Slashdot Mirror
Citizen Case, DVD-CCA, Napster, and MP3
This weekend, Josh Rosenberg, a Slashdot reader and Drexel University student, sent the following e-mail:
"Dear Jon Katz,
Today [Friday], Slashdot posted a series of related stories. There is the one about Napster being banned in colleges, and even more closely tied together are the articles and threads about DVD reverse engineering. There are well over 1000 comments about these topics, and just by browsing at a level of 3, I can see how many good ideas are mentioned within.
"Many of these ideas, however, need a mass unifying force to have any real effect. (Ad banners containing the deCSS source will be no good if there are only 10 out there and they don't point to anything useful. Writing letters to the copyright office will be no good if they are flames, or perhaps more relevant, if they are not in Word, wordperfect, or pdf format.
"Can you be that unifying force?... Can you make some clear suggestions to the community that can hopefully be followed en masse? As I see it, the Slashdot masses are needed now more than ever."
This e-mail, one of a number like it, had a powerful impact on me. No single person can be a unifying force for so diverse a place as Slashdot, and Josh's plea for constructive suggestions is complicated. But the actions he cited aren't occurring in a vacuum. He's right to perceive a common thread. They aren't unrelated. They are all very much linked by a growing, runaway menace: corporatism. And they are in fundamental conflict with open source notions of technology and culture, on the rise in recent years, from Linux to MP3 to DVD's.
The Net and Web, and the technological creativity, cultural outpouring and individual expression that has accompanied their growth, are incompatible with the greedy and powerful corporations moving to dominate burgeoning new markets and economic opportunities online. Corporatism finds intolerable the outpouring of individualism the growing sense of choice and control that typifies the Internet, and which is closely related to the issues behind the DVD - CCA, Napster and Mp3 cases (Josh might have mentioned Amazon.com's legal steps to patent one-click shopping and AOL's legal efforts to block Microsoft from using instant messaging programs as well).
This conflict pits millions of people newly empowered by technology (to access information for free, and choose their own culture such as music, books, software innovations and movies) against increasingly wealthy, lawsuit-happy, politically influential corporations who will fight to restrict those choices in order to control content (product) make money and retain power.
In many ways, the Net has been an open frontier, generating an astonishing amount of creativity, information-sharing and experimentation. The ideology of corporatism dictates that those kinds of unrestricted boundaries be closed. Corporations have begun deploying lawyers, and seeking a wide range of patents, copyright protections, restraining orders and other actions that are the Net equivalent of fences and borders. As the primary contributors to political campaigns, they will certainly seek the help of government regulators as well.
The geek conceit has been that the Net is too big and diverse for anyone to restrict, but this growing litany of aggressive legal action suggests otherwise. Corporatism has billions of dollars at its disposal, as well as access to platoons of attorneys, politicians and lobbyists.
Any real solution or response of the kind Josh Rosenberg seeks begins with the realization that corporatism is, in fact, a serious challenge that needs to be countered. Distributing source codes for disputed programs is certainly one highly effective option, as it makes legal challenges pointless. Supporting sympathetic political candidates -- these are rare -- is another option. So is contributing money for legal challenges.
Punishing censorious and proprietary corporations by refusing to buy their products may be the readiest, and the most powerful option. Although antithetical to many of the Libertarian impulses on the Net, boycotts are more feared by corporations than any other single threat. It might well be time to send some economic messages. People have to make their own choices. In my own case, I stopped buying books from Amazon.com after their one-click patent infringement suit against Barnes & Noble.com. If ten or twenty thousand people did the same, they might very well re-consider the suit.
(If you have other ideas, please post them below)
But are these responses premature? Are Netizens really less apathetic and comfortable than their non-virtual counterparts?
The first step seems a realization that we are suddenly up to our necks in a political, economic and technological struggle -- the most important political conflict of the 21st century, perhaps -- the outcome of which will say much about our personal freedom, technological choices and cultural expression. So far, there is no such consensus or consciousness.
Most of the people reading this probably don't share Josh's prescient concern. They believe we are in good and prosperous times, and have little reason to fear encroaching corporatism. In this regard, we are still an unconscious civilization. People like Josh could change that quickly.
To see our new future, and to better grasp the context in which the DVD, Napster and RIAA vs. MP3 cases are occurring, get hold of last week's "Newsweek" and see the cheerful face on the cover of "Citizen Case," who, at 41, has miraculously become our new national corporatist leader, momentarily crowding aside the distracted Bill Gates.
In the enthusiastically approving magazine article, one of a torrent of excited journalistic accounts of his life, Case spouts the corporatist ideology for the umpteenth time in recent days: the inevitabilities of globalization, the ethos of the marketplace and the growing power of technology as a force in modern life. These are the rationales for Napster, DVD and the ongoing war on MP3's.
Citizen Case is a bland tycoon indeed, the media baron as vanilla ice cream, too dull to hate or fear. The hapless magazine writer, breathlessly spreading the news that Citizen Case is such a regular guy that he doesn't even have a pool or tennis court, is nearly desperate to wring a single quote out of the new Monarch of the Information Age. What, he pleads, is Citizen Case's overarching philosophy?
"To change people's lives."
Citizen Case, says Newsweek, sent away for anything he could get for free when he was a tot, getting himself on mailing lists for records, consumer-product samples and other geegaws. "His family," reports the magazine, "recalled that he was eager to be first to the mailbox every day. (Steve, you've got mail!)"
Gads. Come back, Bill. All is forgiven.
For more than a century, sci-fi writers, futurists and filmmakers - H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Mary Shelley, George Orwell, Arthur C. Clarke, Ridley Scott ("Blade Runner"), the Wachowski brothers ("The Matrix") - have been painting bleak portraits of life in the 2lst Century, our time.
Some have pictured a world engulfed by war and high-tech weaponry; others foresee humanity overrun by runaway technologies from artificial intelligence to genetic engineering. The sci-fi writers were deceptively political. Most of them lived in a time when governments were especially brutal and predatory, and they inevitably jumped to the conclusion that evil political systems would conquer the human spirit.
How could they have imagined that we are, instead, being stalked by invasive and predatory corporations, who don't want to torture or kill us, because each of us is somebody's target demographic. As long as we don't hack into their computer systems, give up some privacy and cash, accept mediocre culture, gadgetry and software, we seem relatively safe, at least for now.
Still, a lot of the issues the futurists raised are relevant to the year 2000.
They evoke a nameless sort of bigness, an overwhelming intrusion by forces so wealthy and powerful, all-knowing and corrupting, that they crush the individual, place profit above human, moral and social concerns, corrupt the police and political system, and quell opposition and resistance. They smother us in gadgetry and entertain us nearly to death. Orwell and Huxley would have absolutely feasted on the image of the lonely citizen, up for hours trying to reach Tech Support or Customer Service, shunted from one automated menu to the other until he quits in disgust or perseveres heroically. This is, in fact, a uniquely American social equivalent of the Olympic trial, a hellish kind of cultural decathlon - only the bravest and most determined can get through to another human being and get the help they are entitled to receive.
So far, the future seems to be going its own way, and the futurists have been partly right, partly wrong. Life for many people is immeasurably better. Work is safer, cleaner. Lifespans are longer, food more plentiful. Leisure time and entertainment technology spawn vast new amusement industries.
The Luddites who violently rebelled against the advent of the Industrial Revolution in England in the 19th century rioted against what they believed would be impossible working conditions. In fact, labor conditions were often so brutal then that the Industrial Revolution is credited as having helped produce both communism and fascism in response, along with countless eruptions, rebellions and civil wars. Both movements promised, and then failed to deliver, better and more human working conditions.
Even though the modern workplaces has serious problems - unequal access to technology, crummy jobs, lack of benefits, security, and individual creativity - employed workers are not nearly as bad off as the Luddites were, or as many feared workers would be at the beginning of the 21st century.
We are healthier, safer, and having more fun than any previous American generation. Life before the Multiplex was bleaker.
But in some ways life is worse - more polluted, crowded, ugly, and complicated and less spiritual, and certainly less private. In parts of this county and world, job markets are quixotic or collapsing, standards of living slipping, social programs weakening. Divisiveness seems inevitable in a world in which access to new technologies spells the difference between education and ignorance, poverty and wealth, opportunity and despair. And increasingly, we can see, as Josh Rosenberg has, growing challenges to freedom and creative growth.
Our time is defined by symbols. One newsmagazine selects the founder of an online book and retailing service as the Man of the Millennial Year, and the other celebrates the unpretentious "Citizen Case," (he drives a VW, wrote the stunned reporter) creator of one the blandest, most consumer-abusive Internet Service Providers.
In a sense "Citizen Case" is pathetic compared to Orwell's Big Brother, who also took pains to present himself as cheerful, ordinary and bland while amassing fearsome power and information. He also, he told his cowed citizens, wanted to change their lives for the better, and had only their best interests at heart.
We would, Orwell warned, become inured to warnings from the handful of people who saw this coming. We'd deem them mad, then make them mad.
Just because you're right, his helpless Winston repeated to himself over and over again after being jailed by Big Brother, doesn't mean that you're crazy. But in Orwell's world, this mantra comes too late. If you see too much and complain, you are crazy, according to the people who run society. Soon enough, in Orwell's world and ours, the insane are envied by the sane.
It's no accident that in the past few months, three organizations have occupied our energy, imagination and consciousness as we bumble into the next century. There was the continuing government confrontation with Microsoft, which had become a new kind of company, bigger and more powerful than any that preceded it.
Then there were the startling eruptions in Seattle over the gathering of the World Trade Organization, attracting a polyglot coalition of protesters, many enraged at what they perceived as the greedy behavior of increasingly powerful multinational corporations.
But the most significant organization was born last week, dominating our cultural and economic news - a proposed corporation that would instantly dwarf Microsoft and every other corporation in history. Of the many amazing qualities of the gargantuan AOL/Time-Warner, perhaps the most remarkable is that even though the list of things it owns is two feet long, they are almost all intangible - ISP's, messaging systems, movies, music labels, cable operating systems. In a few years, you'll probably be able to fit the the whole company's holding on a couple of CD's or micro-chips. That says a lot about how valuable information has become in the Digital Age.
As increasingly happens in our boom-benumbed economy, where a record-breaking NASDAQ and an Everest-like Dow have become our only common national political goals, news of the merger obsessed business writers and journalists for a few days, then receded to the back pages and to thousands of mailing lists, Web logs and e-trading messaging boards. When it comes to the volatile mix of money and technology, Americans no longer have the attention span to get seriously concerned about anything for more than a few news cycles.
AOL and Time-Warner had barely formed their new $350 billion monstrosity before it became clear that other conglomerates would need to soon arrange their own super mega-mergers in order to compete with this mega-merger. In a few weeks, we'll have three or four multi-billion-dollar companies controlling much of our information and cultural lives.
The AOL/Time-Warner marriage is a fine metaphor for many of the futuristic predictions about our time.
Almost everything about the merger seems wrong. The company is too big, too unwieldy. It will know too much about our tastes. America Online is a new media company, growing along the flexible, hi-tech risk-taking that is the hallmark of tech industries. Many investors of both companies are twitchy about the merger. Time-Warner is an old media company, vast, lumbering, conservative, much better at acquiring things than creating them. Case, stubborn and unassuming as he's described as being, has never undertaken anything so remotely as complex as fusing these two worlds.
But there's no doubt that if the merger happens, Case will become one of the most powerful men in the world, the de facto voice of contemporary techno-driven corporatism. Does that make him someone to fear?
Orwell and Huxley were bounded by what they knew, and believed only governments should be feared, that only they could amass this kind of power, promote this degree of mass-marketed conformity, monitor private lives, squelch competition, individual voices and entrepeneurial spirit. And treat their citizenry (customers) with arrogance and contempt.
It turns out that governments aren't nearly as efficient at all of the above as large corporations.
In the 20th century, the governments that aspired to such total domination all failed. The human drive for individuality and freedom, it turns out, is more potent than fearsome weaponry and cadres of secret police. But the offspring of the world's newest global movement - corporatism - are doing much better.
They are less overtly malignant and heavy-handed, and have a simpler, all-inclusive ideology: money and market domination. Political power is less appealing and much less profitable. Everything else - working conditions, job security, the environment, individual creativity - is subordinated to the annual stockholder's profit.
In this new culture, critics don't have to be silenced or imprisoned. They just rail from the fringes until they wear themselves out. Winston wouldn't have been thrown in jail in the year 2000. Steve Case would woo him with some stock options, he'd get a talk show on MSNBC, or, most likely, he'd end up ranting into the ether on some Web log, his enemies and targets never even aware of his existence. Maybe somebody would take out a restraining order against him.
This is perhaps the strangest lesson of Seattle; the futility of the idealistic kids, labor types, environmental warriors and others who saved their money to trek out there. Unlike Winston, they aren't even accorded the dignity of being persecuted. They aren't threatening enough. Their targets could hardly view them as more toothless or ridiculous.
Curiously, the group the corporatists fear aren't the college kids with picket signs, but the handful of kids who can really fiddle with the machinery - the Uber-Hackers. Here, Orwell was right on the beam. The powers that be wasted no time in getting to Kevin Mitnick (now being released) and the handful of other renegades who hack governmental and corporate computers, spread viruses, or penetrate the systems that run the system.
They are not ignored or dismissed; they're treated like major criminals, rounded up by platoons of high-tech federal cops, paraded before reporters, jailed for years. Perhaps they signify the teeth behind the unpretentious corporate smile, the warning to the rest of us to behave, that things aren't quite as benign as they might appear.
The Libertarians appear to have gotten what they wished for, always a dangerous thing. Government now appears to exist primarily to collect taxes, and move paper and money around, and occasionally intervene in ugly foreign hotspots. We no longer even expect it to protect freedom, check power or monitor increasingly wealthy private interests.
Corporatism has also stripped the press of any bite, mostly by acquiring it. Government regulators are flummoxed, uncertain of whether to try and contain this new kind of fluid, evolving global economy, or simple take their best shots (the Microsoft trial) at appearing to be on the case. With corporations now the primary contributors to the political system, Congress is unlikely to take up this role either. That means there's no one around to slow this process, question its impact, or challenge it much.
The only entity smart enough or strong enough to challenge or disrupt the corporatists - the young techno-elite building the very technology they use, increasingly control and profit from - seem anesthetized, sated by the booming, techno-driven global economy, enjoying full employment and soaring salaries, dazzled by the most extraordinary array of toys and interactive entertainment machinery ever assembled. They don't have to be conquered; they've already been co-opted.
The AOL/Time-Warner merger offers us one of those opportunities to define the present and shape the future, depending on whether it's permitted to happen or not, or whether or not we choose to oppose it. If it does happen, the futurists warnings about life in a world dominated by bigness, greed and homogeneity will take another step towards reality.
In the corporatist culture, progress depends on public conformity, the unexamined life, since even a little scrutiny invites regulation, interference and public doubt. Nowhere in Newsweek or in any of Citizen Case's many public appearances recently does he acknowledge a single one of the questions or criticisms being raised about his new company.
Case is a skilled corporate ideologist, even if he isn't so great at getting his customers online quickly. He seems to know that the system he now represents depends on citizen desire for inner comfort, whereas creativity, freedom and individualism depend on self-examination and discomfort. Such unease, a willingness to be discontented, is a hallmark of geek culture, and the beginnings of a conscious civilization.
It may also be the best hope for the 21st century which is, despite all the New Year's pyro-technics, off to a crummy start, as Josh Rosenberg noticed. But his e-mail struck a hopeful chord, especially if it does, in fact, signal the beginning of a broader awakening.
Josh Rosenberg asked good questions, and he deserves good answers. Anybody who has ideas or solutions is welcome to post them here:
The Government's faffing over totally unenforcable Acts suddenly becomes insignificant, when the film companies can virtually hold the Federal courts to ransom, and dictate the media's views on events.
I'm not saying you should trust the Whitehouse, but I =do= think we've got a much bigger threat to democracy on our hands. You can worry about the Goldfish, later. It's the Megalodon Shark that's the more immediate threat, right now.
Sure, you can "choose" which company you buy from, but so what? Microsoft's wealth is so vast that they need only put some into a high-investment account and they can run indefinitely with no sales at all. And, no, that wouldn't make them irrelevent. Not with the amount of tech they've bought up, over the years.
Time-Warner, AOL, etc - the same thing applies. Do you think any of them CARE if a handful of people boycott them in protest? Do you think they'd even notice?? AOL -control- so many related markets, now, and such a big slice of each, that they don't need to care -what- we think. They'll keep their existing customer base, because there's really nowhere for them to go. And with control over so many other industries, every person they control is paying them many times over.
Then, there's this detail of HOW do you boycott these mega-corps? They squirm into so many different sectors, and control so much in so many different areas. Is the money for that beefburger going, through some nefarious route, to AOL, Sun, Microsoft, Nescafe, or some other mega-giant?
It wouldn't be that surprising. There are many very complex connections, out there, with these mega-corps. There is simply no way to be sure you ARE boycotting them. Anything you spend can wind up in the pockets of a dozen major corps.
Next time someone brags about the US' "Free Market", remember DVD's, and how free the market was with them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
JonKatz reads like Sokal's parody of postmodern "research". Big words, frequently used correctly, but sometimes a bit off. Some of them are made up. Some of them are used because they have emotional connotations, not because their meanings really apply. And, of course, The Agenda.
This is getting really frustrating. Why the hell does this guy get to post articles on slashdot? He has no argumentation for his thesis. All he has is the belief that corporations are somehow intrinsically incompatible with a free life.
Jon, I have news for you.
They are us. We, the people, are the "corporations". We build them. People run them. People who, at the end of the day, are no worse than we are. Maybe no better, either, but they're not worse. Mr. Case is not evil. He does not hate freedom. He has different priorities than you do. I do too.
It is no more wrong that Steve Case has his position of power than it's wrong that JonKatz can post the equivalent of a gigantic post that will always be permanently moderated as if it were "+5, Insightful".
I think Jon is a waste of slashdot time, and I will continue to think so until he *JUSTIFIES* these psychotic episodes with some actual arguments. Show me *WHY* it is inevitably the case that any corporation must be nothing but soul-sucking evil. Show me *WHY* I should believe that the mere existance of a megacorp is a violation of all I hold dear.
Or shut up.
Or, at the very least, STOP PRETENDING YOU SPEAK FOR ME. You do not have my *permission* to claim you represent the opinions, goals, or beliefs of educated geeks, hackers, or whatever we're calling ourselves this week. Eric Raymond may pontificate, but he's at least *DONE* something.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
So, no one on slashdot ever buys from amazon again. Fantastic, their profits drop off by 0.5 % because we all shop at fatbrain anyway (it's not like most of us were real big fans prior to the one-click suit). Jeff Bezos, I'm sure, is shaking in his boots.
If i sound frustrated, it's cause I am. From the point of view of responding to a capitalist threat by exercising our capitalistic free-will, you know, I don't see much promise. Those people interested in shopping in a morally or philosophically responsible fashion will always be outnumbered by those not willing or not informed enough to do so, especially in the case of technically or socially complicated issues. Other examples are things like electric cars and global warming -- in the case of supposedly conflicting evidence, and problems with the costs of safe alternatives, people just can't seem to care.
That said, i think that there is a tremendous moral imperative for any member of a community that does recognize and understand the problems to a) inform others, b) act passively to prevent the hegemonies and intellectual monopolies we're seeing, and c) act in a positive fashion to secure and develop the tools to make any attempt to unfairly or maliciously gain a stranglehold on our access to information.
So, a) and b) are straightforward -- we stop buyin from Amazon, and we make sure to bore our windows-using friends to death with how fast/efficient/empowering/etc. other OSes/browsers/applications/etc. are. I do these things already, much to the detriment of my social life.
The really important thing, however, is c). It's also the one that sounds dangerous, violent, and fun. It's like the role of the monks in Canticle for Liebowitz or the Foundation in those Asimov books. We're more capable than the average bears of discerning which tools, trends, and uses for information are (on the one hand) most important in terms of their relevance to our information-access-related freedoms, and (on the other) most in danger of encroachment by industry, whether due to lawsuit, or good, old-fashioned suffocation-by-conglomoration.
That is to say, if DVD decryption tools had been squashed by the court prior to their dissemination to the community, well, the industry has won. If we all study and understand the code first, though, they can pass as many laws as they want, but they will fail to encroach upon our right to understand their technology, to understand and adapt any technology. This, I think, is the important thing, in spite of any lawsuit.
Point of story, what the people who break things open are really doing isn't destructive or criminal, it's a natural consequence of human curiousity. And the key way to nullify any attempt to limit this sort of curious inquiry is simply to exercise it at every opportunity. If we know a thing, and understand it, we own it, in a manner that the lawsuits and conglomorates will always lag behind.
I guess I'm trying to reinforce the degree to which I think that this is a great crusade for us, against intellectual limitation, because it's a fight that seems perfectly catered to the things we already enjoy -- learning things, busting them up and reusing the pieces however we'd like. These are subversive acts, I think that most of us discovered this at a very young age, but I think that understanding that this still applies is very important now that there are these potential threats to our ability to own our information and code and processes and stuff.
Those are my thoughts. I'm sure that I've made them sound pretentious and overblown, when I mean to make them sound populist and grass-roots. Fight the power via learning stuff, and knowing stuff. It sounds like fun to me.
god is just pretend.
We sufferred a BAD loss in the second deCSS injunction against us:
By upholding the injunction against an ISP for the actions of a subscriber, the court effectively changed ISPs from communication conduits into content providers. I realize that this is a preliminary injunction, but if it stands, the spirit of the Web is in trouble.
Today, I am responsible for the content of my web site, and the buck stops here. If my ISP becomes co-responsible, what is going to happen to the personal website? What about controversial websites, that some find offensive? What about Free (speech) Software websites that some deep-pocketed lawyer-laden business finds offensive.
In the worst case, the Web becomes the realm of the dotcom, and those who brought it into being are banned, or at the very least, tightly leashed and censored by litigation fearing ISPs.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.