Hope

As many people I’ve spoken with agree, young consumers have passed the point of no return, as it applies to paying for music. To whatever extent the preceding voices from the independent music industry suggest that nearly all “successful” musicians live in a precarious financial state as a sacrifice to their music; that the support of editors such as record labels is crucial to the long-term creation and spread of such music; that fewer people paying for music didn’t mean art was any less tainted by commercial compromise; that a profound and unnecessary disconnect between consumers and creators had manufactured an unbalanced understanding of digital piracy… it doesn’t really matter. If one believes that the forces of technology, when mixed with human selfishness, stir a potent social concoction that is beyond reason, then there is no point to this search for the truth of digital piracy. As we saw in the vitriolic dismissal of my original writing, in the disconnection from reality that our digital gadgets offer, and in the Decade of Dysfunction that crippled any hope for reasonable discussion of the issues, it makes little sense to hold faith in the future. The fear mongering that took place during the SOPA protest was just one more symptom of communicative ineptitude. We are forever becoming more isolated and splintered away from our concentric communities—from our immediate neighborhood, from our nations, from our human species—isolated by and for technologic tools that numb us to reality. No longer counting on one another to do the right thing in service of the common good, nihilism and opportunism become the only reasonable courses of action.

Why the hell should I pay for music if he’s not paying and she’s not paying? I’m not a sucker.

In our cynical, media soaked world, there is no greater sin than to trust in the decency of your fellow consumer. The lack of faith in one another that results invites us to join in a culture of negativity, where we assume greed is too powerful to be fought and institutions are doomed to failure. Hope for a better future, for digital content or anything else, is stupid and naive. We are on our own, all of us.

That cynicism would all be fine and good, except for the fact that I have not been fully honest with you. Forgive me, but the tangled discourse of digital piracy is not as hopeless as I made it out to be.

Amidst the “kill yourself” hate mail and message board ridicule for my pro-responsibility piracy writing, described earlier on, other sentiments revealed themselves. One of these alternative sentiments forever shifted my assumptions for the possibility of changing popular attitudes. A few days after receiving the email that told me to kill myself, an antithetical message appeared in my inbox:

Hey! I just read your article and it kind of blew my mind. I, a seventeen-year-old kid in the suburbs of Texas surviving on a small allowance and the occasional babysitting check, have always pirated music in the spirit of “hey, there’s no way I could afford all the music I love, so I’m sure the bands would want me to listen somehow.” I also justify this by buying the occasional record and pirating the rest, but with over 8000 songs on my iPod and a vinyl collection that won’t even fill up a bookshelf, I have to realize that I could have bought more and supported more of my favorite artists, but due to the convenience and free-ness of the Internet, simply didn’t.

As someone who tries to support independent businesses over the Wal-Marts and Starbucks that cost less and are easier to find, this hipster “share-the-music” ideology really just comes down to being a load of hypocritical bullshit. So, thanks for the article, it was a big wake-up call, and I’ll definitely show it to a few friends.

Hmm… I thought.

If my arguments had reached even one mind, perhaps change was possible after all. The letter stood in such sharp contrast to assumptions of teenage pirates: these digital natives who could never conceive of an analog, paid-for past long enough to alter their consumption habits. While such assumptions were presented by experts like Lawrence Lessig and Chris Anderson as proof that they alone were the unsentimental realists in the room, the idea that youths were lost to the idea of payment was, I now realized, alarmingly condescending.

This zombie-like teenage army was incapable of paying for content, supposedly, because they’d never been properly programmed. They could not be educated. Appeals to common sense or morality were above their limited capacities. As a result, because file sharing was the way they fundamentally “understood culture,” digital natives couldn’t be bothered to take responsibility for their actions. The mess in music was the responsibility of the government, corporate record labels, supposedly rich artists… anyone but people actually doing the downloading.

Digital natives served as useful boogeymen for those looking for means to stiff-arm piracy’s critics. Because teenagers and college students would never pay for digital content, file sharing’s positive or negative consequences were pointless for us to examine or discuss. A waste of breath. We would just have to deal with this new reality of free content, like it or not.

Digital natives themselves play this “youth card” in order to excuse their actions. The conventional expectation that their generation would never pay for digital music has become an easy rationalization for them to do just that. Making the claim that a generation would not pay for content implicitly consented to such a future, a self-fulfilling prophecy. This spirit of fatalism contributed mightily to the Decade of Dysfunction, lending the entire period an air of resignation and pessimism as to our capacities to do the right thing.

This teenager’s letter exposed the fallacy of such assumptions, but it wasn’t the only feedback to do so. The few pieces of hate mail I initially received were outnumbered by dozens of letters telling me, in various ways, “Thank you.”

“I’m a teenager—apparently a member of a hopelessly self-entitled and over-privileged generation—whose sole income comes from working in an ice cream shop twice a week,” another wrote me. “Beyond that I don’t have any honest justification for the amount of music I download. I’m really conflicted about it.”

“Thank you for writing this,” another said. “I started downloading music this year and quickly realized that it was irresponsible. My policy now is to only pirate music that is out of print or music by dead people. I’m not sure whether the latter is sensible or not.”

These file sharers were not “understanding culture” by way of piracy, they were anxious and confused about it. But rather than throwing their hands up in the air in surrender to their irrational desires for more, they matched their anxiety with honest self-awareness. People desired confidence in their choices—wanted to do the right thing—but the digital content debates had left them feeling stranded to work these vexing issues out on their own.

“I too, in the past, have fallen in with the hordes of pirates only to emerge with a different view,” said one reader. “I’ve gone through cycles of this, several times deleting all my illegal music.”

Another reader was remarkably evenhanded in his assessment: “In the end, to me, it’s all about balance…. File sharing and supporting your local musicians can peacefully co-exist I think. Anyone who holds an entitlement attitude that they should never have to pay is just as greedy and unethical as the suits of the RIAA.”

I checked up on the avatars attacking me on various Internet message boards. There, too, pleasant surprises awaited. On the Hipinion message board thread, the first few pages of comments were derisive, as expected. But at the juncture when I might have logged on to defend myself, other voices chimed in to challenge the file-sharing apologists. In the subsequent days, I marveled at a developing open discussion. I sensed a community of strangers struggling with the meaning of digital piracy in a sincere, intelligent manner. It was that rarity: a constructive online conversation. By the discussion’s end, over a thousand comments later, the jilted originators of the thread had completely disappeared.

Other message board threads popped up where I grew to better understand this secret middle ground on piracy. Its members were by turns pessimistic (“I would like to think people will develop some morality upon being educated, but sadly that is unlikely”), confused (“Just for clarity’s sake: I’m 100% ambivalent about illegal downloads. What I would like to believe is that we’re just going through a paradigm shift that will eventually work itself out”), funny (“Imagine how much better The Beach Boys would’ve been if they worked 40 hours a week doing stupid shit”), passionate (“pay apple. pay comcast. pay a liquor store. pay a bar. pay a drug dealer. pay your taxes. but FOR GOD’S SAKE, DON’T EVER SPEND FIFTEEN FUCKING DOLLARS ON A PIECE OF RECORDED MUSIC”), and clearheaded (“Being in cyberspace doesn’t change the fact that you’re taking something from somebody (usually many, many people at once) without their consent. No matter what arguments or justifications you might think you have, you can’t argue with that”). Candor, hope and a sense of responsibility percolated from these message boards. In the midst of a long, argumentative thread, one post concisely summed up both digital piracy’s status quo and the silent majority’s simultaneous yearning for a more humanistic future:

I’m profoundly conflicted about the whole situation we live in, because I don’t feel like the world owes me free music, and I spend more than most on physical recordings, old and new, but at the same time, I do download records. If suddenly I wasn’t allowed to, I wouldn’t be particularly upset, but I do think that what we have now is an unsustainable situation, and instead of just saying “tough luck, musicians who don’t make the kind of music that benefits from touring and live performance,” it would be interesting to think of how things could evolve in a positive way, where we don’t try to either put the toothpaste back in the tube or act like musicians must necessarily be hobbyists from now on.

The status quo of piracy could change. Perhaps James Bradley of Sound Fix Records was correct; reformed file sharers, a bit older and wiser, could help end the recording industry’s depressing slide and usher in an inspiring renaissance. With this new hope, the truth of the Internet grew in its subtle complexity.

On the one hand, Marshall McLuhan was right. The further we stretch and stress our nervous systems through the mediated experience of gadgets and grow dependent upon them, the more we risk becoming numb to our real selves and interests. But the hypnotizing, hallucinatory qualities of digital media are a danger, not an absolute condition. As much as I harbored some curmudgeonly reflexes toward the Internet, I couldn’t deny the ideals manifesting themselves in front of my eyes. The overwhelming majority of my reader reaction came in the form of diverse, gracious, good-faith reflections. A community of thought seemed to recognize itself for the first time, aided primarily by digital connections. When quality information is married to the radical efficiency of digital distribution, reality-based communities can build and affect positive change throughout the world at near simultaneous rates. Such is the true promise of the Internet.

In the overall reaction to my writings, I found plenty of reasons for hope in this regard, that consumers could place their rational visions for a better society above some itchy compulsion for free content. The question remained: was the largely positive reaction to my article truly representative of a silent majority that believed creators deserved to be compensated for their digital works? It was impossible to know for sure, although the results of one 2011 survey were at least encouraging.

In their efforts to combat digital piracy, the government of the United Kingdom controversially turned to the suspension of Internet service as a possible punishment for repeat violators in their Digital Economy Act legislation, which was seen as an extreme measure. In an effort to gauge where the UK stood on such enforcement, a regional law firm measured how many people were file sharing and where attitudes stood in 2011:

The law firm Wiggin polled 1,750 “digitally active” UK consumers over 15 of all ages for its annual survey. 62 per cent surveyed agreed that it was right to suspend the Internet connections of persistent online copyright infringers. The same number agreed that more should be done to block pirate sites, but 61 per cent preferred site blocking to going after individual infringers…. A mere 11 per cent disagree with the statement: “It is important to protect the creative industries from piracy;” four per cent disagreed with it strongly. Around 25 to 30 per cent of those surveyed were indifferent.1

Even when Wiggin restricted the question—of the importance to protecting creative industries from piracy—to confessed pirates, nearly half of them agreed it was important to protect such industries from piracy. When all participants were asked whether they pirated digital music regularly, only five percent said yes, with a total of thirteen percent admitting to unlicensed downloading on a rare to regular basis.

Judging by the survey, the core group of ideologically committed digital pirates is marginal—as little as five percent of Internet users in the UK. Reflecting the inner conflict many of my readers expressed, one-third of Internet users remained undecided on the issue, presumably open to new ideas.

If a sensible middle ground can be reached on how to deal with digital piracy, the Decade of Dysfunction may end up looking like nothing more than a historical anomaly on humanity’s path to discovering an enlightened digital course. In this anomalous period, the loudest and angriest voices in the room, as noted by Craig Finn, drowned out the sensible among us and jerry-rigged public perception of the issue. Knowing that most people believed it was important to protect the basic legal rights of artists and businesses from sites like The Pirate Bay, this marginal group advanced shocking allegations, as with the SOPA protest, that any attempt at bringing fairness to the digital marketplace was an attack on freedom of speech; or that what rights holders really wanted was to shut down Twitter or Facebook. These claims, coming from hip young activists and entrepreneurs, confused most of the population, leaving them unsure what to believe.

During my time at the University of Minnesota, when the school hockey team won consecutive national championships, we students did what most drunk college kids do when they want to collectively express joy or anger—we rioted.

Though never a hockey fan, I got drunk and watched the team win the title game in 2004 at a friend’s house. After the final buzzer rang and the championship title was official, we slammed one more beer and headed out to the main business district to see what was going to happen. The previous year a minor riot had occurred, so students were expecting and perhaps hoping for a follow-up affair. We walked down the street to a main intersection of the college district, called Dinkytown, feeling energized and curious. The streets were empty and ominously quiet. After one block, we passed a mattress burning in the middle of the street. There was no sign who had put it there. An angry flame cast shadows between the parked cars.

We walked on to the main intersection and waited. A few other students showed up and stood around as we were. Then, a few more arrived. And more. Then, some students started climbing the traffic poles while the crowd below cheered and rooted them on. When the traffic light turned red, the coalescing mob’s more enthusiastic members recognized the open intersection and filled it with their jumping bodies and pumped fists. The crowd was now in the hundreds or thousands, moving between the cars, banging on windows and blocking traffic, unworried and exuberant.

Along with the great majority of the crowd, my friends and I remained on the sidewalk, watching the developing chaos. We smiled and laughed in nervous disbelief.

Where is this going to lead?

By this time, some in the middle of the intersection had taken wooden signs and garbage cans off of the sidewalks. They piled them up in the middle of the intersection and lit them on fire. The mob cheered and took pictures as the instigators in the intersection scavenged for anything new to feed the bonfire. More kids were hanging from the poles and climbing on buildings. The same unlucky cars were stalled amidst a scene of total chaos, beholden to the will of the mob.

After a few short minutes, the police showed up and prepared to disperse the crowd. Those like me, at the edge of the mob, could see the police preparing and shifted position to ensure an easy escape path. The True Believers wreaking havoc in the intersection weren’t as aware. When the police finally charged, the passive element of the mob fluidly dispersed. Two True Believers were lassoed by the police near the bonfire, while the rest of them easily escaped. At another intersection, just two blocks away, the mob quickly gathered yet again. While the police were busy cleaning up the mess at the original staging ground, the True Believers, now acting with some experience, efficiently gathered dumpsters and material for a new, larger bonfire. Next to where I stood watching, four students flipped over a parked car. Again, after a few short minutes, the police advanced from down the street. This time they apprehended no one. The mob dispersed once more.

With thousands of my classmates, I wandered around Dinkytown that night, sniffing out new nodes of drama. I passed by a parking lot filled with students celebrating, encircling multiple overturned cars serving as tinder for twenty-foot high flames. I watched as True Believers methodically smashed the windows of a parking lot booth, setting it on fire before moving on to the next one. One half of a mile away from the original intersection, I witnessed a group of three male students—all the students destroying property were male—smash the windows of a liquor store and dash in, exiting with armfuls of liquor bottles. I eventually became disturbed by the destruction, but I must say it took awhile. I felt very alive, watching these scenes from a comfortable distance. On my way back home, I ran down an embankment with scores of others, hiding under a bridge and covering my face as policemen lobbed pepper spray canisters in a last ditch attempt to restore order.

The following day it occurred to me that the True Believers were, in fact, a tiny fraction of the mob that night. On a normal evening, the few dozen of them who were actually setting bonfires, harassing drivers or looting stores would never have acted in such ways or considered acting in such ways. Ultimately, it was the passive crowd—the thousands watching from a comfortable distance and milling about, drawn in by the drama—that gave the True Believers their perception of power and influence. I may have felt as though I was merely watching that night. But without me—and the rest of that crowd who watched, shocked and curious, as the property and welfare of our community was set in flames all around us—the riot and its consequences would never have come to pass. Ultimately the unthinking crowd was just as responsible for providing an aura of protection, if not acceptance, to actions and attitudes of a marginal and extreme core of individuals.

Digital piracy has enjoyed massive popularity for an obvious reason: pirated content is free and easy to find. Millions of passive consumers—the digital natives—were used as props and powerful proof that destructive actions of True Believers like The Pirate Bay were expressions by and for the masses. The passive crowd lent power to ideas and ideologies that, when examined, were ill-conceived notions that merely eroded the foundations of open society and sowed the seeds of destructive chaos. The crowd was entertained by the actions of the True Believers. However, once peeled off from the mob mentality, as my early articles did for those who responded to me, the dark assumptions and misunderstanding that girded digital piracy was exposed in the light of day. As a result, the True Believers setting the fires became a bit more marginalized; a bit less powerful. In an effort toward common sense and marginalizing the forces of self-destruction, it is time to aggressively reconsider the many assumptions that emerged throughout the Decade of Dysfunction.

The True Believers of digital piracy might be delirious with illusions of their own power or opportunists in search of action—but mostly they are well meaning people who have been temporarily led astray by their own insatiable desires and can no longer objectively perceive the truth of their own actions. If everyone seems to be setting the fire (or encouraging it), it begins to feel as though no one is truly responsible for the blaze. Ultimately, is the public of individual citizens whose choices and attitudes will determine how many more fires will be set and how far the blaze will spread.