Localism and the Commons: Capitalism’s Misguided Attempt to Protect the Surfing World
This is where I was back in April of 2009 as I wandered through the crowd on the beaches below the college town of Isla Vista at what was to be an annual clandestine party called Floatopia. Since then Floatopia has pretty much been deflated by the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors with the decision to permanently ban alcohol consumption on Isla Vista beaches. As someone who regularly surfs by the point at the end of that picture, I can appreciate the prevention of trash being left behind since Floatopia has a very disastrous environmental footprint. While the decision to ban alcohol seems excessive, the decision has me wondering about the management of our beaches. Who gets to say who comes and goes and what they can do.
Despite being a free-flowing, open ended and amorphous gathering of people, by most standards Floatopia’s excess would be regarded as a tragedy of the commons. The unavailability of access, the externalities of waste and destruction matched others beaches whose utility is diminished by excessive overcrowding. Imagine trying to surf at this beach in China. It’s just not going to happen:
Most of us will never see beaches with crowds like this but for the rest of us, the question is how do we manage our own beaches without forfeiting the commons? David Bollier’s article at Onthecommons.org titled ‘A Surfing Commons in Hawaii‘ praises the “localism” of the Wolfpak as an example of managing the commons by a new generation of Hawaiian surfers stemming from Da Hui who have assumed a de facto role to police some of Hawaii’s most popular surf spots; most notably Pipeline. While I often agree with Bollier, I don’t think he fully understands what I will call a “tragedy of the surfing commons” or what localism as a solution ultimately entails.
Bollier appears to have constructed his praise almost entirely on an article (which he cites in the piece) from the New York Times entitled ‘Rough Waves, Tougher Beaches‘ by Matt Higgins, who in turn seems informed by the commercial content that has come down the surfing-capitalist pike such as documentary Bustin’ Down the Door (detailing the conflict between the commercial surfing world and Hawaiian locals) and other web media (such as videos of fights on the North Shore). I’m not saying these sources are misinformed about the threat of overcrowding, but I want to make it clear that they all share origins to a marketable and image-based form of knowledge that is produced around such figures as The Wolfpak and Hawaii’s marketable pseudo-tribal form of localism. In turn it is the problem of the localism that is brought on and how that becomes a threat to a surfing commons.
So why focus on The Wolfpak? The Wolfpak have a different reputation depending on who you ask. Some see them as counter-colonial heroes to emulate, others view them as thugs who are hogging surfing spots under false pretenses. Bollier had this to say about The Wolfpak:
The Wolfpak constitutes a commons because it is a social collective that manages usage of this scarce local resource that its members cherish and use themselves. They are protective of it and each other, and have evolved their own rules for the orderly, fair use of the resource and community stability.
The problem with this argument is that it ignores the role a gang or cartel may have by acting as the decision makers for a common property regime. If a cartel allows for “fair use” under certain limited grants of access, they are still nevertheless a cartel. It would be like making the mistake by saying just because a record company allowed you to download a song on your computer, they no longer had a monopoly on content. They still possess the rights and can control exclusion, so unless you have entry into that record company to determine who can and can’t access the song, it’s still a protective mechanism of a cartel to control access. In other words, let’s say hypothetically the company only wanted to allow you to download it at certain times when the download speeds were slow because they wanted better speeds to be prioritized for their friends. So while you have to wait for the bandwidth swell to go flat, they’ve let all their friends download at times when the speed is high. You’re essentially waiting, if even allowed, to get the slim pickings of the bunch. Now the parity between both examples isn’t exact as it could be argued it’s in the interest of the record company to promote the song regardless (as they profit from promotion), whereas for The Wolkpak it’s not in their interest to promote their spot (and they lose space from promotion). However in terms of either acting as a social collective, you have to question what dues have to be paid to join the gang or company and furthermore how you would make your way up the gang or companies hierarchy to have input in that decision process.
What is true is that The Wolfpak do in fact manage a scarce resource. The North Shore is a mecca for surfing and has been for decades. Surfers who have their own tragedy of the commons at their local breaks flock en masse to spots like Pipeline hoping to get a spot in the crowded lineup just for the chance of a wave so they can tell all their friends back home how they surfed Pipe. But the question, much like the case of Floatopia, is what dangers these unintended guests cause and what to do if they leave the place a mess after their party? The Wolfpak contend their beach cleanups and vigilance for “kooks” out in the water corrects this. However the reliance on this has resulted in a behavior that makes them feel like they are the rightful heirs to the waves.
No Lineup Should Be Regulated
For decades the surfing world has dealt with a wide range of encroachments on the surfing commons; realty that hinders easements to beach access, runoffs and pollution by industrial modernization into a common space, a growing commercial interest in the sport that has expanded it into a marketable multi-million dollar pastime, and above all else the overuse of favored spots. Despite that waves will always continue to break, surfing has witnessed a fast ascent into the tragedy of the commons. These matters have been treated by different interest through different structures to approach combating expansive growth, external pollutants and development of surfing commons.
Organizations such as the Surfrider Foundation have grown from collective efforts to preserve natural diversity through ecological principles aimed at protecting coastal commons and ensuring open access to surfers. They have sometimes conjoined their efforts with the other end of the spectrum of state and local government’s regulatory process by seeking to council and promote ways to combat coastal growth that imfringes on the accessibility of surfing commons. Surfrider thrives on being part of the community and relying on community volunteers to help with efforts. But above all else, they don’t take their position to protect the surfing commons by going out and regulating the lineup by telling people who can and can’t be surfing a certain break.
Surfline has a good “bill of rights” that dictates common knowledge about the surfing line-up. These unwritten rules are usually the same even when the vibe of the surf spot will differ. Any lineup is regulated by ad-hoc associations in the water. If someone is endangering the group they will be told off and in rare cases physically attacked. But for the most part this is pretty rare as surfers proceed to know the unwritten rules of the line-up and who is given right-of-way. Respect is also yielded to and sometimes given to regulars or those who also show respect for the lineup or beach. If someone isn’t allowing for this respect, it will be noticed as other surfers will try to take off inside of them and jockey for positions to prevent them from catching waves. The most important part as stated, it this is ad-hoc. it will differ from whoever is there at any given time.
The problem of allowing a cartel to basically camp out and dictate these rules or carry them out as The Wolfpak does at a break like Pipeline means they often use this advantageously to gang-up against outsiders or use their position as a cartel to hog the waves. Instead localism creates a conflict that doesn’t ease the jostling for waves but instead can shuts anyone off from even getting in the water. The rivaling of gangs has been something promoted through capitalism (I will use the term very loosely throughout) as an answer because it reflects the mindset of proprietorship that comes with the information cartels of intellectual property.
Capitalism Pulls Up and Wants You Out
Localism has had various faces in the realm of Hollywood. From being the leather clad villains in the campy 1960s pop-teen film Beach Blanket Bingo to mystically enlightened natives in the 1980s surf-cult-film North Shore.
Though Beach Blanket Bingo conveys the Malibu Rat Pack bikers as a threat to the beach party commons, their threat is one of pop-culture rivalry as opposed to something regulatory. Youth rivalries were settled in a “do or die” competition of sorts where the loser would be banished, never able to return. This reflected cultural evolution as dog-eat-dog when notions of what was changed from a greaser culture to surf culture pretty much came with the flick of a switch when Gidget came out and the sexes were able to interact in a past time that pushed the moral envelope by being able to show a lot of skin.
In the case of North Shore, we get a representation that goes beyond youth culture to dig into the history of Hawai’i and get closer to the representation of surfing-fraternization witnessed with The Wolfpak. In the film, Rick Kane is an outsider who goes to surf Hawai’i in a way much like the outsiders who came before him and brought competitive surfing to the state as documented in Bustin’ Down the Door. Rick is scorned as an outsider by everyone and comes to find his hero Lance Burkhart (played by surfing legend Laird Hamilton) is a representation of the threat that came to surfing and Hawai’i through forced annexation by the United States. This all coincides with Rick’s epiphany as channeled by his exotic love interest Kiani who happens to be family of Da Hui lead by Vince (played by Mr. Pipeline and surfing legend Gerry Lopez). Vince also steals Rick’s stuff earlier in the film as a symbolic taking that the Hui had occur to them by annexation. Da Hui are portrayed as exotic “noble savages” who have had their harmonious lives upset by the entrance of Burkhart and the competitive surfing world. Because of this, Vince represents a “surfing for the right reasons” and shapes the mind of Rick by the end of the film when he is finally integrated into the “familial tribe”.
This impression of eclectic nobility in the pseudo-tribalist surfing world has been a cornerstone of how Da Hui and The Wolfpak interpret themselves to be. But here’s the key difference. Since the time of North Shore, the corporate surfing world has set up shop on the door-step of what Da Hui once claimed to preserve and now have become a sponsored extension of their localism. The surf competitions and surf clothing manufacturers that once posed an imperialization of their waves have become the key promoters of the image to Hawai’is famed localism. As such, Da Hui and The Wolfpak have evolved into corporate brands.
If there is any better example of the marketing it’s in the short-lived FuelTV show The 808, which followed around The Wolfpak and their leader Kala Alexander, including an episode where Alexander went to a corporate surfing expo to market The Wolfpak’s clothing line.
Alexander is a protégé of the old Da Hui and in particular Eddie Rothman (the guy on the far left in the red hat) who despite not being native to Hawai’i is basically the CEO of Da Hui with an unofficial claim to the ownership of Da Hui’s image and logo. Both Rothman and Alexander embody the marketable hyper-masculine “tough guy” image that is associated with Hawaii’s localism. These muscular, tattooed and self-described warriors share synonymy to the world of Mixed Martial Arts fighters by promoting a thrash-and-bash life style of excessive rowdiness (which coincidentally Alexander is a practitioner of MMA-fighting, along with Wolfpak member Kai “Kaiborg” Garcia who is a championship fighter).
Alexander is the poster-child for what is “post-modern punk capitalism.” He is the “new native” and represents gangster-corporatism as a means of connoting power through localism.
Those like Kala Alexander, Eddie Rothman and Koby Abberton (Bra Boys) have constructed a forced “native” identity as an associative and implied-empowering product. Something that has created a new wave in the mass culture of surfing that brings their attitudes to the mainstream as something marketable to no matter your locale. As if you too can embrace their identity politics as your own and become a tough guy like them. Companies like Billabong, Volcom, DaKine, Lost, Rockstar Energy, Monster Energy and Vans have all been able to capitalize off localist image-laden manufacturing. In doing so it’s created a reverse dynamic of “localist hegemony” that in turn reverberates to other communities who become overtaken by Hawaii’s localist culture. For example, in Santa Barbara, California some of these aforementioned surfing conglomerates have planted themselves in the community with retail shops that turn around and sell the localism that Da Hui has constructed. As a result it’s also created a threat to the true local surf shops of the area who can’t compete when the retailers occupy high-rent storefronts and are able to take a loss when their companies aren’t driven by how well that store performs. The identity of locals in Santa Barbara has adapted elements and symbolism of the image of Hawaii’s locals through a mimesis in purchasing the same styles of clothing they wear to convey the same localist attitude they have. If you can dress like them then you can hope to be like them.
It’s Not About the Benjamins
If the surfing community were to go the route of The Wolfpak, it would create diasporic elitism of pseudo-tribal-inspired localism throughout the surfing community. Maybe even chapters of The Wolfpak would appear in the continental United States or surf spots around the globe. It would be an encroachment by mass-produced locaist attitude. None of this is to say what Da Hui and The Wolfpak do for their own community is wrong. They do engage in an occasional forms of corporate sponsored soup-kitchen-activism by teaching kids with cystic fibrosis to surf or adopting a highway and doing things like corporate-sponsored beach clean-ups. The problem is allowing that to be a rationale that gives them a right to control the accessibility of surf. What was once a call to protecting against a threat of outsiders in the period of post-annexation has become a tool for a transnational corporate surfing world to bottle and manufacture surfing cartels as the answer to the sport. For this reason, I have to disagree with those who believe this type of localism is an answer to protecting a surfing commons.
Fauxpen Source Phone Advertising and the Cult of You
YOU should remember the Time magazine cover where we all won person of the year with “You”. That was for us right? I mean it did say “you” and i’m a “you” and you are too, so shouldn’t we be honored to feel so empowered that we “control the information age.”
A cult of You didn’t begin with the Time award and certainly predates computers. From parables to Greek mythology, narcissism is traced as a common trait to human existence. However in the epoch of user-driven “Web 2.0” we witness narcissism driving towards cyber-hedonism through an aesthetics of personalization.
These aesthetics provides a misnomer of open-source abilities to “prosumers” by delivering a pre-packaged interface that is marketed towards making customizable on a superficial level and above all aimed at appeasing the users own pursuit for uniqueness. There is no greater example in the present than in the world of smartphones. Such devices are a personal appendage to the information age and as such have become a reflection of our own identity in this era where our supposed digital-empowerment has become a fashion accessory.
By focusing exclusively on you, it evades the user from the sense of community that comes with open source and instead sends them in the direction of wanting to further accumulate self-satisfaction by obtaining more superficial controls without taking part in the development of it.
The most recognizable instance of this has occurred with mobile carriers advertising around the Google Android operating system. T-Mobile’s MyTouch3g has gone leaps and bounds beyond their competition to market the phone as being the first phone strictly for “you”. Their campaign is featured on the T-Mobile MyTouch website featuring a line of celebrities such as Darrell Hammond, Avril Lavigne and Chevy Chase who each have clickable options to explain how much they love their phones customizability and how it’s a reflection of themselves.
The MyTouch campaign has also made the pages of magazines such as Wired and television spots with one commercial featuring Whoopi Goldberg, Phil Jackson and Jesse James each passing the same phone on to the other as the phone magically morphs into their own customized settings. This sequence is set to the tune of Cat Stevens’ “If You Want to Sing Out Sing Out” and highlights the chorus of “if you want to sing out, sing out, and if you want to be free, be free” and “if you want to be me, be me, and if you want to be you, be you.” The song has played a central theme in all MyTouch advertisements to create a linkage between freedom and the sense of you that is derived from user customizability. The commercial concludes with the tagline of the campaign: “the first phone 100% you.”
For the majority of consumers out there who are venturing into the android world, this is where a familiarity with open source will begin. It isn’t with the frustrations that the development community had with the terms of the developers kit or any hurdles in builds of Android’s development. Instead it’s all packaged up nice and tight around and easy to navigate UI where the goal of aesthetic customizability would give the impression that open source is merely changing your wallpaper and icons.
In the minds of T-Mobile, they likely believe the carrier wouldn’t sell as many MyTouchg3g units if the distinctions they advertised against Blackberry or others smart phones was about being part of the Android community. So by focusing on a connection of “you” rather than with community, it triggers consumer narcissism to feel the product will extend their individuality. T-Mobile is in the interest of selling phones, not about promoting community. That’s clearly understandable how they don’t have a vested interest to solely push Android. The responsibility would fall on Google but I think they feel it would be too daunting on consumers to understand that aside from when Sergey Brin and Steve Horowitz demonstrated how good Android was at ordering pizza.
This doesn’t mean the advertising of community has to be boring. IBM created an amazing campaign with Linux that surprisingly never got much notoriety even though it too featured an ensemble of famous faces preaching the importance of community.
Maybe one day we can think of these mobile phones as a tool of community rather than being a fashion accessory.
Is Culture Free or Not? Either Way it’s Getting Shared
Andrew Keen is up to his usual reactionary hijinks in his recent article Why Culture Isn’t Free. While I can appreciate a sober reminder about the ill-conceptions of any digital utopianism, I feel Keen is building disingenuous arguments to attack the free culture movement and in particular remix culture.
One part of his piece sticks out like a sore thumb and sadly it’s the point Keen wants to try and drive home with the reader. Emphasis added by me:
Much of the pirate ideology is simply left-leaning communitarianism gone amuck. Book after book and idealistic media academic after academic eulogize the “public sphere” and its supposedly cathartic impact upon culture. Take, for example, Copyright and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity by the University of Virginia media theorist Siva Vaidhyanathan, which argues that the privatization of culture has impoverished the public sphere. We need radical copyright reform, Vaidhyanathan claims, to “encourage creative expression without limiting prospects for future creators.”
But what kind of creative expression are radical copyright reformers like Vaidhyanathan seeking? Their goal in the copyright wars are to give consumer-artists the right to “remix” content, the creative pasting together of different forms of media which current copyright law restricts. While Lessig who, for a law professor has much to say about the muse of creativity, argues that in today’s interactive media, the nature of art has changed and that pre-existing images and sounds have become a “palette” for the digital artist.
The problem with the cult of the remix, however, is that it conveniently ignores why the majority of consumers steal content on the Internet. No doubt Lessig and Vaidhyanathan are right that there are some genuinely creative artists whose digital work is being undermined by today’s copyright laws. But the vast majority of thieves on Pirate Bay and other file-sharing sites aren’t Lessig’s heroic digital visionaries remixing the sounds of Philip Glass with the images of Andrei Tarkovsky to create innovative new art. Instead, they are downloading the latest Harry Potter movie or hit song by Madonna so that they won’t have to pay for it at the cinema or record store.
Keen believes the death knell to the arguments of those like Lessig and Vaidhyanathan is that the vast majority of content sharing goes to free-riding viewers rather than for creative purpose which would carry a noble merit since there is a productive outcome. Now even though Keen disavows this productivity in “Cult of the Amateur”, the ideas at stake that Keen picks from Lessig and Vaidhyanathan on remix culture are not aimed at excusing the bulk of file-sharing. It’s merely a function of what liberty consumers should feel they can take with their content and culture that they engage and immerse themselves with.
Both Lessig and Vaidhyanathan, among others in the area of arguing copyright reform, have made distinguishable arguments on the function of sharing. For instance Vaidhyanathan’s “The Anarchist in the Library” looks more at a function of cataloging knowledge reciprocity with digital media while making little mention about remixing. If Keen wanted to address the problem of people downloading Harry Potter and Madonna with no intent to remix the content, then he should have addressed it from their arguments on content sharing.
Before remix culture and the Henry Jenkins’s out there tried to convince us we’d all prosume our digital media, there was a straight forward response by nascent file-sharers that felt dejected by the price and distribution mechanisms of CDs and DVDs. There was little recognition of piracy as a function of identity-politics or an overarching ideology about what should be done with the content once it was shared. While Keen chastises the vast amount of pirates for wanting a free lunch from their file sharing, that same vast majority never conformed or saw themselves as part of the ideology either. Overtime that may have changed certain people with the popularity and support to matters like The Pirate Bay’s dramatic saga, but most importantly the ideology never preceded the action.
Sharing Will Always Occur
In looking at file-sharing there is a social function at work that precedes any inherent value to data. It’s predicated on the simple exchange of knowledge communicated between humans. This is a distinction Karl Polanyi observed about human relationships to the market society in “The Great Transformation”. Polanyi noted the process of gifting resembled a reciprocity of knowledge shared through social interaction. Telling ideas, laws, theories, mythologies and fictions had an intrinsic function to enable human communication which society thrived to progress and educate themselves by. So as a result the gifting of goods or services operated the same function to gift someone with the said knowledge about it.
Now we don’t have to follow Polanyi to a T, but we strive to have knowledge at our disposal and whether it’s free or not; we want the quickest and easiest ability to fill voids of knowledge. Here’s an example. Your friend tells you about a movie they just saw but you haven’t seen it. In communicating to you aspects of the plot, you instantly want access and knowledge of the movie in your mind. But why? Because your mind operates on this interaction with either a desire for reciprocity to communicate back or the need to fill the gaps of knowledge with the rest of the information available about it. Since we might not have immediate access we then fish around for other areas of information freemiums: trailers, press-packs, IMDB information, discussions on message boards, reviews. To those like Keen these only serve allowable marketing function to generate buzz but we flock to them since they serve a function of completing a knowledge loop.
Sadly as a society that’s become so rooted in having controlled mechanisms to ideas, it’s become an acceptive norm to negate having an informational buffet even when we have the technology to provide it. The information we get for free in regular human interactions is just overlooked and dismissed as banal even though it’s a vital and common aspect of our lives that we almost never think twice about. Our culture educates us and looking to commodify it so artificial market mechanisms will be at work to construct profit, we treat our notions of culture passively in the way we can dismiss its routine consumption. This creates the problem of looking a culture to be there to entertain and do nothing more. The power of fictions are unmistakable, Oliver Twist may tell you more about 19th century industrial England than what you may get from an encyclopedia and you’re more likely to turn to it as an example than you would a historical moment.
The argument I would expect against this, is that by allowing content sharing to persist you remove the incentive for the Milos Formans out there to share their genius with us. This assumes a sort of cultural vanguarding with content bias built on trite canonizations to make content appear scarcely unique to be considered “good” or high brow (the way a 100 Greatest Movies list tries to give each movie some glistening aura). Moreover it ignores that any genius or good ideas will flow into a public sphere or be communicated, reflecting a true marketplace for knowledge. Is that not an even more supportive argument for remix culture? Not everyone will be in the situation Forman or others were during the Czech New Wave to have large state funding to make films lampooning the system. While we consider it genius, his work came purely by happenstance. Preserving copyright had nothing to do with it, nor would it create another Forman. But i’m sure just by brining up Milos Forman in this discussion (as these ideas are publicly exchanged), those who read this or Keen’s piece will feel compelled to look Forman up or find his work and perhaps better educate themselves about Forman, the Czech New Wave or any other related knowledge category that might in turn inform themselves about both his film’s cultural place place in history and now in being used in a discussion on copyright reform.
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