It’s been an odd few months. It seems like one headline after another
since the latest round of court decisions regarding Napster have all
made bold statements about the end of file sharing and Napster itself,
it has yet to happen.
I believe there is a reason why this is so that can be stated in just
five simple straightforward words, “This is just the beginning.” So hold
onto your hats kids because the ride is only going to get better and
faster from here.
This whole file sharing idea with all of its copyright and ownership
laden rhetoric is nothing new. If you were any kind of astute user of
bulletin boards before the world wide web or have been a user of the
commercial Internet since the early days then its likely you remember
pirating Doom, waiting hours for an early copy of Adobe’s Photoshop and
even downloading .wav files that took just as long wishing someone would
make it all easier. Luckily they did.
Some people call Napster evolution while others stand by their stance
that it is a revolution. I call it good fun. I have always loved entropy
and the idea that all systems break down. When you get down to it,
that’s really what is happening here just one system breaking down in
place of a new one. Nothing different then when the printing press was
invented for example.
Before Guttenberg came along, unless you lived in China (by that I mean
they actually invented a different form of printing press long before),
then information was controlled by middlemen who by their given class,
education and sheer will to dominate were the only ones who could both
afford to buy and were taught how to read books. Their main job was to
act as intermediaries for the masses. They were intermediaries between
the masses and law, government, production as well as man and his idea
of God.
With the printing press we could produce lots of books at ever lowering
costs. Mass production and mass media began! Now people had a reason to
learn to read and the intermediaries, try as they might, were thrown out
of a job and lost their social standing. Eventually the Protestant
Reformation and long after that the American Revolution occurred all
because people had access to information and realized that they had the
power to make a change.
Some have made the case though that the printing press was really just
evolution. A series of technologies coming together in a way that
uplifts them beyond their original design and makes them more useful as
a whole then as individual technologies.
As you can tell I am comparing Napster to this innovation which some
would say is just another one of a long series of great technological
achievements in mass communications that gave the people the power over
the intermediaries while expanding on principals laid long before.
Now a lot of people spend a lot of time worrying about whether it is
revolution or if it is evolution and all that. I call these people,
“People with far to much time on their hands who don’t really get that
revolutions and evolutions do what they do and don’t care what they are
called” I have another term for them that isn’t as elitist, high brow
and arrogant on my part but it is eight letters and just mean. Think
about it!
Anyway, what is important to me is what we can do with these
technologies. Why its important is because time and again these new
technologies fall into the hands of a small percent of people and they
simply use them to become new types of intermediaries. It wasn’t long
before people started controlling the printing press and the same went
for newspapers, radios, televisions etc. Just imagine if in five years a
company like Napster becomes the dominant intermediary between the
people and music and we find we are in the same situation once again.
It would definitely make for some interesting entertainment to see the
demonized enemy knock out the giant old boys network that has dominated
for so long. But it wouldn’t really serve the people any better. My main
goal is to remove this cycle of a dominant one percent from our society
no matter who is doing the dominating. (Wish me luck because even I am
not sure it will ever be possible!)
You see by removing the middlemen we give not only the consumer power
but also the creators of information power because they no longer need
to act through an intermediary to get to us. The means of production, in
this case computer hardware and software capable of doing what used to
cost millions now can be used for relatively nothing and anyone can
become a rock n roll star or a great writer to someone else if they
distribute their creations online.
This also means that a music group is increasingly also becoming its own
production company. The same goes for filmmakers and video producers.
Instead of having all aspects of production controlled by a few very
large and very wealthy companies who make all the profit and possibly do
things like price fix, manipulate consumers through advertising, sell
potentially harmful products and green light others that they know are
pure crap, a larger array of companies all struggling to survive and
compete are forming, that to me is capitalism!
One percent of a population controlling the other ninety nine percent
sounds a lot more like communism then the egalitarian view of the
Internet I proposed in my last column or what I am proposing here.
There are still intermediaries in this system, there always will be.
Someone needs to maintain our Internet infrastructure so we can get
online. In many countries the government pays the bill and contracts
private industries to build and maintain them. We chose a long time ago
the idea that “the electromagnetic spectrum belongs to the people” and
so we give private industry the licenses to use them and they pay for
the content they push through them. This same idea is being carried over
to the Internet.
I am not saying this system is right or wrong when compared to the rest
of the world. Just that these corporations are the intermediaries
between information and the masses and not government that in the United
States is supposed to be operated by the people.
So I am not claiming an end to all intermediaries and middlemen for the
rest of time but rather an ideological shift in how we view the role of
information and the intermediaries that bring it to us. Hopefully by
doing so we can level that one percent into a more balanced number and
open up our communications systems and information infrastructures to a
more diverse population.
The decentralization of the system that has been in place now for many
years and our understanding that it was a centralized and at times
corrupt and anti consumer system is the first step to avoiding going
right back into another similar system.
Another important change along these lines is in how we act as
consumers. One belief amongst many people is that the system is how it
is, always will be that way and therefore there is no hope of ever
changing it.
The first step to change has already occurred. The technology is there.
We have it and those of us who use it will never be able to walk into a
record store without thinking “why pay twenty dollars for two good songs
when I can just download them” and soon we will be doing the same thing
for movies when we burn dozens of DVD’s a day and see that there really
isn’t that much to it.
With this step many of us are becoming smart consumers buying only the
things we really want to own, expecting more from what we buy and
becoming aware of what it really costs to produce the product we are
paying for and who is really the entity that is producing them.
If an informed consumer knows a shoe company uses slave labor or that a
group of companies have come together and priced out competition then
they are now making a choice on whether or not to support the company
through buying their products or choosing to buy from a different
consumer that shows an interest in their needs and desires.
This is the best first step to changing the system because an informed
consumer is no longer just a mindless being but rather a responsible
demanding individual.
It isn’t just music either. Software, video games, books, newscasts,
television programs, radio broadcasts all the information anyone can
dream of is being digitized and spread. As long as we collect it and
spread it, our new system flourishes. What Napster and “Peer to Peer”
networks do is allow what was once considered purely hacker fare to
become mainstream.
The beautiful part of this system is that someone will come along and
free any new forms of encryption and any new middlemen for us again and
again breaking down the system in place in favor of a new one. Despite
what you see on the news at night file sharing is done by people of all
ages, races, nationalities and so on and that allows us to right now
collectively ask and inspire a few generations to break down the system
without fear that they are in the minority. So I say download, devalue
and distribute because that is the revolutionary thing we can do to stop
this system.
It’s the remarkable “Boston Tea Party” like movement that someone giving
feedback to my last column had hoped to see. In my mind we have already
done it. We have collected the information and given it zero value. We
have then turned around and distributed it a million times over
devaluing it even more.
Basically we are doing what humans do. We are revolving and changing.
It’s why I don’t care what you call it, as long as we continue to do it
and fight the people who want to stop us.
The one percent had its chance to utilize this technology when it first
hit the scene. Instead fans of television shows and movies were sent
scare tactic letters and told if they didn’t take pictures off of
websites they would be sued. The same went for people spreading MP3’s
and using Napster until the companies realized they were attacking
consumers who were basically giving away free advertising and
discovering new bands that were under their labels.
Now after a couple of years of being told we were filthy and rotten for
going around these middlemen, they will want us to file share through
their networks and embrace their new business models. Maybe it’s just
me, but I am ready to see this generation of intermediaries disappear as
we consumers continue to become informed and revolt.
