradition of the original Luddites, who were highly proficient users of the machines they destroyed but critical of how those machines could be used to ill purpose by powerful interests.  If anything, the Luddite protest in 1811 by English textile-workers has more kinship with the spirit of Occupy Wall Street (coincidentally of 2011) than with technophobia.

Of course, it is in the nature of the English language for word meanings to change with use, so there’s nothing linguistically wrong with calling someone a Luddite who you believe to be anti-technology.  But the revisionist history inherent in this particular semantic shift is relevant because there is a great deal wrong with both the intent and the implications of this over-used and unexamined pejorative.

To scrutinize technologies from a broad perspective, including matters of law and policy, is anything but an endeavor toward an anti-progress agenda. To the contrary, policy sometimes promotes technological advancement to the scorn of one set of interests or constrains it to the frustration of another.  One need look no further than the brewing battle over gun regulation to see this in action right now. A high-capacity magazine is certainly a technological upgrade;  but to some Americans, it is a useless improvement except in the hands of professional soldiers or mass murderers, while to other Americans, access to this technology is a matter of civil liberty.  We see this all the time:  one man’s freedom is another’s industry run amok.  Either way, it’s a safe bet that no matter what policy emerges, neither position will be wholly satisfied.  Welcome to democracy.

A glance at the mundane technologies around us reveals that the advancement and adoption of progress almost always requires a balance among free enterprise, civil liberty, and regulatory policy.  Even something as innocuous as the CF lightbulb has raised libertarian hackles to near incandescence (yes, I went there) over the right to use whatever bulbs they want; but it’s a given that the vacuum filament variety will soon be phased out as a matter of both personal habit and public policy.  When color television was ready for mass consumption, the federal government instituted the standard we know as NTSC, which required the color signal transmit in a manner that owners of black and white TVs could receive it.  This was never the best quality the technology could have delivered — some engineers call it Never Twice Same Color — but it is an example of public policy constraining technology in order to avoid disenfranchising citizens from news and information based solely on their financial means. In case you’re just tuning in, that’s the government protecting free speech and access to it by keeping the technologists in check.

I was thinking about this balancing act while working on an old carriage house that sits on the property where I live.  As far as records show, this house belonged primarily to village doctors beginning in the early 19th century and up to at least the late 1960s, so  the presence of the carriage house is explained by the fact that its early, physician owners made house calls by horse and buggy.

Taking care of historic structures is an exercise in both the practical and the abstract. One must simultaneously consider past, present, and future in a way that is neither simple nor purely academic and sentimental. Fortunately for me, my best friend Craig is a professional conservator who works on historic buildings for the National Park Service; so unfortunately for him, this means I get his help wrangling with my old structures in exchange for beer.

Historic building conservators deal with philosophical questions as much as with the technical means of preservation; and the perennial question seems to be one of value (i.e. why something is preserved in the first place).  “Preserving old buildings for the sake of sentiment alone,” Craig says, “is like advocating technological progress solely for the sake of making something new.”  An apropos simile in this context.  What we preserve of the past implies the question of what we protect from the future. There is nothing inherently anti-progress about this question unless progress must exclusively mean to leap without looking.

Lining the ceiling of the ground floor of the carriage house are a number of ceramic knobs that were used in a wiring system known as Knob & Tube, outdated by the turn of the 20th century but still found in active use in some historic homes, much to the frustration of new buyers. It occurs to me that building code makes a pretty good example of public policy working hand-in-glove with technological advancement. K&T WiringWhile it isn’t a perfect system, the principle applies that soon after a more efficient, safer, better way to do something emerges, it becomes mandated by law. At the same time, we continue to learn by not entirely erasing the systems and structures that tell the stories of the past.

The last time I was personally called a Luddite was in reaction to my recent post about my kids and online piracy.  This is fairly typical of the techno-utopian response to those of us who believe systems like copyright remain something more than outdated ideas waiting to die like K&T wiring.  The more complex irony in this familiar ad hominem is that, just like puzzling the maintenance of a 150-year-old barn, we contemporary “Luddites” are actually taking a much more expansive view of the future than our detractors.  Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that, like our namesakes of 1811, we filmmakers, musicians, photographers, authors, designers, etc. are expert users of the technologies we’re not afraid to criticize.

Workspace of a Technophobe
Workspace of a Technophobe