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Pardon Our Appearance – “Guest Post” by Helena Handbasket

David knows of course that it is the start of a new year—a time when one is expected to write some kind of review of the year gone by and/or a few thoughts anticipating the year to come.  But as 2019 careened toward the obligatory crescendo of December’s final days, I would find him staring blankly at his computer monitor muttering, “We have abandoned all reason” over and over.  I poked him with a cocktail fork a couple of times and wafted small-batch bourbon under his nose but was unable pierce the veil of his melancholic gaze.

I cannot say that I was very surprised to find him in this gloomy state.  Given that the editorial nature of The Illusion of More is a skeptic’s view of tech-utopianism—namely the proposal that the information age is actually improving democratic societies—the events of 2019 can leave one in a fumbling search for enough consensus on the truth just to begin a discussion grounded in reason.   At the start of the New Year in 2017, in the wake of the “techlash” following the last election, David wondered whether people might take a more sober approach to the belief that social media was elevating political discourse.  And to some extent, this sobering did occur.

I know, for instance, that he expressed enthusiasm for the number of stand-up comics—Chappelle, Gervais, Sleshinger, Jeffries to name a few—who were eagerly riffing on the theme that social media beckons the ill-informed and self-righteous.  I even caught him almost break a smile at the opening of Ronny Chieng’s performance, in which (after mocking anti-vaxxers), the Singaporean comedian says,  “Yo, the internet is making people so fucking stupid.  Like who knew that all human knowledge could make people dumber?”  Indeed, who would have thought that?, David muttered.

If I had to pinpoint a moment when I began to notice David yielding to his taciturn despondency, I think it was while he was watching congressional hearings in September.  Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was testifying before the House Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Jamie Raskin referred to executive privilege (in context) as imaginary “like the tooth fairy,” to which Lewandowski responded sarcastically, “Thank you Congressman.  My children are watching.”  

David muted the television and, tilting his head like a contemplative Weimaraner, asked, “Is Lewandowski saying that children young enough to believe in the tooth fairy are watching committee hearings on Capitol Hill?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, “As I certainly do not know the Lewandowski children.”

“Fair enough,” he said, content to let it go for a moment, but then continued, “Okay, but if these political prodigies have in fact chosen C-Span over Clifford, can’t we assume that they have figured out the whole tooth fairy thing?”

“I suppose that would make sense,” I said, “but why does it matter?”

“Because barring those considerations,” David pressed on, “Lewandowski is suggesting that Members of the United States Congress, while conducting the business of the nation, should not speak metaphorically in any way that might disabuse juvenile viewers of their mythical, childhood fantasies.  Or by “his children” did he mean the flock, whose blind adulation of the president demands clinging to illusions no less fictional than the tooth fairy?”  And then, without saying another word, he left and drove to the liquor store.

The Lewandowski/Raskin exchange was a tiny moment of political theater in the scheme of things.  But I suppose David found it both characteristic and symptomatic of the twenty-year acid trip we have been on since the dawn of the digital revolution—an acute example of raw insanity that has become normal conduct for people in positions of influence.  Upon his return with a bottle of Polish vodka, David played The Clash at an impolite volume and presumed to do what he called “writing” for about an hour—an intermittent ack-ack of plastic keys between fits of scatological outbursts and the replenishing of ice cubes in the glass.  He managed to produce the following …

Those in positions of authority and leadership have utterly failed to meet the challenge of galloping bullshit in the digital age.  Instead, they brought bigger shovels.  For instance, what began as bi-partisan congressional hearings to investigate the nature of the Russian hack and disinformation campaigns in the 2016 election soon mutated into a Trumpian (I cannot call those politics Republican) narrative in which Facebook et al should be sanctioned for kicking “conservatives” like Alex Jones off its platform.  

That inversion of the whole purpose of oversight (i.e. to mitigate raving lunacy in public discourse) was a prelude to two major events in 2019:  the Republican party unanimously shedding any hint of integrity in response to a clear abuse of power by the president; and Mark Zuckerberg declaring that the utopian promise of social media can still be fulfilled if we just give the experiment more time—and more of our data.  It was hard to miss the visual of Zuckerberg fiddling at Georgetown while the Capitol in the background was beginning to smolder.

Of course Zuckerberg seized the moment to double down on the tech-utopian narrative in his October speech.  As long as we remain neatly organized into our various competing realities, we can never effectively hold a platform like Facebook accountable for profiting from disinformation.  There is no disinformation because there is no information.  This is exactly why some 40% of Americans will nod, or at least shrug, when Donald Trump says that he knows better than generals, scientists, economists, State Department officials, the FBI, the CIA, etc. about any topic we can name.  Of course this brand of mad hubris works in the digital age:  it is a politics of memes.  The pinnacle of tech-utopianism.

That was probably about when The Clash was exchanged for The Smiths; at least half the vodka was gone; and David slipped back into a dejected silence—a state in which he is frankly a prick, so I left him to it.  But about thirty minutes later, he came bursting into the other room, having read an article by Joseph Bernstein about the failure of the digital age to deliver a new enlightenment.  Reading from his tablet, he quoted, “When they opened their eyes, they did indeed see that the Digital Nation had been born. Only it hadn’t set them free. They were being ruled by it. It hadn’t tamed politics. It sent them berserk.”  

This was ringing in 2020 for The Illusion of More.  Please pardon our appearance.  Restoration is in progress. 

Posted on by Editor

Announced Departure of Register Temple Provokes Tired Anti-Copyright Rhetoric

I know it seems like we have ample government shenanigans to watch on TV right now, but in case you missed the real barn-burner yesterday, it was announced that Register of Copyrights Karyn Temple has been named as the next Senior Executive Vice President and Global General Counsel at the Motion Picture Association (MPA).  Why?  What were you paying attention to?

You see in the trenches of the so-called “copyright war,” the Antis delighted in this news about Temple’s career move because it appears to fulfill their conspiracy-theory narrative that a “revolving door” exists between the Copyright Office and major, corporate creators, mainly “Hollywood.”  This was a big theme being promoted by Public Knowledge et al at about the same time (Fall 2016) that Dr. Carla Hayden was first appointed Librarian of Congress and, within weeks, dismissed then Register Maria Pallante, leaving Temple to serve as Acting Register and then appointed Register in March of this year.  

I responded to this “revolving door” allegation in a post, which cites former Copyright Office Senior Counsel Steven Tepp’s rebuttal noting, among other pesky facts, the wide variety of private sector jobs that USCO employees have taken outside proverbial Hollywood.  This includes the widely respected William Patry, who became Senior Copyright Counsel at Google.  Such realities did not stop the righteously uninformed to take to Twitter and declare “Told ya so!” about Temple’s move to MPA, and some folks even rather inscrutably dragged the Restatement of Copyright Project into the same complaint.  Who better than Mike Masnick to represent the kind of logic being applied as follows …

Anyone who would conflate these subjects really needs to breathe into a bag for a while.  Because it is strenuous work to imply so many inaccuracies in a single tweet; but, for one thing, the MPA was neither the first nor the most vocal critic of the Restatement Project.  Next, Congress is not “silencing” anything by expressing its concern about the fact that the American Law Institute has NEVER EVER published a Restatement on any matter of federal law in its nearly 100-year history. In fact, there is nothing Congress can do to stop the publication of the Restatement. So, the snarky allegation that a) the USCO’s criticism of the Restatement is MPA-driven, or b) that concern over the project is just a “silly spat” is typical of the unprincipled theatrics infecting so much debate in all directions.

Whether it’s the foreign service, the intelligence community, or the modest little Copyright Office, deference for institutions, how they got that way, and what they actually do is lately under assault by rampant conspiracy theory (thank you internet) and a blinkered zeal by one faction or another to rewrite the rules according to their own dogmatic agendas.  Although the consequences and characters are substantially different, there is little intellectual distinction to be found between the radicalized partisan who says, “the FBI is broken” and the one who insists, “the Copyright Office is broken.”  Both are guilty of the same ahistorical, self-defeating brand of fallacy, epitomized in Masnick’s accusatory tweet that almost no senior Copyright Office employee ever goes to “work for the public’s interest.”  

The USCO is the public interest! What Masnick really means is that he and his friends have their own definition of “public interest,” (which does seem to coincide quite often with the interests of major internet companies), and they have decided in their cloistered wisdom that the public can only be well-served if the Copyright Office is led by people who are as skeptical about copyright as, say, Andrew Wheeler is about climate change.

We saw this attitude peak in October of 2016 when Dr. Hayden surprised a lot of people, including Members of Congress, by effectively dismissing Register Pallante, who was being contemporaneously smeared by the aforementioned anti-copyright groups for being (well) pro-copyright.  As I said at the time, you’ll get that with people who work for certain public offices:  they tend to believe in the purpose of the office.  And I would argue that we have lately witnessed the dire consequences of maligning this kind of professional commitment in order to achieve political/ideological ends. 

So, now that Dr. Hayden will be tasked with appointing the next Register, I hope she does not exhibit the habit of every other egotist in America who suddenly feels it is his/her mission to radically transform (i.e. weaken) yet another federal organization.  As described in this post, the Copyright Office, from its inception, has always been functionally distinct from the Library, even when it was formed as an extension of the Library’s own foundation as a public institution in 1897.  Consequently, I think the Librarian would best serve the public by showing deference to that history—and to Congress for that matter—in exercising her prerogative to appoint the next Register.  This may be a small victory to hope for in a storm of mass organizational disruption, but, as it was in the founding period of the nation, protecting the value of authorship is never a bad place to start.    

Photo by fizkes