Tag: gawker

Tarantino Sues Gawker. Hellz Yeah!

I am dying to hear the rationale for this one.  According to several stories this morning, Quentin Tarantino is suing Gawker for leaking and promoting access to the full screenplay for a feature in late-stage development called The Hateful Eight.  According to the LA Times, the director says he’s depressed over the leak and is shelving the production, but meanwhile, he’s suing Gawker for copyright infringement.  The first report I read stated that a rumor was circulating that the whole kerfuffle is a publicity stunt by Tarantino, but I doubt it; and I certainly hope not.  Tarantino doesn’t need a publicity stunt.  His films, like them or not, are provocative enough to be their own publicity stunts.

There are times when copyright cases contain shades of gray, but this isn’t one of them.   What possible social justification can anyone offer for leaking the screenplay of a motion picture in development? If you think you have an answer to that, find someone to administer a dope slap because your ego is eating the rest of your psyche.  Assuming there’s nothing more to this story, what Gawker is doing is an outright hijacking of a process that represents many hours and many dollars worth of stranded investment. What journalist does that absent any actual news that serves the public?  Have we become so debauched that we think we have a right to read an author’s work mid-process, let alone a component of a multi-million-dollar product in development? Tarantino should not only sue Gawker, but the responsible parties should have to clean his house without pay for six months.

It is apt that this story breaks this morning, when the House Judiciary Committee readies to hold another round of hearings on copyright review.  Today will be focused on the subject of fair use, and we will undoubtedly hear testimony from parties arguing to expand fair use, despite the fact that the U.S. already has the most liberal application of the principle among countries who uphold copyright.  Regardless, while there may be nuance to consider in this regard, this Tarantino case serves as a timely example of the fact that certain website owners would strain the legal foundation of fair use until the only part left is the use. This is what happens when people grow accustomed to making money for doing nothing: they become self-righteous about exploiting people who actually work for a living.

I don’t love every film Quentin Tarantino produces, but his voice certainly makes its presence known in the chorus of American cinema; and the world would be duller without him.  Gawker?  Really?  It could disappear tomorrow, and what?  Where would we ever find another team of lazy-ass gossip-mongers?  Check under the nearest rock.

Our Inner Troll

troll

One of my favorite observations by David Foster Wallace is about television, which he describes as essentially “watching furniture.”  As a recovered-TV-junkie (20+ years clean), I have long appreciated the sentiment; however, by contrast, the detachment involved in old-school TV viewing may be healthier for some than the two-way mirrors we use in our wired lives. Our screens of many sizes are not only private windows through which we can choose to view the world as we wish to see it, but they are also personal projectors through which we can reveal ourselves as we wish to be seen or even allow us to hide behind masks so that our latent monsters can roam free. These devices are not merely physical extensions of our hands but can be metaphysical extensions of our identities.

I joked with a friend who described herself on Facebook Chat as “moaning her head off” that she probably means “moaning her thumbs off,” complaining as she was via iPhone; but this isn’t entirely a joke, is it?  We might rekindle Descarte’s mind/body question to ask the new mind/body/gadget question. And would we conclude, I tweet therefore I am?

To what extent the id/gadget relationship presents itself must of course vary from individual to individual. Although we can probably assume that the association is strongest within the generation who’ve grown up alongside these devices and the social dynamics they’re programmed to foster, it is also true that some of the most extreme manifestations of this psychological shift are in no way restricted to the young.  Super-troll Michael Brutsch (aka Violentacrez), who was outed by Gawker in October of 2012, is a man in his mid-50s, who spent hours of his time moderating misogynistic and pedophiliac threads on Reddit; and he is cited as a prime example in this video from the series of original projects from Academic Earth entitled The Psychology of the Internet Toll.

One of the contributors to this video, a man named Jack Collins, contacted me directly and asked that I consider sharing it on this blog, and I do think it offers interesting food for thought on the mechanisms by which two forces that appear contradictory — anonymity and a desire for attention — actually conjoin through social media to spawn the ugliest of behaviors.  What matters of course is not merely exposing extreme examples like Brutsch and labeling the disorders at play, but rather asking ourselves to what extent we are all made a bit more troll-like (I would say narcissistic) through these media and devices.  To quote Jaron Lanier, “It would be nice to believe that there is only a minute troll population living among us.  But in fact, a great many people have experienced being drawn into nasty exchanges online. Everyone who has experienced that has been introduced to his or her inner troll.”

Beyond the value of personal introspection on our own behaviors, I believe the McLuhan question as to what extent the medium becomes the message is particularly relevant when we consider the influence of these media on our political process and the ways in which certain dissociative trends can be unhealthy for democracy. To Lanier’s point about getting “drawn into nasty exchanges online,” how many of those exchanges are about politics? By my reckoning, quite a few. So, the question becomes whether or not this new form of public debate is really fulfilling its promise to add nuance or is instead homogenizing discourse because its mechanisms too often call upon the voices of our lesser angels, who fail to listen, learn, or empathize. And well beyond the matter of us getting a little bitchy on Facebook is the question as to the role of social media in what appears to be a rise in narcissistic behaviors in general.

In my last essay, I wrote about balancing free speech rights between recipients and disseminators because it seems as though the internet itself wants to assert the rights of recipients as somehow more important than those of disseminators.  This would be consistent with an ego that has begun to merge with its appended machine to the extent that whatever that machine may provide is perceived as an entitlement.  Through these devices (which by the way are destined to become wearable), is it possible that we cultivate a visceral association with words, pictures, and sounds to the extent that the body itself comes to expect all content to be a natural right like air is to lungs?  If so, this might explain why, at a certain point, the ego no longer recognizes the right of the other who may be harmed by one’s consumption of said content. This would explain not only the grotesque behaviors of a Michael Brutsch and his Reddit followers, but even the more subtle forms of everyday narcissism, including the ability to rationalize choices like media piracy in the name of an insidious notion called “permissionless culture.”

Popularized by scholars like Lawrence Lessig, “permissionless  culture” is assumed to mean that the permission being ignored or rejected is that of a corporate or government authority — some entity we feel should not even have the right to grant permission in the first place.  Unfortunately, the problem being overlooked is that we may indeed be fostering a permission-free culture — one that ignores individual permission from one another, and it is that permission that is the basis of all civil rights. If you don’t think there might be a relationship between ideas like “permissionless culture” and the rise in a phenomenon people are calling “rape culture,” I would recommend a visit to several of the threads on 4Chan.org, where frat-boy style narcissism is both medium and message in the service of what we might call a Cartesian circle jerk.

With its population of anonymous, young males engaged primarily in a less-violent version of Brtutsch’s misogyny, 4Chan is no obscure anomaly, but is in fact one of the nebulae whence political action originates on issues pertaining to free speech and the internet, and it is the site where the hacktivists known as Anonymous got their start.  In his book Freeloading, Chris Ruen even cites 4Chan as one source of the early efforts to stop the SOPA bill, the relevance not being SOPA itself, but the discomforting consideration that my thoughtful, progressive friends and colleagues were to some extent influenced by a lot of teenage neanderthals.  This raises a question about all politics pertaining to the digital age with regard to identifying who exactly are those defenders of the web often referred to as the “internet community?”

Of course we all use the internet and have Facebook pages and some other social media accounts, but are we all part of the internet community?  Typically, this reference is used broadly in news media to describe influential bloggers, activists, or site owners who speak out for the health of the internet on a regular basis and with consistent messages. But every community has its thought leaders and its base, who do much of the disseminating, distilling, and even wrongly interpreting the messages of the thought leaders.  I suspect the base of the internet community is actually quite small, despite its power to influence through viral media, and that it is also demographically very narrow.

Specifically, I suspect that the base of the internet community just might be a fraternity of economically privileged 15-34 year-old males, who are the first generation of guinea pigs in the mind/body/gadget experiment. If this is true, and the politics of digital life are in fact dispersed through what may be a clique of narcissists, this can produce a dramatic change in the social contract on which democratic freedom is based. In light of the fact that, economically, the internet appears to spawn more consolidated, personal wealth while yielding very little middle-class opportunity, paying attention to our collective inner troll may be more important than we think.

On Letting Foxes Mind Chicken Coops

Photo by Global IP

One thesis I have continually proposed since the death of SOPA is that thinking citizens are going to have to stop giving Internet companies a blank check on policy positions, or we’re going to regret it.  So far, it looks a lot like there isn’t a piece of legislation, a trade agreement, a civil action, or any other policy initiative that is not going to be labeled a ”threat to freedom” by these companies, their lobbyists, and their PR groups. The first sane question anyone should ask when any industry makes such a claim is, “Do you mean a threat to my freedom or your cash flow?”

The new battle brewing that has the potential to rival SOPA is one over the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP).  As US exports include a lot of intellectual property, one should not be surprised to find patent and copyright protections on the table in these negotiations. Nevertheless, the usual tech-funded suspects are blasting away at the TPP using many of the same tactics we saw with SOPA, causing one to wonder whether these diplomatic negotiations are really so insidious; or are these Web-based organizations simply determined to create a digital world without any copyright protections, without laws against child pornography, without security, and with some very twisted definitions of privacy?

The grassroots petition site StopTheTrap.net smacks you in the face with this headline:  You could have to pay a fine for simply clicking the wrong link.  I don’t have to read anything about the TPP to know that this isn’t true, and you know why?  Math. Who exactly is monitoring trillions of clicks?  The government? Media conglomerates? All with their magically endless resources to spy on our every mouse move?  Headlines like this should make anyone stop and consider the motivations of the people or companies promoting them.  Similarly, the first sentence on this post by the EFF stating that the TPP is “secretive” is very strange in light of the fact that the EFF itself has been in attendance at TPP events along with other stakeholders, and with the same opportunity as other organizations to speak to delegates.

The point is, I’m not an expert in international trade, but then neither are most people.  This is, in fact, why we have a representative government. Sure leaders make mistakes or decisions we don’t like, but are we seriously going to migrate toward this bizarrely hysterical, global referendum on every complex law, agreement, or treaty?  Or, more to the point, are our new representatives going to be the proverbial foxes watching the chicken coop?  When it comes to international trade like this, shall we invest no faith in our elected president — the USTR serves at the pleasure of the president — and instead place that faith in the hands of people who work for the Internet industry, people like Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, who is among those leading the protest against the TPP?

And then there’s the question as to exactly what freedoms are being threatened?  Perhaps there are some worth discussing, but I’m not sure someone like Ohanian is the ideal spokesman, particularly in the wake of the Violentacrez story. It turns out Reddit gave an award to a guy named Michael Brutsch, a 49 year-old Internet troll who created a forum called “Jailbait” along with multiple subforums with names like “Rapebait,” “Incest,” “Pics of Dead Kids,” and “Choke a Bitch.”  You get the idea.

Trolling under the name Violentacrez, Brutsch was recently outed by Gawker, and you can watch an interview with him here on Anderson Cooper 360.  In the interview, Brutsch seems to be anything but apologetic to the young women whose photos he posted in violation of their personal privacy and, quite possibly, child pornography laws.    Instead, he responds the way an adolescent would when caught doing something stupid — he blames the medium and his fans for his actions.  While this man’s choices are indeed his own responsibility, the reality is that Brutsch’s idiotic, offensive, and, if nothing else, useless posts generated an estimated 800,000 subscribers according to CNN. And that’s why Reddit rewarded Brutsch with a little gold-plated statuette of the company’s alien logo.  Okay, they didn’t give him a bag full of money, but watch the interview, and you understand that what the troll wants most is attention, which becomes its own kind of currency in this environment.

So, what does Michael Brutsch have to do with international trade agreements?  Not a thing. But stories like his are exactly why I do chuckle every time I hear that it’s our copyright protections that stifle some cultural motherlode yearning to burst forth on the Internet; or that legalizing child pornography is the only rational choice in this era; or that it’s the government chomping at the bit to invade my privacy.  Indeed, where would the world be if such inconvenient concepts as law, diplomacy, and global trade were to in any way dampen the crucible of creative energy exemplified by a middle-age troll spending hours of his life denigrating young women for fun?

If you want to learn about the TPP, by all means it’s your right to do so.  But speaking personally, if I don’t have time to dig into the complexities of this agreement, I’m choosing to trust President Obama’s office to seek balance rather than the multi-millionaires in the Web industry.