In Defense of (a little) Elitism

Imagine your diet will henceforth be determined by the tastes of a majority of American ten-year-olds.  This may sound as unlikely as it does unappetizing, but the prospect is not really all that different from the basis for at least one of the arguments of the copyleft crowd with regard to distributing creative content via the Web.  One assumption behind DIY culture seems to be that the best work is being systematically squashed by big media conglomerates, and that the level playing field of the Web will allow great art to emerge through the ultimate, democratic means — popularity supported by algorithms.  This theory has proven generally untrue for journalism, music, and publishing; and we’re now on the leading edge of its proving untrue for filmed entertainment.

Gavin Casleton, in this article shared on The Trichordist, sums up his observations about popularity combined with search algorithms thus:  “When you release the valve without well-tuned filters in place, you get what we have now:  muddy waters (not the artist, the metaphor).  You have tracks from seasoned artists like Radiohead distributed side by side with garbage (not the band, the metaphor), and you have transferred the burden and blessing of filtering from more official gatekeepers to the consumer….[but] when almost all new aggregators are adopting the algorithm that sorts results by Most Popular, you tend to end up with the same results.”

The apparent good in this digital-age model — that it is populist — is also its own weakness when we look at results in various media.  Most obviously, it doesn’t take more than a glance at the effects of extreme populism on journalism to realize that we now have news tailored to every taste — conservative, liberal, alternative, user-generated, subversive, and just plain wacko. No one can argue that the consumer isn’t “getting what he wants, and for free,” but the democratization of journalism has broadened the concept to include literally anyone with a computer.  As with Caselton’s Radiohead example, the best journalists in the world now swim in murky waters amid every crackpot, amateur netizen who considers himself a reporter.

Likewise, overemphasis on populism does not inherently produce the best art, either for the creators, the industry in question, or for society as a whole.  Anyone who has taken an art-history or literature class knows that many works immediately unpopular in their time are now among the canon of world masterpieces. The digital-age conceit (because the Web is an egomaniac’s paradise) is that the consumer always knows best; but this apparently fair and reasonable-sounding attitude may well be a greater culture killer than all the suits in Hollywood have ever been.  Why?  Because, just like solid news reporting, great art is not created by popular consent; to the contrary, it is often created in spite of it. When we shift the “burden and blessing” of gatekeeping from a finite number of professionals involved in the process to an infinite number of amateurs detached from the process, we are simultaneously creating work by committee in real-time while undermining the principle of investment in that work in the first place.

It is necessary that both artist and investor take risks. Sometimes art will succeed and money will fail, sometimes the other way around; and occasionally both will succeed or fail together.  Specifically, of course, I am thinking about my own industry and the fact that filmmaking, on a scale greater than other media, requires substantial investment and collaboration among professionals to produce damn good, let alone exceptional, work.

When the film director proposes some creative choice, he may meet resistance from any number of gatekeepers — from his most trusted Director of Photography to some guy in the studio marketing department who has never taken a decent vacation photo, let alone made a movie.  Ironically, though, the web-based, populist model would take what might be wrong with the marketing guy — that he thinks he knows the audience — and exacerbate the problem exponentially by insinuating audience taste even more invasively into the creative process.   Frankly, I’d rather deal with the marketing guy than an algorithm.

The consumer/audience is, of course, the ultimate arbiter of work once it has been produced, but history demonstrates that too much attention to the whims of viewers within the process is less likely to produce the next Citizen Kane so much as the next Fear Factor.

Pink Slime Culture

Originally published on the blog at Copyright Alliance, and the folks at Techdirt were insulted.

A few months ago, our Facebook walls were adorned with images of “pink slime,” the nickname given to Mechanically Separated Meat (MSM) that is now the subject of controversy. And although claims that pink slime is currently used in McDonald’s nuggets aren’t true, who isn’t disgusted by this stuff, no matter where it might be in the food supply?  I know I would certainly like to see a world that neither “needs” nor even allows pink slime to pose as food.  To me, this goo is emblematic of what happens when we allow unfettered corporate culture to lead society away from the most basic qualities that actually make us human — like eating chicken that is actually chicken.  Of course, the consumer plays a role, too, by demanding more volume for less money; and the U.S. obesity rate is, perhaps, an indicator as to how much emphasis is placed on quantity over quality.

Another thing that makes us human is the desire and ability to create and experience art in its many forms; and I would certainly like to envision a future where technology companies don’t do to art what the slime makers are doing to meat. Setting aside the arguments over economic harm done to the culture industries, we should consider how the work itself is being treated and what this means to our quality of life in general.

Among the reasons I believe companies like Google are so hostile not only to copyright but  to other regulations, is that their revenue and aspirations are anathema to distinguishing value (prime meat) from muck (MSM).  To the contrary, their business models are literally based on grinding up all content into a homogenous slurry in order to turn billions of clicks into billions of dollars.  To companies like Google, torrent sites, and many aggregators, everything goes into the big, digital grinder — a John Irving novel, some bits of junk journalism, a few stupid cat videos, Lawrence of Arabia, several thousand mail-order brides, a hard-news report from Central Africa, trafficked children, an episode of Downton Abbey, counterfeit pharmaceuticals, The White Album, years of scientific research, and of course several jiggling pounds of college chicks shaking their booties at webcams.  It’s all just ones and zeroes, right?  It’s digital pink slime.

This is where I think the schism between technologists and creators becomes ideological and sociological.  The serious artist is offended to have his work ground into mouse fodder, valued identically with the garbage; and the consumer should be offended, too.  The paradigm Google wants to foster is one that asserts that the booty-shakin’ college girl video has the same intrinsic value as the Emmy Award-winning TV show and that the value of either will only be determined by the number of hits each receives in cyberspace. Never mind that the financial value of those hits won’t be shared; this is a philosophical world view through the eyes of a computer. It is a machine’s sensibility, not a human being’s.

I believe our current economic woes are cultural, asserting short-term transactions over long-term production. Wealth consolidation has resulted from allowing many corporate interests to practice in an unregulated environment that grinds real value into virtual value, generating cash for the few and leaving the many empty-handed. And all under the guise of “freedom,” according to many industry leaders.  This is the same culture that produces junk securities backed by faulty mortgages, the same culture that wants to refute climate change, the same culture that ignores child labor making our products overseas, the same culture that makes pink slime, and the same culture that treats art as generic ones and zeroes.  At some point, the consumer has to realize that he’s going to get exactly what he pays for and decide just how much slime he’s willing to swallow.

Is copyright a threat to free speech?

This is a piece I wrote as a guest post for The Copyright Alliance. It got the folks over at TechDirt into a lather, but I suspect that’s because it wasn’t read or read very carefully by most of them.  

Not only have Copyright and Free Speech coexisted peacefully for the entire history of the Republic, but I would go so far as to suggest that Copyright is both literally and figuratively the money where our proverbial mouth is when it comes to the power of the First Amendment.  Think about it:  we are not only free to criticize our government, but if we’re really good at it (like Lewis Black), we’re entitled to make a pile of cash doing it.  How cool does that make America?  I say pretty cool, but there are those who seem to think the enterprise piece of the equation somehow diminishes the freedom part.  Au contraire.

If the U.S. is founded on one idea above all others, it’s that there is a link between free enterprise and freedom itself. Yes, this ideology has its flaws, and we’re still living through the economic woes of certain kinds of enterprise run amok; but let’s not throw out the baby with the bankers just yet. I believe it is no accident that we grant special rights of enterprise to those who exercise free speech in the form of books, music, and the performing and visual arts. After all, the First Amendment guarantees the right of anyone on U.S. soil to speak, but it in no way guarantees that everyone has something to say.

I know this may be hard to believe in the age of Tweetdecks, blogs, and threads; but all speakers are not created equal. Those who speak well enough to do it for a living have benefitted society in precisely the way intended by Article I Section VIII of the Constitution; and while you may quarrel with a particular form of expression, you can’t quarrel with the trillions of dollars in economic activity derived collectively from all works. Still, the mental contortionists of the copyleft claim that copyright, in the magic wonderland we call The Digital Age, now threatens Free Speech. And their position reminds me of another First Amendment stumper:  that same-sex marriage threatens the Freedom of Religion.

As alluded to in one of my recent posts the Kantian principle that your rights end where they infringe on the rights of another is logically implicit, if not explicit, in the broad, human rights established in our laws.  In a nutshell, society functions because most of us agree that your pursuit of happiness does not extend to a right to, say, drive an ATV across my yard and tear up the garden. Strangely, though, we often encounter folks trying to argue this principle in reverse — i.e. that my right to restrict trespassing infringes on your right to drive an ATV wherever you please.  Yeah, this sounds dumb because it is; but the logical construct is applied by religious zealots regarding same-sex marriage and by copy zealots (they actually have a religion now) regarding copyright.

The craftiest of gay-marriage opponents will argue that legalizing these unions infringes on their rights to be Christian in America, which is tantamount to undermining religious freedom.  Yes, anyone with two working brain cells can recognize that this isn’t sound reasoning so much as thinly veiled bigotry. Same-sex marriage can only be a threat to religious freedom if we agree that the zealot’s belief that homosexuality is a sin should implicitly influence our legal definition of marriage. There is no way to cut through this logical Gordian Knot without concluding that all marriage would have to be religious (and ultimately Christian) in order to be legal in the U.S.  And that would violate the definition I believe most of us apply to religious freedom.

Similarly, the copyright-threatens-speech proposal uses the illusion of reverse discrimination to suggest that when the producer exercises his copyright, this somehow infringes on the consumer’s desire to reuse or “share” the work as he sees fit, which amounts to a “chilling effect” on speech. Like the same-sex marriage thing, this argument glosses over personal bias to foster a logical leap to a shaky conclusion.  Copyright only threatens speech if we agree that the consumer’s right to reuse is more important than the producer’s right to treat his work as property. But we haven’t agreed to this for the same reason we don’t agree that you may drive an ATV over my lawn in the pursuit of happiness.  Freedoms have boundaries defined by the harm done to others; and free speech has managed to survive just fine despite the fact that it does not grant permission for plagiarism, perjury, libel, vandalism, disturbing the peace, hate crimes, or, indeed, theft of intellectual property.