Tag: conservative

Strange Theater at the CATO Institute

“To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a “mummified” form.”
– Alfred Jarry –

Legal expert and blogger Terry Hart and I had the chance to meet in DC this week, and we were discussing the likelihood that, although copyright is dispos’d in brawl ridiculous on the virtual battlefields of cyberspace, that most people neither know nor likely care much about the subject. This is probably a good thing as there are more serious matters at hand. Still, one of the reasons I personally do pay attention to this digital-age donnybrook is that, beyond concern for the rights of creators, the future of culture, and the economics of the creative industries, my sense is that there are some strange, ideological forces at play.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post asking whether or not conservatives and libertarians are eager to take up copyright reform under the umbrella agenda of small government.  My post was in response to a somewhat haphazard brief, published and then retracted by the Republican Study Committee.  And last week, the libertarian Cato Institute hosted what I can only describe as a piece of absurdist theater entitled Copyright Unbalanced: From Incentive to Excess, so named for the book edited by Jerry Brito and co-authored by Tom W. Bell, who were the featured speakers

As usual, I’ll direct you to Terry’s blog for legal analysis of the presentation but offer my take from a broad perspective. The premise is that copyright law has expanded beyond it’s original intent (translation: an example of big government), and the conclusion proposed is that copyright law ought to revert back to its status of 1790 (translation: strict constitutionalism).  So, as a purely academic exercise, I get why this stage play might seem attractive to libertarians or conservatives; but as we contemplate taking these proposals seriously in the real world, we run headlong into some peculiar hypocrisies and contradictions.  Libertarians and conservatives looking to weaken the notion that intellectual property is property? Or even stranger, the same groups suddenly emphasizing the “public good” over the individual?

Now, I personally have come to reject most political labels, which seems only rational when liberals classify me as a conservative, and conservatives as a bleeding heart liberal.  But no matter what ideological alliance is being claimed, I’m always concerned when anyone makes a case that any law ought to remain static as of the 18th century.  I believe there is an inherent danger, somewhere between impractical and barbaric, to propose living too strictly according the gospels of ancient men. (Just look what happens when people try to cherry-pick the Old Testament for political purposes.) Hence other than selling a book (and no it doesn’t seem to be available through Creative Commons license), it’s a little hard to fathom what in any practical sense Brito and Bell are proposing with regard to “re-balancing” copyright.  There may be a rational conversation to be had about the present system and duration of terms, but Mr. Bell’s loftily presented assertion that it’s obvious we should simply erase 200 years of jurisprudence and reset the clock to a time before mass publication of books even existed doesn’t exactly have the ring of balance to my ear. On the other hand, I might be game for resetting the letter of the law to 1790, if we are willing to restore remedies from the same period.  I mean, who doesn’t want to bring back dueling or good old-fashioned belaboring one’s ideological foe with a cudgel? Or the word cudgel, for that matter?

Most of us recognize that technological innovation is a primary reason why copyright, not to mention quite a few other laws, has grown and evolved since the world was new. In the case of copyright, of course, technologies have created new media the framers could not have imagined, as well as new ways to consume media and new ways to steal media. Yet, Brito and Bell seem to want to ignore these and other realities and regress the law as an ideological principle to a time when the U.S. population, including slaves, was roughly 3.9 million. That’s about one million fewer people than visit just The Pirate Bay on a daily basis to enable mass copyright infringement. Shift this same academic argument about half a click toward the subject of patent protections, and I suspect that any conservative or libertarian support for the larger rationale will quickly vanish. And that’s part of what was so bizarre about the presentation — the fact that Brito and Bell seem to be weaving a very narrow and serpentine path through conservative and libertarian values, not to mention running smack into conflict with the preachings of Ayn Rand from a stage built partly in her honor.

Brito himself invoked the name of Rand, and all I could imagine was the smoky old tart choking on his assertion that copyright is not based in any kind of natural right of the individual.  By choosing to interpret the clause on copyright “To promote the progress of science and useful arts…” in the most collectivist sense, Brito and Bell would earn themselves an indignant tongue-lashing from Ms. Rand were she alive to hear them.  After all, even a half-stoned teenager forced to skim the novel Atlas Shrugged would be able to glean that Rand placed value solely on the individual’s absolute, natural right to exploit for profit any type of product of his own mind without restriction of any kind ever. She reviled the notion of performing work “for the common good,” even voluntarily; and she defined those who would profit from the work of others, either by design or by circumstance, as “looters.”  Hence, in the digital age, Rand would see the rise of “looters” among torrent sites, the users of these sites, Google, advertisers, payment processors, etc.  So, it’s odd enough to hear collectivist proposals about any property right at the Cato Institute, but it’s even more bizarre that these academic proposals would supersede a pragmatic discussion about the unmitigated expansion of “looting” in our times.

Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised that so many tech bloggers are swooning over the assertions of  Brito and Bell.  Those who aren’t working directly for the Internet industry have culturally bought into the premise that copyright stifles innovation and new business, so they’re thrilled to hear anyone propose rolling back copyright until it’s all but irrelevant.  Of course, I have yet to hear any “new business” concepts whose aims are actually stifled by copyright. Instead, we continue to hear the same kind of vague predictions that we’ve been hearing since Web 1.0, when investors were lulled into launching start-ups that had no foreseeable revenue stream. Hence, without real data on real businesses being held back, I have no idea what’s conservative about this basis for a discussion about copyright reform.

Narrative

 

Last week, when I logged onto Facebook, two stories were near the top of my feed.  The  first was about the plot of at least four U.S. soldiers who had plans to carry out acts of domestic terrorism, including assassination of President Obama, and who had killed a fellow soldier and his girlfriend in order to stop them from reporting the group’s intentions.  Their sated goal:  “To give America back to the people.”

The second story was a post by a friend, a Vietnam War veteran who writes beautifully about his journey through the world, still grappling with PTSD, still seeking peace.  He was very upset to have stumbled upon a grotesque, right-wing image, a variation on the famous Obama “Hope” poster depicting the president hanged in a noose with the word Hope changed to Rope.

I recognize with some amusement that some readers of my commentary will make the mistaken assumption that I am a right-wing conservative, which only underscores for this mostly liberal Democrat just how incoherent political dialogue has become.  When we speak in memes instead of nuance, and when all issues are associatively lumped together, our narrative becomes useless at best, and the raw ingredients for the ambitions of psychos at worst.

For the first podcast on this site, I had the pleasure of speaking to Christopher Dickey about journalism in the digital age, but Dickey is also an expert on extremism, terrorism, and counter-terrorism, having reported on these issues for thirty years.  In a discussion that didn’t make the cut for the podcast, Dickey described the three elements one always finds in the anarchist, extremist, or terrorist.  Neatly packaged into the acronym TNT, the components are Testosterone, Narrative, and Theater; and it is that middle component, narrative, that compels me to focus on many issues in the way I do.

Narrative, as Dickey defines it in this context is “one of oppression, some wrong that is being righted,” and after all, what politically or humanistically motivated citizen does not possess such a narrative?  Doctors Without Borders are righting a wrong, are they not?  But when that sensibility combines with stupidity (testosterone), and egomania (theater), it becomes a volatile mixture that I believe is actually fueled by even relatively innocuous anti-establishment rancor. For instance, what OWS and the Tea Party inadvertently have in common is a generalized agenda of tearing down institutions without envisioning new institutions in their place.  Our critical narrative has shifted so that bad or failed policies within our institutions are not the enemy, but the institutions themselves are.  And we all feed this narrative from our own political points of view, preaching to our own little choirs in cyberspace.

This excellent article in The Daily Beast suggests that the Fort Stewart F.E.A.R. plot is indicative of “rising domestic terrorism,” and the article explains how a DHS report on right-wing extremist organizations was criticized by conservative pundits (and John Boehner) as “an attempt to smear or criminalize right-wing free speech.”  There it is again — the First Amendment being used as an excuse to apply blunt thinking to a complex issue, to capitulate to the notion that we cannot possibly make a distinction between conservative ideas and violent extremists. And perhaps that’s because the narrative of the two is way too similar. I think it’s fair to say that if the voice of the contemporary right wing sounded like William F. Buckley instead of FOX News, these dumb soldiers would have been less likely to hear their misguided sentiments echoed in the mainstream.  That is not a cause and effect assertion. I don’t propose that FOX News causes these acts of violence any more than Marilyn Manson was responsible for Columbine; but the psychotic hears the coded messages he wants to hear; and there is no question that the conservative plank of “small government” has mutated into a more virulent strain of anti-government (often laced with racism).

But I don’t single out conservatives in dialing up the destructive rhetoric.  While liberals tend toward fewer violent metaphors, I do find parallel fear-mongering among my liberal friends. It’s hard to tell the difference, for instance, between liberals insisting earlier this year that the NDAA gives the feds the right to “assassinate citizens in the streets” and conservatives labeling HR347 an “anti-peaceable assembly bill.”  In these instances, everybody has a motive for writing a narrative of oppression, and that motive is often the aforementioned theater itself.  TV, radio, print, and web pundits need to make theater (and individuals want stuff to post on their walls). So everybody adds a little spectacle to otherwise mundane bits of legislation, and we’re off to the races.

I pick these two examples because the rhetoric from both the right and the left on each bill is completely interchangeable. It really doesn’t matter if it’s Glenn Beck or my liberal friends predicting Storm Troopers in the streets. Both are making theater, and I believe both are in some way feeding the very real paranoia of the next violent extremist.  And that brings me back to my underlying point regarding the lens I apply to the issues discussed here. When the narrative coming from opposing sides on a given subject begins to produce identical rhetoric, it’s probably a good sign that we’ve stopped discussing anything grounded in practical or humanistic reality.