Summer Reading & the Information Economy
Vacation is a great time to catch up on some reading. So far, I’ve plowed through three of the information economy books from my “read this first” shelf:
Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation, by J.D. Lasica (Wiley, 2005); The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System by Siva Vaidnhyanathan (Basic Books, 2004); and After the New Economy by Doug Henwood (The New Press, 2003).
All are excellent, and all are worth reading. In fact, they’re worth more than just reading. All are worth contemplating—which means that everything that follows qualifies as initial thoughts, subject to amplification and alteration at any time. With that caveat in place, here goes:
Lasica’s Darknet shares a basic message with Larry Lessig’s Free Culture
Lasica, like Lessig, illustrates this theme through anecdotes. Unlike Lessig, who try as he might cannot escape his legal background, Lasica writes with a journalist’s ease. More importantly, though, Lasica writes from the perspective of a cultural consumer, rather than that of a putative deregulator. That vantage point allows him to inject a sense of shock that Lessig never quite conveys. In other words, whereas Lessig tells his readers “things are wrong,” Lasica states incredulously, “you must be kidding.” Each of Lasica’s characters—a music producer turned entertainment industry consultant, a high-tech black preacher, superfans of TV’s Firefly and Hollywood’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, and others—make (and in some cases, pioneer) valuable creative contributions to society. Rather than receiving the sorts of accolades that such contributions warrant, however, they find themselves either facing legal action or relegated to a world of underground culture, the “darknet.” Lasica’s cultural (rather than legal) perspective also positions him to begin with a dilemma and follow it into whichever legal corner it happens to occupy, whether copyright, patent, telecommunications, or some other realm. His coverage of the cultural dimension is therefore considerably more complete than anything that I offered in Digital Phoenix, and superior even to Lessig’s discussions in Free Culture.
Cutting to the chase, Lasica ends with a “ten-point digital culture road map:”
(1) We are users as well as consumers;
(2) Artists must be compensated for their works;
(3) The public’s digital rights should be affirmed;
(4) The DMCA requires a dramatic overhaul;
(5) Celebrate participatory culture. Don’t outlaw it;
(6) The Darknet is the public’s great equalizing force;
(7) The Internet is not an entertainment medium;
(8) To make file sharing and the Darknet irrelevant, innovate;
(9) Trust the marketplace;
(10) Efforts to enrich the public domain should be encouraged.
Anyone who has read Digital Phoenix (or any of my other work) should know that I am in broad agreement with Lasica’s agenda.
My views are somewhat less consonant with Vaidhyanathan’s, which goes a long way towards explaining why I enjoyed The Anarchist in the Library even more than Darknet. After all, while it’s nice to see that others agree with me, I typically learn more from authors with whose basic premises I agree—but whose differing experiences and emphases lead them to conclusions different from my own. And Vaidnhyanathan agrees with me on the most significant premise of them all: that the lines separating entertainment politics, information politics, and politics at large have all but disappeared.
Once again, Lessig’s earlier work provides a nice point of reference—though in this case, it was his first book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
As Vaidhyanathan explains it,
This book was supposed to be about entertainment. . . an extension of my first book. . . . But as I researched this new project, the world shifted beneath my feet. . . . My concerns moved to the regulation and control of all sort so information, much of it cultural, much of it political. . . . The transition from entertainment politics to information politics was less complicated than it may seem. After all, much of politics is about entertainment and much of entertainment is about politics. In Copyrights and Copywrongs I concluded that the United States corrupted its copyright system by privileging corporate interests to the detriment of public interest. . . . The strategies that are emerging in copyright battles resemble those in more important battles over democracy and human dignity.
So far, so good. The unity of the political battles over entertainment, software, democracy, and human dignity is a key theme of Digital Phoenix. The real treat in Vaidhyanathan’s writing—at least for me—is that his politics are clearly to the left of my own. In fact, the “anarchist” in his title is the subject of some admiration (rather than the disapproval with which I used the term). What I learned to my (pleasant) surprise, is that Vaidhyanathan’s notion of anarchism philosophical, rather colloquial. His explanation of anarchism as a movement against coercive centralized control (along with an equally interesting and enlightening review of the proper meaning of cynicism) suggests that what he admires in the anarchist is not all that different from what I admire in the liberal. It also suggests that he is as annoyed with the colloquial misconstrual of anarchism as I am with the colloquial perversion of liberalism. Finally, it serves as a reminder of one of liberalism’s most distinguishing characteristics: alone among world movements, liberalism’s degenerative state is anarchy, not authoritarianism.
From there, it turns out that we agree on more than we disagree. In particular, our views of the entertainment industry and the steps needed to fix it are not all that different. As I have noted in the past (specifically, in Digital Phoenix’s discussion of Copyrights and Copywrongs), Vaidhyanathan grounds his arguments in the damage that contemporary copyright law is wreaking on our culture; I frame mine in terms of its negative impact on the economy. Our politics beyond the entertainment industry may diverge, though likely in ways suitable to spurring debate, rather than vitriol. His closing thought affirms that feeling:
Those of us who are concerned about issues of open communication and information justice must generate richer, more informed debate on many fronts and across borders and oceans. We must invent global institutions that can facilitate deliberation and serve public needs. Republican activism is growing, but it is still fractured and inchoate. The anarchists might seem to be our allies. But they are better at uncivil disobedience than at civil discussion. We would be better off with less disobedience and more deliberation.
. . . and he even used the terms democracy and republicanism correctly in these bloody, partisan times.
My joy at finding Vaidhyanathan’s intelligent voice to my left turned to downright glee, however, when I encountered Henwood. Though I’ve always considered myself to be somewhat to the left of center, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time lately railing against the left. Part of the impetus, I guess, is that that far right’s mindlessness hasn’t changed much in recent years, while more and more of the left seems to have drifted into mindless territory. In the years since Clinton left office, I have seen growing parts of the left oppose initiatives simply because Bush favors them, abandon its commitment to human rights, embrace and/or condone anti-Semitism, deny the existence of objective morality, and lapse into bouts of suicidal pacifism. To make matters worse, many of these mindless leftists proclaim all of this garbage in the name of “liberalism,” and spout it as if it were self-evident truth. Not Henwood. Henwood is a proud and clear-thinking social democrat (or democratic socialist). After the New Economy questions every statistic, pillories every “expert,” and asks a huge number of critically important unasked (or at the very least, underasked) questions. Unlike Lasica and Vaidhyanathan, who focus on the impact of copyright law, Henwood takes on the broader topics of the “New Economy” and globalization. He concludes that New Economy hype, though not all bad, was all dangerous, and that the jury is still out on globalization. (He also expresses the sort of nostalgia for 1950s America that I always associated with a strand of the political right. Live and learn).
Henwood is as hard on icons of the left as he is on icons of the right, taking on Alan Greenspan, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and Ralph Nader with equal grace and ease. He lines up statistics rarely shown together and demonstrates that they cannot be all be true. He questions whether we’re doing enough to help the world’s poor (answer: we aren’t), and shows that workers have paid a disproportionate price for the technological advances of the past few decades. His case is compelling and his many questions provide all of us who favor these technological advances with something to ponder.
After the New Economy is the single most intelligent articulation of social democratic principles that I have seen in a long time. In my experience, leftist discussions either spout mindlessness or leap immediately into mind-numbing jargon (or both). Henwood, as a journalist, avoids the pseduointellectual babble and makes his case in simple, plain English—he even explains government economic statistics in comprehensible terms! And he offers a simple prescription:
There’s no great mystery to making the poor less miserable and the middle more secure. You start with unions, add vigorous antidiscrimination programs, and finish with a civilized welfare state. Not very fashionable in the year 2003, for sure, but if nineteenth-century notions of social policy and economic organization can be rebranded as “new,” then anything’s possible with the right organization.
That prescription also alludes to Henwood’s greatest blind spot. The two groups who seem to earn free passes in his book are unions and antiglobalization protesters.
Henwood is no liberal, and to his great credit he does not claim to be one. Even a social democrat, though, should question whether or not the unions we have are the unions we need. Unions play a role in many systems. From a liberal perspective (e.g., mine), unions are needed to rebalance the labor market. In a “perfect” labor market, huge numbers of employers would each employ one or two workers, and bargaining power between those buying and those selling labor would balance. The development of firms to increase efficiency by cutting transaction costs (following the Coasean argument) turns labor negotiations into deals between oligopolistic employers and competitive workers. A good union should aggregate workers to rebalance the equation, effectively pitting oligopolists against oligopolists in a fair negotiation. In today’s world, it’s not at all clear that unions play this role well. Clearly, unions exist to “protect workers rights,” but in the absence of a cleaner definition, unions are at least as prone to becoming sclerotic, corrupt, and wasteful as are all other organizations. Without even a “bottom line” to discipline them, it’s not at all clear whether Henwood approves of some abstract notion of unionization or an existing concrete realization of that abstraction.
As to the antiglobalization protesters, Henwood doesn’t even see to the problems that bothered Vaidhyanathan. So here’s a reminder, guys: These protesters have marched under pictures of Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat. (One thing about living in DC is that you get a pretty good view of some pretty prominent protests). Granted, the protesters may have some good points. But if the leaders of these movements can’t separate themselves from hatemongers, tyrants, and mass murderers, they don’t deserve a seat at the table. The antiglobalization movement discredits itself at almost every turn—and leaders who should assume responsibility instead take the attitude that they will accept whatever support they can get.
So there you have it. A week on vacation, three new economy books, three recommendations—and I have found intelligent life on the left. I must say that I’m pleased.
The trackback URL for this entry is: http://www.theinformationist.com/index/trackback/103/Qb3rdLIJ/
Trackbacks:
american idiotamerican idiot
bikini shop
ashley judd
toys r us
Comments:
No comments yet.Next entry: Ideology or Partisanship?
Previous entry: Gandhi in Gaza