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For a brief time in the broadcast era some reaped great rewards from monopoly.
He [Jaron Lanier] blames the Web’s tradition of “drive-by anonymity” for fostering vicious pack behavior on blogs, forums and social networks. He acknowledges the examples of generous collaboration, like Wikipedia, but argues that the mantras of “open culture” and “information wants to be free” have produced a destructive new social contract.There's nothing novel or digital about vicious pack behavior any more than for generous collaboration. This is how human societies are and always have been. There was a brief time when printing presses - as well as audio and video reproduction systems - were monopolized due to the costs of manufacture and distribution. If we are looking for a historical aberration this is it, not the more diffuse system that is emerging as those entry costs go down. And it is good to remember that quality has often had little to do with the selection of winners and losers in the scramble to monopolize a trend, and that the true innovators were often the least well remembered or rewarded. It's a bit hard to feel any sympathy for those few who managed to promote themselves or be promoted by agents and publishers since it is almost certain that better artists never were "discovered".“The basic idea of this contract,” he writes, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”
Trying to charge for songs and other digital content is sometimes dismissed as a losing cause because hackers can crack any copy-protection technology. But as Mr. Lanier notes in his book, any lock on a car or a home can be broken, yet few people do so — or condone break-ins. . .The monopoly model is no longer appropriate.In theory, public officials could deter piracy by stiffening the penalties, but they’re aware of another crucial distinction between online piracy and house burglary: There are a lot more homeowners than burglars, but there are a lot more consumers of digital content than producers of it.
The result is a problem a bit like trying to stop a mob of looters. When the majority of people feel entitled to someone’s property, who’s going to stand in their way?
“It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump,” Mr. Lanier writes. Or, to use another of his grim metaphors: “Creative people — the new peasants — come to resemble animals converging on shrinking oases of old media in a depleted desert.”Society is digesting change, mumbling to itself a bit while it thinks and reconfigures. Laniers's self interested, reactionary, linear thinking prevents him from grasping the nature of these processes. A big part of that change is the spreading realization that the former monopolists were never in fact the "creative people". That claim can be made by a far larger number of people. As this realization dawns on everyone we see a great deal more creative output.To save those endangered species, Mr. Lanier proposes rethinking the Web’s ideology, revising its software structure and introducing innovations like a universal system of micropayments.
There are not only many more creative people who now have opportunities to be seen, read and heard, there is greater variety. This pleases me since the sparseness of choice has been disappointing in the past. IMV this will have great positive effects on society. We won't be limited to hearing from a small group of connected insiders with a narrow range of tastes and talents. Another benefit is that the true sources of innovation are increasingly revealed. The new fashions, insights and creative energies that bubble up from the streets had in the past been mined and exploited by those who can more correctly be seen as popularizers than truly creative innovators. Now it is easier for all of us to see the real deal inventors even if their tentative efforts are unpolished and sometimes just plain bad.
In 2007 I did a project, 365 Day Project. I put on Internet one short film every day. In cinema, when I was making my films, it was very abstract. I could not think about the audience. I knew the film will be placed in a film distribution center and eventually someone will look at it. Now, in my 365 Day Project I knew that later, same day, I will put it on Internet and within minutes it will be seen by all my friends, and strangers too, all over the world. So that I felt like I was conversing with them. It's intimate. It's poetic. I am not thinking anymore about problems of distribution. I am just exchanging my work with some friends. Like being part of a family. I like that. It makes for a different state of mind. If a state of mind has anything or nothing to do with thinking, that's unimportant to me. I am not exactly a thinking person. I am a poet.
A big part of that change is the spreading realization that the former monopolists were never in fact the "creative people".
People have no idea that the talent was only getting about 20 cents per album sold. Now, there's so much more opportunity for the talent to produce and distribute itself. Some of my friends in Nashville started their own record companies just to produce and market their own material. They may not get the big backing and promotion from the monopolists, but getting that was a crapshoot to begin with.
I know a few people in various creative professions - musicians, visual and performing artists - and they say much the same. It's sad and odd when we study the history of popular music - the roots not the smash hits - to find that the true innovators often were not the ones who profited from their creativity, it was popularizers who copied them - poorly in many cases - that were promoted.
Posted by: back40 at January 11, 2010 10:41 PMBecause of the new digital universe, music (and other arts, as well) has an interesting opportunity to evolve more organically than in the somewhat "artificial" means via a marketing executive's bottlenecking whims. There's a whole culture out there of independent musicians and songwriters who can compose and record right onto their laptops and upload the song in minutes to be heard by possibly millions. Those millions may not necessarily pay the talent, but they'll make snap decisions as to whether it lives or it dies, developing styles and tastes like some kind of living organism. It's fascinating.
My own nephew (20 years old) writes, records, and via the internet, his songs were heard by some popular recording artists with actual recording contracts. One of his songs was purchased and now has been recorded by one of those artists on his big label CD. Twenty years ago, the only known way of making that happen was for me to send tapes to a record company and hope it got listened to. Chances are, it wouldn't have. I have friends who were underlings in Nashville for big record producers and they'd bring home bushel baskets full of cassette tapes to listen to and report back to their boss if anything sounded promising. If any of the amateur songwriters knew what really happened to their tapes, they would have been mortified.
I put mp3 samples of my own compositions played on my own instruments up on my website and at some point they were found by sites that collect and link them. With my website software I watch those mp3s get played dozens of times daily by people all over the world.
It's not just a whole new ballgame. This is a completely different sport now.
Tim has some thoughts on it if you haven't seen them yet. He's a culture guy who has been thinking about such things for a long time.
Perhaps also see this old post that discussed a related issue, or so it seems to me. I used some of Tim's stuff there too.
Posted by: back40 at January 13, 2010 11:22 PMTim says, "One thing you could say for the high-water mark of the old culture industry from about 1920 to 1990 or so, we often held our best authors and poets and musicians and filmmakers in high esteem and paid them well beyond a living wage."
Well, yeah, but there were so few of them. Tim later comments that there is too much product and not enough buyers now, but that's what I'm saying. People are being more selective. They have to. A comic collector can no longer walk into a comic store on Wednesday and buy everything that came out that week. And as for having the leisure time to appreciate what he/she does buy - whether it's comics, books, movies, music, whatever - how much time would it take to read or watch the immense quantity of material available? People have to be selective and their choices will determine the ebb and flow of taste, style, and content.
The existence of that selectivity also keeps raising the bar in terms of quality. The competition is fierce and the most obvious way to hedge our bets as artists is to keep pushing our skills to new boundaries.
Some curmudgeony folks might say that "yeah, we've got more stuff, but it's not as good as it used to be." Pfft. Go back in time to show a 50s culture two movies, Citizen Kane and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings Trilogy from the past decade. Which do we think would literally change their lives? Star Wars was one of those moments.
I, as a working artist, see productivity in a different light than an accountant or engineer sees productivity. The activity of creating is heroin to me. I'm addicted to it and if the bills are paid, I have a tendency to swim into new, uncharted waters with my work. Because I can. The products of that activity become something I can trade for food and shelter, but make no mistake, my "leisure time" is all about getting hip deep in wood chips. AND I have a new audiobook, music cd, or movie going every second I work in my studio. That's heaven to me.
Back in what I call the golden years of McFarlane Toys and the action figure culture, the salaried talent there was quite content to work an absurd amount of overtime for the company. We were happy, though we didn't get remunerated with money, per se. When the admin asked us to keep time sheets, they were shocked to find that we'd been putting in almost 2,000 hours of overtime EACH per year. My skills spiked during those years. What was that worth? A bunch.
Just some thoughts triggered by Tim's essay.
Posted by: Jeffrey at January 14, 2010 07:43 AMSome really good points, Jeffrey. I think this point that creative people are often going to create anyway, and compensation is just a bonus, is a good one.
There's certainly some great models in the online world of people whose drive to expression and creation has been duly rewarded by appreciative audiences (usually through ad revenues rather than micropayments) who previously would not have been even allowed to produce or disseminate work by the old monopolies. Webcomics are a great example of this: there was literally nowhere that strips like Penny Arcade or Achewood or Hark, A Vagrant could have been published in 1975, really.
What I think is happening to some extent is that cultural work is undergoing a rapid "flattening" in economic terms. Both the middlemen and their favored "top" producers are seeing the extreme profits they formerly made diffused across a wider span of production. The middle of the distribution of producers will be bigger, more people doing cultural work, and none of them will make a lot of money at it, but a lot more people will make some kind of living creating. I'm not in a rush to join the digerati who think this is the best thing ever, nor the folks like Lanier who bemoan the golden age. It's just different, and it'll lead to a different kind of culture (both popular and elite).
Posted by: Timothy Burke at January 14, 2010 08:43 AMTimothy:
From my position, I have a hard time seeing the business objectively. I'm isolated more than I'd like to be in a lot of ways, but at the same time, it's a trade off in exchange for the time to create. I think you've made some very valid comments about the flattening of the cultural economy.
That said, the one most important thing the internet did was level the playing field for those of us who've chosen not to live in New York or LA. When I lived in the NY Metro area, I was in the thick of it, but it felt like a prison. Now I can work out of my own studio and shop in rural Missouri.
I've not shifted my work into the digital media, however. I like the "wetwork" too much. There's also a reason why so many digital effects houses employ analog sculptors. We're fast and we can make changes in real time. Our maquettes are then scanned and digitized, but lots of the real aesthetics of what appeals to warm-blooded humans takes place out here in the fresh air.
Granted, there are machines that are getting better at doing what I do, but they're extremely expensive, like in the millions of dollars range. I'm much cheaper, plus, I'm always automatically upgrading with no additional fees.
I like your writing, Timothy, and I hope to visit your blog frequently. I've seen Gary mention it often and I regret that I've not spent any time there.
Posted by: Jeffrey at January 14, 2010 11:36 AM