Jason J. Crawford

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.