I spend a lot of time reading and posting (on Twitter and elsewhere) about the politics of the Internet, particularly issues regarding online speech and the open architecture of the web. I am vocal about my positions on many “offline” political matters as well, and try to back them up with action, but there’s something about advocating for the web that feels more communal, more urgent, and maybe ultimately, more effective. I don’t mean this in the illusory quasi-utopian sense put forward by techno-activists in the early days of the web (not that the days aren’t still early), but rather in the very concrete sense that the web’s history, technology and body of stakeholders are unusually harmonious.

Everyone has something at stake

One important (and practically cliche) characteristic of the Internet, as it has evolved in recent years, is that regular users have increasingly become content producers. They have a real ownership stake in the way the web works and the rules that govern it. Linking, sharing, quoting and remixing are fundamental to the web, but also fraught with legalities (legitimate and otherwise), which is why things like CreativeCommons and EFF have sprung up from within the industry to bring some order and balance to online copyright, while preserving and promoting the existing culture of openness. While citizens in “real life” (or whatever), through years of being beaten down, ignored, and propagandized, may be prone to letting harmful and irrational legislation pass unchallenged, those of us who create content on the web frequently respond to power-grabs, injustices and legislative threats with an immediacy that is uncommon offline. This perhaps reflects the “right now” nature of the network. But I think this immediacy is also related to the fact that many of us understand just how fragile the web actually is (technically, legally and culturally), and how easily it could be fundamentally changed or even destroyed by the rash actions of the ill-informed and/or ill-intentioned.

Internet Enforcers

While there is ample room for debate and disagreement over tactics and ethics, I find in web protests like those of Anonymous or the Reddit-led mobbing of Cook’s Source an undeniably populist and democratic spirit. Many -  notably the music and film industries – have complained that the Internet generation has an outgrown sense of entitlement. There may be some truth to that, especially when it comes to pirated content, but all in all, the web’s “power users” have also displayed a very sharp sense of justice, an affinity for the theater of public relations, and a knack for rapid coordination. Imagine the world we might live in were offline political organizing so fast and effective. (There is, of course, the obvious dynamic of anonymity at play here, which is not to be discounted. But one could argue that is equally the case for any sufficiently large protest, on the web or on the street. Anonymity is what makes the mob a mob, and mobs can be blamed for acts of brutality as readily as they can be credited for acts of liberation.)

“Go web young man!” (groan)

While it’s beyond ridiculous to call the web “the wild west” or the “cyber-frontier” or whatever the hell people say or used to say with that newscaster-y blend of vague understanding and condescending doom, it’s still an apt metaphor (or at least one that’s good enough to indulge for the next few sentences).  The web really has always been about opportunity, possibility,  growth, and a great push into the unknown. As with the westward expansion of 19th century America, the web has seen it’s share of gold rushes (real and hysterical), fortunes made and lost, an array of ever-shifting economies, and an embrace of the classically-liberal capitalist ideal that markets (in the modern case: investors, developers, and users) will decide the natural order of things, distant legislators be damned. (Of course, laissez-faire societies are rife with all forms of collateral damage. Perhaps we should begin to regard the 20th century version of the music industry as the wild buffalo of the digital age.) As the colossus crawls west, possibilities emerge for the young and recede for the old. In this dead horse of a metaphor, the web is both the prairie and the railroad, the developers are the prospectors, and users the settlers (California is basically still California). The danger and the promise are one: only the real frontiersmen know how to get things done out in this wilderness of ones and zeros, and yet our so-called statesmen have failed to even commission themselves a Lewis and Clark (to clarify, I’m talking about this horse shit).

Industry is on our side for once

The web/tech industry is historically rooted in openness and decentralization. Reading up on the history of the Internet and the web (see for example Johnny Ryan’s History of the Internet and the Digital Future or James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood), you will see a recurrence of geeks (boy, am I tiring of that word lately) pushing back against authority, circumventing military protocol, skirting institutional bureaucracies, and escaping co-optation. The web and its core of makers have always pushed toward the fluid and open, and against the staid and stable. In many tech companies, one can almost detect a sort of institutional joie de vivre. Not to overstate or even fully accept such an assertion (corporations being profit-oriented legal constructs and not actual moral/emotional beings), but it makes sense in light of the fact that these companies are made up overwhelmingly of people who do what they do for a living because they would otherwise be doing it for free. The industry and it’s constituent parts have a shared interest in keeping the web as open as it was when they walked in the front door, and as fluid as it was when they were first seduced by its possibility.

Old media operates on a culture that could not be more opposed to that of the web, which is why they and their frighteningly-effective lobbyists have been cast (rightly) as enemies of the open web. Where the web fosters openness and decentralization, old media culture is one of centralization, hegemonic control, and hair-trigger litigation. For the most part, this is the culture of corporate America as a whole, but even the giants of the tech industry have a stake in maintaining an open, fair and free Internet. On the most obvious level, legislation like SOPA and PIPA present a very real threat to the existing legal and technical foundations of the web, which is why web and tech companies, joining open web activists, have been waging a very public fight against them, even as politicians and old media outlets struggle (or perhaps refuse) to understand what’s actually being proposed. But perhaps less obvious to some is the longer term threat posed by such heavy-handed intervention. It’s not just that SOPA, PIPA, and the like threaten the web of today (curbing speech while propping up the decrepit media titans of yesteryear), it’s that it threatens the web of tomorrow, and a whole range of innovation and opportunities yet unknown. As such, open web activism has yielded an unlikely common interest that includes citizens of every type, free speech activists, software engineers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, lobbyists, universities and massive multinational corporations.

That’s quite an unusual alliance and frankly if we can’t make progress to protect the web with that constituency, then one has to wonder about the entire premise of representative democracy. But I’m hopeful that progress will be made in the coming years, and while attacks may continue, I don’t think the dynamic described above will change any time soon. As we look down the barrel of yet another absurd and borderline retarded election year, it just feels good to be hopeful about something.

These bills are scheduled to come to a final vote on January 24th, 2012. If you haven’t already (and maybe even if you have), visit americancensorship.org, fightforthefuture.org or EFF.org to learn more about SOPA/PIPA and how you can help stop their passage. I know it’s a drag but you should really consider calling your representatives in Congress. Using a telephone.

Some Background

When Sonny Bono and company enacted the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, the entry of new works into the public domain basically froze. Bono and his powerful backers (Disney, Jack Velenti, and other assorted industry shills) pushed this freeze mainly to protect their own interests (but also to come into line with the EU’s even worse copyright adjustments). Representative Bono, formerly half of the craptastic pop duo, Sonny & Cher, would be able to license his one hit song for the term of his own life (which actually ended shortly before the bill passed) plus 70 years instead of the previous 50, ensuring that his descendants will receive unearned income from Viagra (and perhaps flying car) commercials until at least 2068. That’s a 100 year copyright protection; for a younger (and even crappier) artist like Justin Bieber, think more like 150 years and you hopefully realize how absurd this is. And yet Bono, Disney and Valenti felt even this was not enough, and would have lobbied for infinite copyright protection if they thought they could pass it. Valenti, a real turd if you’ve ever looked at his life’s work of killing artistic freedom, famously proposed a copyright term of “forever less one day.” Imagine a world in which nothing is in the public domain. That’s what they wanted. The perpetual monetization of what is essentially public culture. A disaster for humanities scholarship and production, but also for preserving and forwarding our shared culture in the US and around the world. For most, this doesn’t require much more explanation, but Lawrence Lessig’s recent TEDTalk on “remix culture” is a nice place to continue thinking about it.

So What Does This Have to do with Metropolis?

So, Metropolis. I’ve seen Metropolis (usually in bits and pieces) several times. It’s available on VHS and DVD, streams on YouTube and elsewhere on the web, is screened in galleries and museums; I even saw it used as the visual backdrop to a hip hop show (DJ Spooky circa 2000, who played his set in front of both Metropolis and Society of the Spectacle, among others, as I recall). While I’m not by any means an expert on the film’s history or impact, I can say with some certainty that it is among the most important films ever made, possibly the best loved silent film and one of the first sci-fi stories ever put to celluloid; a simply stunning piece of visual art. Unsurprisingly, it has been referenced, re-mixed and re-interpreted widely over the past 83 years.

Metropolis, while flourishing mainly in marginal “film geek” and “art school” segments of society, is about as ubiquitous as a silent film can be. This ubiquity owes not only to the films quality and lasting appeal, but also to its unbelievable availability. In addition to relatively frequent free and public use, I’ve seen it for sale for about the cost of a postage stamp in at least a dozen different versions (different music, mainly, including one version featuring a terrible Freddie Mercury song) and stores. Like other public domain titles (Metropolis entered the public domain in 1953), it is manufactured and distributed around the world by small companies that put little effort into quality control or maintaining the original artistic vision. With the 2010 release of The Complete Metropolis, which is digitally remastered and includes some lost footage, as well as an updated performance of the original musical score, the film is now getting a definitive treatment by film preservationists.

If we consider Fritz Lang as the author, under the current copyright regime, this film would not have entered the public domain until 2046; if we consider it a corporate authorship (and I’m not sure whether an individual or a studio actually owns a film’s rights, especially one from 1927), that date could be as late as 2071. Luckily, the copyright expired in ’53 under an older but equally confusing regime and was not renewed (a subsequent court challenge to reclaim the film’s copyright failed, despite the fact that the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act restored copyright to many works that might have entered the public domain). So the question is this, in which scenario would this silent film be poised to flourish in a widely anticipated re-release 83 years later: the one in which the film built up a huge following through ubiquitous and varied availability and remix, which also allowed the film to be pieced back together from archival quality prints held around the world? Or the one in which the receivers of a defunct German film company tightly controlled the film, restricting use and distribution, and most likely burying it altogether? My assumption (in my view, quite uncontroversial) is that whomever would have controlled the copyright of the film would not have kept it in print at all, let alone promoted it widely (though admittedly, perhaps the film would have lived on in Germany either way).

What do we have if nobody can get their hands on Metropolis until 2071? Basically, we have an historical artifact. That’s all well and good. I happen to like things called “artifacts,” but I also happen to think of those things as distant and dead (at least when I’m not wearing my history hat). As it turned out, in Metropolis we can see a living culture, a film carrying its influence across the first century of international cinema, a film whose importance and adoration is not so much being asserted with the re-release, but being reinforced and celebrated. There is a continuity that benefits our understanding of film history, of popular culture; it enriches our appreciation of the film and ensures its continued existence far more fairly and organically than any legal right. Paradoxically, if Metropolis were not in the public domain, The Complete Metropolis would not stand a chance of existing, let alone generating a profit. The widespread and generation-spanning love and appreciation of the film came largely out of it’s free-ness, which is why we’re willing to pay for it.

Post Script

I’ve recently entered the tangled web of copyright hell by way of a local history-based documentary film project, in which students and others use archival and oral history assets to construct short films for the web. I’m not talking about serious filmmaking here, but largely amateur/educational creation. We don’t need Donald Duck in our documentaries but we do need access to more footage and images than you can imagine to construct reasonably interesting short films, and most of that material, it turns out, is copyrighted. Sometimes it is held by large corporations (which equals two possible outcomes: “No” or “Pay us your whole budget for this thing we forgot we owned”); other times, it is under the control of the original creator (some who feel their work is too important to ever allow anyone to see or use it); most frustrating, some of it is held in archival collections where conservatively-interpreted pre-digital accession contracts basically ensure that the footage will never again see the light of day (“in-house screening only” both ignores the way research is conducted in the digital age, and also the way content is consumed by the public; neither group is likely to dig through a low-profile archival collection in order to wait hours while library staff finds the film projector that will inevitably be crammed into a 1 person “private viewing station.” And of course, when they leave they will only have some notes and their memories to show for it). These approaches might work to the benefit of the copyright holders and maybe even creators if they were MGM and I were Errol Morris, but they are not and I am not. For most works, particularly those archival items held at small institutions, copyright essentially becomes moot because no one gives a damn, no one knows it exists. But still, we hide it away, we consult our lawyers and our contracts, all parties turn out their empty pockets and walk away, less than satisfied that “at least it’s being preserved.” The question remains, “For who? For what?”

Yes, I know it’s 2010 (pronounced “twenty-ten”), and I know that nostalgia for the analog age is a 30-something cliche, and I know the cassette has become a sickening node of ironic culture.  But for just a few minutes, I ask you to set aside your pernicious Family Guy-inspired liking for hackneyed 80s references to consider the cassette as it should be understood: as a lost assertion of our basic rights, a technological and social artifact,  and a symbol of friendship, grassroots culture and low-fi audiophilia.
I’m not really going to get deep into the history of the cassette but I think it’s worth noting that tapes “changed everything” as they say.  Music became smaller, more portable, cheaper (actually, freer), more contentious, more ubiquitous, and both more and less intimate.

When considering cassette media, we need to ponder the hardware that was used to play it.  The cassette gave us The Walkman and the “boombox” – two devices that couldn’t be more different.  One, the Walkman, was meant to shut out the world, to bring the music closer, to retire into the imagination and the inner world of musical sensation.  The other, the boombox, or “ghetto blaster”, was meant to bring imagination and musical sensation into the outer world.  The Walkman is an extension of the teenage bedroom, domain of the vinyl LP.  The boombox is an extension of the club, the car, the party, and perhaps the penis – a manifestation of action, performance, and bravado.  Think Radio Raheem when you think boombox.  Whatever you do, do NOT think Lloyd Dobbler, that sappy new romantic who reappropriated his boombox as a two-way Walkman. The boombox was urban, evolving into the “system” – the window-rattling audio menaces one might encounter when stopping your car next to a ’91 Civic with gold spinner rims.  The Walkman was suburban, evolving into the iPod – a tiny, consumer-fetishized personal technological wonder.  Culturally, I think these two very conflicting devices actually worked in tandem to create an atmosphere in which divisions of youth (and sub/counter) culture  became more distinct, more visible, more confrontational and also more accessible – a commodity-identity that could be easily recognized and digested and therefore easily bought and sold.

Still, the cassette was a continuation, as were its followers.  Like a vinyl album, it retained the “flipside.”  This was an essential component of musical media that was not removed until the birth of the CD,  a small (i.e. cassette-like?) disc (i.e. album-like?) media which was capable of high fidelity sound (i.e. album-like?).  The displacement of the CD by the mp3 removed the physicality of all prior formats but combined the reproducibility, portability, and low-fi impermanence of the cassette with the single serving goodness of the 7″ vinyl single/EP.  It was not until fairly recently that mp3 recordings began to match the high fidelity of CDs and vinyl LPs, and even still the mp3 is most often consumed one song at a time (rather than by the album).  The introduction of both the cassette and the mp3 format launched the recording industry into a hissyfit panic that some people might copy content instead of buying it, and both technologies came along right at a time when mainstream record labels were putting out the kind of banal garbage that helped make that true.

But even though the early mp3 resembled earlier formats in some senses, in others it was music/youth culture’s waterloo – the end of an era in which music was an all-powerful, awe-inspiring, cultural force; a refuge that was both in plain sight and deeply underground; equally technical and nebulous.  It signaled the beginning of a new era where music became a capitalist accessory, a component of yet more shallow spectacle, an economic asset used primarily to sell physical and sensory widgets.  Sure, we can look back to the late 1960s and see similarities in the commodification of hippy/beat culture, but nobody was using The Velvet Underground to sell car tires, mainly because ad execs (not to mention the general public) didn’t know who the VU were. (Yes, that linked ad is from 1993 – roughly “the year punk broke” to name another watershed moment – yet it still illustrates the music as advertising appliance approach that has become even more common since the late nineties/early aughts.)  Now, anyone with an internet connection can find, read about, and download that Moss Icon EP I searched for across several months within a matter of seconds.  When a thing becomes too easily accessible, it loses its value.  If diamonds grew on trees, nobody would be interested, except for their industrial value.

Which brings me back to the point of this little rant.  I am deeply sad, forlorn even, that music is meaning less to me these days.  Perhaps it is age, but I think it has even more to do with the ritual, culture, and physicality of the cassette, as contrasted with modern equivalents, which are far more casual, and it is on that theme that I shall continue to opine without further asides.

The mixtape, an icon of 80s and 90s culture, was (and is for some purists still) a deep symbol of friendship and even love, representing a ridiculously large commitment of time and energy.  I have given and received mixtapes that went through so may edits and overdubs that in the quiet between songs you could hear layer upon layer of other songs, some that didn’t fit the mix, some that made the cut but were moved elsewhere in the order, and others that were simply taped over for lack of a new and truly blank cassette.  Labels and covers were almost always handmade, with evidence of their own revision and improvisation.  I once received a mixtape recorded over a factory-issue Best of Chicago album that belonged to my friend’s father.  She just popped the overwrite-protection tab and taped right over “Saturday in the Park”, confirming that all was well in the world.  Unlike the burned CD, a sterile object of disinvestment only Stanley Kubrick could love, a great mixtape was a palimpsest of aural, cultural and emotional information.

Although the dubbed cassette was not as personalized as the mixtape, it could still be deeply personal.  The dubbed cassette was the lo-fi copy you got from your friend who had an album you didn’t own yet, or maybe had never even heard of before. My first dub was Appetite for Destruction (side A) and Eazy Duz It (side B).  The height of my dubbing excess came about a decade later, when I spent roughly a week digging through a new friend’s collection of obscure oi!, streetpunk, and viking rock, dubbing each album and transcribing the songs onto little pieces of notebook paper that I folded into the tape cases to serve as makeshift liner notes.  I honestly cannot imagine listening to any of that music on any other physical format and even though I would have loved to find my own original copies of some of that stuff (for bragging rights), part of me was always okay with just having the scammed copy.  A few years ago, my tape deck (a wood paneled top loader with 4 level sliders on the top) broke for the last time.  I put those tapes, and dozens more, out on the street in my densely populated urban neighborhood, hoping someone would find and cherish them.  Without my noticing, it rained heavily that day, soaking the box, the labels, and the covers.  Nobody, save for the garbage man, ever came for them.  A shameful moment indeed, but instructive.  The dubbed cassette was both a second class citizen and an object of desire and affection, the Sally Hemmings of your record collection.  It represented the inferior but also the exotic.  It was special and prized but also kept to the side,  segregated from your more conventionally desirable items, except for those moments when you were alone, when you traveled, or when you wanted to impress your savvier friends with your more obscure tastes.  In the end, unceremoniously abandoned.

I could go on some more about the importance of the cassette to DIY and punk culture, but I’ll leave that alone.  I could also talk about taping crappy pop songs off the radio so I could lip sync to them in my childhood living room, or how I once faced two single-deck boomboxes at each other in order to make a copy of Licensed to Ill, but I don’t want to spread the schlock too thick here.  Instead of grasping at the sky in agony over my lost passion for music, I’ve decided to reinvest myself in vinyl and try to set aside times to just listen to music – not on my phone, not while I’m walking down the street or in the elevator, but listening to music while I’m… listening to music (okay, I might read a magazine, but an analog one for sure).

As Steve Albini put it back in the day, “The future belongs to the analog loyalists. Fuck digital.”

Note: I “dubbed” the above image from the Internet and photoshopped in what may well be the real title of a real tape I may or may not have made for or received from a friend circa 1989.