Digital Barbarism, page 5
I had touched upon a mysterious nerve, and although the style of the response can be explained, who, exactly, would react in such a way to a plea for the extension of the term of copyright? Had I offended a sub-cult amid those modern people who dress like circus clowns or adorn themselves like cannibals? (That is not an exaggeration if you consider the requirement politely to stifle one’s reactions in the face of massive tattooing; nose, ear, and other rings; feathered adornments; perpetual three-day beards; orange and blue hair; and even variations of what used to be called war paint; plus degrees of undress that used to be confined to the Folies-Bergere or the pages of the National Geographic. If Queequeg were dropped on Santa Monica, trying to find him would be like playing Where’s Waldo?
I don’t claim to want to understand a great deal that goes on these days in America, as most of its raging enthusiasms are beyond my comprehension, but I never would have thought that such a reaction was possible anywhere. I would have bet money that it wasn’t, and I would have lost. Because there actually is a kind of tribe, a community of interest, united by a shared passion in attacking copyright. They are in spirit the impossible fusion of the tribe of boys in The Lord of the Flies, the extras in a Mel Gibson post-nuclear-holocaust movie, and the American Library Association. Their wildness has been denatured into a crusade against copyright, their audacity lies in button-pushing, and their chief barbarism is the use of intemperate language behind a shield of anonymity on the internet. They are sprinkled like confectioners’ sugar over all the United States, although no doubt more than 99 percent of them reside within an iPod’s throw of a Starbucks. When mobilized, they are able to surge like a mighty ocean through the abstract channels of the internet. I offended them because I wrote a piece calling for the strengthening of copyright when the heart of their cause is to abolish it. What began as an argument about the duration of copyright quickly devolved into a dispute about its legitimacy.
Make no mistake about this. They may protest that they are not against copyright itself but rather its abuses, extensions, and unnecessary inconveniences. This is an unartful dodge. Not only the persistent undercurrents of their logic and commentary, but their unselfconsciously expressed arguments show their true colors. If, as they assert, copyright stifles culture and intellectual advancement, if it is a tax, a monopoly, injurious to the public good, and of marginal legitimate purpose, why would they be for it? If what they argue were true, I wouldn’t be for it either.
Some state the case for abolition directly, unashamedly, and even violently, but though not all of them subscribe to the same views, and each of course has his own take on things, the train they are riding is clearly headed toward abolition, and they do not disavow one another, even the most extreme, except perhaps when cornered. The calculation (or, better, reflex) on the part of the mob is, likely, how much to accept the leaders’ apparent overcaution in exchange for the benefit of their respectability, and on the part of the leaders it is, likely, how much setback and embarrassment to tolerate in return for passion, numbers, force, and fuel. One thing is clear after reading hundreds of pages of their unshielded conversation on the internet: the more they succeed, the less coy they will be about their aims and predilections, and the more absolutist these will become.
I had stumbled into this encampment as artlessly as some of my former British Merchant Navy shipmates, in Yokohama in 1966 or 1967, who walked up to a group of smoldering Yakuza, pulled the edges of their eyelids back to simulate an Asian visage, and enquired, “Choinese restaurant? Choinese restaurant?” Thirty years later, I received, figuratively, the same reception they did. The attacks were often ad hominem, seeking to discredit all of my views on any subject, and apparently even my whole life—which they cannot possibly know—as well as my abilities such as they are, my honesty, and my integrity. I will leave out an account of such assaults, as they are irrelevant to the dispute.
Because of the very great number of assailants it is tempting to liken them to mosquitoes on the tundra, but that would be a mistake. Taken together, they are a bull. I put out a cape, and they charged. When I was twenty, I was hitchhiking through France in a glorious summer and found myself, with two young Scots, stranded for several days on the (then) little traveled Autoroute du Sud. We spent the daylight hours hoping that a car or truck would pass (which, when they did, was usually at about one hundred and ten miles an hour) and at night we would sleep in the organ loft of the little church at Givry. Sometimes cars would go by only every hour or so. Next to us was a field in which a young bull was grazing. The Scotsmen had been doing missionary work in East Africa and were familiar with large herd animals. It was their idea that, using a long-sleeved shirt, we should teach ourselves bullfighting. The reason I am still here and thus able to irritate people who don’t like copyright is that the bull was perfectly behaved, he always went for the shirt, he was apparently frightened, perhaps even cooperative, and he seemed to be enjoying the whole thing. I think he liked us. We liked him. As he was young and new to the game, perhaps for him it was a learning experience, with us in the role of his mother and father.
Almost a lifetime later, I had an encounter with a different kind of bull, a huge, fully grown adult in his prime, who had broken down a gate and was wandering around the road near my house, angry moisture clouds coming double-barreled through his nostrils like shotgun blasts. A few people had stopped, and remained in their cars. Remembering my pleasant experience in France, I thought to be a hero and maneuver the bull back through the gate. On my first try, however, he signaled me by lurching forward, head down, and planting both front hooves upon the asphalt. On my second, more tentative try, he charged. There was no compromise or hesitation. All two thousand pounds of him, dense musculature focused, horns pointed, nostrils flaring, eyes wild, came at me with surprising speed. I was well over fifty but have never sprinted faster in my life. Like a bullet, I zinged into a grove of pines to my right, and the two of us, one of us in adrenalized terror, started weaving around the trunks. Then, with a snort of contempt, he decided to go back onto the road.
The anti-copyright bull, a centurion of the electronic culture, is quick, massive, muscular, untiring, and stupid. Although it can’t (or doesn’t) really read, write, or think, it and others like it are setting the agenda for your future and mine. We are now busy—sometimes against our will as we open an inbox with six hundred e-mails or are summoned from a mountain pool by a cell phone with an abominable ring—applying machine algorithms to our lives, like it or not. And this new regime is anchored not in a great truth or discovery but in a swarm of dullard machines and a great many fatuous assertions.
Before touring the more pertinent arguments, most of which are sufficiently careless and spurious to be a Disneyland of self-impeachment, one should have some idea of their origins. What occult force has brought so many people together into a movement both as agile and dense as a tyrannosaurus running, a movement that, in the time it takes to fill a fountain pen, can deliver three-quarters of a million badly written missives to every corner of the world? Granted, they are much like the poets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, thirty or forty years ago. There seem to have been about five hundred of these. Each one had a poetry magazine that published five hundred poems in each issue. Each magazine had five hundred subscribers. And each poet had subscriptions to five hundred magazines. The traffic was remarkably heavy and mainly borne by the post office, and, as in the inbreeding of Spanish royalty, the effect was peculiar. There was, however, something almost noble about the fuse of this bud, as it was poetry itself that moved them to their complex arrangement of mutually reflecting mirrors.
The primum mobile of the anti-copyright partisans, however, is a lot less noble than that of the five hundred poets of Cambridge. The force that created their movement, and the glue that holds it together—on account of which they suffer no apparent embarrassment—was their epic battle with the record companies. In 1999, the recording industry was (by revenue) three-quarters the size of the book publishing industry, but by 2006 a good deal less than half its size, thanks to an average annual negative growth of 3.5 percent. For some reason, music seems to be the first pillar to fall. When I arrived in Cambridge as a freshman in 1965, more than half of the Harvard Coop’s record aisles was devoted to classical music. A few years later, it was no more than a tenth. And once the locusts have exhausted one husk they turn to another. It is not surprising, however, that they would focus next on the printed word even though what really exercises them is software, their metier. Like good jackals, they go for the weak. Software and motion pictures are not only behemoths, but fast-growing behemoths, having annually increased their revenues, from 1999 to 2005, at 8 percent and 7.2 percent respectively, whereas in the same period book publishing grew at approximately half that rate, and from a smaller base. In 2005, book revenues were $24.42 billion. Revenues from software and the motion picture industry were $193 billion.7
It is not difficult to see which is the weakest animal in the herd. Not only is it true that publishing as a sector is financially feeble, but it is (as hard to believe as this may be, given the publishing consolidations of recent years) less concentrated than either Hollywood or Microsoft and its vassals, and it has far less spare money with which to fund its defense. Add to that the difference between the motion picture executive, after whom the pit bull, cobra, and tarantula were named, and the typical mouse-burger publisher, and no strategist worth his double Ethiopian nonfat goat milk latte would advise attacking the hard target before knocking out the soft one. Much like Lenin’s rope-selling capitalists, publishers, who live by copyright, publish lots of books attacking it and very few in defense. In fact, at least in the realm of general books rather than legal treatises, this may be the only one. That they have fallen into such a pattern is explained, I believe, by the same thing that explains why such an overwhelming proportion of the West’s intelligensia believed that resisting communism and the Soviet Empire was to have been (embarrassingly) on the wrong side of history, and why they acted accordingly, and why to this day they cannot see what was at stake, what happened, how it happened, why, and according to what principles.
Is it not somehow revolting that the forceful drive of the copyright abolition movement, its lust aroused by music “sharing,” DVD copying, and software piracy, has turned upon the relative backwater of publishing? The spillover of passions and resources to the literary sphere (or what is left of it) seems disproportionate, unnecessary, unjust, and a touch sadistic, like a cat sporting with a mouse. This is not an oblique plea for a separate peace. All a separate peace usually does is move you back to the end of the line so you can wait to be dessert. Rather, I am indignant that a movement begun by people who wanted to avoid paying for music that to me is worse than North Korean water torture, now mortally threatens the stability of a craft and art that was ancient at the time of Jesus, that encompasses the world, and that has evolved by the love and labor of the greatest souls ever to have graced the earth.
When recently Pearson Education moved to stem the piracy of seventy-eight of its texts, it was met by the assertion that it stood on “shaky legal ground.” Those who pirated them displayed on their web site the following appeal: “There are very few scanned textbooks in circulation, and that’s what we’re here to change…. So pick up a scanner and start scanning.”8 It is easy to be sympathetic to students (and their parents) who because of the greed, vanity, and corruption of the people who make and assign textbooks must spend inordinate amounts for worthless tomes stuffed full of unnecessary graphics and obeisances to political correctness of one sort or another (showing a woman in the kitchen has long been almost a capital crime, and, apparently, male Caucasians no longer do math problems), but they are not so oppressed that this is yet or can ever be a justification for pulling down the whole temple. It is said that the American Association of Publishers finds 30,000 to 125,000 pirated files every week.9 And this is just the beginning.
As have others over the course of history, many have now decided that it is impossible not to be entitled to something that is easily and commonly stolen. Partly because my aging and self-indulgent generation has educated those in its wake to believe that the way to confront moral failing is to reclassify it as virtue, this they have done, and with unalloyed certainty. Copyright must be abolished so they won’t have to pay for the music and software that sustains them—like oxygen, which, after all, is free—for so vast a proportion of what they may claim to be their waking hours. Never has a human generation been so transformed by and dependent upon such an electronic blood flow. It is as if they are fighting for a quality upon which their existence depends. Thus, the passion, as strange as it may seem and as terribly mistaken as it is, to argue and declare, like Louis XIV, that the fruit of other people’s labor should naturally flow to them. It should not.
The advocates of “music sharing” think that, because the Beatles, half of whom are dead, have hundreds of millions, or perhaps even billions of dollars, and the people who would filch a song or two may have to buy their salad one tomato at a time and use milk crates as chairs, these expropriations are somehow mathematically justified. They aren’t, and not mainly because their cumulative effect has destroyed the music industry. They aren’t, because what has been done is simply wrong, and in contradiction of the rules and morals of civilization. Those who flatter themselves with such loose opinions should think of what the world would be like if everyone behaved as they do. It’s almost a matter of aesthetics. It doesn’t matter if you steal a lot or a little, or if you get away with it, or not: theft is ugly.
During my unreconstructed twenties, my father once assigned to me the task of eliminating a huge wasps’ nest in a woodpile beneath the kitchen window. Rather than use chemicals, and because fire may have been ill advised so close to the house even if a politician might not understand why, I decided to put my reflexes to the test. I took a heavy shovel and smashed the nest, launching at least a hundred wasps in maximal rage, whom I then engaged in a twenty-minute Battle of Britain, swatting with the shovel at implausibly high speed. There was no reason I should not have died that day, and even less reason to have remained unstung, but I did not, and I did. Never before or since had I or have I reacted so fast and with such unthinking efficiency—not even as the father of two-year-olds. With no time to calculate, much less reflect or strategize, I moved like a radar-directed gun, or something in a cartoon.
The response to my article was crafted by the wasps of the internet, who have been educated to move quickly and in synchrony, to cut and paste, to organize, skip, jump, and race from one thing to another in a frenzy of vituperation while treating people’s misfortunes as a form of entertainment. Their style of argument is reminiscent of the Red Guard’s. If you have ever been the odd man out at a dinner party—say, one of eight people, seven of whom furiously support a position you do not—you have an idea of what it is like to argue with a hundred, two hundred, twenty thousand, or two hundred thousand people at once. If an argument is converted simply to a contest of strength, endurance, or efficiency of reflex, mass can sometimes quite easily overcome accuracy, validity, and justice.
I could not even think to match my opponents in any reflexive game of speed or volume. In their addictive dialogue with their computers, their keystrokes come in rapid machine-gun surges that end in silences filled by flowerings upon the screens into which they stare like Turkish dope addicts, only to be followed by more surges and more silences, one machine talking to almost another. In such a world virtue is the rapidity and agility with which one responds to preprogrammed, modularized, mechanized routines. Close analysis of text, the slow and careful judgment of the delicate structure of a sentence, and sensitivity to the origins and syntactical placement of words, have long been eclipsed by cartoon-like graphics and machine-gun bursts of language meant not to mean anything as much as to move debate in the manner of the riot-control fire hoses against which many of this tribe may find themselves arrayed when they besiege meetings of the Group of Eight.
These are not sensible people. By now I have read far too much of what they have written not to know that though they eschew style, wit, punctuation, proper spelling, capitalization, and accuracy, they are functionally literate. Nonetheless, they cannot read, which may mean also that they do not read, but rather leap from screen to screen in quick Evelyn Wood–like scans which, like mixing nuts or candy into ice cream, they then meld with predigested versions or accounts of whatever they are supposed actually to have read. The material which they work and rework to death is often just as inaccurate as the collective product they hope to form. Taken for fact, misconception builds upon previous misconceptions until what emerges is the result of a high-speed game of telephone among thousands (or tens or hundreds of thousands) of people, in which responsibility to the truth is considered met if one has read something somewhere that says something close to what one will now further distort.
