Wow, what an exciting day! Mark at Ditchwalk posted a great entry furthering the discussion we’ve been having about piracy and copyright. With his support, I feel like the discussion is going somewhere. In this post I want to directly respond to what he wrote, so please read his post first. Once you’ve done that, let’s talk:

Both of Mark’s scenarios that don’t involve the taking of something from someone else, but still involve physical piracy (free newspaper and concert), stem from the same given: content creators have a right to decide how, why, when, and where their content is experienced, if for no other reason than they created that content.
I’m not sure I agree with that given as it stands, and I’d like to use a silly example to illustrate why. There is an anti-corporation argument that has a place in the piracy debate and I think this is also the place to bring it into our discussion. I want to use some examples to talk about where I think that argument comes from, but also what I think it means that the argument even exists in the first place. I hope that this will also help address Mark’s ideas about stealing.

We’re going to need two people for this discussion, so let’s pick polar opposites to try to tease out the implications of the thing.

First, we need someone who’s rich and can pretty much buy and sell whatever they want. Let’s use Bill Gates, since I seem to have been thinking about him lately. I don’t know why – it might have something to do with him recently joining twitter and also donating billions of dollars to charity (although those two events might be unrelated).

Second, we need someone who’s not rich. Anti-rich, even. For this, let’s use Marian, referenced in the same blog post I’m responding to. Since we were put up as mutual mouthpieces there, that seems fitting. Marian, unlike Bill Gates, cannot buy and sell whatever she wants. She’s limited by her limited income.

So here’s the scenario:

Say that I’ve just finished writing the next great American novel. It’s the best thing since sliced bread, full of the bees-knees, wisdom, humor, and great ideas. Not only is it gonna be a best seller, a strong member of the Oprah book club, and adored by the mainstream and counter-culture alike, it’s also full of life-changing ideas that everyone on the face of the planet, young and old, should read. Say that’s what the book is, just for example.

Now say that, before it’s released, word gets around that all the hype about the book is true, that it really is better than Shakespeare, the Bible, and Twilight (for the mass market appeal) rolled into one and my publishing company and I decide to set the price of the novel at 10 billion dollars a copy, because we think, for some reason, that we can get Bill Gates to pay that price.

Lo, the novel is realized. My publishing company and I sell three copies to the three richest people in the world. We retire in luxury and never work again. Bill Gates gets to read the book, being one of the three who bought it, but poor Marian never does, because she cannot afford the price of entry.

This is an extraordinarily silly example, but a necessary one, because it demonstrates some talking points:

People should only have a right to distribute content if their profits from said content are reasonable. What right, beyond the creation itself do I have to price my novel at such an exorbitant price? I created the content, but if the book is so good that it might improve lives, what right do I have to price it so only a few lives can be improved?

That’s the point about sticking it to corporations and where it originates. Just because I create something, do I have the right to completely control access to that thing? Maybe, but only to a point. After that point, the social contract says that the work should be freely available, or at the very least, as widely available as possible.
That’s what this is really about. Did Bill Gates really have the right to make 40 billion dollars because he started a software company that provided the right thing at the right time? Does he have the right to become the wealthiest person on the planet because he won big on a social roulette game?

I don’t think so. That’s too much. Letting someone profit that much from the creation of a single thing is absurd, whether it’s a company or a novel. Now, novels aren’t as absurdly profitable as the amount of money Bill Gates has, but you get the slippery-slope gist of the thing.

Now, Marian’s point was this: if the content isn’t priced affordably, she knows how to get it for free.

I think she’s right. It’s easy to get it for free. And digitalization of work brings that into a whole new perspective. Because although piracy might be described as the theft of a sale, the hard fact is that after the content is created, an additional digital copy costs the company nothing. NOTHING.

So how in the hell can they justify pricing a book at ten dollars? It’s an unreasonable profit margin for their investment.

If a publishing company spends 150,000 dollars to pay the author, the editor, the layout person, and the web guy who throws it up on the digital store – they only have to sell 15,000 copies at 10 bucks a pop to recoup that investment. Now, for a novel that they are willing to spend 150 grand on, they are easily going to sell 15,000 copies. It’s more likely that they are going to sell 100,000 copies or more, since they are banking on it being a best seller (otherwise, they would have paid 15,000 or less for the advance, layout, and editing fees). 100,000 copies at 10 bucks a pop gets them 1 million gross and 850,000 net. That’s an absurd margin.

This is simplistic, but basically how it works nonetheless. Now, if they price the book at one dollar, not only are they going to sell way more than 100,000 books, they also put it in reach of a bunch more people. They probably aren’t going to make the same margins, since they’d have to sell a million books at one dollar to make the same as selling 100,000 books at 10 bucks, but it’s possible.

And if they do sell a million books, it’s time to lower the price. Thus spake the social contract and the social contract mote it so.

(Beyond that, there is also the issue of the payment of the writer versus the payment of the publisher, but that’s another whole big thing that probably needs its own post.)

So, my belief is this: content creators have a right to distribute their content as they wish, as long as they price that content so the most people can have access to it (which means as cheap as possible) and still maintain a comfortable lifestyle that lets them continue to create that content. If you want to charge me ten bucks for a copy of a digital book, you don’t get to have a private jet. I’m sorry. No. That’s not feasible or socially responsible. Instead, people in my generation will steal your book. So it goes.

In the above scenario, I would be an asshole for writing something that could help people and then pricing it so only a select few could afford it. That’s capitalism, you say. Fine, I say, well capitalism is an asshole, too.

Information, content, entertainment, whatever you want to call it, should be priced so that the highest number of people can access it and the people who made it can live and continue to create it. When that happens, then content creators have a right to control their content. Until that level of social responsibility is inherent in the system – content creators shouldn’t have a right to do what they want with their content.

That’s the “right” of creation – bringing good to people, and as many people, as possible. If you don’t do that, you have no right to create.

This post directly follows this post and the comments originating there. Anyway:

Don’t fool yourself: social consciousness has become commoditized, as evidenced by culturally aware works by Cory Doctorow like The Makers and, to a small extent, Little Brother. I talked about that a little in my post on STUFF. More so, proof that it has been directly commoditized is directly exemplified by CauseWorld. This is the only program I’m aware of that does this, but I’m sure it’s not the only one that exists.

If you’re not familiar with it – CauseWorld allows users to donate “Karma” to specific charities. Karma represents real money that sponsors (read: companies who want you to buy what they sell) will donate to causes you choose. Karma costs no money for the users, but, and get this, because it’s goddamn genius, karma is earned via GPS located check-in locations in stores. Yeah, that’s right. Big companies are basically saying that they will donate money to charities that you choose if you go to their stores and spend a little time there.

There’s no way that you can say that this system isn’t stamped, signed, and delivered proof that social consciousness is a commodity that can be traded or sold. Whether it’s ultimately a good thing for the charities is hard to argue against – it probably is, and it’s certainly an easy way to get people into your stores for companies – it’s basically the same thing as “Pay-Per-Click” advertising on Google. Companies pay charities for store visitors, just like they pay Google for visitors to their website.

The real debate is whether it’s good for users, both financially and mentally. Sure, if it’s just a bonus of doing their normal shopping – they were going to go to The Gap anyway, so that feel good feeling they get for helping out is just a bonus for buying a new pair of Gap 1969 jeans, right? But you can’t argue that it doesn’t commodity social consciousness. It puts a price on it. I don’t know if that’s a good thing, even if it fits with the major first tenant of capitalism: everything has a price. But price isn’t the end all be all with everything.

So although our coffee-loving friend at the Mars Café might rock his free trade coffee grounds because he believes that he is supporting farmers and protecting the earth by doing so – he’s still buying his social consciousness with his dollar. Some might argue that he was going to buy coffee with his dollar either way, so it’s better that he buy the “right” coffee, but “right” is an appeal to “All I want” or “taste” (if you’ll allow me to through in some art lingo while also making a great pun). It’s the same thing. Just because his “All I want” is better justified, it still doesn’t change what it is. It’s taste.

And taste is a commodity that’s traded like any other. It’s socially created by “education” in proper taste, both in voiced and unvoiced lessons. Voiced by traditional education in university, commercials, segments on the nightly news, parent, friends, and that ubiquitous hippie girl you know who is always into a new cause. But the unvoiced lessons are probably more powerful, since we’re inundated with so much talk nowadays that after awhile it all becomes noise.

The unvoiced lessons are the ones you learn when trying to impress a girl by breaking into a higher class (and the pants of said higher class). The way she smiles when you pick up the check for the expensive wine, the way she frowns when you can’t. That tug of her lip, those glances she planned for you to catch but acts coy when you catch them – it’s all calculated by who’s giving what to whom, and for what reasons, even if it’s all just lonely neurons firing in the dark subconscious. Unvoiced lessons are given by physical social signals.

To speak to my point, I’d like to bring in a snobby literary theorist, which is a bit awkward, considering this conversation is essentially a discussion of how snobbery is created, commoditized, and why it probably isn’t a good thing, but, alas, I’m not above it if it speaks to my own ends. Thus, I submit to our conversation the introduction to Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu. You can find a PDF of this introduction here. I hope it stays up (even though it’s probably under copyright) because I don’t want to just throw things at you that you have to go out of your way to find. In my experience, most won’t make much extra effort to go out of their way to prove someone else’s point.

Anyway, Bourdieu says that:

Whereas the ideology of charisma regards taste in legitimate culture as a gift of nature, scientific observation shows that cultural needs are the product of upbringing and education: surveys establish that all cultural practices (museum visits, concert-going, reading etc.), and preferences in literature, painting or music, are closely linked to educational level (measured by qualifications or length of schooling) and secondarily to social origin. The relative weight of home background and of formal education (the effectiveness and duration of which are closely dependent on social origin) varies according to the extent to which the different cultural practices are recognized and taught by the educational system, and the influence of social origin is strongest—other things being equal—in ‘extra-curricular’ and avant-garde culture. To the socially recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds a social hierarchy of the consumers.

Here we see Bourdieu making the point that taste is based on education, both formal and social. Although he’s talking about art, the line between “high” art and “low” art has been blurred even more since the time of his writing. I would submit that we now view products as a form of art, and that our tastes, controlled by both formal and social education, shape our views on those products. This fits very easily into Bourdieu’s idea structure. Note that he even uses the word “consumers” in the last sentence of the above quote. He goes on to talk about how we build these tastes:

The logic of what is sometimes called, in typically ‘pedantic’ language, the ‘reading’ of a work of art, offers an objective basis for this opposition. Consumption is, in this case, a stage in a process of communication, that is, an act of deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a cipher or code. In a sense, one can say that the capacity to see (voir) is a function of the knowledge (savoir), or concepts, that is, the words, that are available to name visible things, and which are, as it were, programmes for perception…A beholder who lacks the specific code feels lost in a chaos of sounds and rhythms, colours and lines, without rhyme or reason.

Here he builds on the concept we’re discussing – he mentions that specific method in which education about taste takes place. He points out that decoding taste is a matter of knowing the specific cultural markers that both define that taste, but also teach it to us. This is what I mean when I’m talking about the cute girl who bites her lip at you when you make the “right” (read: expensive) cultural, artistic, or, more importantly, brand decision. She gives you a cultural marker in order to teach you that you are on the right path. This serves as motivation for you to learn how to appreciate the arcane and encoded appreciation for that specific brand or product. We also taught these things formally, though voiced communication, by professors and celebrities yakking in commercials about charities.

In the last sentence of this quote, he mentions that a beholder who is unable to interpret the code is left without understanding. This is your father, my parents, the apathetic young – anyone who is unable to culturally discern between brand X and brand Y. They have not yet noticed or been taught the cultural significance, as well as the rewards, for that distinction.

Moving on:

An art which ever increasingly contains reference to its own history demands to be perceived historically; it asks to be referred not to an external referent, the represented or designated ‘reality’, but to the universe of past and present works of art. Like artistic production, in that it is generated in a field, aesthetic perception is necessarily historical, inasmuch as it is differential, relational, attentive to the deviations (écarts) which make styles. Like the so-called naive painter who, operating outside the held and its specific traditions remains external to the history of the art, the ‘naive’ spectator cannot attain a specific grasp of works of art which only have meaning—or value—in relation to the specific history of an artistic tradition. The aesthetic disposition demanded by the products of a highly autonomous field of production is inseparable from a specific cultural.

Here we see the next step and it’s easier to understand why I think Bourdieu has a place in our discussion. He’s talking about self-referential art here, the kind of art that is only valid as place in an artistic timeline. This is a loose definition of taste – the only way to say that one type of coffee is better than another type of coffee is to be educated in the timeline of coffee itself – that is, to write one’s personal story of coffee consumption. Now, this isn’t quite what Bourdieu is saying here – I don’t want to misuse him – however, the idea of creating a cultural connoisseur and becoming an expert in self-referential art is the same: we learn the process of distinction, the value of the process itself, and thus understand the idea of taste. After that, what taste is specifically important can be defined by any who is willing to produce more arcane cultural markers:

This mastery is, for the most part, acquired simply by contact with works of art—that is, through an implicit learning analogous to that which makes it possible to recognize familiar faces without explicit rules or criteria—and it generally remains at a practical level; it is what makes it possible to identify styles, i.e., modes of expression characteristic of a period, a civilization or a school, without having to distinguish clearly, or state explicitly, the features which constitute their originality. Everything seems to suggest that even among professional valuers, the criteria which define the stylistic properties of the ‘typical works’ on which all their judgements are based usually remain implicit.

He goes on to discuss a bit more what exactly defines this sense of taste, how it is learned, and I’m going to gloss over that in hopes of brevity. It’s there in link if you’d like to read it. However, once he’s moved past that, he makes the most interesting and telling addition to our discussion yet. Because there are points that connect with our discussion all the way through, the easiest way to draw these out is to go through Bourdieu’s text alongside our discussion:

The pure aesthetic is rooted in an ethic, or rather, an ethos of elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world, which may take the form of moral agnosticism (visible when ethical transgression becomes an artistic parti pris) or of an aestheticism which presents the aesthetic disposition as a universally valid principle and takes the bourgeois denial of the social world to its limit.

This says that brands and products are morally agnostic and therefore their own thing. However:

The detachment of the pure gaze cannot be dissociated from a general disposition towards the world which is the paradoxical product of conditioning by negative economic necessities—a life of ease—that tends to induce an active distance from necessity.

This says that taste is based on economics.

Although art obviously offers the greatest scope to the aesthetic disposition, there is no area of practice in which the aim of purifying, refining and sublimating primary needs and impulses cannot assert itself, no area in which the stylization of life, that is, the primacy of forms over function, of manner over matter, does not produce the same effects.

Discerning people are shaped as discerning people, but as they live the discerning life, they get more discerning. Connoisseurism breeds more connoisseurism, which was my original point in the first post.

And nothing is more distinctive, more distinguished, than the capacity to confer aesthetic status on objects that are banal or even ‘common’ (because the ‘common’ people make them their own, especially for aesthetic purposes), or the ability to apply the principles of a ‘pure’ aesthetic to the most everyday choices of everyday life, e.g., in cooking, clothing or decoration, completely reversing the popular disposition which annexes aesthetics to ethics.

Here he talks about adding aesthetic status on objects that are banal or common – making something cool because it fits in with the tastes you’ve been educated to think are cool. This is directly applies to advertising and brand allegiance.

In fact, through the economic and social conditions which they presuppose, the different ways of relating to realities and fictions, of believing in fictions and the realities they simulate, with more or less distance and detachment, are very closely linked to the different possible positions in social space and, consequently, bound up with the systems of dispositions (habitus) characteristic of the different classes and class fractions.

This inspires the ideas of different brands for different classes, with different levels of connoisseurism for those classes. Aspiring to, or reaching a brand or product with higher and more specific taste elements makes people learn how to find those elements in other brands, desire them, but also fetishize those things as if they matter.

Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.

We think we are classy because we like brands that are supposed to be classy. We also like things based on what class we’d like to join, and think that by liking a higher class of goods, we attempt to join a higher class.

Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed.

Choosing companies, products, and brands on a regular basis, operating in a discerning mode, builds the behavior of discerning people.

The allegiance is not to the brand itself – that’s a short sighted and silly idea. The allegiance is to connoisseurism, the idea that taste is something true, and that there is a better and a less good. The allegiance is to the idea of rank, of file, of inequality. For without inequality, there can be no better and no worse. The allegiance is to distinction.

And this allegiance to distinction is what captivates us. It’s an old story, the story of the haves and the have nots, the difference between thriving and mere survival.

Does the addition of these ideas about artistic taste link up with the ideas of products in your mind? Please share your thoughts in the comments and WE’LL TALK.

I don’t know why I’m writing about the iPad. I really don’t. I don’t really wanna write or think about the iPad anymore after all the coverage in the last few days, but this post just sort of started itself, and now I’m writing it, and so here it is.

So, this Apple iPad thing was announced and demonstrated, right? Man, how exciting. How wonderful and interesting and everything. It’s like, man, you know? Or something.

And the thing is, we all wanted to be excited about this, Apple. We wanted to give you our firstborns in exchange for a small tablet-sized device that would revolutionize the way that we interacted with computers and the internet.

But we can’t be excited about what you gave us, Apple. It’s just an iPod Touch with a big screen, Apple. Why did you think that was a good idea? It’s not. Because I already have an iPhone and that has a camera and makes phone calls.

The screen size, Apple, is not the point of the thing. That’s a side effect of the form factor, and the form factor is not why people really wanted a tablet from you.
They wanted a tablet from you because they wanted a fresh round of innovation, Apple. They wanted to be inspired. They wanted to see how Steve Jobs would make an awesome, useful device if he was given an excuse to launch one.

It’s not the size, Apple. It’s the opportunity to release something new. Because you usually rise to that occasion with characteristic aplomb.

But you, you thought it was all about the size of the device. You thought we wanted it for a REASON and that REASON was the FORM-FACTOR. That’s not it at all. We wanted you to push limits, make technology improve our lives in ways we didn’t even know we needed improving. We wanted to be surprised, but we were going to settle for you listening to our suggestions.

Oh, but Apple, why did you do what you did? You didn’t surprise us. You didn’t even listen to us.

Why can’t we run background applications on the iPad, Apple? You’ve built a computer. Why can’t we use it like a computer?

Why isn’t there a camera, Apple? We wanted to finally make video chat a part of our lives on a regular basis. We can’t do that without a camera, Apple.

Why isn’t there built in handwriting recognition, Apple? Sure, we can buy a stylus and an iPhone app like WritePad to do this, but we can’t do it in Safari, or email, or anywhere else. We don’t like typing on onscreen keyboards without tactile feedback, Apple. Why can’t we write instead, with our hands, dead simple, the way we learned in first grade? You put “pad” in the name of the device and yet the device cannot be used as a note-pad.

Why did you pick AT&T again, Apple? Their data network can’t even support all the phones you made. Why don’t you give us a choice, Apple?

Why won’t you allow users to install whatever programs they want, Apple? Why do I have to ask you for permission to do what I want with my device?

Why didn’t you give us a reason to use your device, Apple? Why didn’t you make us think – wow, that’s something I’d like to do someday, as we all looked on in awe, glimpsing into the future? Why didn’t you do that?

All you did, Apple, was make it easier to watch movies on the couch. Now, I don’t mind holding my hot laptop on my chest. But now, I can hold a tablet instead. I didn’t ask for that, Apple. I don’t need that, Apple. I’m not inspired by that, Apple.

I asked to be inspired by the future and by your relentless march into it, leading ahead as a visionary, while we poor naves wandered behind, squinting at the bright light. Instead, you want to charge me 500 bucks for a laptop really big iPod Touch.

Thanks, but no thanks, Apple.