Digital Barbarism, page 23
At least since the Enlightenment, man has modeled himself and his society upon the machine. Slowly shorn of his knowledge of and feel for nature and human nature, he has been brought over to the principles (and, often, the mere effects) of speed, efficiency, economy, and emotional detachment: doing the most with least; just-in-time inventory; lack of feeling; absence of commitment; neutrality of conscience; all the techniques common to a business, an organization, a mechanical contrivance, or a modernist novel. But neither nature nor man are machines, and, treated as machines, they sicken.
Convergence is not a fact on the horizon but a contrivance of human vanity. It will not come from a hand-held toy, an electronic network no matter how powerful, or a machine that sits on a desk. It will not come by virtue of universal or near-universal agreement or by virtue of the new. Wait as long as you wish, it will not come.
CHAPTER 7
PARTHIAN SHOT
Calling Barbarism for What It Is
If it is to be honorable, a military objective must be not merely to check or destroy an enemy’s forces, but to do so while sparing innocents and noncombatants as much as is practicable. Unfortunately, most of the time this is not possible on a scale sufficient to redeem the terrible necessities of war. And when it is impossible, no victory can be unalloyed. Even in the heart of the Nazi war machine (that is, Germany) were children as innocent as angels, who when caught in the immense crossfire deprived an otherwise clear-cut and morally urgent victory of any pretense to perfection.
Intellectual argument, unsaddled with the finality of death, is unsaddled with the laws of tragedy. Once an opponent’s attack is gutted, one may look upon his formations in disarray and pull from them perfectly alive everything worthy of preservation. Doing so, however, is no more magnanimous than carrying off the Sabine women, but rather another blow, in that what was once dear to the enemy may then cleave to the other camp.
What is useful and good in the arguments and justifications that the previous pages have opposed? Though they are confusedly coy about it, the critics of copyright and legionnaires of the machine would severely cripple or scuttle the system for the sake of universal access, which they term open. Their presumption is that copyright is a bar, and much of their motivation stems from indignation that it is therefore an impediment—even a fatal impediment—to an obvious public good.
But why must widespread or even universal access, which is unquestionably good, be “open”? That is, what makes the licensing of and payment for works not in the public domain, and apart from fair use, a bar to universality of access sufficient to change the quality of universality? Nothing, of course. Universal access needs no more to be free of licensing and payment than a transportation system, to be comprehensive and excellent, or a communications system, to be all pervasive, must be free of charge. One pays for access to the internet. One pays for hardware and (presumably) for software. One pays for telephones and PDAs. One pays for advertising on the internet—with money if one is an advertiser and with time and distraction if one is an internet user. None of these things is free. To facilitate fluidity of information, why must “content” be free? Why must one seek not to pay for music or television shows that come over one’s iPhone, with no such effort in regard to the instrument itself or the substantial and continuing user fees? If paying for the means and instrumentation of universal access is not a barrier to universal access, paying for the substance cannot therefore be more of a barrier, for, as discussed previously, the reasonable charges can be tracked, tallied, and managed as conveniently as are cell phone charges.
The availability of information is not and will not be restrained by the copyright system any more than it is or will be restrained by the delivery systems that make it possible. To focus on copyright as the impediment is a false argument, and to imply that those who would uphold and strengthen it are opponents of universal and ready access is a false argument as well, as there is no inherent contradiction between the two. Like most, I am looking forward to the promised fluidity of information. I don’t know of anyone who opposes such a thing, useful and beguiling as it is.
Although at present its effect is chiefly a rise in economic productivity and a surge in frivolous entertainment, the phenomenon is in its infancy, and the synergy and ferment that can result from a new world of almost effortless appositions and cross-fertilizations may be of unchartable value. How could one fail to be enthusiastic about the transformation of every home, every seat on every commuter train, and every park bench, into a full-fledged branch of the greatest libraries in the world? Ignoring for a moment the coincident if not directly related decline in reading that is both obvious and documented, there are wonderful aspects to the transformation as well as drawbacks and dangers, and no reason that it cannot be implemented ethically and intelligently. Most certainly copyright does not stand in its way.
As we have seen, some are fervently convinced that it does, and their strong advocacy has moved public perception, pulling it in their direction partially because the opposition to their advocacy has been largely confined to immensely rich and impersonal corporate bodies with which it is nearly impossible to be sympathetic, and that are not agile enough to have created armies of blogging-ants steeped in self-righteous anger. These armies may be disreputable, but, like the graffiti that extend the limits of acceptability merely by their brazen appearance, they are influential.
Normally I don’t deal with foundations. My last grants, hangovers from the habits of the academy, arrived long ago. But in the months preceding the writing of this book, a foundation offered very generously and from the blue to underwrite the production of another book on an entirely different subject. I had to decline, but soon thereafter asked if they might underwrite this one. Their judgment was that they would not back such extreme and controversial positions as you have just read. This reaction, from a group of accomplished people whose resumes could choke a hippopotamus, made me doubt my sanity and discernment, until I reflected that the extreme position I advocate is a defense of the copyright system that has been with us, in one form or another, for three hundred years; an extreme position largely endorsed by the Supreme Court, the Congress, and the Founders, as well as the governments and peoples of most of the countries of the world. Although of course I do not think so, my stance may be not entirely correct, it may be the weaker of the two positions, it may even be wrong, but it cannot be extreme.
What magic has given the young coalition protesting this venerable system its sudden force? They have grounds only to be concerned with copyright’s efficiency relative to the processes and machines that have temporarily outrun it, something that can be easily corrected by the application of these very machines and processes to bring it up to their speed. You would think that this would obviate the necessity for their activism, let alone its groundswell. But it hasn’t.
I understood why, when I realized that when I think of them I cannot help but think of California. They are everywhere, from Boise to Trondheim, Barcelona, and back, but whenever they come up an image appears before me associatively of palm trees, strip malls, golden hills that reel under searingly blue skies, and surfboards strapped to purple Volkswagens driven by skinny boys with nineteenth-century French facial hair. I asked myself why I invariably associate the tormentors of copyright with these pictures. Is it because, when I lived in California in the late sixties it seemed so much like another planet, cut off from the history and culture of the East (not just the East Coast, but Europe and everything else all the way to China)? Is it because so many there have taken the opportunity to wipe civilization’s slate until it is squeaky clean, and that after they have done this there is in fact nothing on the slate? That in such a gorgeous place there is a contagious mental vacuum as deadly and dangerous as a black hole? That it is, as I used to call it, beauty and the abyss?
Actually not. It was much simpler than that, it was just the recurring image of the surfboards. A surfer is a skilled rider who achieves his transit and momentum through no force of his own—which in this case would be argument—but by opportunistically taking advantage of a wave. The wave here, like the tremendous waves that in some seasons strike the north coast of Oahu, is the technology that has washed almost without resistance over much of modern life.
The changes that have come in train make the destruction of the copyright system not only feasible but easy. The argument has not created the capability, the capability has created the argument. It was the same in Macaulay’s time, though on a lesser scale, when he protested, in his way, in reaction to the advent of mass printing techniques and an expansion in the reach and transmissibility of information analogous to that which we are now experiencing.
Flush with money and power, the keepers and users of the new machines and processes (whether giant corporations like Google portraying themselves as selflessly centralizing information within their control, or individuals high on their ability to summon information and images from all over the world without effort or, they may think, price) fund, organize, and carry out attacks upon the old system. Is it not ironic that their motto is rage against the machine, when in fact they rage in behalf of the machine? And is it not ironic that those who protest against what they misidentify as the monopoly of copyright are aiding the centralization of information by Google, which may become the most powerful monopoly the world has ever seen? It is, and they are, despite the fact that their battle cry is, “Down with monopoly.”
They are now entering a particularly aggressive phase, suing holders of copyright for the temerity of asserting their rights under law. As one violator who is suing Universal Music Publishing Group for “abusing copyright law” puts it: “I don’t like being made to feel afraid, and I don’t like being bullied.” Or as a couple who make their living by pirating copyrighted images states: “They think we are just some country bumpkins they can push around. This is our livelihood, and we stick up for ourselves.” These kinds of people are aided, abetted, and stimulated by groups such as Public Knowledge, Public Citizen, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. With the exception of Public Citizen, in these organs the power of Silicon Valley is grafted onto a “progressive” outlook by means of what progressives used to love to call (though perhaps not anymore) interlocking directorates. In regard to companies that take action against the piracy of their copyrights, a representative of Public Knowledge says: “They like to accuse their customers, the music fans and TV fans out there, of not respecting the law, but I don’t think they respect the law.”121 (If your customers don’t pay, but, rather, shoplift, they are no more your customers than your burglar is your guest.)
As even a cursory observation of politicians confirms, power makes people particularly vulnerable to the fault of human nature that tells them that if something can be done it should be done; that if there is a desire it should be fulfilled; that if there is a hunger it should be satisfied; that if there is an opportunity it should be taken. The powers in this case are the gifts of modern life, the sheer capabilities of the new technologies, and, not least, the money and success that have concentrated in the hands of the owners and directors of the new systems and machines.
The theater in which they maneuver has until now been primarily that of litigation, where they are met by corporations with interests in intellectual property. But they are both fresher and smarter than the old corporations struggling to suck air out of the previous paradigm, and their next move will almost certainly be to expand the battle to Congress, where, after defeat in the courts, they now realize the power of decision rests. They have more than enough money to buy off Congress, which as everyone knows can be had for a song, but there they will be met by an almost equal power more experienced in lobbying and cajoling. There, however, the corporate defenders of copyright (distinguishable from the corporate attackers of copyright by very little except that they are accidentally on the right side) will begin to run out of options. And there they will appear embarrassingly sclerotic, and may well lose.
They will have won in the courts, yes, and they probably will tie in lobbying and bribing Congress—which would ordinarily be enough for them to claim victory, for to be victorious the opponents of copyright have the added burden of altering the status quo. But the opponents may sweep in from the flank and catch the old guard unaware with a decisive stroke. What is the flank? Where is the vulnerability that the defenders have not taken sufficiently into account, much less fortified, as they deploy their lawyers and lobbyists? What will move the stalemate?
Congress has the ultimate power of decision, and the ultimate power over Congress is not influence or money but public opinion. The Left, the Right, and everyone in between look at Congress and they see the surface action in ordinary circumstances—money, influence, party interest. True, this is how it works, and it is how the wise and cynical alike (assuming they are not the same) will tell you that it works. But, no matter how worldly wise, cynical, and sure they may be, when public opinion coalesces, see how they run.
How often supremely confident politicians and their handlers are dethroned by this sometimes wonderful and sometimes terrible flood, and of the two sides in the question at issue, the only one working the currents, the winds, and the waves of public sentiment is the one that knows well how to ride a wave, because it has ridden one to where it is and is intoxicated with the thrill of being there.
With their agility, overflowing capital, and huge audiences, the new industries—Google alone—can shift public opinion and succeed in crippling or destroying copyright, which by its very nature is fragile and dependent upon the kind of outlying political consensus that in the modern age can rapidly be shifted by a patient and devoted minority able to gnaw like a rat. This would radically alter the culture as we have known it. The standard counter to a concern of this nature is that cultures, language, art, and anything anyone can think of to supplement the list, evolve; and that deploring the factual trajectory of things makes one reactionary, a dinosaur, rigid, unimaginative, impotent, a fascist, and a chipmunk. But one need not be a Nazi brontosaurus to question the trajectories of one’s time if indeed one’s time produces people who think their grandchildren are their ancestors. I return to this example out of continuing astonishment, but it is accurately representative. At a rest stop in Maryland not long ago, I heard a high school girl ask her father where they were “now” (perhaps she was related to Yogi Berra). When told “Maryland,” she asked, “Is that in New Jersey?”
Nor need one be senescent to note that the middle ground has been continually pressed to the extremes, so that on one edge of what is published we have, from Edna Moisture, professor of gender studies at California State University at Uponga:
To clarify the fascistic class burst of intra-pseudo-transgenderism, one must accept that the other is the object of the actor, and the actor is an apodeictic imagination of the object. In my Transgender and Back: Male to Female; Female to Male—A Study of Possibly Unnecessary Surgery, I attempt to deconstruct the false question of pointlessness in an effort to struggle against the suppressed value distinctions representational as palliatives of detrimentally invisible self-reliance in the mimesis of faux postcolonial dependencia. The extrapositional question is whether Ognitz is correct in her paradigmatic dissection of Eric the Red and Barbara Bush (boldly displacing Caesar and Daffy Duck) as ideal typologicals of the penis theory of the Berkeley rejectionists; cf. Ognitz’s monumental (but flawed) On Apodeictic Self-Identical Being. p. 3, 217.
And on the other edge, from the immensely popular John Geisha, whose books are to airports what kudzu is to the banks of the Tallahatchie:
The boy sat on the swing. He saw a dog. Here, dog, he said. Come here. The dog saw the boy. I can not come to you, boy, the dog said. I am looking at a crime. Oh, said the boy. What do you see? The dog said, I see Walter Cronkite. He has a machete. He is hitting a milkman. He is hitting a milkman with it. The milkman is yelling. The milkman is yelling stop! Oh, the boy said. I will call a police man. The dog was glad.
What used to be the center has been drawn toward such painfully idiotic extremes ever more steadily as the extremes move from strength to strength and the center quietly atrophies. As anyone in publishing can tell you, the last thirty years (strangely, since I published my first novel) have seen a Spenglerian decline. The diminished ranks of those literary readers that remain have swollen with people who read for political gratification, flattery, titillation, or to be au courant and conform properly and efficiently to what they are “supposed” to think. These are the fragile souls who buy a book with an eye to what the other people in line and the clerk who checks them out will think; the narcissists who use literature as a mirror in which to gaze lovingly at themselves or their narrowly defined brethren instead of as a window through which to see the world; and “movement” people who, like self-basting chickens, read to propagandize themselves. Their minds may run in terribly stiff gutters, but they are miraculously ductile when commanded by the supposed authorities they embrace. If you are, let us suppose, a Waponyite, how many books on Waponyism do you need to read past your orgasmic conversion? Why not read a history of France instead, or go on a picnic?
In recent decades the decline of voluntary reading has been Gibbonesque: 18 percent among college graduates in the twenty years ending in 2002, according to their self-reporting, which probably flatters them more than would the facts. Only 45 percent of college freshmen and 33 percent of college seniors read of their own volition. People fifteen to twenty-four—yet another wave of the televisioned American family—spend two-and-a-half hours a day in front of the television (which is always on) and seven minutes in voluntary reading. And when students in grades seven through twelve are reading, 35 percent of them are watching television, listening to music, playing video games, e-mailing, surfing the internet, or picking their feet in Poughkeepsie. Perhaps not surprisingly, according to the definition of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, in 2003 only 13 percent of all adults and 31 percent of college graduates were proficient in reading prose, the latter representing a 23 percent decline since 1992.122
