Aram Sinnreich

Aram to Russian Gov: Ease Up On the Capitalism, OK? [audio + slides]

A few weeks ago, I had the honor and pleasure to give a talk in Moscow for the Russian Government, who are in the process of assessing their Intellectual Property policy, as well as Google, who co-organized the event.

While most of the other speakers (record and movie execs, WIPO officials, IP attorneys, think tankers, etc) focused on specific IP policy items, I chose instead to focus on creative communities themselves, in whose name intellectual property law is enacted and enforced. Specifically, I focused on six creative communities (three traditional, three emerging) that have thrived in the absence of copyright control or enforcement, both in terms of cultural innovation and economic benefit. (For more in-depth analysis, see the book chapter about music and fashion I co-authored with Marissa Gluck a few years back).

The specific creative communities I discussed included quilting, food, fashion, mashups, doujinshi, fansubbing, and Filipino cover bands.

The talk went over well, but whether I swayed the Russians away from potential copyright maximalism remains to be seen. Below are audio from my talk, as well as my PowerPoint slides.

You can listen to the audio here: http://bit.ly/sinnrussia2011

And here are the slides: http://slidesha.re/jKSMJM

UPDATE:

A few weeks after my talk, President Medvedev addressed the G8 summit, and expressed his doubts about the strategic value of copyright maximalism. In his words:

"The declaration reflects an absolutely conservative position that intellectual property rights should be protected according to the existing conventions. No one questions that, but I have repeatedly stated that, unfortunately, those conventions were written 50 or almost 100 years ago, and they are unable to regulate the whole complex of relations between the copyright owner and users. . . Unfortunately, this was not included in the declaration because, in my opinion, my colleagues have a more conservative opinion than is necessary at the moment. Or maybe they just don't use the Internet and have little understanding of it."

I'm sure I can't take full credit for this, but I'd like to think I played a small role.

Theft or democratization? Great-looking documentary about the Barnes foundation imbroglio

Just in case you thought that the theft vs. democratization arguments started with digital and configurable culture, Don Argott's new documentary The Art of the Steal is here to tell you otherwise:

Update: for the record, I discovered this trailer when my friend, business partner, and earlier adoptrix Marissa Gluck mentioned it on Facebook.

The dark side of D.I.Y. (and sustainability)

As any reader of this blog, or anyone who is familiar with me and my work knows, I am a generally a big cheerleader for the whole D.I.Y. ethic. User-generated content, peer production, craftiness, what have you -- I'm all the way behind it. My wife and I subscribed to both Make and Craft magazines. D knits and crochets like a dynamo, and I am in the process of publishing a book on how mash-ups betoken a new social epoch. We dig hacks, mods, machinima, anything that smacks of good-old-fashioned people power.

However, an unnerving thought has been playing around the corners of my mind for a while: What if the whole D.I.Y. ethic isn't (just) a strategic boon to collective agency, but something more sinister: a wholesale shifting of productive labor onto the backs of consumers, and a sign of the end of the bourgeoisie as we know it?

We generally think of D.I.Y. as (light, encouraging voice) "C'mon, kid! You can do it! Do it yourself!" But what if it's actually something more like (gruff, discouraging voice) "Get out of here, pal, I'm too busy. Do it yourself!"

There are certainly many signs that D.I.Y. production is supplanting traditional economic structures across many industry sectors:

• Fifty years ago, you'd go to a department store and purchase a bookshelf. Today, you go to IKEA, bring home a box of compressed wood chips, and spend hours at home with an allen wrench.
• Marketers are increasingly relying upon consumers to share the cost of advocating products and identifying markets. MySpace and Facebook can certainly be seen as vehicles for this trend, although it also applies in the mass media, such as the recent peer-produced Superbowl Doritos commercial.
• Fifty years ago, both local and national news events were reported and published by a corps of professional journalists. Today, an increasing percentage of the news and (especially) opinion we read comes from the peer-produced blogosphere.

The list could go on ad nauseum; these are simply the first examples I could think of. There are many competing potential explanations for this trend:

• Peer-production is killing traditional industry, (e.g. the much-maligned influence of blogging on the newspaper business).
• Big businesses are crassly appropriating the peer-production ethic to lower their costs and boost their margins, in the guise of consumer-friendliness.
• Everybody benefits from increased efficiency, with lower overall production costs being passed down to the consumer.

Unfortunately, none of these explanations appears to be true:

• In the case of newspapers, for instance, I would argue that Craigslist is far more devastating an influence than the blogosphere. Local and classified advertising have always subsidized print news journalism, and the Web is simply a much better platform for localized marketing and commece. If anything, the blogosphere provides much-needed credibility and readership for the newspapers' online editions.
• Far from maximizing their margins, many industries are now in the red, and we are witnessing the fastest growth of unemployment in American history, and one of the fastest rates of atrophied production on record.
• Consumers have hardly reaped economic rewards from taking on the burden of production. I did a little checking with the bureau of labor and statistics, and it turns out that the cost of furniture has escalated 300% (accounting for inflation) since the mid-1950s:

So if none of the explanations I cited above explain the D.I.Y. trend, what does? Is it just simply an accident of aesthetic and cultural history, a trend as shallow and temporary as pogo sticking or C.B. radio? Maybe. But I don't think so. My suspicion is that we, as a society, are primarily using the D.I.Y. ethic as a screen to hide our increasing poverty from ourselves -- both at the individual and the industrial levels.

One statistic that's stuck with me since i came across it a few years ago is that a double-wage-earner family in the 2000s has a lower standard of living, and less buying power, than a single-income family in the 1970s. Obviously, the continuation of this trend would be devastating: maybe we should expect to see polygamy legalized in coming years to functionally allow families to include three or more full-time wage earners. More likely, we'll see people staying with their parents longer, and the birth rate shrink, especially among higher-SES populations.

To put my premise simply: I think that the D.I.Y. ethic provides industries with a convenient way to hide the declining health and wealth of their sectors by cutting costs (both labor and capital) without cutting prices. And it provides individuals with a socially positive context in which to cut consumption costs, by buying raw or semi-raw materials, rather than finished products. Of course, neither of these trends can continue much longer; to combine metaphors, if D.I.Y. is an economic band-aid and craftiness is a cultural fig-leaf, the open sore of our festering economy and naked poverty of our middle classes cannot be hid much longer.

One final thought, generated by a masters student of mine as I was discussing the above in class last week: The whole green/sustainability movement may have powerful economic and altruistic roots, and may be socially beneficial in problematizing and solving the rampant excess of consumer culture, but it can also be understood as a fig leaf of sorts. When I was growing up, old people who saved string, tin foil, and paper bags seemed like damaged goods, crazy holdovers from the anomalous scarcity of the great depression. Today, it's becoming increasing hip and cool to do exactly these things -- in other words, we've developed a cultural mechanism couching the degradations of poverty in both the attractiveness of hipster culture and the admirability of altruism. Today's string-savers aren't a bunch of crazy old kooks; they're cutting-edge, avant-garde paragons of youth culture, and staunch defenders of our planet's future.

Please, somebody tell me I'm wrong...

Broken industries, fractured lives

I recently saw an old friend of mine, Norm Savage, after about 10 years without contact. He's a writer -- of the post-beat, neo-romantic, soul-searching, confessional variety (although he'd hate being classified this way, I'm sure). He wanted to talk with me about using the Internet to self-publish.

Norm had been a hair's breadth away from landing a big publishing contract with FSG for his powerful memoir of diabetes and heroin addiction, Junk Sick: Confessions of an Uncontrolled Diabetic, which had been about 25 years in the works. Just before the paperwork went through, the economic downturn shook up the market, and his editor got canned. She recommended he wait until she landed somewhere else, and publish with her there, but Norm just couldn't wait any longer. After a quarter of a century of masochistic labor, he wanted his words out in the world.

Despite my frequent championing of participatory culture, I have to admit I was a little skeptical about self-publishing on a site like SmashWords. I've been more successfully brainwashed by the traditional cultural gatekeepers than I like to admit, and for me (an aspiring book author myself), the concept was tainted with the odor of "vanity publishing" -- narcissistic, self-deluded, amateurish, delusional, desperate, etc. After all, FSG is the top of the heap publishingwise, and SmashWords just seemed to be such a tragic fall from grace.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized what a ridiculous point of view that is. I've read drafts of Norm's book, as well as other work of his, and I know that his story is one that needs to be told, and that his style is one that needs to be read. His book is deep, powerful, painful -- in a word, human. If the traditional publishing industry is so dysfunctional they can't serve as a conduit for writers of Norm's caliber to reach potential readers, then maybe we readers and authors should let them die -- and switch our focus to publishers like SmashWords. Don't get me wrong -- I love the stuff that FSG puts out, from their cover designs to their content. It's just that, knowing the specifics of this case, I can imagine all the other innovative and valuable books they and the other publishing houses are failing to put out.

I'd never purchased a book on SmashWords before, but I just bought Junk Sick. It only costs $2.99, and for that price, I can read it in every imaginable digital format, from HTML to PDF to EPUB. And it's DRM-free, so I won't have the amazingly frustrating experience of being locked out of my own library by a stupid robot, which ended my brief sojourn into ebook-purchasing a few years back.

If you're at all interested in the psychological and social dimensions of diabetes, addiction, writing, sex, music, loneliness, pain, friendship, art, introspection, exhibitionism, love and fear, you should seriously consider buying this book. SmashWords will even let you read the first 35% of it for free. Or you could read an interview with Norm at the SmashWords blog, which will give you a pretty good sense of his character, his story, and his relationship to language.

Norm also publishes his own blog, which is basically fragments of his new book-in-progress, posted as he writes them. It's called The Savage Diabetic.

Firefox plugin replaces banner ads with art

This nifty little plugin replaces all the banners on a web page with "curated art images." Every 2 weeks, its cache of images is updated, to a new bunch of works by a new bunch of artists selected by a new curator. I'm definitely installing it now.

(Spotted on Grand Text Auto)

Art and craft disintegrate in Columbus Circle

One of the central themes of my doctoral dissertation (soon to be my book, I hope) is the increasingly blurry line between "art" (defined by its aesthetic purity, non-functionality and authorial origins) and "craft" (defined by its functionality and communal origins) in the age of remixes, mash-ups and configurable culture. As I discuss in the book, I believe the effects of this ontological blurriness have and will continue to extend far beyond the world of digital media, to the very core of our society.

More evidence that the high art world is now grappling with the art/craft erosion (a scarier prospect than you might think) now appears in the New York Times, where Roberta Smith writes about the opening of the new Museum of Arts and Design (formerly the American Craft Museum), where one of the exhibits is entitled  “Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary." In Smith's words,

“Second Lives” confirms how thoroughly blurred the lines dividing art, craft and design have become over the past few decades. Unfortunately, its lens is a strategy that has reached epidemic proportions in the larger art world: the use of many small recognizable things to make one big recognizable thing. . . . The basic experience with these works is: You see the thing, then you see the things it is made of. Something in the way of a punch line follows.

In other words, Smith is arguing that reuse, appropriation and collective production have precipitated a symbolic crisis in the world of visual high art, similar to the crises we are facing in popular culture. She appears to find this both boring and galling:

Are more iterations of this tired Surrealist idea needed? Are you really giving the objects you’re using a second life, or just enabling them to last longer and take up more space?

Smith isn't the only one to link configurable culture with surrealism and readymades -- a surprising number of the DJs I spoke to for my book directly referenced Duchamp as an influence and a justification for their musical mash-up and remix work. As to the question of giving objects a "second life" (the digital reference in this case is, I think, unintentional), I wonder what's so very wrong with that. I think the unspoken sin here is that work which reuses materials (the tools/materials categorical breakdown is another theme of my book) violates the principles of uniqueness and exceptionality that surround an artwork -- the "aura," to use Benjamin's term. Smith, as a member of the art establishment, must find this deeply unsettling, but, trivializing its disruptive potential, recasts it as merely annoying.

At any rate, it sounds like a very interesting show, and an interesting development in the world of "high art." I plan to see it as soon as the torrential rains end.

Mash-ups hit the funny pages

Masha emailed me an interesting piece of news: cubicle totem Dilbert is going "Web 2.0" -- offering fans the ability to dynamically insert their own punchlines (take that, New Yorker!), and eventually to individually and collectively rewrite the entire strip.

Of course, there's nothing new about mashing up cartoons; what's new is the author giving you the tools and permission. That permission, by the way, is limited; mashers don't get any ownership stake in the product they help to produce, but according to the site's terms of service, they can share stuff noncommercially, as long as they don't piss anyone off:

United Media grants the users of the Web Site the limited, revocable permission to engage in Viral Content Distribution of such Collaborative Content as may from time to time be made available on the Web Site for such purpose.

DIY Media Summit this weekend, in LA

I'm proud to have been one of the co-organizers of the forthcoming DIY Media Summit, to be held this coming weekend in Los Angeles.

It'll be a 3-day cornucopia of art, academia, industry and good ole fashioned nerdishness, featuring uber-nerds like Mimi Ito, Howard Rheingold, John Seely Brown, Henry Jenkins, Fred von Lohmann, and plenty others. If you've ever heard of vidding, vlogging, political remixes, machinima, anime music videos, or any of the other video-based expressions of configurable culture, you're gonna love it. If you haven't, you need to -- so you should come, too.

Registration and venue information available here.

Gross, L. (1995). Art and artists on the margins. In L. Gross, ed., On the Margins of Art Worlds.

Notes

Art is a specialized form of communication

- a source encodes a message that is decoded by a receiver

- an artist creates a work that is appreciated by an audience

high/low art distinction maps onto class distinction, but this is not a truism throughout human culture. Two poles of artistic definition:

- virtuosity in performing conventional skills, approaching ideal form

- innovation and individuality as the badge of genius and mark of quality

birth of the romantic ARTIST

- European 15^th/16^th centuries, Reformation/Renaissance

- Western preoccupation with the individual

- Thus, art was defined as the innovative product of creative genius.

- This, in turn, undermined art’s traditional communicative function

- Artists came to be viewed as avant-garde

Arts were defined as a separate class of product in the 18^th C., and were defined by their irrelevance to daily life. – Arts were banished to a cultural “reservation”

Artists (like clerics) are viewed with a mixture of contempt and awe. This wasn’t always so. As religion’s function waned, so did art’s.

Most Western adults view art as fundamentally separate from their lives. Why?

- our culture doesn’t nourish artistic symbolic competency the way it does linguistic competency.

- children are not raised to be competent in the arts, because the assumption is that only a special few will possess the requisite talent, and most adults are not equipped to help them gain competency.

Artist exceptionality >> arts as scarce resources

- unique, individual, innovative all become synonymous

- this is a problem if we view art as communication, and thus shared meaning

Kant: aesthetic vs. utilitarian

Rousseau: untainted childhood >> becomes model for western artist (cf. Baudelaire)

Late 18^th century: Romanticism elevates the role of individualism in art by shifting from skill to unique personal vision

- sincerity, integrity become essential qualifiers of a true artist

- represented through unique distortions of representation (e.g. cubism)

Stetson (late 19^th c.): believed that design would be the key to industrial success in a competitive international market (got trumped by Ford, who aimed instead for efficiency and economies of scale). This is really interesting, especially in light of the recent resurgence of design aesthetics for basic consumer goods (e.g. Target). Wonder whether the rules change to benefit Steston’s theory in a post-Fordist, information economy.

Practical art education was thus considered to be essential in public schools through WWI. Then it got eclipsed by “progressive” art education in the 1920s. John Dewey was its chief proponent. Emphasized individuality, etc. In other words, a return to a non-functional, Romantic notion of art, with an I’m-OK-you’re-OK-everyone’s-OK angle. I think there is a middle ground – or rather a meta-ground – between Dewey and Stetson. Aesthetics can be functional but self-contained. This is too complex to elaborate here, but at least I know what I’m talking about.

‘social synergy’ (Bendict and Maslow) – when something is good for both the individual and the collective. Values abundant, rather than scarce, resources. Art can be considered this way instead of as a scarce resource but he doesn’t get into the larger reasons – it’s not just the art-world argument. Our treatment of art echoes and reinforces the logic of capitalism.

Quotes

“The resulting pattern of constant innovation in the arts undermines their ability to embody the common experiences and meanings of the society, to serve the central communicative functions of socialization and integration – roles now assigned to the ‘popular’ arts and the mass media.” (3)

“The common observation that art and religion seem to ‘go together’ in many cultures of the past and the non-Western present can be traced to their joint roles as carriers and articulators of these cultures’ basic beliefs about the nature of things and about the moral order.” (4)

“Perhaps the capacity to acquire competence in the symbolic modes we associate with the arts is not rare but widespread, and it may wither for lack of nourishment.” (5) RIGHT ON. (Cites Blacking).

“few adults manifest competence or expect it in the child, and the arts do not function as common carriers of cultural knowledge, which thus reinforces their marginal status.” (6)

“Parents, schools and peers convey in a variety of forms the message that art isn’t quite ‘real’ and that its ambivalent, peripheral status is appropriate to those who are ‘called’ to it.” (7)

“The undisputed sincerity of this progressive position nonetheless reinforces the isolation of the arts from the things that really matter and further weakens the basis for art education.” (13) What ‘really matters?’ Politics? Social change? Economics? Aesthetics plays a role in shaping each of these, even if artistic practices remain self-contained (e.g. not used specifically toward commercial or political ends). I should take this up with Larry.

“As a society made up of people whoa re mostly unsure of their judgment in the arts and who are aware of their own lack of skill, we perpetuate a contradictory set of views that trap most of us into dropping out.” (14) I think there are other functional reasons for this (e.g. division of labor)

“It is also important to understand that the ideology of talent and individuality as the passport to the reservation is congruent with the institutional structure of the official, elite art worlds.” (14) yes. Ideology << >> Structure

“A program for early education that focuses on the acquisition of competence in primary modes of thought and action – lexical, iconic, musical, logico-mathematical – understood as communicative systems could make possible a fuller employment of human potential than we now achieve.” (14) telos = employing human potential

Robinson, L., & Halle, D. (2002). Digitization, the Internet, and the arts: eBay, Napster, SAG, and e-Books. Qualitative Sociology, 25(3), 359-383.

Notes

Explores effect of digitization on people’s relationship to the arts. 4 case studies: eBay, Napster, and SAG strike against use of digitized replicas in ads.

Opine that the effects of digital revolution will not come to full fruition for decades (a la movable type, industrial revolution)

eBay user-to-user rating system provides decentralized apparatus for assessing trustworthiness

SAG wars: unions want to extend residual compensation to newer media (in 2000, from broadcast to cable). Advertisers refused. A strike ensued. Advertisers considered using “cyber-performers” as scabs. However, they are still expensive, require humans for body/voice, and inferior at communicating emotion.

Ebook devices not ready for prime time, also, theft issues (i.e. Stephen King)

Napster: nothing of substance in this case study

These case studies are pretty superficial (compared to, say, market research)

Quotes

“even in the short time that it has been widely available digitization has so increased people’s ability to interact creatively with products that this amounts to a qualitative change which, over the next few decades, is likely to develop so far as to justify the label ‘revolution’” (359) yes but seems to be from a purely consumerist perspective. A real revolution would entail a transgression of the line between producer and consumer.

[re: eBay art fraud] “the overall online auction process here seems to substantiate Drucker’s assertions that the full, revolutionary experience of online art in a digitized world has not yet occurred. (369)

“it is not clear how actors can sustain the viability of their trade when the new technologies reach maturity – it may become more economical to create virtual characters than to hire flesh-and-blood actors. Their skirmish with the advertising industry may herald an era in which actors’ leverage over the advertising industry is significantly diminished” (374)

“the interactive quality of digital formats has a unique characteristic that makes it different from other media advances. With digitization, not only are consumers able to access many genres of art easily and quickly through the medium of the Internet, they are also able to both produce their own works and take existing works and edit them using digital media tools” (382) only reference in the whole paper to shift in producer/consumer dynamic