It’s Oscar night and I’m happy about the feature documentary category. Some great choices in there but my gut feeling is that The Cove will take the award – - but that’s out of my own belief the category is transforming into an “adopt-a-cause” program for Hollywood. Though, that’s not to take away from the movie itself. It’s well-deserving and has turned a magnifying glass on the dolphin slaughter in Taiji.

In an e-mail convo with my friend, he critiqued the single-issue approach of the movie for focusing exclusively on dolphins when the exploitative system behind whaling has also created much human suffering. In many ways we can create the parallels, whether it be to the prison-industrial complex, the US defiance over it’s torture policy or about the capitalist structure in general – however the discourse about the “dolphin abusement park industry” (to use Ric O’Barry’s words) usually stops short at complaining about greed. This does present a problem in working towards a solution. While chalking it up as greed only makes the whalers motives seems that much more barbaric, it speaks for the mindset of a few rather than damning the system as a whole.

This is a growing problem in this meta-genre of documentaries. By the end of the film, the door is left open to an audience of voters expecting to accomplish something through representative politics. It comes down to convenience of choices or political power of purchase that is solutionized at the end of a documentary like An Inconvenient Truth (also in this meta-genre). Solutions never agitate the viewer to rise up out of their seat and organize. Instead it’s turning to a voter-by-wallet crowd and hoping a choice by guilt reaches enough to make a change.

In The Cove, our hope that the dolphin slaughters comes to an end are in the hands of tech savvy and stealhy – - Oceans 11 style eco-operatives which brought us the footage of the slaughter. While this is powerful imagery, the social medium to display it is lost beyond when the select time the film is shown. Remember the ending with Ric O’Barry standing with the monitor in the streets as countless numbers of people pass? In a sad way that’s an analogy of what the problem is with these meta-documentaries. The awareness reaches up to the point of one person with a sign attracting a few passers-by. It will inspire few, be seen and catch the glance of many but everyone will continue on with their day. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good O’Barry did this but the action is without teeth which is a fault of this meta-genre and not the film itself.

The heroes of The Cove are something out of a Mission Impossible operation yet other heroes are lacking, and as with An Inconvenient Truth for that matter, it is the masses that are missing. In contrast, a movie of similar caliber, Sharkwater, turns the lens on the masses of protesters in Costa Rica who assemble on their government and put forth the demand for changes to be made despite threats of the mafia. While The Cove gives us glimmers of hope with the city council members who stepped up against the school food program, we don’t see the masses demanding change. Does this mean the masses in Japan are for it? Hardly. As the film demonstrates, there are large numbers of cosmopolitan and urban Japanese (largely permeating from corridors in youth culture) who object to whaling. But we don’t see them organize. It’s reminiscent to our own problem of relying on representative politics (a choice system of convenience) to be the guide for what should be a moral outrage.

The film follows Arthur Rashkovan (Surfing for Peace) and Matt Olsen (Explore Corps) in their efforts to bring surfboards and surfing equipment to Israel with the goal to enter and deliver surfboards into Gaza during the 2008-2009 siege. I would call their effort nu-humanitarianism because even though they rely on NGO sponsorship to gain permission to enter Gaza, Arthur and Ben highlight criticisms of modern humanitarian structure while promoting surfing as an unorthodox relief solution that can assist toward a conflict resolution between communities.

Matt Olsen mentioned after a screening during the 2010 Santa Barbara International Film Festival that one significant problem for communities is that the physical geography of Israel does not reflect the mental geography that is perceived to exist and divide groups. To Palestinians, a town like Ashkelon or Sderot seems hours away when it’s a matter of minutes from Gaza, while to Israelis, Gaza seems worlds away. This sense of separation is further exacerbated by the lack of a public discursive sphere, that has been replaced by state channels of accusatory statements hurled back and forth by either side. It is this lack of constructive dialogue that the nu-humanitarianism of the film wishes to correct.

Just as walls separate Gaza from Israel, there is an invisible partition that controls the coastline. This has been the most devastating for Palestinian fisherman who have witnessed their waters continue to decrease from 20 nautical miles offshore to 12 and now with the ongoing blockade since 2007, down to 3 nautical miles offshore. The blockage also means a greater presence by the Israeli navy who monitor the coastline. Consequences for defying this partition were also mentioned in the film: surf beyond a certain point and chances are you’ll be shot.

These conditions to not bode well for the relief effort since surfers in Gaza cannot intermingle in Israeli lineups. But it does present to the world that Palestinians in Gaza want to construct a space of peace.

Image from GazaSurfClub.com

For members of the Gaza Surf Club, surfing also provides an outlet for youth and residents to feel temporary relief from the hardships of living in Gaza. This is very similar to what Isaiah Walker has pointed out as the ka po’ina nalu or surf zone that Hawaiians used as a space to construct free identity and association that would negate colonial influence.

While the space may yield Palestinians to not be subjugated to the terms of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it does not immediately mend the conflict and such a space may elevate animosity and spawn a future localism that could come when restrictions are lifted. However this is something that is also being tested in the film with Jewish-Israeli surfers in Tel Aviv and Arab-Israeli surfers in Jaffa. Despite what tensions that might be perceived to exist, surfing constructs an apolitical space where ethno-political claims are absolved and the focus is shifted towards the community of surfers as a whole identity.

If localism doesn’t permeate along ethnic, religious or political lines then what is happening in Tel Aviv/Jaffa? Aside from harboring less extreme attitudes than the rest of the country, the case is a more telling indicator that localism is a product of social relationships to scope of property.

In Israel surf breaks are few and far between. However it’s scarcity of waves in Israel that trumps localism. This goes against the prevailing thought that scarcity should increase competition and in turn increase hostility between actors competing to gain from the same resource. Instead it’s a free for all to get waves, with lineups that would make most surfers cringe. Cramped lineups achieve a common space that defies the mental and physical proximities that entrench communities in Israel.

However this illustrates another crucial problem. With a lack of surf breaks and surf being fickle in Israel how often can common spaces convene and how many will be uneffected by being outside this space? This seems to be the larger task at hand, how can this construction of discursive spheres shift around Israel to locations without a coastline? According to direct Alexander Klein, he got the idea whole the film after he shot a skateboarding trip to Israel, and this is where I’d be curious to see how this idea shifts in the realm of similar activities that evolve elsewhere. Could skateboarding, bmx, street art/graffiti, music subcultures around these also create similar spheres the way other subcultures evolved out of the California surfing subculture?

Avatar finally caught my interest when I read a few articles crediting the movie with giving bold examples to justify private property. One such review by Stephan Kinsella at the libertarian think-tank the Mises Institute, lauded the film for it’s ideals of private property:

… the plot is about property rights. In particular, the property rights of the Na’vi, in an established tree-city that they have clearly homesteaded. The Na’vi are not just some uncivilized savages as some curmudgeonly reviewers imply; they live they way they do because of the wondrous bounty of their strange world and some unique features it has–which, again, I can say little of without spoiling, but suffice to say it’s grounded in reality and extrapolative science fiction, not some quasi-mystical nonsense. They even have a sophisticated homesteading technique worked out for ownership of the wild, pterodactyl-like creatures known as Banshee or ikran. In addition, the main Na’vi character, Neytiri, although she is betrothed to another Na’vi, is permitted to change her mind and choose someone else–respect for individual choice and autonomy.

Another review by Matt Bogard at AgWeb credited the film with explaining the role of private property to protect means of scarce resource:

Property rights were not just an invention of western culture. Demsetz looks specifically at various groups of Native Americans and the relationship between resources, scarcity, enforcement costs, technology, and property. In cases where technology is insufficient or enforcement costs are too great, property rights may not evolve. In other cases, when resources become scarce, there are not technological barriers, ( or there are technological breakthroughs) and enforcement costs are low, more extensive systems of property rights may develop.

It appeared from the movie, that on Pandora, resources were relatively abundant. There appeared to be no need to develop more complex and intricate forms of property than what they had. As I mentioned above, property rights often evolve to make sure that we are living in harmony with others and the environment. It appears in the movie, that the limited forms of property that the Na’vi had adopted were sufficient to keep the balance. It doesn’t mean that they rejected the idea of property, or that they wouldn’t develop more complex systems in the future if necessary.

Now there are a lot of things pointed out in both of the aforementioned.

In Kinsella’s review we assume the film conforms to the parameters of our world, that they have homesteaded in the same tradition as Western settlers who made a nativist declaration of manifest destiny and are morally justifiable because they are “first settlers”. However in the film it’s the “quasi-mystical nonsense” that Kinsella disregards that puts this into question. What can be said is that the Na’vi are not a nomadic species as they hearken to rooted “eco-tropolises” that are marked by either being a spiritual space or one of evolutionary sustenance. As Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) points out, the Na’vi have a genetic and neural connection with the land which operates as a biological and social network. This raises the question whether their conception as a species and society is attached to a biological-botanic component on the planet that is inherently tied to a specific geographic locale. Now there is no clear background to this in the film but it certainly isn’t clear this particular clan “homesteaded” their way to a mystical tree where their ancestors go back to becoming one with the environment which in turn sustains and protects them.

As for the point about the “homesteading” of the wild animal-like species, or a supposed domestication, this is also suspect. All of these species exhibit freedom of choice in their ability to make a connection with the Na’vi — or in other words it’s the species that chose the Na’vi. This is pointed out by Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) when Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is told the process of finding a banshee. This marks a companionship of mystical qualities unlike homesteading where settlers put species to work as strictly labor or as a commodity for consumption. The “animals” of Pandora are never used in the way of oxen or cattle were for developmental and herding purposes. There is also no economy to the species because it’s impossible. Once species like banshees make a connection to a certain Na’vi, no one else can interfere with that bond, much like no one else can inject themselves as someone else’s avatar — the exact reason why only Jake could replace his twin brother in the avatar experiment because of their matching genomes.

In the case of Bogard’s review, the question of property rights to manage scarcity and a tragedy of the commons is raised. However we never see scarcity to be a problem with the Na’vi. Instead it’s the humans who we find out have “eliminated the green” in their world and are now going to become free riders on Pandora by carving it up for unobtainium. To the Na’vi there is no indiciation that unobtainium has any value to their society. However for the humans the barrier to get unobtanium that is in place is a natural barrier (and not a barrier to manage it’s scarcity), a barrier of the commons because the common value of the hometree has a greater common value than the unobtainium that sits underneath it. The Na’vi have not adopted limited property rights to manage this. Instead it’s a right to preserve a common space that protects it by happenstance.

Now the question is this: do we observe Avatar as strictly promoting the commons or a film promoting private property?

Ultimately like any fiction, most of the time you have to play by the rules of the fiction. One critical separation from making this film an allegory about property is that by the end of the movie we witness that Eywa is an active being who is conscious to the destruction going on. This means property may have his own managerial mechanism. As Neytiri explains, Eywa won’t take sides but will always strive for balance and eventually that balances tips over when the humans intend to launch a series of “daisy cutters” in a bombing raid. Species that once existed separate from the Na’vi (and that also attacked Jake) come to assist them in their fight to stop the attack. This might not seem to have anything to do with property based on our understanding of it but in the end we have to remember this world operates by a completely different set of rules. Perhaps a tragedy of the commons is not even possible on this planet and perhaps the war launched by Jake wasn’t even necessary (and is a reflections of mankinds own errant perception that property must always be defended) as in the end it was inevitable that Eywa would control the planetary balance.

The 1980s surfing world reached a new competitive level with the rivalry of Mark “Occy” Occhilupo and Tom Curren. A comparison of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson proportions triggered a commercial frenzy to sponsor competitive surfers and bring in a new generation of sponsor-identity marketing to the sport. As the 1990s began to shape as the decade of synergistic mass-consumption, the extreme sporting world found sponsorship as a tool to build a persona-driven subculture around athlete identities. Along with Kelly Slater, Rob Machado became the mold for corporate surfing to manufacture a style and culture that expanded surfing products, clothing lines and accessories. The period was about wearing a brand and claiming faithfulness to the products identity with stickers covering your board just like the pros.

In a relatively short period, the wave of manufactured counter-culture ushered in by companies like Quicksilver, Volcom, Hurley, Billabong among others increased the visibility of the sport to a commercial level. However, the consequence of this rapid growth has been a tragedy of the commons in the sport, combined with coastal growth (ironically influenced by the ‘tropicalist’ beach culture that surfing has promoted). What were once isolated and secret locales exoticized for generations have become ground zero for a globalized economy of surf tourism.

The Drifter is a subtle recognition of this change. From Rob being at the top of the competitive surfing chain to becoming engulfed at surf breaks by crowds and frenzies of photographers looking to manufacture the next Machado, he ventures into isolation to get away from what has been built from his image.

This isolation begins with a sad but ironic literal self-reflection when Machado comes across an advertisement outside a Hurley outlet in Bali, Indonesia that has been defaced.

One major problem for me is that we never know what triggers Machado’s emotional reaction to this, whether it be guilt or nostalgia (however he recalls a negative comment made after winning a jr. surf contest about the value of the win). But as I intend to explain, the fact this entire soul-searching journey is sponsored by Nike subsidiary Hurley International, I’m willing to tend to the latter being nostalgia and believe that Machado’s question to rediscover surfing is as much a reinvention of the corporate surfing world who has burst at the seems in it’s growth. Out of this journey is to promote a new medium of surfing, free surfing.

Discovering a non-competitive surfing

Rob’s isolation from society is as much a figurative separation from the corporate surfing world as the self-discovery that he launches into is to discover a secondary surfing culture and community outside of the what the mainstream has created. His geographic detachment of locale as he constantly repeats he doesn’t feel home anywhere is experienced by his years of surfing on tour. The competitive surfing world has facilitated much of this detachment as it’s required to constantly be on the move and be recorded for media and advertisements. Seeing as the film is sponsored by Hurley (with other companies running various contests around the DVD release), there is never any explicit condemnation of the corporate surfing world. Instead Director Taylor Steele (and rather bravely) creates two worlds of surfing to illustrate a juxtaposition between the surfing world Rob is trying to escape from and the other he is trying to drift around in, with the earlier being streets in Indonesia lined with corporate surfing billboards and brand logos plastered everywhere.

Bali has become a mecca for surf tourism and while the island has embraced and built an economy around it, this has been largely absorbed by transnational capitalism and Westerners looking to enhance to market of facilitating more foreign travelers. Much of Machado’s soul-searching involves getting out with the people and interacting at a perceptually local level. Even though much of this is arranged by Steele, in an interview on CNN, Machado explained that he did have a lot of alone time to wander without a crew by his side. What he discovers is something he is ultimately looking for, a non-competitive world of surfing.

Throughout the movie there are a lot of allusions to Christ with Rob laying in the crucification position. Whether intentional or not, this provides for a rather interesting reading of his relationship to the rural society when he begins to tour the island via motorcycle. Machado acts as surfing’s Che Guevara, another Christ-like figure in the position of having this journey of self-discovery, as illustrated in The Motorcycle Diaries, act as a travelogue for a revolutionary idea. Both finds themselves in situations as saviors to the community around the:, for Che it’s the notion of a pan-Latin Americans egalitarianism and for Rob a transition to promote “free surfing” to save the surfing world from collapse.

How will Commons Function in the Free Surfing Economy

In many ways the free surfing trend is a “green” prescription to a potential social collapse of a surfing commons. And for this reason and much like the green economy out there, we have to wary that this is a market answer built around a trend to go green. This is also another problem for me because there is a lack of direction in what Machado is ultimate trying to preserve. His travels by motorcycle, bus, hitchhiking and foot produce a virginal side of Bali that the West has long idolize, one that hasn’t been exposed to the commercial surfing world and ultimately detached from modern society. For Westerners the prospect of unspoiled paradise has been a long standing pursuit that ultimately falls to a tragedy of the commons when others arrive.

Rather than build a perspective with the inhabitants he encounters, Machado becomes immersed in an ambassadorial type of soup-kitchen politics. He picks up a shovel and works to build a well for the villagers who have to travel 3-4 Km away on foot for fresh water. The moment is described for it’s feel-good qualities, “surfing is a selfish activity. In the course of doing so, giving back is what makes the waves we ride that much better.”

The conundrum is this; Machado has fulfilled an ambition of what he wants to see Indonesia and the surf touring world become, free to the extent it caters to less crowds and has a small organic footprint that is left behind. However without a dialog with the Indonesians, he among the corporate surfing world who want to promote free surfing and seek to preserve an anachronistic version of Indonesia (one with cattle herders roaming grassy open fields along pristine beaches) are going to find a problem with the question of the modern mobilization that’s taking place in the country. Ever since Suharto’s “new order” form of neo-liberal economic policies, the country has exploded with investment in industrial manufacturing. Ironically enough it was corporations like Hurley’s parent company Nike who promoted much of this industrial growth as a way to generate reluctant prosperity to the developing world (and in return manufacture cheap goods with low labor costs, lack of employer standards and laxed environmental restrictions). How are Indonesians suppose to respond to this? Reject growth so they maintain an antiquated world that seems novel to surfers who want a paradise to escape to?

If free surfing is going to exist and be promoted, then the Rob Machado’s, Donavon Frankenreiter’s, Dave Rasrovich’s out there who will have their bohemian identities manufactured to promote it are going to have to be clear on dialogging with the communities that they want free surfing to grow from. Otherwise it will be the 1990s all over again.

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.

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.

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.

I’m going to spare you the common Leftist diatribe that you have probably already read elsewhere how Earth Day/Green week is all a bunch of corporate greenwashing by companies like NBC/General Electric.  Or what I will call the Skeptic crowd (who revere memos by CATO) and would say  its a regulatory hoax and any “solution” is non-sustainable to the point of being  heavily dependent on common resource chains.  What I am interested in is what I would call a possibly soft or unconscionable shift in green aesthetics.

When I say green aesthetics, the first thing that may come to mind are the obvious signifying qualities of something being green.  For example, the hemp sandals that I am presently wearing made by Simple.  It’s not that they are just recycled or hemp, its that they must carry the aesthetics of looking as if i’m wearing two burlap sacks on my feet.  This is what I would say is the form of hard green aesthetics.  One that screams the politics on their sleeves.  This is also something pointed out with critiques about the Toyota Prius in that its success is that it looks environmentally friendly as opposed to the Civic hybrids that function similarly but don’t sell anywhere the number of models because they still look like a regular compact car.  So much so that now Honda has come out with a new Insight that mirrors the contours of the Prius.

However, what I find more fascinating that these obvious symbols is what I will call soft green aesthetics.  For the most part these don’t even reference themselves as even being green.  The most obvious example of this, at least in my opinion, has been the shift (coinciding with the rise of the green popularity) to interior design minimalism.  New homes or model home dwellings for the 21st century consumer convey a perceived sleek elegance.  And I think this is the common perception that this trend in design minimalism is conveyed through a sense of elegance and organization so the homeowner doesn’t need to be the homemaker and spend their weekends having to go through the chaos of their home trying to find and clean everything.  It lacks the sentimentalism of the decades before where gaudy photos and garnishing of the nuclear age have been replaced with streamlined furniture and appliances.

It sounds like i’m selling it by its own claim, but i’m not.  What I find interesting about these homes is the “lack of stuff.”  The knick-knacks, the wastefully spent and kitsch items of no purpose are hidden.  These homes are based on what they don’t show.  It is about hiding consumerism.  Homes of the past were like your grandparents place.  Basically full of crap.  Figurines, snow globes, cheap novelty items that were displayed around the house as if they had value beyond their material construction.  But now people of the green generation feel shamed in consumerism.  They have it, but its hidden in the drawers below the empty counter-tops.

The function of the home is also in denial.

I went to help a friend with a plumbing problem last week.  He had quite the fancy modern and minimalist interior.  I went to the kitchen looking for paper towels but the counter-tops were completely empty.  Both the garbage basket and paper towels were hidden behind doors and out of plain view.  As if you were to go into the place you would think no consuming goes on there, no waste made, no paper towels to be used.  The reality is that behind the kitchen doors were tons of products ready to be wasted.

This didn’t strike me until today when I went into my own kitchen to make myself some guacamole.  Right next to me were paper towels within arms reach and a garbage basket below me so I could throw the seed and skins out (I don’t compost skins since they take much longer than other compostable materials to breakdown).  I’m not proud of waste but its a fact that happens and I don’t have it shyed away and hidden so I can doubt it ever occurs.  The aestetics of my kitchen come far behind function.  I’m all for decreasing our use and dependency of such items, particularly paper towels, but my curiosity with the aesthetics of minimalism and whether hiding away consumption is whether it is a productive or problematic recognition of our own waste?  On one hand a person is making a deccisive choice to not want to see it, but if its kept hidden from plain view then is the situation just being suppressed?

When I first found out that DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) had begun working on an “Antarctic suite” last year, my real question was why?  My cynicism made me think it would be a “hip-hopera” set to March of the Penguins where it explored an appropriation of the Antarctic visual landscape that has come to prominence through the recent strain of penguin movies.  Instead what I saw was something absolutely genius and something I think is Miller’s best work yet.

It is the first time I have seen a meditation or any media about Antarctica from a position that underscored the universal and plural function of the region.  Excluding assigned territories from the original treaty, Antarctica contains the world’s largest common-space of land.  It was meant to symbolize the dawning of an international age with the function to promote world peace and cooperation rather than be subject to the conflict of a power grab by colonizers.  This was similar to the way Al Gore described the famous Earth Rise photo in An Inconvenient Truth and how that functioned to promote global unity.  Miller also made this point apparent in one sequence when flags of the world shuffled over and over across the screen in what conveyed a very cohesive composition between countries being interlocked in a way of forming a global quilt of nations that were conjoined by Antarctica.

I left feeling that the commons were a step forward with promoting international solidarity.  However not everyone felt this way.  Walking out of the theater, it was surprising to overhear so many jeers by the audience who either didn’t know what to make of it or as one lady described it as “boring and self-indulgent.”  It’s unfortunate there wasn’t a discussion afterwards because I believe it would have cleared up a lot of misconceptions and allowed for this meditation to create a public discourse from it.  In the lobby I heard another couple comment how repetitive the opening portion was.  I felt like inserting myself into their conversation but I was waiting in a line.  However on this point about repetition and extended time duration, I think it came at a fitting point during the “arrival” as we experienced what Werner Herzog also noted during the flight into Antarctica in Encounters at the End of the World.  In the film, Herzog commented about this sense of time vanishing as if you are crossing into this parallel realm.  The sort of experience you would see in science fiction when someone travels through a  portal or the “flying house” experience in Wizard of Oz.  In this regard I believe Miller has structured this film in an autobiographical experience that mirrors his own entrance into Antarctica, positioning us as the viewer to experience what he must have felt crossing over into Antarctica.  After you have been sucked in down the rabbit hole to this other world of Antarctica, Miller draws on the initial experiences one would likely feel.  A bedazzlement of the sublime, the feeling of a natural vastness that allows you to begin examining the intricacies of the landscape.  You begin to hear the ice, sense the rawness of the barren environment in Antarctica.

From this point Miller then takes us through the troubles of this landscape by presenting data that makes the viewer conscious to the threat that global warming has on this landscape.  This portion reminded of Len Lye’s work with certain visual matches and object movements across screen.  The data he presents has a graphical function to be didactic as opposed to just merely be read like one would get their information from the New York Times. It’s a feeling like you are climbing up the mountain of a bar chart displaying anthropogenic C02 levels of the last 150 years which has a more nauseating feeling than merely reading about it in print.  However this is where one reservation about the piece could be made.  Why not present such data or factoids plainly?  It’s true, you don’t get a lot of information but as a meditation piece I don’t believe one should be looking at Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica to be providing you with the educational basis about climate change.

After the show I got to speak with Miller briefly.  I asked whether this work was a concious extension of his previous work of remix culture that is an direction of the commons that we can understand about Antartica.  He smiled and noded, seemingly delighted that I recognized the commons function of the piece.  He also mentioned that going into the process it was something that be built upon once he visited Antartica, as opposed to going there specifically looking for things he already wanted to convey.  This is another factor that has lead me to believe Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica was a very personal and spiritual piece for Miller, something that is very much memorialized with the experience of going there.  I also believe this may attribute to why it is performed differently from time to time, something ad libbed by memory of his experiences as it brought together the way you may reflect on a journey in life differently depending on what mental photographs you recall from it.